Jonathan Lethem - The Fortress of Solitude

Positioning, positioning, Arthur Lomb was forever positioning himself, making his views known, aligning on some index no one would ever consult. Here was Dylan’s burden, his cross: the accumulated knowledge of Arthur Lomb’s smug policies on every possible question. The cross was Dylan’s to bear, he knew, because his own brain boiled with pedantry, with too-eager trivia ready to burst loose at any moment. So in enduring Arthur Lomb Dylan had been punished in advance for the possibility of being a bore.

“Develop your pawns or Hulk Will Smash.”

Now and again Dylan saw a shutter wink open, a glimpse into the furnace of anger inside Arthur Lomb. Dylan didn’t mind. He regarded himself as deserving, according to the same principle of similars which had dictated their friendship in the first place. Just as Dylan should absorb the ennui of Arthur’s poseurdom because of that kernel which thrived inside himself, so again with those glimpsed coals of rage.

“I couldn’t help but notice the other day you were talking to that Mingus Rude kid after school. Ahem, keep your eye on the board, you’re going to be shocked again. It’s going to be bad for your health until you learn to start castling. As I was saying, I noticed you talking to Mingus Rude, he’s an eighth grader, how’d you get to know him? Not that he’s in school much, huh. Still, it must be advantageous to be friends with, hurrh, that sort of person.”

Arthur Lomb’s speech bore like a small puckered scar a characteristic hitch of intaken breath in that place where he’d omitted the word black from a sentence but not from the thought which had given rise to the sentence. And that hitch of breath, it seemed to Dylan, was Arthur in a nutshell, making such show of a card unplayed that he tipped his whole hand.

“How’d you know Mingus’s name?” Dylan heard himself say. He’d been concentrating on the game for once, waiting for Arthur to castle as he always ostentatiously castled, but ready this time, with something in store. Distracted, he’d blurted a question which confessed his possessiveness of Mingus, his jealousy. Listen to Arthur Lomb for a month of afternoons and your own talk would be stripped of disguises, that was the price you’d pay.

“Oh, various kids talk about him,” said Arthur airily.

Dylan couldn’t imagine which various kids would ever be seen speaking to Arthur Lomb in school, as opposed to browsing his pants pockets for loose change. Dylan himself shunned Arthur inside the school building, only met up with him afterward for their mutual creeping to the safety of Pacific Street. He understood Arthur’s acceptance of the humiliation of Dylan’s silent treatment at school as a clear measure of Arthur’s desperation and loneliness. So, which various kids?

“Yeah, well, I knew him before,” said Dylan, shutting up before it was too late. Let Arthur fish. Dylan advanced his knight in reply to Arthur’s castling. He made the move lackadaisically, but his heart pounded. Arthur was blind to knights, it had only taken the first thousand games to see it.

“Before what?” said Arthur with thin sarcasm. He pushed a pawn absently, scowling past Dylan and the chessboard, toward Hoyt Street, perhaps mentally groping for a suitable Snappy Answer.

“Check,” said Dylan.

Now Arthur frowned at the board, his eyes racing hectically to consider this unanticipated turn.

“Is this pawn here or here ?” he asked.

“What?”

Arthur pointed, Dylan leaned in. Suddenly the board rattled, jarred at the corner. Then the ripple among the chessmen became an explosion, and the board was lost, pieces tipping, rolling, Arthur’s doomed king clattering atonally down the stoop toward the street, revealed as plastic.

“Look what you made me do,” said Arthur Lomb.

“You knocked it over.”

Arthur opened his palms: sue me.

“I was going to beat you.”

“Now we’ll never know.”

“You win every time and you couldn’t stand letting me beat you once!”

Arthur Lomb stroked his chin thoughtfully. “Actually, I do think we were headed for a stalemate. You shouldn’t get overexcited, Dylan, it may be a while before you beat me. But your game is improving. I congratulate you. You’ve definitely picked up a few things. Speaking of which, har har, would you pick up that king? My leg seems to have fallen asleep.”

Two men, two fathers. Two fathers expelled from their lairs, headed to Manhattan for a change, dressed for a day threatening rain, having shaved their chins to make some nominal impression at their target destinations, tightened scarves with momentary vain glances at hallway mirrors before flushing themselves out of hiding, onto the street. Two fathers each sighing as they plunge down stairwells to underground trains, to endure the shoulder-jostling crowds which mill on platforms and pass through the jerky opening doors, then hang wearily from straps or clutch poles in the blinking, grinding trains. One carrying evidence, a black pebbled-cardboard portfolio with lace ties, the other empty-handed, his instrument his throat and lungs, carried in the valise of his chest. Two fathers ride a while on two separate trains, then, stations attained, Times Square for one, West Fourth for the other, two fathers again put shoe leather to pavement, out on the big island now, two fathers negotiating Abe Beame’s crumbling, deranged infrastructure in the year of the Tall Ships. Two fathers blinking in confusion, each startled how reclusive they’ve become, drifted into their Dean Street solitudes, Brooklyn a mind-state peeling further from Manhattan each day, like continental drift. Two fathers briefly and involuntarily recalling other less morbid and sensitized selves as they move dazed through strobing faces in the late-October streets, two fathers each realizing he alone is distracted by a slide-show sequence of false recognitions- You! Didn’t you go to City College? Ain’t you Charles What’sisname? -among dulled millions trudging Manhattan daily, millions jaded out of such free-associated overstimulation. Two fathers shake it off, forcibly raise the thresholds of their own naïveté, get back to their twin metropolitan missions in the chill-now-beginning-to-rain. Two fathers bearing down, recalling their work-selves, their places in the world. Two fathers here after all for a reason, to do some business, no fooling around.

One father stops abruptly, ducks beneath an umbrella to trade fifty cents for a hot dog from a street vendor, another lost ritual unavailable in his part of Brooklyn, his circumscribed rounds. He juggles the portfolio full of painted boards to one arm, then frees both hands, crumples wax paper back and consumes the mustardy dog in four chunks more swallowed than chewed. The snack glowing nicely in stomach’s pit but, breath possibly fouled, conscious again of the impression he’ll make, the hot-dog-gobbling father halts again at a newsstand for mint chewing gum. Forty-one blocks south, the other father’s got similar pangs and is tempted to stop by the siren odors, suspended in misty cold, of a similar cart with hot dogs in boiling water and greasy knishes on the grill, in fact pats his stomach at the smell but pushes on, relying in anticipation on the spread he’s been promised waits at the recording studio, corn bread and barbecued brisket and red beans and rice trucked down from Sylvia’s , that’s the word.

Two fathers come to their respective thresholds, pause. Rain’s falling sideways now, borne on wind, hastening them to curtail reflection. Two fathers exhale deeply. One steps inside the elevator in the lobby of the Forty-ninth Street office tower and pushes the button for the eighteenth floor. The other squints through a porthole window, then rings the buzzer at the door of the squat recording studio on West Eighth Street, the place known as Electric Lady.