Jonathan Lethem - The Fortress of Solitude

Running Crab with her romance of poverty can go fuck herself.

Last postcard came you-can’t-remember-when, anyhow.

It only meant working after school every day senior year of high school and all the summer before college to blunt the cost-loans and scholarships and work-study and your own pathetic savings, all these would be required to meet that famous $13,000 tuition, the number like a crazy carrot dangling in the sky. Abraham almost shit his pants when he heard, he had to sit down and breathe slowly.

The big breakout costs big.

So Dylan Ebdus in a red apron scooped ice cream at the Häagen-Dazs on Montague for the girls from Saint Ann ’s he’ll soon be at college with, a twelve-year wait to be a private schooler at last. Don’t spit in their cones if they’re not glancing your way-it’s always darkest before blond dawn.

Winter months no one came in but moms needing hand-packed quarts for birthday parties. Dylan daily made himself ill on tasting spoons of double chocolate, cranked his Specials cassette to the limit during cleanup, afterward glowered home along Henry Street all the way to Amity, only cut across Court and Smith at the last possible minute. Dean Street ’s nothing but a route now, no life in it, and Dylan kept his head bowed against the risk of recognizing a kid from before.

It did happen occasionally, some lanky mustached Puerto Rican calling out “Hey, Dylan!” who turned out to be Alberto or Davey. Certain persons never left the block, maybe never would.

Impossible to explain they shouldn’t greet you because you’re not really there, you’re gone. Easier just to say Hey, Alberto, what’s up, man? , fake a smile or hand slap. Then realize maybe that’s all anyone does-fake it. Maybe there were pavement zombies like you all over the place.

Given how often he bumped into Mingus Rude, he might as well have been teleporting back to Abraham’s house. Dylan’s choice of hours returning to the neighborhood or streets chosen for walking, a system formulated at deep needful levels, thwarted all encounters.

One morning at breakfast Abraham said:

“I saw your friend Mingus.”

“Mmmh.”

“He always asks where you’ve been, why he never sees you anymore.”

What Dylan couldn’t say was that Mingus’s needs scared him now. Mingus’s black-man’s drugs, Mingus’s dark filthy room, these were impossible realms, quarantined in the past. When Dylan felt guilty for assiduously avoiding his best friend-which was only every single day of his life-he just had to recall that Mingus had the ring.

Aaron X. Doily’s Cracker Jack prize was a sort of buyout, a seal on what Dylan Ebdus couldn’t risk contemplating anymore.

“He didn’t look so well to me,” said Abraham. “When I asked he laughed it off, only suggested I give him a dollar.”

“Did you do it?”

“Of course.”

“You got yoked, Dad.”

“Sorry?”

“Never mind.”

Mondays, on his way to Montague, Dylan stopped to deposit last week’s minimum-wage Häagen-Dazs check at Independence Savings on the corner of Court and Atlantic. There was a couple thousand marked in the passbook, representing one season plopping flavors on cones with a blunt instrument. He’d double that sum by the end of the summer, then turn it over in a lump, to Abraham. So that particular February day, Dylan, Brando-collar flipped against the wind, perversely unhatted, ears red, trudged past blackened curb-rinds of snow along Atlantic.

As Dylan passed Smith Street, a guy putting gas in his car at the Shell station pointed with a finger at the jail, the Brooklyn House of Detention, his mouth hung open in some kind of look, up in the sky, it’s a bird, it’s a plane posture of astonishment.

Doesn’t he know there ain’t no such thing as a Superman ?

Maybe Buddy Jacobsen, the girlfriend-murdering horse trainer from Long Island had broken out again, bedsheeting from a high window. News of that escape had put the House of D on the map for a week two years ago, the neighborhood’s blight suddenly plastered all over the five o’clock news. It might have been Isabel Vendle’s worst nightmare, a decade of public relations undone in a stroke.

So Dylan glanced at the jail tower.

There on the vast glass-brick and concrete face, maybe ten stories above the street and three stories tall, was a brazen impossibility, the biggest tag in the history of tagging. The lines were broken and wobbling as they’d have to be, spray-painted from the open window of a hovering helicopter, which was the only way the tag could have got there in the first place, right? Right? Still, however ragged, the thing was a masterpiece, dwarfing Mono’s and Lee’s old bridge stunt, and meant to shock the viewer’s brain with the obvious question: How the fuck DID it get up there?

Four letters: D, O, S, E.

The tag was a cry, a claim, an undeniable thing. The looming jail which no one mentioned or looked at and the trail of dripping paint that covered the city’s every public surface and which no one mentioned or looked at: two invisible things had rendered one another visible, at least for one day.

(In fact it would be ten days before it was gone. Who knew how to clean the exterior of a twenty-six-story jail? And after, a phantom DOSE remained etched in scrubbed concrete.)

Dylan stared up in stupid guilty wonder, trying to figure it out, wondering what now ensued in the world he’d abandoned. Puzzling the message in the four letters. Puzzling whether it was a message.

Or just a tag.

Someone’s betrayed someone but you can’t say who.

Someone’s flying and it isn’t you.

One hot July afternoon, six weeks before he departed the city for college, Dylan Ebdus looked up from Hesse ’s Steppenwolf to find Arthur Lomb leaning on the Häagen-Dazs counter, pinching a sweat-drenched white T away from his body, sighing and puffing his cheeks at the chill of the air-conditioning. The little shop was empty, just the two of them, Dylan leaning over the book in his glasses, his chocolate-smeared smock over a polo shirt, his Remain in Light tape just audible over the hum of the coolers. Arthur Lomb had gained his height at last. In fact he swayed, a beanpole with jeans loose like banners from his legs, in maroon suede Pumas, a cigarette behind his ear. His eyes were red and small and wrinkled like those of some fetal animal, a blind mole rat or cauled calf. It shouldn’t have been such a shock to see him there: a Gowanus kid could stroll into Brooklyn Heights any time he cared to, they’d all proved it a million times.

Dylan sat up, removed his glasses, flopped the book over on its cracked spine.

“Yo, D, lemme get a taste of that, um, macadamia.”

He gave Arthur a spoon.

Arthur tipped his chin at the paperback. “What are you reading that for?”

“What’s wrong with it?”

“Those guys suck . Yo, I hear you’re going to college.”

“From who?”

“Oh, you know, around. I think your dad told Barry.”

“Yeah. Vermont.”

“Cool, cool. I’m going to Brooklyn College. I’m just doing some summer school to make up a few credits at Murrow.”

So even Arthur had trudged through high school, the nerd in him a flame Dean Street couldn’t entirely extinguish. Probably his mother had ridden his back.

“Nice setup here,” said Arthur. “Hot days you must rake it in, huh?”

“It’s not like a taxi. I get paid the same if no one comes in.”

“You’re socking it away for college, I guess.”

Dylan’s mental fingers tightened around his mental passbook.

“I only mention it because I’ve got a proposition I thought you might be interested in,” said Arthur slyly, lapsing into his old routine, boy huckster. “I just thought I’d give you first crack before I haul it over to the comics shop on West Third Street. Because I’m liquidating the collection. All those number one’s. I figured you might still be interested in that kind of stuff.”