Jonathan Lethem - The Fortress of Solitude

“I wrote the notes,” I said.

“Oh?”

“Inside, there’s a book, a little essay about your career. I wrote it. I hope you like it.” I somehow hadn’t until this moment weighed the odds of Barrett Rude Junior reading my tribute. Now there were a few sentences I might prefer his eyes glossed over. Again, too late.

“I like it already , baby,” said Barry. He put the box on the couch beside him where he sat. He’d ushered us in, no more surprised than Marilla had been. The apartment was barely changed, only corroded by twenty years of neglect. Barry took up a considerably lesser portion of it. I’d swear certain LPs were right where I’d last seen them, in piles on the floor by the stereo, half out of their sleeves.

“See, Arthur,” he said, taking just a glance from the television, which was tuned to Judge Judy . The television was new, and I sensed it got more use these days than the stereo. “I always told you Little Dee would do us proud.”

“Sure,” said Arthur. “Here, Barry, I brought you something too.” He slapped at his pockets until he found it: a fresh pack of Kools, which he tossed to Barry’s lap. “You know that warning about how smoking is bad for your health? Very few people realize I actually wrote those words.”

“Y’all a couple of gifted children, I’ll give you that.”

“Of course, they changed them all around, took out most of my best stuff.”

“That’s their prerogative, though, isn’t it, Arthur?”

“Yeah.”

“You got to grant them their pre rog ative.”

“I guess so.”

“I heard that .” Barry reached to graze fingertips with Arthur, still not neglecting the television show. He’d pushed the cigarettes off with the box set.

“You want to hear the CDs?” I said stupidly. “They sound really great.” Barry’s publishing stake meant he’d see some money from the box, eventually. It should add to the trickle of royalties which presumably kept him in the house. Maybe I was wrong to think he should be proud of the monument too. Maybe the Barry I wanted to be able to give the box to was the Barry of 1975. That man, like the one in the photograph, was as inaccessible to Barry now as he was to me.

“I know what all them old records sound like.”

“Yeah, but-”

“I’ll check them out some other time, man.” He spoke slowly and carefully, and I knew I should drop it. “I don’t have no CD player, anyhow.”

I just nodded.

“You know that Fran, that girl your old man took with?” Changing the subject, his voice grew gentle again. “She’s all right. She’s been looking out for me, you know.”

“I heard.”

“He’s lucky, find a girl like that.”

“I know.” Everyone agreed, from A to Zelmo. I only hoped Abraham did too. It was then that I remembered what I’d wanted to ask my father about the new paintings. Were the portraits of Francesca an excuse to stare, to try to see through the skin of his new situation, this woman who’d taken Rachel’s long-abandoned place? Was he trying to fathom Francesca? Or had she asked him to paint her, requested he look with that intensity? Who’d sought the confrontation the portraits recorded?

There was a long silence, filled by the television’s yammer. I began to think of the rental car again, and the road I meant to cover this day. My heart was bogging on Dean Street, but it was Mingus I had to see.

Barrett Rude Junior focused his eyes on mine for the first time in nearly twenty years, perhaps reading my mind. His gaze at last pierced the caul that had covered it even when he’d found us at his door, and through his short inspection of the photograph and words on the box set’s cover.

“What brings you round to see this old washed-up singer, Little Dylan?” he said. He gave washed-up singer some of his old melodic juice, and I felt a twinge in my saliva glands, as though I’d dipped my tongue to cocaine.

“I just wanted to give you the records,” I said. I couldn’t call them CDs now.

“You done that,” he said, a little coldly.

“And we’re going up to visit Mingus. I mean, I am.”

“Huh.” Barry clouded. He grimaced in concentration at something in Judge Judy’s realm, perhaps a ruling going the wrong way. Someone had to keep a watch on such stuff.

“Maybe if you’ve got any message for him-”

Barry chopped with a clawed hand. Mingus in Watertown was too distant, that was what the gesture seemed to say. Dean Street was real, Francesca and Arthur were real and worth acknowledging. One brought soup, the other cigarettes. Judge Judy was real enough: she was in front of his eyes. I’d come and proposed that Barry consider California and 1967 and Watertown and those were all too remote, too tiresome.

“You know I’m watching my morning shows,” he said, addressing Arthur. “I’m not awake yet, man. Come around tonight and we’ll party.”

“Okay, but Dylan’s gotta head,” said Arthur. “He just wanted to say hello.”

“Tell the boy I’m watching my morning shows.”

Arthur walked me to my car, and apologized. “I should have told you not to mention Mingus,” he said. “It sort of shuts him down.”

“What did Mingus do to him?”

“It’s not that simple.”

I’d stashed my bag in the rental’s trunk already, and said my goodbyes, promising Abraham and Francesca I’d spend a day with them on the other end of my jaunt upstate, before I returned to California. I was ready to go.

“Here,” said Arthur. He frisked himself again and produced an unsealed envelope full of cash, evidently counted in advance. He slapped it into my hand. “You can’t give it to them directly, they can’t have money inside. You have to contribute it to their commissary accounts, then they, you know, take it out in cigarettes, or whatever. Hundred apiece.”

“Who’s they ?”

“You know how I was saying to Marilla it seems like everybody’s in jail?”

“Sure.”

“Robert Woolfolk’s inside too. Watertown, same joint as Mingus.”

Iwas an amateur here, as much a neophyte crossing these thresholds as I’d been in L.A., penetrating Jared Orthman’s sanctum. Only now I was an amateur among professionals. All the black and Hispanic moms and grandmoms, all the stolid grown-up homeboys visiting homeboys, all but me knew how to visit a prison. Their expertise began to be shown just past the parking area, still well outside the outermost ring of wire, where taxicabs from the Watertown train station and the Greyhound terminal turned in a circle, where the chartered bus from New York, full of prisoners’ families, off-loaded and waited, the driver smoking hand-rolled cigarettes and picking tobacco from his teeth. There the visitors fell into a line, to trudge through a long shack, a small aluminum trailer on concrete blocks. It had been raining the afternoon before, as I drove out of the city, raining when I took my motel room just outside downtown, raining just a bit more this morning, as I breakfasted on sausage patties at a Denny’s. Now gray-green clouds wheeled above the prison and were mirrored in the puddled gravel at our feet. No one but me glanced up at the sky or down at the ground as I hurried in to take a place. Inside the trailer three guards- correctional officers , they were called-ran a bureaucratic outpost, one where we displayed ID, signed this form, then that one, giving address, stating relationship to prisoner, avowing comprehension of rules, etcetera. All but me knew the prisoner’s number they’d come to visit. I knew only Mingus’s name, causing a bored captain to have to flip open a fat binder to locate the corresponding digits. The bathroom in the trailer was our last chance to pee. Everyone took it, knowing the drill. I took my cue, fell in line. The trailer’s single pay phone was the last we’d see, and it too was in continuous use. I thought of calling home, trying for Abby. But the line of callers was too long.