The Fortress of Solitude

by Jonathan Lethem

  “Tell Henry fuck you,” added Robert in a meaningless flourish.

  Dylan ducked his head inside the dark, cheese-acrid storefront. Buggy’s German shepherd snapped up to the limit of its chain behind the counter, whining into a single pointed bark, and Buggy floated out of the back like a pale bloated pickle in a jar to hover at the register. When Dylan emerged with the brown sack of groceries Robert was gone.

  It was a whole week and Sunday morning again before Dylan found his voice. Abraham was in his high room, Rachel in her garden, Dylan stewing alone in his room as he dressed at noon, the ritual time. Downstairs he paused in the kitchen calculating his defection, then went down the backyard stair. He approached his mother where she kneeled on the cold ground beneath the bare ailanthus, hacking with a trident at a network of unwanted roots, cigarette smoldering from between her lips. The cigarette’s filter was smudged with mud. Rachel wore jeans and an orange denim jacket and a Dodgers cap. Rejected blooms lay heaped in a pile of green and brown that bleached and shrank in the air as Dylan stood watching.

  When he opened his mouth Robert Woolfolk was left out of the story.

  “Poor old Vendlemachine. So don’t work for her, kiddo.”

  “I tried to tell her, though.”

  “What do you mean you tried?”

  “I said it two times.”

  “You’re kidding me, Dylan.”

  “She pretended not to listen.”

  “Just ignored you?”

  Dylan nodded.

  “Come on,” she said. She stood and brushed the dirt from her thighs. “We’ll go together.”

  Dylan absorbed the thrill of Rachel’s indignation, his breath short. “Maybe you should just call her,” he said as they went into the kitchen.

  Rachel scrubbed under her nails at the sink, and slurped from her cooled coffee.

  “Let’s see what she has to say,” she said, and Dylan was silent, understanding that his fate was to cross Isabel’s threshold at least once again.

  In the yard of the abandoned house the boys who would never be invited to work for Isabel Vendle played running bases: two basemen tossing a spaldeen between two squares designated as bases and four or five base stealers—Earl, Alberto, Lonnie, some other Puerto Rican kid. The runners bunched in between, bobbing and colliding like cartoon mice, while Henry gripped the ball and faked a throw once, twice, three times, wagging the spaldeen, showing it to them like a stuck-out tongue as he threatened the chase with a stomped footfall in their direction, until his bluff became irresistible and in glee and exhaustion the congregated runners surged, loping toward his base as though his hand was empty, and were tagged out one after the other in quick sequence. The base runners lolled their heads, drunk on being fooled, on Henry’s mastery.

  Robert Woolfolk wasn’t among them.

  Maybe nobody saw Dylan looking. Often a kid was invisible walking with his mother halfway down the block. You didn’t look, you didn’t want to get mixed up in that space between a kid and his parents.

  Then Earl waved, but he could have been pointing out a bird or a cloud in the sky. Instead of returning the wave Dylan looked up at the sky himself, pretended he’d seen something move there, a body dart across the cornices, or leap from one side of Dean Street to the other.

  “I’m Croft,” said the man who opened Isabel Vendle’s door, amused with himself already. “You’re the kid that works for Isabel, I guess.” He shook Dylan’s hand comically before looking up at Rachel. His cropped black hair was astonishingly equal in length everywhere on his head, including his eyebrows. “You got a girlfriend, huh? Come on in, Isabel’s upstairs. Me and her are drinking Coca-Cola, and there’s plenty.”

  It was as if Vendlemachine had calculated the coming affront and defended herself with the visitor. She was supposed to be alone on Sunday mornings, adrift in bed or curled at her desk, moaning, trembling to moisten a stamp with her tongue. She had always waited for Dylan by herself and now she’d cheated him, denied him the chance to show his mother the deathly house he’d been forced to enter. The darkened street-level front room was opened now, the corners only Dylan and the orange cat knew exposed to light, the dusty chairs rearranged to make room for a green plaid sleeping bag and a hiker’s backpack spilling with clothes, T-shirts balled like used tissues, and a stack of paperbacks: God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater ; In Watermelon Sugar ; Sexus. Even the garbage smell was mysteriously gone.

  Vendlemachine sat at her patio table, scowling, her grip crackling the real estate section of the Sunday Times. The table was littered with sections of newspaper and the promised Coca-Cola and a scattering of violently colorful comic books. “Isabel’s Sunday paper was stolen this morning,” began Croft, as though he felt generally destined to explain everything and accepted the assignment with good humor. He might next start explaining that he was young and Isabel Vendle was old, or that they sat in a backyard in Brooklyn.

  “Again,” said Isabel Vendle.

  “I had to walk all the way up to Flatbush Avenue and Atlantic to buy a replacement,” Croft said. “I found that newsstand on the traffic island. There were all these great comics, you never know where you’re going to find them. The Fantastic Four, Dr. Doom, Doctor Strange, you know.”

  Dylan wasn’t clear whom Croft was talking to until Rachel Ebdus grabbed one of the comic books and looked at the cover. “Jack Kirby’s a god,” she said.

  “Oh, yeah, you’re into this stuff? You know the Silver Surfer?”

  “Everyone’s got Peter Max posters but I think Jack Kirby’s about ten times more psychedelic.”

  A Rachel word.

  “Yeah, sure,” said Croft. “But who do you like? Silver Surfer? Thor? What about Kirby’s DC stuff? You know Kamandi: The Last Boy on Earth ?”

  Dylan’s gaze scattered against the comic-book covers. A man of stone, a man of fire, a man of rubber, a man of iron, a brown dog the size of a hippopotamus, wearing a mask. That was all Dylan saw before his sight blurred in the sun and shadow and the figures were liquefied into blobs like Abraham Ebdus’s abstractions.

  “Black Bolt,” said Rachel, tapping to point out a figure on the cover of one of the comic books. “You know, the Inhumans. The leader of the Inhumans.” Rachel seemed tangled in herself, seemed bewildered as Dylan to find herself in this conversation. The force of Dylan and his mother’s arrival at Isabel Vendle’s, the arrow of Rachel’s intention flying down the block, had been captured and utterly redirected by Croft and his comic books.

  “Sure, the strong silent type,” said Croft, grinning. “I get it.”

  “Croft, you are in irresponsible man,” said Isabel Vendle with weary affection.

  “Sweet Aunt Petunia,” said Croft obscurely.

  “Yes you are,” Isabel went on. “And now an irresponsible boy has brought his mother here to tell me he doesn’t want to visit me anymore on Saturdays. We know this because the boy isn’t interested in your comic books, Croft. He’s staring at me, isn’t he?” She flapped her newspaper so it bowed over her hands, then glared over the tented top. “Do you find me evil, Dylan? Or boring?”

  I find you psychedelic, Dylan wanted to say.

  “You know there probably isn’t any difference, Aunt Isabel. Not to the kid.”

  “You knew he wanted to quit, Isabel,” said Rachel, faintly recalling her purpose. “He tried to tell you.” She half stood in her chair to work her cigarettes out of her front pocket, then offered one to Croft, who shook his head.

  “Oh, I felt him working up to it,” said Isabel. “I’d imagined I might get another few weeks out of him.”

  “It’s a coming-of-age thing,” said Croft. “Running away from scary old ladies. I had to do it myself.”

  “Shut up, Croft.”

  That was the end of the discussion and the end of Dylan’s working for Vendlemachine. Croft went into the kitchen and returned with more glasses and they sat in the mottled sunlight squeezing lemon into Coca-Cola and turning the pages of his comic books, Dylan an
d Rachel and Croft, while Isabel Vendle stained her fingertips nearly to black with the ink of the Times. The Human Torch was the Invisible Girl’s younger brother, and the Invisible Girl was married to Mr. Fantastic, and Ben Grimm was The Thing and Alicia was his blind girlfriend, a sculptress who could honestly appreciate his hideous but monumental body, and the Silver Surfer was Galactus’s emissary and Galactus ate planets but the Silver Surfer had helped the Fantastic Four protect Earth, and Black Bolt couldn’t open his mouth because a single syllable of his speech was so powerful it might crack the world apart—Croft and his mother explained it all to Dylan, word balloons in the bright panels on the pale yellow paper, while Vendlemachine moved her lips silently and eventually dozed in her chair, and the late-October Sunday afternoon collapsed to evening, Abraham in his studio darkening squares of celluloid with brushstrokes, the nudes in the parlor below with no light to make them glow, the backyard window boxes and fire escapes black against the ruddy streaked sky, the street too dark to judge a throw properly so the spaldeen hit a kid in the face and anyway it was time for dinner. Dylan fell asleep in his chair for just a minute and for that minute he and Isabel had the exact same dream but when they awoke neither of them remembered.

  “Let me see it for a minute.”

  Let me see it : you saw a basketball or a pack of baseball cards or a plastic water gun by taking it into your hands, and what happened after that was in doubt. Ownership depended on mostly not letting anyone see anything. If you let a kid see a bottle of Yoo-Hoo for a minute he’d drink what was left in it.

  “Let me see it, let me check it out. I only want to take it for a ride.”

  Dylan gripped the handlebars. Abraham had pried off the training wheels the day before, and Dylan still wobbled, still scuffed with his sneakers groping away from the pedals to steady and brake against the sidewalk. “Only if you stay on the block,” Dylan said, miserably.

  “You afraid I’m gonna take it? I just want a ride. You get it back after that, you got it all day, man. Just let me go around the block.”

  It was a trap or puzzle, the way Robert Woolfolk already knew to work Dylan’s guiltiness. And the empty block conspired to leave Dylan alone to solve it. Robert Woolfolk carried a vacuum around with him, or revealed by his presence the vacuum on Dean Street, the expanse of moments when no one saw and no one knew what happened in plain sight, when all of the block was shrouded in daylight like the abandoned house was shrouded in leaf shade.

  Old Ramirez stood in front of his store and sipped a Manhattan Special and squinted at them from under his fisherman’s hat. He was beyond appeal, watching them like television.

  Robert Woolfolk added his hands to the bars beside Dylan’s and tugged gently at the bike.

  “Stay on the block.”

  “Around once, that’s all.”

  “No, I mean stay in front of the house.”

  “What, you think I’m not coming back? Just around the block.”

  What came out of Robert Woolfolk’s mouth was petition and chant, irresistible in its illogic. His eyes, meanwhile, were hard, a little bored.

  “Just once around.”

  Robert Woolfolk’s legs were too long to unfold in the span between seat and pedals, so he rode with his knees doubled and knobbing up near the handlebars, like a clown on a tricycle. Then he changed his approach, elevated his hips above the seat to stand on the pedals and pump side to side, elbows flaring. The bike teetered, annexed to Robert Woolfolk’s stretching limbs. Like that, a vanishing pile of elbows, he took the bike around Nevins.

  When Dylan used the word block he didn’t mean Bergen Street, the other side.

  How long did it take to go around the block?

  How long was twice as long as that?

  The tonguelike latch of Dylan’s black ironwork gate rattled with the vibration of the bus going by. Though there were no trees on the Nevins end of Dean Street red fallen leaves had blown into the gutter from somewhere. The plastic milk cartons in front of the bodega claimed you could be fined or go to jail for not returning them to May Creek Farm, Incorporated, a fairly unlikely destination if you gave it any thought.

  The afternoon withered like a balloon around Dylan on his stoop, waiting for Robert Woolfolk to return. Old Ramirez wasn’t watching, there was nothing to watch. Dylan stood naked in the minutes as they accumulated, as they stacked up indifferently on the distant face of the Williamsburg Savings Bank tower clock. The day was like an unanswered telephone, the mute slate ringing. The call of Dylan’s arm-swinging vigil went unreplied.

  Nevins Street might as well have been a canyon into which Robert Woolfolk had vanished like a cartoon coyote, wordlessly, trailing puffs of dust. When Lonnie wandered up bouncing a Super Ball and asked what Dylan was doing Dylan said he wasn’t doing anything. It was pretty much as if there had never been a bike.

  Abraham Ebdus lost a day to finding the boy’s bicycle. He stalked Wyckoff and Bergen and Nevins, thinking unavoidably that Rachel would have found it herself in the first half hour. She knew Brooklyn in ways he didn’t. He walked the periphery of Wyckoff Gardens, not crossing into the grounds, the maze of walkways and hedge and low Cyclone fence, not knowing where to start if he did. Light soured in the shade of the graffitied white brick of the projects. They seemed designed as future ruins. He put his head into a Puerto Rican social club on Bond Street, a small hangar full of cardplayers. Before he ducked out he registered a tiny pool table, blue carpeted walls, the tang of malt-stale cork. Nobody spoke to him.

  But by the end of the afternoon word was out, somehow. A woman with a baby stepped out of her door, seemingly angry at him for wandering. Abraham’s family was possibly famous for being white, fools. She passed the child back inside and led Abraham around to a vacant lot on Baltic, a fenced yard filled with debris shot through with ailanthus sprouts, the mongrel trees which grew as fast as a crack in a windshield spread under pressure of a fingertip. The heap of crushed baby carriages and rotted lath with clinging bits of plaster and torn tin ceiling made a pattern with which Abraham Ebdus refused to permit his eye to become fascinated. The bicycle was on top of the pile, above his head, flung there who-knew-how, its blue curved fender twisted like a splintered wing. Give it another day and the ailanthus might have shot through the spokes. He had to climb the fence and ended up tossing the bike to the ground to free his hands. No one was inclined to help, though some watched. He wasn’t sure it mattered to rescue the bicycle. If it had been stolen for use by another child, maybe. But this, this gratuitous trashing, was just the street’s incomprehension, its resistance. That shadows stood sipping from paper bags as he struggled down to join the bicycle on the pavement was only appropriate, matched his mood. The bicycle was defeated, and Abraham Ebdus wondered why he’d taught the boy a useless skill. He knew Rachel required he bring the bicycle home for repair but suspected the boy would never choose to ride it outside of the dirt of their backyard.

  Marilla and another girl were waiting, playing jacks at the base of Dylan Ebdus’s stoop.

  Marilla sang in crazy falsetto The prob-lem is you ain’t been loved like you sho-huh-hood, what I got will sure-nuff do you good—

  The other girl—Dylan recalled that Marilla called her La-La, wondered if that could really be her name—scooped jacks between ball bounces, counting with a slurred inrush of breath whoosies, whreesies, whorsies, whivesies. The game was splayed beneath his bottom step so he couldn’t pass. He sat on the third step from the bottom and watched.

  “Robert Woolfolk says he didn’t take your bike and if you say he did he’s gonna mess you up,” Marilla announced suddenly.

  “What?”

  “Robert said don’t go saying he took your bike since he didn’t even.”

  “He said he’d fuck you up,” clarified La-La. Her hand darted in distraction to fumble eightsies, the jacks scattering.

  “I didn’t say—” he began, thinking he hadn’t, hadn’t said a thing.

  The bicycle was in Abraham Ebdus�
��s studio, its fender straightened and decorated now with Dylan’s name in his father’s brushwork hand. Soon it would be downstairs again, leaning in the hallway like a stuffed animal, a blind chrome elk loaded with his parents’ expectation and Dylan’s dread.

  Marilla shrugged. “I’m just saying.” Squatted like she was peeing, her ass an inch above the slate, she seized the tiny red ball and swept the jacks up, and sang You refuse to put anything before your pri-hi-hide—what I got will knock all that—uh—pride aside!

  “Robert told you to say it?”

  “Nobody told me nothing, I’m just saying what I heard. You got a dollar for some candy, Dylan?”

  Who was on the block? Was Henry in his yard? Was Robert Woolfolk there?

  Dylan Ebdus’s head twitched, trying not to look. His fingers clenched the two quarters in his pocket. He’d meant to buy a spaldeen, a fresh ticket of entry in pink rubber. Maybe practice taking shots off the face of the abandoned house until a game built up around him. Dylan had a knack for making catches only when no one was looking, in private rehearsal, but any day now that knack might translate into Henry’s genius. Though come to think of it you couldn’t say when the last time was anyone played wallball, it might be another lost art. Forgotten games stacked up like the grievances of the losers of wars, unrecorded in the street’s history.

  You didn’t think of who got money from where. Every kid kept the change when their mom sent them to buy milk. Alberto bought Schlitz for his cousin. Old Ramirez knew who it was for, so he let a kid buy beer, also cigarettes.

  Word had gone around that on Halloween the kids from the projects threw, no, hurled with bruising force, eggs. It was a holiday but you still had to go to school, a bad deal, a bad situation, every kid for himself, scattering once the bell rang at three o’clock, and more likely to be hit if he bunched with another kid, let alone tried to protect him. You couldn’t protect anyone from a thrown egg or much else.