The Fortress of Solitude

by Jonathan Lethem

  Onstage was a trio of African musicians, an organist, xylophonist, and bongo player, billed as the Kenya Orchestra Vandals. They weren’t creating a lot of excitement, and I wondered if a major portion of the orchestra hadn’t been detained at the Nairobi airport. There were free tables near the riser, but I didn’t sit as close as I could have. Instead I picked the quietest corner of Katha’s section.

  “Hiya, buster,” she said, and dropped a menu on my table.

  “Katha, Katha, Katha.”

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Nothing at all. Just saying your name. It sounds like panting, actually.”

  “I guess, if you’re a dog. You drinking?”

  She brought me scotch and I pretended to admire the band. Whenever she was near enough I made jokes about Walla Walla and tried to make her sit at my table for a cigarette break. Once I succeeded, I said: “So what are you doing later, anyway?”

  “Who, me ?” Katha’s tone of delighted surprise was all I wished to inspire in her, or for that matter in any other living human, ever again. When two bodies felt the raw uncanny instinct to be joined, and before any damage had been exchanged, it was so easy for one to make the other smile.

  “You. You and your so-called friends. You and what army.”

  She squinted. “What about the horse I rode in on?”

  “The horse especially.”

  “You want to party with me, Dylan?”

  “I want to hear you play your guitar.”

  I felt her hesitation, avoiding a trap. I will not trap you ever or tonight, I willed.

  “I’m not off until one-thirty,” she said.

  I shrugged and she began to know that I was serious.

  “Some people are showing up later,” she said, precisely vague. “But if you don’t mind coming along we could get some hanging-out time.”

  I wasn’t much into the Kenyans, so I took a walk to the marina. Mexicans fished off the pier by night, hunched against the indifferent skyline, the Orwellian Transamerica pyramid. I went as far as the pier’s crumbled tip, where lovers walked, though I couldn’t decide whether to count myself as one.

  Then ten blocks back to Shaman’s, to an alley door Katha had told me to use. A rap beat pulsed from a small boom box on a kitchen shelf, playing Digital Underground’s “Foghorn Leghorn,” a song which happened to include a few sampled bars of Doofus Funkstrong’s “Bump Suit.” You could hear Barrett Rude Junior’s tenor moan deep in the sample, if you listened hard. The lights in the kitchen were up, the chairs in the darkened front room already turned on the tables. Katha and one of her friends counted the till, mumbling numbers aloud like a prayer, hurrying through the work. The third girl had drawn lines of cocaine on the counter with a kitchen knife.

  “Deirdre,” said the girl with the knife, and handed me a rolled bill. Hair had fallen to cover her face as she concentrated over the drug and now she swept it back behind her ear.

  “Dylan. Thanks.”

  “You know Katha—?” She left it for me to fill in.

  “Just from here.”

  “Cool.”

  The quick onset of alliances were the stuff of these girls’ days, that was the impression Deirdre gave. She’d make a place for me, mildly weird older guy, if I’d make a place for myself. So it was here, as elsewhere, Gowanus, Hollywood, ForbiddenCon 7, other secret zones of belonging. Entry points between zones are hidden until they aren’t, until they become as obvious as a lit kitchen door in a club’s alley, behind which three young women from Walla Walla pool an evening’s tips. And as so often in my experience, passage between was eased by alcohol or marijuana or cocaine, those boundary medicines. Line, Mr. Mildly Weird Older? Of course I’d like a line, and to cross one too, please. How could I not find myself doing Barrett Rude Junior’s drug before this weekend was behind me? That was precisely what I’d come here to do, without knowing it. It wasn’t that I didn’t want Katha. I wanted her badly, but now I’d sensed that the price for having her would be a reschooling in the provisionality of my being, in the futility of my illusions of control. And I wanted to pay that price as much as I wanted Katha herself.

  “You really write for Rolling Stone ?”

  “I have.”

  “Who’d you meet?”

  “Uh?”

  “Like, did you ever meet Sheryl Crow?” The questions were flat, unashamed.

  “Nope.”

  “R.E.M.?”

  “I was backstage with R.E.M. once, at the Oakland Coliseum.” How to explain that I’d spent the time talking to the dB’s—the opening act?

  “What are they like?”

  “Well, Michael Stipe was sucking from an oxygen tank after the show.”

  “Wow.”

  Katha was at the wheel of her Ford Falcon, Deirdre beside her, up front. I was being interviewed by Jane, third and youngest, in the backseat, as we whistled down San Pablo Avenue into Emeryville. A bag of bottles from Shaman’s sat on the seat between us. Velocity, the company of girls as brash as Frank Sinatra and Gene Kelly in Anchors Aweigh, and revelatory after-hours views of streets I took for granted in daytime, these were the intoxicants I was high on, as much as the cocaine. Or at least I couldn’t parse my other thrillments from the drug. Katha hadn’t spoken to me directly, back in Shaman’s kitchen, only taken the rolled bill from me with a wry, welcoming smile before doing a line herself. And she ignored me in the car, left me to Jane’s questions. That was another thrillment. The silence seemed consent that we’d taken a step. That this night was already earned. We could rest the banter for now.

  We slowed in front of a big, turreted, three-story Victorian, set back from the street and with a low white gate around its weedy yard. Bare bulbs and postered white walls blazed from behind curtains of bedsheet and hippie tapestry, so the commune stood out like a piñata from the two-story cookie-box apartments which slumbered on all sides. The cars parked on the street included two that weren’t going anywhere, and one that looked lived in. As my eyes focused I made out a black man in a white undershirt, seated in a lawn chair under the carport of one of the neighboring apartments, and crumpling a paper bag around a bottle. His gaze followed the sputtering progress of the Falcon into the alley beside the commune, impassively.

  “You wanna meet Matt?” Jane asked, as Katha parked.

  “That’s just her polite way of saying goodbye,” said Deirdre from the front. “Jane and Matt pretty much just fuck all the time.”

  “Shut up! ” said Jane, and slapped at Deirdre’s head.

  “You can’t deny it because you know it’s true.”

  On the porch Katha smiled at me again, as though she knew she was handling a man in a trance. “Go ahead,” she said. “My room’s on the second floor. You’ll find it.”

  Jane and Matt lived in the attic, reachable only by ladder from the commune’s third-floor landing. When Jane summoned him Matt didn’t come down, just peeked his bare-chested torso over the edge of the loft. Despite a Christian beard he also wasn’t past nineteen.

  “Hey,” he said.

  “Dylan knows R.E.M.,” Jane told him. “He’s Katha’s friend.”

  “Cool,” said Matt, blinking, waiting, if I believed Deirdre, to fuck.

  “Okay, bye,” said Jane to me, shy now for the first time. She climbed the ladder, squirrel-like.

  I turned back down the grand ramshackle staircase, which was lit by a bare violet bulb. Music seeped from behind various doors, and the air of the house was stale with fumes—laundry, cigarettes, old beer. This was my chance: I could have crept past the second floor, found my way out and to a cab on San Pablo. I didn’t.

  Katha’s two rooms formed a suite at the back of the second floor, and with their built-in bay-window seats and ornate ceilings and mosaic parquet they would have been grand rooms in a grand house, if the house were anywhere but Emeryville. As it was, the ceiling was water-stained, the parquet warped, and I was sure the landlord was grateful to have tenants to fill the place, even if the
y mostly used strings of Christmas lights for lamps. Katha’s guitar case leaned against a wall near a CD boom box; a shelfless, doorless closet was heaped with clothes. The smaller second room was empty except for a tapestry-draped single mattress. There was nothing at all on the walls.

  In the main room Deirdre kneeled on the floor, slicing more coke, on a mirror now, with a taped blade. Katha, tucked into one of the bay windows, spoke on a telephone, low murmuring not audible over the Beck on the boom box. Another couple sat, knees up, on a futon against the wall, a light-skinned black with a large Afro, faint mustache, and mild eyes, and his girlfriend, a somewhat older-looking woman with choppy short black-dyed hair who, when she spoke, disconcertingly revealed a German accent. Sprawled in a butterfly chair was a Mexican-appearing teenager, fifteen or sixteen at most, gangly in oversized hip-hop trousers, his hair in a blue handkerchief. Deirdre didn’t offer any introductions. Sultry and hollow, she seemed a player in a Warhol film of the mind. Rolando and Dunja, the couple on the futon, gave their names and smiled pleasantly. The teen in the butterfly chair said, “Yo,” and presented for a black-power handclasp. I took his hand and he chewed his name: Marty or Mardy or Marly, I couldn’t be sure.

  It was the least of the uncertainties which gave shape to my long night in Katha Purly’s rooms. Katha’s slighting me in the shuttered nightclub and again in the car had turned into a policy. We weren’t together in any sense that I could tell. I did coke and talked with Deirdre and Rolando and Dunja. Maybe-Marty refused, his expression haughty, full of childish disdain, like a housecat preening to avenge an indignity. Maybe-Marty was silent, though when the last track of the Beck ended he moved over and found N.W.A.’s Straight Outta Compton in Katha’s small collection, then twisted the volume up. The rest of us raised our voices to be heard. Asking some innocent question I unleashed talkative Dunja, who was, it turned out, an Israeli German, raised both in Germany and on a kibbutz. Her life wasn’t a history lesson or an allegory to her, only a story. I listened, marveling that I had followed my waitress crush to a ghetto mansion in Emeryville to sit, cross-legged and stoned in Christmas-bulb light, learning of a sixteen-year-old German girl’s losing her virginity on a moonlit Middle Eastern soccer field to an émigré Russian engineer. Meanwhile, elsewhere in California, Abby slept or didn’t sleep, and in Anaheim, my father had a few hours earlier been treated to his banquet.

  Katha made a couple of calls and left the room. She returned, perhaps half an hour later, with a six-pack of Corona, and trailed by someone she introduced as Peter. Peter was twentyish as well, demure and chubby, maybe gay, I thought. Katha took a line of coke, but Peter waved it off, instead helped himself to a beer. He seemed to know the others, or anyhow he was comfortable with Deirdre and Rolando, and began explaining to them how he’d had a fight with his roommate and now refused to return—that was where Katha had gone, to pick him up. Meanwhile Dunja went on telling me of kibbutz days, her cokey tales like an encyclopedia entry, devoid of highs or lows. Katha offered me a beer, the first words she’d spoken to me inside the commune. I took one, just to rinse my gummy throat. It was sweet and sharp, a treat I hadn’t anticipated. Maybe-Marty did some shy, tentative break-dancing in the corner near the boom box. No one watched. The time was three in the morning.

  I leaned away from Dunja and the others, to Katha. She still sat to one side, distracted—on duty, it seemed to me.

  “Play your guitar,” I said.

  “You want to hear me play?”

  “Something you wrote.”

  We moved off, sat in one of the bays. Under a humming, sneaker-draped streetlamp the street was dead calm, poverty calm. The lights were out even in the lived-in car. Katha told Maybe-Marty to turn the music down—not off, just down—and he did, then flopped back in his butterfly chair. The others, Deirdre, Peter, Dunja, and Rolando, paid us no attention, went on murmuring. Rolando rubbed Dunja’s shoulders; she talked with her eyes shut. I saw Peter had changed his mind, accepted a line. The supply was low. Deirdre shaved the mirror in an obsessive, mechanical action. Katha tuned her guitar, not looking at me.

  She began suddenly. Her voice was deep and gorgeous, the lyric remorseless:

  Psychedelic twitches in my mood

  I’m getting down I’m gonna have to get high soon

  I didn’t mean to smoke your last cigarette

  I love you baby but sometimes I forget

  It was the drugs that made me lose my mind

  It was the drugs that made me so unkind

  It was the drugs

  That made me love you in the first place

  And:

  Last thing I remembered before I passed out

  Were your needful eyes staring from across the couch

  I never look at you like that

  I guess I don’t need you, I just need you to need me back

  It was the drugs that made me lose my mind

  It was the drugs that me so unkind

  It was the drugs

  That made me want you in the first place

  Maybe-Marty’s hip-hop selections throbbed on in the silences. The talk had quelled, though. Katha tuned again, then began a simple blues. She bluffed some verses, humming, but sang the refrain clear.

  I don’t need you to tell me I’m alone

  don’t you think I know I have no home?

  I just want to call my mother on the phone

  I just want to call my mother on the phone

  “That’s new,” she said, interrupting herself.

  Peter got up sobbing, both hands on his face, and left the room. To my dismay, Katha put down her guitar and followed him into the hall. Dunja too, jumped up and went after them.

  Maybe-Marty turned up the music.

  Rolando switched to kneading Deirdre’s shoulders, which I wanted not to resent. Deirdre had been doing an awful lot of coke and reminded me more of an anorexic raccoon than anything alluring, but the dishonorable truth was I yearned to be touching one of the women by now, and I felt a little bitter about Rolando’s access. I wandered over for another beer and peeked into the violet-hued stairwell, but it was vacant. I heard thin trails of music from other floors, nothing I was tempted to follow. I ducked back inside.

  “Yo.”

  It was Maybe-Marty. I’d gotten used to pretending he wasn’t in the room, the universal strategy here, it seemed.

  He’d switched off the music. “You wanna hear my shit?”

  “Sure,” I said, helpless.

  “Okay, but hole on, I gotta get set.”

  “Okay.”

  I sat against the wall near the boom box. In the silence I could hear Deirdre’s breath sighing from her as Rolando labored over her shoulder blades. Maybe-Marty shrugged his wrists together and cocked his head, then planted one foot ahead of the other and dipped his knee like Elvis onstage. He pushed the words out in a stream, his high voice slurring the syllables, popping for emphasis on the p’s and g’s.

  Check it out like this and then like that

  Li’l gangsta M-Dog with that smoov-ass rap—

  “Hole on, hole on, I gotta start over.” He spread his hands in an appeal, as though he’d been challenged. When he resumed he went on tossing out poses, but his eyes were closed in shy concentration.

  Check it out like this and then like that

  Li’l gangsta M-Dog with that smoov-ass rap

  Y’know it goes like this and then like this

  ’Cause when I bus’ my gat I never miss

  I’m good in the hood with my homie Raf

  So if you step in our path you might get blown in half

  Don’t laugh ’cause I’m ill from Emeryville

  Where if you don’t survive then your memory will

  “How you like that?” he said defiantly.

  “Let’s hear it again,” I said.

  He rewound into his starting pose, absolutely ready to oblige. The second run-through was more confident and precise, and fiercer, or mock-fiercer. Maybe-Marty looked y
ounger each minute to me, twelve or thirteen now, despite gangstas and gats.

  I’d spent fifteen or twenty years being angry at rappers, black and white equally, for their pretense, for claiming the right to wear street experiences, real or feigned, like badges, when mine were unshown. I’d spent fifteen or twenty years senselessly furious at them one and all for not being DJ Stone and the Flamboyan Crew in the yard of P.S. 38, for being ahistorical and a lie, for being ignorant of Staggerlee and the Five Royales, for not knowing what I knew. M-Dog, with his bashful Mexican face and utterly derivative rhymes, couldn’t offend me this way. Perhaps Katha would have said it was the drugs, but I adored him. He’d never lived in a rapless world, I understood. M-Dog’s cobbling a rhyme of his own wasn’t pretense—and now it seemed terrible that I’d ever been so punishing in my judgments. His reaching for this language was as elemental as wishing to be able to roof a spaldeen.

  At some point Katha had returned, and when M-Dog finished again she said, “That’s great, you wrote that?”