Jonathan Lethem - The Fortress of Solitude

What would Dylan find if he walked across Flatbush, past its shops selling dashikis, and T-shirts which read I’M PROUD OF MY AFRICAN HERITAGE, past Triangle Sports, past Arthur Treacher’s Fish and Chips, past Pintchik itself? Who knew. His world found its limit there, under the narrowed shoulders of the Williamsburg Savings Bank tower. Dylan knew Manhattan, knew David Copperfields’s London, knew even Narnia better than he’d ever know Brooklyn north of Flatbush Avenue.

“We don’t live in a box, we don’t live in a little square box, I don’t care what anyone says we don’t live in a sixteen-millimeter frame!” She flew like the Red Queen in Through the Looking-Glass through Pintchik, whispering madly to him. “He can’t put us inside, we’ll break out, we’ll bust out of the frame. He can’t paint us in a little celluloid box. We’ll run out in the streets! We’ll paper him into his studio!”

Inside, Rachel led him to a room full of wallpaper rolls. He was meant to choose a replacement for the jungle animals hiding in palm leaves, that children’s-book design, too young for him now. The samples in the room were furred with velvet, decorated with orange Day-Glo peace symbols and Peter Max sunsets and silver-foil-stripes and lime paisley-Pintchik might be implacable and timeless but it hosted wallpaper that looked like the newest candy wrappers, Wacky Wafers or Big Buddy. Dylan felt embarrassed for the wallpaper. It had the bad taste to be passing through and not know it. Dylan preferred Pintchik itself, its yellow-and-red painted-brick scheme, its cigar-glazed walls.

“I’ll pry him out of his studio the way I drive you out to play, let him get a job instead of living on his mountaintop like Meher Baba-”

Now Dylan was startled to find a roll of his jungle among the Pintchik swatches. Here it was no better than paisley or Day-Glo. The jungle he gazed into while falling asleep had no age at all, was flat and empty, corrupt as advertising. Abraham would never have had wallpaper in his studio.

Dylan wanted wallpaper as old as slate, profound and murky as his father’s painted frames. He wanted to scratch a skully board on his wall, wanted to live in the abandoned house. Or Pintchik.

Brooklyn was simple compared to his mother.

“A gang from the Gowanus Houses picked up a fifth grader after school and took him into the park and they had a knife and they were daring each other and they cut off his balls . He didn’t fight or scream or anything. It’s not too soon for you to know, my profound child, the world is nuttier than a fruitcake. Run if you can’t fight, run and scream fire or rape , be wilder than they are, wear flames in your hair, that’s my recommendation.”

They walked home from Pintchik along Bergen, Rachel filling his ear. His mother never mentioned Robert Woolfolk, never once, but as they passed the corner of Nevins and Bergen, the site where she’d kicked Robert’s ass right out on the street Dylan felt the shaming thrill of it again, felt it in her as well as in himself. Rachel wasn’t responsible for what she said, he knew. She was afraid too. Dylan’s role was to unravel what Rachel said and ignore ninety percent of it, to solve her.

“That beautiful black man who moved in next to Isabel Vendle is Barrett Rude Junior, he’s a singer, he was in the Distinctions, he’s got this amazing voice, he sounds just like Sam Cooke. I actually saw them once, opening for the Stones. His son is your age. He’s going to be your new best friend, that’s my prediction.”

It was Rachel’s last setup.

“You don’t want any kind of wallpaper, we’ll tear it off and paint, whatever. It’s your room. I love you, Dylan, you know that. Come on, race me home.”

Dylan put his confusion into his running, tried to put his mother somewhere behind him.

“Okay, can it, your mother’s out of breath. You run too fast.”

His sneaker-slapping footfalls petered at the corner of Nevins and Dean, where he waited for Rachel to catch up, and crooked his head up to gulp air. In that instant Dylan was sure he’d seen it again: the ragged figure arching from the roof of Public School 38 to the tops of the ramshackle storefronts on Nevins, to disappear then under the sky. The impossible leaper. He looked like a bum.

Dylan didn’t ask his mother if she’d seen. She was lighting a cigarette.

“You’re not only beautiful and a genius but you’ve got a pair of legs. I wouldn’t say it if it wasn’t true. You’re growing up, kid.”

Merit badges were cryptograms, blips of unlikely information from another planet of boyhood, and Mingus Rude, though in principle showing off , seemed to regard them with an anthropological detachment not so different from Dylan’s. “Swimming, fire, tying, compass,” he mouth-breathed as he ran his thumbs over them, talismanic evidence of the Philadelphia suburbs, flotsam from a dead world.

Mingus Rude made Dylan wait in the empty, weedy backyard while he dressed himself in the full Scout uniform, then stood before Dylan and they both considered the non sequitur of it, sleeves and legs already too short, yellow scarf stained with a slug trail of snot. He went inside again and came out in a green-and-white hockey uniform with his name pressed across the shoulders in glossy, slightly crooked iron-on letters. He held a splintered stick with black electrical tape wound around the handle. Dylan absorbed it silently. Then Mingus again vanished, to return in a crimson football uniform, with helmet reading MANAYUNK MOHAWKS. Together they peeled back the ventilated nylon jersey to examine the foam-and-plastic shoulder pads that gave Mingus Rude the outline of a superhero. The pads smelled of sweat and rot, of dizzy, inaccessible afternoons. But can you catch a spaldeen? Can you roof one? Dylan wondered bitterly. Mingus Rude would soon know that Dylan Ebdus could not.

Dylan was torn between wanting to claim to possess merit badges in skully , Etch A Sketch , sneaking down creaky stairs , and drawing “Skippy” and a desire to protect Mingus Rude from mockery, theft, incomprehension. He could already hear Yo, let me see it, let me check it out, what-you don’t trust me? He wished to protect them both by commanding the new boy never to bring any of these madly fertile and irrelevant possessions out onto the block for any other kid to see.

Dylan tangled in silence. There in the high-fenced sanctuary of the backyard he wanted to heap the various uniforms in a bonfire, like the one Henry and Alberto had once set on the stoop of the abandoned house, igniting smoldering newspapers and dried dog shit and the stinky green late-summer ailanthus branches which had fallen to litter the street everywhere. Dylan wanted Mingus Rude and himself to build a fire and smother the uniforms in damp smoke until the plastic blackened and melted, until the numbers and names, the evidence, was destroyed. A Dean Street fire, no merit badges involved. Instead he watched as Mingus Rude somberly packed the uniforms into the bottom of his closet.

“You like comics?” said Mingus Rude.

“Sure,” said Dylan unsure. My mother likes them , he almost said.

Mingus Rude excavated four comic books from the closet floor: Daredevil #77 , Black Panther #4 , Doctor Strange #12 , The Incredible Hulk #115 . They’d been tenderly handled to death, corners rounded, paper browned by hot attentive breath, pages chewed by eyes. MINGUS RUDE was written in slanted ballpoint capitals on each first interior page. Mingus read certain panels aloud, incanting them, shaping Dylan’s attention, shaping his own. Dylan felt himself permeated by some ray of attention, moved so that he felt an uncanny warmth in the half of his chest that was turned toward Mingus. He wanted to put his hand in Mingus Rude’s crispy-looking hair.