Jonathan Lethem - The Fortress of Solitude

“Oh, Buzz ,” moaned Mrs. Windle.

Buzz stood pouting sarcastically, shifting from leg to leg, player in a script he was too dull to resist.

“Why don’t you younger kids come along. This lesson couldn’t hurt you to learn.”

In a narrow, windowless office they watched as Buzz dutifully produced Hot Rod , Penthouse , and a box of shotgun shells from the hunting and fishing aisle.

“Last time we said next time we’d call the sheriff, Buzz.”

“Say something,” Buzz’s mother commanded.

“ I should’ve called the sheriff, after how Leonard treated me last time,” mumbled Buzz. “Shit, I shouldn’t even come in here anymore.”

“Afraid that’s right, Buzz, you shouldn’t. Leonard’s got nothing to do with it.”

“Well, I don’t know about that,” said Buzz, locating his rallying cause. “You need to have a word to him about getting off my back, man.”

“What did Leonard say to you?” said the manager, his face instantly growing red.

“You kids go wait at the car,” said Mrs. Windle, nodding at Heather and Dylan.

They drove in silence, Buzz in the Rambler’s passenger seat, forlornly leveraging elbow, head, and neck, as much of himself as possible out the window, his mother rigid with fury at the wheel. Heather and Dylan slumped low and traded grimaces beneath the horizon of the long front seat. Dylan lifted his shirt as in a striptease and flashed the copy of Inhumans #7 and the two Nestlé’s Crunches tucked at his waist. Heather widened her eyes obligingly, put her hand to her mouth. Home, they ate both bars of chocolate together in the attic while downstairs Buzz reckoned with his father.

Vermont was permeable to Brooklyn ways. Nothing simpler, really, than racking the chocolate and the comic book with Buzz in the role of the black kid, drawing heat.

Buzz had set a pick for Dylan-that’s what Mingus would have called it.

Afternoons had a dazing slackness. You dropped a bicycle in the grass or on the gravel, wherever you were sick of it, stripped off your T-shirt and kicked away flip-flops and resumed swimming, since you’d been cycling in your drying trunks in the first place. Heather’s tits were plums in the armholes of her tank tops and there was always the possibility of an angle, another take on that subject. You compiled views until the postulated form burned in mind’s eye, gathering obsessive force like an advertisement you’d passed over forever until the day you just had to know, Sea-Monkeys or X-Ray Specs.

Blackflies and boners, each were solved by immersion.

Dylan mentioned he’d turn thirteen in August at least twice a day.

It was natural enough in those humid, bug-drunk afternoons, the house, pond, field, gravel front yard all Dylan’s and Heather’s alone, that they’d find themselves sprawled in their suits making wet ass-prints on the sofa one minute, side by side, panting heavily and laughing hysterically in rapid alternation, and then a moment later kneeling barekneed on chairs at the counter, stirring up a Tupperware quart of lemonade crystals and cold tap water. Equally likely to next be ferrying ice-filled beading glasses to the attic, which in daylight boiled with a psychedelic swarm of dust swimming in angled light.

Half naked on the checkered bedcover they again lay side by side, sucking ice.

“I can’t feel my lips.”

“Me neither.”

“Feel this.”

“Cold!”

“You now.”

The country-city premise freed them to pretend anything was a surprise. Maybe ice didn’t work the same in New York City.

“Kiss where I kissed.”

A pause, then the attempt.

“I can’t feel anything.”

“Kiss my lips.”

Though they’d been mashing iced lips to wrists, the first was a graze, a bird’s peck.

“I’m numb- dumb .” They cracked up.

“Okay, again.”

“Ah.”

She’d closed her eyes.

They rolled away. Dylan flopped onto his stomach, quashing a throb in his trunks. “You ever suck laughing gas from whipped cream?” he asked to keep up the stream of distractions, a permitting air of larkiness.

“Noooo,” she said. “ Buzz did though.”

Buzz, code for all things crude, contemptible, townish. Dylan and Heather were beings of the pond and the distant-recalled city, nothing between. Forget laughing gas.

“You want a back rub?”

“Sure.”

“Turn over.”

She obeyed, keeping their deal: nothing was related to any other thing. They were sprites who’d banished taboo and were also a bit stupid, willingly dim. The kiss was on one planet, the back rub another.

He kneaded and pinched, gave her spine a noogie, whatever seemed artful.

Inside the arrangement of her flung arms on the bedspread her tits bulged, third-moons. He earned a grope through extensive rib work, lingered just enough to find them disappointingly lozengelike, hamburger-hard. Her eyes fluttered inside their lids.

When his fingers curved slightly inside the tight band of elastic at her hips she twisted away, sat up.

“I can’t breathe in here.”

They tumbled out and onto the bicycles and raced down the gravel shoulder, just two local kids killing time as far as dozing passersby in any passenger windows might care, Heather ratcheting ahead madly, knees flashing in and out of bronze shadow, Dylan chasing, relieved, mouth wide gobbling the moist air, the infinite Vermont afternoon.

Mr. Windle parked the Rambler at the rear of the drive-in lot to shorten his walk across Route 9 to the Blind Buck Inn. There, Buzz predicted, he’d not stir from the bar through the entire double feature- Star Wars , The Late Show -and emerge so crocked he’d pass the keys Buzz’s way for the three-mile drive home. The lot was two-thirds empty, maybe fifty cars hooked as if on life support to units thrusting at angles from weed-cracked pavement.

Space in the city, like time, moved upward. Here the direction was sideways, into the trees.

At blue twilight figures browsed car to car, leaning through windows for a light, making mock of an overfull backseat, a social moment before hunkering down.

“I’m taking a pass on the first feature,” Buzz said, not looking at Dylan. With the ten Mr. Windle had floated their way and Buzz confiscated, Heather’s brother had magnanimously bought Cokes for Dylan to convey back to the car, then pocketed the change. He was humped over the Evel Kneivel pinball machine in the concessions hut, intent on making it tilt a hundred or a thousand times. Or possibly there was an agenda beyond pinball, say a four-foot bong in a trunk. Likely accomplices milled nearby.

Always there was a pond or quarry rumored through the fields, where the real action went on.

Buzz tipped his chin at the distant screen. That scuffed blank billboard was the least interesting place to rest your eyes in the whole sky, which was full of what looked like feathers the color of bruises. “You can stay in the backseat with my sister if you want.”

Dylan stood dumbly clenching the paper frame full of Cokes. A week kissing Heather every stolen moment had made him faint and dreamy, incapable of reading either sincerity or scoffing in Buzz. This might actually be some rough blessing.

He nodded and Buzz grinned.

“Bet about now you’re thinking the Avoid Nigger Fund’s the best deal you ever had in your life, huh?”

They did watch from the backseat. Dylan steered Heather’s attention to crucial details, though Star Wars didn’t carry the same impact here, flashing like a View-Master slide in the pinpricked bowl of night, as it did at the Loew’s Astor Plaza on Forty-fifth Street. Dylan had seen it four times there, the last two alone, a dwarfed figure growing amazed as the frames pulsed in his eyes, feeling in his subvocal anticipation of certain lines, his sense-memory of certain actorly gestures, the possibility of floating up and intercepting the light halfway, of being a human projector secretly responsible for the existence of the images.