The Fortress of Solitude

by Jonathan Lethem

  “Go on your bike. Get some Mountain Dews. Meet back here.”

  She nodded, spellbound, guileless.

  In the Windles’ guest room he slipped the ring onto his finger, then bundled the costume under his arm. Paranoid he’d be seen, he moved sideways through the kitchen and out, then slipped through the fields.

  On the dock he spread the costume out and looked at the thing for the first time since riding the Greyhound bus out of the city.

  He’d had his father teach him the simple stitches he’d used to sew it together, though he hadn’t said what for. The cape, cut out of a worn Dr. Seuss bedsheet featuring A Lion Licking A Lemon Lollipop, was attached at two corners of the neck of the sky-blue T-shirt which formed the costume’s body. He’d centered the lion, a suitably enigmatic logo, as nearly as possible in the middle of the cape. The sleeves of the T he’d extended with brightly striped bell-bottom legs scissored off a pair of his mother’s abandoned pants, scavenged from the heap at the bottom of her closet where only Dylan ever visited. They hung imperially, his hands extending through a fringe of threads like the clapper in a bell. Impractical, but this was only a prototype. A showpiece. The shirt’s chest he’d stretched flat over cardboard and decorated using the Spirograph, the rusty pins, the balky cogs, a clumsy labor with imperfect results. The emblem was an oscillated circle, the widening path of an atom traced a thousand times through space to form bands of power. At any distance, though, it blurred to a fat zero.

  The boy from the city wriggled into the elaborate top and stood on the yawning dock in a veil of tiny insects, waiting.

  A moment later the girl appeared at the top of the path, two green bottles clanking where she had them cradled at her belly, head bowed as she placed bare feet on rocks.

  At the foot of the dock she set the bottles of soda in the grass and stood considering.

  “Well?”

  “What is it?”

  “What does it look like?”

  She didn’t seem to know.

  He fluffed the cape with his elbows, wishing for a wind. The weight of it dragged the neck of the shirt back so it rode against his throat, a design flaw. He’d attach the next cape at the shoulders, maybe.

  “This is who I really am,” he said.

  She still didn’t say anything, just stood.

  “Aeroman.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “It means flying man. Dylan Ebdus is my secret identity.”

  Forehead knit, she said: “Well, I don’t like it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It looks weird.”

  “When it’s done it’ll cover my legs. This is just the top half.”

  “Where did it come from?”

  “I made it.” He said nothing about the ring, about Aaron X. Doily.

  She nudged the Mountain Dews, her bare toes cast in green shade by the sunstruck bottles. “It doesn’t seem like you.”

  “Well, it is me,” he said, adamant. He realized now he wanted Heather to tell her brother, so Buzz would understand he could presume nothing about Dylan or Brooklyn.

  She sat, folded her legs in the grass. He stood, still looking for the sign she comprehended the importance of what he’d shown her.

  “Dylan?”

  “What?”

  “If you stayed here you wouldn’t have to go to private school.”

  He was stupefied. The remark was so irrelevant and appalling, he didn’t even know where to start.

  “I’m not staying here,” he said simply, perhaps cruelly.

  Heather abruptly stood, her face red and shocked, as if he’d slapped her.

  “Take it off,” she said. “I don’t like it.”

  “No.”

  She moved to the path, abandoning the bottles which lay in the grass.

  “What about the surprise?” he said. There was a breeze suddenly, and he felt the cape flutter and snap perfectly at his back, like a stadium flag.

  “I don’t care,” she said without turning.

  “I haven’t even shown it to you yet,” he yelled, but she was gone.

  After a moment he moved, anyway, to the end of the dock, there bent his knees, pointed his hands straight from his body, preparing what he’d planned for weeks. Heather might be watching from high in the grass at the field’s edge; it was possible. Or not, didn’t matter now. He didn’t need to be known in Vermont, this null area that was only measured in its distance from the city, its use as a restorative, a place to get your act together before returning to the real world. In his case, to prepare to be thirteen in the city, to kiss city girls, to be the flying boy who fights city crime, shit incomprehensible to anyone from Vermont.

  He dove in air. The mirrorlike surface dazzled his eyes as he executed a pinball circuit, like one of those dragonflies, inches above. He trained on the far bank to keep from dizziness, flew near and turned, brushing the high grass there, springing an explosion of waterstriders snoozing deep in roots.

  He toured the water twice around. When he landed running on the dock he took a splinter in his heel: never fly without proper footgear. And the corner tips of the cape had dangled and were soaked. That’s how close he’d been. So: 1. Wear sneakers. 2. Hem cape. One way or another, you were always learning something.

  chapter 12

  The church was a garage, set back on Dekalb Avenue behind a low white picket fence that fooled no one, being flush to the busted slate sidewalk and wedged between an ironworks and a plumber’s shop. On a Saturday the ironworks was in full operation, oblivious to the services next door, rolling gate up to reveal a man in a welder’s mask dipping an acetylene torch against a window grille, sparks spilling on the concrete floor. The block also included an auto body shop, its windows showing a 1967 pinup calendar; a “record” store, glass papered with empty album jackets to conceal the interior from the street, protecting sellers of something likely not records; and two boarded lunch counters with thirties vintage Coca-Cola signs intact, emblazoning forgotten names. The church, whitewashed cinder-block exterior decorated with a handpainted tin sign reading PARLOR OF GOD , “ IN HIS BOSOM WE ARE REVEALED,” REV . PAULETTA GIB , PASTOR and decorated with a golden Star of David was absolutely a garage, plywood doors open to expose five rows of backs and nodding heads of sitters in folding chairs facing the woman with the microphone at the front of the room. August sun blazed down, baking the churchgoers. Ties were tugged loose at necks, knees eagled to ventilate genitals, cuffs hitched. The pastor’s floral dress was soaked at the belly and where the wattles of her upper arms pressed against her ribs. As she paced at the front she expertly flipped the mic’s cord across the floor at her feet, keeping it looped far from her high, thick-heeled shoes, which bore a print to match the dress.

  The two men, father and son, each boiling in a suit and tie in the midmorning heat, moved through the gate of the picket fence and took seats at the back, just inside the shade of the garage.

  “We had better strive to emulate the five virgin brides,” the woman said at the pitch of her talk. “Keeping our wicks cropped close, keeping our oil clean, preserving the flame, oh yes.”

  “Oh yes,” came the murmured and shouted reply.

  “Keeping that light in the window so when the robber bridegroom arrives he can see us waiting faithfully in the window, oh yes, all in our fine things, in our finery all untouched, not one fingertip soiling our garments, not one.”

  “Not one, not one.”

  At the end, as the tiny congregation milled through the picket fence and onto the sidewalk, the pastor found her way to the strangers who’d arrived late and seated themselves in the rear, Barrett Rude Senior and Junior. They stood as she approached.

  “Welcome,” she said, holding out her hand. “Pauletta Gib.”

  “That’s a fine service, Sister Gib,” said Senior, bowing deeply. His tie was still knotted tightly at his neck, despite the heat.

  She nodded at him, then opened her hands, and they stepped out together into the gla
re. Pauletta Gib turned to the son. “You’re that singer with the Distinctions,” she said.

  “Barrett Rude Junior, ma’am. No longer with the group.”

  “I’d heard word you were raised within the Parlor.”

  “Raised by my father in the church, yes.” The singer softened his voice, spoke as humbly as he could. The pilgrimage to the garage-front church today was for Senior, not a concession but a gift.

  But Pauletta Gib had eyes for the tall man who wished today only to stand in his father’s shadow. “Your singing’s given a lot of easement to folks,” she said.

  Barrett Rude Junior lowered his head as his father said: “My son is not a worshipful man, Sister.”

  Pauletta Gib arched an eyebrow. “I’m sure I don’t have to tell you, Mr. Rude, that a worshipful man is measured one Sabbathday at a time. Today I find your son here within my walls.”

  “I have only just joined him here in the city. He had no idea of the existence of your temple.” His choice of words conveyed hesitation over the setting, the dressed congregation lingering on the sidewalk where men from the ironworks now misted a section of grille with black Krylon. The paint settled to form a blurred negative of the grille on the pavement.

  “Yet you found us today, praise be to God.”

  The father at last found voice for what he wanted her badly to know: “I once had a ministry of the Parlor of my own in Raleigh, North Carolina.”

  Her frown seemed to go through the older man, to pass over his tight-knotted tie, his fresh shave, his keen and defiant expression, to ask How long ago was that? And what transpired in between?

  What she said, though, revealed nothing of her conclusions at the going-over her eyes had conducted: “Love sets up a Parlor wherever it wanders.”

  To that Barrett Rude Senior could only add, grumpily, “Praise God.”

  The woman took the son’s hands in hers, gazed deep in his flinching eyes. “Would you sing in our church next Sabbathday?” The tone suggested it was a kindness she offered the singer, not the request for a freebie it should seem to be.

  But it was the father, now shifting his weight from squeaking shoe to squeaking shoe, who ached to be at Pauletta Gib’s microphone.

  “I don’t know,” said Barrett Rude Junior sincerely, not certain what his father would prefer to hear, mostly wishing he could cause the question to be unasked.

  “Don’t speak to it at present,” said Pauletta Gib, patting the singer’s hand. “Your heart will clarify the question in your sleep.” Then she turned to the father, her tone slipping an octave. “I trust I’ll see you next week, Mr. Rude. Unless you’ve already set up a temple of your own.”

  “Hrrph.”

  Barrett Rude Senior turned and pouted, squinting into the sun. He checked his cuffs, picked a nonexistent thread off the breast of his jacket and examined it briefly before tossing it toward the curb, elaborate dandyish mime.

  Inevitably, Pauletta Gib had begun to remind Senior and Junior of their deceased wife and mother.

  Like the woman they both remembered, she disfavored the father for the son.

  Now two of Pauletta Gib’s flock who’d hovered at the edge of the talk came forward with an envelope and a ballpoint pen and pressed them into the hands of Barrett Rude Junior. A girl in a print dress, bare dusky arms with a trace of talcum powder, her young brother a twig in a pale peach suit. The boy stood shy at his sister’s hip, so the girl had to make the request. They wanted nothing much, though it was a thing the singer hadn’t given in nearly two years: just an autograph.

  “Yo.”

  “Yo, man.”

  “What up?”

  “Nothin’, man. What you doin’?”

  “What you think, man? Same as you—gettin’ some ink.”

  “Cool, cool.”

  Samuel J. Underberg’s, Inc. Food Store Outfitters is a boxy, pale-green five-story building on the other side of Flatbush, beyond the newsstand on the traffic island, in the region of flattened lots and stilled warehouses in the shadow of the Williamsburg Savings Bank tower. The area is a big zero in most senses, a region of lack. Past the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Long Island Rail Road terminal, there’s nothing doing, nobody home. In fact, though no one seems to know it, this is the site once slated for Ebbets Field’s relocation, before the Dodgers defected. They got as far as knocking down a lot of old brick and putting nothing up in its place. Nobody smells beer and peanut ghosts here because the ballpark never arrived. The flattened region is a sort of brick-dotted outline tracing a phantom limb. As far as a wandering crowd of kids would care, housing projects–wise, it’s beyond the safety zone of Wyckoff Gardens, well into the turf of Atlantic Terminals.

  Strange groups on the bare sidewalk give uneasy props all around, heads bobbing and nodding, eyes averted.

  All gaze is deferred to the warehouse wall, the splendid explosion of graffiti there.

  At the center of this dead land Samuel J. Underberg’s is a site of mysterious life, one to which the family-owned business is oblivious. It’s nothing to do with their real profitability, which is mainly in supplying new shopping carts, replacements for those stolen by the homeless or wrecked in parking lot collisions. Every day Underberg’s trucks dozens of carts out of their warehouse to supermarkets all over Brooklyn. From the warehouse they also shift big-ticket items like registers and rubber matting and display carousels. Call it a niche. At least it keeps a number of men employed, cousins, many of them.

  None of this remotely explains the special magnetism of Underberg’s for the kids who congregate there. The secret’s inside the dinky showroom, practically an afterthought, which features the trimmings a supermarket needs to dress itself as a stage set for the play of shopping: fake parsley-sprig barriers to lay between different cuts of meat inside coolers, fake plastic salamis and gourds of cheese to bulk up displays of real goods, vinyl and laminate signage cut in shapes of fish and pigs to stick in the fronts of delicatessen trays, hot-pink and orange fluorescent signs blaring SPECIAL!

  “Yo, man, check it out, that’s Strike, man.”

  “Strike? Really?” This a whisper of disbelief that the King of the Broadway Line would materialize in human form.

  “Check it out man, he’s tagging up.”

  “Ho, snap, man. Strike.”

  “I’m gonna get him to sign my book.”

  The Underberg’s showroom is the sole place in Brooklyn where a walk-in customer can buy, no questions asked, an eight-ounce bottle of Garvey Formula XT-70 Violet, an industrial ink comprised of ethanol, butyl ether, and polyamid resin, formulated specifically for stamping prices on frozen cellophane and plastic-wrapped packages of slimy meat. Garvey Violet’s unique grabability extends also to grime-covered windowpanes—the panes in question being those of subway cars. For use in the homemade markers of graffiti artists Garvey Violet is an irreplaceable elixir, and that, in turn, makes lowly, oblivious Underberg’s a destination. It also ensures that the sides of the building form a constantly updated museum of tags from every corner of the borough, a showcase for rival tribes in temporary collaboration.

  The skull-capped men at the showroom counter have sussed out this much: Garvey Violet is stacked well behind the counter, so it can only be purchased, never shoplifted. And the counter it hides behind is a glass case filled with cutlery, boning knifes, fat cleavers. At $5.99 a bottle Garvey Violet’s enough of a bargain the writers pony up—the only other option, anyway, would be to storm the place with shotguns. Their acting out inside the showroom is more covert: stealing fake fruit and scribbling tiny tags here and there on the cardboard displays.

  But apart from this the writers tend to shift in and out glumly, one at a time plunking cash on the counter and mumbling the request, their braggadocio damped until back on the street.

  “Yo, man, you hear that? He said Jew want a bag for that ?”

  “Ah, shut up, man.”

  “I swear man, he said it. I’m not making it up.”

  These
wary groups pass around drawing books bound in pebbly black board, full of their own and others’ tags, as well as full-color felt-tip blueprints for top-to-bottom burners they hope someday to dare to reproduce on a train. Underberg’s is a place for displaying books, for gathering autographs from all over, though the risk is always abasement or mockery if a group of older, stronger writers decides to bully some younger faction.

  From up Flatbush Avenue, off the D train, from up Fourth Avenue off the N and the R at Pacific Street, wandering up from the projects, small groups arrive in waves and mingle jostling on the sidewalk there, blocking the Underberg’s men from loading their truck. They come and go noisily, the groups themselves like a form of human scribbling.

  This day two white kids stand hoping to be inconspicuous in the gabble of activity that’s suddenly all around them, a simple run to Underberg’s not so simple after all. One’s frozen in the act of tagging up.

  “Check out the white boys, man, think they bad.”

  “What you write, white boy?”

  The white kid with the marker is silent, shoulders bunched against his harassers, but with a certain plodding integrity he finishes marking his tag on Underberg’s wall, in the small space he’s found between larger, spray-painted throw-ups.

  “Whazzat say? Art? A-R-T?”

  “Dude’s tag is Art, man. That’s wack.”

  “Your name Arturo, dude? You don’t look Puerto Rican to me.”

  “Shut up, man, leave the guy alone.”

  “He’s a toy.”

  “Leave him alone, man.”

  “I’m not messin’ with the dude, yo, I just want to see what he’s writin’. You with a crew, Art ?”

  Question’s rhetorical: What white kid could be with a crew? For that matter, what self-respecting crew could contain a white dude, let alone a small, ferrety white dude like this one, let alone two white dudes? Not to mention two like these, beginning to cower instinctively against Underberg’s wall in the manner in which negotiating the halls and schoolyard and adjacent streets of Intermediate School 293 has tutored them.

  Ritualized cringes buried millimeter-deep in the psyches of the two white kids, mock-asthmatic seizures and other forms of beseeching, are ready to surface when the nearest thing to a crew these guys could ever hope for pops back out of the showroom with a fresh-purchased bottle of Garvey Violet: Mingus Rude.