Jonathan Lethem - The Fortress of Solitude

From Winegar’s tone it was plain Arthur had bragged to the teacher in advance, worked up expectations with a series of snappy answers and arch asides.

“Well, Sarah Hale is right by my house,” said Dylan, impulsively sadistic. He adopted a moronic, grating monotone, tribute to Arthur Lomb, fallen soldier. “I mean, it does seem like all my friends are going there.”

“I’m sorry?”

“I only took the test to see how I’d do. I might not go.”

Winegar looked traumatized. Sarah J. Hale High School was the next grim repository, following Intermediate School 293 by rote. You could cut class for two years straight, as in the case of Mingus Rude, and they’d eventually palm you off to Sarah J. just to free up the chair in your homeroom for someone else. Dylan might as well have said I think I’ll just go straight to the Brooklyn House of Detention . “I’d hate to see you neglect an opportunity-”

You’re white! Winegar wanted to scream.

Man can fly! Dylan wanted to scream.

“I’ll think it over,” said Dylan.

“You’ve shown an aptitude-”

You should see my altitude.

“I have to talk to Abraham. My dad.”

The mustache might dissolve in Winegar’s fingers if Dylan didn’t show a little mercy. “Certainly. Please let your father know I’d be glad to answer any questions-”

“Okay.” He glanced outside. Brooklyn was captured in a net of false calm, the school drowned. Dylan was bored with Winegar now, prepared to meet his ice-ball fate.

Snow-thick roofs could be a fine place to study cornice-hopping, leave inexplicable footprint trails, jumpings-off to nowhere.

Aeroman, you understand, works locally, like his predecessor.

Marijuana was Rachel Ebdus’s totem fume. To inhale it was communion, a forgiving and being embraced by her smoke-form. Dylan Ebdus learned slowly, first faking when Mingus Rude handed him a joint, making sucky sounds around the damp tip as wisps wreathed his head. Then not faking but getting nothing for his trouble apart from a raw impression that his throat was an overpicked nostril. It was only later, the sixth or seventh time he sincerely inhaled, that Mingus’s room slowly widened outward from pinprick size, the thing Dylan had pretended to feel all along.

At that moment Rachel joined him there, in Mingus’s room with the towel stuffed at the bottom of the door and the back windows vented to the icy air. Whether in the drug or in Dylan, she’d seemingly lurked in one to be catalyzed by the other. Or perhaps it was simpler: as while listening to her records, the Modern Jazz Quartet and Nina Simone and Three Dog Night, Dylan could still be just getting acquainted with Rachel, through her appetites, her puns, her drugs.

Dylan stored the Running Crab postcards, maybe thirty-five or forty now, in order by postmark, pinned upright between Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land and the New Belmont Specials numbers one through sixteen-a run halted when Abraham had quit painting their covers-on a shelf bookended by the Hugo Award statuette. Dylan archived the postcards alongside Abraham’s commercial art not only to ensure Abraham’s irritation, should father sniff into son’s Batcave while son was at school, but also because it felt deeply right: the objects made a voodoo poem of Abraham-and-Rachelhood, of his parents’ DNA, their semivoluntary sheddings like fingernails or hair, mixed on a shelf.

Dylan determined now to reread the whole sequence of postcards stoned, to start at the beginning again and with the assistance of the drug decode Rachel’s vanishing.

“Check this out,” said Mingus Rude, after he’d fanned the smoke into his backyard and shut the windows. The cold didn’t matter, Mingus always wore his stained army jacket indoors. He was always just passing through, ready for action even when he never stirred from the room for hours.

Now he slipped Rhythm Heritage’s “Theme from S.W.A.T.” extended-mix seven-inch from its sleeve and smoothly to the turntable, moved the needle to the groove.

As crackle gave way to the opening break, Mingus began shifting the record back and forth under the needle, isolating the beat. Under his breath he rapped calls to an imaginary schoolyard audience in a rubbery voice of cartoon affront, the Bugs Bunny of the ghetto.

Dylan nodded appreciatively.

“That’s bad, right?” said Mingus.

“It’s fly ,” Dylan ventured.

“All the cuts them DJs can’t even find, I just snuck upstairs and stole out of Junior’s collection. Wanna hear some more?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s right my boy wants to hear more, you bet he does.”

This time Mingus set the needle on Dennis Coffey and the Detroit Guitar Band’s “Scorpio.” Again he scratched it back and forth, again he mumble-rapped along with the song, shy eyes slanted downward.

Mingus might not be ready to take it to the schoolyard, but he had the tracks. They might be the only two kids in Brooklyn with a collection of vinyl beamed direct from Planet Superfly.

Mingus’s room had changed. The Philadelphia Flyers’ Dave Schultz and the Miami Dolphins’ Mercury Morris were gone, the Jackson Five was gone. All three posters had been autographed in real ink, gifts to Barrett Rude Junior. No matter: they’d been ripped from the wall, leaving only shreds under tacks. Just one poster remained, one permanently creased in sixths from its life as a giveaway inside a double gatefold LP: Bootsy Collins and his Rubber Band, in chrome tuxes, platforms, pink smoke. It was autographed too. On a visit upstairs to see Barrett Rude Junior Bootsy himself had been directed to the basement apartment, had stood in Mingus’s room to sign the poster in dripping Garvey Violet, a messy slogan that half-covered his spangled, star-shaped guitar: Love Ya, Bootsy! More recently the poster had been half-covered in silver spray. Mingus had begun tagging inside his room. Too lazy or stoned to go out and put it in the public eye, the tags still flowed from him, DOSE, DOSE, DOSE. Silver loops sprawled over the walls, across molding, touching the ceiling, silver mist even touching the glass of the back windows. The radiator was tagged, a puzzle in three dimensions. If you stood sideways so the radiator’s grille formed a single surface you could read the tag: ART. From other angles it dissolved into stripes, empty code.

Farrah Fawcett-Majors was gone too, the red one-piece and erect nipple and blond tilted grin which had been pinned at telling eye level to Mingus’s single bed. Instead, a clutch of Barrett Rude Junior’s hand-me-down Playboy and Penthouse magazines were inadequately hidden beneath the bed, tattered centerfolds torn from their staples and flapped out like the tongues of exhausted dogs. A white bloom of balled Kleenex failed to conceal a jar of Vaseline.

“You never told me about the girl in Vermont, man.”

“What girl?” Dylan was turning the pages of Defenders #48 , ogling Valkyrie in her blue sleeveless armor, her chain-mail brassiere. Mingus’s comics were in tatters, he’d tagged their slick covers with black El Marko.

“King Arthur said you were bragging about it, man, so don’t even try to lie.”

“I didn’t tell Arthur anything. He’s full of it.”

“Look at my boy, trying to cover up! Arthur said you done got over . You can’t hide from me, D-Man, you know you’ll be telling me in a minute.”

Dylan thought for less than a minute and said, “Her name’s Heather.”

“There you go.”

“We went swimming.”

“I heard more than swimming.”

Despite cutting class for two years, Mingus had graduated to Sarah J. Hale. Like a sundial shadow he’d crept into the next time zone, the next phase. His room had changed, his body had changed, he’d grown gruffer and larger, when he loped down Dean Street he chanted rhymes under his breath, disc jockey patter. He had his own stereo. He scored his own pot, nickel bags through a slot in the door of a tenement on Bergen, no longer raiding Barrett Rude Junior’s freezer stash. His room was a sanctum. Though Barrett Rude Senior had moved into the front of the basement apartment Mingus’s room seemed remote from any authority beyond his own. The rooms of the duplex had become fortresses, the three generations of Rudes barricaded into their dominions in an unspoken war. Mingus called his grandfather Senior and never stepped into his front room, which when it was seen through a half-open door looked barren, as though Senior had forgotten how a large room might be filled. Senior sat by the radiator and stared through the bars of the basement windows onto Dean Street as through the bars of a cell. Sometimes he burned candles. Mingus called him Senior, and he called his own father Junior. Mingus’s room smelled of Vaseline and something else. The jacket of the Ohio Player’s Fire , which depicted a girl’s impossibly hot torso with a firehose snaking obscenely between her legs, was sticky with something, resin maybe, and seeds and stems from rolling joints on the jacket were stuck in the something. It was a bit disgusting, but also fascinating, like a leaf stuck in hair or a smear of food on chin you didn’t want to point out.