Jonathan Lethem - The Fortress of Solitude

For three weeks Mingus Rude was like the flying man, a rumor with himself Dylan couldn’t confirm. Mingus’s vacancy from his own schooldays, and from Dylan’s, was the secret premise of an existence which was otherwise unchanged except by being worse every possible way. Seventh grade was sixth grade desublimated, uncorked. It was the Lord of the Rings trilogy to sixth grade’s The Hobbit , the real story at last, all the ominous foreshadowed stuff flushed from the margins and into view. It wasn’t for children, seventh grade. You could read the stress of even entering the building in the postures of the teachers, the security guards. Nobody could relax in such a racial and hormonal disaster area.

Bodies ranged like ugly cartoons, as though someone without talent was scribbling in flesh.

The biggest shapes were the angriest. That’s what they were, shapes-between hiding your glasses and averting your gaze you were Mr. Magoo now. The less you met anyone’s eyes the less chance you’d ever risk doing it, a self-fulfilling program.

Chinese kids had apparently gotten some warning well in advance, and had thoroughly disappeared.

Puerto Rican or Dominican kids seemed to be tiptoeing away from the scene of everything. They decorated themselves differently and spoke more Spanish each passing hour. The way they occupied space in homeroom or gym class they were there and not there, an operation of mass adjacency.

The scariest fights were between two black girls.

On Court Street and Smith Street it wasn’t even clear who was and wasn’t in your school. Other bodies floated around, loose elements. A couple of black kids might corner you and ask, “You Italian or a white boy?” and all you’d know for sure was not to point out that the Italian kids were white. A black kid might be scared of something, might be watching his back on Court like an Italian kid watched his on Smith, but whatever they were scared of it was never going to be you. Anyway, no Italian kid would’ve answered I’m Italian . He’d have said Fuck you think I am? Or just grabbed his dick through his pants and sucked his teeth, flared his nostrils.

You, you were a million miles from any such procedure.

More in the market for a case of fake asthma.

The day after Dylan Ebdus and Arthur Lomb spoke of the Blue Beetle in the library, Mingus Rude resurfaced. At three o’clock, the hour when the doors were thrown open and the school exploded onto the October-bright pavement, when Court Street shopkeepers stood arms-crossed in doorways, their jaws chewing gum or nothing at all, just chewing under narrowed eyes. Dylan used the Butler Street entrance, looking to be lost in the flow of anonymous faces as he left the building, hoping to be carried a distance down Court Street disguised in a clot of anybodies before exposing himself as a solitary white boy. Today he stopped. Mingus sat cross-legged on the rise of a mailbox on the corner of Court and Butler, regarding the manic outflow of kids with a Buddha’s calm, as though from an even greater height than the mailbox, another planet maybe. He might have been sitting there placidly for hours, unnoticed by the school security guards or the older Italian teenagers who roamed Court, that’s how it felt. Dylan understood at once that not only hadn’t Mingus been inside the school today, he’d never crossed its doors since summer, since the start of his eighth-grade year.

“Yo, Dill-man!” said Mingus, laughing. “I was looking for you, man. Where you been?”

Mingus unfolded his legs and slid off the mailbox, pulled Dylan sideways out of the crowd, like there was never a question they left school together, like they’d done it every day for three weeks. They crossed Court, into Cobble Hill, Dylan hitching his backpack high on his shoulders and trotting to keep up. Mingus led him up Clinton Street to Atlantic Avenue, kids from I.S. 293 all left instantly behind. There the neighborhood opened out, the shipyards visible under the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, the avenue tilting down to the yellow-glinting water. It was as though Mingus knew paths from the school Dylan in his stupefaction couldn’t have plotted for himself.

“I haven’t seen you-” Dylan began.

“ Whenever you call me, I’ll be there ,” Mingus sang. “ Whenever you need me, I’ll be there – I been a-round! Here.” He crumpled a couple of dollars into Dylan’s hands and nodded him to the Arab newsstand on the corner of Clinton. “Get me a pack of Kools, Super-D.” He tipped his head again. “I’ll be over here.”

“I can’t buy cigarettes.”

“Say it’s for your mom, say she always comes in there. He’ll sell it to you, don’t worry. Better let me hold your backpack.”

Dylan tried not to turn his head at the rack of comics as he stepped into the narrow, darkened corridor of a shop.

“Uh, pack of Kools. It’s for my mother.”

The operation unfolded precisely as scripted. The guy raised an eyebrow at the word mother , then slid the Kools across the linoleum counter with nothing besides a grunt.

Back outside, Mingus stashed both cigarettes and change in his jacket-of-mystery, then led Dylan back along Clinton, toward the park on Amity Street.

“Dill-Man, D-Lone, Dillinger,” Mingus chanted. “Diggity Dog, Deputy Dog, Dillimatic .”

“I haven’t seen you anywhere,” Dylan said, unable to check the plaint in his voice.

“You all right, man?” Mingus asked. “Everything cool with you?”

Dylan knew precisely what everything Mingus meant-all of seventh grade, whatever went on or didn’t inside the building which was apparently no longer Mingus’s problem.

According to Mr. Winegar, science teacher, the universe was reportedly exploding in slow motion, everything falling away from everything else at a fixed rate. It was a good enough explanation for now.

“Everything cool?” Mingus demanded.

They were together and not together, Dylan saw now. Mingus Rude was unreachable, blurred, maybe high. There wasn’t going to be any communing with his core, that vivid happy sadness which called out to Dylan’s own.

Dylan shrugged, said, “Sure.”

“That’s all I want to know, man. You know you’re my main man, Dillinger. D-Train.”

It was a rehearsal and now Dylan learned what for. As they slipped into the park Mingus exaggerated his ordinary lope, raised a hand in dreamy salute. Arrayed at the concrete chessboard tables were three black teenagers in assorted slung poses. One more chaotically slung than the others, a signature geometry of limbs which caused Dylan’s heart to guiltily, madly lurch. Nevertheless he strolled beside Mingus into the thick of it, accepted whatever was meant to unfold in the park from within his own sleepwalker’s daze, which, perfected at the new school, covered even the resurrection of Robert Woolfolk as a presence in his life.

“Yo,” said Mingus Rude, lazily slapping at hands, humming swallowed syllables which might be names.

“What’s goin’ on, G?” said Robert Woolfolk.

Robert Woolfolk called Mingus G , for Gus, Dylan supposed. Did it mean he’d also met Barrett Rude Junior?

Then Robert Woolfolk recognized Dylan. He flinched with his whole face, his sour-lemon features hiding nothing, yet didn’t alter the arrangement of his limbs an inch.

The park was full of little white kids with bowl haircuts, maybe second or third graders from Packer Institute or Saint Ann ’s. They ran and screamed past the chessboard tables, dressed in Garanimals, arms loaded with plastic toys, G.I. Joes, water pistols, Wiffle balls. For all they inhabited the same world as Dylan and Mingus and Robert Woolfolk they might as well have been animated Disney bluebirds, twittering harmlessly around the head of the Wicked Witch as she coated an apple with poison.