Doubleday
new york
london
toronto
sydney
auckland
Contents
Title Page
Dedication
part one
Underberg
chapter 1
chapter 2
chapter 3
chapter 4
chapter 5
chapter 6
chapter 7
chapter 8
chapter 9
chapter 10
chapter 11
chapter 12
chapter 13
chapter 14
chapter 15
chapter 16
chapter 17
chapter 18
part two
Liner Note
part three
Prisonaires
chapter 1
chapter 2
chapter 3
chapter 4
chapter 5
chapter 6
chapter 7
chapter 8
chapter 9
chapter 10
chapter 11
chapter 12
chapter 13
chapter 14
chapter 15
chapter 16
Acknowledgments
Also by Jonathan Lethem
Copyright Page
For Mara Faye
chapter 1
Like a match struck in a darkened room:
Two white girls in flannel nightgowns and red vinyl roller skates with white laces, tracing tentative circles on a cracked blue slate sidewalk at seven o’clock on an evening in July.
The girls murmured rhymes, were murmured rhymes, their gauzy, sky-pink hair streaming like it had never once been cut. The girls’ parents had permitted them back onto the street after dinner, only first changing into the gowns and brushing their teeth for bed, to bask in the orange-pink summer dusk, the air and light which hung over the street, over all of Gowanus like the palm of a hand or the inner surface of a seashell. The Puerto Rican men seated on milk crates in front of the bodega on the corner grunted at the apparition, not sure of what they were seeing. They widened their lips to show one another their teeth, a display to mark patience, wordless enduring. The street strewn with bottle caps half-pushed into the softened tar, Yoo-Hoo, Rheingold, Manhattan Special.
The girls, Thea and Ana Solver, shone like a new-struck flame.
An old white woman had arrived on the block before the Solvers, to reclaim one of the abused buildings, one which had been a rooming house, replacing fifteen men with only herself and her crated belongings. She was actually the first. But Isabel Vendle only lurked like a rumor, like an apostrophe inside her brownstone, where at this moment she crept with a cane between the basement apartment and her bedroom in the old parlor on the first floor, to that room where she read and slept under the crumbled, unrestored plaster ceiling. Isabel Vendle was a knuckle, her body curled around the gristle of old injuries. Isabel Vendle remembered a day in a packet boat on Lake George, she scratched letters with a pen dipped in ink, she pushed stamps against a sponge in a dish. Her desktop was cork. Isabel Vendle had money but her basement rooms stank of rinds, damp newspaper.
The girls on wheels were the new thing, spotlit to start the show: white people were returning to Dean Street. A few.
Under the ailanthus tree in the backyard Dylan Ebdus at five accidentally killed a kitten. The Ebduses’ tenants in the basement apartment had a litter of them, five, six, seven. They squirmed on the ground there, in that upright cage of brick walls, among the rubble and fresh-planted vines and the musky ailanthus sheddings, where Dylan played and explored alone while his mother turned over ground with a small trident or sat smoking while the couple downstairs sang together, one strumming a peace-sign-stickered, untuned guitar. Dylan danced with the tiny, razor-sharp, bug-eyed cats, chased them into the slug-infested brick pile, and on the second day, backpedaling from one of the cats, crushed another with his sneakered foot.
Those basement tenants took the kitten away broken but alive while Dylan, crying, was hustled off by his parents. But Dylan understood that the kitten was mercifully finished somehow, smothered or drowned. Somehow. He asked, but the subject was smothered too. The adults tipped their hand only in that instant of discovery, letting Dylan glimpse their queasy anger, then muted it away. Dylan was too young to understand what he’d done, except he wasn’t; they hoped he’d forget, except he didn’t. He’d later pretend to forget, protecting the adults from what he was sure they couldn’t handle: his remembering entirely.
Possibly the dead kitten was the insoluble lozenge of guilt he’d swallowed.
Or possibly it was this: his mother told him someone wanted to play with him, on the sidewalk across the street. Out front. It would be his first time to go out on the block, to play out front instead of in the brick-moldy backyard.
“Who?”
“A little girl,” said his mother. “Go see, Dylan.”
Maybe it was the white girls, Ana and Thea in their nightgowns and skates. He’d seen them from the window, now they were calling to him.
Instead it was a black girl, Marilla, who waited on the sidewalk. Dylan at six recognized a setup when he saw one, felt his mother’s city craftiness, her native’s knowledge. Rachel Ebdus was working the block, matchmaking for him.
Marilla was older. Marilla had a hoop and some chalk. The walk in front of Marilla’s gate—her share of the irregular slate path was her zone—marked. This was Dylan’s first knowledge of the system that organized the space of the block. He would never step into Marilla’s house, though he didn’t know that now. The slate was her parlor. He had his own, though he hadn’t marked it yet.
“You moved here?” said Marilla when she was sure Dylan’s mother had gone inside.
Dylan nodded.
“You live in that whole house?”
“Tenants downstairs.”
“You got an apartment?”
Dylan nodded again, confused.
“You got a brother or sister?”
“No.”
“What your father does?”
“He’s an artist,” said Dylan. “He’s making a film.” He offered it with maximum gravity. It didn’t make much of an impression on Marilla.
“You got a spaldeen?” she said. “That’s a ball, if you don’t understand.”
“No.”
“You got any money on you?”
“No.”
“I want to buy some candy. I could buy you a spaldeen. Could you ask your mother for some money?”
“I don’t know.”
“You know skully?”
Dylan shook his head. Was skully a person or another kind of ball or candy? He couldn’t know. He felt that Marilla might begin to pity him.
“We could make skully caps. You could make them with gum or wax. You got a candle in your house?”
“I don’t know.”
“We could buy one but you got no money.”
Dylan shrugged defensively.
“Your mother told me to cross the street with you. You can’t do it yourself.” Her tone was philosophical.
“I’m six.”
“You’re a baby. What kind of a name is Dylan?”
“Like Bob Dylan.”
“Who?”
“A singer. My parents like him.”
“You like the Jackson Five? You know how to dance?” Marilla laced herself with her hoop, buckled her knees and elbows at once, balled her fists, gritted her teeth, angled her ass. The hoop swung. She grinned and jutted her chin at Dylan in time with her hips, as though she could have swirled another hoop around her neck.
Whe
n it was Dylan’s turn the hoop clattered to the slate. He was still fat, podlike, Tweedledee. There was no edge on his shape for the hoop to lodge. He could barely span it with his arms. He couldn’t duck his knees, instead scuffed sideways, stepping. He couldn’t dance.
That was how they played, Dylan dropping the plastic hoop to the ground a thousand times. Marilla sang encouragement, Oh, baby give me one more chance, I want you back. She punched the air. And Dylan wondered guiltily why the white girls on skates hadn’t called to him instead. Knowledge of this heretical wish was his second wound. It wasn’t like the dead kitten: this time no one would judge whether Dylan had understood in the first place, whether he had forgotten after. Only himself. It was between Dylan and himself to consider forever whether to grasp that he’d felt a yearning preference already then, that before the years of seasons, the years of hours to come on the street, before Robert Woolfolk or Mingus Rude, before “Play That Funky Music, White Boy,” before Intermediate School 293 or anything else, he’d wished, against his mother’s vision, for the Solver girls to sweep him away into an ecstasy of blondness and matching outfits, tightened laces, their wheels barely touching the slate, or only marking it with arrows pointing elsewhere, jet trails of escape.
Marilla whirled in place, singing When I had you to myself I didn’t want you around, those pretty faces always seemed to stand out in a crowd —
Isabel Vendle found the name in a tattered, leather-bound volume at the Brooklyn Historical Society: Boerum. As in the Boer War. A Dutch family, farmers, landowners. The Boerums kept their wealth in Bedford-Stuyvesant, had actually come nowhere near Gowanus, none except a wayward, probably drunken son, named Simon Boerum, who built a house on Schermerhorn Street and died in it. He’d been exiled here, perhaps, a prodigal, a black sheep sleeping off a long bender. Anyway, he’d lend his name—he wasn’t about to say no!—to the band of streets laced between Park Slope and Cobble Hill, because Gowanus wouldn’t do. Gowanus was a canal and a housing project. Isabel Vendle needed to distinguish her encampment from the Gowanus Houses, from Wyckoff Gardens, that other housing project which hemmed in her new paradise, distinguish it from the canal, from Red Hook, Flatbush, from downtown Brooklyn, where the Brooklyn House of Detention loomed, the monolith on Atlantic Avenue, ringed with barbed wire. She was explicating a link to the Heights, the Slope. So, Boerum Hill, though there wasn’t any hill. Isabel Vendle wrote it and so it was made and so they would come to live in the new place which was inked into reality by her hand, her crabbed hand which scuttled from past to future, Simon Boerum and Gowanus unruly parents giving birth to Boerum Hill, a respectable child.
The houses here were sick. The Dutch-style row houses had been chopped into pieces and misused as rooming houses for men with hot plates and ashtrays and racing forms, or floor-through apartments, where sprawling families of cousins were crammed into each level, their yards and stoops teeming with uncountable children. The houses had been slathered with linoleum and pressed tin, the linoleum and tin had later been painted, the paint painted again. It was like a coating on the tongue and teeth and roof of a mouth. The lines of the rooms, the fine moldings, had been broken by slapdash walls to make hallways, the bathrooms had had Sears Roebuck shower stalls wedged into them, the closets had been turned into kitchens. The hallways had been pissed. These brownstones, these upright Dutch houses, were bodies, bodies abused, but Isabel would make them well again, she’d fill them with couples, renovators who’d replaster the ornate ceilings, refurbish the marble hearths. She’d already lured a few. The first renovators were motley, truth be told. Disappointing to her, the beatniks who came, the hippies making communes little better than rooming houses. But someone had to be first. They were Isabel’s ragged first recruits, not good, only good enough.
For instance Abraham and Rachel Ebdus. The encountered reality of a marriage was always wearying to Isabel. She, Rachel, was wild-eyed, chain-smoking, too young, too Brooklyn, actually. Isabel had seen her talking Spanish to the men on the crates on the corner. That wasn’t going to solve anything. And he, Abraham, was a painter, splendid—but need the walls of the house be filled top-to-bottom with nude portraits of his wife? Need the paintings in the front parlor sometimes be visible from the corner of Dean and Nevins, scumbled flesh beaming past half-drawn curtains?
Wife supported husband, working half days at a desk at the Department of Motor Vehicles on Schermerhorn Street. Talking Spanish to the undershirts who polished cars in front of rooming houses.
While the husband stayed home and painted.
They had a boy.
Isable tore a thread of smoked turkey from the periphery of her dry sandwich and draped it across the orange cat’s incurious nose, until the doltish thing fathomed what was offered and engaged it with clacking, machinelike teeth.
There were two worlds. In one his father paced upstairs, creaked chairs, painting at his tiny light box, making his incomprehensible progress, his mother downstairs played records, ran water over dishes, laughed on the telephone, her voice trailing up the curve of the long stair, the backyard ailanthus brushed his bedroom windows, dappling the sun into tropical, liquid blobs of light against the wallpaper which itself depicted a forest full of monkeys and tigers and giraffes, while Dylan read and reread Scrambled Eggs Super and Oobleck and If I Ran the Zoo or pushed his Matchbox car, #11, dreamily with one finger down its single length of orange track or exposed the inadequacy of the Etch A Sketch and the Spirograph again, the stiffness of the knobs, the recalcitrance of the silvery ingredient behind the Etch A Sketch’s smeared window, the untrustworthiness of the Spirograph’s pins, the way they invariably bent at perihelion when the pressure of the drawing pen grew too much, so that every deliciously scientific orbit blooped and bent at the crucial moment into a ragged absurdity, a head with a nose, a pickle with a wart. If the Etch A Sketch and the Spirograph had really worked they would probably be machines, not toys, they would be part of the way the adult universe operated, and be mounted onto the instrument panels of cars or worn on the belts of policemen. Dylan understood and accepted this. These things were broken because they were toys, and vice versa. They required his pity and patience, like retarded children who’d been entrusted to his care.
In his indoor world Dylan could float in one of two directions. One was upstairs, grasping at the loose, rattling banister, sliding his small hand around a portion of its burnished smoothness, then hopping his fingers over the gapped joints, to knock on the studio door and be permitted to stand at his father’s elbow and try to watch what couldn’t be watched, the incomprehensible progress of an animated film painted by single brushstrokes directly onto celluloid. For Abraham Ebdus had renounced painting on canvas. The canvases which filled the halls, those lavish, painterly nudes, were his apprentice work, the sentimental traces of his progress toward what had become his lifework, an abstract painting unfolding in time, in the form of painted frames of film. Abraham Ebdus had perhaps finished two minutes of this film. There was nothing to show except the sketches and notes pinned to the walls where the canvases had been before. The large brushes were all stiffened and dry in cans. They’d been replaced with brushes like those a jeweler uses to smooth away diamond dust, and in that third-story studio where window fans whirred, pushing the yellow August sky in to dry the paint, Abraham Ebdus hunched like a jeweler, or a monk copying scrolls, and licked with the tiny brushes at his celluloid frames, his work grown reverent and infinitesimal. Dylan stood at his side and smelled the paint, the thin acrid plume of freshly mixed pigment. He was at the height of the light table on which his father painted, his eyes level and close, and he wondered if his tiny hands might be more suited to the work than his father’s. Bored after a while, he’d sit cross-legged on the floor and draw with his father’s abandoned oil crayons, carefully unpacking them from the metal tin with the French label. Or run his Matchbox car, #11, along the painted floorboards. Or wrestle open an enormous book of reproductions, tipped-in plates, Brueghel or Goya o
r Manet or De Chirico, and become lost, briefly dreaming himself into a window in the Tower of Babel or a circle of witches sitting with a goat beside a campfire at night or a line of boys with sprouted branches chasing pigs across a brook. In Brueghel and De Chirico he found children playing with hoops like Marilla’s and wondered if he might be allowed to turn her hula on its side and run it down Dean Street with a stick. But the girl with the hoop and the stick on the lonely street in De Chirico had flowing hair like the Solver girls, so never mind.
“That looks the same,” Dylan said, watching his father finish a frame, turn to the next.
“It changes very slightly.”
“I can’t see.”
“You will in time.”
Time, he’d been told, would speed up. Days would fly. They didn’t fly there, on the floor of his father’s studio, but they would. They’d fly, the film would speed up and run together so fast it would appear to move, summer would end, he’d be in school, he was growing up so fast, that was the consensus he alone couldn’t consent to, mired as he felt himself to be, utterly drowning in time there on the studio floor, gazing into Brueghel, searching for the other children among the dogs under the banquet table at the feet of the millers and their wives. Retreating from his father’s studio he’d count the whining stairs.
The Fortress of Solitude Page 1