Jonathan Lethem - The Fortress of Solitude

“Parsecs measure space , not time,” he droned, unable to quit though the point felt unworkable, Arthurish. “Some claim it’s a mistake but I’m sure it’s intentional, Han Solo’s pretending-”

“Dylan,” Heather whispered.

“What?”

She closed her eyes. Dylan completed the sentence silently, groping for a relation between speech and the passage of breath in two mouths, the miasmic world created at the junction of two faces. As in the dusky cool of the attic, as at the noon-blazed pond, there was nothing between, the rupture was total, bliss speechless.

’Nuff said.

It was only hard to believe it wasn’t illegal. But shut up already and kiss her.

Then he opened his eyes.

The Windles’ car was rocking.

Four sets of ass cheeks like blond lunar pancakes pushed the Rambler’s windows in gentle alternation, side to side.

Their hair flash-dried in horns and Superman spit curls as they swam and kissed. The sun-dazzled heads were calm, bobbing like floes while an eye-level dragonfly described chess problems on the table of the water. Just below, animal bodies thrashed in green cold. The boy had grabbed the girl everywhere by now, his demented hands inventorying shapes there in the Negative Zone, where nothing counted. Twice he’d felt her fingers graze his pond-numbed prong and practically drowned.

He was returning to Brooklyn tomorrow.

“Your dad might send you to private school,” said Heather, breath rippling pond between them. She ducked lower, water past her nose, blue eyes floating doubled in reflection, pupils near invisible.

“What are you talking about?”

“Buzz heard him talking to my mom. Buzz says you’re struggling with a black influence .” She’d plainly rehearsed the phrase, dared herself to speak it.

“Buzz is struggling with a moron influence,” said Dylan. “I think he’s losing the struggle.”

“He said you got beat up.”

Dylan dove, plunged fully into the silt and shadows of the Negative Zone. He’d taught himself to open his eyes underwater these past weeks. The pond didn’t punish eyeballs like the chlorine-poisoned Douglas Pool, down behind the Gowanus Houses, where he’d gone swimming with Mingus a couple of times. You also didn’t need to wear sneakers underwater for fear of broken glass. He’d have liked to see Buzz contend with that.

Now he rushed in echoless slow motion at Heather’s seal-like body, her red one-piece, limbs glowing like milk in the bent emerald-yellow light. She cycled afloat, not fending him off. Wrapping one arm around her middle, he mashed his mouth into her stomach. A fugitive hand found a tit. She didn’t thrash, or even pull away. Anything under water was between him and her body, apparently.

When he’d come up for air and they lay panting and dripping on the dock, gaze squinted through fingers to protect their eyes from the sun, Dylan said, “I’ve got something to show you.”

“What?”

“Surprise.” He’d meant to reveal the costume today anyway. Now it seemed a correction too, to Buzz’s garbage.

“Where is it?” she said.

“Go on your bike. Get some Mountain Dews. Meet back here.”

She nodded, spellbound, guileless.

In the Windles’ guest room he slipped the ring onto his finger, then bundled the costume under his arm. Paranoid he’d be seen, he moved sideways through the kitchen and out, then slipped through the fields.

On the dock he spread the costume out and looked at the thing for the first time since riding the Greyhound bus out of the city.

He’d had his father teach him the simple stitches he’d used to sew it together, though he hadn’t said what for. The cape, cut out of a worn Dr. Seuss bedsheet featuring A Lion Licking A Lemon Lollipop , was attached at two corners of the neck of the sky-blue T-shirt which formed the costume’s body. He’d centered the lion, a suitably enigmatic logo, as nearly as possible in the middle of the cape. The sleeves of the T he’d extended with brightly striped bell-bottom legs scissored off a pair of his mother’s abandoned pants, scavenged from the heap at the bottom of her closet where only Dylan ever visited. They hung imperially, his hands extending through a fringe of threads like the clapper in a bell. Impractical, but this was only a prototype. A showpiece. The shirt’s chest he’d stretched flat over cardboard and decorated using the Spirograph, the rusty pins, the balky cogs, a clumsy labor with imperfect results. The emblem was an oscillated circle, the widening path of an atom traced a thousand times through space to form bands of power . At any distance, though, it blurred to a fat zero.

The boy from the city wriggled into the elaborate top and stood on the yawning dock in a veil of tiny insects, waiting.

A moment later the girl appeared at the top of the path, two green bottles clanking where she had them cradled at her belly, head bowed as she placed bare feet on rocks.

At the foot of the dock she set the bottles of soda in the grass and stood considering.

“Well?”

“What is it?”

“What does it look like?”

She didn’t seem to know.

He fluffed the cape with his elbows, wishing for a wind. The weight of it dragged the neck of the shirt back so it rode against his throat, a design flaw. He’d attach the next cape at the shoulders, maybe.

“This is who I really am,” he said.

She still didn’t say anything, just stood.

“Aeroman.”

“Who’s that?”

“It means flying man . Dylan Ebdus is my secret identity.”

Forehead knit, she said: “Well, I don’t like it.”

“What do you mean?”

“It looks weird.”

“When it’s done it’ll cover my legs. This is just the top half.”

“Where did it come from?”

“I made it.” He said nothing about the ring, about Aaron X. Doily.

She nudged the Mountain Dews, her bare toes cast in green shade by the sunstruck bottles. “It doesn’t seem like you.”

“Well, it is me,” he said, adamant. He realized now he wanted Heather to tell her brother, so Buzz would understand he could presume nothing about Dylan or Brooklyn.

She sat, folded her legs in the grass. He stood, still looking for the sign she comprehended the importance of what he’d shown her.

“Dylan?”

“What?”

“If you stayed here you wouldn’t have to go to private school.”

He was stupefied. The remark was so irrelevant and appalling, he didn’t even know where to start.

“I’m not staying here,” he said simply, perhaps cruelly.

Heather abruptly stood, her face red and shocked, as if he’d slapped her.

“Take it off,” she said. “I don’t like it.”

“No.”

She moved to the path, abandoning the bottles which lay in the grass.

“What about the surprise?” he said. There was a breeze suddenly, and he felt the cape flutter and snap perfectly at his back, like a stadium flag.

“I don’t care,” she said without turning.

“ I haven’t even shown it to you yet ,” he yelled, but she was gone.

After a moment he moved, anyway, to the end of the dock, there bent his knees, pointed his hands straight from his body, preparing what he’d planned for weeks. Heather might be watching from high in the grass at the field’s edge; it was possible. Or not, didn’t matter now. He didn’t need to be known in Vermont, this null area that was only measured in its distance from the city, its use as a restorative, a place to get your act together before returning to the real world. In his case, to prepare to be thirteen in the city, to kiss city girls, to be the flying boy who fights city crime, shit incomprehensible to anyone from Vermont.