The Fortress of Solitude

by Jonathan Lethem

  “This is your school?”

  “This is the town. School’s three miles out.”

  He regarded me blankly.

  “It’s an easy hitch,” I boasted. This was another secret perk: someone from the school, an upperclassman or a graduate student with a car, sometimes even a professor, invariably recognized the style of dress which distinguished you from a local and picked you up on the side of Route 9A, to ferry you from the dying industrial center of Camden, past the strip malls which had vampired the town’s life, and into the woods, up the long driveway behind the college’s gates. I wanted Arthur cowed by the full effect. I hoisted his Adidas bag and we trudged across a Dunkin’ Donuts lot, to the gray-sleeted roadway.

  As it happened, the car which stopped for us belonged to Richard Brodeur, president. Maybe he’d gone into town for a slice of pizza. As we climbed into the car I introduced Arthur as a friend visiting from New York. Brodeur greeted him uneasily, and reminded me of the official policy requiring overnight guests in dorms to register with the office. And of the three-day limit for such visits. I assured him we’d comply. Brodeur seemed aged from the man I’d seen deliver the pizza speech—I wondered if his first three months at Camden could have been as full as mine. I felt sorry for him, actually. Picking us up on the road seemed evidence of a desolate wish to be liked, to find a place for himself in the casual atmosphere, one he hadn’t found, yet.

  Snow bunched at the windshield’s edges, smashed into crumbling pillars by the wipers, and flakes swam up madly to speckle the glass.

  “Are you in college, Arthur?”

  “Nah. Uh, I’m going to Brooklyn. City, I mean. But I, uh, gotta pick up a couple of credits first. So I’m taking the year off.”

  This contradictory blurt didn’t leave a lot of room for a follow-up. Brodeur smiled and said, “You’re a bit underdressed for this Vermont weather, aren’t you?”

  “Nah, I’m cool,” said Arthur. “Sir.”

  Brodeur drove us all the way to the door of Oswald Apartment, when anyone else would have dropped a rider just past the guard’s booth. I had a ridiculous impulse to invite him in. I wondered if he’d been inside a student’s dorm room in his time here—probably not. And Matthew would be impressed. It would have been a very Devo move. It wasn’t likely any drug paraphernalia or stolen campus property was sitting out in plain view, but I figured I couldn’t take the chance and let the whim pass.

  “Enjoy your time here, Arthur. Maybe you’ll want to transfer.”

  “Uh, yeah, cool. Thanks.”

  In the space of two days Arthur Lomb was locally famous. If I was the Cat in the Hat, I’d now revealed the more unlikely Cat hidden under my headgear. With his baggy jeans and fat laces and clumsy patois, his constant references to rap and graffiti, and his unvarnished, bug-eyed awe at the place he’d come to, Arthur struck my Camden friends as riotous confirmation that whatever it was I alluded to, with my ghetto shtick, I wasn’t completely kidding. Ironically, Arthur struck them as something real. When he insisted on counting their money before handing over the drugs—he and I and Matthew had spent the waning hours of that first afternoon divvying Arthur’s quarter kee into Camden-sized portions in folded paper sleeves—they were titillated out of themselves by his street sincerity. An actual drug dealer had come to campus at last. And though Arthur was the joke, he also got it, and pushed its limits. No one could have said who was laughing harder at the other’s expense.

  Arthur’s third day on campus Runyon and Bee drove us to Camden Town’s hardware store, where we boosted a batch of Krylon and Red Devil. The four of us spent the small hours of that night spray-painting the sides of Oswald, then the campus pub and the arts complex for good measure. Arthur and I adorned the buildings with “authentic” Brooklyn graffiti, reproducing tags of FMD and DMD members, the gangs who’d toyed our own feeble tags out of existence. Those runes meant nothing here, though if we’d dared appropriate them on Brooklyn walls we’d have soon afterward seen the inside of the emergency room at Long Island College Hospital. Runyon and Bee wrote KING FELIX in erratic block letters a few times—the name was a private running joke of theirs—but after they saw our dexterity with the spray cans they mostly didn’t bother.

  Arthur must have felt as though he’d been dropped into a Saturday Night Live skit: “Samurai Drug Dealer,” or maybe “Cokeheads in Vermont.” I dedicated myself to acting as though I’d fit in this atmosphere all along, as if I found it unremarkable, needing to make sure Arthur got the message: Dylan Ebdus had been a sort of prince in pauper’s clothing on Dean Street, waiting to assume his rightful place. I assuredly didn’t want to discuss what had happened between Mingus and Barry and Senior. I refused to reminisce, or even acknowledge how long I’d known Arthur. I doubt I mentioned Abraham, unless it was to scoff at how little my father knew of my life at this school. Abraham, who was of course footing the bill—but that was an inconvenient detail.

  Friday we woke to find we’d scrawled the tags of our enemies all among the pastoral buildings. It was actually shocking to see the fresh red paint against the white clapboard in the morning light, as though Arthur and I had imported our urban nightmares in some sleepwalkers’ compulsion. The dining hall was buzzing with theories as to who’d done it, but Runyon and Bee, in whispered voices, persuaded me it was no big deal. We’d redecorated our playpen, that was all. Camden was ours to deface.

  Arthur should have been put on a bus back to New York that day, to honor the rule, but the rule was far from our minds. I wanted him to see a Friday-night party—tonight’s was at Crumbly House—and, though word had spread among the campus cokeheads that I was holding a fire sale out of Oswald Apartment, and Arthur had already covered Robert Woolfolk’s payment, we needed another big night, a party night, to shift the last of his stash.

  We had the Apartment mostly to ourselves. Matthew had lately been sleeping with his sophomore girlfriend in an off-campus house in North Camden, and Arthur had taken Matthew’s place in the bedroom in the rear of the suite. My bed was in the big common room, with the fireplace and couch. That afternoon Arthur and I lounged stuporously in that front room as the thin December light dimmed in the bare apple trees outside, the two of us recovering from the night before, waiting for the night to come. Arthur didn’t like the Devo and Wire and Residents records Matthew and I had in constant rotation those days, and he’d dug deep in Matthew’s collection to find something he liked better: Genesis’s The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway. We slumped in the dark, me on my bed and Arthur on the couch, and the hysterical symphonic glamour of that music seemed to speak for the rich absurdity of our circumstance so well it felt as though we’d never need to utter a word again.

  The first knock on the door wasn’t a customer for Arthur’s wares but a member of the cleaning staff, a woman I’d seen a dozen times before but without any name that I knew. Pale and thick and stooped, she seemed to me a kind of crone, though she was surely no older than forty. It was her job to scour the Oswald bathrooms, most of which were common spaces, adjoining public corridors. But once a week she had to clean the private bathroom in our apartment, and so we let her in. With barely a nod at Arthur she vanished through Matthew’s room, into the back of the suite. I flipped the record and sagged back on my bed.

  The woman was typical of an army of gray locals who maintained the buildings and grounds at Camden. They had none of the color or defiance of the usual townies, but were true servants, perfecting the art of deference to the point of invisibility. We knew the names of a few of the older men, those who’d served for twenty-five or thirty years and, having seen generations not only of students but professors come and go, achieved talismanic status. They had snaggly grins and names like Scrumpy or Red and were hailed as they bumped past on a mower or snowplow. But the toilet-scrubbing, Morlockian women never spoke. Runyon liked to call them little people, and I once saw him raise a beer and say, “I’d like to thank all the little people, especially the one that mopped the puke off the land
ing Saturday morning while I was still blissfully passed out.”

  Before the album side was finished playing I had to rouse myself to answer another knock. Now it was Karen Rothenberg and Euclid Barnes. Karen and Euclid were friends of Moira’s, from Worthell House, and I suppose they were mine also. Now they were also customers—had been, already, during the three-day binge surrounding Arthur’s arrival. Euclid was a tall, soft junior with loose dark bangs that tumbled into his eyes. He was resignedly, mopily gay, never found anyone to have sex with, complaining bitterly of his isolation in Vermont. Karen was his protector and solicitor, a dark-haired, heavy girl who wore gothy makeup and affected a jaded exhaustion. In relentlessly pitching Euclid at various boys it seemed to me Karen was really protecting herself from a terror of her own desires. One desultory three A . M., weeks ago—which was to say, in Camden time, eons past—I’d fended off a double advance from Karen and Euclid. Now they were both openly obsessed with Arthur, the wild child of Brooklyn.

  Euclid shook out of his pea coat and threw it over a chair, then immediately began fumbling with his cigarettes. “What are you listening to?” he said.

  “Genesis,” I said.

  “Nonsense, this sounds nothing like Genesis. Take it off.”

  “Where’s Moira?” said Karen.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “She said she’d meet us here.”

  “Okay, but I didn’t hear about it.”

  Karen plopped herself on the couch at Arthur’s feet, startling him from his doze. This spree might be more wearing for him than I’d realized.

  “I’m absolutely tapped,” Euclid muttered around his cigarette. He tossed four twenties onto the dresser. “My parents are late with a check, blame them. This has to be the last.”

  “We’re almost out anyway,” I said. Arthur was sitting up, rubbing his eyes.

  Euclid frowned, disapproving my unworldliness. “Isn’t there always more?” His eyes slid to Arthur, now understood to be cocaine’s personal escort in its inevitable passage from New York to Camden. For the first time it occurred to me this needn’t be a one-time thing. I’d thought of my dealerhood as a kind of paraphrase, a larkish appropriation of Runyon and Bee, upstairs. But then maybe Runyon and Bee had been ironic when they began too.

  “This music is agony. It sounds like troll music.”

  “What’s troll music?” said Arthur.

  “It’s the music trolls listen to,” said Euclid. He shook his head to show that if you didn’t understand this it couldn’t be explained. “I always predicted Dylan and Matthew would succumb to the pressure of living in Oswald, but I’m sorry to see it happen so quickly.”

  “This place is a hotbed of trolls,” I agreed.

  “Ooh, play this, I like this,” said Karen, sing-songing for her pleasure like a child. She’d been flipping through a pile of LPs and now held up the Psychedelic Furs.

  “Dang, I hate that shit,” said Arthur with dopey sincerity, and we all laughed.

  “Do it yourself,” I told Karen. She replaced one record with the other, then cranked the volume. Richard Butler snarled Yaaah fall in love and as if on that cue Moira came in without knocking and joined us there as we sat, all of us on my bed now, while Arthur sliced lines of coke on a duct-taped scrap of sheet steel Matthew and I had liberated from the welding studios. In four days Arthur had come a long way toward the Camden manner of dealing cocaine, the casual sampling which surrounded every act of throwing down bills as Euclid had just done. In Arthur’s idiom the dealer was meant to be above partying with his customers, but that distinction was meaningless here.

  I was happy to see Moira. The binge with Arthur and Runyon and Bee had been boyish, and I missed her. I was glad she’d invited herself with Euclid and Karen, glad she’d known to enter without knocking. In fact, as she slid in beside me, under that roar of guitars which made conversation unnecessary, I decided I probably loved her, that I’d need to be more than her confidante. In fact it would be two nights later, after Arthur had finally gone, that Moira and I slept together again, a costly mistake in a December of costly mistakes. Now I just smiled, assuming she felt what I did.

  We all did lines. When Arthur objected that we’d given away too much I silenced him by buying an eighth myself with my share of our profits. In fact, everything I did was meant to chagrin Arthur. That I treated him so casually as my sidekick masked an obsession with Arthur’s witnessing eyes. While we did the lines Euclid and Karen plied Arthur with questions: Why were the laces on his shoes never done up? How he could walk with his jeans so low? Was anyone ever tempted to pull them down around his ankles? When Arthur looked to me for help in his bafflement, I looked away, pulled Moira closer, only laughed. See me get the girls, Arthur, and get the friends, and get the jokes, see how hip I am—if you’d grasped how I was on the brighter path all along you never would have thrown me over for Mingus. You and Mingus never would have thrown me over for one another. Arthur and I were still playing chess, two wretched nerds on his Pacific Street stoop, and now I’d toppled his queen but let him go on playing, hobbled and bound to lose. See, see? In another day or two I’d exile Arthur back to Brooklyn, to Robert Woolfolk. But first he had to take a good look at what he’d lost and I’d won.

  It was five o’clock. The first wave of students would be lining up with their trays in the dining hall. The party at Crumbly wouldn’t be under way for hours but it was already dark and we were high and the music was loud. Our party was under way. Probably we’d skip dinner. If we were hungry Karen Rothenberg would be willing to drive us into town, we’d pile into her Toyota. Soon others would attach to our core, be led into the Apartment for drugs. We’d see Matthew, surely, and his new girlfriend, though she was a bore and making Matthew boring too, that was the consensus. We’d visit Runyon and Bee upstairs, tip back their six-foot lucite bong. Our ranks would grow, then split like a paramecium, we’d drink flavorless drinks, see all our friends and enemies, visit the dance floor, transmute yet remain ourselves. At some point Euclid would commit a sulky pass at Arthur, humiliating them both. Consoling Euclid would be a rich drama, occupying us deep into the dawn hours. Anyone could see it all coming and no one could possibly stop it and that was the beautiful thing. Friday night was open wide and writ in stone.

  The cleaning woman barreled out with her body protecting her yellow bucket of cleaning supplies like a tiny fullback. She must have been cowering in the bathroom, her work completed, listening as the party developed, praying we’d disperse for dinner. Then, as the minutes ticked past, it would have dawned, with horror, that we weren’t going anywhere, that she had no alternative but to make her mad run. To get from Matthew’s room out of the apartment she needed to thread between the five of us arrayed on the bed and the couch, and sidestep a heap of LPs Karen had spread across the floor. This she did very nimbly, with the harried grace of prey. She might have muttered Excuse me, but not audibly. Whether she’d understood the references in our talk, or the scrape of razor against steel, she evidenced understanding by her fear, the way she’d dunned her rabbity eyes against seeing as she passed through.

  Then she was gone, leaving us shocked into silence under the buzz-saw music.

  Karen dropped the rolled dollar she’d held and covered her mouth in theatrical astonishment.

  Euclid spoke first: “What. Was. That. ”

  “Ho, snap,” said Arthur. “That’s fucked up.”

  “I totally forgot she was there,” I whispered to no one in particular, my mind reeling at the insane mistake.

  “Did she see?” said Karen, her black-ringed eyes wide like a bird’s.

  “Of course she saw,” said Moira. “What do you think ?”

  We knew what we thought, but none of us knew what it meant. A famous Camden story—I was certain Moira at least also knew it—concerned a student dealer at Fish House, a few years earlier, who’d been discreetly warned by the school of an imminent bust by the Vermont Police. A sympathetic faculty member had su
ggested the dealer lock his door and take a long weekend off campus. The point being: Camden had a monumental stake in protecting us from tangles with the law. Talented and eccentric children shouldn’t be judged by society’s harsh adult standards. Let them be eased through their difficult years—this was the deal implicit in the huge tuition, and in the school’s quarantine deep in the woods.

  So what did it mean if one of the little people knew I dealt coke from Oswald Apartment? Maybe nothing. She might not tell. She might not have caught the full implication, anyhow, might not have seen money change hands. It was easy to imagine nothing crucial had occurred, only something freakish and funny. I could hear Runyon’s voice in my head, urging me to understand it that way. I tried not to race through recollection of the words we’d said aloud, the words she might have overheard.

  “Well, I consider it appalling,” said Euclid, breaking the long silence. “The notion of keeping a cleaning woman locked in your bathroom as some kind of sexual pawn. I can’t imagine how you thought you’d get away with it.”

  “Ew, she was definitely not my sexual pawn,” I said.

  “Of course she was,” said Euclid. “You and Arthur both, you’re animals. It’s lucky we created a diversion so she could escape. Were you even intending to give her any food? Were you even intending to give her any drugs ?”

  “Hey, man,” said Arthur, getting with the joke now. “Everybody pays.”

  “I wouldn’t have it any other way,” said Euclid.

  “Well, I’m glad she’s gone,” said Karen. “Because I have to pee.”

  “That would have been a shock,” said Moira.

  “Go see if she built a fire,” directed Euclid. “She probably tried to send smoke signals, to others of her kind.”

  “Maybe she ate the soap,” suggested Arthur.

  The scandal passed, and we resumed our evening’s plot. When Matthew appeared, we recounted the story, competing to exaggerate the details: the woman’s demented scurry, Karen’s nearly wetting her pants, Arthur certain it was narcs and ready to swallow his stash. The five of us were still laughing about it over ten o’clock cassoulet at Le Cheval, courtesy of Karen Rothenberg’s mother’s Mastercard. The next day I described the incident to Runyon, who, as I’d expected, waved it off. And so it was forgotten.