Jonathan Lethem - The Fortress of Solitude

Maybe every other week, though, Dylan would find Mingus seated on his own stoop, like a bum, with a forty-ounce in a bag. Mingus ruled his own yard again, now that Barrett Rude Senior had shifted into the welfare hotel on Atlantic Avenue, several blocks away. He’d greet Dylan in the old manner, as though they’d been interrupted a minute before.

“That Parlet record I was telling you about? I just scored it.”

“Oh yeah?”

“That shit is serious, I’m telling you, Dillinger, you need to check it out now .”

Dylan and Mingus met according to no plan or reason, might have been darts hitting a calendar, a roulette of days. He and Mingus would go into the basement apartment and get high and Tim and Gabe, Dylan’s whole Stuyvesant world, would evaporate, Manhattan unlikely as Neptune or Vulcan, restored to its status as an unexplored planet, the future.

Hallway and bathroom were tagged now, the whole basement a subway tunnel. Senior’s room was still off-limits, though, an abandoned shrine which stank of dust-rotting candles.

Mingus chugged beer now, Colt and Cobra, a regular thing.

Dylan didn’t, only got high.

Dylan knew Mingus still hooked up with Arthur Lomb too, saw Arthur’s practice tags in ballpoint on scattered pages around Mingus’s room, sometimes saw Arthur himself. Arthur Lomb had the curse of puniness: he still looked eleven or twelve, no number of what-ups and yos , no degree of street slaunch in his walk, no green suede Pumas could compensate. After flunking the Stuyvesant test Arthur’s mother had falsified their residence to get him transferred to Edward R. Murrow, a white high school deep in the Irish Italian heart of the borough. It was too late, though, he might as well have been at Sarah J. Hale from the look of things. Arthur had become yucky, his sleeves always crusted with Krylon, his red hair slack and ratty, jeans black. Arthur was a pothead now, often looked red-eyed, glazed with an afternoon’s doping. His street credibility was all he had and it was direly thin.

Arthur’s being seen with Mingus was a gift Dylan wouldn’t begrudge him now: it was a thing Arthur needed much worse than Dylan ever had. Let Arthur imagine a parity. In fact, Dylan knew, their two friendships with Mingus, his and Arthur’s, were vastly different. Dylan and Mingus lived in a motherless realm, full of secrets. Aeroman, for one thing. Certain other things, for another. Dylan doubted Arthur even had pubic hair yet. Plus Dylan and Mingus knew each other’s dads, and Mingus went into Dylan’s house. Dylan was certain Arthur wouldn’t ever want Mingus to see inside his own mommified sanctuary of Hi-C juice and Hydrox cookies.

When Mingus was a dollar short of a nickel bag he and Dylan might scrape for loose change in Dylan’s kitchen or even climb the stairs to Abraham’s studio. There Mingus waited at the door, dim transistor jazz seeping through, while Dylan cadged folding money. Abraham, always sensing the lurker in the corridor, would ask:

“Is that Mingus?”

“Yeah.”

“He doesn’t need to hide. Tell him to come say hello.”

In Abraham’s presence Mingus Rude grew courtly, called Abraham Mr. Ebdus , asked about the progress of his film. Abraham would sigh and produce some opaque riddle.

“As well ask Sisyphus, my dear Mingus.”

“ Cookypuss ?” Mingus would be quick with a free-associated reply. He and Abraham had hatched some running joke of mishearing one another. They couldn’t get enough of it.

“Ah, Cookypuss. Maybe Cookypuss for one is showing some progress. I’d like to think so.”

On the other hand, the two no longer went upstairs to Barrett Rude Junior. The stairway between basement and parlor floors might as well have been sealed now. Dylan saw evidence Mingus avoided the upstairs kitchen, cans of Chef Boyardee heated on Senior’s hot plate, Slim Jim wrappers in the bathroom garbage pail. When they cranked Mingus’s stereo, though, Dylan felt himself expecting, even yearning for Junior at the door singing Fuck you doin’ Gus? , his sweet disapproval a fragment of melody you pined to hear whole.

But no amount of volume drew Junior to the door, in Mingus’s apartment they were mole-men now for sure, on their own deep exploration.

Foxy’s “Get Off” they played fifteen times in a row, louder each time, trying to destroy the distance between that rubbery, fleshlike bass line and themselves, as if the song was a photograph, a Playboy centerfold they enlarged by degrees until they could enter the frame, walk into the picture.

They also stared at certain photographs until they might have left sheddings from their blistered eyeballs strewn on the pages, then exchanged relieving hand jobs without making a particularly big deal of it.

Mingus kept the ring and the costume, Aeroman was officially him. Both were stashed on a shelf high above the door, with a hockey trophy and Mingus’s old football helmet, ring out of sight above eye level, costume balled behind the helmet, nothing any random visitor to the room, Arthur Lomb, say, would bother remarking on. Whether Mingus ever donned them out of Dylan’s company went undiscussed. Afternoons passed when Aeroman wasn’t mentioned, the ring wasn’t handled or even seen, Dylan sat on Mingus’s bed and glanced at the shelf between joint tokes but nothing happened, they’d hit the street or catch a Kung Fu flick or Dylan would only go home stoned to whatever supper Abraham had prepared. Then Aeroman might as well have been the lead in a quickly canceled Marvel title like Omega or Warlock , or a murdered sidekick, quickly avenged then forgotten, or a name from the Golden Age, perhaps, like Doll Man or the Human Bomb: in other words, no superhero at all, not really, not one anyone remembered.

Other days he’d have told Abraham he was having dinner at Mingus’s house, or slipped out after wolfing dinner at Abraham’s table to return to the basement apartment, and then after a certain hour Mingus would glance at the shelf too, and say:

“Fight crime?”

“Yeah.”

“You sure?”

“Uh huh.”

Mingus would grin and say, “Look at you, you’re like, I thought you would never ask .”

Aeroman flew six or seven times that fall, was perhaps involved in eight or nine incidents, could claim maybe three bona fide rescues, legible crimes authentically flown down on and busted up. On State Street near Hoyt they halted a six-foot Puerto Rican showing a steak knife to a small Chinese guy, who was busy pulling balled wadded dollars from his pockets, magicianlike, in terrified surrender. Mingus-Aeroman swooped from a fire escape and scissored legs around the knife-wielder’s neck, torque twisting them both to the pavement, Dylan scooted from an apartment building’s entrance to pounce on the knife, plucking it from the ground and surrounding it with his body as though it might detonate. Puerto Rican and Chinese both fled in shock. Though Dylan waved the fluffy bills and called after the victim, he didn’t turn. Breathless and amazed at confiscated weapon and money, Dylan and Mingus stuffed Aeroman’s outfit and mask into a paper sack and walked to Steve’s Restaurant on Third Avenue, celebrated with midnight cheeseburgers and chocolate shakes, adrenaline and marijuana buzz given way to a ravenous appetite, adolescent cells howling for lipids. Waiters gave the hairy eyeball all through the meal, suspecting a scarf-and-run, but Dylan and Mingus didn’t care. They had the dough, even left an ostentatious fuck-you tip.

On Smith Street, howling an unrehearsed cowboys-and-indians woo-woo-woo as he descended, Aeroman spooked drunks boxing at the door of a social club, sole duty at the tail end of a long night’s stalking around, prowling for gigs, killing time tagging on metal doors. On Third Avenue in a cold mid-October rain he foiled a holdup attempt at one of the Plexiglas-barrier Chinese joints, leaving a spilled mound of orange fried rice trampled to pudding at the entrance. At the far end of the Heights Promenade, under cover of darkness, he was cooed at in his costume by men rendezvousing on park benches, men who didn’t need his protection. On Pacific Street near Court, Dylan and Aeroman found roof access to a tenement and lay on their bellies, in costume and street clothes, peering over the cornice, memorizing the life of the unfamiliar block, every girl screaming “ Mira, mira! ” at someone who wouldn’t reply, every boy slapping a spaldeen into the joint of a wall, every grandmother window-perched on Buddha arms, watching just as Mingus and Dylan watched, absorbed, doing nothing.