The Fortress of Solitude

by Jonathan Lethem

  What if everything changed? Probably it had. It had before.

  You and what army ?

  You and your so-called friends.

  Yo mama.

  From his bedroom Dylan Ebdus heard like a dog’s inaudible whistle the lonely call of the Spirograph: the pins, the toothed cogs, the skipping red pens. “No,” he said to Marilla, terrified. “I don’t have any money.”

  “You scared of Robert?” Marilla dashed the jacks across the slate in a crazily wide swathe, and frowned at the result.

  “I don’t know.”

  “He got a razor.”

  “Tell me something good! ” screamed La-La, then Marilla dropped the red ball which dribbled under Rachel’s forsythia and the two girls stood away from the array of paint-chipped jacks and danced, knees bowed, eyes slitted, cheeks blowing out as they chanted Ooh ah, ooh-ooh ah, ooh ah, ooh-ooh ah—

  The elongated rectangular grid of these streets, these rows of narrow houses, seen from above, at dusk in late October: imagine the perspective of a flying man. What sense would he make of the figures below, a white woman with her black hair whirling as she struck with the flat of her hand at the shoulders and back of a black teenager on the corner of Nevins and Bergen? Is this a mugging ? Should he swoop down, intervene ?

  Who does this flying man think he is anyway—Batman? Black man?

  These streets always make room for two or three figures alone in struggle, as in a forest, unheard. The stoops lean away from the street, the distance between row houses widens to a mute canyon. Our lone figure above flies on, needing a drink more than anything, and the woman’s beating of the boy continues.

  The day after Halloween the pavement outside school was stained with egg, bombs that had missed their targets, streaks of browning yolk studded with grains of shell, so distended by velocity they seemed to speak of the Earth’s rotation on its axis, as though not gravity but centrifugal force had smeared them lengthwise across the planet. The ones who’d worn home an omelet drying in their corduroys, borne a throbbing red oval punched onto their thigh, they’d deny it until you saw tears mass in the edges of their eyes. Any kid honest with himself was sobered, though, by the glimpse of whatever raged inside the bullies from Intermediate School 293, the berserkers just a grade or two ahead. The egg throwers had worn cartoon-smooth, store-bought masks—Casper, Frankenstein, Spider-Man—so they resembled Symbionese bank robbers or chainsaw killers, figures from nightmares fueled by stolen looks at television news and The Late Movie.

  Everyone moved at a fixed rate toward the same undiscussable destinations.

  No one could push the concept of a razor blade or a heroin-filled hypodermic stuck into an apple completely out of their heads.

  There were days when no kid came out of his house without looking around. The week after Halloween had a quality both hungover and ominous, the light pitched, the sky smashed against the rooftops.

  No Vember.

  “Go deep,” Henry commanded. Now he wagged a football, the latest enticement. Four kids were like yo-yos strung to his hand, running to jump in a cluster when he finally spiraled the football half the length of the block. No matter what happened, whichever hands the ball came down in or eluded, Henry’s expression was sour. There was something inelegant or compromised in the ball’s descent from the air where he’d placed it.

  Dylan Ebdus waited on Henry’s stoop in a bubble of silence, seeing he made six, wondering if they’d call him into the street to even the sides for a game. He’d detected in himself a certain translucency today, a talent for being ignored. Rachel had flushed him from a four-day hide in his room, from a retrenchment into the secret power of his books and pencils, into the mysteries of eavesdropping on Abraham’s footfalls and Rachel’s clangor on the telephone, into the dreary conundrums of the Etch A Sketch and the Spirograph, and something in his conjured solitude had followed him out onto the street, then reversed itself to drape all over him anywhere he sat still.

  Gaze long enough into Dean Street and Dean Street will gaze into you.

  Hands in pockets, Dylan went into the street and leaned against a car. Then, as if tide-swept from a beach, he began to sway with the others toward the place the ball descended, making no show of trying to catch it, just drawn to the site, taking air through his mouth, silently emulating play.

  “You seen Robert Woolfolk?” said Alberto casually.

  Dylan wasn’t surprised. He felt the irresistible relevance of Robert’s name. He shook his head.

  They stopped playing. Henry tried to dribble the football. Two or three times it actually came back to him instead of twisting away across their shoe tops. The ball was scarred with grease where it had lodged under a car and been scraped down the block.

  “He got beat up,” said Alberto reverently.

  Lonnie nodded his head, Alberto nodded, Earl and Carlton nodded. They gathered wide-eyed as though warming at a campfire of their own awe. Dylan waited. Henry slapped the football against the ground and Alberto and the others stared as though it was Dylan who should explain Robert Woolfolk’s beating to them. Then Henry flicked them away, as easily as flicking a drop of water from his hand, by muttering “End zone,” and dropping back, the ball hidden behind his knee, to roll his eyes at the sky. The four scuttled to the place where Henry’s glance promised to deliver the ball, each yearning to be the kid made pure by the perfect catch. Henry turned away the instant the ball was aloft, uninterested. He gestured to Dylan and the two of them crossed to the abandoned house. The bus thumped past, giving cover.

  “Your mother kicked his ass, right out on Bergen Street,” Henry said. “He was crying and everything.”

  Dylan was silent.

  “I guess nobody told you,” said Henry.

  Could there be a distant island or hidden room where your life took place without your knowing? Dylan tried to picture the incident on Bergen Street, the lunatic collision between Rachel Ebdus and Robert Woolfolk, but the spotlight of his wondering slipped to the invisible floating room in the dark of the house at night where through the walls as he lay awake in bed he heard his mother’s rhythmic whimpering or his father’s urgent, angry whisper. I guess nobody told you, Henry said, and Dylan began to drown in the stuff he dammed with silence at the brink of sleep.

  Did Abraham beat Rachel, to bring those moans?

  Who was kicking whose ass?

  Of course that fury would slip out of the house to hammer some kid on the street. At least it was Robert Woolfolk who’d taken it.

  It suddenly seemed that Henry and every kid on the block might know the sound of Abraham and Rachel fucking and fighting at night, that only Dylan was protected and blind.

  “Your mother’s crazy,” said Henry. He didn’t say it as a snap, like Yo mama’s so ugly bigfoot takes her picture, but instead with admiration and goofy horror in his voice.

  Dylan saw now that it wasn’t strict invisibility that had cloaked his presence on the street, had kept him wavering like a mummy on the sidelines, but instead his mother’s hidden act hovering over him, a force field, a pale blur of shame. Who told Rachel about Robert Woolfolk? Had he betrayed himself, wept and murmured in his sleep about a razor?

  Dylan wanted to tell Henry he’d already known, but couldn’t voice the lie. Alberto reappeared with the football, rushing ahead of the others, and flipped it into the air. The ball rose out of the canopy of leaf-bare twigs between the frame of cornices and found a backdrop of low clouds against which it was illuminated like a bomb. Henry stretched back and snared it with his fingertips, then in his downward motion plumped it to Dylan, a sneak play. Dylan hugged the ball to his shoulder like a pledge of allegiance. The thing ticked with cold, its skin impossibly tight.

  chapter 4

  Nixon quit, and NIXON QUITS read the full front page of the Daily News, a guilty pleasure tacked to the wall of her study. The block words suited her that summer, her seventy-eighth, fifty-second since the oar, and she imagined her own headline: VENDLE QUITS . She f
elt her coming quit like the stone of a sour plum in her mouth, felt it graze her teeth as it nestled there but couldn’t tell whether it wanted to be spit out or swallowed: quit, quit, quit. Swallowing hurt. Her hand hurt where it met the cane, her grip slipping, wrist crimping. Her eyes hurt where they met the page of a book. The words hurt. One day she thrilled, almost drunkenly, to scratch with a ballpoint pen in the pages of Anthony Powell’s Casanova’s Chinese Restaurant, breaking a taboo of seventy-eight years: she heard her father’s voice then, a shred of memory, commanding her reverence for the leather-lined vault of his library. There might be nothing worse than defacing a book, but now she felt the urge to drop them, half read, from her deck into her overgrown garden. She would only need to turn her wrist, let her grip slip once more. She knew she’d quit, one way or another, drop the book or simply die, before finishing the twelve volumes of Powell’s novel, his Dance to the Goddamn Music of Time. Powell had written too much, taken too much of her time already, and she punished him by scribbling in his book, a wavering row of lines, like some hieroglyphic tide. Was it Lake George she wished to return to? Was it waves she’d miss, at the end? The rocking and thump of waves against the swollen planks, a kiss in a skiff in the minutes just before her spearing by the oar?

  Grips slipped. Hers had from every surface. She’d shaped nothing after all, only been crushed and reshaped. No wonder she felt for the brownstones, the cripples, now filling chaotically with no regard for her plan. Take for example the black singer who’d taken the house between hers and the Ebdus’s. Was that progress? He had money but looked stoned. The singer’s mulatto son stood each afternoon that August in the middle of the weedy backyard next door, dressed in a full Boy Scout uniform, gazing up boldly at Isabel on her deck, saluting her as though she were his troop master. Dean Street had produced its own weird spore, and she couldn’t track or account for what bloomed now. Homosexuals colonized Pacific Street; a collective of naïve communists spilled from a row house on Hoyt Street, pasted signs on streetlamps announcing a slide show on Red China or a fund-raiser for squatters in Loisada. She’d founded a Bohemian grove. They won’t have Isabel Vendle to kick around anymore. But then they wouldn’t even know it was she who’d gathered them here.

  They walked together to Pintchik on Flatbush Avenue at Bergen, a complex of interconnected shops selling paint and furnishings and hardware and plumbing, a business likely once a single storefront, now infiltrated through a block of fronts, and lodged below row houses painted schoolbus yellow with PINTCHIK emblazoned in red, brownstones turned into a street-long billboard, brownstones wearing clown makeup. Something in Pintchik’s unmistakable age and specificity, its indifference, made Dylan ache. Apparently Brooklyn needn’t always push itself to be something else, something conscious and anxious, something pointed toward Manhattan, as on Dean Street, on Bergen, on Pacific. Brooklyn might sometimes also be pleased, as here on Flatbush, to be its grubby, enduring self. Pintchik pointed only into Pintchik for provenance. It was a lair, a warren, and the hairy men selling dust-layered shower-curtain rings and glass doorknobs, the tangible stuff of renovation instead of the idea of renovation, from behind cash registers thick with newspaper clippings, they were rabbits like Bugs Bunny or the March Hare, smug into their hole and only amused or impatient that you might tumble in. Pintchik was a white Brooklyn unimagined by Isabel Vendle.

  On the walk to Pintchik Rachel had taught him the word gentrification. This was a Nixon word, uncool. “If someone asks you say you live in Gowanus,” she said. “Don’t be ashamed. Boerum Hill is pretentious bullshit.” Today Rachel was talking and Dylan was listening, listening. She sprayed language as the hydrant opened by the Puerto Rican kids around the corner on Nevins on the hottest days that year sprayed water, unstoppered, gushing. You might scrape the bottom of a tin can until it was open at both ends, then use the can to direct the water momentarily through the window of a passing car, but the force of the spray would win in the end. When Dylan had tried it the pillar of water captured the can from his hands and sent it spinning across the street to clatter under a parked car. His mother’s flow he wouldn’t dare try to direct. “Never let me hear you say the word nigger,” she said, whispering it heavily, lusciously. “That’s the only word you can’t ever say, not even to yourself. In Brooklyn Heights they call them animals, they call the projects a zoo. Those uptight reactionaries deserve the break-ins. They ought to lose their quadraphonic stereos. We’re here to live. Gowanus Canal, Gowanus Houses, Gowanus people. The Creature from the Gowanus Lagoon!” She inflated her cheeks and curled her fingers and attacked him at the entrance to Pintchik.

  What would Dylan find if he walked across Flatbush, past its shops selling dashikis, and T-shirts which read I’M PROUD OF MY AFRICAN HERITAGE, past Triangle Sports, past Arthur Treacher’s Fish and Chips, past Pintchik itself? Who knew. His world found its limit there, under the narrowed shoulders of the Williamsburg Savings Bank tower. Dylan knew Manhattan, knew David Copperfields’s London, knew even Narnia better than he’d ever know Brooklyn north of Flatbush Avenue.

  “We don’t live in a box, we don’t live in a little square box, I don’t care what anyone says we don’t live in a sixteen-millimeter frame!” She flew like the Red Queen in Through the Looking-Glass through Pintchik, whispering madly to him. “He can’t put us inside, we’ll break out, we’ll bust out of the frame. He can’t paint us in a little celluloid box. We’ll run out in the streets! We’ll paper him into his studio!”

  Inside, Rachel led him to a room full of wallpaper rolls. He was meant to choose a replacement for the jungle animals hiding in palm leaves, that children’s-book design, too young for him now. The samples in the room were furred with velvet, decorated with orange Day-Glo peace symbols and Peter Max sunsets and silver-foil-stripes and lime paisley—Pintchik might be implacable and timeless but it hosted wallpaper that looked like the newest candy wrappers, Wacky Wafers or Big Buddy. Dylan felt embarrassed for the wallpaper. It had the bad taste to be passing through and not know it. Dylan preferred Pintchik itself, its yellow-and-red painted-brick scheme, its cigar-glazed walls.

  “I’ll pry him out of his studio the way I drive you out to play, let him get a job instead of living on his mountaintop like Meher Baba—”

  Now Dylan was startled to find a roll of his jungle among the Pintchik swatches. Here it was no better than paisley or Day-Glo. The jungle he gazed into while falling asleep had no age at all, was flat and empty, corrupt as advertising. Abraham would never have had wallpaper in his studio.

  Dylan wanted wallpaper as old as slate, profound and murky as his father’s painted frames. He wanted to scratch a skully board on his wall, wanted to live in the abandoned house. Or Pintchik.

  Brooklyn was simple compared to his mother.

  “A gang from the Gowanus Houses picked up a fifth grader after school and took him into the park and they had a knife and they were daring each other and they cut off his balls. He didn’t fight or scream or anything. It’s not too soon for you to know, my profound child, the world is nuttier than a fruitcake. Run if you can’t fight, run and scream fire or rape, be wilder than they are, wear flames in your hair, that’s my recommendation.”

  They walked home from Pintchik along Bergen, Rachel filling his ear. His mother never mentioned Robert Woolfolk, never once, but as they passed the corner of Nevins and Bergen, the site where she’d kicked Robert’s ass right out on the street Dylan felt the shaming thrill of it again, felt it in her as well as in himself. Rachel wasn’t responsible for what she said, he knew. She was afraid too. Dylan’s role was to unravel what Rachel said and ignore ninety percent of it, to solve her.

  “That beautiful black man who moved in next to Isabel Vendle is Barrett Rude Junior, he’s a singer, he was in the Distinctions, he’s got this amazing voice, he sounds just like Sam Cooke. I actually saw them once, opening for the Stones. His son is your age. He’s going to be your new best friend, that’s my prediction.”

  It was Rache
l’s last setup.

  “You don’t want any kind of wallpaper, we’ll tear it off and paint, whatever. It’s your room. I love you, Dylan, you know that. Come on, race me home.”

  Dylan put his confusion into his running, tried to put his mother somewhere behind him.

  “Okay, can it, your mother’s out of breath. You run too fast.”

  His sneaker-slapping footfalls petered at the corner of Nevins and Dean, where he waited for Rachel to catch up, and crooked his head up to gulp air. In that instant Dylan was sure he’d seen it again: the ragged figure arching from the roof of Public School 38 to the tops of the ramshackle storefronts on Nevins, to disappear then under the sky. The impossible leaper. He looked like a bum.

  Dylan didn’t ask his mother if she’d seen. She was lighting a cigarette.

  “You’re not only beautiful and a genius but you’ve got a pair of legs. I wouldn’t say it if it wasn’t true. You’re growing up, kid.”

  Merit badges were cryptograms, blips of unlikely information from another planet of boyhood, and Mingus Rude, though in principle showing off, seemed to regard them with an anthropological detachment not so different from Dylan’s. “Swimming, fire, tying, compass,” he mouth-breathed as he ran his thumbs over them, talismanic evidence of the Philadelphia suburbs, flotsam from a dead world.

  Mingus Rude made Dylan wait in the empty, weedy backyard while he dressed himself in the full Scout uniform, then stood before Dylan and they both considered the non sequitur of it, sleeves and legs already too short, yellow scarf stained with a slug trail of snot. He went inside again and came out in a green-and-white hockey uniform with his name pressed across the shoulders in glossy, slightly crooked iron-on letters. He held a splintered stick with black electrical tape wound around the handle. Dylan absorbed it silently. Then Mingus again vanished, to return in a crimson football uniform, with helmet reading MANAYUNK MOHAWKS . Together they peeled back the ventilated nylon jersey to examine the foam-and-plastic shoulder pads that gave Mingus Rude the outline of a superhero. The pads smelled of sweat and rot, of dizzy, inaccessible afternoons. But can you catch a spaldeen? Can you roof one? Dylan wondered bitterly. Mingus Rude would soon know that Dylan Ebdus could not.