The Fortress of Solitude

by Jonathan Lethem

  And he didn’t mean no seven-inch record. Damn straight.

  The Times Plaza Hotel was on the way back from the pawnshop and that was where he stopped on his way home, figuring to buy himself a treat out of the fresh money. There was always some deal cooking in the lobby there. He’d only had to stop by twice, looking for Senior, to suss the general atmosphere.

  “Hey, honey, I know you.”

  “Nah, you’re mistaken. You don’t know me. But we can change that.”

  “I know you because I know your daddy and your little boy. I just never seen you around here before, but I know you.”

  “Baby, I come ’round here all the time, you just missed me.”

  “You a singer.”

  “That’s right.”

  “See, I would of seen you if you come around before, because I know your daddy. He a religious man. He tole me all about you.”

  “That so?”

  “Mmm hmm. I don’t even want to tell you what he said though.”

  “Maybe he told me about you too.”

  “See, now you just talkin’ shit.”

  “Listen, baby, you know these Trinidadian dudes come around here sometimes?”

  “Maybe I do.”

  He made it songlike and seductive, dropped register: “I know you know everybody, that’s the reason I ask.”

  It’s 1981: nobody’s heard the term crack. They won’t for two or three years, at least. What’s slipped lately onto the street from Jamaica, Trinidad, from the Leeward and Windward Islands, is called variously base-rock, gravel, baking-soda base, and roxanne. The stuff’s not pure as home-cooked, and in a few years its erratic Columbia-Hollywood-New York-Caribbean-Miami-and-back genealogy will be neatly concealed by the new name. Crack will be eligible then to be taken for a deadly meteorite from an unknown planet, ghetto Kryptonite. In this current epoch of transition, though, confusion reigns. Some folks will tell you base-rock and freebase aren’t the same thing at all, and Barrett Rude Junior, who feels a certain proprietary interest— Shit, man, I was there at the birth, me and them Philly cats might of practically invented freebasing! —is half inclined to agree with them.

  But the point wasn’t to debate chemistry or semantics or authorship. It would hardly be the first of his inventions for which he’d received no credit or royalties. The point now is to figure out what this woman calls the stuff and whether she can lay hands on any now.

  “You gonna bring me to party along with you, girl?”

  Party : the word was like Open Sesame. “Of course I am, baby. I just need you to show me where the party is at.”

  Sometimes when you walked around the neighborhood now it was like you were already a visitor from the future.

  The pavement, the slate’s not changed, but though you’d never flown higher than one precocious spaldeen catch you might be drifting now, a released balloon, too far off to discern distinctive cracks formerly memorized, let alone rain-rinsed skully ghosts.

  Three college applications were in the mail, Yale an unlikely joke, UC Berkeley a safety net at Abraham’s urging but he’d never go, Camden the only one he cared about, with its weird disreputability and allure of pure dollars. If a kid from Gowanus goes to the most expensive college in America maybe he’s from Boerum Hill after all. If not Brooklyn Heights.

  Running Crab with her romance of poverty can go fuck herself.

  Last postcard came you-can’t-remember-when, anyhow.

  It only meant working after school every day senior year of high school and all the summer before college to blunt the cost—loans and scholarships and work-study and your own pathetic savings, all these would be required to meet that famous $13,000 tuition, the number like a crazy carrot dangling in the sky. Abraham almost shit his pants when he heard, he had to sit down and breathe slowly.

  The big breakout costs big.

  So Dylan Ebdus in a red apron scooped ice cream at the Häagen-Dazs on Montague for the girls from Saint Ann’s he’ll soon be at college with, a twelve-year wait to be a private schooler at last. Don’t spit in their cones if they’re not glancing your way—it’s always darkest before blond dawn.

  Winter months no one came in but moms needing hand-packed quarts for birthday parties. Dylan daily made himself ill on tasting spoons of double chocolate, cranked his Specials cassette to the limit during cleanup, afterward glowered home along Henry Street all the way to Amity, only cut across Court and Smith at the last possible minute. Dean Street’s nothing but a route now, no life in it, and Dylan kept his head bowed against the risk of recognizing a kid from before.

  It did happen occasionally, some lanky mustached Puerto Rican calling out “Hey, Dylan!” who turned out to be Alberto or Davey. Certain persons never left the block, maybe never would.

  Impossible to explain they shouldn’t greet you because you’re not really there, you’re gone. Easier just to say Hey, Alberto, what’s up, man?, fake a smile or hand slap. Then realize maybe that’s all anyone does—fake it. Maybe there were pavement zombies like you all over the place.

  Given how often he bumped into Mingus Rude, he might as well have been teleporting back to Abraham’s house. Dylan’s choice of hours returning to the neighborhood or streets chosen for walking, a system formulated at deep needful levels, thwarted all encounters.

  One morning at breakfast Abraham said:

  “I saw your friend Mingus.”

  “Mmmh.”

  “He always asks where you’ve been, why he never sees you anymore.”

  What Dylan couldn’t say was that Mingus’s needs scared him now. Mingus’s black-man’s drugs, Mingus’s dark filthy room, these were impossible realms, quarantined in the past. When Dylan felt guilty for assiduously avoiding his best friend—which was only every single day of his life—he just had to recall that Mingus had the ring.

  Aaron X. Doily’s Cracker Jack prize was a sort of buyout, a seal on what Dylan Ebdus couldn’t risk contemplating anymore.

  “He didn’t look so well to me,” said Abraham. “When I asked he laughed it off, only suggested I give him a dollar.”

  “Did you do it?”

  “Of course.”

  “You got yoked, Dad.”

  “Sorry?”

  “Never mind.”

  Mondays, on his way to Montague, Dylan stopped to deposit last week’s minimum-wage Häagen-Dazs check at Independence Savings on the corner of Court and Atlantic. There was a couple thousand marked in the passbook, representing one season plopping flavors on cones with a blunt instrument. He’d double that sum by the end of the summer, then turn it over in a lump, to Abraham. So that particular February day, Dylan, Brando-collar flipped against the wind, perversely unhatted, ears red, trudged past blackened curb-rinds of snow along Atlantic.

  As Dylan passed Smith Street, a guy putting gas in his car at the Shell station pointed with a finger at the jail, the Brooklyn House of Detention, his mouth hung open in some kind of look, up in the sky, it’s a bird, it’s a plane posture of astonishment.

  Doesn’t he know there ain’t no such thing as a Superman ?

  Maybe Buddy Jacobsen, the girlfriend-murdering horse trainer from Long Island had broken out again, bedsheeting from a high window. News of that escape had put the House of D on the map for a week two years ago, the neighborhood’s blight suddenly plastered all over the five o’clock news. It might have been Isabel Vendle’s worst nightmare, a decade of public relations undone in a stroke.

  So Dylan glanced at the jail tower.

  There on the vast glass-brick and concrete face, maybe ten stories above the street and three stories tall, was a brazen impossibility, the biggest tag in the history of tagging. The lines were broken and wobbling as they’d have to be, spray-painted from the open window of a hovering helicopter, which was the only way the tag could have got there in the first place, right? Right? Still, however ragged, the thing was a masterpiece, dwarfing Mono’s and Lee’s old bridge stunt, and meant to shock the viewer’s brain with the obviou
s question: How the fuck DID it get up there?

  Four letters: D, O, S, E.

  The tag was a cry, a claim, an undeniable thing. The looming jail which no one mentioned or looked at and the trail of dripping paint that covered the city’s every public surface and which no one mentioned or looked at: two invisible things had rendered one another visible, at least for one day.

  (In fact it would be ten days before it was gone. Who knew how to clean the exterior of a twenty-six-story jail? And after, a phantom DOSE remained etched in scrubbed concrete.)

  Dylan stared up in stupid guilty wonder, trying to figure it out, wondering what now ensued in the world he’d abandoned. Puzzling the message in the four letters. Puzzling whether it was a message.

  Or just a tag.

  Someone’s betrayed someone but you can’t say who.

  Someone’s flying and it isn’t you.

  chapter 18

  One hot July afternoon, six weeks before he departed the city for college, Dylan Ebdus looked up from Hesse’s Steppenwolf to find Arthur Lomb leaning on the Häagen-Dazs counter, pinching a sweat-drenched white T away from his body, sighing and puffing his cheeks at the chill of the air-conditioning. The little shop was empty, just the two of them, Dylan leaning over the book in his glasses, his chocolate-smeared smock over a polo shirt, his Remain in Light tape just audible over the hum of the coolers. Arthur Lomb had gained his height at last. In fact he swayed, a beanpole with jeans loose like banners from his legs, in maroon suede Pumas, a cigarette behind his ear. His eyes were red and small and wrinkled like those of some fetal animal, a blind mole rat or cauled calf. It shouldn’t have been such a shock to see him there: a Gowanus kid could stroll into Brooklyn Heights any time he cared to, they’d all proved it a million times.

  Dylan sat up, removed his glasses, flopped the book over on its cracked spine.

  “Yo, D, lemme get a taste of that, um, macadamia.”

  He gave Arthur a spoon.

  Arthur tipped his chin at the paperback. “What are you reading that for?”

  “What’s wrong with it?”

  “Those guys suck. Yo, I hear you’re going to college.”

  “From who?”

  “Oh, you know, around. I think your dad told Barry.”

  “Yeah. Vermont.”

  “Cool, cool. I’m going to Brooklyn College. I’m just doing some summer school to make up a few credits at Murrow.”

  So even Arthur had trudged through high school, the nerd in him a flame Dean Street couldn’t entirely extinguish. Probably his mother had ridden his back.

  “Nice setup here,” said Arthur. “Hot days you must rake it in, huh?”

  “It’s not like a taxi. I get paid the same if no one comes in.”

  “You’re socking it away for college, I guess.”

  Dylan’s mental fingers tightened around his mental passbook.

  “I only mention it because I’ve got a proposition I thought you might be interested in,” said Arthur slyly, lapsing into his old routine, boy huckster. “I just thought I’d give you first crack before I haul it over to the comics shop on West Third Street. Because I’m liquidating the collection. All those number one’s. I figured you might still be interested in that kind of stuff.”

  “Why?”

  “Oh, I don’t know, I remember you always said you were going to buy X-Men forever, unless Chris Claremont quit writing. I always thought of you as like the ultimate collector.”

  Demoralizing how Arthur owned him, like a stink you couldn’t wash off. True enough, Dylan still picked up the new X-Men. Not every month, but sometimes. Other month’s issues he didn’t take home, just skim-read beside the spinning rack at the cigar shop on Fourteenth. Like making out with an ex-girlfriend at a party, grudgingly, a chip on your shoulder that you had nothing better to do. Which was exactly what Dylan and Amy Saffrich had been doing all summer, clinching in hallways and bathrooms in the desultory wake of their term’s-end breakup. The months between high school and college were a time of glum derangement, everyone half-spun to new destinies and arrived nowhere yet, living at home, infantile. It only followed that Arthur Lomb would wander into this breach to assert his thin claim.

  “No,” Dylan said now. “I mean, why sell.”

  “Oh. Heh. I’m just trying to raise some—funds.” Arthur spoke airily. “Now seemed like a good time to get out.”

  “Right, right,” said Dylan, pretending to mull.

  “I’m sure it’s pretty valuable by now. Everything’s still in fine or near-fine condition.”

  “Uh huh.”

  Dylan’s plan dawned in curiosity, no notion it would lead to Mingus and the ring, no inkling it was born in the betrayal and rebuke of seeing DOSE on the prison. It began merely as an impulse to see inside Arthur Lomb’s house one last time, to see inside his room, to see Arthur’s mom again, maybe. Nothing more. Dylan was safe already, he was gone, scot-free to Vermont. Why not tour what he’d left behind?

  “When can I stop by and take a look?” he said lightly.

  “Tonight?”

  Arthur looked like he couldn’t believe his luck. His proposition had been a potshot, a lark.

  So, like all the best deals, each would believe they were gypping the other. “I’m off at eleven,” Dylan said. “Be at home.”

  The apartment was the same, a time capsule: carpet, piano, addled tortoise-shell cats. Arthur Lomb’s mom braless in a batik T, listening to WBAI. She greeted Dylan with gushy gratitude, seemingly awed to find him still associating with her son. Dylan was generous, her manner seemed to say, just allowing her to consider Dylan Ebdus and Arthur Lomb still some version of two-of-a-kind. Arthur, meanwhile, had already sneered into his room and shut the door.

  “Off to college?”

  “Camden.”

  “That’s wonderful, Dylan. I’m so happy for you. God, you’re so grown up.”

  Disgusting to realize he was flirting with Arthur’s mom, to realize, now that he grokked girls, he’d always been flirting with Arthur’s mom. Worse, she was fuckable.

  “I, um, I’ve got to look at some stuff Arthur’s got for me.”

  “It’s good to see you, Dylan.”

  “Yeah.”

  The collection was buried in Arthur’s closet beneath balled underwear and a heap of brand-x porn mags, mostly Players and Hustler. Arthur seemed unembarrassed at the spill of black centerfolds, their purple-backlit Afros and cocoa aureolae. Was he practicing being black? Dylan didn’t want to know. Arthur tugged the plastic dairy crates full of mylar-sealed comics into the center of the room and sprawled back on his bed, lit a Kool.

  “Good as gold.”

  Dylan knelt self-consciously on the carpet, which was full of pot seeds and blackened matchheads, and browsed the crates. He felt he’d been reduced to something, propelled back in time to bug juice and chess disgrace, but pushed it from his head. The collection looked mostly status quo. Arthur had massed a surprisingly strong war chest of mint number one’s: five or ten each of Peter Parker, The Eternals, Kobra, Ragman, Mister Machine, Nova. For what it was worth.

  “You want to sell the whole thing?”

  “Yup.”

  “What, uh, what number did you have in mind?”

  “Five hundred.”

  “You’re insane.”

  “Four.”

  “I’m not even making an offer unless you put back the Howard the Ducks and Omegas. Plus X-Men #97. I assume that’s what’s under your bed.” Dylan had spotted the plastic sleeves glinting there.

  Arthur was impossible to shame. “Sure. Four for everything, Howard, Omega, whatever.”

  “I’ll give you a hundred bucks.”

  “You must think I’m a chump.”

  “One-fifty.”

  “You shitface. When can you get it?”

  “I’ve got it with me. But you have to help me carry them home.”

  They fished the hidden cache from under the bed, then each hoisted up a crate. They slipped downsta
irs, to Arthur’s stoop. In the glow of money Arthur would be incautious, boastful. Now would be safe for Dylan to confirm what he suspected, that the trail of funds led to Mingus. As he counted out twenties he said:

  “So—funds for what?”

  “Gus and Robert and me are gonna buy a quarter kee and cut it up and make some real money. From Barry’s connection.”

  “Cocaine?”

  Arthur pounced. “No, we thought we’d go into your line—chocolate sprinkles.”

  “So you guys are pooling cash.”

  “Uh huh.”

  “Do you think Mingus would be interested in selling his comics, too?” Dylan asked.

  “You’ve got to be kidding,” said Arthur. “Those comics are ruined.” As if the interior pages of his own didn’t feature breast-tracings and Sea-Monkey ads adorned with oversize cock-and-balls. But Dylan let it go.

  “Yeah, I know they’re in bad shape but he’s got some titles I’m interested in.” Let Arthur think him crazy, suspect what he liked, he’d never grasp Dylan’s real angle here, behind the blind of the comics. No worry, anyway: dollar signs served in place of Arthur Lomb’s eyes and, behind them, his brain.

  “I suppose he’d listen to a reasonable offer.”

  Dylan milked it. “I’d have to get some more cash from the bank.”

  “That’s an excellent idea, so you can finish the transaction right there.”

  “But mention it to him.”

  “I’ll do that.”

  Only six weeks. Arthur Lomb’s two crates of number ones relocated to his own closet’s depths, Dylan Ebdus in his loft bed stewed in self-contempt, and the only solace was the escape so near he could hear it like a distant throb, a summer boom box on a Puerto Rican patio or a DJ in the Wyckoff Gardens courtyard. He might seem momentarily to have been drawn back into Arthur and Mingus’s morass but it was only to conclude some old business, the thing left undone to earn his vanishing from Dean Street. Six weeks: he could scheme, be craven as Arthur, didn’t matter. He was waving goodbye.