Any stray tendril of fantasy that Croft was about to produce Rachel in the flesh, that she dwelled incognito like a Weatherman or Symbionese soccer mom in one of those homes in the woods, evaporated now, even before he spoke.
“We kept it in the Bug, when we drove out to the coast. We’d write you a postcard each time we stopped for gas, or to get stoned.”
“You wrote them, or she did?”
“I had to kind of push her, but she helped. I think she was ashamed, you know? Later it was just me. After she was gone.” I held the melted typewriter in my two hands, like a beggar with his hat. Croft brushed at the sodden chunks of rust it had deposited on the sleeve of his corduroy jacket.
“You want it?” he asked.
“No.” I wanted my cleaning deposit back when I returned the rental, that’s what I wanted.
“Let’s go for a walk.”
The dirt road curved out of the open field at the property’s entrance, down the hill and to the woods. We left the cars, strolled into the glade, the cool forest, too steep and irregular to ever have been farmed. The sun gone from sight below the hill’s line, the birch trunks and pale ferns seemed bioluminescent, charged with the day’s light. Our footfalls whispered unreplied on the private road’s fresh layer of sharp, gray gravel. The woods were an engine of silence, pumping it to the sky.
Around each turn lay a house. Wooden two-story buildings, seven or eight total, each with their thoughtful trace of Buckminster Fuller or Christopher Alexander—circular rooms with skylight domes, greenhouse windows, breezeways attaching a low annex or small studio. Each house with a car or two in the drive, a few with smoke unfolding from a chimney. Here and there bicycles, chain saws, snowshoes, mulching piles, splintery blast marks of log splitting, ax wedged in a stump. The Watermelon Sugars were home, their kitchens lit. From the distance of the road, though, we granted their privacy as we passed. I was humbled, as I ought to have been, to see what varieties of life could hide between the arrogant, oblivious coasts.
“Rachel and Jeremy were probably the biggest challenge this community ever faced,” said Croft in his squeaky alto. “Confronting them helped us grow up, so I guess we owe them a lot. I’ll never forget that night, we held hands in a circle around them and told them they had to go. I just about shit my pants. Jeremy had already punched me a couple of times, but I was too embarrassed to admit it to anyone. Turned out he’d punched a lot of people.”
“I don’t know who Jeremy is,” I said.
“Somebody told me he died a couple of years ago. He was basically just this really charismatic, really violent guy from Kentucky who used us as his playground for a few months. His favorite game was to scare guys by getting them really high, then talk about how he’d once killed a man outside a bar with a single blow to the throat. He had a lot of those biker horror stories. Right after the throat story he’d move in on the guy’s girlfriend. Everyone was sort of passive, you know, like ‘If she wants to be with Jeremy, that’s cool, maybe she’ll bring him some peace.’ Rach was actually the only person who really stood up to him.”
“He took her away from you?” I asked. It was growing darker, and I’d been momentarily transfixed by the scene in a bright-lit kitchen window—a middle-aged woman, her hair as gray as Croft’s, sliced tomatoes at a counter, while behind her, two blond daughters, bright and shiny as Solver girls, played a dual-remote video game, some dungeon or deep-seascape glowing unearthly blue on a screen. But they couldn’t see me, and I felt like Frankenstein’s monster, peeping at the humans. So I turned away.
“Oh, we weren’t spending much time together at that point. Rachel was her own problem, a lot of people weren’t completely thrilled about my bringing her out here. She had that New York sarcastic thing that burst a lot of people’s balloons.” He laughed. “I mean, she sort of ran rings around people, truth be told. She ran rings around me. Plus she wasn’t happy here. She’s wasn’t all that happy, period, or she would never have gone with Jeremy. I think she regretted leaving New York.”
“Did she talk about—Abraham?”
“Well, she was pretty ashamed,” Croft said. It was the same word he’d used to explain why he’d had to force her to write the postcards. I supposed it was true, the right word. I decided to quit fishing for more.
Croft went on. “Mostly I just remember this one day, I tried to get her to come looking for mushrooms with me. She hated that kind of thing, she thought it was stupid. This was after Jeremy showed up too. I was just trying to reach out, you know, make some connection, because she seemed so balled up. So she had this routine, every time I tried to get her to do anything outdoors she’d say, ‘I wonder what’s playing at the Thalia.’ Like I should know what she was missing, from her life before. She’d say, ‘Maybe it’s The Thirty-nine Steps, or A Thousand Clowns,’ or whatever. So this particular day she said yes, I don’t know why. It had just rained for three days, and we went hunting for fresh morels.” Croft gestured at the forest floor, and I understood he meant here. More or less right around here. “Not that she picked mushrooms. She was chain-smoking—she couldn’t drive, either, she constantly forced me to run her into town for cigarettes. Anyway, she walked with me, smoking like a fiend, and when she started in about the Thalia she said, ‘Maybe they’re showing Beat the Devil,’ and I said, ‘What’s so great about Beat the Devil ?’ and she told me the plot of that fucking movie for an hour. I mean, doing Peter Lorre’s voice and everything, all the lines—she had the whole thing memorized.”
I didn’t reach for music until I was out of Indiana. First Croft and I reclaimed our cars, and he showed me his house, another beauty nestled at the end of the drive, where the Watermelon Sugar property nearly ran out. A fire lane cut across another twelve acres, then opened onto the interstate, up from Louisville, Kentucky. If the wind blew right you could hear the trucks. It was then that Croft mentioned, just an afterthought, that the farm was in the fight of its life, against a creature less chimerical than Rachel and Jeremy. The legislature meant to extend the highway across the property, a four-billion-dollar contract for local construction—one which, Croft said, would cut only ten minutes off the trip to Chicago. We considered this together, tipping our ears to catch the distant whine of tractor trailers. Then he showed me inside, and we lit his kitchen, and he made me a plate of spaghetti. He offered a guest-room bed, but I wanted to drive. He told me I could use his phone and I nearly did, then decided I’d call Abby from somewhere west of here, somewhere nearer to home, when I’d sorted out more of all I’d have to explain.
At the door Croft hugged me, awkwardly, and I hugged him back, awkwardly. There was nothing to accept or refuse in the embrace. Isabel Vendle’s nephew wasn’t the mother I never had, any more than a rotting typewriter was. He wasn’t the father I never had, either. Abraham was the father I never had, and Rachel was the mother I never had, and Gowanus or Boerum Hill was the home I never had, everything was only itself however many names it carried, and so I hugged Croft and I went out to pilot my car through the woods, back to the serpentine road. I was lost a few times on the way to Bloomington, but I never stopped and asked for directions. There was no one to ask. And I wasn’t in a hurry.
It was after midnight when I skirted Gary, Indiana, birthplace of the Jackson Five. In Illinois I stopped for gas and noticed the wallet of discs on the backseat. Once on the road I groped one into the mouth of the car’s player, the first to fall into my hand—Brian Eno’s Another Green World. Prog rock—troll music, Euclid Barnes would have called it. I’d listened to this record my whole life since discovering it in the cut-out bin on the eighth floor of Abraham and Straus, at the dying record store there, behind the stamp and coin collecting department. Using Brooklyn skills, I’d boosted another copy, a commercial cassette, from the Main Street record shop of Camden Town, then played it endlessly one night as I made love to Moira Hogarth. I adored the record’s harmless spookiness: Eno’s keyboard washes, John Cale’s sawing cello, Robert Fripp’s teardrop fr
etwork. And I always associated it with driving, with miles rushing beneath headlights and my eyes. I associated it with one drive in particular.
This was the winter of my expulsion from Camden College. After Richard Brodeur’s letter, I’d been forced to return to the campus once more, to collect my belongings—books, bedclothes, stereo—all crated in the attic of Oswald House. So Abraham had, in his typical, infuriating, silent way, driven me north, in a borrowed car. The school was closed then, for the long, fuel-conserving winter break. Still, at my insistence, Abraham had waited in the car, while I found a security guard who could unlock the dorm’s attic. I didn’t want my father to set foot on the grounds.
Returning, we’d driven through a Massachusetts blizzard, wind swirling flakes in a tunnel of white around the mole-eye of our windshield. Our silence was total. My shame at Abraham’s presumed disappointment could only be stemmed by stony, preemptive fury of my own. When the storm was at its height, our car inching through the polar cyclone, navigating by the taillights of a wavering truck whose treads ground a path through the slurry, I’d reached into the backseat, into a carton of books and cassettes and, as tonight, pulled out the Eno, and put it into the car’s player. The music made an ideal soundtrack to the blizzard’s unreality. I suppose Abraham was actually struggling with a vivid amount of danger, but Another Green World ’s supernatural placidity seemed to acknowledge his effort and to calm us at the same time. Eno sang I can’t see the lines I used to think I could read between —
Earlier, the first years of high school, when the Clash and Ramones were first thrilling me and Gabriel Stern and Timothy Vandertooth, I’d bring a record home and play it for Abraham and ask him, “Do you hear it? How great it is? There’s never been music like this!”
“Sure,” he’d say. “It’s wonderful.”
“But do you really hear what I’m hearing? Can you hear the same song I do?”
“Of course,” he’d say, leaving me perfectly unsatisfied, leaving the mystery unplumbed: Could my father hear my music? By my college years, though, I’d never have asked, even if we weren’t on that dour voyage home. Those lines of inquiry were shut down, so I barely troubled to speculate what Another Green World might mean to Abraham, whether he felt it shaping our pummel through the snow. Eno sang, You’d be surprised at my degree of uncertainty —
I considered now that what I once loved in this record, and certain others— Remain in Light, “O Superman,” Horses —was the middle space they conjured and dwelled in, a bohemian demimonde, a hippie dream. And that same space, that unlikely proposition, was what I’d eventually come to hate and be embarrassed by, what I’d had to refuse in favor of soul, in favor of Barrett Rude Junior and his defiant, unsubtle pain. I’d needed music that would tell it like it is, like I’d learned it to be, in the inner city. Another Green World was like Abraham’s film: too fragile, too yokeable—I wanted a tougher song than that. I knew stuff B. Eno and A. Ebdus didn’t, and I couldn’t afford to carry them or their naïveté, any more than Mingus could afford to carry me or mine.
The collapsing middle was what Running Crab had fled out of. It was the same space the communists and gays and painters of celluloid imagined they’d found in Gowanus, only to be unwitting wedges for realtors, a racial wrecking ball. A gentrification was the scar left by a dream, Utopia the show which always closed on opening night. And it wasn’t so different from the space Abraham raged not to find opening to welcome his film, a space the width of a dwindled summer, a place where Mingus Rude always grooved fat spaldeen pitches, born home runs.
We all pined for those middle spaces, those summer hours when Josephine Baker lay waste to Paris, when “Bothered Blue” peaked on the charts, when a teenaged Elvis, still dreaming of his own first session, sat in the Sun Studios watching the Prisonaires, when a top-to-bottom burner blazed through a subway station, renovating the world for an instant, when schoolyard turntables were powered by a cord run from a streetlamp, when juice just flowed. I’d come to Indiana not to see a typewriter, or meet Croft, but to walk that back road in dusk and see the middle space the Watermelon Sugars had wrested from the world, before the makers of highways wrested it back, just as I’d gone to Katha’s house to see the pallet she kept for her sister, to hear M-Dog’s rhymes. A middle space opened and closed like a glance, you’d miss it if you blinked. Maybe Camden had been one once too, before it was poisoned with cash. It bore the traces. In the same spirit, on Rachel’s principles, I’d been pushed out like a blind finger, to probe a nonexistent space, a whiteboy integrating public schools which were just then being abandoned, which were becoming only rehearsals for prison. Her mistake was so beautiful, so stupid, so American. It terrified my small mind, it always had. Abraham had the better idea, to try to carve the middle space on a daily basis, alone in his room. If the green triangle never fell to earth before he died and left the film unfinished, it would never have fallen—wasn’t that so? Wasn’t it?
Brian Eno sang How can moments go so slowly? as we drove through the storm. Abraham and I let ourselves be swept through the blurred tunnel, beyond rescue but calm for an instant, settled in our task, a father driving a son home to Dean Street. There was no Mingus Rude or Barrett Rude Junior with us there, no Running Crab postcard or letter from Camden College pushed through the slot. We were in a middle space then, in a cone of white, father and son moving forward at a certain speed. Side by side, not truly quiet but quiescent, two gnarls of human scribble, human cipher, human dream.
Just Walking in the Rain by Jay Warner, unread by D. Ebdus, is a responsible account of the Prisonaires.
“It Was the Drugs,” lyrics by Chrissie McClean.
Among too many to thank, I must at least mention Elizabeth Gaffney, Lynn Nottage, Sarah Crichton, David Gates (the man in the abandoned house), Christopher Sorrentino, Lorin Stein, Julia Rosenberg, Walter Donohue, Zoë Rosenfeld, Bill Thomas, Richard Parks, and Yaddo.
Above all, Christina Palacio, Karl Rusnak, Dione Ruffin, and my brother, Blake.
Also by Jonathan Lethem
Fiction
Gun, with Occasional Music
Amnesia Moon
The Wall of the Sky, the Wall
of the Eye (stories)
As She Climbed Across the Table
Girl in Landscape
Motherless Brooklyn
This Shape We’re In (novella)
With Carter Scholz
Kafka Americana
As Editor
The Vintage Book of Amnesia
The Year’s Best Music
Writing 2002
PUBLISHED BY DOUBLEDAY
a division of Random House, Inc.
1745 Broadway, New York
New York 10019
DOUBLEDAY and the portrayal of an anchor with a dolphin are trademarks of Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Lethem, Jonathan.
The fortress of solitude : a novel / Jonathan Lethem.— 1st ed.
p. cm.
1. Brooklyn (New York, N.Y.)—Fiction. 2. Male friendship—Fiction. 3. Race relations—Fiction. 4. Teenage boys—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3562.E8544F67 2003
813'.54—dc21
2003043535
eISBN 0-385-51153-1
Copyright © 2003 by Jonathan Lethem
All Rights Reserved
v1.0
Table of 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
ch
apter 18
part two Liner Note
part three Prisonaires
Acknowledgments
Also by Jonathan Lethem
Copyright Page
Table of 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
Acknowledgments
Also by Jonathan Lethem
Copyright Page
The Fortress of Solitude Page 56