Jonathan Lethem - The Fortress of Solitude

Abraham didn’t speak, just nodded as the others alternated on the microphones. But his distaste for whatever it was Vundane and Pflug had accomplished-or failed to-was painfully obvious. For that matter, it was unmistakable that nobody on the dais liked Pflug. I wondered how he’d come to be invited.

“I’ve told this story many times,” said Buddy Green. “I was trying to trace the provenance of the original art for the Belmont Specials-his first seventeen paintings. They weren’t in the hands of any of the major collectors. They weren’t in the hands of any of the minor collectors. Unfortunately, they weren’t in my hands. I kept writing to the Belmont people and they said they didn’t know what I was talking about. I thought they were stonewalling . So, being a little slow on the uptake, it finally occurred to me to ask Abraham. And he explained, like it was no big deal, that he destroyed them. He couldn’t imagine anyone cared.”

Abraham’s eyes scoured the crowd, looking for me, I permitted myself to imagine. I wondered how it felt to hear those called his first seventeen paintings .

“It’s true,” said Sidney Blumlein, with great avuncular gusto. “When I hired him away from Belmont, Abe was systematically destroying the work.”

This drew oohs and aahs, a kind of titillated awe from the crowd.

“This man is the only one your father respects,” whispered Francesca. “None of the others. Not even Zelmo.”

“Zelmo?”

“The chair. I mean, of the whole convention. You’ll meet him at dinner. He’s a very important lawyer.”

“Ah.”

Now the microphone was retaken by Blumlein, whom Francesca had claimed as Abraham’s only friend on the panel. Being moderator, Blumlein took it upon himself to prize open the jaws of the clam-to find a way to force Abraham Ebdus to acknowledge and address his admirers.

“For more than two decades Abe has graced our field, and I do mean graced. All well and good. But at this time of celebration there’s no reason to pussyfoot around the question-he’s done so at a remove. His background isn’t science fiction, and in that he’s an exception from the vast majority of professionals at this gathering, at any gathering in our field. We’re fans, our interests begin in the pulp-magazine tradition, however we might like to hope we’ve elevated it.”

Pflug sneered. Vundane took a pitcher and topped off his untouched glass.

The audience was stilled, silenced from its murmurs of approval and recognition, perhaps less certain now that everything they were hearing fell safely in the vein of an Elk Lodge testimonial dinner.

“Abraham Ebdus, let’s not kid ourselves, had no interest in elevating it. He was looking to make a buck to support his art-what he regarded as his real art. As perhaps some of you, perhaps many of you may know, Abe is a filmmaker, an experimental filmmaker, of terrific seriousness and devotion. This is how he spends his days, when he’s not painting jackets for books. It has nothing to do with science fiction. What’s miraculous-what we’re all here to celebrate-is that being a real artist, one of depth and profundity, Abe brought to the books a visionary intensity that did elevate. That contained beauty and strangeness. Because he couldn’t help himself.”

I saw how well Sidney Blumlein knew my father. He was urging Abraham into the weird light of this roomful of celebrants, baiting him with the possibility of an audience worth addressing. I didn’t know whether I wanted him to succeed.

“This is what, Abe? Only your fifth or sixth time at a convention?”

My father hunched, seeming to wish he could reply with his shoulders. Finally he leaned into the microphone and said, “I haven’t counted.”

“I first dragged you to a LunaCon, in New York, in the early eighties. You weren’t happy.”

“No, it wasn’t to my taste,” said Abraham reluctantly.

The crowd tittered.

“And wouldn’t it be fair to say, Abe, you rarely if ever read the books under your jackets?”

Now a collective gasp.

“Oh, I’ve never done,” said Abraham. “I say it without apology. Mr. Vundane, your book, what was the title?”

“ Neural Circus ,” supplied R. Fred Vundane, his jaw so clenched it mashed the vowels.

“Yes, Neural Circus . I was always stopped by that title. It seemed, I’m sorry, vaguely distasteful to me. You speak of surrealists-I suppose you mean the poets. It feels a very poor shade of symbolist imagery, actually. Rimbaud, maybe? No, I was asked to envision other worlds, and I did. Any congruence with the work is happenstance.”

I’d read R. Fred’s book. I recalled a troupe of genetically altered acrobats residing in a hollowed asteroid.

Blumlein rode in to the rescue now, perhaps pitying Vundane, who’d shrunk even smaller in his chair. “This is just an example, I think, of the wider context, the erudition , that Abe brings to what he touches. In our field he’s a comet streaking past, whom we’ve managed to lure into our orbit. A fellow traveler, like a Stanley Kubrick or a Stanislaw Lem. He disdains our vocabulary even as he reinvents it to suit his own impulses.”

“I have to interrupt, Sidney, to say you’re overstating the value of what I do.” Here was a subject to rouse Abraham’s passion. “You throw names, Kubrick, Lem. And Mr. Green, god bless him, throws Virgil Finlay, whom I’ve never had the good fortune to encounter. Let me throw a few names. Ernst, Tanquy, Matta, Kandinsky. Once in a while, the early Pollock or Rothko. If I’ve accomplished one thing, it’s been to give a rough education in contemporary painting, or what was contemporary painting in 1950. The intersection of late surrealism and early abstract expressionism. Period. It’s derivative, every last brushstroke. All quoted. Nothing to do with outer space, nothing remotely . Honestly, if you people hadn’t put such a seal on yourselves, if you’d visit a museum even once, you’d know you’re celebrating a second-rate thief .”

“You stopped at pop art?” asked Blumlein.

“Please. You have Mr. Pflug for that. That’s all there was when I began doing jackets-pop art.”

Blumlein and Ebdus had begun to seem a kind of vaudeville act, scripted at the expense of the fall guys who’d made the mistake of joining them onstage. The audience ate it up.

“Yet here you are, Abe, among us. LunaCon wasn’t to your liking, but you’ve spent a career among us, sharing your gift. You’re the guest of honor .”

“Look, that’s fair. You want an explanation. It isn’t pretty. If I were a stronger person I wouldn’t be here. I’m tempted by flattery, so I come. My work on film is hardly known. It’s unknown . You people have been very kind, too kind. I’ve grown fond, despite myself. My companion enjoys travel. There isn’t one explanation, there are several.”

“Do you feel a part of the field, warts and all?”

Abraham shrugged. “It’s a bohemian demimonde, like any other. There are similar convocations in the world of so-called experimental film, but I’ve always declined to go. Some attend imagining they can further themselves. But the work, the true work, is of course carried on elsewhere. Perhaps for me the stakes there are too high, so I accept your invitations instead. I don’t ponder these things. An event like this is an accident, not necessarily a happy one. I frankly marvel at the oddness of a room gathered in honor of a forgotten man, a nobody. Perhaps I can wake you from the trance you’re in, but I doubt it.”

Fifty people laughed in delighted recognition, and a light spontaneous applause broke out. I heard a woman in the row ahead whisper appreciatively, “He always says that.”