Jonathan Lethem - The Fortress of Solitude

Any sentiment could be reserved for the return visit Dylan had projected, one where Arthur would be absent.

“I hear you’re trying to put together some cash,” Dylan said.

“Yeah, yeah, D-Man, you want in on this deal we got going?” Mingus seemed immune to any slight.

“I might take those comics off your hands.”

The room was a cave, kept dark. Whatever damage the comics had suffered surely wouldn’t include sun-faded inks, but rot was a possibility. Dylan raised his eyes enough to see the shelf over the door had been tugged down, its hardware scarring the plaster. No football helmet or anything else. He averted from the rest, the sprayed walls and ceiling, didn’t care to take it in. Then someone in the shadows moved, shifted, hitched trousers from knees and tugged at crotch in sitting up straight. Robert Woolfolk. The party of the third part , it only figured. Robert nodded, barely. Dylan back. Mingus recranked the volume once the door was shut, some pulsing funk. Arthur scraped and tapped with a razor blade at a jagged chunk of mirror, its sharp edges rimmed in black electrical tape. He sniffed a line and offered the rolled dollar to Dylan.

Dylan shook his head.

“Good stuff.”

“No thanks.”

Arthur handed the dollar to Robert, who tipped his upper half out of shadow and over the mirror.

“You know Robert, right?” said Arthur coolly, tauntingly.

“Sure,” said Dylan. “He stole my bike once.” He’d grant nothing after: no Rachel, no pizza slice, no East Village ambush. Let Arthur and Mingus each muse on the allusion to the block’s prehistory. Robert wouldn’t contradict him. Dylan was certain of the bargain of silence they’d struck locking eyes in the gay dealer’s apartment or even earlier, the lifelong misunderstanding they’d forged in the P.S. 38 schoolyard. Robert Woolfolk wouldn’t contradict Dylan because whatever he might be he wasn’t a liar, or a lion.

“But that was a long time ago,” Dylan added with munificent sarcasm. “How’s it going, Robert?”

“Yo,” said Robert Woolfolk murkily, as he sucked a slush of coke down the back of his throat.

Mingus had quarried the comics from his closet, scooting them into hasty piles. He’d likely not laid eyes on them for years. “I never did get these in no plastic bags,” he said apologetically, dazedly. He flipped open an issue of Fantastic Four and grew transfixed in nostalgia. “Dang, I even wrote my name in all these, check it out.”

Mingus was talking to himself. His nostalgia was a non sequitur, no one was interested in the comics.

“I’ll give you a hundred and fifty.” Dylan spoke not looking at Mingus but staring bullets at Arthur, who made himself busy with the razor blade.

Robert Woolfolk only reclined in the low chair, grew hooded in shadow.

Mingus frowned in mock deliberation, a performance dying in the thin air of the bullshit transaction. “Well, I guess that would be fair.”

Dylan tossed the money on the mirror. He relied on their understanding how puny the sum was to him. This was a demonstration to all three of them, as representatives of Gowanus, that Dylan was no longer of this place.

In reply, Robert Woolfolk only scooped up the cash, produced a thick-curled roll and layered Dylan’s bills to the outside of it.

“I brought a knapsack,” Dylan said. “I don’t need any help.”

Mingus nodded and blinked, defeated by Dylan’s efficiency. “Okay, then, that’s chill.”

Turning his back to the three of them, Dylan shoveled the marker-tagged, fingerprint-worn comics into the sack. He was tangled in rage, to be there on the floor on his knees. In an irrational gesture he scooped up one of Mingus’s Afro picks too, and pushed it into the mouth of the sack, on top of the comics. Then he remembered his cool, how he’d thrown down the money. He had a larger purpose here, his plan. The comics were only a joke. Dylan was like the garbage man of their entire youth, come at last. He might have been acquiring a collection of roofed spaldeens, or old cum-gummed socks.

“Walk me out,” he said when he’d stood.

“Yeah, yeah, sure.”

Again they tiptoed past Senior’s crypt. At the apartment’s gate Dylan whispered:

“Call me tomorrow. When Lomb and Woolfolk aren’t around.”

Lomb and Woolfolk, like Abraham and Straus or Jeckyll and Hyde, an old association. Dylan almost laughed.

Mingus widened his red eyes, but Dylan left him hanging. Two could play at spurious mystery, or three, or four: anyone could be spooky, bogus street rap was no commodity in Gowanus. Dylan had survived Dean Street when Mingus Rude was a Philadelphia Boy Scout, Arthur Lomb a private-school dork. Only Robert Woolfolk held any real fear, and Rachel Ebdus had taken care of that, Dylan was untouchable. The other two were newcomers and comic-book collectors forever, and if they wanted to play at being players Dylan could play too. He assumed his demonstration was adequate to show it was the one with the fat passbook who held the cards.

Eleven in the morning, heat already gripping the day like a vise, it nearly went wrong right at the start, Abraham walking in as Dylan counted money. “Goodness,” Abraham said.

Dylan shuffled it into the pocket of his yellow-checked shorts, Ska -wear for the concrete jungle.

“How much have you got there?” said Abraham.

“Three hundred,” Dylan lied.

“Doesn’t it belong in the bank?”

“It’s none of your business.”

Abraham grew consternated, and tried to formulate a stern reply, an effort Dylan always pitied.

“I’d say it is my business, Dylan. What’s the money for?”

“I need to lend it to Mingus,” said Dylan lamely, landing too near the truth.

“Why does Mingus need three hundred dollars?”

“I don’t know.” Dylan moved to the door.

“Dylan?”

“Treat me like a grown-up, Abraham,” said Dylan coldly. “I told you how much I’d contribute at the end of the summer, and it’s not the end of the summer yet.”

Not summer’s end, no: summer’s crotch . Yoo-Hoo, Rheingold, Manhattan Special, everywhere bottle caps were massaged irretrievably into caramel tar by inching cars with gauges in red. Coming up Nevins passenger-siders jerked windows to block tin-can vented streams: some vigilante had again wrenched a hydrant open to belch the city’s supply, and nobody rallied heatstruck brains to summon cops or firemen. By noon every house, every window was jammed open to suck air from the street. Pointless, though. The air was dead.

With five hundred in his pocket, his final offer determined in advance, Dylan Ebdus strolled to Mingus Rude’s, casual as shit, sweating bullets.

Arthur Lomb and Robert Woolfolk weren’t among the creatures slugging at minimal speeds along the heat-watery sidewalk. Dylan recognized nobody, his eyes walled.

Sunday, Senior was at the Parlor of God Ministry on Myrtle Avenue, so Mingus had the basement to himself, doors all flung open.

Dylan followed the music inside.

Mingus lay tumbled in baggy shorts and a grayed undershirt on his bed, sheets kicked to the foot, pillow doubled under his neck, dozing in daylight and loud funk. Possibly he’d started his day two or three times and lagged back, nothing on the agenda until Dylan arrived, sleeping off a night or series of nights, still sleeping off high school. The mirror was stowed somewhere, the room in midday light unmysterious, just a room. The walls and ceiling had been rolled black, maybe the only shade which would cover silver Krylon and Garvey Violet.

Mingus rubbed his eyes with balled fists like a newborn.

“Yo, D.”

Dylan replied self-consciously, “Yo.”

“So, my boy wants in the deal after all.”