II. The Fortress of Solitude

The karmic fulcrum of the apartment was the armchair and its satellite, the side table. The chair was the only piece of furniture Ted owned, bought when he found the apartment. Ted arranged the apartment around the chair. A collage of tattered posters and remaindered book jackets covered the wall before him. Piled on the floor around the chair were dozens of binders documenting his research.

Each page of the binders contained a detailed outline of certain aspects of an imaginary world left unarticulated by the world's creator. The implicit paragraphs, the covert prologues and epilogues: the restless youth of a renegade star pilot, the seismology of the lost continent, the 1930s pulp adventurer's banal Sonoran retirement, the spaceship slowly rusting in the sand, the brutish viral death of the barbarian hero, the collapse of the star. The story between the lines: the floral taxonomy of the alien planet, the architectural history of the abandoned jungle city, censuses of the ten thousand New Yorks and their infinite citizenry.

The room also quartered hundreds of cheap paperbacks stacked in neat piles against the wall. Ted had compiled this collection of marginal fiction over the previous year from Bob's Paperback Exchange, a short walk away in a decaying strip mall near the campus. Each book was its own universe ready to map. Sometimes one reality tried to spread itself across several volumes, but that never worked—the rules always appeared to alter just slightly. In many ways, Ted noted, every chapter, paragraph, sentence, even each word defined its own separate space with independent atmosphere and topography. The actual "reading" functioned as a sort of surveying. Ontological triangulation for a mental atlas of the million worlds.

Stacked under the side table were shoeboxes containing the hundreds of black-and-white Polaroids Ted had snapped from the chair:

-- Buildings on fire
-- Unfinished freeway ramps
-- The television's vertical blanking interval
-- Roadside debris
-- The space between clouds
-- Unoccupied hotel rooms
-- The blank ends of audio cassette tapes
-- Shopping mall dressing rooms
-- The view from the car's blind spot
-- Gaps between suburban houses
-- Abandoned office buildings
-- Carefully landscaped interstate medians.

This research was a continuation and refinement of the project most responsible for the alienation of Ted's colleagues in the Department—his remote exploration of the Negative Zone. An excerpt from the introduction to Ted's unfinished dissertation:

The Negative Zone does exist as both an idea and a reality, despite the urgent dismissals of so many logicians. Its existence precedes its introduction in Fantastic Four #62, and continues in a variety of temporal and dimensional continuities. The Negative Zone is tangible precisely through its intangibility. The truism that the Fantastic Four and its ancillary universes are literally "fantastic" is of no relevance. The Negative Zone exists despite the verification of this indisputable fact. The Negative Zone is humming around us and among us with all the lucid reality that the Invisible Girl would if she were sitting across the table now, as she in fact is. The real trick is to pry open the portal.

After frozen pizza and another bowl, Ted spread out the hex paper and began work on the revised plan for the fortress of solitude. Ted had discovered the site—a rocky archipelago above the Arctic Circle—while perusing 19th century naval reports in the university library's map room. Magnetic confusion and the obscurity of the islands on contemporary charts would ensure a truly hermitic isolation.

The fortress of solitude, as inspired by those of Clark Savage and Kal El, and refined by Ted, would be both laboratory and cathedral. Its manifest purpose was to serve as the setting for a role-playing scenario Ted and Phil were developing. The true reason for its construction by legions of brainwashed Eskimos was to provide psychic sanctuary for Ted.

The focal point of the fortress was the stubby tower rising from the rocks, a meditative aerie. Beneath the tower, buried in the cold granite, lay several levels of labyrinthine chambers: research lab, radar/sonar room, observatory, library, computer room, firing range and armory, aquarium, tool shed, gymnasium, submarine dock, kennel, natatorium, landing pad, motor pool, living quarters, and dimensional gateway to the Negative Zone.

Sitting in the dome of the fortress monitoring the midnight tide and the weekly degeneration of galaxy NGC 372 with a small Zeiss telescope, Ted made notations in the journal:

The world I inhabit is an abstract expressionist's copy of a Frank Frazetta painting. Perhaps the one that hangs on my living room wall. A retro-futuristic craft has crash-landed on a desolate alien world. In the distance, strange spires rise from the dessicated jungle against jagged black mountains and tandem orange moons. The lone human figure faces the distant city, face obscured by shadow, his manifest anxiety over unexpected events about to transpire masking secret satisfaction with the predicament—true and permanent divorce from the other place.

I have mapped this world and many others here from the vantage point of the furnished apartment. In the realm of the ordinary my limbs traverse beyond the door, every millimeter is quantified and catalogued. Inside here reality is infinite, malleable, unexplored.

The furnished apartment exists in the negative space between tangible objects and expressed ideas. It is more than a fortress of solitude. It is:

-- a space station orbiting the seventh planet of a cold sun
-- a hermit's domicile on the Icelandic coast before the arrival of the Danes
-- a cabin in an abandoned roadside motel
-- a forgotten back room in the west suburban branch of the public library
-- a lichen-covered stone house in a humid terrarium
-- a cave within the fiberglass face of an artificial mountain at a failed amusement park
-- a catacomb within the clandestine recesses of the shopping mall

a secret place of voluntary solitary confinement, free to roam above the treeline of the cerebellum.