Jonathan Lethem - The Fortress of Solitude

Another asked about the progress of the film since the second excerpt. What did it look like now?

“I find a paraphrase almost impossible. Some progress has been made. You’d see a superficial resemblance to this sequence, I think.”

“Is the triangle-” This is what the questioner had really wanted to ask. “Is the triangle, uh, lower ? Has it finished falling?”

“Ah,” said Abraham. He paused a while. “The green, yes. It continues in its struggle. More or less as you saw.”

There was a hush within a hush.

“Will it ever -?” someone managed. The question on everyone’s lips. That unfinished falling had broken a lot of hearts, not only mine.

“I prefer not to speculate,” said Abraham. “That’s the daily task, in my view. A refusal to speculate, only encounter. Only understand.”

Zelmo, waiting in the wings, could stand it no longer. He swept up the microphone. “In other words, folks, stay tuned . Abraham Ebdus isn’t done yet. Pretty amazing.” Yes, the film had gone into extra innings, but Zelmo the Chair, Zelmo the Connoisseur, he wasn’t one of those philistines getting a head start to the parking lot, no sir.

With that the spell was broken. My father’s fans drifted from the ballroom, checking their pocket schedules. Maybe somewhere in the building R. Fred Vundane was seated on another panel, if they were lucky. Abraham hurried back to prevent the hotel’s employee from rewinding the film incorrectly, and Zelmo and Francesca surrounded me again.

“You’ve got a plane to catch,” Zelmo said merrily.

“There’s plenty of time.”

“Sure, but my car’s waiting downstairs. So-”

“You better go, dear,” said Francesca.

I was too blurry to fight. Zelmo was a thug by nature, and Francesca a thug of love, and together, in the name of convenience and some irritating secret agenda, they would cheat me of a half hour more in my father’s company. He’d fly back to Brooklyn and another year or decade would go by. But I’d made no use of the visit so far, and there wasn’t a lot of potential in half an hour at the Marriott, not with Zelmo and Francesca and my hangover all circling, making their claims. I slung my bag over my shoulder.

“Son.”

“Dad.”

“It was good to see you. This-” He waved. “Impossible.”

“The new segment was beautiful.”

He closed his eyes. “Thank you.”

We embraced again, two bird-men briefly touching on a branch. I’d showered but already reeked again of the liquor working through my pores. I wondered if my father thought I’d come to Los Angeles in the middle of a breakup, or a breakdown. I wondered if he’d be right to wonder.

Then I smudged Francesca’s face and was escorted downstairs, through the lobby, and into the backseat of Zelmo Swift’s chauffeured, window-tinted limousine.

Disneyland was distantly visible from the gray suburban freeway strip, a clutch of spires like a sinking ship in the industrial sea.

“You don’t like me,” announced Zelmo, with no regard for the driver’s hearing. On the leather-plush seat there was plenty of room between myself and the lawyer. I suppose it seemed I wanted to climb out the window.

“What do you want me to say?” I needed orange juice, a toothbrush, a blood transfusion, a Bloody Mary, Abigale Ponders, Leslie Cunningham, a Thneed, someone to watch over me, a miracle every day-anything but a moment of truth between myself and Zelmo Swift. I needed a volume knob on Zelmo Swift.

“Nothing. I’m doing this out of respect for your father and Francesca.” He took an envelope from his jacket and placed it beside my hand.

“What is it?”

“An accident. You’ll understand when you look. I go all out for my guests, Dylan. Whatever you might think of ForbiddenCon, it’s a moment in their lives, I like to make it a big one. We usually do a ‘This Is Your Life, Abraham Ebdus!’ kind of thing at the Saturday banquet. Surprise appearances from the past, very sentimental.”

I opened the envelope. A single sheet, two typed paragraphs. Some legal secretary’s notes, unsigned. Nothing official, but dry legalese aspiring to the official, language dead with indifference to its subject.

Ebdus, Rachel Abramovitz, conviction for forgery, conspiracy, Owensville Virginia, 10/18/78, sentence suspended. Subsequent arrest and indictment, Lexington, Kentucky, 5/9/79, accomplice armed robbery; bail flight, whereabouts unknown; warrant issued 7/22/79.

And:

Ebdus, Rachel A., last verifiable address, 2/75: #1 Rural Route 8, Bloomington, Indiana, 44605.

“I hope you don’t feel I was prying,” said Zelmo. “We have an excellent research staff at my firm. What they discover is out of my hands.”

“Why am I seeing this?” What I meant, really, was: Why am I learning this from you? Why in your limousine, Zelmo?

He understood. “Abraham wanted me to destroy it. He wasn’t interested. Francesca spoke to me privately.”

“So Francesca’s wishes prevailed over my father’s?”

“She’s well-intentioned, Dylan. She thought you had a right.” His voice rose to a declamatory, courtroom-finale level. “You shouldn’t be furious with her. It’s difficult coming into a family, knowing what’s right to do.”

I glanced at the sheet again, and felt Zelmo’s eyes on me. I wanted to fly at him in my rage, but I sat. Fuck you looking at? I wanted to ask, then throw him in a yoke.

But I sat, a white boy saying nothing.

“Forget it, if you want,” said Zelmo. “I’ll destroy the traces.”

“I don’t care what you do. Just don’t bother Abraham with it again.”

“Assuredly.”

I put the sheet in the envelope, the envelope in my bag. We fell to silence, Zelmo gratefully for once. I wondered if he’d ever been so little rewarded for what he regarded as his generosity.

Still, it was hardly his fault a legal researcher in his firm knew more about my life than I did.

Destroy the traces . I’d never tried to do that. Instead I’d lived in their midst for thirty years, oblivious, a blind man fancying himself invisible.

Perhaps every male animal has an idea what he’ll do with himself the evening of the day he comes home to a newly empty house-rooms which show signs, as mine did, of a hurried start to permanent departure. Perhaps every man has a consoling, self-abnegating fantasy lined up for such a moment, a rabbit hole down which to plunge. Anyhow, I did. I only had to stretch out on my daybed for a few hours, dozing slightly as light turned to dark in the trees outside, the jewel-case shambles of Abby’s tantrum still decorating the floor at my feet, to have my chance. Once night fell I only needed to change my shirt, splash water on my face, and walk a few blocks south through the cool evening to put my plan under way. My scheme of self-wreckage was that near at hand, that much in my back pocket all the time.

Shaman’s Brigadoon, on San Pablo Avenue, was a Berkeley institution, a dingy, poster-layered blues-and-folk nightclub where for some thirty-odd years black musicians in dark suits, narrow ties, and freshly blocked fedoras came to sit on a tiny stage and perform for an audience of white people wearing berets, fezzes, ponchos, and dashikis. As a music journalist known to Shaman’s longtime floor manager I could rely on being waved in free of charge. I always fulfilled the two-drink minimum at the candle-in-mason-jar tables, though-it was worth it for a seat nearer the stage, and lately for the sweet, slow-cooking flirtation I’d been engaged in with one of their typically zaftig young cocktail waitresses, a wide-faced, green-eyed, cigarette-raspy blonde seemingly just arrived from Surferville, named Katha.