The Fortress of Solitude

by Jonathan Lethem

  I mumbled the lie out. “An old friend, Abby.” Bill Withers’s Still Bill was my next choice. I flipped the disc to the bedspread without looking away from the shelves.

  “Right, old friend, dinner, I forgot. Oops.” The CD clattered to the floor. “I kicked it.” She laughed for an instant.

  I caught the disc still spinning, and slid it into the wallet, near her toes.

  “I’m trying to make you talk to me.”

  “I’ll miss my plane.”

  “They leave on the hour, I’ve heard.”

  “Right, and I’m expected at Dreamworks at one. Don’t fuck this up.”

  “Don’t worry, Dylan, I won’t fuck anyone. Is that what you said?”

  “Abby.” I tried scowling.

  “Not even you. So don’t be jealous of yourself, because you’re not getting any.”

  “Go back to bed,” I suggested.

  She yawned and stretched. Hands on her bare thighs, elbows dipping toward her middle as if seeking to meet. “If we were fucking anymore, Dylan, maybe that would help.”

  “Help who?”

  “The nature of fucking is it involves both people.”

  I tossed Brian Eno’s Another Green World onto the bed and envisioned a row to myself at sixty thousand feet.

  She ran thumbs under elastic. “I made myself come last night after you were asleep.”

  “Telling someone else about masturbation involves two people, Abby, but that doesn’t make it fucking.” This sort of stuff passed easily between myself and Abby. The tang of déjà vu to the banter made it a simple task to carry on browsing my record collection.

  “Do you want to know who I was thinking about when I came? It’s gross.”

  “Could you see the whites of his eyes?”

  “What?”

  “Never mind. I’m interrupting.”

  “I’ll tell you if you tell me the name of your secret date in L.A.”

  “We’re swapping a real person for an imaginary one? That’s supposed to be a good deal?”

  “Oh, he’s real.”

  I didn’t answer, but made another couple of quick CD selections—Swamp Dogg, Edith Frost.

  “I was half dreaming, really. Guy d’Seur was putting his froggy little hands all over me. Isn’t that stupid, Dylan? I’ve never thought of him that way, not for a minute. When he took out his dick it was enormous.”

  “I’m not surprised.”

  I wasn’t. Not at d’Seur’s appearance in Abby’s fantasy or at the size she’d granted his apparatus. Guy d’Seur was more than Abigale Ponders’s thesis advisor, he was a Berkeley celebrity. Forget being a rock critic—forget even being a rock musician. The professors of the various graduate departments were the stars that wowed this burg. To walk into a Berkeley café and find seated before a latté and scone one of the Rhetoric or English faculties’ roster of black-clad theorists—Avital Rampart, Stavros Petz, Kookie Grossman, and Guy d’Seur formed the current pantheon—was to have your stomach leap up into your throat. In Berkeley these were the people who hushed a room. Their unreadable tomes filled front tables at bookstores.

  Abigale Ponders was the sole child of a pair of black dentists from Palo Alto, honorable strivers through the middle classes who’d only wanted to see her attain a graduate degree and then been completely bewildered at the result. Abby’s thesis, “The Figuration of the Black Chanteuse in Parisian Representations of Afro-American Culture, from Josephine Baker to Grace Jones,” had led her, two years earlier, to come calling on the one working journalist in Berkeley who’d interviewed Nina Simone. I’d made my humbling pilgrimage to Simone on behalf of Musician Magazine in 1989, and Abby had proved she could research a bibliographic index with the best of them. That day, I’d charmed Abby out of interview mode by playing rare Simone records, until it was late enough to suggest a bottle of wine.

  We’d moved her into my little Berkeley house three months later.

  “Now you owe me one,” she said. “Who are you seeing in L.A.? What’s worth a hotel room you can’t afford?”

  “The hotel room is in Anaheim, and it isn’t costing me anything,” I said. “I guess that’s a clue.” I’d resigned myself to giving up the secret.

  “You’re being paid for sex ? With a Disney character ?”

  “Try harder, Abby. Who in life, when you visit them, insists on paying for everything?”

  She fell silent, just slightly shamed.

  I took my advantage. “You’re dreaming about d’Seur because you owe his froggy little hands a chapter draft, you know.”

  “Fuck off.”

  “Okay, but why not use this as a chance to get back to work?”

  “I’ve been working.”

  “Okay. Sorry I said anything.”

  She sat up and crossed her legs. “Why is your father going to Anaheim, Dylan?”

  “He’s got business there.”

  “What kind of business?”

  “Abraham is the guest of honor—the artist guest of honor—at ForbiddenCon.”

  “What’s ForbiddenCon?”

  “I guess I’m about to find out.”

  A pause. “Something to do with his film?” She spoke this softly, as she ought to have. Abraham Ebdus’s unfinished life’s work was no laughing matter.

  I shook my head. “It’s some science-fiction thing. He’s winning an award.”

  “I thought he didn’t care about that stuff.”

  “I guess Francesca convinced him.” My father’s new girlfriend, Francesca Cassini, had a gift for getting him out of the house.

  “Why didn’t you tell me he was coming?”

  “He isn’t coming. I’m meeting him there.” Our tone was rote and flat, a comedown from Abby’s sexual provocations. Those now drifted off as easily as fumes from a solitary cigarette.

  I took Esther Phillips’s Black-Eyed Blues from its jewel case and slid it into the wallet. The light outside was altered. An airport shuttle van would come in half an hour.

  Abby tugged at one of the short dreadlocks at her forehead, twisting it gently between her knuckles. I recalled a baby goat scratching tender, nubby horns against a gate, something I’d witnessed in Vermont a hundred or a thousand years ago. When she felt my gaze Abby looked down, stared at her own bare knees. Her mouth worked slightly but formed nothing. I thought I could smell that she had made herself a little excited hectoring me.

  “You seem a bit down,” I said.

  “What?”

  “A little depressed again, lately.”

  She looked up sharply. “Don’t use that word.”

  “I meant it sympathetically.”

  “You have no right.”

  With that she suddenly took herself out of the room, peeling the Meat Puppets shirt off over her head as she descended the stairs and moved out of sight. I only got a flash of back. A minute later I heard the shower. Abby had a seminar today, the second of the new semester. She ought to have spent the summer months writing a segment of her dissertation—as I likely should have been drafting my screenplay. Instead we’d fought and fucked and, increasingly, lapsed into separate glowering silences in our two rooms. Now, just as Abby was going in to face her mentors more or less empty-handed, I’d be winging down to Los Angeles to talk out a hot notion for which I’d not scribbled even the first hot scrap of note.

  My sometimes-editor at The L.A. Weekly had arranged the pitch meeting, my first. Over the last two years I’d slowly ground myself into $30,000 of credit card debt as a freelancer, my recent livelihood consisting mainly of the work I’d been doing for a Marin-based reissue label, Remnant Records. My dealings with Remnant’s owner, a graying beatnik entrepreneur named Rhodes Blemner, vexed me. So today’s pitch was a bid for freedom.

  I must have lapsed into some kind of fugue, because the next thing I knew Abby was dressed and back at the top of my stairs. She wore jeans and a black sleeveless top and knee-high boots which raised her above my height. The boots still needed to be laced through their
elaborate upper eyelets. She stood rubbing moisturizer into her palms and elbows and regarding me with steely fury.

  “I don’t talk about the hardest parts of my life only to have you throw them back at me,” she said. “If I’ve ever been depressed at least I’ve had the nerve to admit it. I don’t want you to ever use that word with me again, do you understand?”

  “Sure you’ve got a nerve. Apparently I touched it. That’s called letting someone know you intimately, Abby.”

  “Oh, yeah? What’s it called when you don’t know yourself intimately?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Why didn’t you tell me your father was coming, Dylan? How could you let me twist like that?”

  I stared.

  “You’re depressed, Dylan. That’s your secret from yourself. You don’t let it inside. Your surround yourself with it instead, so you don’t have to admit you’re the source. Take a look.”

  “It’s an interesting theory,” I mumbled.

  “Fuck you, Dylan, it’s not interesting, it’s not a theory. You’re so busy feeling sorry for me and whoever, Sam Cooke, you conveniently ignore yourself.”

  “What exactly do you want, Abby?”

  “To be let inside, Dylan. You hide from me, in plain sight.”

  “I suppose that’s another way of describing one person sparing another their violent shifts of mood.”

  “Is that what we’re talking about here? Moods ?”

  “One minute you’re jerking off on the carpet, now this outburst. I can’t take it, Abby.”

  “You think you’ve spared me your moods ? What do you think it’s like for me, living under your cockpit of misery, here?” She gestured at the wall I’d been contemplating, covered with fourteen hundred compact discs: two units each holding seven hundred apiece. “This is a wall of moods, a wall of depression, Mr. Objective Correlative.” She slapped the shelves. They rattled.

  “Wow, you’ve really drawn up an indictment.” I was fumbling for breathing room, nothing more.

  “That’s what you call it when I won’t play depressed for you? You switch to your little Kafka fantasies? I don’t have the power of indictment, Dylan. I’m just the official mascot for all the shit you won’t allow yourself to feel. A featured exhibit in the Ebdus collection of sad black folks.”

  “That’s unfair.”

  “Let’s see, Curtis Mayfield, “We People Who Are Darker Than Blue”—sounds like depression to me.” She chucked the CD to the floor. “Gladys Knight, misery, depression. Johnny Adams, depression. Van Morrison, total fucking depression. Lucinda Williams, give her Prozac. Marvin Gaye, dead. Johnny Ace, dead, tragic.” As she dismissed the titles she jerked them from the shelf, the jewel cases splitting as they clattered down. “Little Willie John, dead. Little Esther and Little Jimmy Scott, sad—all the Littles are sad. What’s this, Dump ? You actually listen to something called Dump? Is that real? Syl Johnson, Is It Because I’m Black? Maybe you’re just a loser, Syl. Gillian Welch, please, momma. The Go-Betweens? Five Blind Boys of Alabama, no comment. Al Green, I used to think Al Green was happy music until you explained to me how fucking tragic it all was, how he got burned with a pot of hot grits and then his woman shot herself because she was so very depressed. Brian Wilson, crazy. Tom Verlaine, very depressed. Even you don’t play that record. Ann Peebles, I Can’t Stand the Rain. Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes, blecch. “Drowning in the Sea of Love,” is that a good thing or a bad thing? David Ruffin, I know he’s a drug addict. Donny Hathaway—dead?”

  “Dead,” I said.

  “The Bar-Kays, it sounds happy, but I get a bad feeling, I get a bad vibe from this disc. What’s going on with the Bar-Kays?”

  “Uh, they were on Otis Redding’s plane.”

  “The Death-Kays! ” She overhanded it to shatter against the far wall and rain onto the pillow.

  “Okay, Abby.” I held out my palms, pleading. “Peace. Uncle.” My spinning brain added, Sprite! Mr. Pibb! Clitoris!

  She stopped, and we both stared at the crystalline junk around her feet.

  “I have some happy music,” I said, dumbly adopting her terms.

  “Like what?”

  “‘You Sexy Thing’ is probably my favorite single song. There’s a lot of disco-era music I like.”

  “Terrible example.”

  “Why?”

  “A million whining moaning singers, ten million depressed songs, and five or six happy songs—which remind you of being beaten up when you were thirteen years old. You live in the past, Dylan. I’m sick of your secrets. Did your father even ask if I was coming down with you?”

  My face was hot and no speech emerged.

  “And all this shit. What is this shit, anyway?” Alongside the box sets on the shelf above the CD cases were arrayed a scattering of objects I’d never shown off or named: Aaron X. Doily’s ring, Mingus’s pick, a pair of Rachel’s earrings, and a tiny, handmade, hand-sewn book of black-and-white photographs titled “For D. from E.” Abby’s unlaced boots crackled in the broken plastic cases as she walked. “Whose little shrine is this? Emily? Elizabeth? Come on, Dylan, you put it there so I could see it, you owe me an explanation already.”

  “Don’t.”

  “Were you once married? I wouldn’t even know.”

  I took the ring from the shelf and put it in my pocket. “This is all stuff from when I was a kid.” It was a slight oversimplification: E. was the wife of a friend from college, the gift of the book commemoration of an almost which was really a just-as-well-not.

  Mingus’s comic books were in a box in my closet, mingled with mine.

  She grabbed the Afro pick. “You were already taking souvenirs from black girls when you were a kid? I don’t think so, Dylan.”

  “That’s not a girl’s.”

  “Not a girl’s.” She tossed the pick onto the bed. “Is that your way of telling me something I don’t even want to know? Or did you buy this off eBay? Is this Otis Redding’s pick, stolen from the wreckage? Maybe it belonged to one of the Bar-Kays. I guess the truly haunting thing is you’ll never know for sure.”

  I lashed out. “I guess I have to listen to this shit because you don’t feel black enough, Abby. Because you grew up riding ponies in the suburbs.”

  “No, you have to listen to it because you think this is all about where you grew up and where I grew up. Listen to yourself for a minute, Dylan. What happened to you? Your childhood is some privileged sanctuary you live in all the time, instead of here with me. You think I don’t know that?”

  “Nothing happened to me.”

  “Right,” she said with heavy sarcasm. “So why are you so obsessed with your childhood?”

  “Because—” I truly wanted to answer, not only to appease her. I wanted to know it myself.

  “Because?”

  “My childhood—” I spoke carefully, finding each word. “My childhood is the only part of my life that wasn’t, uh, overwhelmed by my childhood.”

  Overwhelmed—or did I mean ruined ?

  “Right,” she said. And we stared at one another for a long moment. “Thank you,” she said.

  “Thank you?”

  “You just told me where I stand, Dylan.” She spoke sadly, no longer concerned to prove anything. “You know, when I first spent a night in this house, you don’t think I didn’t walk up here and check out your shit? You think I didn’t see that pick on your shelf?”

  “It’s just a pick. I like the form.”

  She ignored me. “I said to myself, Abby, this man is collecting you for the color of your skin. That was okay, I was willing to be collected. I liked being your nigger, Dylan.”

  The word throbbed between us, permitting no reply from me. I could visualize it in cartoonish or graffiti-style font, glowing with garish decorations, lightning, stars, halos. As with the pick, I could appreciate the form. Most such words devaluate, when thrown around every day on the streets by schoolboys of all colors, or whispered by lovers such as myself and Abigale Ponders.
Though it had been more than once around the block of our relationship, nigger was that rarity, an anti-entropic agent, self-renewing. The deep ugliness in the word always sat up alert again when it was needed.

  “But I never was willing to be collected for my moods, man. You collected my depression, you cultivated it like a cactus, like a sulky cat you wanted around to feel sorry for. I never expected that. I never did.”

  Abby was talking to herself. When she noticed, a moment after I did, her expression curdled. “Clean up your room,” she said, and went downstairs.

  The airport shuttle’s horn had been sounding for some time now, I realized. My room would have to wait to be cleaned, and the five or six CDs I’d selected would have to be enough. The Syl Johnson record, Is It Because I’m Black, had skated to the top of the small heap of discs and plastic left behind where Abby had been. I fished it up and added it to the wallet.

  At the kitchen table Abby stood, one boot up on a chair, cinching the endless laces. She’d already refreshed the Africanoid jewelry in her piercings. It would seem an absurd costume for a student in a classroom, if I hadn’t known how hard her fellow students dressed for the same occasion. The boots were only a little obstacle to the art of dramatic exitry—she’d surely meant to be out the door before me, meant her last words upstairs to be conclusive.

  I grabbed the bag at the door. Her face, when she looked up, was raw, shocked, unmade. The van honked again.

  “Good luck today,” she said awkwardly.

  “Thanks. I’ll call—”

  “I’ll be out.”

  “Okay. And Abby?”

  “Yes?”

  “Good luck, too.” I didn’t know if I meant it, or what it was meant to apply to if I did. Was I wishing her good luck in leaving me? But there it was, our absurd coda completed, good luck on all sides. Then I was gone.

  chapter 2

  It was September 1999, a season of fear—in three months the collapse of the worldwide computer grid was going to bring the century’s long party to a finish. Meanwhile, as the party waned, the hottest new format in radio was a thing called Jammin’ Oldies. Los Angeles’s MEGA 100, recently reformatted (or in radio parlance, “flipped”) to the new trend, was playing in my cab—the song was War’s “Why Can’t We Be Friends?”—as I instructed the driver to take me to the Universal Studios lot and we swung away from the LAX curbside, into palm-lined gray traffic. The trees looked thirsty to me.