The Fortress of Solitude

by Jonathan Lethem

  I was glad for my father, but my attention wasn’t held. My sick heart swirled with distraction. When I closed my eyes it felt as if Mingus Rude was in the room, perhaps on the second bed or in the bathtub. I borrowed from some grisly urban legend an image of a man packed in ice, robbed of his kidney by a gang of organ bandits. Alternately, despite a room party chattering and clunking through the wall, and the fact of my own father in a suite five floors above, I felt the possibility that my hotel room was detached in the void, a plush sarcophagus with cable television, drifting in space. This second hallucination jolted me from my daze on the bedspread, to reach for the key to the minibar.

  I’d emptied my pockets on the dresser. Now I saw what was arrayed there. Beside the minibar key, the room’s keycard, and some crumpled dollars, lay Aaron X. Doily’s ring. I’d pocketed it that morning, to rescue it from Abby’s interrogation of my stuff.

  I wondered if the ring still worked, and, if it did, whether its powers had changed again. Before I was done wondering I’d pulled on my pants and slipped the keycard into my pocket and the ring onto my finger. In bare feet I crossed the carpet to the door, and out into the corridor, to stand blinking in the bright light.

  I couldn’t see my hands or feet, but then I was drunk too. It wasn’t until the elevator door opened and I stepped into its mirrored interior that I was certain. I was alone there, and the elevator’s cab appeared empty. I pressed my hands to the mirrors and blew breath around them, saw invisible fingers outlined in visible steam. No matter that I’d left the ring alone for years: this was still its power. Mine, when I chose to wear it.

  Upstairs, I’d lain tripping on misery for what felt like hours. So I expected the lobby to be empty. Instead it was full of gabbling Forbiddenoids. So was the hotel’s bar. I crept in, easily dodging the usual collisions. I’d become a skilled invisible man ten years before, and the expertise was ready in me.

  The convention’s denizens surrounded the bar’s round tables in gathered chairs, groups of ten or fifteen. Their conversations had a sprung, argumentative quality, like regurgitated panel discussions. But they were human; they imbibed, galed with laughter. Some would probably pair off tonight, like the crocodiles. I was glad to be invisible. The bar itself, an island in the center, was mostly empty. I overturned a glass of melted ice at one end to make a diversion, then, as the bartender groused over to swab it up, snuck behind him to grab a third-full bottle of Maker’s Mark. As I clutched it to my chest it was enclosed in my transparency. I tiptoed back through the lobby. Paul Pflug was there, pinned on a couch between identical women in leather bustiers, and high-laced boots not so unlike Abby’s. I toasted him with the invisible bottle, then brought the whiskey up to my room, to render invisible by other means.

  Ten was too early, but at least the room was dark. My father dithered angrily, threading the projector, insisting on doing it himself, while the pair of hotel staff who’d wheeled it into the room were exiled to one side. I sat with Francesca in the front row, unable to completely avoid the knowledge that only a scattered fifteen or twenty filled the seats behind us, in a room which wanted a hundred. The audience waited patiently, more patiently than I. Some drew orange juice from small boxes through straws, others munched Danish. Zelmo wasn’t in evidence, not yet.

  Under my starchy lids a film of hangover already played. I’d barely showered and made it out of the room in time to find Wyoming Ballroom B. I was relying on coffee and a bagel on the plane, for now an Advil from Francesca’s purse. My floppy bag was repacked and stuffed under my chair, Aaron Doily’s ring returned to my pocket. The emptied bottle of Maker’s Mark I’d hidden in the minibar—it took some jostling to get it inside.

  “I’ll show two sequences,” my father explained, beginning without any warning. “The first is from 1979 to 1981 and lasts twenty-one minutes. The second is more recent, from 1998. About ten minutes, I think. If it’s all right I’ll leave any remarks or questions for the end.”

  No one objected. No one but myself or Francesca could have known a reason to. The small population of hardcore Ebdus fans shifted in their chairs with that rote hushed excitement which proceeds the start of any film, even one shown at ten in the morning in the Wyoming Ballroom of the Anaheim Marriott. They had no idea.

  I cared about the film. What choice did I have? I’d cohabited with that presence longer than any other, apart from my father himself. In my childhood life the film was a sort of crippled, mute god, one nursed upstairs like a demented relative. I knew the twenty-one-minute 1979–81 section well—I’d attended its one other public screening, at the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley, four years ago, and watched it twice in practice runs during the same week. It was a sequence Abraham thought particularly definitive. A landscape lit by an unseen moon, the horizon splitting the screen, the ground brighter than the sky—though Abraham would have rejected the terms “landscape,” “horizon,” and “ground.” Nevertheless: the sky gray-black, the ground gray-gray. The effect more or less that of a thousand late-period Rothkos, stacked in time, and vibrating in projected light. The years 1979 to 1981 were just two in a half-dozen when Abraham had painted this one image—black and gray wrestling in fierce tandem. The ground might rise, or roll slightly, as though an ocean had swelled and waved. The black might leak from the sky and briefly roll across the lower frame—the moments when it did were shocking action in the dazzling, dancing stillness. Just once a red-and-yellow pulse moved like an occluded sun behind the black, then dissolved in shards. Had Abraham secretly gotten his ashes hauled that particular week, so long ago? I’d never dared ask.

  As it happened, I was reasonably sure that the twenty-one-minute segment included my sole contribution, a single frame I’d forged one day after school, during my senior year. I’d come home to find Abraham out, perhaps shopping. Later I couldn’t remember the exact circumstances, only the compulsion which had come over me, to sneak into his studio and paint the frame. Abraham’s brushes were wet—he’d just been working. The empty frame was centered in the sprockets, and I would only have to ratchet it one position farther to conceal my addition. The chance was handed to me on a platter, but still I barely dared. With a loaded brush tip I trembled over the frame, not setting the pigment down: the irreversible act. I was terrified of authority —not Abraham’s, but my own.

  I painted it—laid down black, laid down gray. Then broke out in a fearful sweat and fled the scene. I spent a week waiting to be accused, and wasn’t. Whether I was caught I’d never know. My father was more than capable of detecting the forged frame and opting not to speak. Leaving it in or splicing it out, but saying nothing. Now, though, I permitted myself to imagine he’d left it in. One twenty-fourth of a second in twenty-five years: mine.

  Now I cadged a painkiller from Francesca and tried to ignore the pressure of my dehydrated brain against the top of my eyeballs. The room was silent apart from the film’s clicking passage and the whine of the projector’s fan. It was hard to give the film its due (whatever that was), between hangover and my sense of Abraham, back with the projector, watching us watch from across a distance of empty seats. Hard not to feel his disappointment in this venue on the back of my neck. I waited for that one strange flare of yellow and red: there it was. Twenty-one minutes passed.

  “This is how your father tortures these people who love him,” whispered Francesca. “By subjecting them to such darkness.”

  I didn’t reply. I could have used even more darkness at the moment.

  The second excerpt was a surprise. A dispatch from the frontier: my father had discovered a green triangle with blunted corners, one trying and failing to fall sideways against the phantasmic, blurred horizon.

  The triangle occupied perhaps a quarter of the frame’s area. It trembled, tipped a degree, nearly kissed earth, jumped back. Progress was illusion: two steps forward, two steps back. Impossible, though, not to root for it. To feel it groping like a foot for purchase. Daring, hesitating, failing.

  I was unexpe
ctedly moved, forgot the room, forgot my headache, suddenly wept for the triangle’s efforts, a tragedy in no acts. Francesca handed me a tissue from her purse. Prisonaires, triangles, I was a pushover these days. Then it was done, and the lights came on. No one clapped—they’d forgotten how, or perhaps the film had persuaded them to fear that their hands, urged together, would fail to meet.

  Zelmo Swift appeared at the front and taught us to be brave: a clapping sound could indeed be produced. He led the way. We applauded and my father came to the front, was seated before another microphone, though he hardly needed it to be heard in the sparse room. The few questions that came were either timid or inane. Abraham took them politely.

  “Have you ever considered adding a soundtrack?”

  “You mean conversation? Or music?”

  “Uh, music. It would give you something to listen to.”

  “Yes, it would do that. And then, yes. We’d be listening to music.” He paused. “It’s something to think about.”

  Another asked about the progress of the film since the second excerpt. What did it look like now?

  “I find a paraphrase almost impossible. Some progress has been made. You’d see a superficial resemblance to this sequence, I think.”

  “Is the triangle—” This is what the questioner had really wanted to ask. “Is the triangle, uh, lower ? Has it finished falling?”

  “Ah,” said Abraham. He paused a while. “The green, yes. It continues in its struggle. More or less as you saw.”

  There was a hush within a hush.

  “Will it ever —?” someone managed. The question on everyone’s lips. That unfinished falling had broken a lot of hearts, not only mine.

  “I prefer not to speculate,” said Abraham. “That’s the daily task, in my view. A refusal to speculate, only encounter. Only understand.”

  Zelmo, waiting in the wings, could stand it no longer. He swept up the microphone. “In other words, folks, stay tuned. Abraham Ebdus isn’t done yet. Pretty amazing.” Yes, the film had gone into extra innings, but Zelmo the Chair, Zelmo the Connoisseur, he wasn’t one of those philistines getting a head start to the parking lot, no sir.

  With that the spell was broken. My father’s fans drifted from the ballroom, checking their pocket schedules. Maybe somewhere in the building R. Fred Vundane was seated on another panel, if they were lucky. Abraham hurried back to prevent the hotel’s employee from rewinding the film incorrectly, and Zelmo and Francesca surrounded me again.

  “You’ve got a plane to catch,” Zelmo said merrily.

  “There’s plenty of time.”

  “Sure, but my car’s waiting downstairs. So—”

  “You better go, dear,” said Francesca.

  I was too blurry to fight. Zelmo was a thug by nature, and Francesca a thug of love, and together, in the name of convenience and some irritating secret agenda, they would cheat me of a half hour more in my father’s company. He’d fly back to Brooklyn and another year or decade would go by. But I’d made no use of the visit so far, and there wasn’t a lot of potential in half an hour at the Marriott, not with Zelmo and Francesca and my hangover all circling, making their claims. I slung my bag over my shoulder.

  “Son.”

  “Dad.”

  “It was good to see you. This—” He waved. “Impossible.”

  “The new segment was beautiful.”

  He closed his eyes. “Thank you.”

  We embraced again, two bird-men briefly touching on a branch. I’d showered but already reeked again of the liquor working through my pores. I wondered if my father thought I’d come to Los Angeles in the middle of a breakup, or a breakdown. I wondered if he’d be right to wonder.

  Then I smudged Francesca’s face and was escorted downstairs, through the lobby, and into the backseat of Zelmo Swift’s chauffeured, window-tinted limousine.

  Disneyland was distantly visible from the gray suburban freeway strip, a clutch of spires like a sinking ship in the industrial sea.

  “You don’t like me,” announced Zelmo, with no regard for the driver’s hearing. On the leather-plush seat there was plenty of room between myself and the lawyer. I suppose it seemed I wanted to climb out the window.

  “What do you want me to say?” I needed orange juice, a toothbrush, a blood transfusion, a Bloody Mary, Abigale Ponders, Leslie Cunningham, a Thneed, someone to watch over me, a miracle every day—anything but a moment of truth between myself and Zelmo Swift. I needed a volume knob on Zelmo Swift.

  “Nothing. I’m doing this out of respect for your father and Francesca.” He took an envelope from his jacket and placed it beside my hand.

  “What is it?”

  “An accident. You’ll understand when you look. I go all out for my guests, Dylan. Whatever you might think of ForbiddenCon, it’s a moment in their lives, I like to make it a big one. We usually do a ‘This Is Your Life, Abraham Ebdus!’ kind of thing at the Saturday banquet. Surprise appearances from the past, very sentimental.”

  I opened the envelope. A single sheet, two typed paragraphs. Some legal secretary’s notes, unsigned. Nothing official, but dry legalese aspiring to the official, language dead with indifference to its subject.

  Ebdus, Rachel Abramovitz, conviction for forgery, conspiracy, Owensville Virginia, 10/18/78, sentence suspended. Subsequent arrest and indictment, Lexington, Kentucky, 5/9/79, accomplice armed robbery; bail flight, whereabouts unknown; warrant issued 7/22/79.

  And:

  Ebdus, Rachel A., last verifiable address, 2/75: #1 Rural Route 8, Bloomington, Indiana, 44605.

  “I hope you don’t feel I was prying,” said Zelmo. “We have an excellent research staff at my firm. What they discover is out of my hands.”

  “Why am I seeing this?” What I meant, really, was: Why am I learning this from you? Why in your limousine, Zelmo?

  He understood. “Abraham wanted me to destroy it. He wasn’t interested. Francesca spoke to me privately.”

  “So Francesca’s wishes prevailed over my father’s?”

  “She’s well-intentioned, Dylan. She thought you had a right.” His voice rose to a declamatory, courtroom-finale level. “You shouldn’t be furious with her. It’s difficult coming into a family, knowing what’s right to do.”

  I glanced at the sheet again, and felt Zelmo’s eyes on me. I wanted to fly at him in my rage, but I sat. Fuck you looking at? I wanted to ask, then throw him in a yoke.

  But I sat, a white boy saying nothing.

  “Forget it, if you want,” said Zelmo. “I’ll destroy the traces.”

  “I don’t care what you do. Just don’t bother Abraham with it again.”

  “Assuredly.”

  I put the sheet in the envelope, the envelope in my bag. We fell to silence, Zelmo gratefully for once. I wondered if he’d ever been so little rewarded for what he regarded as his generosity.

  Still, it was hardly his fault a legal researcher in his firm knew more about my life than I did.

  Destroy the traces. I’d never tried to do that. Instead I’d lived in their midst for thirty years, oblivious, a blind man fancying himself invisible.

  chapter 5

  Perhaps every male animal has an idea what he’ll do with himself the evening of the day he comes home to a newly empty house—rooms which show signs, as mine did, of a hurried start to permanent departure. Perhaps every man has a consoling, self-abnegating fantasy lined up for such a moment, a rabbit hole down which to plunge. Anyhow, I did. I only had to stretch out on my daybed for a few hours, dozing slightly as light turned to dark in the trees outside, the jewel-case shambles of Abby’s tantrum still decorating the floor at my feet, to have my chance. Once night fell I only needed to change my shirt, splash water on my face, and walk a few blocks south through the cool evening to put my plan under way. My scheme of self-wreckage was that near at hand, that much in my back pocket all the time.

  Shaman’s Brigadoon, on San Pablo Avenue, was a Berkeley institution, a dingy, poster-layered blues-and-folk n
ightclub where for some thirty-odd years black musicians in dark suits, narrow ties, and freshly blocked fedoras came to sit on a tiny stage and perform for an audience of white people wearing berets, fezzes, ponchos, and dashikis. As a music journalist known to Shaman’s longtime floor manager I could rely on being waved in free of charge. I always fulfilled the two-drink minimum at the candle-in-mason-jar tables, though—it was worth it for a seat nearer the stage, and lately for the sweet, slow-cooking flirtation I’d been engaged in with one of their typically zaftig young cocktail waitresses, a wide-faced, green-eyed, cigarette-raspy blonde seemingly just arrived from Surferville, named Katha.

  Katha had been born in the late seventies but her flippant smile, easy banter, and the pitch of her sturdy hips as she moved with a tray, all were film-noir vintage, whether she knew it or not. Though I gobbled her up with my eyes, she was only an easy, impersonal icon of sexual cheer in my life the first dozen times she waited my table. I took her friendly provocations for nothing more than an aspect of her art, and tipped accordingly.

  As has sometimes been the case for me, it was one woman who focused my attention on the reality of another. “You and that girl really get a kick out of each other, don’t you?” Abby said one night in May, as we walked home from a Suzzy Roche show.

  “She’s got a Drew Barrymore smile,” I joshed, denying by not denying.

  “She’s got Drew Barrymore jugs,” said Abby, and punched me on the arm. We laughed, chummy, jaded cohorts in my self-deception. And that was the last night Abby and I went together to a show at Shaman’s Brigadoon.

  My next visit I learned Katha’s last name, and a few other things. Katha Purly only looked nineteen—she was twenty-one. Despite appearances, she wasn’t up from some beach town, but down, from Walla Walla, Washington. Flying in the teeth of cliché, she was an aspiring singer-songwriter waitressing at a joint where she hoped someday to headline. She lived in a commune in Emeryville, along with two of the other waitresses from Shaman’s who’d come south with Katha at the same time. No, the three weren’t a band, just friends. I couldn’t keep from asking the questions but after I learned the answers I pretended I didn’t know them. My sincerity had almost spoiled our breezy, effortless repartee, but on my next visit we fought our way back. And that was where we’d left it, until this night.