Jonathan Lethem - The Fortress of Solitude

So silence and comic-book word balloons and the bass thump of the stereo upstairs.

One December afternoon Mingus tossed down his loose-leaf binder, bowed cardboard pressed with blue fabric, fraying at the corners, and Dylan saw that on every surface surrounding Mingus’s old Philadelphia Flyers sticker the binder was laced with ballpoint scrawlings, lines dug in repetition like Spirograph ovals, gestures toward some perfect, elusive form. Here was the scribble from schoolyard walls, now carried home to Dean Street and plopped on Dylan’s stoop.

“That’s my tag,” said Mingus when he caught Dylan studying the cloud of visual noise. “Here.” He tore out a page and, holding his pen with fingers close to the point, tongue curling against his cheek in concentration, wrote DOSE in angled block letters. Then he drew it again in a clumsy balloon font, the D and O barely distinguishable, the E swollen so its three digits overlapped-faint mimicry, it seemed to Dylan, of a Marvel Comics sound-effect panel.

“What’s it mean?”

“It’s my tag, Dose. It’s what I write.”

It was a new given. Anyone might have a tag. Dylan might have one himself any day now. Further explanations were or weren’t coming. The narrowed hours of winter light were a form of patience themselves, a stoic reply to no question. Rachel had vacated a certain hysteria from the house, replaced it with the telephone and assorted other ringing tones. A day had a hum like a seashell. Dylan watched television, watched the mails, watched his father trudge upstairs to his studio. He listened to his mother’s abandoned records at low volume, Carly Simon, Miriam Makeba, Delaney & Bonnie. From the barred window of his second-floor classroom he watched janitors trudge through a thin carpet of snow to Dumpsters, which were covered with the newly visible scribble. Dylan had begun to pick out names, layers in the mess. Most things had happened some time before Dylan came along, that’s why taking them for granted was so crucial. You could dial up any example in reruns, Room 222 , The Courtship of Eddie’s Father , The Mod Squad . All was exemplary of daily life, the undertow of the normal.

Things occurred in one another’s company that Dylan Ebdus and Mingus Rude might never discuss. They watched the Super Bowl in Mingus Rude’s parlor, first sealing a five-dollar bet in whispers in the basement room, Mingus taking the Pittsburgh Steelers, Dylan, on helmet aesthetics, the Minnesota Vikings. Then they’d tiptoed upstairs, under the eye of the gold records. The parlor was rearranged, the water bed hidden, the couch and a tremendous Barcalounger arrayed around a mammoth color television. Barrett Rude Junior sat enthroned before the screen in blue satin pants and an unsashed silk robe, his thick arms fallen to either side, palms open, legs sprawled halfway to the television. Coils of black-and-white hair were like false starts, unfinished cursives on the flat brown page of his chest. He cinched his head halfway from the pregame show to consider Dylan, squinted through his granny glasses, his goatee warping wryly as he pursed immense lips.

“This your friend, huh?”

Mingus ignored the question, sat on the couch.

“What’s your name?”

“Dylan.”

“Dylan? I met that cat, man. Who you like in the game, Little Dylan?”

“Huh?”

“Who you like in the game?”

“He likes the Vikings,” said Mingus, distantly, fallen into some trancelike state induced by his father and the immense, pulsing screen.

“Vikings lose,” said Barrett Rude Junior, so flatly that Dylan was momentarily confused-weren’t they all here to find out who won? The game wasn’t a rerun.

“You know the Dolphins?” said Barrett Rude.

Dylan lied yes .

“I worked out with them, summer of ’71. Get the picture, Gus.”

Mingus rose from the couch and slid into his father’s carpeted bedroom, returned with a framed color photograph, worm’s-eye, showing Barrett Rude Junior in a football uniform, ball curled to his chest, dreaming eyes fixed worlds beyond the lens.

“Mercury Morris said I’d make the cut as a second-string wideout, never got the chance, though. Damm record company put the kibosh, thought I couldn’t protect myself. Cost me a Super Bowl ring, man.”

Barrett Rude Junior wound down, his voice purring to nobody in particular. The game itself, when it began, turned out to be a long green flattening: of huffing, robotic men, and of Dylan’s interest. Football was an arrangement of failures, a proving how unlikely most things were. Mingus kept his betting stake private, just rooted maniacally for anyone to put it in the air. Dylan chanted silently along with the commercials, I’d like to buy the world a Coke. Indi-gestion. Barrett Rude Junior twitched his fingers, beating some tune on the Barcalounger’s arm.

“Gus, get me a Colt from the fridge, man.”

The yellow forty-ounce bottle sweated beads in the radiator-dry apartment. Barrett Rude wiped his fingers on his blue silk knee after each sip, dark wipes which evaporated but left puckered signatures, trails.

“Halftime y’all take ten dollars, get us some sandwich makings. Go round to Buggy’s, get me some of that Swedish cheese I like. I hate that Puerto Rican cheese they got at Ramirez, man.” Barrett Rude Junior said Buggy’s like the rest of the block, it didn’t matter that he never went out. Names were known indoors. The block was one thing, whole, it was proven again. The brownstones had ears, minds ticking away.

Y’all was a couple of yos walking together.

Dylan and Mingus wrapped themselves in their coats and jammed their hats to their eyes. Wind ripped around the corner of Bond Street, flaying their bony legs, whistling in the vents of their Keds. Fists balled in pockets, palms sweaty, knuckles frozen. Prying Buggy’s door against the wind. She and her German shepherd loomed as apparitions, creatures from Mars peering through glass. A black kid and a white kid buying cheese and mustard. Buggy might not know it was the Super Bowl, might even think the word was toilet-related, a blue dusty item lining her top shelf, which nobody bought.

Mingus and Dylan assembled sandwiches and the three of them ate, Barrett Rude Junior raving about the taste of the hot mustard, licking his fingers, muttering, punishing a second bottle of malt liquor. The third quarter was a floodlit desert, men piled in disarray, time desolately stretched. Somewhere ice-laden planes might be crashing, Manhattan might have snapped in two and drifted out to sea. Brooklyn was the winter island. Outside it was black as night. You’d never have guessed the Super Bowl was so grim and insistent. A shot from a drifting blimp alleviated nothing. Mingus kept his vigil, closed into himself, father-struck, father-stilled. Dylan scooted on his knees and picked through Barrett Rude Junior’s record collection, which filled the far corner beneath the mantel. Dylan flipped them forward and back, the Main Ingredient’s Afrodisiac , Esther Phillips’s Black-Eyed Blues , Rahsaan Roland Kirk’s The Inflated Tear , the Young Holt Trio’s Wack Wack , the names and cover art windows to some distant world as embedded with irretrievable meaning as any single issue of Marvel Comics.

“You don’t need to be looking at that stuff now,” said Barrett Rude Junior, distantly annoyed. “Sit up and watch the game.” He squinted, seemed to consider Dylan’s entirety for the first time.

The whiteness of the boy in the black man’s house.

“Your mother know you’re here?” Barrett Rude Junior asked.

“Dylan’s mother’s gone,” volunteered Mingus from the couch.

“Your mother’s gone?”