Jonathan Lethem - The Fortress of Solitude

The bridge crossing after dark was a sure spot, a famous mistake to walk there at night, so they took it to the bridge: Dylan standing as bait by the massive shoring tower still bearing Mono’s and Lee’s fabulously weathered autographs, Mingus in costume flown to a perch on the high, swaying cable. Below, on the streets, it was late summer, but here above the city winter was arriving, swept off the ocean. Dylan was mugged in minutes, it was comically predictable, almost corny when two homeboys lurched out of the gloom beyond the tower and said: “Hey, whiteboy, lemme borrow a dollar off you, man.”

Dylan gladly played at reaching into his pockets for money, his attackers fish in a barrel. Only Mingus didn’t shoot the fish, he didn’t swoop.

“What you checkin’ around for, man?”

Dylan had made them nervous. They smelled setup in his hesitation and followed his gaze to the bridge, the sky-harp of spun lines. So all three saw the caped figure struggling in the gust which had torn it from the cable, saw Mingus cycling in air, trying to reclaim a footing, nearly doing so before being wind-wrested into the breach between the bridge and the water, the wild void. All three watching lost sight of him below the line of the bridge’s roadway. He was just a twinkle, mask, cape, Puma soles maybe, then nothing at all.

He’d been blown from the bridge.

Dylan turned on the walkway’s planks and bolted for the Brooklyn end, abandoned the scene exactly as Rachel had always told him to do- Just run, kiddo, use those pogo sticks, they can’t catch up with you! -and which he’d never done once in a thousand yokings. For Mingus he found his legs, he ran. He nearly tumbled dodging a beat cop staked at the foot of the stairs, waved a quick hello-I-must-be-going to the cop’s dull glower, then panted on, limbs wheeling. Cabs curled off the bridge, faceless, cornering through Cadman Plaza to Henry Street, Clinton Street, to placid brownstones with mock gaslight fixtures. There wasn’t anybody to appeal to for help, Dylan was alone, Mingus, Aeroman, ring all drowned, smashed on the water. Dylan veered to the dark paths below the bridge, seeking the edge of the river, the junk-strewn wasteland where the city hid crashed police cars and looted parking meters and other evidence of helplessness.

Mingus sat hunched and dripping at the base of the anchorage, twisting water from the tips of his cape, stain spreading on the concrete embankment like a snow angel. Dylan arrived gasping, hot-faced, couldn’t speak before Mingus said: “Ho, shit , man.”

“You’re okay?”

“I was swimming, man. I don’t even know how to swim.” He spoke with quiet amazement, nodding his head at the water.

“What do you mean?”

“Like a fish, D-Man.”

“You’re saying the ring gave you the power of swimming ?”

“Or flying underwater, don’t ask me. I was up to some serious Aquaman shit, though.”

They slunk to Dean. The staged rescue left unfinished on the walkway and the plummet from the wires, both were put behind them, though Dylan and Mingus and Aeroman skirted the bridge after that. Aeroman, having been laid flat to dry, mellowed on the shelf for weeks, regathering his wits and bravado, perhaps, shaking off effects of the fall. Mingus didn’t reach for the costume and Dylan didn’t push. Dylan instead became briefly obsessed with clandestine powers in the ring. Why imagine Aaron X. Doily had plumbed them all? Possibly Aeroman was named prematurely, had more to offer. Dylan wore the ring and immersed his head in Mingus’s filled tub, hoping to breathe underwater. He snorted a flood into his lungs, came up hacking, nearly puked, bathwater scalding his nostrils.

The ring also conferred no X-ray vision, though they spent one thrilled night persuading themselves, scowling hard at dresses, black hos working Pacific and Nevins, white Saint Ann ’s girls massed at the Baskin-Robbins on Montague.

“Wait, wait, I see something.”

“My turn now.”

“Oh-sweet-Jesus. She’s wearing no panties.”

Aeroman’s last venture that first season of high school was in a light, freak-early midnight snowfall two weeks past Thanksgiving, Dylan walking State Street, Mingus hopping the rooftops above, keeping pace. Ever since the Chinese victim who’d dropped his money, State between Hoyt and Bond was their lucky mugging strip, safe distance from anyone they’d know on Dean or Bergen, dark with a smashed streetlamp, close enough to the Hoyt-Schermerhorn subway stop that dumb junkies frightened of venturing into the Heights considered it safe prowling for renovators’ wives, trembling whiteboys, geezers. Tonight, though, a snowball was all Dylan drew. A lone, tall Puerto Rican kid leaning on a car scooped a windshield-mass of fresh stuff and flung an unerring bull’s-eye in Dylan’s back. When Dylan whirled he said: “Try it, motherfucker, I dare you throw one.”

At that moment Mingus descended with a cradled armload, shoveled it into the tall kid’s collar.

Then Mingus landed softly beside Dylan and they ran together hooting, Mingus stripping the costume and cape off over his head, momentarily bare-chested in the snowfalling night.

Mingus afternoons, Aeroman nights, they were untellable the next day at Stuyvesant, if he’d even wanted to try, if he’d somehow corralled Tim Vandertooth’s and Gabriel Stern’s ears for the attempt. Dylan had no interest in telling. Mornings after, he felt himself an orbiter on reentry, his hidden knowledge sealed in flame. Mingus and Aeroman were a million miles away, another realm, Brooklyn. Besides, the thing coming for Tim and Gabe had found them.

Once it arrived it was obvious, had a common name already known: punk. Or new wave. They were related strands: Sex Pistols, Talking Heads, Cheap Trick. Discerning their difference, articulating your precise relation, that was part of the point, a continuum of the now it was suddenly clear anyone could be placed on. Even the longhaired stoners in their refusal were anti-punk, defining something.

Tim came to school one day with a point-studded dog collar. He showed them how it worked, a simple snap. Gabe taunted him uneasily for a week, then went out and bought a Ramonesian leather jacket loaded with zippers and buckles, smelling of preservatives and sizing, almost like one of Abraham’s canvases. Gabe slapped the jacket against a rock in the park, trying to age it. They studied the results. The jacket looked new as licorice. Or the problem was themselves, their bangs, hair curled over their ears. The next week Tim and Gabe returned from Roosevelt Island having fucked up their hair with children’s scissors. The jacket looked slightly improved.

Tim smoked cigarettes now.

Gabe etched a tiny swastika on his forearm with a razor blade. “ You know what my parents would do to me if they saw this? ” he whispered darkly, like he’d been kidnapped by Satanists and forced to recite a pledge.

The girls with short black-dyed hair were suddenly visible. Sarcastic, pale, and titless, they were a different flavor, previously overlooked.

A few even had tits, which might violate punk aesthetics but you’d consider making an exception.

Dylan shunted knapsack-loads of Rachel’s Blind Faith and Creedence Clearwater Revival records to Bleecker Bob’s record exchange, embarrassed to see them in the house, returned with the Clash’s Give ’ Em Enough Rope.

Steve Martin was for children.

There wasn’t much terror. Fourteenth Street, First Avenue, they were scungy but populated, jostling with drug traffic but not a lot of yoking. Maybe you’d outgrown victim size, though it was hard to imagine there could be universal consensus on that point, you had to stay alert. A girl your age was pushed from a subway platform on her way to Music and Art, a cellist who lost her arm under the train and had it reattached in a miracle surgery. The incident made a brief noise of panic among white kids on subways and their parents, but that was 135th Street, Harlem. Poor kid but what did she expect? Thank God you hadn’t gone to Music and Art. To escape the outer boroughs only to soar on the subway past Manhattan ’s safe zones all the way into Harlem was ironic, one crazy mistake you’d at least avoided.