Jonathan Lethem - The Fortress of Solitude

Mingus was authoring a romance, wrapping my awkwardness in his old raconteur’s warmth. It was nonsense and a gift I took gladly. No mention of the special nature of the setting for our reunion, though his jive happened to be piped over an intercom. The setting didn’t bear mentioning. His smile’s warmth, the way he beamed himself across that thickness of Plexiglas, suggested a capacity for a binocular vision which excluded surroundings. Recalling how the city had reeled from us as we stood on the Brooklyn Bridge’s walkway gazing at spray-painted stone, I thought now that that had always been one of Mingus’s talents.

“Arthur couldn’t come,” I said, as if Arthur were the unfaithful one. “He sent up some money for the commissary, though.”

“Arthur’s always lookin’ out for a brother,” said Mingus. He didn’t mean to sting me, only to bathe Arthur, too, in beatific gratitude. “I know I let Arturo down a bunch of times, but my man always picks up the phone.”

“I count on him for news of you,” I lied. I hadn’t been any more in touch with Arthur than I had with Mingus. And I hadn’t heard news of Mingus until Abraham and Francesca raised the subject in Anaheim, at dinner with Zelmo Swift.

“Little brother’s doing fine for himself, too,” said Mingus, freeing me from this line of talk. “Done got fat and happy.”

“Well, fat.”

Mingus wheezed, too much laughter for the joke. “Ho snap ,” he said, putting on a show. “I heard that. I been tellin’ the boy he got to shed some poundage he wants to snag himself a wife .”

The word was peculiarly silencing: heading to forty, we’d fallen laps behind life’s course. We had no wives. Mingus, at least, had an excuse for why he hadn’t been dating lately. About Abby there was nothing I could say that wouldn’t sound self-pitying or fatuous. I felt the distance between Dean Street and my Berkeley life as an unbridgeable gulf.

At the lapse I tuned in the murmur around us: one-sided talk into the visitors’ telephones, the unself-conscious yakking of two corrections officers at the door, and, from one of the booths, a voice gummy with weeping.

“I saw Junior,” I said.

“At the house?”

“Yesterday. With Arthur.”

“My old man,” said Mingus. He spoke simply now, his gaze shy. “He’s hanging in there.”

“It was good to see him,” I said.

“He must have been glad to see you.”

I couldn’t fathom a reply, so we fell to silence a second time. Mingus had abandoned his patois, and the trumped-up garrulity that had gone with it. I was ashamed to want it back.

Mingus smoothed his long contrails of mustache, stroked his chin. There were flecks of spittle on his side of the glass between us, evidence of his actor’s enthusiasm, now gone. I met his rheumy eyes and saw a stranger. I could no more ask Mingus who he’d become-whether incarceration had broken him the first time, at eighteen, or what had led him back inside after his first release, or what his life had meant to him in the time between his two sentences-than I could imagine how to confess myself to him. I was helpless to say who I’d become in California, or to let him know I remembered everything between us despite it all.

“Arthur says Robert’s inside too,” I said, despising myself for the false casualness, for my use of inside . My heart was thudding now.

“Plenty of brothers you’d recall from the old days inside now,” said Mingus. There might have been rebuke in his words, I wasn’t certain. “Donald, Herbert, whole bunch of them.”

I didn’t remember Donald or Herbert. Perhaps Mingus knew this.

“You and Robert see a whole lot of each other?” Dopey questions poured from me, helplessly.

“I put myself out for Robert until I couldn’t afford to no more.” Now there came a steely note of institutional savvy in Mingus’s voice, and his gaze blinked from mine. “Our boy Robert put himself in the way of some trouble. They had to shift him into protective custody.”

“Oh.”

“I told him but the poor-ass snake can’t listen.”

To divert the anger that seemed to be unstoppering, I said, “Actually, Arthur sent cash for both of you.”

“Put mine to Robert’s name. Boy could use it.”

“Really?”

“It’s not too late for him to pay his debt down. Anyway, I’m in a protest with these motherfuckers, they took my stamps.”

“Stamps?”

“For letters. Postage stamps, man.”

“What happened?”

“I had thirty dollars of stamps in my bunk down at Auburn. When they moved me up here they were supposed to be transferred-” Here Mingus launched into a torturous account of a paperwork error. The Watertown facility prohibited stamps because they resembled paper money, could be used as scrip. The postage had been meant to be dissolved into Mingus’s commissary account, had been placed instead with belongings to be returned to him after release. Mingus filed protest forms, but the seized stamps were stranded in a limbo between the two prisons, the two sets of rules. Mingus retailed this story with a joy-in-persecution that could only be called Kafkaesque. In a world of deprivations, I suppose the smallest might become a fetish. It made my head hurt. I wanted to scream Forget the stamps, for God’s sake I’ll buy you thirty dollars’ worth of stamps if you want! But the stamps were Mingus’s cause, and so he railed on. What was thirty dollars compared to a cause? Too, in this place a talker’s gifts were only encouraged in one direction, to stanch the wound which bled hours, days, years. I tried not to lose patience with the monologue.

“I brought you something else,” I said, when Mingus paused for breath.

He scowled confusion.

I dug in my pocket as discreetly as I could. “I’ve been keeping it for you,” I said, and pushed the ring to the edge of the Plexiglas, like a checker I wanted Mingus to king.

“Put that away,” he said. He waved, a low flat gesture which seemed to say Keep it under the table . “They’ll confiscate it.”

I covered the ring with my palm. Still, I couldn’t keep from avowing my mission of rescue. “This is why I came-I mean, I wanted to see you. But the ring belongs to you.”

“It never did.”

“It does now, then.”

“Shit.”

Mingus had grown cold and wary, as though I’d asked him to recall things he couldn’t afford to.

“How can I get it in to you?” I said, thinking moronically, If I’d known about the hermetic seal, I’d have baked a cake .

“Put it away.”

“You could use it to break out of this place,” I said quietly.

His laugh now was bitter, and authentic.

“Why not?”

“You couldn’t even use that thing to break into this place.”

The rest, until my time was up, was small talk. Mingus wanted news of my father, so I described the honor he’d received in Anaheim. I mentioned Abby, omitted her color. We even talked over the stamps again. Mingus asked questions and didn’t listen to my answers. A wall had fallen between us. Afterward, I was led out, my knuckles inspected again for the phosphorescent stamp of a free man. On my way out I deposited two hundred dollars into Robert Woolfolk’s commissary account, keeping my promise.

Invisible in twilight, my eyes picked out stuff I’d missed the first time crossing the yard.

On concrete clean of the slightest scrap of litter or leaf, a single latex glove, flipped inside out in the haste of its removal.

Pinned to the fence, a hand-pained sign: DON ’ T FEED THE CATS!

Past the fence, shadow-blobbed trees. Sensuous unreachable hills. The moon a pale disk snuck into sky before sunset.