Jonathan Lethem - The Fortress of Solitude

Dylan Ebdus doesn’t speak, he stares.

The flying man nods at the fallen El Marko. “Scrawling up some nassyshit on the walls, I seen you.”

“You fell down,” says Dylan Ebdus.

“Nah, man, I flew down,” says the flying man. “Fucked up my motherfucking leg, though. Can’t land right no more.”

“How-how can you fly?”

“Hah. Ain’t ’cause of this fucking thing, that’s for damn sure.” The flying man pulls now at the sheet around his neck, sticks his blunt fingers in the knot and jerks it loose, surprisingly easily. He balls the soiled cape and tosses it to the side, into a pile of broken glass. “Tangle me up, hurt my leg, dang,” he mutters. “Got to be fallin’ all the time.”

Dylan Ebdus takes a cautious step toward the uncapped El Marko where it lies on the rubber floor of the park.

“Gohead, pick it up. I don’t give a shit ’bout no fucking graffiti , man. Least of my problems, shit.”

Dylan grabs the marker, caps it, and puts it away. The flying man seems to be talking to himself now, anyway.

“Hey, man, you got a dollar, man?”

Dylan Ebdus stares again. The flying man shows his teeth, which are small and too spacious. His gum a flare of brown and pink.

“You can’t talk, man? I axed if you got a dollar.”

The mole-boy is almost relieved to shift to such familiar turf. On automatic, he digs in his pocket. Another part of him, though, still calculates trajectories, replays that flash and thud of descent a minute before. His eyes flicker to the rooftop, three stories high. From there to here ?

Elsewhere this day’s unstarted. The park an empty bracket, no one walking Pacific Street’s sidewalk to confirm or triangulate any goings-on.

The flying man reaches up and Dylan Ebdus hands him fifty cents, stepping into the aura of stink to do it. He steps quickly back.

The flying man palms the quarters, turns a silver ring on his pinky finger, his eyes locked on Dylan’s. There’s a rime of white crusted in the fine lines of the flying man’s neck, as though he’s been beached, baked in evaporating salt.

“I used to fly good,” says the flying man.

“I’ve seen you,” says Dylan, nearly whispering, the knowledge appearing with the words.

“Can’t no more,” says the flying man angrily, then licks his lips. “Muthafucking”-here he works to find a word-“ air waves always got to be knocking me down.”

“Air waves?”

“Hah. Hah. I can’t stay in the air no more. That’s the problem , man.” The flying man suddenly spots the quarters shining in his cracked palm, like shards of mirror sun-caught in a muddy curb. “That’s all you got, man? That’s all you got for me?”

Dylan nods mutely, then undoes his belt and surrenders the tiny, wadded dollar, not unfolding it but dropping it like a Chiclet into the cup of the flying man’s vast fissured hand.

“Hah. You really seen me flyin’?”

The flying man lifts his chin to point at the distant rooftops above Pacific and Nevins, the roof of P.S. 38 and beyond, to the Wyckoff Houses. Seagulls wheel in the pale sky, strayed from Coney Island or Red Hook.

Dylan Ebdus nods again, then flees the park.

Apostcard from Running Crab, postmarked Bloomington, Indiana, August 16, 1976. The front a black-and-white photograph of Henry Miller on the beach at Big Sur, naked apart from a loincloth so big it’s like a baby’s diaper, wrinkled chest sagging below caustic grin and sunburned brow. A statuesque, black-haired woman stands aloof behind him, in a bikini and a filmy wrap, ankles in surf, ignoring the camera.

don’t let hank fool you d

a brooklyn street kid never quits

dreaming of stickball triples

egg creams and the funnies

in his mind he’s dick tracy

she’s brenda starr

not venus on the half shell

love beachcomber crab

He stared at the tickets so long his eyeball vibes might have scoured off the ink bearing that blind coon’s name and replaced it with his own. Some fool up at Artists and Repertory had sent him two tickets to see Ray motherfucking Charles at Radio City Music Hall, as though he was likely to sit pondering a mile of the spangled white pussy known as the Rockettes-from the goddamn balcony!-just to see that haughty jive-ass banging on a grand piano hollering “God Bless America.” Never wished to play Radio City, why would he be found in the balcony ?

He’d propped his parlor windows open high. Outside, Dean Street moaned in an ailment of humidity. The heat was granular, undissolved. The sunlight on the strewn mirror blobby, swimmy. Nothing rippled the curtains, the air didn’t move. Just a steady distant Puerto Rican beat from the square in front of Ramirez’s store, might be the same song for the last two hours, the whole afternoon. Cars moved like jellyfish, barely distinguishable from their medium, a ripple where the tar met the air.

Four black kids dancing like startled spiders in the flow of a wrenched-open hydrant on Nevins and Bergen.

He tossed the tickets on the mirror, then carved out a line, taking care to point his toes outward, ten and two on the face of an imaginary clock. He’d recently developed a technique of widening his hips and knees and keeping his back arched as he leaned forward, so that breathing a line became more natural, the blow raining into his open lungs, flushing him through with cool air. Too many cats snorted while balled up, imbibing the drug ragefully, their bodies fistlike.

It was like singing, a matter of what distant quadrants in your belly and chest you could find to offer up.

Commitment on a deeper level.

From the low angle he puzzled the tickets with his eyes, exploring how they lay twinned on the mirror, dark writing inaccessibly sandwiched in shadow between the two pairs, the real and the reflected. Maybe Crowell Desmond, his so-called manager, had engineered this affront. A widely unknown historical fact was that Ray Charles had personally bounced a reel of Subtle Distinctions’ demos when he was running Tangerine, saying, reputedly, Don’t come around here with this Motown-sounding doo-wop horseshit . But could Desmond, who’d crept onto the scene only a year ago, be savvy to that fact? Not likely. Anyway, Crowell Desmond lacked initiative for such a cryptic put-down.

Barrett Rude Junior picked up a rolled dollar bill and drew a line clear into his lower gut, into his balls and dick. Felt the chill there shudder outward everywhere through his clammy, sweat-boiled carcass.

Nigger , he thought. Nig- guh , major falling to minor, an interval of sevenths.

Fugitive melodies lurked in the space between syllables, niggers themselves crouching in the dark.

No, the bestowal of the Ray Charles tickets was A &R working on its own, twitches from a corporate body which had never walked, only groveled. The resemblance to sentient life purely accidental. Someone in the offices had the wholly asinine and improbable notion they’d sweet-talk him up to Montreal to record some discofied bullshit with the German producer of the Silver Convention, wanting to turn him into Johnnie Taylor, maybe, or the Miracles after Smokey split, soul men in mirror-studded spandex bodysuits singing for horny Valley of the Dingbat housewives.

Move it up, move it down, move it in, move it out, Disco Lady! Then take me out behind the house and shoot my lame black ass.

Nihhh- gahhh , like breathing.

Could turn into a Curtis Mayfield falsetto thing, maybe.

In the same cause the sycophantic flacks had one month earlier dragged to his doorstep a slick new four-track tape recorder with a note on cream-colored gold-embossed stationery reading Barry, never forget you wrote Bothered to get me off your back, I’m still on it, Ahmet . As if that white-goateed upper-management hipster had likely even noticed the tune until the Mantovani Strings version had floated into his private fur-lined elevator.