Jonathan Lethem - The Fortress of Solitude

The strange and unfortunate Abraham Ebdus might actually be on to something, she admitted privately. Time was indeed a series of days, and the film of the block’s changing was as static as a series of hand-painted frames, considered singly. The New York Times had put her new name for the neighborhood into print, Boerum Hill -that was something. But Isabel Vendle wished to see the film in motion now, the frames run together, trees hurrying in the wind instead of dying in the humid stillness, the abandoned house unbricked and rescued. Growth, process, renovation. The only thing that moved on the block were the boys in the traffic, like insects skating on the surface of a still pond, the one white skimming among the black. The incinerator at the Wyckoff Houses housing project was on fire every other day, or so it seemed, a plume rose which the air refused to dissolve. A single man had bought the house with the terrible blue siding and threatened to renovate so slowly that it might as well be never. He lived in one room near the back and renovated from the inside out so that no one could tell the house wasn’t a ruin. It was a ruin, the block was hopeless, and Pacific Street was progressing more quickly than Dean. Isabel wished she could tear away the blue siding with her own hands, an idiotic thought, but nevertheless: she wished she could paste money over the blue siding which stung her eyes like ointment, wished she could slather money over Dean Street entirely, could bribe the man with the car with the painted flames to polish it on Pacific or Nevins instead or just to drive it into the Gowanus Canal. She didn’t actually have so much money as that. She had white paper and envelopes and stamps and days which refused to end-a thunderstorm might break the heat and an hour afterward the humidity clamped itself over the block again as though no thunder had struck. She wrote to Croft, who’d gotten another woman on the commune pregnant, I’m running out of days, Croft, or maybe not. I can’t tell if I’m any older than I was forty-seven years ago when as a mere girl the oar pierced my side and Croft you’re a fool . Croft to her was becoming a character in Graham Greene, The Heart of the Matter or The Comedians , Croft ought to be made to swelter on some imperial island, he ought to be brought up on charges by outraged local authorities.

It was hard to say when Robert Woolfolk began hanging around. He was from somewhere down Nevins Street, maybe the projects, maybe not. One day he was there on the stoop of the abandoned house, another day he sat on Henry’s low wall and looked at the girls. Then he got into a game or two, though he wasn’t really a game player. Robert Woolfolk was taller than Henry and could fling a ball as far but there was something disorganizing in him as a presence that broke games apart, some slangy way of moving his arms and head that could only throw football interceptions or roof a spaldeen. Once he stood a few feet from the implacable surface of the abandoned house, while a catcher waited in the street, and somehow hurled a spaldeen in such a way that it flew directly sideways to smash a parlor window in the house next door. Woolfolk could run, they agreed after that. He’d danced around the corner of Nevins, like Henry after pretending to be hit by the bus, seemingly before the glass rained out of its frame to the garden below, while the ball itself actually penetrated the window to be lost inside the house, an unheard-of accomplishment. The other kids stood gazing in a mixture of astonishment and defiance. They hadn’t been the ones to throw it, after all. Robert Woolfolk didn’t appear again for two weeks after his miraculous aberrant throw, during which time the landlord next door to the abandoned house had replaced the pane with a cardboard patch, then stood every day on his stoop for a week glaring at the afternoon players, who dispersed guiltily into football or tag or just pushing one another off Henry’s low concrete wall, glancing back at the landlord and muttering softly, too softly for the landlord to hear, “Damn, man. What are you looking at?” until the landlord wearied of his symbolic protest and hired a glazier to replace the patch with a new pane. Once the Dean Street kids felt it safe to wield a spaldeen again they spent an afternoon or two trying to reproduce something like the perverse and famous throw but couldn’t, the angle was sheerly impossible. When Robert Woolfolk came peering back around the corner they tried to involve him in the experiment but he refused for days, sulking around the edges of the game. When, finally made curious by their egging, Robert Woolfolk consented to touch a spaldeen again, it had an abrupt dampening effect. The kids scattered before he could approach the wall, traumatized by the possibility that his arm would shoot out again in its hectic way, and Robert Woolfolk was left to pocket their new spaldeen and go home, wherever that was.

Nobody seemed to know where Robert Woolfolk lived.

Robert Woolfolk might live in the projects and just not say.

Likely he did live in the projects.

“He’s got a fucked-up name,” said Henry one day, to nobody in particular.

“Who?”

“Will Fuck.”

“ Mother fuck,” added Alberto, sort of generically inspired. No one else spoke.

That was the whole conversation. The words floated away, or so you would have thought. But two days later Robert Woolfolk lurked on Henry’s stoop and everyone sensed the unsavory weight of his vigil there. You could read it in the noncommittal language of the kids staked out at various distances, nobody playing anything specific in the claylike, immovable afternoon. Henry stood especially proud and oblivious, slanting handball shots from inside his yard into the joint of the pavement at his low wall, not looking at Robert Woolfolk.

“Why don’t you come here for a minute?” said Robert. He was leaned back, one knee up, other leg sprawled with toe pointing inward, elbows braced on the stoop, shoulders up around his ears, hands dangling dangerously. He resembled a puppet with live eyes, his strings limp just for a moment.

“I’m right here,” said Henry.

“Why don’t you say my name again?”

The question was what alliance ran invisibly around the corner to Nevins Street, whose voice had found Robert Woolfolk’s ear, and where, and when. Each kid wondered and had to consider the possibility that he alone didn’t know, that the lines of force were visible to the others. The Dean Street kids were widened in that instant, a gasp of breath went in and out of the lung of summer just then. It made you dizzy to taste the new air.

“I never said your name.”

“So say it now.”

“Go home.”

When Robert Woolfolk undraped from the steps and bid at Henry it was like his famous spaldeen throw. You could never have predicted his one bony arm would wrap around Henry’s waist so that they crumpled, knees folding together like spooning lovers, Robert on top, to the pavement of Henry’s yard. Robert didn’t punch until they were on the ground, and then he kneed and punched maniacally, his eyes and mouth and whole face squeezed shut as if he were underwater, boxing a shark. Henry wriggled into a ball. For a moment the combatants were both viewed distantly, through a haze of watery interference. Then the silence broke with a rush, the fight bobbed up from its oceanic depths and the kids pushed in close to watch. How else would they have heard the strange whining sounds, the almost animal keening which came out of both of the bodies in Henry’s yard? You were learning something. That kids fought was understood but your chances to see it were still rare. The same sound might come out of your own body one of these days. It was worth a look, worth holding back a moment from breaking it up no matter what your sympathies, which anyway weren’t so clear. Then you broke it up, shouting “Breakitup! Breakitup!”-words that emerged by fluent instinct though you’d never spoken them before. In this case, Alberto dashed into Henry’s yard and pulled Robert off by his shoulders.