The Fortress of Solitude

by Jonathan Lethem

  Anyway, he might have an audience for ostentatious kindness to fish. Heather, the Windles’ daughter, thirteen to his twelve. He’d felt her trailing him with her eyes. The bookish way the boy talked to their parents and his long, bowl-cut bangs, turnoffs to Buzz, had aroused her curiosity.

  She was blond like a Solver.

  She darted on her bicycle in quick silence like a figure in Brueghel or De Chirico.

  You might murmur to a girl on a dock in the summer, what you’d never dream of trying in school.

  You might be one lucky motherfucker.

  Heather Windle picked her way down the path. Her legs had outgrown her own yellow raincoat so it rode high, giving her a Morton Saltish aspect. She hopped side to side on the wet rocks, and slapped, fingers splayed, at a cloud of gnats.

  So the kid from the city had completed the transfer, brother to sister.

  “Hi, Dylan.”

  “Hi.”

  “What are you doing?”

  “Nothing.”

  She stood at the top of the dock, glanced at the pole in the grass.

  “Are you sad?”

  “Why would I be sad?”

  “I don’t know, you just look sad.”

  Maybe he was. Not, though, if the rest of July could be theirs, on the dock, in the field, in the mist, anywhere but out in the oily, pull-tab-strewn driveway, the 7-Eleven lot full of pickups. Dylan Ebdus was ready to vanish out of Buzz’s Vermont into a girly world, into Heather’s hair. He wanted to ask her if he could simply breathe the oxygen of her blondness, nose the wisps at her cheek.

  “I was waiting for you,” he heard himself say.

  She didn’t speak, just clambered to sit beside him at the rain-puckered window of the pond.

  “Are you sad because you have no mom?” she said eventually.

  “I said I wasn’t sad.”

  “That’s why you came to stay here, though, right?”

  Dylan shrugged. “Plenty of Fresh Air kids have moms,” he said. He’d been justifying the Fund to a stoned man with an eye patch the night before, and the spiel came easily. “The whole point is for city kids to, you know, spend the summer in the country. For variety’s sake. I guess your parents thought it was a good idea.”

  “I know,” she said. “We had one last year, but he was black.”

  “My best friend is black,” said Dylan.

  Heather thought for a minute and then leaned into him. Raincoat elbows squeaked together. “I’ve never been to New York City.”

  “No?”

  “Not yet.”

  “You have no idea.” A glow in Dylan replied to the pressure of her body. He felt her curiosity as a kind of enclosing radiance, a field.

  Sure, he’d be sad, accept pity, work with whatever came his way.

  At that moment he decided to tell his secret, show her the costume he’d brought hidden in his knapsack, the ring, his secret powers.

  “You know what graffiti is?” he asked.

  “Uh-uh.”

  “Motion-tagging?”

  “What’s that ?” she said, delighted.

  “You do graffiti on a moving train,” he said. “Instead of in the yard.”

  “But what’s graffiti?”

  Yes, he’d reveal the costume, he’d wear it for her. First, though, they sat inside a cloud and he told her about Brooklyn.

  When after dinner Heather’s mother called to where they played and whispered in the sharply pitched attic Dylan felt a bolt of guilt, as though accused of what hadn’t yet happened, as though his yearnings were films projected on the walls downstairs. He’d anticipated Buzz’s scorning gaze all afternoon, but when Buzz missed dinner no one even spoke his name. Dylan had felt himself and Heather to be invisible under the Windles’ eyes, attic mice, dust balls. Now at her mother’s voice he and Heather shared one luscious gaze of complicity, then moved in silence to the stairs.

  “You’ll want to call your dad, if the phones are getting through,” said Heather’s father from his recliner, in the room lit by the television’s glow. He spoke without turning his head from the spectacle. In shades of blue, New York was in the dark and on fire.

  The phone rang four times before his father answered.

  “I wouldn’t care to be on Fulton Street,” said Abraham Ebdus. “There’s no sign here, though, just fools yelling. Ramirez parked his station wagon on the sidewalk blocking his shop window. He’s standing with a bat, I can see him. I suspect he’ll be disappointed.”

  Dylan nearly asked about Mingus, didn’t.

  “It’s been so hot, it’s really a blessing. I’m in my studio, I’ll paint the stars, you never see them. Or I’ll paint Ramirez. I’ll be fine, don’t worry.”

  “Okay.”

  “Everything well with you, Dylan?”

  “Sure.”

  “Put Mrs. Windle on.”

  Dylan handed over the phone and turned to Heather. To show provenance over the distant riot he said, “It’s no big deal.” Then, a bit wildly: “This actually happens all the time, it just doesn’t usually get on the news.” This drew a look of perplexity from Heather’s mother, who’d just replaced the receiver.

  The television never returned to the blackout. Still, those rapid-flashed shots of spilled glass and running figures trumped his father’s report. Dylan lay dreaming awake of the city on fire.

  While Mrs. Windle shopped, the three wandered together to the magazine rack in the broad, white-lit aisle of the supermarket. There Buzz marked his indifference to the new order. Dylan and Heather knelt at the comics rack and murmured in low tones, Dylan patiently explaining the mysteries of Marvel’s Inhumans while Buzz leafed at hot-rod magazines and High Times, then wandered away.

  As he did, Dylan saw Buzz was trailed by a middle-aged woman with a dirty blue apron and a sticker-gun dangling in one hand like Dirty Harry’s Luger. She leaned on her hip to follow Buzz’s progress around the aisle’s corner, then strolled after him. Dylan smiled to himself, returned to the comics. Heather was oblivious.

  Followed in a shop like a black kid.

  Dawdling through checkout behind Mrs. Windle, Buzz labored at innocence, shrugging, poking at a rack of gum, making small talk, doomed. The woman with the gun and a bald, stern manager hung near at a closed register, biding time until it was official, until Buzz moved for the exit without plopping whatever he had in his pants and sleeves onto the scudding rubber belt. Only Mrs. Windle and Heather were surprised when the manager corralled them just through the automatic doors.

  “I’m sorry, Mrs. Windle.” The manager squinted in the pounding sunlight, his tone full of sorrowful inevitability. “We gotta ask Buzz here to step into the back, please.”

  “Oh, Buzz,” moaned Mrs. Windle.

  Buzz stood pouting sarcastically, shifting from leg to leg, player in a script he was too dull to resist.

  “Why don’t you younger kids come along. This lesson couldn’t hurt you to learn.”

  In a narrow, windowless office they watched as Buzz dutifully produced Hot Rod, Penthouse, and a box of shotgun shells from the hunting and fishing aisle.

  “Last time we said next time we’d call the sheriff, Buzz.”

  “Say something,” Buzz’s mother commanded.

  “I should’ve called the sheriff, after how Leonard treated me last time,” mumbled Buzz. “Shit, I shouldn’t even come in here anymore.”

  “Afraid that’s right, Buzz, you shouldn’t. Leonard’s got nothing to do with it.”

  “Well, I don’t know about that,” said Buzz, locating his rallying cause. “You need to have a word to him about getting off my back, man.”

  “What did Leonard say to you?” said the manager, his face instantly growing red.

  “You kids go wait at the car,” said Mrs. Windle, nodding at Heather and Dylan.

  They drove in silence, Buzz in the Rambler’s passenger seat, forlornly leveraging elbow, head, and neck, as much of himself as possible out the window, his mother rigid with fury at the w
heel. Heather and Dylan slumped low and traded grimaces beneath the horizon of the long front seat. Dylan lifted his shirt as in a striptease and flashed the copy of Inhumans #7 and the two Nestlé’s Crunches tucked at his waist. Heather widened her eyes obligingly, put her hand to her mouth. Home, they ate both bars of chocolate together in the attic while downstairs Buzz reckoned with his father.

  Vermont was permeable to Brooklyn ways. Nothing simpler, really, than racking the chocolate and the comic book with Buzz in the role of the black kid, drawing heat.

  Buzz had set a pick for Dylan—that’s what Mingus would have called it.

  Afternoons had a dazing slackness. You dropped a bicycle in the grass or on the gravel, wherever you were sick of it, stripped off your T-shirt and kicked away flip-flops and resumed swimming, since you’d been cycling in your drying trunks in the first place. Heather’s tits were plums in the armholes of her tank tops and there was always the possibility of an angle, another take on that subject. You compiled views until the postulated form burned in mind’s eye, gathering obsessive force like an advertisement you’d passed over forever until the day you just had to know, Sea-Monkeys or X-Ray Specs.

  Blackflies and boners, each were solved by immersion.

  Dylan mentioned he’d turn thirteen in August at least twice a day.

  It was natural enough in those humid, bug-drunk afternoons, the house, pond, field, gravel front yard all Dylan’s and Heather’s alone, that they’d find themselves sprawled in their suits making wet ass-prints on the sofa one minute, side by side, panting heavily and laughing hysterically in rapid alternation, and then a moment later kneeling barekneed on chairs at the counter, stirring up a Tupperware quart of lemonade crystals and cold tap water. Equally likely to next be ferrying ice-filled beading glasses to the attic, which in daylight boiled with a psychedelic swarm of dust swimming in angled light.

  Half naked on the checkered bedcover they again lay side by side, sucking ice.

  “I can’t feel my lips.”

  “Me neither.”

  “Feel this.”

  “Cold!”

  “You now.”

  The country-city premise freed them to pretend anything was a surprise. Maybe ice didn’t work the same in New York City.

  “Kiss where I kissed.”

  A pause, then the attempt.

  “I can’t feel anything.”

  “Kiss my lips.”

  Though they’d been mashing iced lips to wrists, the first was a graze, a bird’s peck.

  “I’m numb— dumb.” They cracked up.

  “Okay, again.”

  “Ah.”

  She’d closed her eyes.

  They rolled away. Dylan flopped onto his stomach, quashing a throb in his trunks. “You ever suck laughing gas from whipped cream?” he asked to keep up the stream of distractions, a permitting air of larkiness.

  “Noooo,” she said. “Buzz did though.”

  Buzz, code for all things crude, contemptible, townish. Dylan and Heather were beings of the pond and the distant-recalled city, nothing between. Forget laughing gas.

  “You want a back rub?”

  “Sure.”

  “Turn over.”

  She obeyed, keeping their deal: nothing was related to any other thing. They were sprites who’d banished taboo and were also a bit stupid, willingly dim. The kiss was on one planet, the back rub another.

  He kneaded and pinched, gave her spine a noogie, whatever seemed artful.

  Inside the arrangement of her flung arms on the bedspread her tits bulged, third-moons. He earned a grope through extensive rib work, lingered just enough to find them disappointingly lozengelike, hamburger-hard. Her eyes fluttered inside their lids.

  When his fingers curved slightly inside the tight band of elastic at her hips she twisted away, sat up.

  “I can’t breathe in here.”

  They tumbled out and onto the bicycles and raced down the gravel shoulder, just two local kids killing time as far as dozing passersby in any passenger windows might care, Heather ratcheting ahead madly, knees flashing in and out of bronze shadow, Dylan chasing, relieved, mouth wide gobbling the moist air, the infinite Vermont afternoon.

  Mr. Windle parked the Rambler at the rear of the drive-in lot to shorten his walk across Route 9 to the Blind Buck Inn. There, Buzz predicted, he’d not stir from the bar through the entire double feature— Star Wars, The Late Show —and emerge so crocked he’d pass the keys Buzz’s way for the three-mile drive home. The lot was two-thirds empty, maybe fifty cars hooked as if on life support to units thrusting at angles from weed-cracked pavement.

  Space in the city, like time, moved upward. Here the direction was sideways, into the trees.

  At blue twilight figures browsed car to car, leaning through windows for a light, making mock of an overfull backseat, a social moment before hunkering down.

  “I’m taking a pass on the first feature,” Buzz said, not looking at Dylan. With the ten Mr. Windle had floated their way and Buzz confiscated, Heather’s brother had magnanimously bought Cokes for Dylan to convey back to the car, then pocketed the change. He was humped over the Evel Kneivel pinball machine in the concessions hut, intent on making it tilt a hundred or a thousand times. Or possibly there was an agenda beyond pinball, say a four-foot bong in a trunk. Likely accomplices milled nearby.

  Always there was a pond or quarry rumored through the fields, where the real action went on.

  Buzz tipped his chin at the distant screen. That scuffed blank billboard was the least interesting place to rest your eyes in the whole sky, which was full of what looked like feathers the color of bruises. “You can stay in the backseat with my sister if you want.”

  Dylan stood dumbly clenching the paper frame full of Cokes. A week kissing Heather every stolen moment had made him faint and dreamy, incapable of reading either sincerity or scoffing in Buzz. This might actually be some rough blessing.

  He nodded and Buzz grinned.

  “Bet about now you’re thinking the Avoid Nigger Fund’s the best deal you ever had in your life, huh?”

  They did watch from the backseat. Dylan steered Heather’s attention to crucial details, though Star Wars didn’t carry the same impact here, flashing like a View-Master slide in the pinpricked bowl of night, as it did at the Loew’s Astor Plaza on Forty-fifth Street. Dylan had seen it four times there, the last two alone, a dwarfed figure growing amazed as the frames pulsed in his eyes, feeling in his subvocal anticipation of certain lines, his sense-memory of certain actorly gestures, the possibility of floating up and intercepting the light halfway, of being a human projector secretly responsible for the existence of the images.

  “Parsecs measure space, not time,” he droned, unable to quit though the point felt unworkable, Arthurish. “Some claim it’s a mistake but I’m sure it’s intentional, Han Solo’s pretending—”

  “Dylan,” Heather whispered.

  “What?”

  She closed her eyes. Dylan completed the sentence silently, groping for a relation between speech and the passage of breath in two mouths, the miasmic world created at the junction of two faces. As in the dusky cool of the attic, as at the noon-blazed pond, there was nothing between, the rupture was total, bliss speechless.

  ’Nuff said.

  It was only hard to believe it wasn’t illegal. But shut up already and kiss her.

  Then he opened his eyes.

  The Windles’ car was rocking.

  Four sets of ass cheeks like blond lunar pancakes pushed the Rambler’s windows in gentle alternation, side to side.

  Their hair flash-dried in horns and Superman spit curls as they swam and kissed. The sun-dazzled heads were calm, bobbing like floes while an eye-level dragonfly described chess problems on the table of the water. Just below, animal bodies thrashed in green cold. The boy had grabbed the girl everywhere by now, his demented hands inventorying shapes there in the Negative Zone, where nothing counted. Twice he’d felt her fingers graze his pond-numbed
prong and practically drowned.

  He was returning to Brooklyn tomorrow.

  “Your dad might send you to private school,” said Heather, breath rippling pond between them. She ducked lower, water past her nose, blue eyes floating doubled in reflection, pupils near invisible.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Buzz heard him talking to my mom. Buzz says you’re struggling with a black influence.” She’d plainly rehearsed the phrase, dared herself to speak it.

  “Buzz is struggling with a moron influence,” said Dylan. “I think he’s losing the struggle.”

  “He said you got beat up.”

  Dylan dove, plunged fully into the silt and shadows of the Negative Zone. He’d taught himself to open his eyes underwater these past weeks. The pond didn’t punish eyeballs like the chlorine-poisoned Douglas Pool, down behind the Gowanus Houses, where he’d gone swimming with Mingus a couple of times. You also didn’t need to wear sneakers underwater for fear of broken glass. He’d have liked to see Buzz contend with that.

  Now he rushed in echoless slow motion at Heather’s seal-like body, her red one-piece, limbs glowing like milk in the bent emerald-yellow light. She cycled afloat, not fending him off. Wrapping one arm around her middle, he mashed his mouth into her stomach. A fugitive hand found a tit. She didn’t thrash, or even pull away. Anything under water was between him and her body, apparently.

  When he’d come up for air and they lay panting and dripping on the dock, gaze squinted through fingers to protect their eyes from the sun, Dylan said, “I’ve got something to show you.”

  “What?”

  “Surprise.” He’d meant to reveal the costume today anyway. Now it seemed a correction too, to Buzz’s garbage.

  “Where is it?” she said.