The Fortress of Solitude

by Jonathan Lethem

  The film devoured days and years and Abraham let them be devoured. He’d optical-printed earlier sections and now and then ran them in his hand-cranked splicer, not editing so much as dwelling in his own work in progress. At sea. He could no longer relate the motifs in earlier sequences to raw dates, facts in his life. Watergate, Erlan Hagopian, Rachel’s leaving. The film floated above his routine, coffee cups, newspapers, the kid growing. The rest was trivia, moods, implementation. A body moving through days, serving higher purposes.

  Abraham Ebdus was reasonably certain he was demolishing the concept of time.

  For that reason, and not because of any fetish for death, he savored obituaries. They might be the only news that mattered, quiet closings on forgotten accounts, revealing lives lived decades past their ostensible peaks, their nodes of fame. He turned to them over breakfast and quoted with exaggerated relish, a touch of hammy gusto. “Lived in Mexico as one of Trotsky’s bodyguards and later edited Popular Mechanics —isn’t that amazing, Dylan? These lives, so full and crazy, so contradictory, and you never learn this stuff until they happen to die. You might not even know they’d existed !” The more Dylan met these ravings with silence the more his father hectored: “Jean Renoir, his father was the painter Renoir, you know,” or “Listen: Al Hodge, he played the Green Hornet and Captain Video—incredible.” Charles Seeger, Jean Stafford, Sid Vicious, the names stacked up, a breakfast litany. If nothing else it was a way to chase the boy from the house and onto the IRT. Dylan owed a sterling attendance record to the obituary page, probably. “The best-written part of the newspaper, these guys are geniuses, listen—”

  So it was dumb luck the kid was still at the breakfast table that particular morning: nobody good died. The page was a rare bore. Abraham survived this slight disappointment and turned to the Metro section, and there it was, a photograph of Mingus Rude in a weird shirt, surplus cloth bunched around the collar.

  “Huh, huh. Wow. Dylan, you’ll want to see this.”

  The kid ignored him, mouth-breathing through a cud of Cheerios, par for the course.

  Abraham quarter-folded the section and handed the article to Dylan so he couldn’t miss it. The item was smart-alecky, sloppily reported, and full of holes and questions begged, no obituary by a long shot, but it contained its own amazements.

  DRUG STING NETS CAPED CRUSADER

  BY HUMBOLT ROOS

  B ROOKLYN,M AY 16. An undercover operation at the Walt Whitman Houses in Fort Greene was tripped up by the efforts of a teenage vigilante dressed as a superhero late Monday night, according to police at the 78th Precinct.

  The costumed do-gooder, later identified as Mingus Rude, 16, was apparently concealed in a tree on housing complex grounds when he assaulted an undercover detective conducting a drug transaction with known dealers, presumably mistaking the officer for a criminal. The attempted citizen’s arrest resulted in a literal headache for plainclothesman Morris, who was treated for minor injuries on the scene, and a paperwork headache for officers filing reports. The surveillance operation, a complex sting in preparation for several weeks, was unsuccessful, and no arrests were made.

  All narcotics detectives got for their trouble was the consolation prize of Mr. Rude, later released into his parents’ custody with a warning, but no charges. Dressed in a hand-decorated mask and cape, and giving his name as “Aeroman,” Mr. Rude initially refused to answer questions without the presence of an attorney. Detectives confirmed that several local incidents had been reported recently involving the would-be hero—

  And so on.

  Dylan had turned bright red. “Can I take this?”

  “Sure, sure.” Abraham spread his hands. “Why not?”

  The kid hustled the folded newspaper into his knapsack and swept in a mad rush from the table, nearly upsetting his abandoned glass of OJ and his unfinished Cheerios floating in a half-bowl of milk, with face averted, ears blazing like taillights.

  “Bye!” he shouted from the hall.

  And was out the door.

  Questions? Sure, Abraham had questions. Do you know something about this, son? Is there anything you might like to share with me? Just where do you and Mingus Rude go all day and all night, anyway?

  For that matter, is Brooklyn itself a geographical form of insanity?

  Are we, do you happen perhaps to know, my darling boy, cursed by God?

  But who in this day and age got answers to his questions?

  He did what he never did: cut school. And a thing he hadn’t done for years: searched Mingus out instead of relying on chance to bring them together. First, though, he squirmed through morning classes, knowing Mingus wouldn’t necessarily even be out of bed before ten, unwilling to risk waking Barrett Rude Junior, and not wanting policemen, truant officers, security guards, gangs, whomever, to draw an absolute bead on him as he imagined they would if he went straight to Mingus’s school, whiteboy with a knapsack on the curb outside Sarah J. Hale after morning bell, nine in the morning. So he rode the train to Stuyvesant and agonized in his seat, swallowed anxiety through French and physics and history, slid the folded newspaper out of his binder for horrified reconfirmation, yes, it happened, Aeroman was arrested, perhaps a hundred, perhaps a thousand times. At least they’d gotten the name right! At lunch period he split, took the IRT back to Brooklyn and prowled the blasted land of Sarah J. Hale’s sidewalk and schoolyard seeking after Mingus Rude. His reward was about what his guilty, panicked heart might have felt it deserved: Robert Woolfolk.

  Robert and a couple of his homies occupied a Pacific Street stoop across from Sarah J. Hale. All three had tallboys of beer concealed in their sleeves for furtive slugs when the coast was clear—just another Wednesday afternoon in late-spring glare, life was sweet. The block was vacant, no guards, cops, gangs, no vibrations from within the building, Robert Woolfolk still the human neutron bomb of Gowanus. Dylan got a blissful crooked smile out of Robert as he approached. The scene was the opposite of what Dylan had imagined, Sarah J.’s sidewalks teeming with cutters like the park across from Stuyvesant. Instead Pacific Street was like a cartoon desert, Dylan crawling across the expanse with cartoon buzzards overhead, Robert and his crew like a batch of cartoon banditos you met on your knees.

  We don’t need no stinking badges.

  Dylan halted on the sidewalk, but Robert didn’t move. Nobody seemed much impressed at what had bumbled into their laps. This crew might find motivation another time to resume careers as criminals or at least harassers, menaces, inspirers of fear: this day they’d got a thirty-year head start on the men who sat on rooming-house stoops or in the entranceway of the Colony South Brooklyn Daycare Center on Nevins, mellow lackadaisical observers of life’s passing streams, Thoreaus at Walden. They were drunk off their asses.

  Life’s passing streams might be urine trails from doorways to the curb, but never mind.

  “Hey, Robert?” said Dylan.

  “Yo,” said Robert Woolfolk, his eyes glazed. He didn’t object to being addressed by Dylan, not today: We’re on the same planet, might as well admit I know you.

  “Have you seen Mingus?”

  Robert tilted his head back and to the side, Ali ducking a jab. Or possibly he mimed a braying laugh, but no laugh came out.

  One of his homeboys extended a hand to slap and Robert Woolfolk slapped it. Dylan had stepped into some slow sculpture, a frieze in motion. Though he’d penetrated the frieze’s reality, barely, he nonetheless couldn’t hurry it along.

  “Have you seen him?” he asked again, helpless, his morning’s panic only mounting.

  “You lookin’ for Arrowman ?” said Robert Woolfolk.

  He made it sound like errorman.

  Dylan didn’t offer a correction.

  Now came braying laughter, in triplicate. Robert’s cohorts squirmed in their spots as though brutally tickled, immediately gasping for air, begging for release from the excess of hilarity. Hands were again slapped, Robert accepting congratulations for his rapier wit.

&nbs
p; “Ho, shit,” said one of Robert’s homeboys, shaking his head as he recovered.

  “Nah, man, G ain’t come around here today,” said Robert. “You want me to tell him something for you?”

  “That’s okay.”

  “I’ll tell him a message, man. What, you don’t trust me?”

  “Just that I came around looking for him, I guess.”

  “Aight. You was lookin’ for him, cool.”

  Dylan mumbled thanks.

  “Yo, Dylan, wait up man. You got a dollar you could lend me?” No one budged from slanted attitudes on the stoop. Someone drained a bag-sheathed tallboy, tossed it aside. Robert Woolfolk might have been addressing the sky, Dylan wasn’t worth settling eyes on. “Because you know I’m good with you, man. These dudes don’t know you, I had to stop them coming down throw a yoke on you. I told them you were my man, we practilly grew up together, you’s like my little brother.”

  The logic was airtight. Certainly Robert’s homeboys weren’t saying otherwise, though neither looked inclined at this moment to yoke anything larger than a cat. Dylan emptied his pockets, his despair absolute, the dollars negligible for passage out of here.

  One thing transfer of funds always did accomplish was a turning of the page.

  He walked to the Heights, knowing he couldn’t risk being seen on Dean Street before three, figuring no authority would doubt the legitimacy of a white kid with a knapsack in Brooklyn Heights being home early from school. There he took up station on a bench at the south end of the Promenade, sat chin-propped, pancaked between sky and the truck traffic roaring underfoot, the exhaust-flooded Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. He abandoned himself gazing into the bay, ferries slugging across to Staten Island and the Statue, garbage scows loaded up for Fresh Kills, the whole watery mouth of the city. Every reeling gull was Mingus Rude tumbling from the bridge again, white wings like cape ends tipped to the water, Dylan’s eye fooled a thousand times.

  The sky was full of Aeroman, except it wasn’t.

  Dylan had never flown in Brooklyn, if the ring was gone. They’d meant to swap it back and forth, the changing from black to white one of Aeroman’s mystifying aspects, another level of secret identity, but it had always been Mingus in the costume, always Dylan crouched behind a parked car or dangled as bait while Mingus flew. Now this, Mingus heroing into the projects on the far side of Flatbush Avenue, where Dylan would never go. Dylan had sewn Rachel’s scraps together and told a story and then clothed in those tatters Mingus had launched himself onto a cop in a drug deal. If the newspaper was to be believed. Of course it had to be understood before it could be believed.

  There was something in the story not to understand.

  Or maybe something you didn’t want to know.

  What did Aeroman care about a drug deal ?

  Two black kids found Dylan there at the end of the bench faced out to the island and the water and the sky. Lodge in any one place long enough and they’d find you, drawn like flies. These were just about as problematic as flies, too small to yoke him, fifth or sixth graders probably, a couple of mugging Robins lacking a Batman to back them up. If they’d roamed to the Heights from wherever, I.S. 293 probably, it had to be after three, school out.

  They circled as if Dylan were a beehive, daring themselves to prod.

  “What’s the matter, whiteboy?”

  “Your friends leave you all alone?”

  “What, you can’t go home? You lost?”

  “You crying, whiteboy?”

  “He ain’t talkin’.”

  “Boy’s stupid or retarded.”

  “Check his pockets.”

  “You do it, man.”

  Dylan looked up and they danced back. There was really no chance they’d touch him. He wasn’t Aeroman, but he’d gained in gravity, was something middle-sized, neither gull nor mole.

  “Ooh, ooh, he’s mad now.”

  “He’s gonna grab you, man, you better book!”

  “Nah, he’s going back to his crying.”

  “He a stupid whiteboy.”

  “He stoopid.”

  “Stoo -pid.”

  “Nigger’s a faggot.”

  It was enough to make you miss Robert Woolfolk. The situation minus fear was only idiotic. Dylan was sick of it, the racial rehearsal. He’d been identified as whiteboy a thousand times and there was nothing more to learn. Another option, Manhattan, was so prominent it was nearly sticking in his eye. If Aaron X. Doily’s ring was gone Dylan might be done with Brooklyn for a while, be done vindicating fifth grade, be through with Mingus’s fucked-up mysteries and ready to complete his escape.

  The two black kids grew bored of him and wandered, maybe to find some Packer or Saint Ann’s kid and work off steam, pick up a dollar or two.

  A barge grunted from the docks with a three-color throw-up by Strike on its side, a strong piece of work.

  He sat and sat, chanting Clash songs in his head, “I’m So Bored with the USA,” “Julie’s in the Drug Squad,” records he’d never played for Mingus Rude because they embarrassed him on Dean Street, because he didn’t know how. Then the Talking Heads, Find myself, find myself a city to live in. He sat and measured skyscrapers through bars and when he was done sitting the sun had fallen, squinting its narrowed orange beams through towers and bridges, the honey light flared and grew dull, and Dylan had missed Abraham’s dinner, he’d sat all day.

  In darkness he returned to the block and tried Mingus’s door.

  Mingus Rude appeared at the gate of the basement entrance, himself, intact, dope-eyed. He showed no particular objection to Dylan being there.

  “D-Man. What up?”

  “Where’s the ring?”

  “I got it, it’s cool, don’t worry.”

  “Where?” Dylan looked up and down the block, fearing surveillance of some kind. There was nothing, his paranoia wasn’t even mirrored in Mingus. Two nights later nobody cared, Aeroman or Errorman was a joke, a name passed along stoops before fading from memory.

  “I hid it away.”

  “Did the police see you fly?”

  “The cops, man? They think I sprung out a tree.”

  “What—”

  Mingus put up his hand to say Enough, not now. “You wanna come in? I got King Arthur here.”

  The shelf was empty, no costume, no ring, just the football helmet, Manayunk Mohawks, its bowling-ball curve now tagged in soppy marker by Art and Dose. “Get Off” was on the stereo, the needle hadn’t actually plowed the music off the vinyl yet though it sounded like it was getting close. Arthur Lomb lay on his side on the bed, his cruddy Pumas on the bedspread, sifting seeds from a nickel bag in the gatefold crotch of the Spinners’ Pick of the Litter. Crumpled rolling paper lay balled in a loose circle around him, failed tries, like some ring of dubious enchantment. He grinned at seeing Dylan: Welcome to my chamber, bluh-hah-hah!

  Arthur Lomb had become a foul gnome. He seemed smaller. That was likely an optical illusion, a matter of losing himself inside titanic hooded sweatshirts and droopy military pants which could have held dozens of his pipe-cleaner legs. Arthur’s clothes were growing though he wasn’t. He completed a joint at last, repulsively swooping it through his mouth to cauterize the paper with saliva. He only spoke after it was lit, in order to demonstrate expertise in speaking through gagged breath, his voice helium-dwindled with effort:

  “You heard Gus got arrested?”

  “Shut up, Arthur.”

  Arthur handed the joint to Dylan, his own held toke exploding in a gust from his lips. “He went to the Myrtle Avenue projects at midnight and jumped out of a tree in his underwear. I suppose if you’re tripping on LSD or heroin it might strike you as a good idea. I saw something like that on The FBI once. A girl ate the bark off a tree in a vacant lot. She was pretty hot, too.”

  “I’m right about to kick your ass.”

  “Do it, superhero.”

  “When I do you’ll be weeping.”

  “I’ll look forward to that day, it’ll be w
orth seeing you dress up in your homo suit, Arrow Man. ”

  Arthur needled like he moved rooks, unashamed of the obvious. He was monotonous and punishing, easy to tune out. Mingus had seemingly acquired the skill.

  “What’s your power going to be, Dylan? Because we all need powers now, we’re Superfriends. I was thinking maybe I’d be able to undress people with my mind, I mean like their clothes would really actually vanish, criminals would be humiliated and surrender on the spot. I’ll call myself Fig Leaf Man.”

  Mingus didn’t meet Dylan’s eyes when they handed off the joint. Questions remained simpler to leave unanswered, Mingus flying solo, Aeroman’s agenda at the Walt Whitman Houses. If he’d wanted to bust up a drug deal he only had to go as far as Bergen, or Atlantic, the foyer of the prostitute hotel. Or upstairs, for that matter, to Junior’s apartment, where deals occurred on a daily if not an hourly basis.

  But maybe that was the dilemma which had spun Aeroman off his usual orbit—the risk of meeting someone familiar in a local deal. Up to and including Barrett Rude Junior or Senior.

  “Yo, D-Man, you got to hear this record ‘King Tim Personality Jock’ by Fatback—” Mingus began. He moved to the stereo, marking the conclusion of his two-night’s-ago adventure as a topic, announcing the resumption of the real story: they lived in a famous era where heroic advances in musical styles, the discovery of a new break previously unheard, could happen at any moment. “Shit is seriously dope, check it out.”