The Fortress of Solitude

by Jonathan Lethem

  “Me and my homeboy worked it out, yeah.”

  “It’s nice.”

  “There ain’t nothing on paper,” he said, eager to be understood. “I got it all up in my head.”

  Katha took my hand. Something had changed. I’d done something right, soliciting M-Dog’s performance—or at least admiring it, as I had. It was as though Maybe-Marty’s presentation was what we’d been waiting for this night, as though it had broken some stalemate and freed Katha’s movement toward me. Perhaps the change was in myself. I felt now that instead of being sharpened to the icy edge of cocaine, I’d been bathed in some river of love—as if I’d taken ecstasy, a drug whose effects I’d only imagined, often resentfully, with the same sort of grudgingness M-Dog’s rhymes had just overwhelmed in me.

  Katha and I returned to our bay, without the guitar. Maybe-Marty put on another disc. Showtime was over.

  “What’s up with Peter?” I whispered.

  “He’s in love,” said Katha. Her tone suggested that to be so was a rare and passing condition, to be met with both skepticism and sympathy. “Dunja’s putting him to bed.”

  “That sounds nice,” I said, surprising myself. It did sound nice.

  She was willing now to hear a little smutty implication in that, one I’d only half intended. “I’ll chase everyone out of here soon.”

  I nodded at the empty side room, suggesting the mattress there. “We could just disappear. Let them go on with the party.”

  “No, that bed is—not for that.”

  “Not for what?”

  “Not for anything but my little sister.”

  “What sister?” I asked, stupidly.

  “She’s still with our foster parents, in Washington. Sometimes I bring her down for a weekend. I’m trying to get her transferred to a school here, but she’s only fourteen.”

  “If she’s fourteen shouldn’t she stay with your parents?”

  “It’d be better for her here.”

  This level pronouncement finished the topic. I sipped my beer while Katha sent Maybe-Marty home, and dislodged Deirdre and Rolando from the futon where they were still engaged in a long massage, Deirdre’s head curled down between her knees, as though Rolando had committed to smoothing the long night’s worth of cocaine shivers from her body with his palms. After they’d slumped from the room, Katha, undaunted by the obvious, put on Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks. I was grateful, but also afraid of that album’s particular scalpel-like quality. I was near enough to bare as it was.

  Now we were alone. Katha lit a joint from the tip of her cigarette and handed it to me. She closed the door and we moved to the futon.

  “So, what are you doing here, Dylan?”

  I’m here to party with you? I thought. No words came out.

  “What about that lady you’re with?”

  “You mean Abby?”

  “If Abby’s your beautiful black girlfriend, yeah. I see her on Telegraph Avenue, you know.”

  “You do?”

  “Just going into bookstores, whatever. She doesn’t know me.”

  “She’s in a hurry,” I said, picturing Abby moving on that crowded street, past the teen beggars in their hundred-dollar leathers—if I ran it like a video clip in my mind’s eye, the soundtrack might be Central Line’s “Walking into Sunshine” or some other not remotely depressing disco cut. Meanwhile in Emeryville it was darkest before dawn, and Van Morrison and the sacred fumes of sex and marijuana beckoned me into the slipstream.

  “She looks kind of angry to me,” said Katha, startling and delighting me. “But it’s none of my business.”

  “It’s okay,” I said, marveling that she’d said it. “Maybe she is. Sometimes it’s hard to figure out what a person is like, when you’re up close.”

  “I don’t know what that means.”

  “Like your song.” I was shameless. “Sometimes you understand all at once, in a flash.” I was so grateful to Katha for calling Abby angry. I wanted to reward her, stroke her, call blessings of orgasms down upon her for pardoning my bungled life with that passing observation.

  Years ago, I’d read a novel, a thriller in which glamorous people destroyed themselves by sexual intrigue. One character was another’s shoals, that was what I’d remembered about the book—and the character who’d wrecked the other had explained how she was infinitely dangerous because she was damaged. This character’s damage made her an involuntary criminal, the book seemed to say. Her damage—orphanhood, abuse, I couldn’t remember what it was—made her unfit to mix with those who’d been luckier, who’d squeaked through life innocent of such knowledge. The story was enthralling bunk, impossible not to finish even as I’d loathed it for its implicit assertion that the undamaged ought to bolt their doors against the damaged ones, who would hurt them if they could, who couldn’t help wishing to. When I read the book, I’d never met anyone undamaged. I still think I never have.

  Suddenly Katha Purly seemed to me a refutation of that book, refutation I hadn’t known I’d needed until this instant. I’d raged against the silly, trashy novel because of the nerve it twinged—my shame at my own hurt, my fear that it made me an untouchable, poisonous to others. Katha made nonsense of that. I’d thought I was following a dangerous angel to her lair, that I’d been drawn by some offer of destruction. But Katha was only an ordinary angel. Her sister’s room was evidence, and so was M-Dog, and so was Peter. But the best evidence was my own presence here. She’d taken me in when I’d needed her to.

  Katha was only as good as her damage. It formed the substance of what she knew. What made me dangerous, or at least awful, wasn’t my damage, but the way I’d denied it. What I’d left undone. Katha sheltered her sister and M-Dog, Mingus surrendered a kidney, and Abraham and Francesca brought Barrett Rude Junior soup and chicken. In my visionary state I could see the Tupperware containers, could see a skeletal Barry as he smeared hot mustard on a fridge-gummed thigh or drumstick. Meanwhile, Abby and I conducted a witty war to prove which of us was truly depressed. Shunning my damage I’d starved my life, it seemed now. I was lost in feints and skirmishes three thousand miles from the homefront. Katha had a bed made, waiting for her sister in Walla Walla—I had The Falsetto Box and Your So-Called Friends.

  When, ten months before, I’d delivered my Subtle Distinctions box-set liner note to Rhodes Blemner of Remnant, he’d let two weeks pass without calling to confirm he’d received it. Finally I cracked, and called him myself.

  “You got it?”

  “Sure, I got it.”

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Nothing’s the matter. We’ll run the note in the box, I sent it to the art department. It’s scheduled.”

  “How’d you like it?”

  “It’s not your best work, Dylan.” Rhodes had perfected a lethal hippie frankness, after the manner of his heroes, from Bill Graham to R. Crumb. “I was disappointed, given how you pushed so hard for the reissue. It wasn’t what I expected.”

  “I think it’s exactly my best work.”

  “Well, it conveys the impression you think that. It’s full of big thoughts, if that’s what you mean. But I personally think it’s also full of shit. Beginning with the quotes up front, all that Brian Eno stuff, which I cut.”

  “Fuck you, Rhodes. Send it back to me.”

  “We’ll run it. What do I know? You’ll win a Grammy, that’s my prediction. For best hot air.”

  I defended. “I had to create a context—”

  “It’s a false context. The piece reads as if you sat in a small room listening to nothing but Distinctions records for a year and then postulated the history of black music. It reads like you were avoiding something. Maybe you were avoiding your research. You quote Cashbox, for crying out loud. That’s like something one of these British writers would do—write a note on living musicians and quote an interview somebody gave to Cashbox in 1974.”

  Now, here on Katha’s futon, layering pot over coke at the outer reaches of a binge which felt stolen from
time, my hand beginning to explore the waitress’s knee in automatic lust, Rhodes Blemner’s cavil to my liner note seemed completely of a piece with every other revelation. My failure to provide Jared Orthman an end to the Prisonaires’ story held the same message for me as M-Dog’s rhymes, as Katha’s sister’s empty room, as my father’s green triangle—I was halted in a motion half-completed. My facts were no good. I’d been scooped by Zelmo Swift’s interns, out-researched by Francesca’s soup. The man himself is still alive, I’d written, but I hadn’t believed it, had to be told again and again by the Jareds and Rhodeses and Zelmos. The man himself, and his son too, even if they only had one pair of kidneys between them.

  Katha and I talked and kissed while my thoughts raced, and until they didn’t. My waitress and I had months of teasing in the bank, and we drew on them now. On the sticky tapestry-covered futon, in the streetlamp light which streaked the wall above our heads, with Van Morrison moaning Celtic inspiration, our addled bodies pushed and gnawed at one another. Hot blunt hands got stuck under blue-jean waistbands until we sighed and tugged apart the snaps. Katha’s flesh was smooth and sheeny, so rubbery I wondered if it was somehow an effect of drug-dust between my fingers and her skin. She was plush and uncreased, like a marzipan animal. An elegant margin of hairs rode the curve from her navel into her pubic tangle.

  I paused where I always do, melancholy at the threshold, a make-out man. Thinking, We could stop here. This could be fine, this could be enough. I’m often more certain I want to be held than engulfed.

  “I’ve got something,” whispered Katha. “I’ll be right back.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  My blondes had always been those Leslie Cunninghams, striding the world undamaged, or seeming so, impassive goddesses who regarded me dubiously. Or Heather Windle, or the Solver girls, forever circling away on bikes and skates, forever packing and moving from the neighborhood of me. Now I had my blonde in Katha Purly. At last one had given herself to me, completely and without bargaining, but she was different, realer, rich with damage. This was an ordinary, rapid-fading epiphany, the last of my dozens: my young waitress wasn’t a fantasy because nobody was. People were actual, every last one of them. Likely even the Solver girls, wherever they were.

  I had my blonde now, yes, but I couldn’t stay hard inside her. It was the drugs—I couldn’t feel myself inside her from within the condom she’d unrolled. But Katha Purly was unbearably generous with me. In the pale daylight now infecting the room, long-shadowing the crumbs in the stale corners and the silent boom box, the streets below noising to dawn life, the house around us still and full of sleeping bodies like an interstellar ship, Katha touched herself, gorgeously gave herself the orgasm I’d wanted to provide, made her own face and throat flush red, temples pink beneath pale eyebrows, while exhorting me to give tribute onto her superb pooled chest, championing me with her voice, cooing me forward. I managed to do it, just.

  When I woke it was in sweat, sun blazing over me and Katha in that barren room, our bodies peeled out of their embrace to opposite sides, sheets squirmed down around our ankles. Katha woke a little and said I could stay, but I couldn’t. I dressed and left, walked home into Berkeley along San Pablo Avenue. It was ten in the morning. I couldn’t stay at Katha Purly because Katha Purly wasn’t, after all, a place. Neither, for that matter, was Abigale Ponders. Or California itself, not for me. They weren’t Dean Street, specifically, weren’t Gowanus, and that was where I was going. I had to get back to where I once belonged. I phoned an airline and booked a coast-to-coast flight, then showered, then slept. When I woke the second time I packed another bag, and again I took along the ring.

  chapter 6

  Iremember almost nothing of the few weeks which remained of summer between Barrett Rude Senior’s death by shooting and my Greyhound ride from the city to begin my first term at Camden College. The tragedy became the communal property of Dean Street, of course, and my own close knowledge of it was a secret. So my sense of it was soon blunted into the pell-mell of general gossip. I spared little sympathy for Mingus, who was under arrest and being charged as an adult; I was a fierce rocket of denial awaiting escape velocity from the scene. The killing only gave a clear name and shape to my fog of reasons for wanting to leave Brooklyn. Anyway, I was scared of Mingus. He’d killed someone with a gun. That hadn’t happened before. This was 1981, before drive-bys made shootings commonplace. It was still a time of knives and baseball bats, of homemade nunchucks, of yokes. I’d seen guns brandished, but never fired.

  Vermont was my antidote. I’d only been there once since my thirteen-year-old Fresh Air Fund voyage, and that just seven months earlier, in late January, for my entrance interview at Camden. Still, though the green hills of the Vermont landscape were fresh-quilted with snow, whiter than any I’d seen, and the wind on the vacant campus bit through my fake down coat, I felt stirrings everywhere of Heather Windle–ghosts, of my dragonfly-and-swimsuit summer. I bought a single cardboard-and-cellophane-boxed leaf of maple-sugar candy in the bus depot in Camden Town and when I melted it on my tongue as Heather had once taught me to do I got the most innocent and yearning erection I’d had in four years.

  Camden College wasn’t Heather Windle’s Vermont, though. At Camden Heather would have been a townie, a girl glimpsed at the Brass Cat or Peanut’s, one of those small-town bars Camden students sometimes dared themselves to frequent on their sorties from the idyllic walled preserve, the bucolic acres of the campus itself. Inside that trimmed-green sanctuary was a sort of collective solipsistic laboratory, where high-strung urban children were allowed to play however they liked. Dressed in leather and fur and batik they and I—for I was briefly one of them—roamed an environment one part New England farmland, complete with white clapboard dorms, twisted apple trees bearing inedible fruit, low lichen-covered Frostian stone walls wending nowhere through the woods, and tattered cemetery plots with burial dates in the 1700s: one part experimental arts college, founded in the 1920s by passionate Red-leaning patrons, and legendary for its modern dancers and faculty-student marriages; and one part lunatic preserve for wayward children of privilege, those too familiar with psych counseling and rehab to follow older siblings to Harvard or Yale, and which recapitulated in junior form the tribal rituals of Mediterranean resorts and East Hampton summers and the VIP room of Studio 54.

  I understood none of this. I was class-dumb, protected from any understanding of money by my father’s artisan-elitism and, paradoxically, by Rachel’s radical populist pride: I’d been raised by a monk and a hippie, each of whom stood willfully outside any hierarchy of class. The desires our little family couldn’t afford to indulge had never seemed important, only snobbish and silly and somehow misplaced, like Thurston Howell’s priorities on Gilligan’s Island. Besides, I’d had as much or more money than most kids I’d known in Brooklyn, if somewhat less than the majority of my Manhattan schoolmates at Stuyvesant, so figured I was somewhere in the middle. Yeah, sure, that was it: I was middle class.

  The truth was, few Camden students had ever set foot inside a public school, much less attended one. And I’d never set a foot inside Brooklyn Friends or Packer Collegiate or Saint Ann’s. A handful of students formerly from those schools, Brooklyn Heights kids mostly, were introduced to me by others, in those first weeks, as being “from Brooklyn too,” yet they were strangers, and when I admitted that I’d gone to P.S. 38 and I.S. 293 they knew, better than anyone else at Camden, what a freak I was to be in their midst here. Across this gulf of experience my new acquaintances and I stared, as though at denizens of a looking-glass world.

  In a gesture which could be taken for either a muddled kindness or a cruel segregation, I’d been given a roommate who was also on financial aid. Matthew Schrafft was from Keene, New Hampshire, a town much like Camden, only lacking a glamorous college. He’d attended Manhattan prep schools until sixth grade, but his family’s fortunes had tumbled, his father abandoning a career as a junior producer at CBS News in order to live
in a small town and write a novel. For this reason I suspect Matthew felt dangerously near to being a townie. We became friends, and it was a solace that my roommate and friend was, like myself, sometimes to be found on the wrong side of the dining hall’s counters, wearing a white apron, spooning hot waffles and sausages and eggs from steel vats onto our fellow students’ trays. Food server was one of the less hidden or euphemistic work-study jobs—those other charity cases who were tucked away quietly research-assisting or working in the alumnus office could afford to pity Matthew and me as they lined up for their meals.

  Matthew and I had also been awarded an unusual housing arrangement, for a pair of freshman: Oswald House Apartment. Oswald was famously the rowdiest and druggiest of the dormitories which surrounded the Commons. Each of these eight clapboard buildings included one central “apartment”: a suite of connected rooms with a fireplace and a private bathroom. These upscale digs were ordinarily reserved for a graduate student or visiting professor, only no one expecting a moment’s peace would have accepted placement in Oswald. The floors in the living room there reeked continuously of cleanser-scrubbed beer spills, the carpet was riddled with burns, the doors decked with thumbtacked porn and spiky, punk-style graffiti. Oswald House was like a pirate ship sailing the apple-strewn lawn, one which blared Grateful Dead more or less around the clock in late summer, when speakers could be mounted facing outward in first-story windows and students sprawled on the grass. The Oswald Apartment had been the domain of a legendary pair of bearded, Belushi-esque partyers, and I think the Housing Office had a notion that by replacing these ringleaders with two fresh-faced, short-haired scholarship students they’d effected a kind of heart transplant on Oswald—that Matthew and I would temper the place from the inside out. That wasn’t exactly how it worked out, but I’m sure the established Oswaldites were every bit as dispirited to see us moving into the Apartment that September as the administration might have wished.