The Fortress of Solitude

by Jonathan Lethem

  On Smith Street, howling an unrehearsed cowboys-and-indians woo-woo-woo as he descended, Aeroman spooked drunks boxing at the door of a social club, sole duty at the tail end of a long night’s stalking around, prowling for gigs, killing time tagging on metal doors. On Third Avenue in a cold mid-October rain he foiled a holdup attempt at one of the Plexiglas-barrier Chinese joints, leaving a spilled mound of orange fried rice trampled to pudding at the entrance. At the far end of the Heights Promenade, under cover of darkness, he was cooed at in his costume by men rendezvousing on park benches, men who didn’t need his protection. On Pacific Street near Court, Dylan and Aeroman found roof access to a tenement and lay on their bellies, in costume and street clothes, peering over the cornice, memorizing the life of the unfamiliar block, every girl screaming “Mira, mira! ” at someone who wouldn’t reply, every boy slapping a spaldeen into the joint of a wall, every grandmother window-perched on Buddha arms, watching just as Mingus and Dylan watched, absorbed, doing nothing.

  The bridge crossing after dark was a sure spot, a famous mistake to walk there at night, so they took it to the bridge: Dylan standing as bait by the massive shoring tower still bearing Mono’s and Lee’s fabulously weathered autographs, Mingus in costume flown to a perch on the high, swaying cable. Below, on the streets, it was late summer, but here above the city winter was arriving, swept off the ocean. Dylan was mugged in minutes, it was comically predictable, almost corny when two homeboys lurched out of the gloom beyond the tower and said: “Hey, whiteboy, lemme borrow a dollar off you, man.”

  Dylan gladly played at reaching into his pockets for money, his attackers fish in a barrel. Only Mingus didn’t shoot the fish, he didn’t swoop.

  “What you checkin’ around for, man?”

  Dylan had made them nervous. They smelled setup in his hesitation and followed his gaze to the bridge, the sky-harp of spun lines. So all three saw the caped figure struggling in the gust which had torn it from the cable, saw Mingus cycling in air, trying to reclaim a footing, nearly doing so before being wind-wrested into the breach between the bridge and the water, the wild void. All three watching lost sight of him below the line of the bridge’s roadway. He was just a twinkle, mask, cape, Puma soles maybe, then nothing at all.

  He’d been blown from the bridge.

  Dylan turned on the walkway’s planks and bolted for the Brooklyn end, abandoned the scene exactly as Rachel had always told him to do— Just run, kiddo, use those pogo sticks, they can’t catch up with you! —and which he’d never done once in a thousand yokings. For Mingus he found his legs, he ran. He nearly tumbled dodging a beat cop staked at the foot of the stairs, waved a quick hello-I-must-be-going to the cop’s dull glower, then panted on, limbs wheeling. Cabs curled off the bridge, faceless, cornering through Cadman Plaza to Henry Street, Clinton Street, to placid brownstones with mock gaslight fixtures. There wasn’t anybody to appeal to for help, Dylan was alone, Mingus, Aeroman, ring all drowned, smashed on the water. Dylan veered to the dark paths below the bridge, seeking the edge of the river, the junk-strewn wasteland where the city hid crashed police cars and looted parking meters and other evidence of helplessness.

  Mingus sat hunched and dripping at the base of the anchorage, twisting water from the tips of his cape, stain spreading on the concrete embankment like a snow angel. Dylan arrived gasping, hot-faced, couldn’t speak before Mingus said: “Ho, shit, man.”

  “You’re okay?”

  “I was swimming, man. I don’t even know how to swim.” He spoke with quiet amazement, nodding his head at the water.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Like a fish, D-Man.”

  “You’re saying the ring gave you the power of swimming ?”

  “Or flying underwater, don’t ask me. I was up to some serious Aquaman shit, though.”

  They slunk to Dean. The staged rescue left unfinished on the walkway and the plummet from the wires, both were put behind them, though Dylan and Mingus and Aeroman skirted the bridge after that. Aeroman, having been laid flat to dry, mellowed on the shelf for weeks, regathering his wits and bravado, perhaps, shaking off effects of the fall. Mingus didn’t reach for the costume and Dylan didn’t push. Dylan instead became briefly obsessed with clandestine powers in the ring. Why imagine Aaron X. Doily had plumbed them all? Possibly Aeroman was named prematurely, had more to offer. Dylan wore the ring and immersed his head in Mingus’s filled tub, hoping to breathe underwater. He snorted a flood into his lungs, came up hacking, nearly puked, bathwater scalding his nostrils.

  The ring also conferred no X-ray vision, though they spent one thrilled night persuading themselves, scowling hard at dresses, black hos working Pacific and Nevins, white Saint Ann’s girls massed at the Baskin-Robbins on Montague.

  “Wait, wait, I see something.”

  “My turn now.”

  “Oh—sweet—Jesus. She’s wearing no panties.”

  Aeroman’s last venture that first season of high school was in a light, freak-early midnight snowfall two weeks past Thanksgiving, Dylan walking State Street, Mingus hopping the rooftops above, keeping pace. Ever since the Chinese victim who’d dropped his money, State between Hoyt and Bond was their lucky mugging strip, safe distance from anyone they’d know on Dean or Bergen, dark with a smashed streetlamp, close enough to the Hoyt-Schermerhorn subway stop that dumb junkies frightened of venturing into the Heights considered it safe prowling for renovators’ wives, trembling whiteboys, geezers. Tonight, though, a snowball was all Dylan drew. A lone, tall Puerto Rican kid leaning on a car scooped a windshield-mass of fresh stuff and flung an unerring bull’s-eye in Dylan’s back. When Dylan whirled he said: “Try it, motherfucker, I dare you throw one.”

  At that moment Mingus descended with a cradled armload, shoveled it into the tall kid’s collar.

  Then Mingus landed softly beside Dylan and they ran together hooting, Mingus stripping the costume and cape off over his head, momentarily bare-chested in the snowfalling night.

  Mingus afternoons, Aeroman nights, they were untellable the next day at Stuyvesant, if he’d even wanted to try, if he’d somehow corralled Tim Vandertooth’s and Gabriel Stern’s ears for the attempt. Dylan had no interest in telling. Mornings after, he felt himself an orbiter on reentry, his hidden knowledge sealed in flame. Mingus and Aeroman were a million miles away, another realm, Brooklyn. Besides, the thing coming for Tim and Gabe had found them.

  Once it arrived it was obvious, had a common name already known: punk. Or new wave. They were related strands: Sex Pistols, Talking Heads, Cheap Trick. Discerning their difference, articulating your precise relation, that was part of the point, a continuum of the now it was suddenly clear anyone could be placed on. Even the longhaired stoners in their refusal were anti-punk, defining something.

  Tim came to school one day with a point-studded dog collar. He showed them how it worked, a simple snap. Gabe taunted him uneasily for a week, then went out and bought a Ramonesian leather jacket loaded with zippers and buckles, smelling of preservatives and sizing, almost like one of Abraham’s canvases. Gabe slapped the jacket against a rock in the park, trying to age it. They studied the results. The jacket looked new as licorice. Or the problem was themselves, their bangs, hair curled over their ears. The next week Tim and Gabe returned from Roosevelt Island having fucked up their hair with children’s scissors. The jacket looked slightly improved.

  Tim smoked cigarettes now.

  Gabe etched a tiny swastika on his forearm with a razor blade. “You know what my parents would do to me if they saw this? ” he whispered darkly, like he’d been kidnapped by Satanists and forced to recite a pledge.

  The girls with short black-dyed hair were suddenly visible. Sarcastic, pale, and titless, they were a different flavor, previously overlooked.

  A few even had tits, which might violate punk aesthetics but you’d consider making an exception.

  Dylan shunted knapsack-loads of Rachel’s Blind Faith and Creedence Clearwater Revival records to Bleeck
er Bob’s record exchange, embarrassed to see them in the house, returned with the Clash’s Give ’Em Enough Rope.

  Steve Martin was for children.

  There wasn’t much terror. Fourteenth Street, First Avenue, they were scungy but populated, jostling with drug traffic but not a lot of yoking. Maybe you’d outgrown victim size, though it was hard to imagine there could be universal consensus on that point, you had to stay alert. A girl your age was pushed from a subway platform on her way to Music and Art, a cellist who lost her arm under the train and had it reattached in a miracle surgery. The incident made a brief noise of panic among white kids on subways and their parents, but that was 135th Street, Harlem. Poor kid but what did she expect? Thank God you hadn’t gone to Music and Art. To escape the outer boroughs only to soar on the subway past Manhattan’s safe zones all the way into Harlem was ironic, one crazy mistake you’d at least avoided.

  It was the leather jacket which caused the only piece of trouble. For once it wasn’t Dylan’s trouble. A Puerto Rican perhaps eighteen or nineteen—mustached and tall and particularly thick around the middle, pearish, apparently self-appointed one-man gang patrolling Fourteenth Street between Second and Third—isolated Gabe in his new leather from among the hundreds of other streaming Stuyvesant kids and stepped up to block his path on the sidewalk. Something affronted him and he demanded reciprocal understanding from Gabe.

  “You wanna fight me?”

  “What? ” Gabe squinted in fierce incredulity.

  “Think you’re tough, you wanna fight me?” He poked Gabe’s shoulder. Gabe looked to Tim and Dylan, who both stepped back.

  Gabe enunciated with Maxwell Smart precision. “I actually don’t think I’m tough, no.”

  “You in a crew ?”

  This was a problem of codes, the self-loathing ironies of punkism not sufficiently conveyed yet to the Puerto Rican–gang quadrant of the universe. The guy himself wore just a jean jacket, wasn’t particularly fitted out or flamboyant. A red handkerchief knotted on his belt loop was maybe significant. Again Gabe’s glance sought Tim or Dylan but they’d melted away. Throngs parted around Gabe and his confronter, uninterested.

  When Gabe spoke again sarcasm curdled to a whine. “I’m just wearing it, it doesn’t mean anything.” Dylan detected scars in Gabe’s cringe-readiness, schoolyard mortifications they’d never have discussed. His tone wasn’t so far from Arthur Lomb pleading I can’t breathe.

  “Don’t come around here wearin’ that, man, or I have to take it off you.”

  The fact of their being lost in a crowd was no help, only added a lunatic degree of humiliation. So despite Tim’s mockery, Gabe diligently obeyed the Puerto Rican. He required Tim and Dylan to accompany him the long way around that block every day for weeks. Even taking that precaution he was spooked, now hustled through subway stations and down certain blocks peeking over his shoulder, wore his jacket with doomy fear—not a bad accouterment, actually, to his punk aura.

  Incredibly, the one day they defied the edict, again in what should have been a protective swarm, the guy’s radar guided him from nowhere to square against Gabe. He chest-bumped him out of Tim and Dylan’s company and to the curb.

  “I tole you. Now we gotta fight.”

  Gabe’s face was hot red and he spoke quietly under a strain of absurdity. “I’m not fighting you.”

  It wasn’t Dylan or Aeroman who rescued Gabe, but Tim, in a delicate maneuver Dylan barely understood. Stepping out to where Gabe and the guy stood in the street he reached into the vest pocket of his own jean jacket and showed his Marlboros.

  “Smoke?” He inserted a cigarette in his own mouth and held out the pack. As the Puerto Rican stared, weighing the offering, Tim said:

  “Give him a break, man. He doesn’t mean anything, he can’t help it.”

  Seemingly the Puerto Rican had only needed Gabe’s deep objectionability confirmed by an outside source. He accepted a cigarette. “Tell him not to come around here,” he said, ignoring Gabe, all violence leached from his tone.

  “Sure, sure.”

  For the first time Dylan and perhaps Gabe really noticed how Tim was taller, cooler, maybe really cool, in fact. He’d quit wearing the dog collar. His hair took the choppy haircut well, unlike Gabe’s curls. He triumphed each time those two wrestled, when you thought of it—only Gabe ever had to cry out Sprite or clitoris. But anyway, they hadn’t wrestled for months. Tim now cut all classes, was flunking madly, while Gabe like Dylan clung to respectability. One day in the park Tim appeared wearing sloppy eyeliner, and a James Dean slouch that dared you to mention the eyeliner. You didn’t. Tim smoked pot with the hippies at eight in the morning before class, while Gabe stood angrily aside in his useless jacket, the jacket he couldn’t defend without Tim’s help.

  Maybe Gabe and Tim didn’t even like each other, you realized now. They barely spoke and never joked, didn’t necessarily arrive or leave school together, rode separate trams. In algebra Mr. Kaplon gestured at Tim’s empty seat and said, “Mr. Stern—any notion as to the whereabouts of our friend Mr. Vandertooth?” and Gabe said “Why ask me?”—summing it up pretty well. By Christmas vacation Gabe and Dylan played demonstration Pong at Crazy Eddie’s in rageful silence and you’d never even picture Tim Vandertooth being there. It wasn’t his kind of thing.

  Mingus Rude, Arthur Lomb, Gabriel Stern and Tim Vandertooth, even Aaron X. Doily: Dylan never met anyone who wasn’t about to change immediately into someone else. His was a special talent for encountering persons about to shed one identity or disguise for another. He took it in stride by now. Maybe Rachel-Running-Crab had taught him that art.

  4/3/79

  viewed from space radioactive

  nostrils want a kleenex

  if sneezy they might blow

  brooklyn to merrie england

  however bad molten core might itch

  don’t pick down there too deep

  or you’ll toast your shell

  infrared like mine

  meltdown crab

  chapter 15

  Two sons might think two fathers never budged from their hiding places apart from runs to Ramirez’s or Buggy’s for bare necessities—toilet paper, Tropicana, cold cuts at gouging prices, whatever.

  Two sons might think fathers utterly unschooled in the craft of stoop-sitting—might suppose them ignorant equally of their neighbors and of the delirious nature of sunshine spilled into the chasm of brownstones.

  Two sons might be wrong all over. Abraham Ebdus and Barrett Rude Junior had their own Dean Street, the eleven A . M. weekday edition.

  Abraham Ebdus was up for hours by then, having packed off to school a mute and bleary Dylan, half-eaten toast in his fist, then ferried a thermos of coffee upstairs for a session painting celluloid frames under natural light. Abraham made film early mornings and late nights, his best hours, reserving lunch-dulled afternoons for painting outer spacescapes and electrical gremlins from the fourth dimension, whatever the latest art director required. Book jackets took care of themselves; he could be half asleep. Drowsiness dulled rage and good taste, unnecessary functions. The film required his sleep-purified, caffeine-honed eyes and mind. From eight-thirty he might accomplish five or six seconds of footage and by eleven be ready to unkink his limbs, rinse the thermos, wander briefly from the house. Dean Street at that hour was pensive, transitive, those with jobs and school all scurried away, idlers just rousing. The first of Ramirez’s corner-men would have found a milk carton, or not. Half a block away a landlord might be brooming his portion of slate. And Barrett Rude Junior would have woken, tucked feet in slippers, moved to his stoop for a gander at the day, a first gulp of air and light.

  Junior, on waking, often staggered first to the stereo whose red lights still glowed, to re-drop needle on whichever long-player had lullabyed him the night before, so when in robe or pajamas he took possession of his stoop it was with strains of Donny Hathaway’s Extension of a Man or Shuggie Otis’s Inspiration Information at his back. If the
volume was sufficient and the Dean Street bus nowhere near, Abraham Ebdus, five doors away, could hear the music, faintly. Junior came sound-tracked, wore a halo of music like a wafting smell, literal funk. No actual bodily odors reached Abraham at that distance, but it wasn’t much of a leap to suppose they clung to those frayed silks in concentrated form.

  Seeing Mingus Rude’s father at eleven cheered Abraham. He couldn’t have said why. It happened every few mornings: no pattern but an accumulation, or a long polyrhythm. They lorded from the height of respective stoops, the block’s true kings. On warmer mornings they’d each sit, in cold or rain they might be outdoors less than a minute. Either way, Abraham made an effort to keep the appointment and imagined Barrett Rude Junior doing the same. No way to know, since they only nodded, chins tipping upward, sometimes waved.

  Abraham never saw the old man anymore and wondered slightly.

  Bus purring through leaf-blotched shadow.

  Run-on sentence of cracked slate.

  Cornices a horizon, lintels slag in a canyon or quarry wall.

  Dean Street of course infiltrated the work, it couldn’t not. Abraham painted row-house façades, then blacked them over, presences drowned in abstraction. The film was among other things a record of methods disguised, a graveyard of strategies. He startled himself one day brushing in a figure, a stoop-wanderer, an armless pylon limned in gray rays. The anomalous form, Barrett Rude Junior taking the morning air, jiggled and danced in place through two weeks’ work, a minute of film, before censure. Abraham didn’t blot the figure retroactively, though. He let it stand. The sprite simply inhabited space for a minute, then turned and went inside. Gone like that.