The Fortress of Solitude by Jonathan Lethem Read Free Book Online

pebbled like a rubber bathmat, which was pitched along the ground toward home plate and that a better kick could get aloft. A fly ball was almost uncatchable, it was bigger than a kid when it was flying through the air. Positioning yourself under a fly was just stupid, and if you reasoned out what happened after the outfielder invariably stepped aside pretty much anything in the air was a home run. You just ran, you didn’t look to see if they were throwing it in. More often, though, you didn’t get it in the air. A mistimed kick scudded back idiotically to the pitcher and you were thrown out at first base.
    Still, a home run. If you put the bloated thing in the air half the time everyone on the field fell down. There’d be a kid on his ass at every base as you went by.
    Anything you painted, however slapdash, got hung on the wall. The brushes at school, though, were like painting with your elbows if you had any point of comparison. The school paint dried like scabs.
    Nobody peed in their chair anymore.
    A book report told the story of a book.
    Second grade had two Chinese kids, and third grade had three, a soothing presence since they always had their hands up. Where they went after school was a mystery. They weren’t white and they weren’t not, so that was a plus. It prevented things from getting too black and white and Puerto Rican. At the current rate you’d all be Chinese by high school, which come to think of it might solve a few problems.
    It wasn’t their fault they were Chinese, and if you asked them about it they’d shrug—they knew it wasn’t their fault. Everyone knew. In third grade you were still only just settling into your skin and couldn’t be expected to answer for it. After that was anyone’s guess.
    chapter   3
    V endlemachine lay on her high bed in the parlor. The gray-yellow October light which filtered through the tall curtains swarmed with motes, with writhing flecks that made the slanted light appear as solid as the polished oak spindles of the bed frame and the third-full glasses of water and cognac on the bedside table and the cane leaned against the table and more solid than the faintly stirring limbs of the tiny woman curled on the bed, now groping slowly for the cane without yet turning her light-haloed head from the pillow in which it was buried.
    “I fell asleep,” she said distantly.
    Dylan Ebdus didn’t speak, but stood not crossing the line into the room filled with the haze and piquancy of the old woman.
    “You were long.”
    Dylan found his voice. “There was a line.” He’d ferried another clutch of her hand-scratched letters on cream stationery to the post office on Atlantic Avenue and stood waiting for his turn at the Plexiglas window, studying the wanted signs and the posters promoting stamp collecting and literacy, scuffing his sneaker toes at the scraps of paper, the yellow slips and torn government envelopes that layered the floor.
    Dylan worked for Isabel Vendle for a dollar an hour each Saturday morning the year of his tenth birthday, the year of fourth grade. Vendlemachine, Vendlemachine , Dylan sang in his head, though he’d never said it aloud once beyond his own doorstep, not even whispered it alone in Isabel Vendle’s house on those days when she was away visiting family at Lake George and he used her key and let himself in through the basement door to gather her mail and pour dry food into a dish for the orange cat.
    Vendlemachine was Rachel’s word. Rachel Ebdus awarded secret nicknames to her visitors and to people who lived on Dean Street and Dylan understood they couldn’t be leaked from the house, from Rachel’s kitchen. His mother had instilled this doubleness: there were things Rachel and Dylan could say to one another and then there was the official language of the world, which, though narrowed and artificial, had to be mastered in the cause of the world’s manipulation. Rachel made Dylan know that the world shouldn’t know everything he