The Fortress of Solitude (15 page)

DOSE
went up on a lamppost, Mingus’s hand moving in studied arcs.

A tag was a reply, a call to those who heard, like a dog’s bark understood across fences. A reply in moist purple. The letters dripped and stunk thrillingly. Every time they went up Mingus hustled Dylan away, the El Marko clanking back in his jacket lining against the blue lighter and whatever else. Mingus pushing at Dylan’s elbow, the two boys crossed the street diagonally, ducking pursuers who weren’t necessarily real. Their path was a zigzag sentence consisting of a single word,
DOSE
, written in blank spots found everywhere.

Under oblivious eyes, the invisible autographed the world.

The long path of the Promenade curled at the end in a small abandoned playground, two swings, a slide. Mingus took a minute to tag
DOSE
on the heel-dented mercury sheen of the slide, a particularly juicy rendition with a dripping halo.

He offered Dylan the El Marko. The purple-fingerprinted bottle rolled like something ripe in Mingus’s stained palm, a plum.

“Go ahead,” he said. “Tag up. Hurry.”

“How do I know what to write?”

“Don’t you got a tag yet? Make one up.”

Vendlemachine
,
Will-Fuck
,
Dose
. Marvel Comics had it right, the world was all secret names, you only needed to uncover your own.

White Boy
?

Omega the Unknown
?

“Dillinger,” Dylan said. He stared, not quite reaching for the El Marko.

“Too long, man. Something like Dill Three, D-Lone.”

A Filipino baby-sitter creaked a stroller into the playground. Mingus slipped the marker into his jacket, tilted his head.

“Let’s go.”

You could flee a woman who was four feet tall and a baby lashed into a stroller, scramble away giddy and hysterical. It was only real threat that froze you where you stood, your feet like bricks, to dig in your pocket and offer up your bills and change. Go figure.

Mingus hoisted onto the fence surrounding the playground, swung a leg, dropped. Dylan, trying to follow, doubled himself on the fence. Mingus braced under Dylan’s arms while Dylan scrabbled with his foot. They fell together like cartoon cats in a sack on the other side.

“Dang, son, get off me!”

Dylan found his glasses where they’d tumbled in the grass. Mingus brushed at his pants, his jacket, like James Brown checking his suit for imaginary lint. He was grinning, lit up. A shard of leaf in the coils of his hair.

“Get up, son, you’re on the ground!” Mingus at his happiest called Dylan
son
in a booming voice, another quotation, half Redd Foxx, half Foghorn Leghorn.

He offered his hand, yanked Dylan to his feet.

There was something about a physical collision, a moment when fond irritation found an outlet. It wasn’t sexual, more just the routine annoyance of what you were supposed to be doing with your time being answered by the occasional pratfall.

You felt its use. The Italian kids on Court Street knocked each other down at regular intervals.

Dylan wanted to clear the leaf from Mingus’s hair but left it alone.

They trudged down a grade to a hidden patch of land, a tilted triangle of desolate ailanthus and weeds, choked in exhaust at the edge of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, cars whirring indifferently below. The patch was littered with cigarette butts, forty-ounce bottles, shreds of tires. It formed another oasis of neglect, with all the secret authority of the abandoned house. Even the Heights was shored with wreckage, the characteristic crap that underpinned everything.

Again they’d traveled in famous traces, like pilgrims. The stone wall that rose up to the Promenade was covered with six-foot letters, patient graffiti masterpieces to be viewed by the passing drivers. They backed toward the traffic to view the art, Dylan adjusting his glasses on his nose.
MONO
and
LEE
: the Dynamic Duo had struck here too.

In Dylan’s mind Mono was black and Lee was white.

Mingus leaned against the painted wall, shaded by a canopy of ailanthus, and thumbed the blue lighter, held it sideways to the tip of a small, faucetlike chrome pipe, another surprise product of the green jacket’s lining. Head tilted, eyes squeezed in concentration, Mingus sipped at smoke, held it in with thin-pressed lips. Fumes leaked from his nose. He nodded his chin at Dylan, finally exhaled.

“You want some weed?”

“Nah.” Dylan tried to keep it breezy, an incidental turndown that could have gone either way.

Below, trucks roared past, a wall in motion. They bore their own graffiti markings from other parts of the city, alien communication spread by an indifferent carrier, like a virus.

“I took it from Barrett. He keeps it in the freezer.”

These days Mingus called his father Barrett. To Dylan it was probably the key to everything, a crucial stance. Alone, he’d rehearse the possibility under his breath:
Abraham
,
Abraham
,
Abraham
.

“Does he know?” Dylan asked.

Mingus shook his head. “He got so much, he won’t even notice.” He flicked the lighter again, the bowl of the pipe flaring orange, crackling faintly. Dylan worked not to tip his fascination.

“You ever smoke weed?”

“Sure,” Dylan lied.

“It’s no big thing.”

“I know.”

“Everybody gets theyselves high on something—that’s what Barrett says.”
Every-body gets they-selves high on some-thing
carried like musical DNA a trace of
Mu-tha’s gone but the boy is keeping it together
.

“It’s okay, I did it before, I just don’t want to right now.”

“Before?” Mingus tested him gently.

“Sure,” said Dylan. “My
mom’s
a pothead.” As it came from his mouth Dylan knew he’d betrayed Rachel, tossed her out like a skully cap you played indifferently, didn’t mind losing.

Shrugging around in your own language, falsely casual, you discovered what you already knew. The stories embedded in the words like puns, waiting.

Running Crab
not out of potluck
.

“Yeah, well, speaking of which, my moms kicked Barrett out for smoking drugs,” said Mingus. He was compelled to chip in his own disaster, then went mute. Possibly mentioning anyone’s moms out loud, even your own, was miscalculation enough to blow an afternoon.

You were never ineligible for a screwup like that—say the unsayable word and watch it foul the sky. Dodging any mention of Intermediate School 293 or the terms
white
or
black
you might think you were in the clear, but you’d be wrong.

There ought to be a whole other language. As it was, talk of Rachel pointed like a sundial shadow to situations like Robert Woolfolk, stuff you’d worked to leave obscure. Then you were right back where you didn’t want to be. Pinned to the grid.

A white boy in sixth grade, squirming in the glare.

Yoked.

Yo mama
.

Mingus made the pipe disappear into his jacket. The two of them clambered up the grade, scaled the fence easily, and in silence stalked back along Pierrepont, putting the Promenade behind them. Though Dylan was ready now to be offered the El Marko, ready to uncap the pinned-out, purple-soaked felt and feel it flow under his own hand, to discover his own graffiti name and to plop it dripping on the sides of lampposts beside Mingus’s
DOSE
, they tagged nothing. Mingus’s hands remained buried in the pockets of the jacket, fists pushed into the lining to grip the lighter and the pipe and the El Marko so they didn’t clank together as they bounced against his thighs.

Mingus stalking ahead. Leaf still in his hair.

Dylan wasn’t even a
toy
, not yet.

Probably Mingus was high too, his brain in some other quadrant, the Negative Zone maybe. That part was too much to factor. Just
another revoltin’ development
, to quote Ben Grimm, more commonly known as the Thing.

He’d learned to let the mail sit until the boy came home from school, to let the boy toss down his knapsack and sort whatever had been pushed through the mailslot and palm away the Running Crab postcard, when one had come, hide it among his
private stuff
, a category of the boy’s that was ever-expanding. Only after Dylan had slid the mail around with his foot, spreading it on the hallway floor and abandoning it there did Abraham Ebdus retrieve the bills, letters, exhibition announcements, whatever else might have come. So the day’s mail sat all afternoon just inside the door, and Abraham on his journeys downstairs from studio to kitchen for coffee or sandwiches did his honest best not to notice whether there might be a postcard sticking out of the pile. He didn’t want to know.

Tonight, after Dylan had passed through the hallway and moved to the kitchen to unpack his homework on the table, Abraham found a thin package pushed through the slot, return-addressed with the name of his new employer. Though he guessed its contents instantly, he held the package in his gaze for a long minute, darkness massing behind his eyes, a sort of headache of pride and rage. When he finally tore it open a shudder of self-loathing went through him, and he nearly ripped the package in half down the center, destroying the thin mass-market paperback book before it was unveiled.

Neural Circus
by R. Fred Vundane, the first in a series called the New Belmont Specials, heralded as “Mind-Warping Speculative Fiction for the Rock Age.” Jacket art by Abraham Ebdus: a third-rate surrealist landscape or moonscape or mindscape of brightly colored yet somehow ominous biomorphic forms, indebted to Miró, indebted to Tanguy, indebted to Ernst, indebted even to Peter Max, and repaying none of those debts in the least. The art department of Belmont Books had overlaid his gouache-on-pasteboard with an electric-yellow sans serif font meant to resemble computer-screen lettering. Abraham wished now he’d denied them the use of his real name, substituted a pseudonym instead, as the author apparently had: A. Fried Mothball or J.R.R. Foolkiller. The colors he’d applied with his own brushes hurt his eyes.

Abraham carried the book into the kitchen, thinking he’d drop it casually onto the table in the middle of Dylan’s homework. Pique compelled his wrist and he flipped the book to the floor instead. It skidded, spinning to a spot under the table near Dylan’s feet. Dylan raised his eyebrows, looked under the table.

“What’s that?” said Dylan.

“My first published book,” said Abraham, unable to modulate the bitterness in his tone.

Dylan scooped the book up from the floor and took it into the parlor, wordlessly. Abraham moved a package of defrosted lamb chops from the refrigerator to the sink, ran the tap. Set onions on the counter, considered them. He could only bear the silence for a few minutes before peering in to see Dylan screwed into the corner of the couch, his whole body curled around
Neural Circus
. Dylan didn’t look up as Abraham entered. The kid read books like he was engaged in some sort of scavenger procedure, scowling in concentration, turning pages at improbable speed while he flayed away the inessential flesh of prose and inspected the skeleton of story, the bare facts or crucial nonsense. Dylan Ebdus didn’t read, he
filleted
.

Abraham returned to the kitchen. He sliced onions, tossed the chops in a pan. By the time he’d gotten dinner on the table and was about to summon Dylan, the boy trotted back in with the garish little book.

“Not bad,” said Abraham Ebdus’s son. His tone suggested he’d read plenty that were worse. And then, in an act of almost unbearably dry wit, the boy returned the book carefully to the spot on the floor where Abraham had thrown it, covered his mouth with his fist and mimicked a slight cough, and turned to his dinner.

The book lay there through dinner, at sea between their feet. Later, after the television was on, Dylan safely established at his pew in the church of
The Six Million Dollar Man
, Abraham retrieved the book and slipped it into his back pocket, carried it upstairs to his studio. There he cleared a row of ink bottles from a shelf just above eye level, at the desk where he painted film.
Neural Circus
would have company soon enough: he’d already painted three more jacket designs for the New Belmont Specials, and a fourth lay in rough form on a table across the room. He couldn’t consider it now.

He dipped his brush, and focused his hot, onion-stinging eyes on the small celluloid frame where he’d left off work. His film’s plot had lately turned to the banishment or purgation, by degrees, of color. By infinitesimal movements, small blottings and eclipses, black and gray were coming to dominate the zone above the horizon line at the center of the frame, and white and gray the zone below. What colors remained were muted, fading rapidly as though disheartened by the trend, their obvious death sentence. They’d seen the writing on the wall.
First they came for the crimsons and I didn’t speak up, then they came for the ochres
—

The New Belmont Specials were purgatory for the banished colors, Abraham decided now. By expelling onto the jacket designs his corruptest impulses—the need to entertain or distract with his paints, the urge to do anything with his paints apart from
seeing through them
to the absolute truth—he’d further purify his film. The published paperback art, he saw now, with a thrill that felt almost vindictive, would be a Day-Glo zombie standing in for his painting career, a corpse that walked. Meanwhile, thriving in seclusion, like a
Portrait of Dorian Gray
in reverse, would be the austere perfection of the unpublished, unseen film.

Mole-boy ventures out in springtime unprotected. Takes his chances. He folds a dollar into sixteenths and works it into a slot on the inside of his belt buckle, arms himself with a double bluff: two quarters in his pocket, and another fifty cents he’s willing to cough up tucked into his sock. Whatever it takes. This operation is routine. In his front pocket, though, the scrabbling furtive creature has a stash he’s nervous about, his hands eager, prickly. His own El Marko, jet-black, seal unbroken. At Pearl Paint on Canal Street the Saturday before, on a run for art supplies, the mole-child had gathered it up with a sketch pad and a long tin box of colored pencils. Abraham Ebdus paid for the lot, no questions asked.