Jonathan Lethem - The Fortress of Solitude

Upstairs, I’d lain tripping on misery for what felt like hours. So I expected the lobby to be empty. Instead it was full of gabbling Forbiddenoids. So was the hotel’s bar. I crept in, easily dodging the usual collisions. I’d become a skilled invisible man ten years before, and the expertise was ready in me.

The convention’s denizens surrounded the bar’s round tables in gathered chairs, groups of ten or fifteen. Their conversations had a sprung, argumentative quality, like regurgitated panel discussions. But they were human; they imbibed, galed with laughter. Some would probably pair off tonight, like the crocodiles. I was glad to be invisible. The bar itself, an island in the center, was mostly empty. I overturned a glass of melted ice at one end to make a diversion, then, as the bartender groused over to swab it up, snuck behind him to grab a third-full bottle of Maker’s Mark. As I clutched it to my chest it was enclosed in my transparency. I tiptoed back through the lobby. Paul Pflug was there, pinned on a couch between identical women in leather bustiers, and high-laced boots not so unlike Abby’s. I toasted him with the invisible bottle, then brought the whiskey up to my room, to render invisible by other means.

Ten was too early, but at least the room was dark. My father dithered angrily, threading the projector, insisting on doing it himself, while the pair of hotel staff who’d wheeled it into the room were exiled to one side. I sat with Francesca in the front row, unable to completely avoid the knowledge that only a scattered fifteen or twenty filled the seats behind us, in a room which wanted a hundred. The audience waited patiently, more patiently than I. Some drew orange juice from small boxes through straws, others munched Danish. Zelmo wasn’t in evidence, not yet.

Under my starchy lids a film of hangover already played. I’d barely showered and made it out of the room in time to find Wyoming Ballroom B. I was relying on coffee and a bagel on the plane, for now an Advil from Francesca’s purse. My floppy bag was repacked and stuffed under my chair, Aaron Doily’s ring returned to my pocket. The emptied bottle of Maker’s Mark I’d hidden in the minibar-it took some jostling to get it inside.

“I’ll show two sequences,” my father explained, beginning without any warning. “The first is from 1979 to 1981 and lasts twenty-one minutes. The second is more recent, from 1998. About ten minutes, I think. If it’s all right I’ll leave any remarks or questions for the end.”

No one objected. No one but myself or Francesca could have known a reason to. The small population of hardcore Ebdus fans shifted in their chairs with that rote hushed excitement which proceeds the start of any film, even one shown at ten in the morning in the Wyoming Ballroom of the Anaheim Marriott. They had no idea.

I cared about the film. What choice did I have? I’d cohabited with that presence longer than any other, apart from my father himself. In my childhood life the film was a sort of crippled, mute god, one nursed upstairs like a demented relative. I knew the twenty-one-minute 1979-81 section well-I’d attended its one other public screening, at the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley, four years ago, and watched it twice in practice runs during the same week. It was a sequence Abraham thought particularly definitive. A landscape lit by an unseen moon, the horizon splitting the screen, the ground brighter than the sky-though Abraham would have rejected the terms “landscape,” “horizon,” and “ground.” Nevertheless: the sky gray-black, the ground gray-gray. The effect more or less that of a thousand late-period Rothkos, stacked in time, and vibrating in projected light. The years 1979 to 1981 were just two in a half-dozen when Abraham had painted this one image-black and gray wrestling in fierce tandem. The ground might rise, or roll slightly, as though an ocean had swelled and waved. The black might leak from the sky and briefly roll across the lower frame-the moments when it did were shocking action in the dazzling, dancing stillness. Just once a red-and-yellow pulse moved like an occluded sun behind the black, then dissolved in shards. Had Abraham secretly gotten his ashes hauled that particular week, so long ago? I’d never dared ask.

As it happened, I was reasonably sure that the twenty-one-minute segment included my sole contribution, a single frame I’d forged one day after school, during my senior year. I’d come home to find Abraham out, perhaps shopping. Later I couldn’t remember the exact circumstances, only the compulsion which had come over me, to sneak into his studio and paint the frame. Abraham’s brushes were wet-he’d just been working. The empty frame was centered in the sprockets, and I would only have to ratchet it one position farther to conceal my addition. The chance was handed to me on a platter, but still I barely dared. With a loaded brush tip I trembled over the frame, not setting the pigment down: the irreversible act. I was terrified of authority -not Abraham’s, but my own.

I painted it-laid down black, laid down gray. Then broke out in a fearful sweat and fled the scene. I spent a week waiting to be accused, and wasn’t. Whether I was caught I’d never know. My father was more than capable of detecting the forged frame and opting not to speak. Leaving it in or splicing it out, but saying nothing. Now, though, I permitted myself to imagine he’d left it in. One twenty-fourth of a second in twenty-five years: mine.

Now I cadged a painkiller from Francesca and tried to ignore the pressure of my dehydrated brain against the top of my eyeballs. The room was silent apart from the film’s clicking passage and the whine of the projector’s fan. It was hard to give the film its due (whatever that was), between hangover and my sense of Abraham, back with the projector, watching us watch from across a distance of empty seats. Hard not to feel his disappointment in this venue on the back of my neck. I waited for that one strange flare of yellow and red: there it was. Twenty-one minutes passed.

“This is how your father tortures these people who love him,” whispered Francesca. “By subjecting them to such darkness.”

I didn’t reply. I could have used even more darkness at the moment.

The second excerpt was a surprise. A dispatch from the frontier: my father had discovered a green triangle with blunted corners, one trying and failing to fall sideways against the phantasmic, blurred horizon.

The triangle occupied perhaps a quarter of the frame’s area. It trembled, tipped a degree, nearly kissed earth, jumped back. Progress was illusion: two steps forward, two steps back. Impossible, though, not to root for it. To feel it groping like a foot for purchase. Daring, hesitating, failing.

I was unexpectedly moved, forgot the room, forgot my headache, suddenly wept for the triangle’s efforts, a tragedy in no acts. Francesca handed me a tissue from her purse. Prisonaires, triangles, I was a pushover these days. Then it was done, and the lights came on. No one clapped-they’d forgotten how, or perhaps the film had persuaded them to fear that their hands, urged together, would fail to meet.

Zelmo Swift appeared at the front and taught us to be brave: a clapping sound could indeed be produced. He led the way. We applauded and my father came to the front, was seated before another microphone, though he hardly needed it to be heard in the sparse room. The few questions that came were either timid or inane. Abraham took them politely.

“Have you ever considered adding a soundtrack?”

“You mean conversation? Or music?”

“Uh, music. It would give you something to listen to.”

“Yes, it would do that. And then, yes. We’d be listening to music.” He paused. “It’s something to think about.”