Jonathan Lethem - The Fortress of Solitude

Cut to Aaron X. Doily, passing through this same bus station a week later. He’s got a bus ticket for Syracuse pinned into the breast pocket of one of Abraham Ebdus’s old herringbone jackets, one Abraham wore to Franz Kline’s last one-man show during Kline’s lifetime, as it happens, and this jacket is stretched tight as a canvas and near to splitting across Aaron Doily’s shoulders. In Syracuse he’ll be met by the local Salvation Army and installed in a shelter, given three squares and a bunk on the guarantee of his attendance at the local Alcoholics Anonymous, where among the hard-bitten, laid-off-lathe-operator types he’ll be the sole black face. That’s if he gets aboard the Syracuse bus; see him now, eyeing the ticket counter, knowing he could probably cash the ticket. Bottle of Colt’s in five minute’s reach, easy. But let’s not truck in false suspense: Aaron Doily finds strength to bypass this possibility, boards the bus. Sits blinking atop the humming engines in the dark garage, absently twisting with his right thumb and forefinger a phantom ring on his left pinky. He’s uncertain how and when he lost the ring but figures it might be just as well gone. Let’s leave him, he’s no mysterious flying man anymore, just an incomprehensibly lonely alcoholic with a funny name, risen from pavement in spring to find himself restored to the daily world, sponge-bathed clean and tagged with a plastic wristband, now pointed out of town.

Peek ahead further, another two weeks: there’s Dylan Ebdus himself climbing aboard a bus, destination sign reading SAINT JOHNSBURY, VERMONT. Abraham Ebdus nodding goodbye through the tinted pane. Abraham’s got a grudge against the city these days, and a new penchant for exiling those he wishes to protect, first the detoxified Doily and now his own son, to the north, to New England ’s countryside. Dylan’s signed up to be a Fresh Air Fund kid this summer. What was good enough for Rachel, a Fund-ee back in the fifties, ought to be good enough for Dylan. This scheme she would have approved; father and son both sense it, impossible not to. Abraham’s hunch will seem brilliant after the July blackout, the subsequent looting and mayhem which comes as near as Ramirez’s bodega, whose sprays of smashed shopwindow will be kicked up and down Dean’s slate for days after, and the spree and capture of Berkowitz. These give that season an air of disaster, and Dylan, safe in his idyll, will miss it.

But wait, Dylan’s not bound for Vermont, not yet. He’s not even thinking about it. Today’s the first morning after the last afternoon of seventh grade. Spring is sprung, and so is he. I.S. 293 is behind Dylan Ebdus for now, he can go three months not crossing Smith Street if he likes. Eighth grade’s a distant rumor, a tabled issue, and Dylan knows from experience that the summer between might change anything, everything. He and Mingus Rude too and even Arthur Lomb for that matter are released from the paint-by-numbers page of their schooldays, from their preformatted roles as truant or victim, freed to an unspoiled summer, that inviting medium for doodling in self-transformation. Who knows how it’ll come out, what they’ll resemble by the end of it? All Dylan knows is he’s giddy, loosed, flying.

It’s flying how far that remains to be seen.

Today, first day of freedom, he’s keeping a date with himself. Abraham’s out so Dylan’s free to climb the ladder out of the painting studio, unhook the hatch to their roof and push it aside, crawl out across the mushy tar paper into the new summer’s morning.

Dylan wouldn’t have said he feared heights, but the brownstone’s roof has always made him dizzy, not so much the view to the ground as the view across rooftops, out to Coney Island and beyond. Easier if you gaze on Manhattan’s towers. Those place you, fix you in a firm relation of puniness and awe. Easier still to kneel at the roof’s edge, hands gripping the ankle-high rim of masonry, and stare down at the contents of your own yard: ailanthus, brick pile, shoots of weed, a dirty spaldeen you can just make out like a speck of flesh. The grainy reality is reassuring.

What’s unsettling is to put Manhattan at your back and face the borough. Up from the canyon floor, out of the deep well of streets, gazing out into the Brooklyn Beyond is like standing in a Kansas prairie contemplating distance. Every rooftop for miles in every direction is level with that where you stand. The rooftops form a flotilla of rafts, a potential chessboard for your knight-hops, interrupted only by the promontory of the Wyckoff housing projects, the skeletal Eagle Clothing sign, the rise of the F-train platform where it elevates past the Gowanus Canal. Manhattan’s topped, but Brooklyn’s an open-face sandwich in the light, bare parts picked over by pigeons and gulls.

A sky full of pigeons and gulls and you standing there with a flying man’s ring on your finger.

Dylan stands at the front edge, as close as he’s stood, then closer. Shifts a toe onto the cornice, bends his knee like George Washington in the prow. He can just see down into the pit of Dean Street, the tops of new-planted trees, the roof grilles of the passing bus, but the feeling’s vertiginous. He steps back. No good staring and daring yourself: the will to fly sours, leaks away. That may have been Aaron Doily’s mistake. It needs a running start, a glorious oblivious leap to the opposite rooftop, not the dying quail of a fall that would surely result from long and woozy contemplation.

Close your eyes, reach out and feel the air waves , if there are any. Use the force, Luke.

Okay, okay. Dylan charts with backward steps an invisible runway he’ll retrace. Five steps ought to be enough. He’s retreated to the center of the roof. Anyone watching would think he was cowering, but it’s just the opposite-he’s spring-loaded, expecting to fly. Then, as though smacked by a vast hand from the sky, he crumbles to his knees in terror of the thing he’s proposed for himself. Fingers balled in one doubled fist around the ring, Dylan Ebdus huddles, shivers, and slowly and without resistance pees his pants. The urine runs inside his jeans leg to his ankle, drips into his sock and sneaker and onto the gummy, sun-warmed tar.

Here might be the ring’s only spell, to induce self-pissing.

Got to give it up to the flying man: it’s not that easy to throw yourself off a roof.

The Dean Street bus, unable to slip past the white stretch limousine double-parked in front of Barrett Rude’s place, nestled at its bumper instead, humming like a refrigerator, traffic behind stacking to Bond Street. The bus carried just two passengers, one intermittently asleep, but the thing still had its dumb round to make, its loop. The driver kneaded his horn, bleats cutting the drowsy, humid afternoon. The chauffeur had abandoned the limo, snuck to Ramirez’s for a bottle of Miller and a ham-and-cheese.

So anyone on the block not already eyeballing the limo through parlor or upstairs windows was alerted to the anomaly, the bright unlikely event plopped into their June’s last afternoon. Nobody saw it come, but they’d be damned if they weren’t going to see it go, to learn who’d climb inside. Men on stoops wrinkled new bags open just to the lips of bottles, no farther. Women leaned clubby arms on sills, watching for something to unfold. Behind a basement window grille La-La knit Marilla’s hair in cornrows, jerking her head back with increasing force until Marilla said, “Dang! You got a problem?”

A white man with a rake scraped a day’s new crop of wrappers and bottle caps out of his forsythia, muttering under his Red Sox cap.

Abraham Ebdus daubed gray on a frame of celluloid, totally unaware.

Dylan missed the limousine too. He sat sequestered in ailanthus shade in his backyard, speedily turning the pages of The Pod Thickens , a New Belmont Special written by Semi Chellas, cover art by A. Ebdus.