Jonathan Lethem - The Fortress of Solitude

“Be cool,” says Mingus now, as without glancing sideways he throws out an arm to slow Arthur’s pogo-ing gait. There may be no stopping the flow of Arthur’s talk, not once he’s on this kind of roll. At least, though, he might quit hopping.

Arthur does slow. He allows Mingus to move ahead, giving him some room to glower in his own irritated headspace, often a necessity when Mingus hasn’t smoked a joint in a while. Arthur turns to Dylan instead. “What you think, we could of taken them, yo?”

“Don’t yo me,” said Dylan.

He crouched in darkness at the top of the abandoned house’s stoop, hearing distant sirens. Nearer by, voices at Bond Street, a laugh knifing through the humidity, floated to the sky. Though the night was hot he wore a sweatshirt. Underneath was the costume, the cape crammed up into the back like a soft turtle’s shell, bell-bottom sleeves doubled around his wrists. He sweat furiously, it couldn’t be helped. The ring he kept like a folded dollar, hidden in his sock: the possibility of being yoked while still on the ground was very much with him. Perhaps he should have begun on rooftops, but access to his own was through Abraham’s studio, and Abraham was painting frames of film tonight. Dylan had opened the studio door to find his father planted under a single clip-on floodlamp, fingers crabbed around a tiny brush, transistor radio tuned low to gooselike jazz, the barely audible squonks of Rollins or Dolphy.

“I’m going out.”

“Tonight?”

“Just for an hour.”

“Shouldn’t you sleep?”

“Just an hour.”

It was the evening of the day before eighth grade.

It was somewhat unclear how to begin.

Mingus Rude and Arthur Lomb were off painting a burner on the side panel of an abandoned police truck in the city salvage yard at the foot of the Brooklyn Bridge. The expedition had been planned for days, a wake for summer’s death, a last fling. Dylan involved himself in preparations, including the harvesting of Krylon from McCrory’s and the assembling of a sheaf of marker sketches in full color, then bowed out of the jaunt itself at the last second. This ensured that tonight he wouldn’t bump into Mingus or Arthur. Anyway, Dylan was exhausted with the whole Mingus-Arthur situation. He’d begun to wonder if he was encouraging it by his own presence. Let them be alone together, let Mingus endure the raw, grasping force of Arthur’s sycophancy without Dylan around as a buffer, and see how he liked it.

Besides, the two would be painting Dylan’s design on the police truck, Dylan’s hand was inherent in the sketches. Mingus might be Dose, but Dylan was Dose’s auteur.

Teenagerdom was a secret identity in the first place.

At thirteen you’d begun to leave traces, occult names and signs proliferating, sheets you fiercely insisted on laundering yourself.

Like a Spirograph cog your wobbling path made messes.

Aeroman was a bolder route, only he was proving hard to bring out of his sweatshirt shell.

Where in Gowanus did a fresh-minted superhero go to find the sort of crime in which he could meaningfully intervene? Dylan huddled on the abandoned stoop, ear cocked to the damp howl of the late-summer wind as it bore voices through the night. The gays walked their dog, otherwise the block was empty. Dean Street wouldn’t cut it. Nevins, that was too much, the prostitutes, the old men on Ramirez’s corner, the chance of Wyckoff kids ranging up from the projects. Smith Street, same problem. He needed an isolated nightscape, an alley, a woman yelling for return of her stolen pocketbook, the classical Spider-Man mugging scenario: exactly what he’d never seen in his life. A superhero spliced criminals from victims. In Gowanus things tended to be more mixed up.

He needed height, perhaps. To rise above.

He roused himself from the stoop and walked to the corner, then up Bond Street, to the subway, the Hoyt-Schermerhorn station, knowing it was a place he’d never go at this time of night if conditions weren’t changed, and they were barely changed. He resembled himself, not Aeroman, until he shed the sweatshirt. And Aeroman didn’t walk, he flew. Until he brought himself to fly down from a rooftop he wasn’t Aeroman, he was a kid in a costume in a sweatshirt, walking. The ring was in his sock-he reached down and confirmed it. A white boy on the corner of Bond and Schermerhorn at eleven at night. The place was desolate enough, barren parking lots and basketball courts, darkened municipal buildings, the street’s wide lanes silent. Too desolate, maybe. Places you feared most were empty, your fear of them theoretical. You wouldn’t be caught dead there, so you didn’t go, so no one went because what was the point?

In truth the action was below, in the long urine-stinking subway tunnel beneath Schermerhorn. The token booth there was buried deep in the block, the path to it a terrifying gauntlet, a home for beggars who slumped against the dimmed windows of subterranean displays, relics from a time before Abraham and Straus figured there was no one worth advertising to in the stations underground, and no way to protect the merchandise displayed there. The tunnel was a famous danger.

He caught himself, though: What use was a flying man in the subway? A novice mistake, barely outsmarted. He felt a degree of accomplishment in avoiding it. Aeroman’s first triumph, a prudent hesitation. It was a relief not to enter the tunnel.

Maybe Smith Street was a better bet after all.

Tomorrow eighth grade began.

Aeroman wanted to emerge before it was too late, but he needed crime to call him out.

Beneath his feet the pavement rumbled as the A or GG slowed at the underground platform, then a handful of lonely figures leaked from the station into the night. He stood beneath the lamppost across Schermerhorn, watching. One white woman glanced in his direction, eyes darting, surveying the empty street. She turned down Bond, then onto State Street.

Sweating, hunchbacked, Aeroman followed.

Maybe something would happen. He was magnetized by her fear, a thing he understood. Seeing it reflected in the woman was acutely thrilling. Here was precisely what Aeroman meant to combat, the hectic, accelerating heel steps in darkness, on a block where the canopy of limbs masked the streetlights. He reached down, not breaking stride, and palmed the ring up from his ankle, slipped it onto his left forefinger. The voices of hidden paper-bag drinkers drifted from the recessed stoops, idle jaded watchers who’d never help a woman in danger.

She was underdressed, rape-able, regretting she’d ever heard the word Brooklyn , let alone nibbled the bait of the reputed astonishing rents here, the hardwood floors.

Just one catch: the scene sorely lacked a villain. No one followed the girl apart from him.

He was chasing her down the block. It was his footsteps she fled.

It was a mugging like an egg on a roosterless farm, unfertilized, incomplete.

When she began actually running he stood still in the middle of State Street and let her go, made dumb with chagrin. Should he fly ahead, somersault over and intercept her, perhaps, to apologize? But he’d only scare the shit out of her worse than he already had.

Aeroman had met the enemy, and it was Aeroman.

Now he trudged to Smith Street.

He went unnoticed here in his humped shirt, his hands bunched at his waist, right covering left, the finger with the ring. Happy enough for the moment to be scaring no one, to be a part of the crowd. The summer night was alive, Puerto Ricans spilling from social clubs in groups of four at sidewalk domino games, younger men in Yankee shirts tuned to the game. The entrance to the Bergen subway station was clotted with Gowanus Houses kids, teenage boys in stocking caps, angry girls he might or might not recognize from school. School, ready to resume, ready to pin him in place. He felt urgently again the need to find a meaningful crime, something he could handle. He slunk past the crowd of Gowanus kids at the subway, certain there was less than nothing for him there.