Jonathan Lethem - The Fortress of Solitude

I wondered if it mattered to Arthur that his holdings were around the corner from our old school. Probably not. Probably you had to leave and come back, as I had, to feel the juxtaposition, the crush of time, as we now retraced our sixth-grade walks home to Arthur’s chessmen and graham crackers. Once upon a time me and Arthur Lomb cornering Smith onto Dean were merely the most yokeable pair of humans on the planet.

The evening before I’d been given a Francesca Cassini-guided tour of my own life. “ Imagine the two of you alone in this big house! ” she’d cried repeatedly, and I wanted to reply: I don’t have to! She’d rounded up some fugitive snapshots of myself and Abraham and created a new family album, one to follow the last of those Rachel had assembled and abandoned, the ones showing me in my mother’s arms, and Abraham, younger than I’d ever seen him, standing at his easel before paintings that were sold or lost before I or the film was conceived. Francesca’s album gathered school photos, my desperate grins against powder-blue backdrops, as well as a few from my Fresh Air summer, me and Heather Windle, pond-wet hair twisted into horns. The last pages showed Abraham and Francesca on an Italian holiday, my father shading his eyes on hotel terraces, restaurant patios, in vineyards. This was a satisfactory conclusion to the tale which preceded it-the two men alone in the house.

More interesting to me were the new paintings, ten or so, hung in the corridor and stairwell. These were on boards, like my father’s jacket art. The style had no relation to his book designs, though. It recalled the paintings on those easels, and others, the nudes. These weren’t nudes but portraits: small, penetrating studies of Francesca with her glasses off. They weren’t flattering, but they weren’t exposés, either. What struck me was the lack of any strain to make the paintings differ. Several were nearly identical. In that sense they resembled the film, or, anyway, were indebted to the film in their diaristic patience. Something here might or might not change , they seemed to say. I have no particular stake one way or another, but if it occurs I will be here to record it.

I couldn’t ask my father about them that night, couldn’t get words in edgewise. Francesca was overexcited at my being in the house, and her chatter was something all three of us could only wait out. My father went to bed. Francesca ran a while before exhausting herself. Once she did, I rang my own number twice, checked my messages. There were none from Abby.

Francesca slept in. I’d asked Abraham to wake me for my date with Arthur at Berlin. He and I sat alone with coffee, but I couldn’t remember anymore what I’d meant to ask about the portraits. I told him I liked them.

“Thank you.”

“Are you going to try to show them?”

“I never think of it.”

“You still work on the film?”

Abraham shot me a look of stern Buster Keaton panic. “Of course, Dylan. Every day.”

The abandoned house wasn’t abandoned. I had to count stoops from Henry’s yard to know which it was. Brickwork all along the block was repointed, the brownstone lintels and steps refreshed, the gatework repaired and reblacked-the block was like a set for an idealized movie that fudged poverty into sepia quaintness. Even the slate was straight and neat, repointed like the brick, where it hadn’t been replaced with poured concrete.

I was gazing dizzily at the cornices, wondering how many rotting spaldeens still clogged gutters, when Arthur called to me; I’d drifted past him. He’d stopped to talk with a black woman on Henry’s stoop, or what had been Henry’s stoop, and though like Euclid she was no longer skinny, I knew the woman was Marilla. Her braids had grown long, and were bundled in a nest atop her head. She had a morning drink in a brown bag by her side on the bottom step.

“You remember Dylan?”

“What you talking about, Artie? I knew Dylan before I even knew you.”

The claims of provenance poured from us, like vows to a great cause. If Marilla hadn’t said it, I might have. It was barely different from writing, as I once had, No one who’s ever heard Little Willie John’s “Fever” ever need bother with subsequent recordings of the song . Maybe I’d first found it on Dean Street, my rage for authenticity.

“You a big old man , Dylan. Where you been at?”

“I live in California,” I said.

“La-La went to California. You ever seen her?”

“No,” I said, my voice almost failing me. “I never ran into La-La.” I considered the joke of La-La in La-La Land , figured it wouldn’t go over.

“No?”

“It’s a big place.”

“I got to see that for myself one day.”

Marilla wasn’t the least surprised to see me, only that it had been a while. I gathered she hadn’t left the block, that Arthur might be an adventurer who’d roamed far, by her measure. I wanted to convey my astonishment that she was still here, that after where I’d been she could still recognize me, but nothing I babbled about Berkeley or Vermont, about Jared Orthman’s office or ForbiddenCon 7, could have conveyed anything except, well, babble. My astonishment, really, was at my own denial of this place. Standing here with Arthur and Marilla it felt that to stay was the obvious thing.

“Henry still live here?” I croaked.

“He comes around,” said Marilla. “You should see these white people stare at us on his own street. They want to call the police and Henry is the damn police.”

“The new type of people in the neighborhood don’t really get the whole stoop-sitting thing,” said Arthur apologetically.

“Henry’s a cop?” I asked.

“Actually, Alberto’s a cop, Henry’s an assistant D.A.” Arthur mused on this. “Pretty much everybody’s either in jail or a cop. Except for you and Dylan, Marilla.”

“I know some people who should be in jail.”

Arthur laughed. “We’re going to see Junior, Marilla.”

“Junior? Damn. He first on the list.”

Rhodes Blemner’s art director had gotten a startlingly early photograph from the Michael Ochs Archive for the cover of Remnant’s Bothered Blue box, one I’d never seen until finished copies of the set’s first pressing had arrived at my Berkeley doorstep a few weeks before, shipped direct from the Canadian factory. It showed Barrett Rude Junior at a microphone in the Sigma studio, ringed by admiring Distinctions, one hand to his ear, mouth bellowed wide like a bragging Ali. From the look it was one of their first sessions together, the Distinctions still awed by the jewel that had dropped into their setting.

I wonder if a stranger could have squared that broad, strong face and those neat fingernails and geometric ’Fro, that sharp-knotted tie against paper-white shirt, the whole authority and predatory ease of the thirtysomething Barrett Rude Junior, with the Fu Manchu mustached, yellow-clawed, shrunken-apple-form who accepted the box as a gift from me now. It wasn’t that he should look as good- nobody had ever looked as good as the man on the box. But I don’t know how I could have fathomed time’s work on Barry’s face without my advantage of knowing son and grandfather. That was the gap the man and the box spanned. The singer in the photograph was Mingus at eighteen, on a good day. As for the man clutching the gift, shaking my hand, nails scoring my palm-well, if it was less than a revelation it was more than a joke, the line that came into my head: Junior was Senior now . He even wore Senior’s Star of David necklace, webbed in white at the gap in his robe. When I saw him lower his eyes to the box and discover himself I wanted to tear the thing from his hands and toss it in the street, only it was too late.