Jonathan Lethem - The Fortress of Solitude

Barrett Rude Junior couldn’t be dead, I was certain of that. I’d have heard. Rolling Stone would have called on me to write the obit-my guess was they’d ask for about four hundred words.

“His kidneys collapsed,” said Abraham simply. “Awful. They came in an ambulance. He was on a machine to keep him alive.”

The subject was too remote, and perhaps too vivid, for Zelmo Swift. He threw another conversational gambit at Leslie and Francesca, and my father and I were left to ourselves.

“He’d been alone in the place for weeks, basically dying there. Nobody on the street had any idea. He’s lived among us so long, but since the shooting, he’s very rarely out of the house.”

Abraham and I had never discussed what he called the shooting , either in the two weeks of summer that remained before I decamped to Vermont for college, or after. Mingus and Barrett had left my name out of any conversations with the police. My presence in their house that day had been kept secret from anyone but themselves, so far as I knew.

I recalled for the thousandth time those heaps of white powder- of course his kidneys collapsed. What had they been waiting for? I began writing those four hundred words in my head.

“At that point a miracle occurred. Your friend Mingus was found. In a prison upstate. They got a court order, and he was released to a hospital, to give a kidney.”

“ What? ”

“They made a special provision-Mingus was the only possible donor. He saved his father’s life by submitting to the operation. And was returned to prison.”

I brought my wineglass up, a phantom toast, then sucked down what remained inside. Behind the glass my head was heating, and my throat tightening, so I nearly choked on the mouthful of Burgundy.

“So, Mingus is back inside,” I said.

“You thought he wasn’t?”

“Last I knew, Arthur said he was out. But that was maybe ten years ago, more. I don’t know what I thought, honestly.”

“Barry is a very sweet man,” said Francesca, leaning in, selecting her moment. “Very quiet. I think he’s awfully sad.”

“You know him?” I managed. Why shouldn’t she? It all seemed equally likely now. A mist fogged my glasses.

She nodded at Abraham. “Your father and I bring him food sometimes. Soup, chicken, whatever we’ve got extra. He doesn’t eat. Sometimes he just sits, out on the stoop. Sometimes he sits in the rain . The people on the block don’t know him. Nobody talks to him. Only your father.”

“Excuse me,” I said, and tossed my napkin on my chair. I was able to reach the men’s toilet before I wept or vomited into my meatballs. I was unwilling to brandish this new misery of mine before the lawyer who appreciated single-malt scotch and Forbidden Planet . Let my tears remain occult, elusive, seldom seen, ineligible for display in Zelmo’s Museum of the Pathetic alongside R. Fred Vundane.

He saved his father’s life by submitting to the operation . Every once in a while, every decade or so, I was forced to know that Dean Street still existed. That Mingus Rude wasn’t a person I’d only imagined into being. I took a minute to be shamed and then I pushed Mingus back to where he’d been, where he always was whether I bothered to contemplate him or not, among the millions of destroyed men who were not my brothers.

Then I rinsed my glasses, blew my nose, and returned to the table, where through the latter courses I ignored my father and Francesca, though they were my only reason for being there. Instead I did my honest best to get potted on expensive cognac and to demolish Leslie Cunningham with my wit and charm, my roguish innuendo. I think I might even have made an impression on her, but it was all wasted on Zelmo Swift. I would have had to bend her over the table to dent his implacability.

Zelmo took me aside as we rose from the table. My father had wandered off to the men’s room. “You’re staying for the film tomorrow?”

“Of course.”

“It means a lot to your dad.”

It must be hard to strangle a man using a bow tie. That might be the reason for them. “I’ll try not to do anything embarrassing,” I said.

Zelmo frowned as if to suggest he hadn’t been worried, but now would reconsider. “What time is your flight?”

“Right after.”

“LAX?”

“No, my flight’s out of Disneyland. Goofy Air.” The joke soured in my mouth; it was indebted to one of Abby’s, earlier this endless day.

“Har har. I’ll drive you, if you’ll let me.”

Maybe I’d had more to drink than I realized, but this confused me. “I can take a cab,” I said angrily.

“Let me save you the fare. We can talk.”

Then Francesca was beside me, whispering. “Go with him, Dylan.”

“Talk about what?”

“ Shhhh ,” said Francesca.

I lay on one of the Marriott’s twin doubles in my underwear and spun channels, watched crocodiles fucking and Lenny Kravitz. Twice I rolled over to the phone and punched in my number in Berkeley; twice I hung up on my own voice on the machine. I tried to focus my eyes on the Artforum photocopy.

– Ebdus abjures the comparison to the Wittgenstein-like protagonist of Thomas Bernhard’s Correction , who labors for years in the forest constructing a mysterious, unseen “cone,” just as he rejects any conceptual or philosophical reduction of the essentially material, “painterly” nature of his exploration. All in Ebdus’s work proceeds from the purely physical nature of pigment on celluloid, and of light through the gate of a projector. A more fertile comparison might be made to the decades-long, meditative (not to say obsessive) journey of modernist composer Conlon Nancarrow, who during a blacklist-inspired exile in Mexico explored the unique compositional possibilities of the player piano, developing a unique and painstaking method of hand-punching the rolls which operate the mechanical keyboard. Two or three years of Nancarrow’s effort was required to produce a five- or ten-minute composition, a rate only marginally slower than that of Ebdus in his painted film…

I was glad for my father, but my attention wasn’t held. My sick heart swirled with distraction. When I closed my eyes it felt as if Mingus Rude was in the room, perhaps on the second bed or in the bathtub. I borrowed from some grisly urban legend an image of a man packed in ice, robbed of his kidney by a gang of organ bandits. Alternately, despite a room party chattering and clunking through the wall, and the fact of my own father in a suite five floors above, I felt the possibility that my hotel room was detached in the void, a plush sarcophagus with cable television, drifting in space. This second hallucination jolted me from my daze on the bedspread, to reach for the key to the minibar.

I’d emptied my pockets on the dresser. Now I saw what was arrayed there. Beside the minibar key, the room’s keycard, and some crumpled dollars, lay Aaron X. Doily’s ring. I’d pocketed it that morning, to rescue it from Abby’s interrogation of my stuff.

I wondered if the ring still worked, and, if it did, whether its powers had changed again. Before I was done wondering I’d pulled on my pants and slipped the keycard into my pocket and the ring onto my finger. In bare feet I crossed the carpet to the door, and out into the corridor, to stand blinking in the bright light.

I couldn’t see my hands or feet, but then I was drunk too. It wasn’t until the elevator door opened and I stepped into its mirrored interior that I was certain. I was alone there, and the elevator’s cab appeared empty. I pressed my hands to the mirrors and blew breath around them, saw invisible fingers outlined in visible steam. No matter that I’d left the ring alone for years: this was still its power. Mine, when I chose to wear it.