Jonathan Lethem - The Fortress of Solitude

In the last hours it was Mingus who spoke. I listened, and tried not to drown along with our talk. I’d never been invisible for so many hours, for one thing. Seated on the chill concrete, I felt a recurrence of my childhood micropsia, a night terror I thought I’d left behind at age eleven or twelve, in my bedroom on Dean Street: the sensation that my body was reduced to speck size in a universe pounding with gravitational force, a void crushing against me on all sides. The ailanthus branches brushing the back windows had seemed to me then like the spiraled arms of distant galaxies. Later, in the years after I retired the ring, I’d blamed my inability to fly from a rooftop, my preference to look away from the sky, on the micropsia hallucinations. Now they’d returned to undermine my heroism in the prison. My heroism was used up. I had only enough left to flee the place, and fling Aaron Doily’s curse once and for all into the brush at the side of the highway, then reclaim my rental car and vanish gratefully into the ordinary angst I’d earned as a grown-up Californian. I was an author of liner notes, an inadequate boyfriend. How could I have thrown over these attainments for this chimera of rescue? All I felt was the submarine pressure of the room, the special claustrophobia of a cathedral vault parceled into rat cages. The room had climate, a muggy stink of curdled human years. After lights-out, a planetarium show of cigarette ends pulsed on the galleries above and around us, reproachful failing stars. Go, they said.

I suppose I was trying not to drown, too, in the beauty of Mingus’s voice, as it reeled through jivish yarn spinning to the brokenest kind of confession, the kind which didn’t know it was broken at all. Mingus had borne his own life a hundred or a million moments longer than I could bear to. I tried not to drown in the consolation and guilt of having him back and being an instant from losing him again, of being about to steal invisibly away.

The ring was useless to him. So Mingus wished me to understand. He explained how he was doing good time, hadn’t been written up in years, despite Robert’s tangling with the Latin Kings. He’d felt a prospect of mercy in his last review, and might be near release, in a year, two. Perhaps the kidney had made an impression on the board. Anyhow, the life of an escapee and permanent fugitive, visible or not, held no allure.

When Mingus made me know what he wanted, it felt that he’d had it in mind from the start, that he’d begun bringing me along ten hours earlier in the visitor’s room. I’d offered a way to spare Robert Woolfolk falling into the Kings’ hands. It wasn’t a shoe I’d heard mentioned in the offices, but a SHU -a special housing unit, protective custody for those either threatening the safety of the regular population, or needing protection from it. There our homeboy from Gowanus was celled. I’d take the ring to him-Mingus would tell me how to find my way there, and where guards could be found napping on cots, with stealable keys. Like hitting a broomstick home run, Mingus knew I could do it. Mingus knew I would.

I had a few questions before I left him. Before I decided whether or not to fail him-I had scant interest in the SHU and Robert Woolfolk. Either way, I was nearly done here, the Proust’s madeleine of “Play That Funky Music” eaten. I had just crumbs to savor.

“Mingus,” I said, “did you have any idea how often I was getting yoked?”

“You mean brothers putting you in a headlock?”

It was a point of clarification, not mockery. He didn’t mean to shame me by contrasting my complaint with his withheld lamentations. He hadn’t asked for pity, not once. I’d shamed myself, but I still wanted an answer.

“Putting me in a headlock and frisking me for money,” I said. “Sometimes practically every day for the three years I was at I.S. 293. Calling me a whiteboy.”

“Them niggers took me off a few times too.” He took my inquiry more seriously than I probably deserved. “Dudes from Gowanus Houses, Whitman, Atlantic Terminals, man, they were always robbing, grubbing, didn’t know any different. At Manhattan clubs everybody’d say look out for them crazy Brooklyn homeboys, those motherfuckers are just stick-up kids, always waving a piece.”

Fair enough. I’d been a crash-test dummy for real crime, nothing personal.

“Wasn’t so much a black-white thing,” Mingus went on. “Those motherfuckers were just thirsty people .”

Thirsty people. That about said it. Now I was meant to go to the thirstiest-thirsty for my bicycle, thirsty for my terror-and free him from his cell.

“Mingus?”

“Yeah?” I heard in his voice that he was as tired as I was. He’d given me my task, now I should go. He’d been talking all night, trying not to disappoint, working to shelter my ludicrous expectations, to make something of my incursion here that we could both live with. He’d come this far, to Watertown, out of easy visiting range of the city, in order to stop carrying Barry, Arthur, anyone else. How far should he have to carry me tonight?

“Did you ever yoke a whiteboy?”

He dredged his last reply from some weary place, yet I caught a note of puzzlement, in his tone, at what he found. “Yeah,” he said. “Once. I mean, I didn’t throw a headlock. Nobody had to.”

“How?”

“Me and some homies from Terminals wanted to score some cheeba. Brother said we should go up to Montague and take money off some Packer boys or whatnot. We cornered a couple of kids with braces, on the Promenade, broad daylight. I hung in the background, just looking ill while them other brothers checked their pockets. But I knew I was doing what it took.”

“Which was-what?”

“What I said. I went to the Heights, I made the mean face.” He pressed close to the bars, and the dim gallery light, pruned his chin and brow for demonstration: the mean face . A Sylvester the Cat scowl, yet the volt of panic it struck in me was one of my life’s companions.

What age is a black boy when he learns he’s scary?

Mingus showed it for an instant, then backed into shadow.

I think I went a little crazy when I wandered from there. Invisibility and Mingus’s voice had flayed me bare. I had no secrets to conceal. I had no mean face , or any face at all: no wonder Zelmo Swift had treated me like a moron child! Zelmo Swift and Jared Orthman made adequate nemeses for a man without a face to turn to the world. I felt I couldn’t leave the Watertown facility without completing my mission, and yet couldn’t imagine surrendering the ring-it had become a part of me, become the truth about me. So for a while I split the difference, and meandered. In fact, I made my way to where Mingus had claimed I could acquire keys to the SHU, only I didn’t tell myself this was what I was doing. I moved recklessly, reeling past COs who opened doors for me, a live disturbance in the air waves, a poltergeist sick with ambivalence. It was easy to steal a fat ring of keys. I used them heedlessly, rattling through options until I fumbled the right key into a lock. I left doors swinging behind me as I moved through the compound. Maybe I thought they’d remain open for me when I needed to retrace my steps, maybe I only thought they ought to be open. I wasn’t thinking-my brain was invisible to itself.

I passed back through the yard. Now the moon was gone. Like a puppet under Mingus’s guidance I found the SHU, a squat three-story building, more a hospital annex than an arm of the prison proper. The look didn’t suit my mood. The beast at the heart of the maze ought to be captive in an open-air cage, or at the bottom of a pit, staked to a post. The SHU looked soft. They might as well have cordoned the Lord of Elbows, He Who Can Throw A Spaldeen Sideways, in a gingerbread house, where he could gnaw his way free.