Jonathan Lethem - The Fortress of Solitude

“You wanna meet Matt?” Jane asked, as Katha parked.

“That’s just her polite way of saying goodbye,” said Deirdre from the front. “Jane and Matt pretty much just fuck all the time.”

“ Shut up! ” said Jane, and slapped at Deirdre’s head.

“You can’t deny it because you know it’s true.”

On the porch Katha smiled at me again, as though she knew she was handling a man in a trance. “Go ahead,” she said. “My room’s on the second floor. You’ll find it.”

Jane and Matt lived in the attic, reachable only by ladder from the commune’s third-floor landing. When Jane summoned him Matt didn’t come down, just peeked his bare-chested torso over the edge of the loft. Despite a Christian beard he also wasn’t past nineteen.

“Hey,” he said.

“Dylan knows R.E.M.,” Jane told him. “He’s Katha’s friend.”

“Cool,” said Matt, blinking, waiting, if I believed Deirdre, to fuck.

“Okay, bye,” said Jane to me, shy now for the first time. She climbed the ladder, squirrel-like.

I turned back down the grand ramshackle staircase, which was lit by a bare violet bulb. Music seeped from behind various doors, and the air of the house was stale with fumes-laundry, cigarettes, old beer. This was my chance: I could have crept past the second floor, found my way out and to a cab on San Pablo. I didn’t.

Katha’s two rooms formed a suite at the back of the second floor, and with their built-in bay-window seats and ornate ceilings and mosaic parquet they would have been grand rooms in a grand house, if the house were anywhere but Emeryville. As it was, the ceiling was water-stained, the parquet warped, and I was sure the landlord was grateful to have tenants to fill the place, even if they mostly used strings of Christmas lights for lamps. Katha’s guitar case leaned against a wall near a CD boom box; a shelfless, doorless closet was heaped with clothes. The smaller second room was empty except for a tapestry-draped single mattress. There was nothing at all on the walls.

In the main room Deirdre kneeled on the floor, slicing more coke, on a mirror now, with a taped blade. Katha, tucked into one of the bay windows, spoke on a telephone, low murmuring not audible over the Beck on the boom box. Another couple sat, knees up, on a futon against the wall, a light-skinned black with a large Afro, faint mustache, and mild eyes, and his girlfriend, a somewhat older-looking woman with choppy short black-dyed hair who, when she spoke, disconcertingly revealed a German accent. Sprawled in a butterfly chair was a Mexican-appearing teenager, fifteen or sixteen at most, gangly in oversized hip-hop trousers, his hair in a blue handkerchief. Deirdre didn’t offer any introductions. Sultry and hollow, she seemed a player in a Warhol film of the mind. Rolando and Dunja, the couple on the futon, gave their names and smiled pleasantly. The teen in the butterfly chair said, “Yo,” and presented for a black-power handclasp. I took his hand and he chewed his name: Marty or Mardy or Marly , I couldn’t be sure.

It was the least of the uncertainties which gave shape to my long night in Katha Purly’s rooms. Katha’s slighting me in the shuttered nightclub and again in the car had turned into a policy. We weren’t together in any sense that I could tell. I did coke and talked with Deirdre and Rolando and Dunja. Maybe-Marty refused, his expression haughty, full of childish disdain, like a housecat preening to avenge an indignity. Maybe-Marty was silent, though when the last track of the Beck ended he moved over and found N.W.A.’s Straight Outta Compton in Katha’s small collection, then twisted the volume up. The rest of us raised our voices to be heard. Asking some innocent question I unleashed talkative Dunja, who was, it turned out, an Israeli German, raised both in Germany and on a kibbutz. Her life wasn’t a history lesson or an allegory to her, only a story. I listened, marveling that I had followed my waitress crush to a ghetto mansion in Emeryville to sit, cross-legged and stoned in Christmas-bulb light, learning of a sixteen-year-old German girl’s losing her virginity on a moonlit Middle Eastern soccer field to an émigré Russian engineer. Meanwhile, elsewhere in California, Abby slept or didn’t sleep, and in Anaheim, my father had a few hours earlier been treated to his banquet.

Katha made a couple of calls and left the room. She returned, perhaps half an hour later, with a six-pack of Corona, and trailed by someone she introduced as Peter. Peter was twentyish as well, demure and chubby, maybe gay, I thought. Katha took a line of coke, but Peter waved it off, instead helped himself to a beer. He seemed to know the others, or anyhow he was comfortable with Deirdre and Rolando, and began explaining to them how he’d had a fight with his roommate and now refused to return-that was where Katha had gone, to pick him up. Meanwhile Dunja went on telling me of kibbutz days, her cokey tales like an encyclopedia entry, devoid of highs or lows. Katha offered me a beer, the first words she’d spoken to me inside the commune. I took one, just to rinse my gummy throat. It was sweet and sharp, a treat I hadn’t anticipated. Maybe-Marty did some shy, tentative break-dancing in the corner near the boom box. No one watched. The time was three in the morning.

I leaned away from Dunja and the others, to Katha. She still sat to one side, distracted-on duty, it seemed to me.

“Play your guitar,” I said.

“You want to hear me play?”

“Something you wrote.”

We moved off, sat in one of the bays. Under a humming, sneaker-draped streetlamp the street was dead calm, poverty calm. The lights were out even in the lived-in car. Katha told Maybe-Marty to turn the music down-not off, just down-and he did, then flopped back in his butterfly chair. The others, Deirdre, Peter, Dunja, and Rolando, paid us no attention, went on murmuring. Rolando rubbed Dunja’s shoulders; she talked with her eyes shut. I saw Peter had changed his mind, accepted a line. The supply was low. Deirdre shaved the mirror in an obsessive, mechanical action. Katha tuned her guitar, not looking at me.

She began suddenly. Her voice was deep and gorgeous, the lyric remorseless:

Psychedelic twitches in my mood

I’m getting down I’m gonna have to get high soon

I didn’t mean to smoke your last cigarette

I love you baby but sometimes I forget

It was the drugs that made me lose my mind

It was the drugs that made me so unkind

It was the drugs

That made me love you in the first place

And:

Last thing I remembered before I passed out

Were your needful eyes staring from across the couch

I never look at you like that

I guess I don’t need you, I just need you to need me back

It was the drugs that made me lose my mind

It was the drugs that me so unkind

It was the drugs

That made me want you in the first place

Maybe-Marty’s hip-hop selections throbbed on in the silences. The talk had quelled, though. Katha tuned again, then began a simple blues. She bluffed some verses, humming, but sang the refrain clear.

I don’t need you to tell me I’m alone

don’t you think I know I have no home?

I just want to call my mother on the phone

I just want to call my mother on the phone

“That’s new,” she said, interrupting herself.

Peter got up sobbing, both hands on his face, and left the room. To my dismay, Katha put down her guitar and followed him into the hall. Dunja too, jumped up and went after them.