Jonathan Lethem - The Fortress of Solitude

“Get out of my house, all of you.”

“ Shutup , faggit, I ain’t even talkin’ to you. Come over here, Dylan, what you got for me, man?”

Robert explores Dylan’s jeans with ancient and tender familiarity, seeming to find the wad of twenties, tens, and fives unremarkable, his due. These pockets and Robert’s fingers have journeyed on parallel tracks from Brooklyn for this unlikely rendezvous: Why shouldn’t something extraordinary come of it?

Then, sparing Dylan any violence or even the mildest of jibes about Rachel, Robert Woolfolk disappears the gun into his waistband, deep-muffled beneath a sweatshirt that’s nearly to his knees, and waves his homeboys to the door and out into the hall. Perhaps Robert’s forgotten the origins of the prohibition against his harming Dylan. Perhaps as in Chariots of the Gods he goes on obeying a deity he can no longer name or even properly recall.

All that’s heard is a last: “ Who the whiteboy, Robert? ” and the reply: “ Shutup, nigger .” And they’re gone.

Dylan stares at Tom in bewildered silence.

“Get out of my house.”

“But-”

“You brought this here, now get out .”

Dylan touches Liza’s shoulder and she slaps him away, expelling the cat in the same motion. Is it possible for a cat to have peed in fear at the sight of a gun? For the ammoniac stink seems nearer than the bathroom now, and Liza’s got a wet patch on her OshKosh B’Goshes.

Oh.

On the stoop comes the fear that Robert Woolfolk’s still around, that the episode’s not over. As the outer door clicks shut behind them Dylan’s vibrant with this possibility, a plucked string. But no, here’s Linus, just walking up nibbling the tip of a wax-papered slice and saying, “Hey, what’s the problem?” Dylan wants to turn to Liza and plead don’t tell but she floods past Linus, crying now, hands cupping pants seat where urine pooled, seeking the consolation of her gaggle-she never should have left their side, never should have come on this expedition, probably never should have graduated Dalton’s eighth grade and allowed her parents to talk her into taking the Stuyvesant test, the cheapskates. Dylan’s searching, almost hopeful, but Robert Woolfolk’s gone, there’s no trace, no proof, nothing but the tale he dreads to tell, the implausible, unworkable, unlikely confession.

Brooklyn ’s stranded thirty punks in an apartment unpsychedelicized and they’ll be needing an account of why.

Brooklyn ’s chased you to the ground and nobody’s going to comprehend except that you’re marked, cursed, best avoided.

Brooklyn ’s bepissed your blond destiny.

You’d strain pee from fishnets with your teeth to make it up to her but fat chance.

Maybe Liza Gawcet and Linus Millberg can be enlisted in the cause of explaining it to the others in Beatle-dynamic terms: how Dean Street ’s George Harrison tonight spared the life of Dean Street ’s Paul McCartney. If you’re willing to tell it all-Mingus Rude, Arthur, Robert, Aeroman-it might be enough, one hell of a story, worth two hundred bucks, an acid trip of its own. But that’s an awful lot of telling, and it opens to realms you’ve diligently left gray to yourself. Be real: it ain’t gonna happen.

The four-track recorder was secure at the pawnshop on Fourth and Atlantic Avenues, not in the window but deep in the back, on the shelves behind the counter. It would wait for him there: Who’s got use for a four-track hereabouts? The tapes themselves were stashed beneath the loose floorboard under the water bed, along with pipe, silk rope and handcuffs, gun, and assorted drug detritus, though nothing left to smoke or snort or he would’ve smoked and snorted it. At times he was unsure whether the tapes weren’t actually blank, whether he’d demoed any of those compositions floating through his mind. Elsetimes he was positive he slept above a McDuck vault of riches, future sonic gold.

Either way, nobody pillaging the basement closet was gonna find shit, whether pillager came through a window or door or was already there, an inside man, a mole. They’d have to storm his citadel upstairs. If someone were to force him to reach inside his stash hole it wouldn’t be magnetic tapes he’d come up with in his hand, it’d be the forty-five.

And he didn’t mean no seven-inch record. Damn straight.

The Times Plaza Hotel was on the way back from the pawnshop and that was where he stopped on his way home, figuring to buy himself a treat out of the fresh money. There was always some deal cooking in the lobby there. He’d only had to stop by twice, looking for Senior, to suss the general atmosphere.

“Hey, honey, I know you.”

“Nah, you’re mistaken. You don’t know me. But we can change that.”

“I know you because I know your daddy and your little boy. I just never seen you around here before, but I know you.”

“Baby, I come ’round here all the time, you just missed me.”

“You a singer .”

“That’s right.”

“See, I would of seen you if you come around before, because I know your daddy. He a religious man. He tole me all about you.”

“That so?”

“Mmm hmm. I don’t even want to tell you what he said though.”

“Maybe he told me about you too.”

“See, now you just talkin’ shit.”

“Listen, baby, you know these Trinidadian dudes come around here sometimes?”

“Maybe I do .”

He made it songlike and seductive, dropped register: “I know you know everybody, that’s the reason I ask.”

It’s 1981: nobody’s heard the term crack . They won’t for two or three years, at least. What’s slipped lately onto the street from Jamaica, Trinidad, from the Leeward and Windward Islands, is called variously base-rock , gravel , baking-soda base , and roxanne . The stuff’s not pure as home-cooked, and in a few years its erratic Columbia – Hollywood – New York -Caribbean- Miami -and-back genealogy will be neatly concealed by the new name. Crack will be eligible then to be taken for a deadly meteorite from an unknown planet, ghetto Kryptonite. In this current epoch of transition, though, confusion reigns. Some folks will tell you base-rock and freebase aren’t the same thing at all, and Barrett Rude Junior, who feels a certain proprietary interest- Shit, man, I was there at the birth, me and them Philly cats might of practically invented freebasing! -is half inclined to agree with them.

But the point wasn’t to debate chemistry or semantics or authorship. It would hardly be the first of his inventions for which he’d received no credit or royalties. The point now is to figure out what this woman calls the stuff and whether she can lay hands on any now.

“You gonna bring me to party along with you, girl?”

Party : the word was like Open Sesame . “Of course I am, baby. I just need you to show me where the party is at .”

Sometimes when you walked around the neighborhood now it was like you were already a visitor from the future.

The pavement, the slate’s not changed, but though you’d never flown higher than one precocious spaldeen catch you might be drifting now, a released balloon, too far off to discern distinctive cracks formerly memorized, let alone rain-rinsed skully ghosts.

Three college applications were in the mail, Yale an unlikely joke, UC Berkeley a safety net at Abraham’s urging but he’d never go, Camden the only one he cared about, with its weird disreputability and allure of pure dollars. If a kid from Gowanus goes to the most expensive college in America maybe he’s from Boerum Hill after all. If not Brooklyn Heights.