Jonathan Lethem - The Fortress of Solitude

Dylan nodded.

Barrett Rude Junior weighed it. Dylan’s presence in his room was explained, that might have been his first conclusion. Then, in slow motion, something else dawned. Dylan sensed in Barrett Rude’s heavy-lidded gaze a flare of tenderness, felt it like a headlight’s beam turning to enclose him.

“Mother’s gone, but the boy is keeping it together.” Barrett Rude Junior spoke the sentence twice. In the first rendition the words emerged thick, deliberate, tongue-mashed. The second was a lilting echo of the first, the line now a song of admonition, a beguilement. “ Mu-tha’s gone, but the boy is keeping it together .”

Dylan nodded again, dumb.

Mingus Rude’s father still gripped the blunt yellow bottle at its base. He waved it in a circle, toasting an invisible table. “That’s cool. You’re cool. Now, check out the long-players another time, Little Dylan. Sit and watch the game.”

Did Barrett Rude Junior remind him of Rachel? Or was this only the longest the word mother had been strung in the air since Rachel’s vanishing? Dylan felt that she’d drifted into the room, a mist or cloud, a formation. Mingus Rude squirmed on the couch, wouldn’t meet Dylan’s eye-seemingly he felt her too, Rachel Ebdus or some other mother, pressing on him like a force from above, like weather. Then she drifted out of sight, the camera angle switched to the struggle of inches, runners writhing on shredded ground, a helmet hugged like a baby on the sidelines, the long wait for a measuring chain to come upfield.

When at the end Mingus Rude put a fist in the air and said, “I won,” his father said, “What you win?”

“Me and Dylan had a bet.”

“How much?”

“Five dollars.”

“Don’t play your friend like that. Any fool knows the Vikings can’t win no Super Bowl. Come here. Come here .” When Mingus stood near enough Barrett Rude reached out with his wide hand, robe spilling forward, exposing a nipple weirdly soft and large, and cuffed his son on the cheek with his palm. It might have been affectionate if Barrett Rude’s voice, the theatrical summoning, hadn’t marked it as something else. Dylan watched Mingus rock delicately on his sneaker heels in expectation of another, stronger blow. But Barrett Rude grew absent, examined his own hand front and back, as though for something written there. Then he said, “Want money, don’t steal from your friend.” He extended an arm to the mantel and peeled off a twenty from the roll which lay there, shoved it at Mingus. “Put your hat back on and walk Little Dylan home now. And when you get back take a pick to your nappy-ass head, don’t make me keep telling you.”

Winter days were static glimpsed between channel flips. Rotting snow like black diseased gums in the street. The projects were sealed up, the kids didn’t come out. Henry could be seen slinging a football into the sky, basket-catching it himself. Alberto had abandoned him, shifted into new, more Puerto Rican friendships. It was shocking how Henry was diminished, how much his stature had depended on Alberto after all. Mingus appeared on the block before nightfall or was elusive for weeks. Comics got weird, were thrown down in disgust. Warlock was canceled, they’d never know how his battle with Thanatos turned out. Jack “King” Kirby’s return to Marvel, from his exile at DC, was still building steam. Dylan pictured Kirby in a laboratory leaching the Superman toxins from his body, recovering from kryptonite poisoning.

A guy jumped from the fifth floor of the halfway house on Nevins and impaled himself on the spiked iron gate, which had to be cut out in a section and moved with him to the Brooklyn Hospital surgery room. Kids took trips to see the fence, until the telltale spikes were capped by a new steel bar running along their tops. You hadn’t known it was a halfway house until someone jumped out, then it turned out everybody knew. As with the Brooklyn House of Detention on Atlantic, you’d avoided that block on communal instinct, knowledge you couldn’t have guessed you already had.

Dylan and Abraham stayed up late to see Saturday Night Live but after ten minutes Abraham declared he didn’t get it, and rummaged angrily for a misplaced Lenny Bruce record. Time was running backward, said Abraham. Things used to matter and be funny. Dylan took it on faith. One day Dylan found Earl slamming a spaldeen high off the face of the abandoned house, his teeth gritted as he said, over and over, “ I’m Chevy Chase and you’re not! ” Earl was furious, disconsolate, nobody’s friend at the moment. For anybody, ballplaying was now explicitly nostalgic. If a few kids formed a game they were like the Puerto Ricans at the corner on milk crates, recounting the past, grumbling in ritual. Ball games broke like false fevers, passed like moods. Marilla and La-La sang, nearly screaming, Got my sunroof down, got my diamond in the back, put on your shaggy wig woman, if you don’t I ain’t comin’ back, oh, shame, shame, shame, sha-ay-ame, shame on you! If you can’t dance too!

One thawing Saturday in March Dylan met Mingus at noon to walk up Court Street, through the scrap-strewn park that stretched beyond Borough Hall, on a solemn mission Dylan didn’t understand. In the park they bought hot dogs and knishes in greasy wax paper from a steaming cart, Mingus producing a balled-up five from his coat pocket. Mingus rewrapped half his knish and put it where the money had been, stash for the unknown destination. Just past the war monument the park tilted toward Brooklyn ’s edge, the crumpled waterfront: parking lots, garbage scows, city scrap yards. The Brooklyn-Queens Expressway was a vibrating shadow, beneath it the streets still showed cobblestone in places, elsewhere old trolley tracks lay half buried in the new tar.

Mingus showed the way. They circled under the on-ramp to find stone stairs up into the sunlight of the bridge’s walkway, then started across, over the river, traffic howling in cages at their feet, the gray clotted sky clinging to the bridge’s veins, Manhattan’s dinosaur spine rotating into view as they mounted the great curve above the river. The walkway’s slats were uneven, some rotten. Just an armature of bolted wire lay between Mingus’s and Dylan’s sneaker tips and the pulsing, glittering water. The bridge was an argument or plea with space.

They halted two-thirds across. On the vast tower planted at Manhattan ’s mouth were two lavish word-paintings, red and white and green and yellow sprayed fantastically high on the rough stone, edges bled in geological texture. The first read MONO, the second LEE, syllables drained of meaning, like Mingus’s DOSE.

Dylan understood what Mingus wanted him to see. The painted names had conquered the bridge, pinned it to the secret street, claimed it for Brooklyn. The distance between Mono’s and Lee’s blaring, blurry, timeless ten-foot letters and the binder-scribble and wall-scribble, the gnomic marks everywhere, might be traceable, step by step. Tags and their invisible authors were the next skully or Marvel superheroes, the hidden lore. Mingus Rude pulled out his half-eaten knish and nibbled it and the two of them stood in awe, apes at a monolith, glimpsing if not understanding their future. The cars rushing below knew nothing. People in cars weren’t New Yorkers anyway, they’d suffered some basic misunderstanding. The two boys on the walkway, apparently standing still: they were moving faster than the cars.

Nineteen seventy-five.

Dylan Ebdus and Mingus Rude in the spring of 1975, walking home along Dean Street studying marker tags in black and purple ink, on mailboxes and lampposts, DMD and FMD, DINE II andSCAR 56, trying to break the code, mouthing syllables to themselves. Dylan and Mingus together and alone, in windows of time, punctuation. One crossing Nevins to dodge a clump of kids from the projects, keeping his white face hidden in a jacket hood; one hanging in loose gangs of black kids after school, then walking alone to Dean Street. The two of them, a fifth and a sixth grader, stranded in zones, in selves. White kid, black kid, Captain America and Falcon, Iron Fist and Luke Cage. In windows of time, returning from different schools to the same block, two brownstones, two fathers, Abraham Ebdus and Barrett Rude Junior each wrinkling back foil edges on TV dinners to discover peas and carrots that had invaded the mashed potatoes and Salisbury steak, setting them on the table in dour silence. Dinner in silence or to the sound of the television drowned by the baying of sirens, Nevins Street a fire lane, a path of destruction, the projects flaring up again, an apartment on the eighteenth floor with a smoldering mattress pushed halfway out the window, stuck. The grid of zones, the huddled brownstone streets between prison and projects, Wyckoff Gardens, Gowanus Houses. The whores on Nevins and Pacific. The high-school kids pouring out of Sarah J. Hale all afternoon, black girls already bigger than yo mama , Third Avenue another no-man’s-land, the empty lot where they raped that girl . The halfway house. It was all halfway, you walked out of your halfway school and tried to chart a course through your halfway neighborhood to make it back to your own halfway house, your half-empty house. Dylan Ebdus and Mingus Rude like figures stepping through mists of silence every few weeks to read a comic book or fool around with tags in ballpoint, dry runs, rehearsals for something else.