Jonathan Lethem - The Fortress of Solitude

In fact, Dylan found Brakhage, when he spoke, enthralling, though he understood zip of what he said. Brakhage was charismatic and orotund and evoked Orson Welles on television. Like Welles he suggested a greatness both distant from itself and fully at rest, in this case scarcely bothering to taste the air of adulation in the room. The problem with the presentation was that Brakhage rarely spoke. He sat sipping water and blinking rapidly, examining the audience, remaining largely silent in favor of a panel of younger men who in laborious turns pronounced on the significance of Brakhage’s films. Their spiky, resentful tones failed at concealing (or were perhaps not designed to conceal) the implication that they alone understood the filmmaker’s work. Dylan was bored, as Rachel would have said, shitless .

“I would rather see my work as an attempt to clear aesthetic areas, to free film from previous arts and ideologies,” said Brakhage when he was permitted. His words rippled through the room, resonating in minds so straining toward their speaker that they practically boiled. Dylan felt it himself. He looked back at his father, who sat straining too, in love and anger toward the stage. “Perhaps to leave it clear to be of use to men and women of various kinds which might help evolve human sensibility.”

The fluorescent-lit, plaster-crumbled lecture hall in the Cooper Union basement was full to capacity now, to standing room only. Dylan twitched, but he wasn’t alone. The man in the seat beside him was tearing a Styrofoam cup into a thousand dandrufflike shreds which floated down to form a drift between his tapping feet. The Styrofoam-tearing man might have been in an agony of suppressing some question he wanted to cry out to the men on the stage. Perhaps he thought he belonged on the stage. Everywhere chairs creaked.

“I believe in song,” said Brakhage. “That’s what I want to do and I do it quite selfishly, out of my own need to come through to a voice that is comparable with song and related to all animal life on earth. I am moved at the whole range of songs that the wolf makes to the moon, or neighborhood dogs make, and I in great humility wish to join this.”

When the tension in the room was at its height and the Styrofoam cup had been wholly processed the shredder beside Dylan jumped up and shouted into the panel’s droning, “What about Oskar Fischinger? None of you are acknowledging Fischinger!”

Having thrown this gauntlet he stood trembling, perhaps expecting to find the crowd at his back, enraged, ready to rush the dais.

“I don’t think anyone’s denying Fischinger,” said one of the men on the panel, in a tone of draining sarcasm. “I don’t think that’s really the point at all.”

“Never mind Fischinger,” came another voice. It was Abraham Ebdus. He spoke from the corner of the room without rising from his chair, and more quietly than the shredder, who still stood. “Maybe at this point someone should mention Walther Ruttman.”

Silence on the podium, marked only by Brakhage’s slight and unsurprised nod, which seemed to say, Ruttman, yes, Ruttman . The shredder took his seat, humbled.

Then, from the back of the hall another cry pierced the breath-inheld tension: “Fuck Ruttman! What about Disney ?”

This brought a roar of relief, since no one actually relished the burden of understanding how little they knew of the careers of Fischinger and Ruttman. The moment was now lost in a calamity of babble and laughter. Then Brakhage smoothed everything, began taking questions from the crowd. Hostility slowly dissipated as the panelists were rendered equal to the audience by Brakhage’s authority. Silent, the younger men could be more-or-less forgiven for being onstage.

Forgiven perhaps by all but Abraham.

Afterward Brakhage was mobbed at the foot of the stage. Abraham found Dylan in the swirling mass of bodies, took his hand, and together they pushed to the exit. Dylan felt his father’s smoldering inarticulate fury, felt enclosed in it as in a cocoon as they descended the subway stairwell at Astor Place and as they waited on the platform, then boarded the 6 train, felt it shut them out against the other night riders, whose heads lolled with the train’s movements on the weary sticks of their bodies, felt it shut them against the whole city everywhere around them.

Dylan breathed his father’s embarrassment. Something had gone wrong in Abraham’s demonstration to his son of Brakhage’s greatness, and of his, Abraham’s, kinship with the great filmmaker, this man who was Abraham’s secret tutor, his North Star. Perhaps the hall had been too full. Perhaps it would have been too full if there had been even one other soul there apart from Brakhage and Abraham Ebdus and his son. The evening was essentially ruined as soon as it was obvious Brakhage wasn’t only not as lonely for recognition as Ebdus but wasn’t lonely for recognition in the least.

Or maybe it was just that asshole shouting Disney for an easy laugh.

The mood lasted as they waited at Brooklyn Bridge for the 4 train, that extra indignity of the 6’s refusal to bother entering Brooklyn, lasted as they emerged at Nevins to walk in silence toward Dean Street, toward their beds, oblivion for their demolished evening. It might have gotten them home, Abraham’s bubble of muted rage, if it hadn’t been for the tagged bum still in his self-clench on the corner of Atlantic.

Dylan glanced as they passed. The once-flying man’s mummified pose was unchanged, though he seemed nearer to the gutter now. DOSE gleamed on the billboard of his back, spotlit by the streetlamp.

Abraham Ebdus raised his eyes from his dark contemplation of the pavement at his feet and followed Dylan’s gaze to the bum’s back. He halted in his steps.

“What’s that?”

“What?” blurted Dylan.

“ That .” Abraham pointed, unmistakably, horribly, at the spotlit DOSE on the bum’s sleeping bag.

“Nothing.”

“What’s it say?”

“I don’t know,” said Dylan, hopelessly.

“You do,” said Abraham. “You write it on your notebook.” Certainty rose in Abraham’s voice, his fog of anger given shape. “I’ve seen it. That’s the word you and Mingus write on everything. You think I don’t notice ? You think I’m stupid ?”

Dylan couldn’t speak.

“Let me see your sneakers.”

Abraham Ebdus took Dylan’s shoulder, his hand clawlike, a startling assertion of force between them. Abraham’s disapproval or affection were usually aspects of a floating arrangement of father-notions, largely sonic: footsteps pacing overhead, a voice descending stairs. Abraham was a collection of sounds bound in human form by gloom.

Now they stood in the cool night on the corner of Atlantic Avenue, connected by Abraham’s grip. The streetlamp’s nimbus on the shape at their feet, a stinky outcropping of the gutter ignored for weeks and improbably come to human attention at last. Abraham turned Dylan by the shoulder and squinted to examine his son’s sneakers like evidence in a murder.

Eyes behind passing windshields could care less.

A block away, a whore paced to the corner of Pacific. She called to some old man walking a dog, no illusions, just out of boredom.

Spring was coming, though, a general thaw, she could feel it.

“What’s that?” Abraham said, his grip fierce. “It’s the same, isn’t it?”

There was no way to hide. The fat white margin at the sole of each of Dylan’s Pro Keds was crammed with miniature tags. The mushy rubber took a blue ballpoint like butter under pressure of a fork’s tine, a discovery which had enraptured Dylan’s attention during a crushingly dull math class. Though technically he was destroying his prize 69ers, Dylan couldn’t stop himself. At least it rendered them not worth stealing.