Jonathan Lethem - The Fortress of Solitude

Lines of enmity dissolved. Any connection was a good one, here in the woods. Dose met a couple of boys from a once-upon-a-time-terrifying Coney Island gang. Some summer ago, Dose and two others from FMD had gotten on the Coney crew’s bad side by making a dumb mistake: they’d tagged inside a bunch of apparently clean D-train cars in a yard’s dim moonlight, using black ink from heavy-flowing fat mops. When the trains ran the next day, Dose and his mates saw with horror what moonlight hadn’t revealed: the D-train interiors had already been covered with the Coney Island crew’s clunky tags in pink ink. Black now overlapped the pink everywhere. How to explain the pink hadn’t even been visible ? Impossible. They thought Dose had deliberately backgrounded them. Dose spent that summer watching over his shoulder for the Coney gang, marked as prey.

Now it was all hunky-dory, good for a laugh. Dose was one of the famous names, so the Coney crew recalled the incident as evidence they’d once been significant writers.

Dose was ambulatory history, and brothers wished to claim some for themselves.

“Yo, Dog, you remember me? I wrote Kansur 82 , you used to background me all the time.”

“Sure, sure, I remember you,” Dose would say, if he was in a generous mood.

Other times he’d withhold the glory of being linked to his name, just to see their frustration: “Why would I trouble to background you, blood? What was you to me?”

“I was a toy, I know-you was right to go over my tags.”

Dose would deny it, tormenting their minds: “You claiming you got up somewhere before me?”

“You used to go over me!” the younger writer would insist.

“Nah, man. You used to go under me.”

Surgery.

Of course it would be Horatio, clownier than ever, who turned up in Auburn’s visitor’s room talking around the subject, not saying what he meant. Barry was illing-well, Dose knew that already. No, truly illing, like in the Long Island College emergency room a couple of times. His father needed Dose now, in some way Horatio wouldn’t explain. Dose agreed without understanding what he’d agreed to.

A week later he was escorted to Auburn’s infirmary for consultation with a surgeon who acted like Doolittle among the savages, brow furrowed in reproach even as he spoke at moron rpm. Did Dose grasp what he was offering? Yes, sure, though he hadn’t until then. There was no certainty it would work, Doolittle warned. Tests were required, to check the match. His and his father’s candidacy had to be examined. Dose, old hand in passivity by now, submitted to three weeks of fluid donations, spinal, bile, and shit. The results: Dose was a hundredth-percentile shoe-in to rescue his father’s putrefying blood.

Doolittle, chafing at being instrument of a back-channel exception, prison strings pulled by Andre Deehorn and others in the Philly scene, advised Dose against the procedure. The kidney could fail within five to ten years-that was a successful outcome.

Dose would have given heart, or hands, or eyes.

Recovery took six days in Albany Presbyterian Hospital. Dose and his father lay in side-by-side narcotic slumber, with a holstered guard in the room patently thrilled with the assignment, full of Playboy dreams of nurses.

The day before he was returned inside, with both Dose and Barry up and running, having demonstrated renal function to Doolittle’s satisfaction, the four of them-son and father in cotton pajamas, and Horatio, and the guard-escaped through fire doors to the hospital’s roof.

There they smoked a joint Horatio’d smuggled in, conducting their own tests on that new kidney-what else was it for?

There, as they squinted in the glare off Albany’s toy skyline, his father’s fund of disappointment was proven bottomless. Barry could help himself to Dose’s extra kidney and still not meet his eyes.

When he learned how famous the organ donation made him at Auburn, Dose wanted no part of it, and requested the transfer to Watertown, to finish his bid in anonymous peace.

Watertown.

Dose shed it all. No jailhouse artistry, he’d left that behind years back-a million guys could execute the graffiti style now. He had no illusions about stockpiling cigarettes. Old-school eminence held nothing he wanted, it signified zip to the time he had to do, played no real factor in the endurance of the mind. Claiming this or that alliance outside- Yo, I know that dude, younger brother of Fitty Cents, that nigger’s King of Wyckoff Gardens, he gonna set me up when I’m sprung -looked thinner every day. Duck ensnarements and arrears at any level, this was Dose’s campaign. Beguiling COs was of use only if you wanted something a CO could give you. They could give you nothing. A protector like Raf mattered only until you understood there was nothing to protect.

Invisibility, intangibility, Teflon eyes.

Yet he had one last error of affiliation in him.

Robert Woolfolk was the same hectic proposition he’d ever been, only stretched and torn by fifteen years more on the street and inside. Gold-toothed, arm-crook scarred from vein hunts, one ear nipped, Robert staggered on, decades beyond adventures that ought to have been his finish if he hadn’t had so many lives, like Wile E. Coyote still climbing out of the crater and dusting himself off, rubbing his hands and grinning in conspiratorial glee. You wanted to put the man to bed.

Dean Street had come to Watertown, like a radio signal wandering through space, a hit song from 1976 become sole sign of life in the galaxy.

So Dose took him under his wing, as though he had one.

Robert Woolfolk was dealing trees within a few weeks of appearing at Watertown, against Dose’s advice. If you wished to smoke, smoke. Be a customer, laying low. Nope: Woolfolk began dealing two-for-ones, betting against guys’ commissary checks coming in on time, juggling debt. Then slicing trees open and stretching them with stale tobacco. This was tolerable, a line Dose had seen men walk for years, a line he’d walked a few times himself, merely to keep himself amused at Riker’s.

Then Robert found the market in spitback sacks, and lost his interest in trees.

A spitback sack was a parcel of liquid drugs. Methadone, smuggled from the dispensary by signed-in junkies, by the method of concealing a few fingers of a Saran Wrap glove in the throat or the cheek to catch the spitback. This art, of pretending to swallow yet retaining the drug in the slippery sack, wasn’t simple. Not every junkie who wished to mule could be trained into it. Those few were a commodity. A finger of ninety-percent methadone sold for six packs of smokes. This was a trade all contained inside the walls, no outside connection necessary, no dependence on the gangs.

Who you stole your mules from-now that involved a degree of difficulty apparently beyond Robert Woolfolk’s finesse.

The day the Latin Kings stepped up on Dose in the yard he felt the charge in the air a minute before it happened. He’d become a barometric instrument of a prison’s weather without even noticing. Those bumping on either side against him were men he’d ignored and been ignored by for years, but the new intimacy was undeniable, three years of flinched glances gone up in smoke.

It was the old story, weary beyond telling, Robert in arrears on all sides, and Dose to answer for it, and it all went down as scripted since One Million B. C.

Except for one thing.

That one day, Dylan Ebdus came and offered a ring.

Iasked Mingus the time: a quarter to one. I’d been seated on the gallery floor for five hours, my shoulder wedged against a thin lip of wall between Mingus’s cell and the next, my temple close at the bars, and his close beside mine, so we could talk. I felt our ears graze once or twice. I’d shown myself just once, slipping the ring loose and then vanishing again, when I explained how I’d snuck in and found him. We conversed in low murmurs, which drowned in the cavernous block’s slurred surf of illegal radios, inmate talk, ventilation. As the block dimmed to a murmur itself, we whispered.