The Fortress of Solitude by Jonathan Lethem

green-and-white hockey uniform with his name pressed across the shoulders in glossy, slightly crooked iron-on letters. He held a splintered stick with black electrical tape wound around the handle. Dylan absorbed it silently. Then Mingus again vanished, to return in a crimson football uniform, with helmet reading MANAYUNK MOHAWKS . Together they peeled back the ventilated nylon jersey to examine the foam-and-plastic shoulder pads that gave Mingus Rude the outline of a superhero. The pads smelled of sweat and rot, of dizzy, inaccessible afternoons. But can you catch a spaldeen? Can you roof one? Dylan wondered bitterly. Mingus Rude would soon know that Dylan Ebdus could not.
    Dylan was torn between wanting to claim to possess merit badges in skully , Etch A Sketch , sneaking down creaky stairs , and drawing “Skippy” and a desire to protect Mingus Rude from mockery, theft, incomprehension. He could already hear Yo, let me see it, let me check it out, what—you don’t trust me? He wished to protect them both by commanding the new boy never to bring any of these madly fertile and irrelevant possessions out onto the block for any other kid to see.
    Dylan tangled in silence. There in the high-fenced sanctuary of the backyard he wanted to heap the various uniforms in a bonfire, like the one Henry and Alberto had once set on the stoop of the abandoned house, igniting smoldering newspapers and dried dog shit and the stinky green late-summer ailanthus branches which had fallen to litter the street everywhere. Dylan wanted Mingus Rude and himself to build a fire and smother the uniforms in damp smoke until the plastic blackened and melted, until the numbers and names, the evidence, was destroyed. A Dean Street fire, no merit badges involved. Instead he watched as Mingus Rude somberly packed the uniforms into the bottom of his closet.
    “You like comics?” said Mingus Rude.
    “Sure,” said Dylan unsure. My mother likes them , he almost said.
    Mingus Rude excavated four comic books from the closet floor: Daredevil #77 , Black Panther #4 , Doctor Strange #12 , The Incredible Hulk #115 . They’d been tenderly handled to death, corners rounded, paper browned by hot attentive breath, pages chewed by eyes. MINGUS RUDE was written in slanted ballpoint capitals on each first interior page. Mingus read certain panels aloud, incanting them, shaping Dylan’s attention, shaping his own. Dylan felt himself permeated by some ray of attention, moved so that he felt an uncanny warmth in the half of his chest that was turned toward Mingus. He wanted to put his hand in Mingus Rude’s crispy-looking hair.
    “You know what they say now? Doctor Strange could take the Incredible Hulk by making some kind of mystical cage but he couldn’t take Thor because Thor’s a godlike figure, as long as he doesn’t lose his hammer. If he loses his hammer dude’s nothing better than a cripple.”
    “Who’s Thor?”
    “You’ll see. You know where to buy comics?”
    “Uh, yeah.” Dylan thought of Croft, that afternoon on Isabel Vendle’s deck, the newsstand on the traffic island at Flatbush Avenue and Atlantic. The Fantastic Four .
    Could Doctor Strange “take” the Fantastic Four? he wondered.
    “Ever steal comics?”
    “No.”
    “It’s no big thing. You go to camp this year?”
    “No.” No year , Dylan almost said. He’d found an artifact on Mingus’s dresser, a sort of tuning fork.
    “That’s a pick,” said Mingus.
    “Oh.”
    “Like a comb, for black hair. It ain’t nothing. Want to see a gold record?”
    Dylan nodded mutely, dropped the pick. Mingus Rude was a world, an exploding bomb of possibilities.
    Dylan wondered how long he’d be able to keep him to himself.
    They crept upstairs. His father had abandoned to Mingus Rude the spectacular gift of the entire basement level: two rooms to himself, and possession of the magically blank backyard. Mingus Rude’s father lived on the parlor floor. Like Isabel Vendle, Barrett Rude