Jonathan Lethem - The Fortress of Solitude

“Jesus, crap,” said the Force-Be-With-You CO, who was nearest.

Flirting Woman stood at her desk to gawk at the mess.

“Clean it up, Sweeney,” Star Wars told her.

“Clean it up yourself.”

“Nah, I’m going up to the gallery. You should have filed that crap last week.”

“It’s not my crap, it’s Zaretti’s.”

“Sure, but it was you used astral projection to knock it off the shelf, just to jerk my chain. Take it upstairs already. And shut that draft, we’re all getting the flu.”

Surprising me, Sweeney did as she was told. Kneeling, her grays cinching to unveil a margin of floral-print underwear, she scooted the folders into rough order before I’d had a look at them. I battled an urge to spin the last papers from the floor in imaginary gusts, to cavort with their files and cause merry chaos in this dead zone, to show them the invisible-man’s mania I felt throbbing inside. Instead I waited while grumbling Sweeney bundled the stack into her arms. Star Wars ignored her. A tinny Mets announcer was the only peep over the ventilator’s rumble. When Sweeney took the files from the room I trailed her like a stalker, following the decorated panties, that spot of brightness.

The room Sweeney led me to, a private office full of filing cabinets behind a pebbled-glass door, also held a large wooden desk with a telephone, and a few framed citations and newspaper photos-it might be the warden’s office, if I believed in such things as wardens. I remembered my surprise, as a Brooklyn kid, discovering that the small towns in Vermont actually harbored sheriffs, when that was for me as corny and fictional an honorific as knight or caveman . A warden was a figure from a Lenny Bruce routine, or a Slick Rick rhyme. So, say, the lieutenant CO’s office. Sweeney snapped on the light and began tugging open long drawers and replacing those files in alphabetical sequence by prisoner’s name and I knew I’d blundered into what I sought-only right at the moment I wasn’t interested anymore. I hewed close to Sweeney, closer than I needed, pretending for a moment I wasn’t lost deep within a prison. Sweeney was a little stocky, but I loved her. I loved her purely for being female in this man-built, man-patrolled hell, and for letting me see London, for showing me France.

This was new for me. I’d never once explored invisibility’s perverse opportunities-never been one for strip clubs or porn, let alone window peeping. I identified with the figure of the subway frotteur about as much as I did with Bernhard Goetz. Now, here to renounce and abandon the ring and my secret powers, and alone in this upstairs office with a woman, a weird last-minute greed came to me, and I practically mounted Sweeney’s substantial thigh as I leaned close to capture a whiff of her hair’s perfume. She hummed Cher’s “Believe” to herself, and farted too, but these couldn’t deter me. I imagined whispering Be still, Sweeney, don’t scream, and let the invisible hands of the invisible man invade your mannish uniform . I had a hard-on, now inches from Sweeney’s gray polyester ass, a better one than I’d managed with dear Katha. The onset of this lust was surely one final denial that I was going to do what I was already in the middle of doing-that my lonely life and Mingus’s had come to this. It was a call to a life unlike the one I’d lived, one full of women and foolishness, one troubled by less troublesome forms of trouble. Fuck all this dire manly courage! Fuck going “inside” barbwire boundaries and ancient conundrums! Fuck prisons, let’s fuck! Sweeney, let me take you from all this .

Sweeney rolled out the R-S-T drawer and there it was: Rude, Mingus Wright, 62G7634. And that was all it took to deflate me. I might have been a moment or two from asinine calamity, from letting Sweeney feel my breath or erection against her. Now I backed to a corner and watched her complete the task of filing. Sweeney was blithe, unaware of our close call, still humming atonal disco. When she clicked off the overhead on her way out, I left it off. Enough light leaked in from the yard’s floodlamps for me to find the drawer again, and the file inside the drawer.

I sat at the desk and had a look.

The file was fifteen, maybe twenty sheets thick. The first and by far most substantial document dated to 1978-the year Mingus began at Sarah J. Hale, while I was still behind at I.S. 293-on stationery headed by Frank J. Macchiarola, Chancellor of Schools.

P SYCHOLOGICAL E VALUATION:The overall test results suggest a young man of very superior intellectual capacity whose verbal skills are considerably more effective than his practical problem-solving skills. Some limitations in attention, concentration, and awareness… It may be speculated that these limitations are the result of distracting feelings, tensions, and inner upsets. Projectives testing reveals a mildly suspicious young man who tends to view the world in a guarded manner, tends to deny his affective needs but who is then vulnerable to emotional stress-

And:

D EVELOPMENTAL: Mingus was a full-term baby. A breech delivery, he was born fighting, and knocked the instrument from the doctor’s hand-

And:

I NTERVIEW: Mingus feels he does not understand what has happened to him. He stated that as far as he can remember his problems started when he was in preschool-

And:

He has problems because of the “gang” elements in and around his school. He has little social life and finds it hard to explain what he does with his time-

And:

T EST R ESULTS: Mingus entered the test situation readily. There was noted, however, a tinge of mild annoyance with the evaluation process connoting an attitude of condescending disinterest… effectiveness varies from the Low Average to the Very Superior range with the exception of a Deficient score in a rote copying task which is seen as spurious in that he appeared not to be applying his full efforts-

And:

His thinking tends toward secretive and foreboding themes (i.e., on card V a camouflaged butterfly against a tree, card III two people working over a pot, a witches’ brew, card IV a dragon with wings coming down on you)… suggestive of an apprehensive and at times suspicious view of his experience and surroundings-

And:

Mingus’s typical style and manner is likely to dispose him toward sarcasm and verbal bouts of a negativistic and oppositional posture to do combat with authority figures in a covert manner-

The jargon described a Mingus I barely recognized, sulking under the shrink’s gaze-in those same days he ebulliently commanded my world, out on Dean Street. I flipped to the end of the document, and underneath found Mingus’s “yellow sheet,” his at-a-glance arrest and conviction record. First, five or six graffiti detainments, from our high-school days. Before Ed Koch’s graffiti-specific laws, arresting officers had been reduced to euphemistic charges:

3/2/78: Criminal Mischief, Criminal Trespass

4/14/78: Criminal Mischief, Criminal Trespass

9/27/79: Criminal Mischief, Loitering, Possession of Burglar Tools

And so on. Those burglar’s tools were presumably bolt cutters, for breaking into the train yards. No mention of Mingus’s leaping, costumed, from a tree in the Walt Whitman Houses courtyard-he’d been released to Junior’s recognizance that night. His teenage jeopardy was all graffiti related. To that point Mingus had had the freedom to smoke and snort in his own home, when it was being forced onto the street that led to possession arrests.

Those would come, soon enough. First, the parade of scofflaw-charge dismissals ran over this cliff: