Excerpt from The Fortress of Solitude by Jonathan Lethem, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

You, you were a million miles from any such procedure.

More in the market for a case of fake asthma....



...Arthur Lomb and his mother lived on Pacific Street between Hoyt and Bond, the far side of the hospital. Arthur's block was eerie, kidless, no bus, the hospital's laundry stack cascading silent white steam to the sky, the bodega on the corner another sidewalk congregation of old men on milk crates but graver, less amused, less musical than Old Ramirez's bunch. On Pacific the men grumbled in some middle distance, leathery fingers shifting dominoes across felt. Everything on Pacific including a gray cat darting across the street seemed farther away and more pensive. The block might have been the Bermuda Triangle of Boerum Hill, a space arranged the precise distance from the Gowanus Houses, the Brooklyn House of Detention, and Intermediate School 293 to fall under no domain whatsoever. Not a long-term solution to anything, Arthur Lomb's stoop nevertheless formed a kind of oasis on certain October afternoons when he and Dylan would tiptoe there unharassed and set out a chessboard under the furling shadow of the hospital's steam.

"You're in Winegar's science class, huh? I feel sorry for you. He's a worm. You see the way he toys with his mustache when he's talking to the Puerto Rican girls with developed breasts? It makes me want to vomit. Doesn't matter, pretend you like him. Science teacher's your ticket out of here, that's my view. Don't move that bishop, it's the only thing keeping me from crushing you. I told you a thousand times, link your pawns."

Arthur Lomb sat with one leg folded under his body like a kindergartner. His monologues were all brow-furrowed and lip-pursed, craven machinations cut with philosophical asides and vice versa. His jabber had a glottal, chanted quality, seemingly designed to guide you past the territory where you might wish to tell him to shut up already or even to strike him, into a realm of baffled wonderment as you considered the white noise of a nerd's id in full song. Arthur Lomb had been at Saint Ann's until the day his parents divorced and his mother could no longer afford the private school. Now he was intent on getting into one of the specialized public high schools, one of those with academic requirements, entrance exams. Arthur Lomb never pined for the lost school behind him, for the company of other white children whom Dylan could only surmise had loathed him in their way as acutely as the black kids at 293. He was all grim necessity, a soldier in open ground casting for his next foxhole.

"Only thing that matters is the test for Stuyvesant. Just math and science. Flunk English, who gives? The whole report card thing's a joke, always was. I haven't gone to gym class once. You know Jesus Maldonado? He said he'd break my arm like a Pixy Stix if he caught me alone in the locker room. Gym's suicide, frankly. I'm not stripping down to my underwear anywhere inside the four walls of this school, I'm just not. If I have to BM, I hold it until after school."

Arthur Lomb and his mother lived in an apartment on the top floor of a brownstone and Arthur Lomb had the back bedroom. His comics were stacked on low shelves in neat piles, all in plastic. He handled them with somber disdain, and radiated disapproval when Dylan turned pages too quickly to have read certain essential thought balloons. Though carefully archived, his comics bore faint marks where Arthur Lomb had place thin paper over the pages and traced the breasts of the Wasp and Valkyrie with a ballpoint pen. The resultant page of blue parenthetical breasts was stashed like secret Chinese writing in Arthur Lomb's desk drawer. There Dylan found it one day while Arthur Lomb prepared a plate of graham crackers.

"Just pass that test. Your life depends on it. You think this is bad, wait until high school. If you don't get into Stuyvesant or at least Bronx Science you're dead. That's how the test works, highest scores get into Stuyvesant, next highest Bronx Science, Brooklyn Tech's a last resort. Sarah J. Hale or John Jay, those places are practically like prison. A teacher got shot at Sarah J. Hale, it was on TV. Algebra, geometry, biology. Get Winegar to give you a practice test, I'm telling you out of kindness. Make him think you like him. Say you want to enter some kind of project in the science fair. You don't really have to do it. If he knows you want to go to Stuyvesant maybe he'll call someone. Do whatever it takes."

Excerpted from The Fortress of Solitude by Jonathan Lethem Copyright© 2003 by Jonathan Lethem. Excerpted by permission of Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.