Jonathan Lethem - The Fortress of Solitude

“You know what they say now? Doctor Strange could take the Incredible Hulk by making some kind of mystical cage but he couldn’t take Thor because Thor’s a godlike figure, as long as he doesn’t lose his hammer. If he loses his hammer dude’s nothing better than a cripple.”

“Who’s Thor?”

“You’ll see. You know where to buy comics?”

“Uh, yeah.” Dylan thought of Croft, that afternoon on Isabel Vendle’s deck, the newsstand on the traffic island at Flatbush Avenue and Atlantic. The Fantastic Four .

Could Doctor Strange “take” the Fantastic Four? he wondered.

“Ever steal comics?”

“No.”

“It’s no big thing. You go to camp this year?”

“No.” No year , Dylan almost said. He’d found an artifact on Mingus’s dresser, a sort of tuning fork.

“That’s a pick,” said Mingus.

“Oh.”

“Like a comb, for black hair. It ain’t nothing. Want to see a gold record?”

Dylan nodded mutely, dropped the pick. Mingus Rude was a world, an exploding bomb of possibilities.

Dylan wondered how long he’d be able to keep him to himself.

They crept upstairs. His father had abandoned to Mingus Rude the spectacular gift of the entire basement level: two rooms to himself, and possession of the magically blank backyard. Mingus Rude’s father lived on the parlor floor. Like Isabel Vendle, Barrett Rude Junior slept in a bed opposite the heavily ornate marble mantelpiece, behind the shaded light of the tall windows, the showpiece windows meant for front parlors filled with pianos and upholstery, eighteenth-century Bibles on stands, who knew what else. But unlike Isabel Vendle’s, Barrett Rude Junior’s bed, which lay on the floor there under the scrolled Dutch ceiling, was a wide flat bag filled, as Mingus Rude demonstrated in passing with a neat two-palmed shove, with actual water , an undulating sea trapped in slick sheets. The two gold records were, oddly, just what their name promised, gold records, 45s, glued to white matting and framed in stained aluminum, not up on the bare walls but propped on the crowded mantel beside balled dollar bills and half-filled glasses and empty packs of Kools. “(NO WAY TO HELP YOU) EASE YOUR MIND” (B. RUDE, A. DEEHORN, M. BROWN), THE SUBTLE DISTINCTIONS, ATCO, CERTIFIED GOLD MAY 28, 1970,was the legend on one, and “BOTHERED BLUE” (B. RUDE), THE SUBTLE DISTINCTIONS, ATCO, CERTIFIED GOLD FEBRUARY 19, 1972,the other.

“Downstairs,” said Mingus Rude. They left the gold records behind. Dylan walked ahead on the stairs, feeling strangely formal as he gripped the banister, imagining Mingus Rude’s gaze on his back.

In the backyard they winged rocks into the sky, let them plop into the Puerto Ricans’ yard. Mostly Mingus, Dylan watching. It was August 29, 1974. The air smelled like somebody’s arm up close. You could hear the steady ding of a Mister Softee truck on Bergen Street, probably with a string of the usual kids hanging on it.

“My grandpop’s a preacher,” said Mingus Rude.

“Really?”

“Barrett Rude Senior. That’s where my daddy started singing, in his church. But he doesn’t have a church anymore.”

“Why not?”

“He’s in jail.”

“Oh.”

“I guess you know my mother’s white,” said Mingus Rude.

“Sure.”

“White women like black men, you heard that, right?”

“Uh, sure.”

“My father don’t talk to that lying bitch no more.” He followed this with a sharp laugh of self-surprise.

Dylan didn’t say anything.

“He paid a million dollars for me. That’s what he had to pay to get me back, a million cold . You can ask him if you think I’m lying.”

“I believe you.”

“I don’t care if you believe me, it’s true.”

Dylan looked at Mingus Rude’s lips and eyes, his exact brownness, took it in. Dylan wanted to read Mingus Rude like a language, wanted to know if the new kid had changed Dean Street or only changed Dylan himself by arriving here. Mingus Rude breathed through his mouth and his tongue curled out of one side of his mouth with the effort of a throw. Mingus was black but lighter, a combination. The palms of his hands were as white as Dylan’s. He wore corduroys. Anything was possible, really.

A million-dollar kid doesn’t belong on Dean Street, Dylan wanted to say. The word million , even.

Mingus Rude might be insane, Dylan didn’t mind.

Two days later he was already playing, standing in the street, a catcher in stoopball, taking a lean on a parked car to let the bus go by. Like he’d been there all along. He caught laconically, perfectly. He might be the Henry of his own block, now transported here-he might be a Henry of the mind, recognizable anywhere. Dylan crept up and sat on Henry’s wall and watched, with Earl and a couple girls, younger kids. Mingus Rude was viable, apparently. He’d been folded into the ongoing game while Dylan wasn’t looking.

Robert Woolfolk wasn’t around. Otherwise the last splendid day had shucked every verifiable kid out onto Dean Street. Two girls turned a rope with three others inside, their knees shining like a bunch of grapes. The empty, blue-tiled school, Public School 38, hummed, just down the block. Nobody looked at it, nobody cared.

“D-Man.”

“John Dillinger.”

“D-Lone. Lonely D.”

Dylan didn’t know what Mingus Rude was yelling about, didn’t recognize himself in the nicknames.

“Yo, Dylan, you deaf?”

Captaincy was an essence lurking in Henry above all. But one captain needed another, even if inferior, a stooge. Someone had to step up. Dylan had seen Alberto assume it, Lonnie too, once even Robert Woolfolk, to make a lopsided game of punchball, fast dissolved in scowls and a faked limp. Now, at the bright weary end of summer, Henry and Mingus Rude were stickball captains, unexplained.

Mingus chose Dylan first, over Alberto, Lonnie, Earl, anyone.

“He can’t hit,” said Henry. It was a reasonably sympathetic diagnosis. Dylan was any captain’s problem, a communal drag.

“I got Dillinger,” said Mingus Rude coolly. He wrapped and rewrapped the wrist fastener of a Philadelphia Phillies batting glove, teasing reminder of the motherlode of outfits buried in his closet. “Take your man.”

That last August afternoon before school began was something like those heartbreaking, dazzling glimpses of the opening credits for Star Trek or Mission Impossible , before you were commanded to switch the television off and go to bed: it was going to haunt you, play inside your eyelids, after the door was closed, the light extinguished, your pounding rib cage calmed. A summer was unfinished, broken off at the end, a bad splice. Now, Mingus Rude’s arrival promised the possibility of another summer , hinged to this one like a door you couldn’t look beyond.

The palm-sweaty broomstick was wrapped with new black tape, like the hockey-stick handle.

“Lead off, Dill.”

The names, Dylan began to understand, conveyed that he and Mingus were to be one thing to each other indoors, off the street, and entirely another outside. On the block.

Inside, outside, a distinction Dylan understood. Could work with.

Henry pitched. Dylan waved at something barely seen, like a bee overhead. “Ball one,” said Mingus Rude, captain, umpire, announcer.

“Ball one?” scoffed Henry. “Dude chased it.”

“Doesn’t matter,” said Mingus. “Too high.” To Dylan he said: “Don’t swing at that shit.” To Henry: “Strike zone.” Then back to Dylan, he whispered. “Don’t close your eyes.”

You evolved in full view and secretly at once, grew bony and hairy, twisted out a baby tooth and spat blood and kept playing, claimed to know certain words the first time you heard them. A day came when you made contact, stung it somewhere not foul, rounded first before the bat clattered to stillness in the street. It was no big thing, you weren’t looking for congratulations. Dylan danced off on the manhole cover, second base, daring the throw, the next order of business. Reward for trickling the ball between Alberto’s feet. Leading off, batting one thousand .