The Fortress of Solitude

by Jonathan Lethem

  Dose would have given heart, or hands, or eyes.

  Recovery took six days in Albany Presbyterian Hospital. Dose and his father lay in side-by-side narcotic slumber, with a holstered guard in the room patently thrilled with the assignment, full of Playboy dreams of nurses.

  The day before he was returned inside, with both Dose and Barry up and running, having demonstrated renal function to Doolittle’s satisfaction, the four of them—son and father in cotton pajamas, and Horatio, and the guard—escaped through fire doors to the hospital’s roof.

  There they smoked a joint Horatio’d smuggled in, conducting their own tests on that new kidney—what else was it for?

  There, as they squinted in the glare off Albany’s toy skyline, his father’s fund of disappointment was proven bottomless. Barry could help himself to Dose’s extra kidney and still not meet his eyes.

  When he learned how famous the organ donation made him at Auburn, Dose wanted no part of it, and requested the transfer to Watertown, to finish his bid in anonymous peace.

  Watertown.

  Dose shed it all. No jailhouse artistry, he’d left that behind years back—a million guys could execute the graffiti style now. He had no illusions about stockpiling cigarettes. Old-school eminence held nothing he wanted, it signified zip to the time he had to do, played no real factor in the endurance of the mind. Claiming this or that alliance outside— Yo, I know that dude, younger brother of Fitty Cents, that nigger’s King of Wyckoff Gardens, he gonna set me up when I’m sprung —looked thinner every day. Duck ensnarements and arrears at any level, this was Dose’s campaign. Beguiling COs was of use only if you wanted something a CO could give you. They could give you nothing. A protector like Raf mattered only until you understood there was nothing to protect.

  Invisibility, intangibility, Teflon eyes.

  Yet he had one last error of affiliation in him.

  Robert Woolfolk was the same hectic proposition he’d ever been, only stretched and torn by fifteen years more on the street and inside. Gold-toothed, arm-crook scarred from vein hunts, one ear nipped, Robert staggered on, decades beyond adventures that ought to have been his finish if he hadn’t had so many lives, like Wile E. Coyote still climbing out of the crater and dusting himself off, rubbing his hands and grinning in conspiratorial glee. You wanted to put the man to bed.

  Dean Street had come to Watertown, like a radio signal wandering through space, a hit song from 1976 become sole sign of life in the galaxy.

  So Dose took him under his wing, as though he had one.

  Robert Woolfolk was dealing trees within a few weeks of appearing at Watertown, against Dose’s advice. If you wished to smoke, smoke. Be a customer, laying low. Nope: Woolfolk began dealing two-for-ones, betting against guys’ commissary checks coming in on time, juggling debt. Then slicing trees open and stretching them with stale tobacco. This was tolerable, a line Dose had seen men walk for years, a line he’d walked a few times himself, merely to keep himself amused at Riker’s.

  Then Robert found the market in spitback sacks, and lost his interest in trees.

  A spitback sack was a parcel of liquid drugs. Methadone, smuggled from the dispensary by signed-in junkies, by the method of concealing a few fingers of a Saran Wrap glove in the throat or the cheek to catch the spitback. This art, of pretending to swallow yet retaining the drug in the slippery sack, wasn’t simple. Not every junkie who wished to mule could be trained into it. Those few were a commodity. A finger of ninety-percent methadone sold for six packs of smokes. This was a trade all contained inside the walls, no outside connection necessary, no dependence on the gangs.

  Who you stole your mules from—now that involved a degree of difficulty apparently beyond Robert Woolfolk’s finesse.

  The day the Latin Kings stepped up on Dose in the yard he felt the charge in the air a minute before it happened. He’d become a barometric instrument of a prison’s weather without even noticing. Those bumping on either side against him were men he’d ignored and been ignored by for years, but the new intimacy was undeniable, three years of flinched glances gone up in smoke.

  It was the old story, weary beyond telling, Robert in arrears on all sides, and Dose to answer for it, and it all went down as scripted since One Million B . C.

  Except for one thing.

  That one day, Dylan Ebdus came and offered a ring.

  chapter 15

  Iasked Mingus the time: a quarter to one. I’d been seated on the gallery floor for five hours, my shoulder wedged against a thin lip of wall between Mingus’s cell and the next, my temple close at the bars, and his close beside mine, so we could talk. I felt our ears graze once or twice. I’d shown myself just once, slipping the ring loose and then vanishing again, when I explained how I’d snuck in and found him. We conversed in low murmurs, which drowned in the cavernous block’s slurred surf of illegal radios, inmate talk, ventilation. As the block dimmed to a murmur itself, we whispered.

  In the last hours it was Mingus who spoke. I listened, and tried not to drown along with our talk. I’d never been invisible for so many hours, for one thing. Seated on the chill concrete, I felt a recurrence of my childhood micropsia, a night terror I thought I’d left behind at age eleven or twelve, in my bedroom on Dean Street: the sensation that my body was reduced to speck size in a universe pounding with gravitational force, a void crushing against me on all sides. The ailanthus branches brushing the back windows had seemed to me then like the spiraled arms of distant galaxies. Later, in the years after I retired the ring, I’d blamed my inability to fly from a rooftop, my preference to look away from the sky, on the micropsia hallucinations. Now they’d returned to undermine my heroism in the prison. My heroism was used up. I had only enough left to flee the place, and fling Aaron Doily’s curse once and for all into the brush at the side of the highway, then reclaim my rental car and vanish gratefully into the ordinary angst I’d earned as a grown-up Californian. I was an author of liner notes, an inadequate boyfriend. How could I have thrown over these attainments for this chimera of rescue? All I felt was the submarine pressure of the room, the special claustrophobia of a cathedral vault parceled into rat cages. The room had climate, a muggy stink of curdled human years. After lights-out, a planetarium show of cigarette ends pulsed on the galleries above and around us, reproachful failing stars. Go, they said.

  I suppose I was trying not to drown, too, in the beauty of Mingus’s voice, as it reeled through jivish yarn spinning to the brokenest kind of confession, the kind which didn’t know it was broken at all. Mingus had borne his own life a hundred or a million moments longer than I could bear to. I tried not to drown in the consolation and guilt of having him back and being an instant from losing him again, of being about to steal invisibly away.

  The ring was useless to him. So Mingus wished me to understand. He explained how he was doing good time, hadn’t been written up in years, despite Robert’s tangling with the Latin Kings. He’d felt a prospect of mercy in his last review, and might be near release, in a year, two. Perhaps the kidney had made an impression on the board. Anyhow, the life of an escapee and permanent fugitive, visible or not, held no allure.

  When Mingus made me know what he wanted, it felt that he’d had it in mind from the start, that he’d begun bringing me along ten hours earlier in the visitor’s room. I’d offered a way to spare Robert Woolfolk falling into the Kings’ hands. It wasn’t a shoe I’d heard mentioned in the offices, but a SHU —a special housing unit, protective custody for those either threatening the safety of the regular population, or needing protection from it. There our homeboy from Gowanus was celled. I’d take the ring to him—Mingus would tell me how to find my way there, and where guards could be found napping on cots, with stealable keys. Like hitting a broomstick home run, Mingus knew I could do it. Mingus knew I would.

  I had a few questions before I left him. Before I decided whether or not to fail him—I had scant interest in the SHU and Robert Woolfolk. Either way, I was nearly done here,
the Proust’s madeleine of “Play That Funky Music” eaten. I had just crumbs to savor.

  “Mingus,” I said, “did you have any idea how often I was getting yoked?”

  “You mean brothers putting you in a headlock?”

  It was a point of clarification, not mockery. He didn’t mean to shame me by contrasting my complaint with his withheld lamentations. He hadn’t asked for pity, not once. I’d shamed myself, but I still wanted an answer.

  “Putting me in a headlock and frisking me for money,” I said. “Sometimes practically every day for the three years I was at I.S. 293. Calling me a whiteboy.”

  “Them niggers took me off a few times too.” He took my inquiry more seriously than I probably deserved. “Dudes from Gowanus Houses, Whitman, Atlantic Terminals, man, they were always robbing, grubbing, didn’t know any different. At Manhattan clubs everybody’d say look out for them crazy Brooklyn homeboys, those motherfuckers are just stick-up kids, always waving a piece.”

  Fair enough. I’d been a crash-test dummy for real crime, nothing personal.

  “Wasn’t so much a black-white thing,” Mingus went on. “Those motherfuckers were just thirsty people.”

  Thirsty people. That about said it. Now I was meant to go to the thirstiest—thirsty for my bicycle, thirsty for my terror—and free him from his cell.

  “Mingus?”

  “Yeah?” I heard in his voice that he was as tired as I was. He’d given me my task, now I should go. He’d been talking all night, trying not to disappoint, working to shelter my ludicrous expectations, to make something of my incursion here that we could both live with. He’d come this far, to Watertown, out of easy visiting range of the city, in order to stop carrying Barry, Arthur, anyone else. How far should he have to carry me tonight?

  “Did you ever yoke a whiteboy?”

  He dredged his last reply from some weary place, yet I caught a note of puzzlement, in his tone, at what he found. “Yeah,” he said. “Once. I mean, I didn’t throw a headlock. Nobody had to.”

  “How?”

  “Me and some homies from Terminals wanted to score some cheeba. Brother said we should go up to Montague and take money off some Packer boys or whatnot. We cornered a couple of kids with braces, on the Promenade, broad daylight. I hung in the background, just looking ill while them other brothers checked their pockets. But I knew I was doing what it took.”

  “Which was—what?”

  “What I said. I went to the Heights, I made the mean face.” He pressed close to the bars, and the dim gallery light, pruned his chin and brow for demonstration: the mean face. A Sylvester the Cat scowl, yet the volt of panic it struck in me was one of my life’s companions.

  What age is a black boy when he learns he’s scary?

  Mingus showed it for an instant, then backed into shadow.

  I think I went a little crazy when I wandered from there. Invisibility and Mingus’s voice had flayed me bare. I had no secrets to conceal. I had no mean face, or any face at all: no wonder Zelmo Swift had treated me like a moron child! Zelmo Swift and Jared Orthman made adequate nemeses for a man without a face to turn to the world. I felt I couldn’t leave the Watertown facility without completing my mission, and yet couldn’t imagine surrendering the ring—it had become a part of me, become the truth about me. So for a while I split the difference, and meandered. In fact, I made my way to where Mingus had claimed I could acquire keys to the SHU, only I didn’t tell myself this was what I was doing. I moved recklessly, reeling past COs who opened doors for me, a live disturbance in the air waves, a poltergeist sick with ambivalence. It was easy to steal a fat ring of keys. I used them heedlessly, rattling through options until I fumbled the right key into a lock. I left doors swinging behind me as I moved through the compound. Maybe I thought they’d remain open for me when I needed to retrace my steps, maybe I only thought they ought to be open. I wasn’t thinking—my brain was invisible to itself.

  I passed back through the yard. Now the moon was gone. Like a puppet under Mingus’s guidance I found the SHU, a squat three-story building, more a hospital annex than an arm of the prison proper. The look didn’t suit my mood. The beast at the heart of the maze ought to be captive in an open-air cage, or at the bottom of a pit, staked to a post. The SHU looked soft. They might as well have cordoned the Lord of Elbows, He Who Can Throw A Spaldeen Sideways, in a gingerbread house, where he could gnaw his way free.

  I let myself in. The lower level housed a special ward for incarcerated paraplegics—dying AIDS junkies, spinal gunshot victims with maximum-security designations. On the second floor, protective custody, the rooms were Inspector Clouseau loony bins: barred windows, knobless doors with slots for the exchange, I supposed, of trays or papers. There, Robert Woolfolk and I had a tiled corridor to ourselves.

  I needed to raise my voice to wake him.

  “Will Fuck!” I called.

  I removed the ring and stood where he could see me in the light, then came nearer to the mesh grille of his door.

  “Dylan?”

  “Yes, Robert.”

  “Fuck you doing here?”

  It was him, Robert Woolfolk, figment of my hatred turned real once more. With his jumpsuit and shaved head, and the long, disgust-lined sneer of his features, his eternal Mean Face, he resembled Scatman Crothers come for the garbage. Those limbs, now draped in prisoner’s orange, had tangled with Rachel’s on Bergen Street. I despised and envied him for having been embraced by her fists.

  “Mingus sent me,” I mumbled.

  “You must of thought I was sleeping, right?”

  “You were sleeping.”

  “Nah, I ack like that, but I was awake. Nobody could sneak up on me, man.”

  “Whatever,” I said.

  “You know what I was doing?”

  This wasn’t the conversation I’d intended. “What?” I said.

  “Writing rhymes in my mind. I wrote a whole album in my mind. None a these fools know what I’m doing, think I’m crazy ’cause I always got my eyes closed, my head be nodding—I’m a be bust out with this shit someday, shock all they world.”

  Bust out sooner than you know, I thought.

  “You want to hear?”

  “Uh, sure.”

  You know my name, read it off the liner notes

  Pussy rappers with vagina throats

  Get snatched out they designer coats

  For trying to float concrete boats in the Gowanus

  Talk about a battle but they really don’t want this—

  His delivery was gruff and leaden, the lyrics growled incoherently—or perhaps the incoherence was in me.

  Maybe your queer ass better wait till the fear pass

  ’Cause I could see your teeth chatter thru your jaw like it was clear glass—

  “Robert, stop.”

  “What?”

  “I don’t have time.” I pushed the ring at his eyes, impatient. I’d wanted him to ask for it ( Yo, let me see that ring for a minute, let me take it around the block, what, you don’t trust me? ). Now the game was over.

  “You remember this?” I asked.

  “Ho, shit. That’s G’s.”

  I hadn’t been able to get Mingus to accept the ring as belonging to him, but Robert made the call instantly. There was odd satisfaction in this. “Right,” I said. “He told me to bring it to you.”

  “Ho, shit.”

  “You can use it to get out.” I pushed it through the slot, to plop into his cupped hands. The instant it was free of my fingers I felt a tidal panic wipe all giddiness from me: I was drunk on nothing now. I had to go from here.

  “Why don’t G want it for himself?” Robert asked.

  “He wanted you to have it.”

  “How’s it work?”

  “You’ll figure it out.”

  Robert puzzled on this briefly, then his mind slid to another question. “Yo, Dylan, man, you got keys?”

  “I need them.”

  “Unlock this shit, though.”

>   I stared at him, for what must have been a long moment.

  “Yo, Dylan?”

  “What?”

  “Fuck you, motherfucker.”

  Prisons slept. I had transit of the Watertown facility by now—three, four in the morning, whichever it was. The familiar music of clanking deadbolts and jangling keys alerted no one. I was only certain the A/B doors were my limit, a test I couldn’t pass visible. In my previous plan—just hours old, though it felt like another world—I’d intended to ask Mingus to wait a few days before using the ring, to give me a head start in getting clear. I doubted I’d get the same consideration from Robert. Anyway, I hadn’t asked for it.

  I held to that previous plan nevertheless, which consisted of getting as near to the visitors’ room as I could. If I had to be found inside the compound, I figured innocence by association was my best hope—a civilian, I’d go to where civilians could be found, from time to time. There I’d wait out the last few hours of the night, then try to blend in with the morning’s first wave of visitors, maybe claim to have accidentally blundered through the wrong door. I still hadn’t scrubbed my ultraviolet-inked knuckles, and could reasonably hope the mark would still register in the COs’ scanners. I’d offer that up, with my whiteness, as sign I wasn’t part of the population. And, after all, I wasn’t. They’d have to let me go.

  I reentered the green-tile pavilion which led to the visitors’ room, found my way to a corridor I’d passed through, one in sight, through wide Plexiglas windows, of the chamber where I’d removed my belt and shoes and had my earplug puzzled over. There I found a doorless room, really only a vestibule leading nowhere, with a pair of bright-lit Pepsi machines, another vending machine offering cellophane-wrapped Oreos and Cheez-Its at the end of corkscrew spirals, and a high-mounted television set, angled as though for a bedridden patient.