Jonathan Lethem - The Fortress of Solitude

It didn’t take much to persuade Arthur. The next day, a Tuesday, the first light snow of the season drifted down as I waited at the depot in Camden Town. The bus curled in the wide lot, making virgin treadmarks in the fresh accumulation. It sighed to a stop and the driver emerged to pop the undercarriage, but Arthur hadn’t stowed anything. He tiptoed through the snow with an Adidas gym bag slung on the shoulder of his inadequate bomber jacket, blowing into cupped hands and looking bewildered.

“This is your school?”

“This is the town. School’s three miles out.”

He regarded me blankly.

“It’s an easy hitch,” I boasted. This was another secret perk: someone from the school, an upperclassman or a graduate student with a car, sometimes even a professor, invariably recognized the style of dress which distinguished you from a local and picked you up on the side of Route 9A, to ferry you from the dying industrial center of Camden, past the strip malls which had vampired the town’s life, and into the woods, up the long driveway behind the college’s gates. I wanted Arthur cowed by the full effect. I hoisted his Adidas bag and we trudged across a Dunkin’ Donuts lot, to the gray-sleeted roadway.

As it happened, the car which stopped for us belonged to Richard Brodeur, president. Maybe he’d gone into town for a slice of pizza. As we climbed into the car I introduced Arthur as a friend visiting from New York. Brodeur greeted him uneasily, and reminded me of the official policy requiring overnight guests in dorms to register with the office. And of the three-day limit for such visits. I assured him we’d comply. Brodeur seemed aged from the man I’d seen deliver the pizza speech-I wondered if his first three months at Camden could have been as full as mine. I felt sorry for him, actually. Picking us up on the road seemed evidence of a desolate wish to be liked, to find a place for himself in the casual atmosphere, one he hadn’t found, yet.

Snow bunched at the windshield’s edges, smashed into crumbling pillars by the wipers, and flakes swam up madly to speckle the glass.

“Are you in college, Arthur?”

“Nah. Uh, I’m going to Brooklyn. City, I mean. But I, uh, gotta pick up a couple of credits first. So I’m taking the year off.”

This contradictory blurt didn’t leave a lot of room for a follow-up. Brodeur smiled and said, “You’re a bit underdressed for this Vermont weather, aren’t you?”

“Nah, I’m cool,” said Arthur. “Sir.”

Brodeur drove us all the way to the door of Oswald Apartment, when anyone else would have dropped a rider just past the guard’s booth. I had a ridiculous impulse to invite him in. I wondered if he’d been inside a student’s dorm room in his time here-probably not. And Matthew would be impressed. It would have been a very Devo move. It wasn’t likely any drug paraphernalia or stolen campus property was sitting out in plain view, but I figured I couldn’t take the chance and let the whim pass.

“Enjoy your time here, Arthur. Maybe you’ll want to transfer.”

“Uh, yeah, cool. Thanks.”

In the space of two days Arthur Lomb was locally famous. If I was the Cat in the Hat, I’d now revealed the more unlikely Cat hidden under my headgear. With his baggy jeans and fat laces and clumsy patois, his constant references to rap and graffiti, and his unvarnished, bug-eyed awe at the place he’d come to, Arthur struck my Camden friends as riotous confirmation that whatever it was I alluded to, with my ghetto shtick, I wasn’t completely kidding. Ironically, Arthur struck them as something real . When he insisted on counting their money before handing over the drugs-he and I and Matthew had spent the waning hours of that first afternoon divvying Arthur’s quarter kee into Camden-sized portions in folded paper sleeves-they were titillated out of themselves by his street sincerity. An actual drug dealer had come to campus at last. And though Arthur was the joke, he also got it, and pushed its limits. No one could have said who was laughing harder at the other’s expense.

Arthur’s third day on campus Runyon and Bee drove us to Camden Town ’s hardware store, where we boosted a batch of Krylon and Red Devil. The four of us spent the small hours of that night spray-painting the sides of Oswald, then the campus pub and the arts complex for good measure. Arthur and I adorned the buildings with “authentic” Brooklyn graffiti, reproducing tags of FMD and DMD members, the gangs who’d toyed our own feeble tags out of existence. Those runes meant nothing here, though if we’d dared appropriate them on Brooklyn walls we’d have soon afterward seen the inside of the emergency room at Long Island College Hospital. Runyon and Bee wrote KING FELIX in erratic block letters a few times-the name was a private running joke of theirs-but after they saw our dexterity with the spray cans they mostly didn’t bother.

Arthur must have felt as though he’d been dropped into a Saturday Night Live skit: “Samurai Drug Dealer,” or maybe “Cokeheads in Vermont.” I dedicated myself to acting as though I’d fit in this atmosphere all along, as if I found it unremarkable, needing to make sure Arthur got the message: Dylan Ebdus had been a sort of prince in pauper’s clothing on Dean Street, waiting to assume his rightful place. I assuredly didn’t want to discuss what had happened between Mingus and Barry and Senior. I refused to reminisce, or even acknowledge how long I’d known Arthur. I doubt I mentioned Abraham, unless it was to scoff at how little my father knew of my life at this school. Abraham, who was of course footing the bill-but that was an inconvenient detail.

Friday we woke to find we’d scrawled the tags of our enemies all among the pastoral buildings. It was actually shocking to see the fresh red paint against the white clapboard in the morning light, as though Arthur and I had imported our urban nightmares in some sleepwalkers’ compulsion. The dining hall was buzzing with theories as to who’d done it, but Runyon and Bee, in whispered voices, persuaded me it was no big deal. We’d redecorated our playpen, that was all. Camden was ours to deface.

Arthur should have been put on a bus back to New York that day, to honor the rule, but the rule was far from our minds. I wanted him to see a Friday-night party-tonight’s was at Crumbly House-and, though word had spread among the campus cokeheads that I was holding a fire sale out of Oswald Apartment, and Arthur had already covered Robert Woolfolk’s payment, we needed another big night, a party night, to shift the last of his stash.

We had the Apartment mostly to ourselves. Matthew had lately been sleeping with his sophomore girlfriend in an off-campus house in North Camden, and Arthur had taken Matthew’s place in the bedroom in the rear of the suite. My bed was in the big common room, with the fireplace and couch. That afternoon Arthur and I lounged stuporously in that front room as the thin December light dimmed in the bare apple trees outside, the two of us recovering from the night before, waiting for the night to come. Arthur didn’t like the Devo and Wire and Residents records Matthew and I had in constant rotation those days, and he’d dug deep in Matthew’s collection to find something he liked better: Genesis’s The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway . We slumped in the dark, me on my bed and Arthur on the couch, and the hysterical symphonic glamour of that music seemed to speak for the rich absurdity of our circumstance so well it felt as though we’d never need to utter a word again.

The first knock on the door wasn’t a customer for Arthur’s wares but a member of the cleaning staff, a woman I’d seen a dozen times before but without any name that I knew. Pale and thick and stooped, she seemed to me a kind of crone, though she was surely no older than forty. It was her job to scour the Oswald bathrooms, most of which were common spaces, adjoining public corridors. But once a week she had to clean the private bathroom in our apartment, and so we let her in. With barely a nod at Arthur she vanished through Matthew’s room, into the back of the suite. I flipped the record and sagged back on my bed.