The Fortress of Solitude (52 page)

“Are you enjoying yourself?” he asked.

“Sure. You?”

He only raised his eyebrows. “Before I forget, this is something I wanted you to read.” He palmed me a triple-folded sheet from his inner jacket pocket and passed it to me covertly, at the level of the table. I unfolded it in my lap. It was a photocopy of a clipping from
Artforum
. “Epic Crawl: The Hidden Journey of an American Titan,” by Willard Amato. It began:

What chance that the most dedicated abstract painter in the United States abandoned canvas in 1972? Or last showed in 1967, in a two-man show of figurative work which was barely reviewed? As likely that the most profound avant-garde filmmaker of our time would never receive a single screening in his native burg of New York, or that the last monumental modernist artifact should be eked out secretly, in an unnameable medium, through the long heyday of modernism’s toppling. Each of these improbabilities leads to the same place, an attic studio in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn, where—

“Read it later,” he begged. “Keep the copy, I’ve got others.”

So the forgotten man, the nobody, wasn’t quite content to be. It wasn’t news that Abraham’s aspirations still burned, but the clipping was a surprise. I stuffed it into my pocket.

“Tell me, how is Abby?”

“She’s okay.”

“Too bad she couldn’t be along.” I suddenly saw our table in another light: two couples and a broken third. I had no idea where Abby was tonight.

“She’s got school,” I said, hearing my own defensiveness, unable to stop it.

Francesca overheard and announced, “I wish we could have seen her, Dylan. She’s such a sweet girl!” This drew Zelmo and Leslie’s attention. “She’s a black American,” Francesca explained, wide-eyed in sincerity. Francesca and Abby had met just once, when Abby and I passed through New York on our way to a music conference in Montreal. “You should meet her,” she gasped to Leslie. “Such lovely
skin
.” Francesca’s good intentions vaporized conversation. We were left seated at our pasta and veal like obedient soldiers.

“Still in school?” said Zelmo at last, with pious sympathy: yes, my absent black girlfriend was underage too. Count a grown-up, employable blonde in the same category as bow ties, contact lenses, and wing tips: appurtenances Dylan Ebdus was not yet mature enough to brandish.

“Graduate school,” I said. “She’s completing her dissertation.”

“That’s wonderful,” said Zelmo, turning it into a congratulation to Abby’s race that she should be in such a position. I understood it was impossible to squirm from beneath Zelmo’s patronage. Artists were his broken, defective flock, and he’d herd as many as he could into the safety of his care—a plate of meatballs and a ticket to ForbiddenCon. And black people were pretty much artists by definition.

“Darling,” said Francesca to Abraham. “Tell him about his friend’s father.”

“Eh?”

“That poor man down the street, Abe. You said he’d want to know.”

Abraham nodded. “Your old friend Mingus—you remember his father, Barry? Our neighbor?”

Barrett Rude Junior
, I corrected silently. Francesca’s logic was endearingly bare:
Dylan has a liking for black Americans
lead directly to
That poor man down the street
. I promised myself I’d be patient, though hearing Abraham begin so ploddingly made me want to scream. Our neighbor! Mr. Rogers has neighbors—we had a
block
. I merely
grew up
in that house, I wanted to say. I merely wrote the man’s biography in my liner note to the Distinctions’ box set. But the first I wouldn’t mention because Abraham would feel it as a rebuke. And the latter he didn’t know of, because I hadn’t mentioned it or sent him a copy.

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.

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.