The Fortress of Solitude

by Jonathan Lethem

  “You’re home.”

  “Well, I’m in your apartment,” she said cautiously.

  “Is that an important distinction?”

  “I’m just pointing out that you’re not.” She let this sink in briefly, before asking: “Still enjoying Disneyworld?”

  “Disneyland. But no. I mean, I’m not there.”

  She waited. I slowly grasped that all the time I’d been ringing the apartment in search of Abby, she might have been doing the same in search of me, with the same result.

  “I’m not in Anaheim,” I said. “I came back to Brooklyn.”

  “Is your father sick?”

  At first I was stumped. It took a moment to grasp that this was Abby’s most generous guess to explain my absence. She’d spared me her worse ones.

  “No . . . no,” I said.

  “So you’re on some pathetic Iron John quest, huh? In the woods beating on a drum?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “Searching for the guy with the Afro pick?”

  “Maybe sort of.”

  “Why are you whispering?”

  “I can’t really talk now,” I said. “I actually wasn’t expecting you to pick up.” I wanted to add I’ve been calling a lot, but it was too late for that. I kept an eye on the murky light which penetrated the door’s pebbly glass, fearing patrollers in the corridor. Anyone alerted by my murmurs would have seen the phone’s cord hammocked between the handset on the desk and a receiver glommed into invisibility close at my head.

  “You don’t really want to talk to me now, is that what you’re saying, Dylan?”

  “I’m sorry.”

  I heard her consider my silence. “You’re in a bad place, aren’t you?” Her tone was gentler, barely. “Our big talk really fucked you up.”

  “I’m in a bad place,” I said, agreeing with the part that was obvious.

  “I believe you.”

  “Thank you,” I said quietly.

  “I guess you’ll call again when you can really talk.”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay, then. I suppose I can wait.”

  “Thank you,” I said again.

  “I’m staying here now,” she said. “Call anytime.” She was babying me, easing us both off the phone.

  “Abby—”

  “Yes?”

  I wanted to say something before we were done, wanted to have something to say. But where would I begin? Instead I defaulted, to a factoid I’d been holding in reserve for her to admire, the sort of talk we’d enjoyed in better days. “You know how I was always wondering about the Four Tops, about why they didn’t ever break up or get new members, after all those decades? When every other vocal group fell apart?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Here’s the thing, I found out the reason, it’s kind of incredible. I forgot to tell you. The reason the Four Tops never broke up is they all go to the same synagogue. They’re Jewish. Isn’t that kind of moving?”

  “That’s what you called to say? The Four Tops are Jewish?”

  “Well—”

  “Dylan, I thought you always said that the fact that you happened to be Jewish was, like, the least defining thing about you.”

  “Well, sure. But, it’s a . . . a pretty amazing thing to know about the Four Tops.”

  “Hmmm. I guess getting enthralled with negritude still beats self-reflection every time, huh? They must surely have a couple of those black Jewish girls hidden away in Crown Heights somewhere. Good luck on your quest, soul brother.”

  With that she clicked off the line. It wasn’t the worst finish I could imagine, only a tad one-sided.

  And with that, I had nothing left but my purpose here. Or take Abby’s word and call it a quest : go to Mingus.

  chapter 13

  He never wanted to be King of the A, the CC, or King of any of the IRT lines, never wanted to be King of any line at all. It wasn’t like that for Dose: counting tags, bragging, marking turf. No, you might strike deals with the crews who fought dumb wars for dominance—Dose finally joined FMD as a matter of least resistance—but this was only to free you to practice your art. The days of Mono and Lee and Super Strut—the legends who’d operated in a wide-open Gotham that needed to be taught what a tag or throw-up or top-to-bottom was, what graffiti was in the first place apart from primordial bathroom-wall gags and faggot phone numbers—were over. Gone. A million kids tagged and nobody knew the stories. The kids might figure it was always this way: eat and breathe, watch TV, join crews, do tags.

  You needed a feel for the lonely art. It was the line and the language of a fuzzy-gushy flow of pigment settling into vibrant evidence against stone or steel that Dose hungered for. The line and the language, the startlement a perfect tag carved into the city’s face. Let alone a blazing top-to-bottom car rocketing through a station: holy shit! This world might be a dungeon these days, but a few voices called out to a few others. Graffiti never was a popular movement, despite a fog of pretenders. Like Jackie Wilson to Sam Cooke to Otis Redding to Barrett Rude Junior, the real stuff formed a most rarified continuum, a constellation.

  Barry might not understand, but Dose knew his own art brought them, father and son, closer.

  Cocaine might do the same thing—Barry seemed to think so, by the way he welcomed Dose to it.

  A drug was a long study, nothing to take lightly. You might die before grasping what it had to tell you.

  His father Barry and his friend Dylan—they couldn’t know how alike Dose saw them, in the end. He felt the weight of their high expectations, of Dose, and of the world. Pops and Dillinger were dreamers, it made them shy. Weak. He wished to protect them from knowledge that would crush them, even if at times it seemed that might be any knowledge at all. Stuff Mingus knew just because his eyes were open. When he abandoned Dylan to his fate at I.S. 293, it wasn’t in ignorance. The opposite: he couldn’t bear knowing the grievance Dylan was destined to absorb, couldn’t face his own inability to stem it. Certain days he wanted to ring the doorbell and roar at Abraham: Send the whiteboy to Brooklyn Friends School already! Get him clear of there!

  And flying? He’d mainly just tried not to disappoint.

  Black Panther, Luke Cage, Arrowman, sure. Like what Gowanus needed was a black superhero.

  Dose read between the comic-book panels, where Dylan failed to, and knew they were only extras in this urban scene. A soon-to-be-canceled title.

  Half the yoke artists they clocked were chumps Dose knew from around the projects anyway.

  Barry and Dylan, both lingered in a romance of Dean Street. Dose saw the block for the fragile island it was, at sea in the larger neighborhood—knew it as a flying man might, aerial view. He saw Nevins and Hoyt and where they led. Nobody, apart from maybe Marilla, knew how Dose protected the block from thirsty brothers from Wyckoff Gardens and Gowanus Houses, from Robert Woolfolk’s young uncles and their like. Nobody knew how he sheltered the Dean kids, even Alberto and Lonnie, even chest-puffing Henry, from being beaten, from having skateboards and bikes ripped off countless times. Defended the brownstones from the gang on Bergen and Third, who pried basement-window bars with car jacks and slipped inside. Selling them herb, he’d overheard and petitioned against their plotting on the renovators: Ain’t nothing to steal, man! You think those white folks got cash? They a lot of hippies , man! Had a choice you think they’d settle here ?

  A fair question, actually. Did the renovators think this was Park Slope? Or what?

  Why should Dose have to carry them?

  Abraham and Dylan was one thing, but some of those brownstoners, David Upfield, Isabel Vendle, the Roths, wouldn’t look him or Junior in the eye, seemed to begrudge their place on the street. Upfield, out there each day in his Red Sox cap and handlebar mustache, picking litter from his yard. Glaring at PRs on crates in front of Ramirez’s store, like they were ever going to quit tossing bottle caps and empty packets of plantain chips in his forsythia.

  Possibly it was shifting from Philly that made him alert
to the lines of force. Shedding Boy Scout uniform, football jersey, he’d had to tear down and start over. The whole middle-class assumption that was untenable here.

  Junior could stay indoors and buff gold records. You, you were going to have to be able to move along the sidewalk.

  There were mornings he just took off down Montague Street, strolled though the crowds of Heights kids rushing to make the bell at Packer and Saint Ann’s, to steal away and get high at the Bridge’s pilings. No teachers or school guards, no Dylan, no Arthur, no Robert. He’d be deaf to the call. No Flamboyan Crew, not today. No Savage Homicides, who wanted him to run Red Hook way, no Tomahawks, who wanted him to run Atlantic Terminals. Gone, all gone, like smoke to the Bridge’s span, while he sat in the city scrap yard among the crumpled cop-car fenders and smashed parking meters and the heap of Board of Ed typewriter carcasses, keys gnarled in a knot at the platen, as if trying to blurt some unsayable word. Gone. Junior gone, Senior gone, Mingus gone.

  Senior, he was more like Dose, in a way. Though rabid like a mongoose, he had eyes.

  A few times Dose trailed Senior up Nevins for his parole dates, then afterward, to the Avery Bookstore on Livingston Street, where, in the aisle between the astrology magazines and civil-service test books, Senior spent an hour pawing through a bin of mildewed sixties Playboy s, until the old Jew told him he had to buy something or get out.

  One day Senior pinched his arm in the hallway of their basement apartment, said, I feel you in my footsteps, son, hope you’re learning something.

  What he recalls of the Sunday of the shooting, though, is abysmal shame, wanting to hide the white boy’s eyes.

  Remorse in him wasn’t what they’d said it ought to be. If he mentally rewound, it was only to bag Senior by night, entrap him with the whores on Pacific, put a silver one through that vampire heart.

  Really, though, his grandfather wasn’t worth the bullet. If Dose could have somehow wielded a scalpel instead of the .45, he’d have bisected Senior from Junior. He’d meant to save his father. That would have been worth the bid he’d drawn.

  Spofford.

  Barry missed Dose’s arraignment and bail hearing. He’d fled the scene, it turned out, returned with Senior’s body to North Carolina, and left Dean Street behind, the apartment with its stained floor, coke dust melting into the cushions. Nobody arranges for Dose’s release, nobody’s got the money—what’s Arthur Lomb going to do, deal to put up a bond? Take up a collection on Nevins? Ask his horrified mom?

  Nobody knew Dose had turned eighteen. So he was first thrown into a dormitory at Spofford Juvenile, up in the Bronx, alongside thirteen-year-old heroin runners, fourteen-year-old transvestites, child child-molesters. He met a couple of slayers, neither even pubescent. They’d killed other kids. Dose already shaved, and he’d shot an old man. Spofford’s boys treated him like an elder statesman. Ten days later somebody in Philly pulled up his birth certificate and the mistake was repaired. He was shifted to Riker’s.

  Nevertheless, if he flashes to August ’81, it’s Spofford he recalls: a twelve-year-old bunkmate from Bed-Stuy who heard voices he described as “Bugs Bunny in my head,” who’d kidnapped a third-grade white girl from the yard at P.S. 38 and in the brick-strewn lots behind BAM and the LIRR terminal pulled off both their clothes and forced her to eat his feces, and who now spent nights keening for his mommy. Nobody mocked Bugs—his night song might have been on all their behalfs.

  Riker’s.

  His knowledge overwritten a dozen times, Dose can no longer retrieve a first impression of this place. Mastering the island is one of his life’s accomplishments, for what it’s worth. So, likely he’s purged the terror of his first glimpses by necessity. Building 6, sick with the special panic of the newly incarcerated: Dose is always already an old hand here.

  There’s nothing worse than scared homies, seeking to prove they’re hard. You’d opt for a bid at any upstate prison over a spell in 6, once you saw how it worked. Upstate, men eased into sentences. Less uncertainty, fewer fresh crackheads, a general attitude of take your bid and do it, no unnecessary beefs. In Building 6, waves came in off the street. Young chumps, steeling for what they imagined they faced upstate, and making Riker’s worse than any upstate yard. Word went out: better get yourself a reputation as a hard case, straight out the gate. So they’d play razor tag in the long unpatrolled hallway to the commissary. The bubble—the COs’ glassed-in station—was so distant from the action it was humorous.

  Everyone knew the adolescents were scarier than any grown man.

  The fear method spares courthouse time. Every brother lands in Building 6 swearing to request a jury trial this time, vowing never to plea out again. Can’t abide another conviction on the record— Anyway, yo, I’m innocent! Then, after six months of dodging homies slicing on each other in the commissary line, your court-appointed mentions a deal. Felony parole and time served, or one-to-five upstate, and you take it. The risk of a dime-to-life, a Rockefeller bid, is too much. Surprise: you’re busted down again.

  Nothing serves the system more than the system frying out of control around the edges.

  Touring the island from every vantage, Dose has seen its works, like a clock pried open. When crackheads first get inside, they aim for a bunk and nobody lets them settle. Reeking, skinny, they’ll never get over, never convince anyone of anything. Older hard cases or young studs, anyone says the same thing: Damn, motherfucker, you stink!

  Get with them derelicts, boy, don’t sleep here!

  You’ve been the one carrying your blanket to the derelict quadrant, exiled to Riker’s own Bowery to bunk with the leather-scabbed, finger-split winos. Crushed men, eyes flickery from decades of cringing.

  Next you get the whole Horatio Alger bit. Guys taking interest in their appearance for the first time—they’ve never before had an hour to themselves, never gotten clean, never went a day without drugs. Walk in howling for a hit of rock, but it’s not coming. That first lockup is a glimpse in the mirror. The older men have ways, ideologies—jailhouse lawyer, Muslim, player or pimp, or the national gangs, Latin Kings, Nietas, Bloods—and every soul’s got a rap, talking endlessly about respect. Nobody’s without a hustle or an affiliation, even as they speak of self-preservation by relying on nobody. Maintaining your space, staying out of debt. No arrears to anyone, that’s the universal principle. So naturally everyone’s trying to loan you cigarettes the first day, two-to-one interest: that’s arrears, son.

  Every body’s got a layer of muscle too. Then there’s you, scrawny freak from the street, ninety pounds once you beat the cold turkey.

  You’re thinking no arrears but the Riker’s barber gives you a good haircut and then whispers You owe me half a pack, brother, and you don’t even argue, you’re just grateful, because you looked so screwed up before he fixed you.

  Rikers provides the first audition: What’s your hustle to be? Watches? Faggots? Drugs? Or just broker advice and cigarettes, narrate stories that don’t ever finish, Jailhouse Scheherazade?

  This island’s best scam Dose stumbled into, though, his first time, between sentencing and transfer upstate. That September, with a nod to Senior’s ghost, Dose had checked Hebrew on his intake form. The CO didn’t blink, just told him when and where services were held. Dose forgot it completely until the winter holidays, when he was issued a box of kosher matzo at dinner and allowed to take it back into the dorms. Some rabbinical authority must have leaned hard to get this perk grandfathered in—whatever the source, the matzo’s an absurd windfall, each day a full box that could keep him snacking a week.

  Dose’s bunkmate that December was a hard-ass he knew from the neighborhood, a cat he used to see looming around the Albee Square Mall, selling cakes and pushing pamphlets, dressed like Malcolm X. Just a bullshit Five Percenter out on the street, the dude had actually taken to the study of Islam when he got inside: every five in the morning he and his homies are in the dayroom going Allah, Allah on their knees. Now it’s Ramadan, and the mother
fucker is starving, since during festival week the Muslims can’t eat before sundown. At Riker’s this means missing all three meals, sitting on your bunk while everyone else is taken out for the five o’clock dinner. So Dose slips him a box of the matzo, and then another for his friends—he’s got a supply under his bunk by now—which wins those cats over quick. He doesn’t even ask for packs in return, figuring he’ll have the Nation watching his back from now on. So a fake black Jew plays Santa Claus to a bunch of famished Muslims: Riker’s logic.

  Elmira.

  Each institution carries previous incarnations, like sluggish rivers with another century’s silt at their bottoms. Correctional reforms, innovations in prisonology tested and discarded, all these old uses for the same walls leave vibes. Everyone knows Sing Sing’s the juice house, home of the chair, even when capital punishment was abolished the place just has death-row radiation in its steel. Auburn and Philadelphia’s Eastern State are the birthplaces of solitary, stone tombs for driving men into self-hells—though the new supermaxes are working to make Auburn look silly.

  Attica’s just bat shit, like Apocalypse Now.

  Elmira was once juvenile detention, and though it’s officially phased out, they still lean to the young there, like they’re doing you a favor. More lately it’s replaced Sing Sing as the state’s reception center, where you’re tested and classified for placement elsewhere. Your educational level, plus your score on a gross aptitude test, determines what you’ll be paid the entire time you’re employed inside—forty cents, seventy cents an hour. You might be a janitor or trusty, hand out the soap on the block, for ten years, based on an hour’s scrutiny here. Then, having been scoured for hints of gang colors, you’re scattered to the far corners, away from any suspected homeboys. Men serve whole terms at Elmira, not uncommonly; nevertheless, this presumption of just passing through, combined with an air of boys’ prison, makes Elmira You-Ain’t-Seen-Nothing-Yet House. There’s an undertone of Shut up, boy, count yourself lucky you here. As though it could get any worse.

  Dose spent four years inside Elmira’s walls, like turning the pockets of his youthful self inside out. As on Dean Street, he made himself an old hand, an inside-track man, overnight. He was extravagant with lore, goofy with it, telling men twice his age how to operate the system he’d hardly seen firsthand. All Dose needed to know, really, he learned his first day on Elmira’s yard, at the bench, when he found the free weights fused to the crossbar, so they couldn’t be stolen or used to crush a skull. In other words, you’d best have gotten pumped quickly at Riker’s or you wouldn’t even be able to budge the set here. Plus if you weren’t already a certain size the dudes around the bench won’t let you near it. So much for the illusion your fate was yet untold. Any forking path was further behind you on your journey, further back than you dared guess.