Jonathan Lethem - The Fortress of Solitude

It wasn’t either day or night when I crept back inside the gates of Watertown Correctional, but something in between: daynight, the hour of the changing of the guards.

I’d only had to lay on my motel bedspread flipping cable channels for half an hour-Mets game; Emeril ; Sunburn , with Farrah Fawcett and Charles Grodin; and Teddy Pendergrass: Behind the Music -before Mingus’s words penetrated my brain in their full profundity: You couldn’t even break into this place . I’d heard them as merely scoffing, when in fact they spoke of my whole life’s flinching from what mattered most-not California, dummy, but Brooklyn. Not Camden College, but Intermediate School 293. Not Talking Heads, but Al Green. “No way out but in” (cf. Timothy Leary, 1967). “The old way out is now the new way in” (cf. Go-Betweens, Spring Hill Fair , 1984). Behind the Music, sure. But I needed to go behind the walls. My first pass at the prison had been too cursory, a tourist’s, as ever. I had to earn Mingus’s escape with my own willingness to go inside, to show it could be done. I’d known Aeroman had one last mission: now I saw it couldn’t be conducted by surrogate. I’d wear the ring myself, once more.

This certainty came like a fever. The motel room seemed to pitch, the walls to crawl, like Ray Milland’s in The Lost Weekend . I broke a sweat, felt my bowels loosen dangerously. Lying still, apart from the twitching of my thumb on the remote, I sought a channel to distract me from my intent, uselessly. So I sprang from the bed, rinsed the clammy perspiration from my throat, and spent five minutes or so under the motel sink’s fluorescent, trying to stare myself out of what I was about to do. Then I repacked my small bag and checked out.

I hid my rental car in the stadium-sized lot of a shopping mall at the edge of town, camouflaging it in a sea of like models. Recalling the metal detectors, I slid off my belt and watch and left them under my seat, then locked my wallet in the glove compartment, not wanting to carry it inside, either. I also removed the car’s key from its bulky ring and tucked it into my shoe, like sixth-grade mugging money. Finally I slid on Aaron Doily’s ring and walked invisible out of the mall lot, then made my way to the prison along two miles of well-groomed highway shoulder, past signs reading DO NOT STOP FOR HITCHHIKERS.

CO parking was down the hill, behind the trailer where I’d begun my first voyage inside, earlier that day. There, the evening shift trickled in, one or two at a time, in ten-year-old compacts and pickup trucks, to receive perfunctory badge checks at a manned booth, and a glance into bag lunches for signs of contraband. I had no trouble slipping past the cyclone-fence gate behind a Datsun-it felt as though a visible man could have done it, cloaked in haze and exhaust. My guide-Datsun took its place in a scattering of cars. Its driver was a pearishly short man with Elvis sideburns, wearing a Bills jersey. He paused in his open door for long-sighing finish of a smoke before crushing the butt into the gravel lot, then headed for the entrance. I fell in close behind him, matching my invisible footfalls to his own crunching steps. I staggered slightly, and recalled the special nature of invisible clumsiness, the inner-ear panic that seemed to go with appearancelessness. Aping Mr. Pear’s low-center-of-gravity lope helped me find my rudder, though.

The officers had their own A/B door, where they scrutinized one another through a glass partition. This required a hairbreadth maneuver: ducking through, I was almost clipped by the B door, and in hustling to avoid it grazed the heel of Pear’s shoe with my Converse high-top’s toe, nearly giving him what in grade school we would have called a flat tire . Pear whirled. I backed to the gate, clammed my mouth. Pear squinted, saw nothing, believed his eyes, carried on. I let out breath. The prison groaned and hummed, deep in the floors, and the air was full of a distant cascade of clanking-enough to cover an invisible man’s inopportune gasps for air.

So I trailed my unknowing escort across the moon-pale yard. We passed into a low bunker showing lit offices behind unbarred windows, a building I hadn’t glimpsed in my official visit, one with no cell blocks that I could see. Pear turned through an unlocked doorway, headed for a door marked MEN ’ S LOCKERS. It was there I realized he’d played his full part, that I had no reason to follow him farther. I’d need to find other bodies to trail-it would have been impossible dumb luck if Pear had happened to lead me to the exact block where Mingus was celled.

I parted from him there, and wandered through into the offices. The air here was free of the tang of authoritarian fear I’d smelled in the visitor’s hall. Instead the place was as innocuous as a small-town Department of Motor Vehicles. Two CO’s flirted at a coffee machine, the woman with a black crew cut, but zaftig in her uniform. Two more sat with clipboards, yawning at paperwork. Another pair, one slurping a Coke, the other tapping down a pack of cigarettes, watched a clock-radio-sized television, showing late innings of the same Mets game I’d glimpsed in my motel. Lime-green walls were disguised with school photos, newspaper cartoons, garage calendars. Ten years ago they might have featured pinups, but the presence of female guards prevented that. I supposed there were still pinups in the men’s lockers, though.

While I stood flattened just through the doorway, Pear, now in his well-ironed grays, and belt loaded with baton and keys, waddled into the room.

“Yo, Stamos,” said the CO standing by the coffee machine.

“Yo,” said Pear-Stamos. “Whatchoo doing?”

The guards were all Caucasian. Yet even here, podunk nowhere, everything was yo, yo, yo .

“Looking for you,” said the male guard, and now his female companion peeled away from the coffee machine with something like a look of disgust. “Metzger wants us up at the shoe for deadlock. Crappy birthday to you.”

“With ice cream on top,” said Stamos in a dead voice.

“Be careful what you wish for.”

“Christ almighty, don’t let me get shitted tonight.”

“I’ll protect you, sweetheart.”

Stamos and his friend shook their heads as they departed the oasis of the offices, bound for whatever grim duty the shoe represented. “Force be with you,” said another from his desk, waving farewell without looking up.

I let Stamos go. I wasn’t hugely fond of him, anyway. I assumed I’d be able to shadow one or another CO making rounds through any given building if I was patient enough to hover at locked doors, and cool enough to suck in my breath and still my heartbeat while I waited for keys to turn, for my chance to glide through on their heels. My problem was how to locate Mingus in the small dystopian city of the prison, where the streets had no names-at least, no street signs.

His coordinates might be on those clipboards, or in a binder like the one the guard in the trailer had flipped through. So I began ghosting among the desks to peer over shoulders at exposed paperwork, even rifling through pages on vacant desks when I thought I could afford to. Nothing was revealed. The one column book I found was filled not with names but with timed entries in indecipherable jargon: 4:00 secure ATT/4:25 Sgt. Mortine on G-Building LFF/6:30 Inmate Legman, Douglas 86B5978 requests mattress cover per RLH Orderly , etcetera. On another desk I spotted a copy of CPO Family , trade journal of the Correctional Peace Officers Foundation, its lead feature titled simply “Outnumbered!”

Then I saw a stack of folders marked with inmate names and numbers, on a low shelf away from the desks, top pages fluttering in breeze from an open window. If invisibility was good for nothing else it had freed an old infantile delight at making things spill: with the breeze for an excuse, I splashed those folders wide over the linoleum.