The Fortress of Solitude

by Jonathan Lethem

  For three weeks Mingus Rude was like the flying man, a rumor with himself Dylan couldn’t confirm. Mingus’s vacancy from his own schooldays, and from Dylan’s, was the secret premise of an existence which was otherwise unchanged except by being worse every possible way. Seventh grade was sixth grade desublimated, uncorked. It was the Lord of the Rings trilogy to sixth grade’s The Hobbit, the real story at last, all the ominous foreshadowed stuff flushed from the margins and into view. It wasn’t for children, seventh grade. You could read the stress of even entering the building in the postures of the teachers, the security guards. Nobody could relax in such a racial and hormonal disaster area.

  Bodies ranged like ugly cartoons, as though someone without talent was scribbling in flesh.

  The biggest shapes were the angriest. That’s what they were, shapes—between hiding your glasses and averting your gaze you were Mr. Magoo now. The less you met anyone’s eyes the less chance you’d ever risk doing it, a self-fulfilling program.

  Chinese kids had apparently gotten some warning well in advance, and had thoroughly disappeared.

  Puerto Rican or Dominican kids seemed to be tiptoeing away from the scene of everything. They decorated themselves differently and spoke more Spanish each passing hour. The way they occupied space in homeroom or gym class they were there and not there, an operation of mass adjacency.

  The scariest fights were between two black girls.

  On Court Street and Smith Street it wasn’t even clear who was and wasn’t in your school. Other bodies floated around, loose elements. A couple of black kids might corner you and ask, “You Italian or a white boy?” and all you’d know for sure was not to point out that the Italian kids were white. A black kid might be scared of something, might be watching his back on Court like an Italian kid watched his on Smith, but whatever they were scared of it was never going to be you. Anyway, no Italian kid would’ve answered I’m Italian. He’d have said Fuck you think I am? Or just grabbed his dick through his pants and sucked his teeth, flared his nostrils.

  You, you were a million miles from any such procedure.

  More in the market for a case of fake asthma.

  The day after Dylan Ebdus and Arthur Lomb spoke of the Blue Beetle in the library, Mingus Rude resurfaced. At three o’clock, the hour when the doors were thrown open and the school exploded onto the October-bright pavement, when Court Street shopkeepers stood arms-crossed in doorways, their jaws chewing gum or nothing at all, just chewing under narrowed eyes. Dylan used the Butler Street entrance, looking to be lost in the flow of anonymous faces as he left the building, hoping to be carried a distance down Court Street disguised in a clot of anybodies before exposing himself as a solitary white boy. Today he stopped. Mingus sat cross-legged on the rise of a mailbox on the corner of Court and Butler, regarding the manic outflow of kids with a Buddha’s calm, as though from an even greater height than the mailbox, another planet maybe. He might have been sitting there placidly for hours, unnoticed by the school security guards or the older Italian teenagers who roamed Court, that’s how it felt. Dylan understood at once that not only hadn’t Mingus been inside the school today, he’d never crossed its doors since summer, since the start of his eighth-grade year.

  “Yo, Dill-man!” said Mingus, laughing. “I was looking for you, man. Where you been?”

  Mingus unfolded his legs and slid off the mailbox, pulled Dylan sideways out of the crowd, like there was never a question they left school together, like they’d done it every day for three weeks. They crossed Court, into Cobble Hill, Dylan hitching his backpack high on his shoulders and trotting to keep up. Mingus led him up Clinton Street to Atlantic Avenue, kids from I.S. 293 all left instantly behind. There the neighborhood opened out, the shipyards visible under the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, the avenue tilting down to the yellow-glinting water. It was as though Mingus knew paths from the school Dylan in his stupefaction couldn’t have plotted for himself.

  “I haven’t seen you—” Dylan began.

  “Whenever you call me, I’ll be there,” Mingus sang. “Whenever you need me, I’ll be there — I been a-round! Here.” He crumpled a couple of dollars into Dylan’s hands and nodded him to the Arab newsstand on the corner of Clinton. “Get me a pack of Kools, Super-D.” He tipped his head again. “I’ll be over here.”

  “I can’t buy cigarettes.”

  “Say it’s for your mom, say she always comes in there. He’ll sell it to you, don’t worry. Better let me hold your backpack.”

  Dylan tried not to turn his head at the rack of comics as he stepped into the narrow, darkened corridor of a shop.

  “Uh, pack of Kools. It’s for my mother.”

  The operation unfolded precisely as scripted. The guy raised an eyebrow at the word mother, then slid the Kools across the linoleum counter with nothing besides a grunt.

  Back outside, Mingus stashed both cigarettes and change in his jacket-of-mystery, then led Dylan back along Clinton, toward the park on Amity Street.

  “Dill-Man, D-Lone, Dillinger,” Mingus chanted. “Diggity Dog, Deputy Dog, Dillimatic.”

  “I haven’t seen you anywhere,” Dylan said, unable to check the plaint in his voice.

  “You all right, man?” Mingus asked. “Everything cool with you?”

  Dylan knew precisely what everything Mingus meant—all of seventh grade, whatever went on or didn’t inside the building which was apparently no longer Mingus’s problem.

  According to Mr. Winegar, science teacher, the universe was reportedly exploding in slow motion, everything falling away from everything else at a fixed rate. It was a good enough explanation for now.

  “Everything cool?” Mingus demanded.

  They were together and not together, Dylan saw now. Mingus Rude was unreachable, blurred, maybe high. There wasn’t going to be any communing with his core, that vivid happy sadness which called out to Dylan’s own.

  Dylan shrugged, said, “Sure.”

  “That’s all I want to know, man. You know you’re my main man, Dillinger. D-Train.”

  It was a rehearsal and now Dylan learned what for. As they slipped into the park Mingus exaggerated his ordinary lope, raised a hand in dreamy salute. Arrayed at the concrete chessboard tables were three black teenagers in assorted slung poses. One more chaotically slung than the others, a signature geometry of limbs which caused Dylan’s heart to guiltily, madly lurch. Nevertheless he strolled beside Mingus into the thick of it, accepted whatever was meant to unfold in the park from within his own sleepwalker’s daze, which, perfected at the new school, covered even the resurrection of Robert Woolfolk as a presence in his life.

  “Yo,” said Mingus Rude, lazily slapping at hands, humming swallowed syllables which might be names.

  “What’s goin’ on, G?” said Robert Woolfolk.

  Robert Woolfolk called Mingus G, for Gus, Dylan supposed. Did it mean he’d also met Barrett Rude Junior?

  Then Robert Woolfolk recognized Dylan. He flinched with his whole face, his sour-lemon features hiding nothing, yet didn’t alter the arrangement of his limbs an inch.

  The park was full of little white kids with bowl haircuts, maybe second or third graders from Packer Institute or Saint Ann’s. They ran and screamed past the chessboard tables, dressed in Garanimals, arms loaded with plastic toys, G.I. Joes, water pistols, Wiffle balls. For all they inhabited the same world as Dylan and Mingus and Robert Woolfolk they might as well have been animated Disney bluebirds, twittering harmlessly around the head of the Wicked Witch as she coated an apple with poison.

  “Shit,” said Robert Woolfolk and now he smiled. “You know this dude, G?”

  “This my man D-Lone,” said Mingus. “He’s cool. We go back, he’s my boy from around the block.”

  Robert looked at Dylan a long while before he spoke.

  “I know your boy,” he said. “I seen him from before you were even around, G.” He flicked his eyes at Dylan. “What up, Dylan man? Don’t say you don’t remember me because I know yo
u do.”

  “Sure,” said Dylan.

  “Shit, I even know this dude’s mother,” said Robert Woolfolk.

  “Oh, yeah?” said Mingus, carefully blasé, downplaying any further speculations. “So you down, right? You cool with my man Dylan.”

  Robert Woolfolk laughed. “What you need me to say, man? You can hang with your white boy, don’t mean shit to me.”

  At that the thin, worthless pretense of Robert Woolfolk’s fondness for Dylan was shattered in hilarity. The other two black teenagers snorted, slapped each other five for the words white boy, as ever a transport to hear said aloud. “Ho, snap,” said one, shaking his head in wonderment like he’d just seen a good stunt in a movie, a car flipped over or a body crumpled in a hail of blood-spurting bullet thwips.

  Dylan stood frozen in his stupid backpack and unpersuasive Pro Keds in the innocent afternoon, his arms numb, blinking his eyes at Mingus.

  Weebles wobble but they don’t fall down.

  “We going down to bomb some trains or we sit here all day talking ’bout this and that?” said Robert Woolfolk.

  “Let’s go,” said Mingus Rude softly.

  “You bringing your homeboy here?”

  Suddenly a woman stepped into the thick of them. Out of nowhere she made herself present where they sat and stood around the tables. It was a shock, as though she’d ruptured a bubble, disturbed a force field Dylan hadn’t thought was permeable, one where their talk, no matter how many times the word fuck was included, was sealed in a glaze of distant car horns and bird tweets and the younger kids’ sweet yells.

  The woman was a mom, surely, one of the running kids had to be hers. She was maybe twenty-five or thirty, with blond hair, matching blue-jean jacket and bell-bottoms, and granny glasses—she might have been familiar from one of Rachel’s parties. Dylan could see her now, waving a joint around, making some passionate digression about Altman or Szechuan, aggravating men accustomed to holding the floor. Or Dylan might have been kidding himself. There were probably a million like her, false Rachels who’d never known his.

  “You okay, kid?”

  She spoke to Dylan alone, there was no mistaking. The rest of them, Mingus included, were one thing in her eyes, Dylan another. Dylan felt Robert Woolfolk had somehow called the nearest thing to Rachel into being, as though white women everywhere were charged with bearing Rachel’s one crucial intervention however far into the future it needed to go.

  Of all times, it would have to be now. Dylan had wished what felt like a million times for an adult to step up, for a teacher or a friend of his mom’s to turn a corner on Bergen or Hoyt and collide with one of his unnameable disasters, to break it open with a simple question like You okay, kid? But not now. This disaster sealed his status as white boy with Robert Woolfolk forever, precisely when Mingus had been working to change it.

  Mingus, it was clear, had been communicating a message to Dylan by his three-week vanishing act, his elusiveness: that at the new school Dylan was on his own. Nobody had his back. It simply wasn’t possible. It had taken every day of those three weeks for Dylan to abandon the fantasy that Mingus would float him through seventh and eighth grades. Mingus cannily showed himself only after the message was sunk in: I can’t carry you, son, it’s beyond my power. Then, in a compensatory statement of equal clarity, he’d guided Dylan into Cobble Hill to the park on Amity Street to meet and make a pact of being down with Robert Woolfolk in order to say, Where I can help, I will. I’m not actually blind or indifferent here, Dylan. I’m looking out.

  “Hey, kid? Something wrong?”

  Dylan had turned to her, helpless, gaping. There was no way to tell her how right and wrong she was at once, no way to make her evaporate. All the worse that she was beautiful, gleaming like the cover of one of Rachel’s MS. magazines which stacked up scorned by Abraham in the living room for Dylan’s eventual guilty perusal of illustrated features on bralessness. Dylan wanted to protect the blond woman from Robert Woolfolk’s eyes. She shouldn’t have popped out of the other world, the Cobble Hill world of private-school kids and their caretakers, it was a misunderstanding. He wanted to send her home to entice Abraham from his studio, that was where she might have done some good.

  Of course, Robert Woolfolk didn’t really matter. He was only an enemy, finally. The worst thing the woman had done was humiliate him with Mingus.

  “They’re my friends,” Dylan said feebly. As it was out of his mouth it occurred to him he’d failed another test, another where the correct answer was Fuck you lookin’ at? That phrase, robustly applied, might have actually transported them all back in time to a moment before Robert Woolfolk had said the words white boy. Dylan might have then been invited to trail the others to a transit yard or wherever else they were going in order to bomb some trains, a richly terrifying prospect. Dylan craved to bomb some trains as fiercely as if he’d heard that phrase for years instead of just once, moments ago. And he had the El Marko in his backpack to bomb them with, if he’d only get a chance to produce it.

  No one else piped up to say Lady, mind your own fuckin’ business and Dylan saw that Robert Woolfolk and his two companions, Robert’s laugh track, were missing. Gone. Dylan had slipped a gear in staring perplexedly at the blond woman, lost a moment in dreaming, and in that moment Robert Woolfolk had shunted away, out of the blithe park which seemed intended to contain anything but him. As though making a silent confession of whatever it was the woman suspected was going on. Only Mingus remained, and he stood apart from the table where the others had sat, and from Dylan.

  “Do you want me to walk you home?” asked the woman. “Where do you live?”

  “Yo, Dylan man, I’ll check you later,” said Mingus. He wasn’t fearful, only uninterested in contending with the blond woman and anything she thought she knew. Dylan felt her irrelevance to Mingus. Mingus’s own mother having been cleanly bought off with a million-dollar payment, he was immune to echoes. “Be cool,” Mingus said. He held out his hand, waiting for Dylan to tap it with his fingertips. “I’ll check you on the block, D.”

  With that Mingus hunched his arms around his jacket pockets as though leaning into a strong wind and ambled into the sun-blobbed trees in the far corner of the park, toward Henry Street, the BQE, the shipyards, wherever he was going where Dylan wasn’t going to be swept along now. His gait was mock-infirm, a quotation of something amusing and profound you’d seen somewhere but couldn’t place, Mickey Rivers or Weird Harold or Meadowlark Lemon. He seemed a figure cut out of one kind of day and plopped into another, a cartoon squiggle or bass line come to life.

  That’s my best friend, Dylan wanted to tell the blond woman, who the longer he didn’t reply to her offer was more and more squinting at Dylan like she might have miscalculated, like he might be a thing spoiled by the company she’d found him in, a misfit, not a kid worth her rescue in the first place.

  And that’s what he wanted to be to her, spoiled, stained with blackness.

  Racist bitch.

  Where do I live? In his fantasy Dylan replied, I live in the Wyckoff Gardens, the housing projects on Nevins and Third, that’s where. You know the ones, they’re always on fire. If you want to walk me home, lady, let’s go.

  Arthur Lomb and his mother lived on Pacific Street between Hoyt and Bond, the far side of the hospital. Arthur’s block was eerie, kidless, no bus, the hospital’s laundry stack cascading silent white steam to the sky, the bodega on the corner another sidewalk congregation of old men on milk crates but graver, less amused, less musical than Old Ramirez’s bunch. On Pacific the men grumbled in some middle distance, leathery fingers shifting dominoes across felt. Everything on Pacific including a gray cat darting across the street seemed farther away and more pensive. The block might have been the Bermuda Triangle of Boerum Hill, a space arranged the precise distance from the Gowanus Houses, the Brooklyn House of Detention, and Intermediate School 293 to fall under no domain whatsoever. Not a long-term solution to anything, Arthur Lomb’s stoop nevertheless
formed a kind of oasis on certain October afternoons when he and Dylan would tiptoe there unharassed and set out a chessboard under the furling shadow of the hospital’s steam.

  “You’re in Winegar’s science class, huh? I feel sorry for you. He’s a worm. You see the way he toys with his mustache when he’s talking to the Puerto Rican girls with developed breasts? It makes me want to vomit. Doesn’t matter, pretend you like him. Science teacher’s your ticket out of here, that’s my view. Don’t move that bishop, it’s the only thing keeping me from crushing you. I told you a thousand times, link your pawns.”

  Arthur Lomb sat with one leg folded under his body like a kindergartner. His monologues were all brow-furrowed and lip-pursed, craven machinations cut with philosophical asides and vice versa. His jabber had a glottal, chanted quality, seemingly designed to guide you past the territory where you might wish to tell him to shut up already or even to strike him, into a realm of baffled wonderment as you considered the white noise of a nerd’s id in full song. Arthur Lomb had been at Saint Ann’s until the day his parents divorced and his mother could no longer afford the private school. Now he was intent on getting into one of the specialized public high schools, one of those with academic requirements, entrance exams. Arthur Lomb never pined for the lost school behind him, for the company of other white children whom Dylan could only surmise had loathed him in their way as acutely as the black kids at 293. He was all grim necessity, a soldier in open ground casting for his next foxhole.

  “Only thing that matters is the test for Stuyvesant. Just math and science. Flunk English, who gives? The whole report card thing’s a joke, always was. I haven’t gone to gym class once. You know Jesus Maldonado? He said he’d break my arm like a Pixy Stix if he caught me alone in the locker room. Gym’s suicide, frankly. I’m not stripping down to my underwear anywhere inside the four walls of this school, I’m just not. If I have to BM, I hold it until after school.”