Jonathan Lethem - The Fortress of Solitude

Desmond Crowell, standing over by the sink where Horatio was cooking up some base in a glass tube, laughed like a horse.

“Yeah, that’s funny, Barrett,” said Mingus softly.

“Don’t go calling me Barrett, boy. Look at you, all in your hippie Vietnam shit. You ought to be stealing my clothes .”

Yolanda returned to the couch where the girls were arrayed and Mingus was stranded on the long fringe of the rug. The album side was finished, needle crackling to the label, hollow clunk of the tone arm’s return, silence. Now all in the room grew attentive, the birthday concept perhaps penetrating dim brains at last. Or else they’d sensed a crackle in the air, summer lightning. Barry felt rebuked and scorned, though he’d hardly alerted Mingus to his plans. But such feelings lay beyond sense.

You commune with a boy in genetic vibrations and no one but you knows the full history, not even the boy himself who wasn’t born when vibes originated.

The mother half of vibes being an uncontrolled factor.

Under his grubby clothes Mingus was a hunch-shouldered man. Lean, coiled, his eyes slanting to the street where he’d likely rather be. When had Barry last looked him over? Couldn’t say. Not looking was a reciprocal deal, struck who-knew-when. He didn’t want to picture himself in his son’s eyes-or for that matter in the eyes of the girl Yolanda-him with his fingernails grown horny, pudding thighs, thickened neck veiled in muttonchop whiskers. Only cocaine kept him from bloating up entirely, turning into some fleshy Isaac Hayes cartoon.

He should be dancing around the room, instead he felt weighed to the chair, a thousand pounds of ballast.

It was that world-feeling coming over him again. That was the only way he’d ever been able to describe it.

“Only fooling on you, Gus, lighten up. Take a seat. We’re here to toast a man’s birthday, people. Desmond, put on a damn record.”

Mingus twisted on his sneaker soles in the middle of the rug.

“You got one of your friends hiding downstairs? Don’t be all furtive now, bring ’em up.”

“Nope, just-”

“See, Yolanda, Mingus digs white boys.”

He just said it, no big thing, let it mean what it wanted to mean. Silence, though, had crept over everything, bugging him. The room was full of ions, thunderstorm stuff, and Barrett Rude Junior felt himself to be a massive leaden presence. He ought to dance but there was no music, and as his world-feeling increased his forearms and thighs seemed to grow mountainous. If the girl Yolanda came to him she’d be like a mewling kitten, crawling on the landscape of him. On a television nature show a kangaroo’s pink larva had squirmed from birth to pouch, the parent a planetary form. That was his proportion now. The longer he didn’t get off his ass the bigger he grew.

Mingus just stood, playing at being eerie like the kid in The Shining , mooning at his father.

Meantime something good was happening over at the sink, a sizzled stink, a smell with promise. It buoyed him immediately, made him want to sing.

“Don’t immolate yourself in some Richard Pryor deal, now, Horatio. Get that pipe loaded up and bring it here. And pick some music, Desmond, you good-for-nothing flunky. Gonna write you a theme song, Good-fo-nuthin’ flunky man, he can’t book me a gig I bet somebody else can -”

Perhaps motivated to stop Barrett’s improvisation Desmond at last picked a new record. Prince’s For You , nothing too grating.

If Barry wasn’t looming in size like a bloated planet, Horatio and Desmond and Mingus and the girls all tiny and floating in orbit around him, everything would be fine.

“Desmond, I ever tell you about how this feeling comes on me, like I’m getting bigger while everyone else is getting small?”

“Nah, man.” Desmond sounded baffled.

“We all gonna be gettin’ small ,” said Horatio. “Nothin’ wrong with that.”

“My former wife the mother of this boy here used to tell me I was getting grandiose , but there’s nothin’ grand about it. Just at times I feel like my fingertips is a thousand miles away.”

“ Crazy , man,” said Desmond, afraid of saying anything specific or controversial.

“Yeah, crazy,” said Barrett Rude Junior, seeing the futility in trying to explain. “It’s some crazy shit all right. Yo, give the kid his present, ’Ratio.”

“What?”

“Don’t play like you don’t remember.” His voice crept from within the tomb of his chest and made its way into space, where the curvature of his own ears retrieved and confirmed it. He trusted that he’d actually spoken.

Eyes widened, Horatio came from behind the kitchen counter and reached in his inner vest pocket for the slip of folded foil, the gift he might have been unsure Barrett Rude Junior wasn’t joking about. He’d prepared it anyway: never could have too much product on you, partying with Barry.

“They you go. A gram of your own. You don’t have to go jumping out no trees now.”

Mingus only stared.

“That’s for you, take it. You want a line now Horatio cut you up some of his.”

Mingus slipped the packet into his baggy thigh pocket and shook his head.

“Happy Birthday. You a man now.”

Then Barrett Rude Junior, swimming back inside himself, his voice and mind more and more a speck within the sea of his body, saw the gift was incomplete. Sure Mingus was ungrateful, he should be. The gram wasn’t enough. His father had to give him the girl, Yolanda. Barry had no use for her himself, not tonight with these brick-heavy limbs. The girl would be crushed if he somehow mounted her. And if she offered him head she’d be undetectable, miles off, beneath the horizon of the real. Tonight was the boy’s turn.

“Horatio, you done already? Bring me the pipe because I swear like Old King Cole I’m too damn lazy get out this chair. Hey, Yolanda?”

“Yes?” she said, surprised to be named by him now, a bit prim.

“How’d you like to go downstairs and check out Gus’s crib?”

He’d spoken easily, like she’d know his thinking, one thing flowing from the next. But nobody else saw the essential grace of the handoff, father to son. They all got on him at once.

Yolanda said, “What’s that supposed to mean?” She didn’t leave the couch, but crossed her legs, guarding the prize, and angled her body resentfully to the door.

“That’s fucked up, Barrett,” said Mingus in a low and pitying tone.

“Barry, be cool,” added Horatio, like he had any say in this house.

“I don’t mean anything, relax y’all. Damn. What if I make you a bet, though? How old are you, little Yo- landa ? If you’re closer to his age than mine, what about you go downstairs? Do a few lines of birthday blow with my son, it’s only fair.”

“She can’t,” said Mingus flatly.

“Wait up, Gus, let’s hear from the girl. What about it, baby? Year of the Dragon or Rat or what?”

“You’re a sweet-looking man, Mingus,” said Yolanda defiantly, refusing to look at Barrett. Her voice was layered with sex, mothering, other mystical woman shit meant to shame Barry and let him know what he’d missed. For he’d missed it, blown it, she was gone. “Don’t let your father ruin your birthday for you. I’ll come see your room if you want.”

But Mingus ignored her. “She can’t come downstairs,” he said again.

“Why is that?” said Barry.

“Senior’s in the front. I heard him in there.”

“He snuck back in?”

“What you expect? You didn’t take his key.”

Barry was resigned to the world-feeling now. This was how it felt: he’d become a planet and his population swarmed like gnats, flitting in and out of sight. So his old man was back, the skulker! Senior’d done something to get himself in bad with the pimps and dealers running the Times Plaza Hotel, talked some girl into his room and tried to baptize her, or maybe just fulminated too long in the lobby-anyhow, got himself unwelcomed, then crept back here to the basement. Mingus and Senior were two of a kind, creatures ungrateful by nature and grown as remote from him as his own distant hands. Horatio, Desmond, son, father, pussy, gold records, all flew in a cloud, godforsaken and tinny.