Jonathan Lethem - The Fortress of Solitude

“Someone you know in Indiana?”

The boy had come to breakfast with his backpack on, running late, as always. They were like old men at the YMCA, the two of them waking to their two alarm clocks in their two bedrooms and meeting for breakfast. Dylan’s a clock radio tuned to an all-news station which leaked through Abraham’s wall a blaring theme of trumpets and teletype sound effects, a voice boasting “The newswatch never stops,” like being driven out of sleep by a newsreel headache. The kid lived in an anxious world. His nervous system seemed tuned like a robot’s. Now he edged up to the table with the backpack humped up onto the back of his chair and blinked at the postcards while he gulped orange juice.

“The first one came a month ago,” said Abraham. “The one with the crab.”

Abraham Ebdus saw the kid needed new shoes. Dylan crushed his shoe backs by cramming into them with the laces tied, and carved away the inner rim of the heels with his pigeon-toed walk which corrective soles left uncorrected. He wanted to wear sneakers every day, certain sneakers which every kid desired. He’d spoken angrily and Abraham had understood that at stake was less status than a certain bottom line of humiliation, the survival of the kid’s willingness to even keep braving school every day. He’d bought him the sneakers but still insisted on the brown corrective shoes which looked like 1950s boaters. Sneakers two days out of five was the rule.

The boy fingered the postcards but didn’t comment. “Toast is burned,” he said instead, head ducked down. He turned the postcard with the picture of the crab over twice, reading the lines, then scowling again at the Technicolor-hued photograph of the red crab on tan sand. His glasses slipped downward and he shoved them back quickly with his thumb, an occult gesture performed with a fugitive’s deftness. The kid was a hider.

“Give me your glasses,” said Abraham.

Dylan didn’t speak, just handed them over. Abraham fished out of a kitchen drawer a tiny screwdriver and cinched the hinge screws on the kid’s plastic frames. The glasses were shit, made of shit, part of the contemporary ocean of plastic. Abraham frowned at them and did what he could, tightened the screws, doing his miniaturist’s work. This was the level at which things could be improved. He wished now he’d taken the strange, inadequate postcards to his studio and altered them, forged the typist’s Courier font with his delicate brushes, fixed the stupid, enigmatic words to make them mean something more than they did, repainted the fire-engine-red crabshell a natural green and brown. As though crabs were bright red before you cooked them, idiots.

Abraham Ebdus had studied the crab postcard for an hour the day it arrived, five weeks ago, in fact. Dylan’s name was typed in full on the back, the address was typed, the message too, all with a manual typewriter that had a misaligned ribbon which ornamented each of the wobbly-struck letters with a faint under-halo of red. Close inspection revealed too a miniature trail of oily gear marks made by the grinding of the postcard along the typewriter barrel’s right edge. The postage stamp was a reproduction of LOVE by Robert Indiana-that charlatan-and the message, which included no capitals or punctuation, read:

this crab runs sideways west

out of the pot

but not out of potluck

pacific ocean mermaid dreams

be good d and you’ll see one

Unsigned. Postmarked Bloomington, Indiana, which to Abraham could hardly mean less. Three more postcards came in the following weeks. The second showed the same Indiana postmark, followed by two boasting an erratic trail west, Cheyenne, Wyoming, and Phoenix, Arizona. All stamped with LOVE and all equally gnomic, only now the typist had given attribution, still in type, at the foot of the flighty poems, capitalized to show it was the author’s name: Running Crab . Abraham Ebdus had read Running Crab’s subsequent messages with a fury that blurred the dopey words so they swam in his vision. Anyhow, they weren’t addressed to him.

Now he again asked his son, “Got a friend in Indiana?” He was fishing, couldn’t help himself.

Dylan didn’t reply, just scooped the postcards together like a deck of cards and shoved them into his backpack without reading them. Saving them for later. He seemed quite unsurprised.

“I should have given them to you when they came,” said Abraham. “I will from now on. If more come.”

Dylan stared up at him for an instant, adjusting the placement of his tightened frames on his nose.

“I already got two,” Dylan said. “They came on Saturday.”

Now Abraham was silenced.

Outside, at the bottom step of his stoop, the boy looked back to be sure Abraham wasn’t watching through the parlor window, then slung his knapsack off his shoulders and unsnapped the top. Inside were his sneakers, Pro Ked 69ers in navy blue canvas, with the red-and-blue rubber stripes on the sole as thick and satisfying badges of legitimacy. Under the prodding of a fingernail the rubber stripes had the chewy, resistant texture of a fresh spaldeen. Today nobody would hound him singing Rejects, they make your feet feel fine, rejects, they cost a dollar ninety-nine , because these sneakers indisputably weren’t rejects. Few things were as clear. While the knapsack was open the boy stashed his glasses, pushing them into the corner beside the six Running Crab postcards, the two he’d retrieved from the mail himself, the four new ones, three unread, which he’d study later. His interest in the postcards was clinical. The missives from Running Crab were amusing but had nothing to do with his life, like a dated and essentially forgettable television show you watched a lot anyway, but disdainfully, priding yourself on how seldom you laughed or even cracked a smile, Gilligan’s Island or Mister Ed .

He changed his brown corrective shoes for the Pro Keds, but the shoes didn’t go in the knapsack. They didn’t go anywhere near school, not anymore. The shoes had a place under Rachel Ebdus’s overgrown forsythia plot in the yard to the left of the stoop, a cranny the boy had scooped out where they could nest with the earth and the bugs and the twigs until the boy came home from school and retrieved them. The shoes were an artifact from the fitful past, fossil shoes, and they belonged in the ground. Everyone knew to call them roachstompers because they associated them, properly, with their ancient cousins. That their survival into the present was uncanny didn’t make it any less embarrassing. The shoes ought to adapt, grow wings and disguise themselves as present-day birds, like the dinosaurs had. Or return to the ocean, become turtles. Until they burrowed back into the past where they belonged they could live in the earth, nestled in the cool forsythia roots which would never again be thinned or trimmed, and there they would be denied the sunlight which embarrassed them. It was for their own good. If Running Crab sent a postcard with a return address maybe he’d send her the shoes in the mail. Crab and shoes could run together, could scuttle into the sea. Dylan, he’d stick with Pro Keds.

Near the finish of that desultory sixth-grade spring they found each other again, like it was the most normal thing in the world, like they hadn’t missed half a year of afternoons. Mingus wore a military-green jacket though it was too warm for a jacket, and the jacket clanked, full of some metallic something which had been pushed through torn pockets to nestle in the lining. The jacket’s back panel bore Mingus’s tag, DOSE, elaborately surrounded by asterisklike stars and swooping punctuation. All went unremarked. Dylan pushed his schoolbag just inside Mingus’s basement door and they slouched their way together down Dean Street, the block which had become so useless now, no skully, no ball games, any kid you could think of off in some cluster or gang, like survivalist cells. Just Marilla and La-La, but they didn’t even seem to recognize you now as they sang to each other I’m eightee-een with a bullet, got my finger on the trigger, I’m gonna pull it, yeah -