The Fortress of Solitude

by Jonathan Lethem

  Returning to the subway they paused to flip through some worn Beatles LPs for sale on the sidewalk, Let It Be, Abbey Road. Dylan found a name he recognized. The name was superimposed on a photograph of four grinning, beardless black men in peach suits and ruffled shirts seated on stools of various heights, backlit in blue and arranged like a bouquet in a photographer’s studio: The Deceptively Simple Sounds of the Subtle Distinctions.

  Dylan showed it to Arthur. “That’s Gus’s dad.”

  Arthur looked unimpressed. Dylan bought the record and took it home, but it was scratched, unplayable.

  For a week Dylan and Arthur wore the jackets to school pristine. Then one day Arthur appeared with his jacket glamorously ruined with gold and silver paint, sleeves laminated in Krylon, burner scars, evidence. Arthur smirked, Dylan said nothing. That night he retired his virginal jacket before Mingus caught him in it.

  Mingus himself was a random factor, a shade or rumor now, only glimpsed. He’d vanish for weeks, then you’d meet up, get high in his basement, and go to the Rex on Court Street to take in a Charles Bronson double feature, sit in darkness for hours not speaking a word apart from dang and ho snap.

  Mingus was flush erratically, blew cash in a hurry. Later you’d catch him fluffing cushions for change, palming pennies from the dish Abraham kept at the front door, scraping up enough for a nickel bag.

  Nobody took fifty cents or a dollar from Dylan that he didn’t see coming a mile off. One day in the basement Dylan applied Abraham’s hacksaw to a couple of quarters, then strolled with fragments jingling, waiting for the inevitable frisk. When with a dumb grin Dylan offered the sawed half-quarters and quarter-quarters the Gowanus kids who’d cornered him walked off shaking heads, pained, as if he’d spoken Chinese or wriggled an antenna.

  You knew this game of days like the back of your hand, if the back of your hand was changing like a werewolf’s.

  One day Dylan came home to find Abraham with a package on the kitchen table, an upright bundle wrapped in layers of butcher paper and twine. Abraham shredded at it with a steak knife, freeing the hidden object, unpeeling onion layers of newspaper insulation like Humphrey Bogart unpacking the Maltese Falcon. Dylan imagined it might be something from Rachel, perhaps a statuette depicting A Crab, Running. Then Abraham exposed the top of the prize inside: the gleaming golden nose of a 1950s-style rocketship.

  “Don’t worry, I won it fair and square,” said Abraham. “Sidney accepted on my behalf.”

  Words on the gilded rocket’s base explained, at least partly. HUGO AWARD , BEST NEW ARTIST , 1976 , ABRAHAM EBDUS .

  “Recognition creeps up on one,” said Abraham darkly.

  Dylan hefted the thing, scowled.

  “You want it for a doorstop?”

  Dylan considered, nodded.

  “Just don’t say I never gave you anything.”

  chapter 13

  The song could be heard on New York radio for a week or two, mid-February 1978, not yet charting high but picked to click, scored on the R&B chart at number eighty-four with a bullet—it was asserted to be with a bullet each time that discouraging number was mentioned aloud—and slipped into rotation between Earth, Wind and Fire’s “Serpentine Fire” and Con Funk Shun’s “Ffun”: “(Did You Press Your) Bump Suit” by Doofus Funkstrong, a three-minute, forty-second single edited out of the sprawling eighteen-minute jam that covered side two of the band’s Warner Brothers debut, Double-Breasted Rump. DJs solicited phone calls weighing in—bold or cold, smash or trash, funk or junk? A few dozen requests could still tip a song up regional charts and push it toward a national breakout. Anyone trusting their ears knew Doofus Funkstrong was a disguise for the legally hamstrung, hence recording-under-pseudonyms Funk Mob—for those less sure, a look at the psychedelic Pedro Bell jacket art did the trick. Fewer ears would place the name of the vocalist whose melismas decorated just the last thirty-eight seconds of the single edit, credited on the album jacket, as according to plan, as Pee-Brain Rooster: under his own name Barrett Rude Junior was a voice from radio’s middle distance, years out of rotation, not yet an oldie. If a few formed the question Ain’t that the singer from the Distinctions? it was only a passing thought—how likely, anyway, that the tenor voice of the smooth and mellow Distinctions should show up riding the crest of that distorted synth bass line?

  Then the song died. No explanation was called for—certainly none was given. Songs die, this one did. Figure it freakish that it charted at all, with refrains like Up jumped the globster, caught her with a mobster! and Goof a wedgie up your rump pocket! There are limits. So it died; call Doofus Funkstrong an album-oriented act, euphemism for Who cares? Performance royalties trickled through a legal maze, never enough to fight over should Pee-Brain Rooster choose to consult a lawyer. For a few weeks you heard the song or you didn’t, while nerd connoisseurs were left to savor it later, to champion or slag it in their endless tinny dialogue. History, basically, wasn’t made. Marilla and La-La would never be heard chanting this song in their front yard, not skipping rope nor braiding hair nor teasing boys with their fresh-grown hips. That test it couldn’t pass: the song, musicianship aside, lacked a hook.

  When Mr. Winegar asked him to remain after class he sat imagining that he’d somehow become known, that the science teacher had taken it upon himself as gravity’s local spokesman to pronounce on the matter: Young man, human flight is sheerly impossible! Renounce it at once! Instead Mr. Winegar took a letter from his drawer and handed it across his desk, sat twisting the end of his mustache as he watched Dylan Ebdus absorb its contents: test scores permitting entrance to Stuyvesant.

  Outside it snowed, jigsaw chunks which piled on the ledge, clotted the grate which covered the window. The school had poured out into the white-muffled afternoon. Staying late Dylan had lost his chance to sneak across Smith in a protective mob of bodies in motion, would instead be snowball target prime for anyone prowling near the school.

  “Only kid in the school to make it,” said Winegar. “But then only six even tried the test. I requested the chance to tell you in person, don’t mind saying I’m proud of how you’ve applied yourself.”

  Winegar’s mustache-torturing and puzzled gaze contradicted this potted speech: he’d retained the letter in order to glimpse the freak, the reverse-retard who’d surfaced unexpectedly in the ocean of screaming, proto-criminal souls that made up Dylan’s classmates, made up for that matter all five periods of science teaching in his day’s schedule—made up, come to think of it, his entire blighted career. If I’d known you’d pull this I’d have flattered myself by noticing you sooner.

  But caretaking Winegar’s astonishment wasn’t one of Dylan’s priorities.

  “What about my friend Arthur Lomb?”

  Winegar frowned. “I shouldn’t discuss anyone else’s results with you.”

  It could only mean one thing. Dylan found himself pained for Arthur, felt an unexpected throb of empathy.

  “He must of gotten into Bronx Science, though,” he suggested to the teacher.

  Winegar looked hurt. “Certain persons—” he began, and broke off. Dylan understood: not Bronx Science, not even Brooklyn Tech. Arthur Lomb, chess demolitionist, whiz mimic, master strategist of escape, hadn’t honored his own advice and studied for the test. Perhaps he thought a last-minute asthmatic seizure would carry the day, perhaps proudly held a bowel movement through the test period, perhaps thrown a few yos their way. All useless in the teeth of algebra. Houdini had drowned inside his padlocked cabinet.

  From Winegar’s tone it was plain Arthur had bragged to the teacher in advance, worked up expectations with a series of snappy answers and arch asides.

  “Well, Sarah Hale is right by my house,” said Dylan, impulsively sadistic. He adopted a moronic, grating monotone, tribute to Arthur Lomb, fallen soldier. “I mean, it does seem like all my friends are going there.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “I only took the test to see how I’d do. I might not go.”

&n
bsp; Winegar looked traumatized. Sarah J. Hale High School was the next grim repository, following Intermediate School 293 by rote. You could cut class for two years straight, as in the case of Mingus Rude, and they’d eventually palm you off to Sarah J. just to free up the chair in your homeroom for someone else. Dylan might as well have said I think I’ll just go straight to the Brooklyn House of Detention. “I’d hate to see you neglect an opportunity—”

  You’re white! Winegar wanted to scream.

  Man can fly! Dylan wanted to scream.

  “I’ll think it over,” said Dylan.

  “You’ve shown an aptitude—”

  You should see my altitude.

  “I have to talk to Abraham. My dad.”

  The mustache might dissolve in Winegar’s fingers if Dylan didn’t show a little mercy. “Certainly. Please let your father know I’d be glad to answer any questions—”

  “Okay.” He glanced outside. Brooklyn was captured in a net of false calm, the school drowned. Dylan was bored with Winegar now, prepared to meet his ice-ball fate.

  Snow-thick roofs could be a fine place to study cornice-hopping, leave inexplicable footprint trails, jumpings-off to nowhere.

  Aeroman, you understand, works locally, like his predecessor.

  Marijuana was Rachel Ebdus’s totem fume. To inhale it was communion, a forgiving and being embraced by her smoke-form. Dylan Ebdus learned slowly, first faking when Mingus Rude handed him a joint, making sucky sounds around the damp tip as wisps wreathed his head. Then not faking but getting nothing for his trouble apart from a raw impression that his throat was an overpicked nostril. It was only later, the sixth or seventh time he sincerely inhaled, that Mingus’s room slowly widened outward from pinprick size, the thing Dylan had pretended to feel all along.

  At that moment Rachel joined him there, in Mingus’s room with the towel stuffed at the bottom of the door and the back windows vented to the icy air. Whether in the drug or in Dylan, she’d seemingly lurked in one to be catalyzed by the other. Or perhaps it was simpler: as while listening to her records, the Modern Jazz Quartet and Nina Simone and Three Dog Night, Dylan could still be just getting acquainted with Rachel, through her appetites, her puns, her drugs.

  Dylan stored the Running Crab postcards, maybe thirty-five or forty now, in order by postmark, pinned upright between Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land and the New Belmont Specials numbers one through sixteen—a run halted when Abraham had quit painting their covers—on a shelf bookended by the Hugo Award statuette. Dylan archived the postcards alongside Abraham’s commercial art not only to ensure Abraham’s irritation, should father sniff into son’s Batcave while son was at school, but also because it felt deeply right: the objects made a voodoo poem of Abraham-and-Rachelhood, of his parents’ DNA, their semivoluntary sheddings like fingernails or hair, mixed on a shelf.

  Dylan determined now to reread the whole sequence of postcards stoned, to start at the beginning again and with the assistance of the drug decode Rachel’s vanishing.

  “Check this out,” said Mingus Rude, after he’d fanned the smoke into his backyard and shut the windows. The cold didn’t matter, Mingus always wore his stained army jacket indoors. He was always just passing through, ready for action even when he never stirred from the room for hours.

  Now he slipped Rhythm Heritage’s “Theme from S.W.A.T.” extended-mix seven-inch from its sleeve and smoothly to the turntable, moved the needle to the groove.

  As crackle gave way to the opening break, Mingus began shifting the record back and forth under the needle, isolating the beat. Under his breath he rapped calls to an imaginary schoolyard audience in a rubbery voice of cartoon affront, the Bugs Bunny of the ghetto.

  Dylan nodded appreciatively.

  “That’s bad, right?” said Mingus.

  “It’s fly,” Dylan ventured.

  “All the cuts them DJs can’t even find, I just snuck upstairs and stole out of Junior’s collection. Wanna hear some more?”

  “Yeah.”

  “That’s right my boy wants to hear more, you bet he does.”

  This time Mingus set the needle on Dennis Coffey and the Detroit Guitar Band’s “Scorpio.” Again he scratched it back and forth, again he mumble-rapped along with the song, shy eyes slanted downward.

  Mingus might not be ready to take it to the schoolyard, but he had the tracks. They might be the only two kids in Brooklyn with a collection of vinyl beamed direct from Planet Superfly.

  Mingus’s room had changed. The Philadelphia Flyers’ Dave Schultz and the Miami Dolphins’ Mercury Morris were gone, the Jackson Five was gone. All three posters had been autographed in real ink, gifts to Barrett Rude Junior. No matter: they’d been ripped from the wall, leaving only shreds under tacks. Just one poster remained, one permanently creased in sixths from its life as a giveaway inside a double gatefold LP: Bootsy Collins and his Rubber Band, in chrome tuxes, platforms, pink smoke. It was autographed too. On a visit upstairs to see Barrett Rude Junior Bootsy himself had been directed to the basement apartment, had stood in Mingus’s room to sign the poster in dripping Garvey Violet, a messy slogan that half-covered his spangled, star-shaped guitar: Love Ya, Bootsy! More recently the poster had been half-covered in silver spray. Mingus had begun tagging inside his room. Too lazy or stoned to go out and put it in the public eye, the tags still flowed from him, DOSE , DOSE , DOSE . Silver loops sprawled over the walls, across molding, touching the ceiling, silver mist even touching the glass of the back windows. The radiator was tagged, a puzzle in three dimensions. If you stood sideways so the radiator’s grille formed a single surface you could read the tag: ART . From other angles it dissolved into stripes, empty code.

  Farrah Fawcett-Majors was gone too, the red one-piece and erect nipple and blond tilted grin which had been pinned at telling eye level to Mingus’s single bed. Instead, a clutch of Barrett Rude Junior’s hand-me-down Playboy and Penthouse magazines were inadequately hidden beneath the bed, tattered centerfolds torn from their staples and flapped out like the tongues of exhausted dogs. A white bloom of balled Kleenex failed to conceal a jar of Vaseline.

  “You never told me about the girl in Vermont, man.”

  “What girl?” Dylan was turning the pages of Defenders #48, ogling Valkyrie in her blue sleeveless armor, her chain-mail brassiere. Mingus’s comics were in tatters, he’d tagged their slick covers with black El Marko.

  “King Arthur said you were bragging about it, man, so don’t even try to lie.”

  “I didn’t tell Arthur anything. He’s full of it.”

  “Look at my boy, trying to cover up! Arthur said you done got over. You can’t hide from me, D-Man, you know you’ll be telling me in a minute.”

  Dylan thought for less than a minute and said, “Her name’s Heather.”

  “There you go.”

  “We went swimming.”

  “I heard more than swimming.”

  Despite cutting class for two years, Mingus had graduated to Sarah J. Hale. Like a sundial shadow he’d crept into the next time zone, the next phase. His room had changed, his body had changed, he’d grown gruffer and larger, when he loped down Dean Street he chanted rhymes under his breath, disc jockey patter. He had his own stereo. He scored his own pot, nickel bags through a slot in the door of a tenement on Bergen, no longer raiding Barrett Rude Junior’s freezer stash. His room was a sanctum. Though Barrett Rude Senior had moved into the front of the basement apartment Mingus’s room seemed remote from any authority beyond his own. The rooms of the duplex had become fortresses, the three generations of Rudes barricaded into their dominions in an unspoken war. Mingus called his grandfather Senior and never stepped into his front room, which when it was seen through a half-open door looked barren, as though Senior had forgotten how a large room might be filled. Senior sat by the radiator and stared through the bars of the basement windows onto Dean Street as through the bars of a cell. Sometimes he burned candles. Mingus called him Senior, and he called his own father J
unior. Mingus’s room smelled of Vaseline and something else. The jacket of the Ohio Player’s Fire, which depicted a girl’s impossibly hot torso with a firehose snaking obscenely between her legs, was sticky with something, resin maybe, and seeds and stems from rolling joints on the jacket were stuck in the something. It was a bit disgusting, but also fascinating, like a leaf stuck in hair or a smear of food on chin you didn’t want to point out.

  Junior’s rooms upstairs smelled of something else, something wicked, heated foil, singed crystal grains. Senior melted candles and chain-smoked Pall Malls, frequently igniting the next with the stub of the last, Mingus and Dylan, sealed into the sanctum with the towel at the door, puffed pot, while upstairs in the parlor which nobody entered Junior burned freebase cocaine in a glass pipe.

  Barrett Rude Junior and the Famous Flames.

  “Don’t think I forgot you was telling me about Heather, man.”

  “You wish.”

  “How old is she?”

  “Thirteen.”

  “Older woman—always said that’s the way to go.”

  “I gave her a back rub.”

  “Oh yeah. There you go. I know you didn’t stop at no back rub.”

  “We kissed, in the attic.” Saying the words Dylan smelled the place, recalled groaning wooden stairs, blond light. “All she had on was her swimsuit.”

  “Get serious now. She a old thirteen or a young thirteen?” Mingus’s open hands described fullness in the air.

  Dylan thought oranges, said, “Grapefruits.”

  “Damn !” Mingus’s pleasure was so great he scowled. “Hold on a minute.” He pushed himself up and put Sly’s Fresh on the stereo, cranked the volume. Then he slumped back on his bed, fingers spread wide on thighs. Between thighs and spread fingers, tenting his corduroys, a boner.

  “You were saying.”

  Something moving in the brain of a doer sang Sly in a lubricious, dozy drawl.