Jonathan Lethem - The Fortress of Solitude

He was hungry. Looking both ways, he fished in his other sock for the dollar tucked inside. It was soaked. He transferred the dollar to his pocket and rubbed it against the cloth at his thigh to dry it. At Bergen and Smith was a pizzeria, also thronged with older teenagers, a place he and Arthur Lomb had braved one afternoon on the way from school to Pacific, to Arthur’s stoop, in the early days of their friendship. It seemed possible now his friendship with Arthur Lomb had peaked in the first month of that summer, during the deplorable chess marathon, that he would never taste Arthur’s mom’s red juice or turkey sandwiches again. He couldn’t permit himself to be nostalgic. Arthur was a phony, and Mingus would know soon enough. He imagined Arthur saying, Yo, Mister Machine sucks, Jack Kirby can’t draw anymore, dang, but a number one’s a number one, yo, seal it in airtight plastic and put it on the shelf, that’s my policy, yo. He went into the pizzeria and ordered a slice, spread his moist dollar on the counter.

A hand clapped over the two quarters change as they appeared in place of the dollar. Dylan looked up. Robert Woolfolk scooped the coins into his pocket. The men at the pizza counter were uninterested: the event occurred at the teenage stratum, which they filtered at a preconscious level. Dylan or Aeroman was a little uninterested himself. He kinked the slice of pizza at the crust, folding it so it supported the floppy weight of its own tip, fluffed the sheet of translucent paper underneath, then shook garlic salt onto the pizza’s surface, tan grains which saturated instantly in pooled oil. With the slice he stepped into the populated street. Robert Woolfolk followed. Robert had a companion along, a small version of himself, dark and rangy, whom Dylan had never seen before.

“Don’t bite that, man,” said Robert.

“Why not?”

“Take it off him,” Robert told the other boy, who was smaller than Dylan.

“What you talkin’ about?” said the younger boy, disbelieving the obvious.

“Take his slice.”

Among yokings, this was a familiar format to Dylan: the master instructing apprentice, commanding Take it off him or Check his pockets, man . Call it the Batman-and-Robin.

Never for a slice, though. That was fairly original.

“C’mon, man,” implored the protégé, not looking at Dylan.

“Take it, man. Do it.”

Dylan bit the pizza’s tip. Chewing open-mouthed to ventilate molten cheese, he sought out the younger kid’s eyes. He felt a peculiar cheer at the animal bewilderment he inspired there. Yes, I am your first whiteboy . Gaze on me. You’ll know many before you’re through. Some you’ll be large enough to handle, some you’ll even terrify.

He took a second bite.

“Don’t eat it, I told you,” said Robert, his voice rising. “Take the slice,” he directed again.

“Awww, he’s bitin’ on it,” said Robert’s trainee, misery in his voice.

Robert pointed at the pizza. “Quit now, man, or I’ll fuck you up!”

Dylan swallowed, sank his teeth in again. Robert Woolfolk was hamstrung by his intractable sidekick-if he reached for the pizza himself it was an admission of failure. The slice was dwindling anyway, so the principle was all that remained, if there’d been anything apart from principle in the first place. Dylan understood he functioned as a passing occasion here, object in an obscure ritual which had for once nothing to do with Dylan himself. The young black kid would take the brunt tonight, be bullied through a series of low-end quasi-criminal stunts.

The kid knew it too. He sulked in the background as Dylan’s bites made the slice irretrievable. Robert Woolfolk turned to Dylan now, but was jangled, distracted, with only a minute more to spare, seemingly a bit out of his skin.

Last day before school could get to practically anyone.

“I’m still gonna kill you one day,” Robert Woolfolk said.

Dylan chewed, facing Robert with a dope-eyed, cowlike aspect.

“Don’t pretend you don’t know.”

Dylan shrugged, only certain Robert wasn’t killing him tonight.

“Fuck’s the matter with yo back , man?”

“Nothing,” said Dylan between bites.

Robert looked harder. “Lemme see that ring for a minute.”

“It’s a present,” said Dylan. “From my mother.”

“ Fuck your mother, motherfucker .” Now Robert Woolfolk danced as though attacked by invisible insects. The ring, anyway, was clearly off-limits, tainted with Rachel-magic. Robert twitched like a bot moving in circles, his circuits blown.

“Think Gus be gonna proteck you forever?”

No, Aeroman be gonna proteck me forever , thought Dylan, swallowing unchewed chunks of pizza defiantly.

But Aeroman hadn’t flown tonight, there was no pretending.

Dylan had now gnawed all the way to the ragged crust, which he held at his mouth like a jack-o’-lantern smile.

Robert herky-jerked his arm out and slapped the crust from Dylan’s hand. Like hilltop observers musing on a distant nova they watched it tumble to the gutter, officially ruined. Robert’s worst excess of tension was spent in the act. He could return to his protégé who stood abjectly to one side.

Robert Woolfolk pointed a finger at Dylan as they parted, but his voice was lost, his menace dispelled by the conundrum of this encounter.

On Smith Street alone, ignored by the Puerto Rican social club members in their floral shirts and straw porkpies, the humpbacked, overdressed, and sweating thirteen-year-old turned onto Dean and strolled home along the shadowed slate, weirdly satisfied.

Aeroman had not flown, had remained tucked into Dylan’s sleeves and waistband, in chrysalid form.

Nevertheless, two happenings, incomplete in themselves, somehow clicked puzzle-ishly together to form a whole, the phantom image of a mugging averted, Gotham’s streets made safer.

The running woman on State Street had been the one afraid tonight, not Dylan. That was something, a crack of daylight in the night. Aeroman would slip through that crack, he just wasn’t ready yet.

Eighth grade, right, you could almost grasp the shape now. A given day was a model of the grade in miniature, something to get through. Just perfect one single day and you’d have a method to apply to the whole.

Abraham did his part scraping toast while Dylan worked math problems at the table, a take-home test due in fifteen minutes, first period.

Barrett Rude Senior might be lighting a breakfast cigarette in the well of his basement entrance, stroking white stubble, patrolling the morning.

Ramirez rolling up his gate, moms tugging first graders to P.S. 38.

Henry was in his second year at Aviation in Queens, he’d grown a foot and a half and was the man you saw sometimes on the block who’d high-five with younger kids. Recalling he’d been in a fistfight with Robert Woolfolk was useless. There was no history of kids on a block, such facts you couldn’t impart in a way to make anyone care.

Whacking off was a new organizing principle, the rare thing completely under your own command. You might get hard on the way home from school, clutch it in your pocket, anticipating an afternoon session.

Aeroman’s new outfit-in-progress was simpler, cape lighter and shorter and secured at the shoulders, sleeves tight at the wrists.

It progressed slowly, stitch by stitch, no hurry this time.

When the weather cooled Dylan and Arthur took the A to Canal Street. They browsed bins full of lucite knobs, drank egg creams at Dave’s Famous, then made their way to the army surplus store. With money for coats they’d cadged off Arthur’s mom and Abraham they purchased green fatigues like Mingus Rude’s, jackets with heavy vented pockets, strange loops for military knives or rounds of ammunition, who knew. Maybe dudes in Nam had died in the jackets, you couldn’t exclude it, though they lacked telling bullet holes.