The Fortress of Solitude

by Jonathan Lethem

  I hid my rental car in the stadium-sized lot of a shopping mall at the edge of town, camouflaging it in a sea of like models. Recalling the metal detectors, I slid off my belt and watch and left them under my seat, then locked my wallet in the glove compartment, not wanting to carry it inside, either. I also removed the car’s key from its bulky ring and tucked it into my shoe, like sixth-grade mugging money. Finally I slid on Aaron Doily’s ring and walked invisible out of the mall lot, then made my way to the prison along two miles of well-groomed highway shoulder, past signs reading DO NOT STOP FOR HITCHHIKERS .

  CO parking was down the hill, behind the trailer where I’d begun my first voyage inside, earlier that day. There, the evening shift trickled in, one or two at a time, in ten-year-old compacts and pickup trucks, to receive perfunctory badge checks at a manned booth, and a glance into bag lunches for signs of contraband. I had no trouble slipping past the cyclone-fence gate behind a Datsun—it felt as though a visible man could have done it, cloaked in haze and exhaust. My guide-Datsun took its place in a scattering of cars. Its driver was a pearishly short man with Elvis sideburns, wearing a Bills jersey. He paused in his open door for long-sighing finish of a smoke before crushing the butt into the gravel lot, then headed for the entrance. I fell in close behind him, matching my invisible footfalls to his own crunching steps. I staggered slightly, and recalled the special nature of invisible clumsiness, the inner-ear panic that seemed to go with appearancelessness. Aping Mr. Pear’s low-center-of-gravity lope helped me find my rudder, though.

  The officers had their own A/B door, where they scrutinized one another through a glass partition. This required a hairbreadth maneuver: ducking through, I was almost clipped by the B door, and in hustling to avoid it grazed the heel of Pear’s shoe with my Converse high-top’s toe, nearly giving him what in grade school we would have called a flat tire. Pear whirled. I backed to the gate, clammed my mouth. Pear squinted, saw nothing, believed his eyes, carried on. I let out breath. The prison groaned and hummed, deep in the floors, and the air was full of a distant cascade of clanking—enough to cover an invisible man’s inopportune gasps for air.

  So I trailed my unknowing escort across the moon-pale yard. We passed into a low bunker showing lit offices behind unbarred windows, a building I hadn’t glimpsed in my official visit, one with no cell blocks that I could see. Pear turned through an unlocked doorway, headed for a door marked MEN ’ S LOCKERS. It was there I realized he’d played his full part, that I had no reason to follow him farther. I’d need to find other bodies to trail—it would have been impossible dumb luck if Pear had happened to lead me to the exact block where Mingus was celled.

  I parted from him there, and wandered through into the offices. The air here was free of the tang of authoritarian fear I’d smelled in the visitor’s hall. Instead the place was as innocuous as a small-town Department of Motor Vehicles. Two CO’s flirted at a coffee machine, the woman with a black crew cut, but zaftig in her uniform. Two more sat with clipboards, yawning at paperwork. Another pair, one slurping a Coke, the other tapping down a pack of cigarettes, watched a clock-radio-sized television, showing late innings of the same Mets game I’d glimpsed in my motel. Lime-green walls were disguised with school photos, newspaper cartoons, garage calendars. Ten years ago they might have featured pinups, but the presence of female guards prevented that. I supposed there were still pinups in the men’s lockers, though.

  While I stood flattened just through the doorway, Pear, now in his well-ironed grays, and belt loaded with baton and keys, waddled into the room.

  “Yo, Stamos,” said the CO standing by the coffee machine.

  “Yo,” said Pear-Stamos. “Whatchoo doing?”

  The guards were all Caucasian. Yet even here, podunk nowhere, everything was yo, yo, yo.

  “Looking for you,” said the male guard, and now his female companion peeled away from the coffee machine with something like a look of disgust. “Metzger wants us up at the shoe for deadlock. Crappy birthday to you.”

  “With ice cream on top,” said Stamos in a dead voice.

  “Be careful what you wish for.”

  “Christ almighty, don’t let me get shitted tonight.”

  “I’ll protect you, sweetheart.”

  Stamos and his friend shook their heads as they departed the oasis of the offices, bound for whatever grim duty the shoe represented. “Force be with you,” said another from his desk, waving farewell without looking up.

  I let Stamos go. I wasn’t hugely fond of him, anyway. I assumed I’d be able to shadow one or another CO making rounds through any given building if I was patient enough to hover at locked doors, and cool enough to suck in my breath and still my heartbeat while I waited for keys to turn, for my chance to glide through on their heels. My problem was how to locate Mingus in the small dystopian city of the prison, where the streets had no names—at least, no street signs.

  His coordinates might be on those clipboards, or in a binder like the one the guard in the trailer had flipped through. So I began ghosting among the desks to peer over shoulders at exposed paperwork, even rifling through pages on vacant desks when I thought I could afford to. Nothing was revealed. The one column book I found was filled not with names but with timed entries in indecipherable jargon: 4:00 secure ATT/4:25 Sgt. Mortine on G-Building LFF/6:30 Inmate Legman, Douglas 86B5978 requests mattress cover per RLH Orderly, etcetera. On another desk I spotted a copy of CPO Family, trade journal of the Correctional Peace Officers Foundation, its lead feature titled simply “Outnumbered!”

  Then I saw a stack of folders marked with inmate names and numbers, on a low shelf away from the desks, top pages fluttering in breeze from an open window. If invisibility was good for nothing else it had freed an old infantile delight at making things spill: with the breeze for an excuse, I splashed those folders wide over the linoleum.

  “Jesus, crap,” said the Force-Be-With-You CO, who was nearest.

  Flirting Woman stood at her desk to gawk at the mess.

  “Clean it up, Sweeney,” Star Wars told her.

  “Clean it up yourself.”

  “Nah, I’m going up to the gallery. You should have filed that crap last week.”

  “It’s not my crap, it’s Zaretti’s.”

  “Sure, but it was you used astral projection to knock it off the shelf, just to jerk my chain. Take it upstairs already. And shut that draft, we’re all getting the flu.”

  Surprising me, Sweeney did as she was told. Kneeling, her grays cinching to unveil a margin of floral-print underwear, she scooted the folders into rough order before I’d had a look at them. I battled an urge to spin the last papers from the floor in imaginary gusts, to cavort with their files and cause merry chaos in this dead zone, to show them the invisible-man’s mania I felt throbbing inside. Instead I waited while grumbling Sweeney bundled the stack into her arms. Star Wars ignored her. A tinny Mets announcer was the only peep over the ventilator’s rumble. When Sweeney took the files from the room I trailed her like a stalker, following the decorated panties, that spot of brightness.

  The room Sweeney led me to, a private office full of filing cabinets behind a pebbled-glass door, also held a large wooden desk with a telephone, and a few framed citations and newspaper photos—it might be the warden’s office, if I believed in such things as wardens. I remembered my surprise, as a Brooklyn kid, discovering that the small towns in Vermont actually harbored sheriffs, when that was for me as corny and fictional an honorific as knight or caveman. A warden was a figure from a Lenny Bruce routine, or a Slick Rick rhyme. So, say, the lieutenant CO’s office. Sweeney snapped on the light and began tugging open long drawers and replacing those files in alphabetical sequence by prisoner’s name and I knew I’d blundered into what I sought—only right at the moment I wasn’t interested anymore. I hewed close to Sweeney, closer than I needed, pretending for a moment I wasn’t lost deep within a prison. Sweeney was a little stocky, but I loved her. I loved her purely for being female in thi
s man-built, man-patrolled hell, and for letting me see London, for showing me France.

  This was new for me. I’d never once explored invisibility’s perverse opportunities—never been one for strip clubs or porn, let alone window peeping. I identified with the figure of the subway frotteur about as much as I did with Bernhard Goetz. Now, here to renounce and abandon the ring and my secret powers, and alone in this upstairs office with a woman, a weird last-minute greed came to me, and I practically mounted Sweeney’s substantial thigh as I leaned close to capture a whiff of her hair’s perfume. She hummed Cher’s “Believe” to herself, and farted too, but these couldn’t deter me. I imagined whispering Be still, Sweeney, don’t scream, and let the invisible hands of the invisible man invade your mannish uniform. I had a hard-on, now inches from Sweeney’s gray polyester ass, a better one than I’d managed with dear Katha. The onset of this lust was surely one final denial that I was going to do what I was already in the middle of doing—that my lonely life and Mingus’s had come to this. It was a call to a life unlike the one I’d lived, one full of women and foolishness, one troubled by less troublesome forms of trouble. Fuck all this dire manly courage! Fuck going “inside” barbwire boundaries and ancient conundrums! Fuck prisons, let’s fuck! Sweeney, let me take you from all this.

  Sweeney rolled out the R-S-T drawer and there it was: Rude, Mingus Wright, 62G7634. And that was all it took to deflate me. I might have been a moment or two from asinine calamity, from letting Sweeney feel my breath or erection against her. Now I backed to a corner and watched her complete the task of filing. Sweeney was blithe, unaware of our close call, still humming atonal disco. When she clicked off the overhead on her way out, I left it off. Enough light leaked in from the yard’s floodlamps for me to find the drawer again, and the file inside the drawer.

  I sat at the desk and had a look.

  The file was fifteen, maybe twenty sheets thick. The first and by far most substantial document dated to 1978—the year Mingus began at Sarah J. Hale, while I was still behind at I.S. 293—on stationery headed by Frank J. Macchiarola, Chancellor of Schools.

  P SYCHOLOGICALE VALUATION:The overall test results suggest a young man of very superior intellectual capacity whose verbal skills are considerably more effective than his practical problem-solving skills. Some limitations in attention, concentration, and awareness . . . It may be speculated that these limitations are the result of distracting feelings, tensions, and inner upsets. Projectives testing reveals a mildly suspicious young man who tends to view the world in a guarded manner, tends to deny his affective needs but who is then vulnerable to emotional stress—

  And:

  D EVELOPMENTAL: Mingus was a full-term baby. A breech delivery, he was born fighting, and knocked the instrument from the doctor’s hand—

  And:

  I NTERVIEW: Mingus feels he does not understand what has happened to him. He stated that as far as he can remember his problems started when he was in preschool—

  And:

  He has problems because of the “gang” elements in and around his school. He has little social life and finds it hard to explain what he does with his time—

  And:

  T ESTR ESULTS: Mingus entered the test situation readily. There was noted, however, a tinge of mild annoyance with the evaluation process connoting an attitude of condescending disinterest . . . effectiveness varies from the Low Average to the Very Superior range with the exception of a Deficient score in a rote copying task which is seen as spurious in that he appeared not to be applying his full efforts—

  And:

  His thinking tends toward secretive and foreboding themes (i.e., on card V a camouflaged butterfly against a tree, card III two people working over a pot, a witches’ brew, card IV a dragon with wings coming down on you) . . . suggestive of an apprehensive and at times suspicious view of his experience and surroundings—

  And:

  Mingus’s typical style and manner is likely to dispose him toward sarcasm and verbal bouts of a negativistic and oppositional posture to do combat with authority figures in a covert manner—

  The jargon described a Mingus I barely recognized, sulking under the shrink’s gaze—in those same days he ebulliently commanded my world, out on Dean Street. I flipped to the end of the document, and underneath found Mingus’s “yellow sheet,” his at-a-glance arrest and conviction record. First, five or six graffiti detainments, from our high-school days. Before Ed Koch’s graffiti-specific laws, arresting officers had been reduced to euphemistic charges:

  3/2/78: Criminal Mischief, Criminal Trespass

  4/14/78: Criminal Mischief, Criminal Trespass

  9/27/79: Criminal Mischief, Loitering, Possession of Burglar Tools

  And so on. Those burglar’s tools were presumably bolt cutters, for breaking into the train yards. No mention of Mingus’s leaping, costumed, from a tree in the Walt Whitman Houses courtyard—he’d been released to Junior’s recognizance that night. His teenage jeopardy was all graffiti related. To that point Mingus had had the freedom to smoke and snort in his own home, when it was being forced onto the street that led to possession arrests.

  Those would come, soon enough. First, the parade of scofflaw-charge dismissals ran over this cliff:

  8/16/81: Murder 2, Handgun Possession

  And its disposition:

  10/23/81: Felony Conviction, Involuntary Manslaughter

  The long shadow of Senior’s slaying was a six-year silence on the yellow sheet, before the resumption, in 1987, of Mingus’s arrests. By that time the street had undergone its crack revolution:

  11/23/87: Criminal Possession of Controlled Substance (stimulant)

  This was successively shrunk by some bored typist with a fondness for capitals:

  10/3/88: CPCS (stimulant), Simple Misdem.

  2/12/89: CPCS (stim.) Misdm.

  6/3/89: CPCS (stim.) Misdm.

  The sequence was interrupted by the now-expanded penal code:

  8/8/89: Possession of Graffiti Instruments

  And then:

  4/5/90: Larceny 1

  Time after time in those court-swamped years Mingus had been held beyond the length of his sentence while awaiting trial at Riker’s, and so been sprung on conviction, his time served. In the years between Elmira and his current bid he’d never left the city, never been exiled upstate. Elsewhere, his charges had been dismissed. Perhaps superior verbal skills —what I knew as his famous persuasiveness—had kept him afloat. Anyway, no one could claim he’d not received his warnings:

  8/5/92: CPCS (stim.) Misdm.

  1/30/94: CPCS (stim.) Misdm., Possession of Paraphernalia

  Again it had the quality of a train wreck or cliff plummet, to see where this orderly conga line of misdemeanors was headed:

  8/11/94: Felony Possession of a Stimulant with Intent to Sell, Handgun Possession

  And the punch line:

  Felony Conviction, 4-to-Life.

  With that, Mingus’s yellow sheet had run out. It was as though the state had been nibbling him, tasting him, before committing to a mortal bite.

  The rest were documents generated by his present incarceration: his initial classification, dooming him to high-security institutions, based on the previous manslaughter conviction—first Auburn, and then, after his own transfer request, here to Watertown. I’d later understand that he’d swum against a tide: inmates from the city usually pushed southward, trying to shrink the distance for their visitors.

  Here too were carbons of infraction tickets Mingus had been written by the COs on the galleries—his “small beefs.” I puzzled the handwriting on a few before growing numb:

  Inmate refused to come out of cell for inspection

  Contrabanned materials, magic marker

  Inmate cooking soup with heating element

  Drawn on t-shirt

  Excessive news paper

  Inmate climbs on bunk, states he is Superman

  Contraband materials, pipe

  So there
it was: the inadequate liner note to Mingus Rude’s whole existence. I memorized his block and gallery numbers and replaced the file in the drawer. Then, before resuming my spook’s jaunt through the facility, I sat at the desk and was tempted by the telephone there. Perhaps it was a lingering whiff of my encounter with Sweeney, perhaps another stalling action, but I yearned for Abby.

  I’d grown so accustomed to the empty ringing, though, and the blurred click of my machine’s pick up, that it was a shock when she actually answered.

  “Abby?” I said, to her hello.

  “Yes.”