Jonathan Lethem - The Fortress of Solitude

“Black Bolt,” said Rachel, tapping to point out a figure on the cover of one of the comic books. “You know, the Inhumans. The leader of the Inhumans.” Rachel seemed tangled in herself, seemed bewildered as Dylan to find herself in this conversation. The force of Dylan and his mother’s arrival at Isabel Vendle’s, the arrow of Rachel’s intention flying down the block, had been captured and utterly redirected by Croft and his comic books.

“Sure, the strong silent type,” said Croft, grinning. “I get it.”

“Croft, you are in irresponsible man,” said Isabel Vendle with weary affection.

“Sweet Aunt Petunia,” said Croft obscurely.

“Yes you are,” Isabel went on. “And now an irresponsible boy has brought his mother here to tell me he doesn’t want to visit me anymore on Saturdays. We know this because the boy isn’t interested in your comic books, Croft. He’s staring at me, isn’t he?” She flapped her newspaper so it bowed over her hands, then glared over the tented top. “Do you find me evil, Dylan? Or boring?”

I find you psychedelic , Dylan wanted to say.

“You know there probably isn’t any difference, Aunt Isabel. Not to the kid.”

“You knew he wanted to quit, Isabel,” said Rachel, faintly recalling her purpose. “He tried to tell you.” She half stood in her chair to work her cigarettes out of her front pocket, then offered one to Croft, who shook his head.

“Oh, I felt him working up to it,” said Isabel. “I’d imagined I might get another few weeks out of him.”

“It’s a coming-of-age thing,” said Croft. “Running away from scary old ladies. I had to do it myself.”

“Shut up, Croft.”

That was the end of the discussion and the end of Dylan’s working for Vendlemachine. Croft went into the kitchen and returned with more glasses and they sat in the mottled sunlight squeezing lemon into Coca-Cola and turning the pages of his comic books, Dylan and Rachel and Croft, while Isabel Vendle stained her fingertips nearly to black with the ink of the Times . The Human Torch was the Invisible Girl’s younger brother, and the Invisible Girl was married to Mr. Fantastic, and Ben Grimm was The Thing and Alicia was his blind girlfriend, a sculptress who could honestly appreciate his hideous but monumental body, and the Silver Surfer was Galactus’s emissary and Galactus ate planets but the Silver Surfer had helped the Fantastic Four protect Earth, and Black Bolt couldn’t open his mouth because a single syllable of his speech was so powerful it might crack the world apart-Croft and his mother explained it all to Dylan, word balloons in the bright panels on the pale yellow paper, while Vendlemachine moved her lips silently and eventually dozed in her chair, and the late-October Sunday afternoon collapsed to evening, Abraham in his studio darkening squares of celluloid with brushstrokes, the nudes in the parlor below with no light to make them glow, the backyard window boxes and fire escapes black against the ruddy streaked sky, the street too dark to judge a throw properly so the spaldeen hit a kid in the face and anyway it was time for dinner. Dylan fell asleep in his chair for just a minute and for that minute he and Isabel had the exact same dream but when they awoke neither of them remembered.

“Let me see it for a minute.”

Let me see it : you saw a basketball or a pack of baseball cards or a plastic water gun by taking it into your hands, and what happened after that was in doubt. Ownership depended on mostly not letting anyone see anything. If you let a kid see a bottle of Yoo-Hoo for a minute he’d drink what was left in it.

“Let me see it, let me check it out. I only want to take it for a ride.”

Dylan gripped the handlebars. Abraham had pried off the training wheels the day before, and Dylan still wobbled, still scuffed with his sneakers groping away from the pedals to steady and brake against the sidewalk. “Only if you stay on the block,” Dylan said, miserably.

“You afraid I’m gonna take it? I just want a ride. You get it back after that, you got it all day, man. Just let me go around the block.”

It was a trap or puzzle, the way Robert Woolfolk already knew to work Dylan’s guiltiness. And the empty block conspired to leave Dylan alone to solve it. Robert Woolfolk carried a vacuum around with him, or revealed by his presence the vacuum on Dean Street, the expanse of moments when no one saw and no one knew what happened in plain sight, when all of the block was shrouded in daylight like the abandoned house was shrouded in leaf shade.

Old Ramirez stood in front of his store and sipped a Manhattan Special and squinted at them from under his fisherman’s hat. He was beyond appeal, watching them like television.

Robert Woolfolk added his hands to the bars beside Dylan’s and tugged gently at the bike.

“Stay on the block.”

“Around once, that’s all.”

“No, I mean stay in front of the house.”

“What, you think I’m not coming back? Just around the block.”

What came out of Robert Woolfolk’s mouth was petition and chant, irresistible in its illogic. His eyes, meanwhile, were hard, a little bored.

“Just once around.”

Robert Woolfolk’s legs were too long to unfold in the span between seat and pedals, so he rode with his knees doubled and knobbing up near the handlebars, like a clown on a tricycle. Then he changed his approach, elevated his hips above the seat to stand on the pedals and pump side to side, elbows flaring. The bike teetered, annexed to Robert Woolfolk’s stretching limbs. Like that, a vanishing pile of elbows, he took the bike around Nevins.

When Dylan used the word block he didn’t mean Bergen Street, the other side.

How long did it take to go around the block?

How long was twice as long as that?

The tonguelike latch of Dylan’s black ironwork gate rattled with the vibration of the bus going by. Though there were no trees on the Nevins end of Dean Street red fallen leaves had blown into the gutter from somewhere. The plastic milk cartons in front of the bodega claimed you could be fined or go to jail for not returning them to May Creek Farm, Incorporated, a fairly unlikely destination if you gave it any thought.

The afternoon withered like a balloon around Dylan on his stoop, waiting for Robert Woolfolk to return. Old Ramirez wasn’t watching, there was nothing to watch. Dylan stood naked in the minutes as they accumulated, as they stacked up indifferently on the distant face of the Williamsburg Savings Bank tower clock. The day was like an unanswered telephone, the mute slate ringing. The call of Dylan’s arm-swinging vigil went unreplied.

Nevins Street might as well have been a canyon into which Robert Woolfolk had vanished like a cartoon coyote, wordlessly, trailing puffs of dust. When Lonnie wandered up bouncing a Super Ball and asked what Dylan was doing Dylan said he wasn’t doing anything. It was pretty much as if there had never been a bike.

Abraham Ebdus lost a day to finding the boy’s bicycle. He stalked Wyckoff and Bergen and Nevins, thinking unavoidably that Rachel would have found it herself in the first half hour. She knew Brooklyn in ways he didn’t. He walked the periphery of Wyckoff Gardens, not crossing into the grounds, the maze of walkways and hedge and low Cyclone fence, not knowing where to start if he did. Light soured in the shade of the graffitied white brick of the projects. They seemed designed as future ruins. He put his head into a Puerto Rican social club on Bond Street, a small hangar full of cardplayers. Before he ducked out he registered a tiny pool table, blue carpeted walls, the tang of malt-stale cork. Nobody spoke to him.

But by the end of the afternoon word was out, somehow. A woman with a baby stepped out of her door, seemingly angry at him for wandering. Abraham’s family was possibly famous for being white, fools. She passed the child back inside and led Abraham around to a vacant lot on Baltic, a fenced yard filled with debris shot through with ailanthus sprouts, the mongrel trees which grew as fast as a crack in a windshield spread under pressure of a fingertip. The heap of crushed baby carriages and rotted lath with clinging bits of plaster and torn tin ceiling made a pattern with which Abraham Ebdus refused to permit his eye to become fascinated. The bicycle was on top of the pile, above his head, flung there who-knew-how, its blue curved fender twisted like a splintered wing. Give it another day and the ailanthus might have shot through the spokes. He had to climb the fence and ended up tossing the bike to the ground to free his hands. No one was inclined to help, though some watched. He wasn’t sure it mattered to rescue the bicycle. If it had been stolen for use by another child, maybe. But this, this gratuitous trashing, was just the street’s incomprehension, its resistance. That shadows stood sipping from paper bags as he struggled down to join the bicycle on the pavement was only appropriate, matched his mood. The bicycle was defeated, and Abraham Ebdus wondered why he’d taught the boy a useless skill. He knew Rachel required he bring the bicycle home for repair but suspected the boy would never choose to ride it outside of the dirt of their backyard.