The Fortress of Solitude

by Jonathan Lethem

  “Mind?” said Francesca, taking my arm. “He’ll be proud!”

  My father had lived alone for fourteen years after I left Dean Street for college in Vermont. Little changed in those years—he’d gone on painting paperback-book art to cover his mortgage and shopping, and gone on pouring every spare hour on the clock and spare ounce of energy in his frame into his epic, endless, unseen film. In 1989, at last granting the absurdity of having three floors to himself, he’d converted the brownstone to two duplexes, adding a small kitchen to the second floor and renting out the parlor level, with the basement, to a young family. What remained untouched was the upstairs studio, the monk’s quarters where he daubed out days in black paint on celluloid. The neighborhood, in fits and starts, gentrified around him, Isabel Vendle’s curse or blessing realized in lag time. For Abraham it was primarily a matter of raised property taxes. He’d never asked what the rental market would bear—the duplex was always leased at a bargain.

  There were never women, that I heard of. If Abraham knew how to seek for that part of his life, after Rachel, he didn’t know how to mention it. Then he’d come to the attention of Francesca Cassini, a fifty-eight-year-old receptionist working in the offices of Ballantine Books. This man slumping into the offices with his latest jacket art tucked into a pebbly black pressed-board portfolio tied together with black laces, this man slumping from the elevator dressed humbly, in his Art Students League proletarian garb, fingertips slightly stained with paint, his demeanor mordant, as ever—this man had caught the eye of the fresh widow from Bay Ridge. A woman who, despite her immigrant’s name, had lived all her life among the postwar generation of New York Jews, Francesca spoke in their manner and recognized them as one recognizes oneself. She’d lost a Jewish husband six months earlier, a career accountant, a man bent, I imagined, over a lifelong column of figures likely as dear to him as the world’s longest abstract film in progress was to my father. Abraham, jacket-art celebrity, butt of corridor jokes for his Bartelbyesque mien, didn’t stand a chance. If ever a man cried for Francesca’s salvaging, here he was. She’d announced herself. She’d attached herself. One winter I visited Brooklyn and there she was, moved into the Dean Street house. I couldn’t complain. Francesca organized my father, and she seemed, in a peculiar way, to make him happy. She made him visible to himself, by her contrast.

  The greenroom had been set up in a small conference room off the lobby, guarded from the ordinary public by a volunteer at the door. In breathless tones Francesca explained we were a guest of honor’s entourage, and we were allowed into the sanctum. It held two urns containing coffee and water for tea, and a sectioned plastic dish full of cubed cheddar and Triscuits. A pair of volunteers sat behind a tray of blank badges and their plastic holders. From them Francesca demanded a pass “for Abraham Ebdus’s son,” then clipped the result to my shirt pocket.

  It wasn’t clear what we were waiting for. My father stood, stalled in consternation, in the center of the room, while Francesca dithered around the edges.

  “Mr. Ebdus?” ventured a volunteer.

  “Yes?”

  “The other program participants went upstairs. For your panel. I think it’s beginning now.”

  “Without him?” said Francesca.

  “The Nebraska Room, I think. Nebraska West.”

  We hurried out. “I told you we could go direct,” said Abraham to Francesca as we went up the wide central stair to the mezzanine.

  “Zelmo said meet at the greenroom.”

  Abraham just shook his head.

  Everyone moved awkwardly in this space, drifting as though rudderless, then abruptly accelerating, in explosions of tiny steps. Crossing paths they’d glare, mutter, wait for apologies. Through this fitful human sea we made our way to Nebraska Ballroom West. A sign taped to the door announced the program as “The Career of Abraham Ebdus,” as though this were self-explanatory. I supposed it was, or would be by the time the panel accomplished its work.

  We entered at the back of the room. At the front, four figures already occupied the elevated dais, behind table microphones and sweating pitchers of ice water. The dais was covered in maroon bunting which matched the acoustic padding of the ballroom’s walls and the thin upholstery of the stackable chairs that were arranged in rows, wall to wall. A crowd of perhaps fifty or sixty sat, attentive and respectful, scratching, coughing, crossing and uncrossing legs, wrinkling papers.

  “Good of Abraham to honor us with his presence,” said one of the panelists into his microphone, with heavy sarcasm. It drew a burst of relieved laughter from the audience, then a scattering of applause.

  “Up,” egged Francesca, and my father obeyed. She and I took seats at the aisle, Francesca clutching my arm in her excitement.

  The moderator, who’d wisecracked at our entry into the room, was a balding, sixtyish man, distinguishable at this distance from Abraham himself primarily by a garish blue ascot. He introduced himself as Sidney Blumlein, formerly art director for Ballantine, and if not exactly Abraham Ebdus’s discoverer then at least his main employer and patron during what he called the crucial first decade of my father’s work. “I’ve also been his apologist for longer than he’d want me to remind you,” Blumlein continued. “I’m not ashamed to say I protected his art from editorial meddling a dozen times, two dozen. And I talked Abe out of refusing his first Hugo.” Another warm chuckle from the crowd. “But truly, it was always an honor.”

  The others introduced themselves: first Buddy Green, who blinked through thick glasses and couldn’t have been more than eighteen or nineteen, editor of an on-line zine called Ebdus Collector, dedicated to the purchase of the rare original painted boards of my father’s designs. I’d blundered across Green’s Web site a few times, Googling the name Ebdus to search my own archived journalism. Next was R. Fred Vundane, a tiny, withered man in a Vandyke beard and mad-scientist glasses, author of twenty-eight novels, including Neural Circus, the very first for which my father had painted a jacket. Then Paul Pflug, another paperback painter, a fiftyish biker-type, fat in leather pants, with a blond ponytail and eyes concealed by dark wraparounds. Pflug seated himself at the far edge of the dais, leaving an empty chair and unfilled water glass between himself and Vundane.

  The tributes and anecdotes weren’t so terribly interesting that I couldn’t mostly study my father and his reactions. I didn’t recall ever seeing him this way, onstage, at a distance, held in a collective gaze. The result was a kind of nakedness I realized now he’d always avoided. Green spoke gushingly in a high whine, claiming Ebdus as the successor in a line of science-fiction illustrators from Virgil Finlay through Richard Powers—names which meant less than nothing to me—and it was evident Abraham took pleasure in it, however masochistically. Vundane spoke with aggrieved vanity—perhaps he yearned for a panel on “The Works of Vundane”—about Ebdus’s deep and uncommon insight into the surrealist nature of his, Vundane’s, writing. And when Pflug’s turn came he reminisced, gruffly, about meeting my father at the beginning of his career, and claimed Abraham’s seriousness, his regard for standards, as an example which had altered the course of his, Pflug’s, career.

  Abraham didn’t speak, just nodded as the others alternated on the microphones. But his distaste for whatever it was Vundane and Pflug had accomplished—or failed to—was painfully obvious. For that matter, it was unmistakable that nobody on the dais liked Pflug. I wondered how he’d come to be invited.

  “I’ve told this story many times,” said Buddy Green. “I was trying to trace the provenance of the original art for the Belmont Specials—his first seventeen paintings. They weren’t in the hands of any of the major collectors. They weren’t in the hands of any of the minor collectors. Unfortunately, they weren’t in my hands. I kept writing to the Belmont people and they said they didn’t know what I was talking about. I thought they were stonewalling. So, being a little slow on the uptake, it finally occurred to me to ask Abraham. And he explained, like it was no big deal, that he destroyed th
em. He couldn’t imagine anyone cared.”

  Abraham’s eyes scoured the crowd, looking for me, I permitted myself to imagine. I wondered how it felt to hear those called his first seventeen paintings.

  “It’s true,” said Sidney Blumlein, with great avuncular gusto. “When I hired him away from Belmont, Abe was systematically destroying the work.”

  This drew oohs and aahs, a kind of titillated awe from the crowd.

  “This man is the only one your father respects,” whispered Francesca. “None of the others. Not even Zelmo.”

  “Zelmo?”

  “The chair. I mean, of the whole convention. You’ll meet him at dinner. He’s a very important lawyer.”

  “Ah.”

  Now the microphone was retaken by Blumlein, whom Francesca had claimed as Abraham’s only friend on the panel. Being moderator, Blumlein took it upon himself to prize open the jaws of the clam—to find a way to force Abraham Ebdus to acknowledge and address his admirers.

  “For more than two decades Abe has graced our field, and I do mean graced. All well and good. But at this time of celebration there’s no reason to pussyfoot around the question—he’s done so at a remove. His background isn’t science fiction, and in that he’s an exception from the vast majority of professionals at this gathering, at any gathering in our field. We’re fans, our interests begin in the pulp-magazine tradition, however we might like to hope we’ve elevated it.”

  Pflug sneered. Vundane took a pitcher and topped off his untouched glass.

  The audience was stilled, silenced from its murmurs of approval and recognition, perhaps less certain now that everything they were hearing fell safely in the vein of an Elk Lodge testimonial dinner.

  “Abraham Ebdus, let’s not kid ourselves, had no interest in elevating it. He was looking to make a buck to support his art—what he regarded as his real art. As perhaps some of you, perhaps many of you may know, Abe is a filmmaker, an experimental filmmaker, of terrific seriousness and devotion. This is how he spends his days, when he’s not painting jackets for books. It has nothing to do with science fiction. What’s miraculous—what we’re all here to celebrate—is that being a real artist, one of depth and profundity, Abe brought to the books a visionary intensity that did elevate. That contained beauty and strangeness. Because he couldn’t help himself.”

  I saw how well Sidney Blumlein knew my father. He was urging Abraham into the weird light of this roomful of celebrants, baiting him with the possibility of an audience worth addressing. I didn’t know whether I wanted him to succeed.

  “This is what, Abe? Only your fifth or sixth time at a convention?”

  My father hunched, seeming to wish he could reply with his shoulders. Finally he leaned into the microphone and said, “I haven’t counted.”

  “I first dragged you to a LunaCon, in New York, in the early eighties. You weren’t happy.”

  “No, it wasn’t to my taste,” said Abraham reluctantly.

  The crowd tittered.

  “And wouldn’t it be fair to say, Abe, you rarely if ever read the books under your jackets?”

  Now a collective gasp.

  “Oh, I’ve never done,” said Abraham. “I say it without apology. Mr. Vundane, your book, what was the title?”

  “Neural Circus,” supplied R. Fred Vundane, his jaw so clenched it mashed the vowels.

  “Yes, Neural Circus. I was always stopped by that title. It seemed, I’m sorry, vaguely distasteful to me. You speak of surrealists—I suppose you mean the poets. It feels a very poor shade of symbolist imagery, actually. Rimbaud, maybe? No, I was asked to envision other worlds, and I did. Any congruence with the work is happenstance.”

  I’d read R. Fred’s book. I recalled a troupe of genetically altered acrobats residing in a hollowed asteroid.

  Blumlein rode in to the rescue now, perhaps pitying Vundane, who’d shrunk even smaller in his chair. “This is just an example, I think, of the wider context, the erudition, that Abe brings to what he touches. In our field he’s a comet streaking past, whom we’ve managed to lure into our orbit. A fellow traveler, like a Stanley Kubrick or a Stanislaw Lem. He disdains our vocabulary even as he reinvents it to suit his own impulses.”

  “I have to interrupt, Sidney, to say you’re overstating the value of what I do.” Here was a subject to rouse Abraham’s passion. “You throw names, Kubrick, Lem. And Mr. Green, god bless him, throws Virgil Finlay, whom I’ve never had the good fortune to encounter. Let me throw a few names. Ernst, Tanquy, Matta, Kandinsky. Once in a while, the early Pollock or Rothko. If I’ve accomplished one thing, it’s been to give a rough education in contemporary painting, or what was contemporary painting in 1950. The intersection of late surrealism and early abstract expressionism. Period. It’s derivative, every last brushstroke. All quoted. Nothing to do with outer space, nothing remotely. Honestly, if you people hadn’t put such a seal on yourselves, if you’d visit a museum even once, you’d know you’re celebrating a second-rate thief.”

  “You stopped at pop art?” asked Blumlein.

  “Please. You have Mr. Pflug for that. That’s all there was when I began doing jackets—pop art.”

  Blumlein and Ebdus had begun to seem a kind of vaudeville act, scripted at the expense of the fall guys who’d made the mistake of joining them onstage. The audience ate it up.

  “Yet here you are, Abe, among us. LunaCon wasn’t to your liking, but you’ve spent a career among us, sharing your gift. You’re the guest of honor.”

  “Look, that’s fair. You want an explanation. It isn’t pretty. If I were a stronger person I wouldn’t be here. I’m tempted by flattery, so I come. My work on film is hardly known. It’s unknown. You people have been very kind, too kind. I’ve grown fond, despite myself. My companion enjoys travel. There isn’t one explanation, there are several.”

  “Do you feel a part of the field, warts and all?”

  Abraham shrugged. “It’s a bohemian demimonde, like any other. There are similar convocations in the world of so-called experimental film, but I’ve always declined to go. Some attend imagining they can further themselves. But the work, the true work, is of course carried on elsewhere. Perhaps for me the stakes there are too high, so I accept your invitations instead. I don’t ponder these things. An event like this is an accident, not necessarily a happy one. I frankly marvel at the oddness of a room gathered in honor of a forgotten man, a nobody. Perhaps I can wake you from the trance you’re in, but I doubt it.”

  Fifty people laughed in delighted recognition, and a light spontaneous applause broke out. I heard a woman in the row ahead whisper appreciatively, “He always says that.”

  “I’m ashamed of myself,” said my father.

  The applause grew. Buddy Green shot upright from his chair and led the clapping. Only Pflug refused the consensus, turning in his chair.

  “I’ve wasted my life.”

  This was the last thing I made out before my father was drowned in the ovation. A two-way masochism was at work here, made possible by the total insularity of the gathering. The bohemian demimonde, as Abraham called it. My father was their pet heretic, their designated griever for lost or abandoned possibility. The way he brandished his failure thrilled this crowd, and they’d obviously known it was coming. By accepting his contempt like a lash on their backs, the Elk Lodge of ForbiddenCon 7 could feel ratified in their unworthy worthiness, their good sense of humor about themselves and their chosen deficiencies.

  And yet I felt his not entirely withheld affection too. Through his eyes I could even share it. I thought of my namesake’s “Chimes of Freedom”— tolling for the aching whose wounds cannot be nursed, for the countless confused accused misused strung-out ones and worse, and for every hung-up person in the whole wide universe! Certainly I’d witnessed gatherings of rock critics or college-radio DJs, on panels at the South by Southwest conference or the CMJ, which were no less self-congratulatorily marginal. Only the costumes were different. I flashed on a vision of a world dotted wit
h conferences, convocations, and “Cons” of all types, each an engine for converting feelings of inferiority and self-loathing into their opposites.

  The panel was over. Another man had made his way to the front and taken the left-hand microphone from Sidney Blumlein. Now he tapped it repeatedly to get our attention. The new arrival was as eccentrically dressed as anyone in the room, but to an entirely different effect. His clean blue pinstripe shirt with white collar and red bow tie, natty mustache and slicked hair—all suggested a Republican senator who’d run a calculatedly old-timey campaign bankrolled by dark and secretive private interests. His voice was incredibly loud.

  “This is my first chance to welcome you to ForbiddenCon 7,” he barked. “What a beginning, hey? Mr. Ebdus is too modest so I’ll remind you myself, we have the privilege of a special screening of a portion of his film, tomorrow at ten in Wyoming Ballroom B. Really, don’t miss this, it’s a rare opportunity.”

  “Him,” whispered Francesca. She tugged my arm. “He loves your father.”

  It’s you who loves him, I thought but didn’t say. You’re projecting, Francesca, you see it everywhere. Seated beside her, the Cumulus of Love, I felt enveloped in perfume and emotion. Nevertheless, I contemplated this bow-tied man at the microphone, the one who stirred my father’s girlfriend to such a peculiar excitement.

  “One more big hand, ladies and gentlemen, for our artist guest of honor, Abe Ebdus!”

  It was my first glimpse of the man Francesca had called Zelmo the Chair. The important lawyer. An unlikely emissary for secrets pertaining to my whole existence, but he had a few.

  chapter 4

  The restaurant, Bongiorno’s, was bad and didn’t know it. Everything was presented with a passive-aggressive flourish, as though we probably weren’t savvy enough to appreciate the oregano-heavy garlic bread, the individual bowls for olive pits, the starched napkins stuffed into our wineglasses, or the waiter’s strained enunciation of a long list of specials. Zelmo Swift seized control of the wine list and addressed everyone by name, making sure we took the whole episode personally. “This is on me, not ForbiddenCon,” he stressed. “They wouldn’t know food if it bit them on the ass. They’re happy with that crap in the hotel. I know how gruesome that whole scene can get, so I always try to take the guests out once.”