Jonathan Lethem - The Fortress of Solitude

To be in this place is to admit you exist.

To be in this place is to admit you want something.

Or maybe tell yourself you’re doing it for the kid.

One father paces at the reception desk, stands rather than sits waiting for the art director of the second-largest publisher of science fiction in mass-market paperback in the city, no fly-by-night Belmont Books offices now, Belmont Books with its three-months-late checks and Fashion District office of six guys in Chinese-food-stained shirts, no, this is publishing proper, dour receptionist with butterscotch sucking candy in a jar and a phone with three blinking lines. Other father, downtown, is welcomed off the street of leather outlets and white teenage vagabonds into the odd brick fortress of a building by the soundboard man, apologetic, telling him the others are late, no sweat though, come in. Guy knows your name and is a big fan of your work , actually says it, rare for one of these guys not to disguise any awe, hoarding their technician’s seen-it-all cool. Fine, fine. Downtown father nods coolly, taking it out on the guy, feeling like an ass for being early, for being first.

So, two fathers each given more time for stewing than they’d banked on. Then the art director emerges to pump the hand of the one father uptown, guy in a sweater-vest and chewing an unlit pipe, well-fed corporate hipster head-to-toe, while downtown at that same moment the doors to Electric Lady burst open and piling in from a white limo parked at the curb is the whole gang in their Elton John glasses and pimp hats and boas, the bassist in his spaceman outfit of puffy satin shoulder pads and belt, dressed this way just because that’s the way they’re dressed, not for stage or a photo session but because they’re a bunch of freaks who think they’re Jimi Hendrix and Sly Stone and Marvin the Martian rolled into one-and the father reminds himself he knows these guys, they like him and that’s why he’s here, they come from the same place. Shit, they all-every one of these jokers and himself-were signed to Motown back in the day.

Taking his elbow and steering him inside, saying, Really good to meet you, Ebdus. I have the feeling we’re both going to be glad you called .

Slapping his hands high and low, insisting on the whole circuit of bullshit, saying, Hey, man, we just couldn’t get out of bed this morning! But we’re here now! You’re gonna luuuv this motherfuckin’ track, man.

You outgrew Belmont before you started working for them, Ebdus. Don’t think everyone didn’t notice your work the minute it appeared. This isn’t a big industry, not once you’re in it. It’s like high school, everybody knows who the cool kids are. I frankly don’t understand why you didn’t come to us in the first place.

Forget the legal bullshit, man. We’ll put some other name on the sleeve, call you, huh, Pee-Brain Rooster. You like that? Anyone with ears is gonna know it’s you the minute you open your mouth, man. Minute you let out that motherfucker of a voice. We’ll sort out the legal shit some other time, can’t let that trouble us.

What one father doesn’t say is that being here means admitting that what he’s engaged in is some sort of career . The arrangement with Belmont, he’d always told himself, with admittedly perverse logic, was a sort of favor to Perry Kandel: permitting his old teacher to imagine he’d welcomed him back into the world. It was a lark. Plus the notion of the New Belmont Specials suggested a sort of limited engagement, a run to some conclusion. But to make this call and keep this appointment was to grant that he’s a paperback painter now, a commercial artist. And being welcomed so eagerly here meant despite the contempt dripping from his brush he’d done acceptable work. The seduction of craft had led here, to the seduction of praise. In the elevator he’d sworn he’d heard Perry’s bitter wheezing laughter.

What the other father doesn’t say is that though he envies these men dressed as cartoon pimps and superheroes their freedom, that though a part of him thinks Shit, why didn’t I haul out the overt freak shit myself, why did I always stay so buttoned down in the goddamn Philly system , another part just doesn’t think the singing and playing on the backing track is any good. Funk is soul on acid, for better and for worse; today worse. This track sprawls to no purpose, slack, in its way, as disco. Pornographic disco, that’s really what it is. He’s expected to doodle over a harmonizing backdrop but the harmonizing isn’t any good, and for the first time since leaving the Subtle Distinctions he misses their sweet uptight voices, the way they provided him such a smooth clean cushion of sound from which to launch his rhapsodies, his flights.

You want a cup of coffee? It’s not too bad, actually.

Hey man, food’s gonna get here. Need a little blow?

Something the matter?

Just say what you need, man.

Fathers, fathers, why so grim? Today you emerged from your houses, your hiding, and were warmly welcomed. Smile, fathers. Relax. Today this world wants you in it.

At the end of another winter, lion giving way to lamb, he comes to lie there one day in the long sun and shadows and stays for good, curled into a ball at the corner of Atlantic and Nevins, at a spot on the pavement just short of the street, in front of the never-closed liquor store and the never-open locksmith. Fouled in himself, baked in vomit and urine and sweat, his pants black with it, he lies still as a bog man or mummy preserved in a glass case, eyes shut and mouth rigid, arms wrapped around his middle, fighting the chill of one week before, when he first took the position. He’s huddled as if against time itself, enduring the winter that’s already past, his pose a record of pain, a full-body grimace frozen in sunlight. Over his shoulders and tucked under his ass is a child’s thin synthetic sleeping bag, feeble cover though if he’s alive it must have gotten him through. The sleeping bag’s two corners are peeled away in torn strips, exposing cottonoid filler stained gray with street filth, and the two strips meet in a knot under his white-grizzled chin, so the thing weirdly resembles a superhero’s cape.

The flying man, grounded for the foreseeable future.

Guy looks dead if you ask me.

How? Why’s it allowed? Isabel Vendle’s Boerum Hill was declared “The City’s Best-Kept Secret,” New York Magazine , September 12, 1971. Gentrification-say the word, nothing to be ashamed of, only what’s this alcoholic coma victim doing here in plain sight? How likely no one expresses concern or touches his shoulder to see if he still moves, still lives, how likely no one even calls the cops?

Is it because he’s black?

Maybe Atlantic Avenue between Nevins and Third isn’t quite Boerum Hill. Maybe it’s Gowanus or some other thing without a name. Anyway this gentrification is strange and slow and not at all as coherent as Isabel Vendle might have hoped. There’s a cluster of antique shops now on Atlantic between Hoyt and Bond, new families on Pacific and Dean, Bergen too. Not Wyckoff, Wyckoff ’s too close to the projects, no point hoping. Then there’s the communes. Assuming no one stashes Patti Hearst in a Dean Street basement they’re harmless enough, an acceptable placeholder. Some eager beaver’s opened a French restaurant on Bergen and Hoyt, jumping the gun perhaps but worth a shot. Even State Street, so close to Schermerhorn and the House of Detention and the eye-agonizing blight of downtown Brooklyn, even State’s got a tender little boomlet of brownstone renovation.

Yet it exists under a spell, a pall. The white families appear continuously these days, now too many to count, but collectively they’re still a dream, a projection conjured up by Isabel’s will. The renovators-that’s a politer word for them-they’re a set of ghosts from the future haunting this ghetto present. They’re a proposition, a sketch. Blink and they might be gone.