Jonathan Lethem - The Fortress of Solitude

Maybe-Marty turned up the music.

Rolando switched to kneading Deirdre’s shoulders, which I wanted not to resent. Deirdre had been doing an awful lot of coke and reminded me more of an anorexic raccoon than anything alluring, but the dishonorable truth was I yearned to be touching one of the women by now, and I felt a little bitter about Rolando’s access. I wandered over for another beer and peeked into the violet-hued stairwell, but it was vacant. I heard thin trails of music from other floors, nothing I was tempted to follow. I ducked back inside.

“Yo.”

It was Maybe-Marty. I’d gotten used to pretending he wasn’t in the room, the universal strategy here, it seemed.

He’d switched off the music. “You wanna hear my shit?”

“Sure,” I said, helpless.

“Okay, but hole on, I gotta get set.”

“Okay.”

I sat against the wall near the boom box. In the silence I could hear Deirdre’s breath sighing from her as Rolando labored over her shoulder blades. Maybe-Marty shrugged his wrists together and cocked his head, then planted one foot ahead of the other and dipped his knee like Elvis onstage. He pushed the words out in a stream, his high voice slurring the syllables, popping for emphasis on the p’s and g’s.

Check it out like this and then like that

Li’l gangsta M-Dog with that smoov-ass rap-

“Hole on, hole on, I gotta start over.” He spread his hands in an appeal, as though he’d been challenged. When he resumed he went on tossing out poses, but his eyes were closed in shy concentration.

Check it out like this and then like that

Li’l gangsta M-Dog with that smoov-ass rap

Y’know it goes like this and then like this

’Cause when I bus’ my gat I never miss

I’m good in the hood with my homie Raf

So if you step in our path you might get blown in half

Don’t laugh ’cause I’m ill from Emeryville

Where if you don’t survive then your memory will

“How you like that?” he said defiantly.

“Let’s hear it again,” I said.

He rewound into his starting pose, absolutely ready to oblige. The second run-through was more confident and precise, and fiercer, or mock-fiercer. Maybe-Marty looked younger each minute to me, twelve or thirteen now, despite gangstas and gats .

I’d spent fifteen or twenty years being angry at rappers, black and white equally, for their pretense, for claiming the right to wear street experiences, real or feigned, like badges, when mine were unshown. I’d spent fifteen or twenty years senselessly furious at them one and all for not being DJ Stone and the Flamboyan Crew in the yard of P.S. 38, for being ahistorical and a lie, for being ignorant of Staggerlee and the Five Royales, for not knowing what I knew. M-Dog, with his bashful Mexican face and utterly derivative rhymes, couldn’t offend me this way. Perhaps Katha would have said it was the drugs, but I adored him. He’d never lived in a rapless world, I understood. M-Dog’s cobbling a rhyme of his own wasn’t pretense-and now it seemed terrible that I’d ever been so punishing in my judgments. His reaching for this language was as elemental as wishing to be able to roof a spaldeen.

At some point Katha had returned, and when M-Dog finished again she said, “That’s great, you wrote that?”

“Me and my homeboy worked it out, yeah.”

“It’s nice.”

“There ain’t nothing on paper,” he said, eager to be understood. “I got it all up in my head.”

Katha took my hand. Something had changed. I’d done something right, soliciting M-Dog’s performance-or at least admiring it, as I had. It was as though Maybe-Marty’s presentation was what we’d been waiting for this night, as though it had broken some stalemate and freed Katha’s movement toward me. Perhaps the change was in myself. I felt now that instead of being sharpened to the icy edge of cocaine, I’d been bathed in some river of love-as if I’d taken ecstasy, a drug whose effects I’d only imagined, often resentfully, with the same sort of grudgingness M-Dog’s rhymes had just overwhelmed in me.

Katha and I returned to our bay, without the guitar. Maybe-Marty put on another disc. Showtime was over.

“What’s up with Peter?” I whispered.

“He’s in love ,” said Katha. Her tone suggested that to be so was a rare and passing condition, to be met with both skepticism and sympathy. “Dunja’s putting him to bed.”

“That sounds nice,” I said, surprising myself. It did sound nice.

She was willing now to hear a little smutty implication in that, one I’d only half intended. “I’ll chase everyone out of here soon.”

I nodded at the empty side room, suggesting the mattress there. “We could just disappear. Let them go on with the party.”

“No, that bed is-not for that.”

“Not for what?”

“Not for anything but my little sister.”

“What sister?” I asked, stupidly.

“She’s still with our foster parents, in Washington. Sometimes I bring her down for a weekend. I’m trying to get her transferred to a school here, but she’s only fourteen.”

“If she’s fourteen shouldn’t she stay with your parents?”

“It’d be better for her here.”

This level pronouncement finished the topic. I sipped my beer while Katha sent Maybe-Marty home, and dislodged Deirdre and Rolando from the futon where they were still engaged in a long massage, Deirdre’s head curled down between her knees, as though Rolando had committed to smoothing the long night’s worth of cocaine shivers from her body with his palms. After they’d slumped from the room, Katha, undaunted by the obvious, put on Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks. I was grateful, but also afraid of that album’s particular scalpel-like quality. I was near enough to bare as it was.

Now we were alone. Katha lit a joint from the tip of her cigarette and handed it to me. She closed the door and we moved to the futon.

“So, what are you doing here, Dylan?”

I’m here to party with you? I thought. No words came out.

“What about that lady you’re with?”

“You mean Abby?”

“If Abby’s your beautiful black girlfriend, yeah. I see her on Telegraph Avenue, you know.”

“You do?”

“Just going into bookstores, whatever. She doesn’t know me.”

“She’s in a hurry,” I said, picturing Abby moving on that crowded street, past the teen beggars in their hundred-dollar leathers-if I ran it like a video clip in my mind’s eye, the soundtrack might be Central Line’s “Walking into Sunshine” or some other not remotely depressing disco cut. Meanwhile in Emeryville it was darkest before dawn, and Van Morrison and the sacred fumes of sex and marijuana beckoned me into the slipstream.

“She looks kind of angry to me,” said Katha, startling and delighting me. “But it’s none of my business.”

“It’s okay,” I said, marveling that she’d said it. “Maybe she is. Sometimes it’s hard to figure out what a person is like, when you’re up close.”

“I don’t know what that means.”

“Like your song.” I was shameless. “Sometimes you understand all at once, in a flash.” I was so grateful to Katha for calling Abby angry. I wanted to reward her, stroke her, call blessings of orgasms down upon her for pardoning my bungled life with that passing observation.

Years ago, I’d read a novel, a thriller in which glamorous people destroyed themselves by sexual intrigue. One character was another’s shoals, that was what I’d remembered about the book-and the character who’d wrecked the other had explained how she was infinitely dangerous because she was damaged . This character’s damage made her an involuntary criminal, the book seemed to say. Her damage-orphanhood, abuse, I couldn’t remember what it was-made her unfit to mix with those who’d been luckier, who’d squeaked through life innocent of such knowledge. The story was enthralling bunk, impossible not to finish even as I’d loathed it for its implicit assertion that the undamaged ought to bolt their doors against the damaged ones , who would hurt them if they could, who couldn’t help wishing to. When I read the book, I’d never met anyone undamaged. I still think I never have.