Jonathan Lethem - The Fortress of Solitude

“Shit,” said Robert Woolfolk and now he smiled. “You know this dude, G?”

“This my man D-Lone ,” said Mingus. “He’s cool. We go back, he’s my boy from around the block.”

Robert looked at Dylan a long while before he spoke.

“I know your boy,” he said. “I seen him from before you were even around, G.” He flicked his eyes at Dylan. “What up, Dylan man? Don’t say you don’t remember me because I know you do.”

“Sure,” said Dylan.

“Shit, I even know this dude’s mother ,” said Robert Woolfolk.

“Oh, yeah?” said Mingus, carefully blasé, downplaying any further speculations. “So you down, right? You cool with my man Dylan.”

Robert Woolfolk laughed. “What you need me to say, man? You can hang with your white boy, don’t mean shit to me.”

At that the thin, worthless pretense of Robert Woolfolk’s fondness for Dylan was shattered in hilarity. The other two black teenagers snorted, slapped each other five for the words white boy , as ever a transport to hear said aloud. “Ho, snap ,” said one, shaking his head in wonderment like he’d just seen a good stunt in a movie, a car flipped over or a body crumpled in a hail of blood-spurting bullet thwips.

Dylan stood frozen in his stupid backpack and unpersuasive Pro Keds in the innocent afternoon, his arms numb, blinking his eyes at Mingus.

Weebles wobble but they don’t fall down.

“We going down to bomb some trains or we sit here all day talking ’bout this and that?” said Robert Woolfolk.

“Let’s go,” said Mingus Rude softly.

“You bringing your homeboy here?”

Suddenly a woman stepped into the thick of them. Out of nowhere she made herself present where they sat and stood around the tables. It was a shock, as though she’d ruptured a bubble, disturbed a force field Dylan hadn’t thought was permeable, one where their talk, no matter how many times the word fuck was included, was sealed in a glaze of distant car horns and bird tweets and the younger kids’ sweet yells.

The woman was a mom, surely, one of the running kids had to be hers. She was maybe twenty-five or thirty, with blond hair, matching blue-jean jacket and bell-bottoms, and granny glasses-she might have been familiar from one of Rachel’s parties. Dylan could see her now, waving a joint around, making some passionate digression about Altman or Szechuan, aggravating men accustomed to holding the floor. Or Dylan might have been kidding himself. There were probably a million like her, false Rachels who’d never known his.

“You okay, kid?”

She spoke to Dylan alone, there was no mistaking. The rest of them, Mingus included, were one thing in her eyes, Dylan another. Dylan felt Robert Woolfolk had somehow called the nearest thing to Rachel into being, as though white women everywhere were charged with bearing Rachel’s one crucial intervention however far into the future it needed to go.

Of all times, it would have to be now. Dylan had wished what felt like a million times for an adult to step up, for a teacher or a friend of his mom’s to turn a corner on Bergen or Hoyt and collide with one of his unnameable disasters, to break it open with a simple question like You okay, kid? But not now. This disaster sealed his status as white boy with Robert Woolfolk forever, precisely when Mingus had been working to change it.

Mingus, it was clear, had been communicating a message to Dylan by his three-week vanishing act, his elusiveness: that at the new school Dylan was on his own. Nobody had his back . It simply wasn’t possible. It had taken every day of those three weeks for Dylan to abandon the fantasy that Mingus would float him through seventh and eighth grades. Mingus cannily showed himself only after the message was sunk in: I can’t carry you, son, it’s beyond my power . Then, in a compensatory statement of equal clarity, he’d guided Dylan into Cobble Hill to the park on Amity Street to meet and make a pact of being down with Robert Woolfolk in order to say, Where I can help, I will. I’m not actually blind or indifferent here, Dylan. I’m looking out.

“Hey, kid? Something wrong?”

Dylan had turned to her, helpless, gaping. There was no way to tell her how right and wrong she was at once, no way to make her evaporate. All the worse that she was beautiful, gleaming like the cover of one of Rachel’s MS. magazines which stacked up scorned by Abraham in the living room for Dylan’s eventual guilty perusal of illustrated features on bralessness. Dylan wanted to protect the blond woman from Robert Woolfolk’s eyes. She shouldn’t have popped out of the other world, the Cobble Hill world of private-school kids and their caretakers, it was a misunderstanding. He wanted to send her home to entice Abraham from his studio, that was where she might have done some good.

Of course, Robert Woolfolk didn’t really matter. He was only an enemy, finally. The worst thing the woman had done was humiliate him with Mingus.

“They’re my friends,” Dylan said feebly. As it was out of his mouth it occurred to him he’d failed another test, another where the correct answer was Fuck you lookin’ at? That phrase, robustly applied, might have actually transported them all back in time to a moment before Robert Woolfolk had said the words white boy . Dylan might have then been invited to trail the others to a transit yard or wherever else they were going in order to bomb some trains , a richly terrifying prospect. Dylan craved to bomb some trains as fiercely as if he’d heard that phrase for years instead of just once, moments ago. And he had the El Marko in his backpack to bomb them with, if he’d only get a chance to produce it.

No one else piped up to say Lady, mind your own fuckin’ business and Dylan saw that Robert Woolfolk and his two companions, Robert’s laugh track, were missing. Gone. Dylan had slipped a gear in staring perplexedly at the blond woman, lost a moment in dreaming, and in that moment Robert Woolfolk had shunted away, out of the blithe park which seemed intended to contain anything but him. As though making a silent confession of whatever it was the woman suspected was going on. Only Mingus remained, and he stood apart from the table where the others had sat, and from Dylan.

“Do you want me to walk you home?” asked the woman. “Where do you live?”

“Yo, Dylan man, I’ll check you later,” said Mingus. He wasn’t fearful, only uninterested in contending with the blond woman and anything she thought she knew. Dylan felt her irrelevance to Mingus. Mingus’s own mother having been cleanly bought off with a million-dollar payment, he was immune to echoes. “Be cool,” Mingus said. He held out his hand, waiting for Dylan to tap it with his fingertips. “I’ll check you on the block, D.”

With that Mingus hunched his arms around his jacket pockets as though leaning into a strong wind and ambled into the sun-blobbed trees in the far corner of the park, toward Henry Street, the BQE, the shipyards, wherever he was going where Dylan wasn’t going to be swept along now. His gait was mock-infirm, a quotation of something amusing and profound you’d seen somewhere but couldn’t place, Mickey Rivers or Weird Harold or Meadowlark Lemon. He seemed a figure cut out of one kind of day and plopped into another, a cartoon squiggle or bass line come to life.

That’s my best friend, Dylan wanted to tell the blond woman, who the longer he didn’t reply to her offer was more and more squinting at Dylan like she might have miscalculated, like he might be a thing spoiled by the company she’d found him in, a misfit, not a kid worth her rescue in the first place.