The Fortress of Solitude.

by Jonathan Lethem.

chapter1.

Like a match struck in a darkened room: Two white girls in flannel nightgowns and red vinyl roller skates with white laces, tracing tentative circles on a cracked blue slate sidewalk at seven o'clock on an evening in July.

The girls murmured rhymes, were were murmured rhymes, their gauzy, sky-pink hair streaming like it had never once been cut. The girls' parents had permitted them back onto the street after dinner, only first changing into the gowns and brushing their teeth for bed, to bask in the orange-pink summer dusk, the air and light which hung over the street, over all of Gowanus like the palm of a hand or the inner surface of a seashell. The Puerto Rican men seated on milk crates in front of the bodega on the corner grunted at the apparition, not sure of what they were seeing. They widened their lips to show one another their teeth, a display to mark patience, wordless enduring. The street strewn with bottle caps half-pushed into the softened tar, Yoo-Hoo, Rheingold, Manhattan Special. murmured rhymes, their gauzy, sky-pink hair streaming like it had never once been cut. The girls' parents had permitted them back onto the street after dinner, only first changing into the gowns and brushing their teeth for bed, to bask in the orange-pink summer dusk, the air and light which hung over the street, over all of Gowanus like the palm of a hand or the inner surface of a seashell. The Puerto Rican men seated on milk crates in front of the bodega on the corner grunted at the apparition, not sure of what they were seeing. They widened their lips to show one another their teeth, a display to mark patience, wordless enduring. The street strewn with bottle caps half-pushed into the softened tar, Yoo-Hoo, Rheingold, Manhattan Special.

The girls, Thea and Ana Solver, shone like a new-struck flame.

An old white woman had arrived on the block before the Solvers, to reclaim one of the abused buildings, one which had been a rooming house, replacing fifteen men with only herself and her crated belongings. She was actually the first. But Isabel Vendle only lurked like a rumor, like an apostrophe inside her brownstone, where at this moment she crept with a cane between the basement apartment and her bedroom in the old parlor on the first floor, to that room where she read and slept under the crumbled, unrestored plaster ceiling. Isabel Vendle was a knuckle, her body curled around the gristle of old injuries. Isabel Vendle remembered a day in a packet boat on Lake George, she scratched letters with a pen dipped in ink, she pushed stamps against a sponge in a dish. Her desktop was cork. Isabel Vendle had money but her basement rooms stank of rinds, damp newspaper.

The girls on wheels were the new thing, spotlit to start the show: white people were returning to Dean Street. A few.

Under the ailanthus tree in the backyard Dylan Ebdus at five accidentally killed a kitten. The Ebduses' tenants in the basement apartment had a litter of them, five, six, seven. They squirmed on the ground there, in that upright cage of brick walls, among the rubble and fresh-planted vines and the musky ailanthus sheddings, where Dylan played and explored alone while his mother turned over ground with a small trident or sat smoking while the couple downstairs sang together, one strumming a peace-sign-stickered, untuned guitar. Dylan danced with the tiny, razor-sharp, bug-eyed cats, chased them into the slug-infested brick pile, and on the second day, backpedaling from one of the cats, crushed another with his sneakered foot.

Those basement tenants took the kitten away broken but alive while Dylan, crying, was hustled off by his parents. But Dylan understood that the kitten was mercifully finished somehow, smothered or drowned. Somehow. He asked, but the subject was smothered too. The adults tipped their hand only in that instant of discovery, letting Dylan glimpse their queasy anger, then muted it away. Dylan was too young to understand what he'd done, except he wasn't; they hoped he'd forget, except he didn't. He'd later pretend to forget, protecting the adults from what he was sure they couldn't handle: his remembering entirely.

Possibly the dead kitten was the insoluble lozenge of guilt he'd swallowed.

Or possibly it was this: his mother told him someone wanted to play with him, on the sidewalk across the street. Out front. It would be his first time to go out on the block, to play out front out front instead of in the brick-moldy backyard. instead of in the brick-moldy backyard.

"Who?"

"A little girl," said his mother. "Go see, Dylan."

Maybe it was the white girls, Ana and Thea in their nightgowns and skates. He'd seen them from the window, now they were calling to him.

Instead it was a black girl, Marilla, who waited on the sidewalk. Dylan at six recognized a setup when he saw one, felt his mother's city craftiness, her native's knowledge. Rachel Ebdus was working the block, matchmaking for him.

Marilla was older. Marilla had a hoop and some chalk. The walk in front of Marilla's gate-her share of the irregular slate path was her zone-marked. This was Dylan's first knowledge of the system that organized the space of the block. He would never step into Marilla's house, though he didn't know that now. The slate was her parlor. He had his own, though he hadn't marked it yet.

"You moved here?" said Marilla when she was sure Dylan's mother had gone inside.

Dylan nodded.

"You live in that whole house?"

"Tenants downstairs."

"You got an apartment?"

Dylan nodded again, confused.

"You got a brother or sister?"

"No."

"What your father does?"

"He's an artist," said Dylan. "He's making a film." He offered it with maximum gravity. It didn't make much of an impression on Marilla.

"You got a spaldeen?" she said. "That's a ball, if you don't understand."

"No."

"You got any money on you?"

"No."

"I want to buy some candy. I could buy you a spaldeen. Could you ask your mother for some money?"

"I don't know."

"You know skully?"

Dylan shook his head. Was skully a person or another kind of ball or candy? He couldn't know. He felt that Marilla might begin to pity him.

"We could make skully caps. You could make them with gum or wax. You got a candle in your house?"

"I don't know."

"We could buy one but you got no money."

Dylan shrugged defensively.

"Your mother told me to cross the street with you. You can't do it yourself." Her tone was philosophical.

"I'm six."

"You're a baby. What kind of a name is Dylan?"

"Like Bob Dylan."

"Who?"

"A singer. My parents like him."

"You like the Jackson Five? You know how to dance?" Marilla laced herself with her hoop, buckled her knees and elbows at once, balled her fists, gritted her teeth, angled her ass. The hoop swung. She grinned and jutted her chin at Dylan in time with her hips, as though she could have swirled another hoop around her neck.

When it was Dylan's turn the hoop clattered to the slate. He was still fat, podlike, Tweedledee. There was no edge on his shape for the hoop to lodge. He could barely span it with his arms. He couldn't duck his knees, instead scuffed sideways, stepping. He couldn't dance.

That was how they played, Dylan dropping the plastic hoop to the ground a thousand times. Marilla sang encouragement, Oh, baby give me one more chance, I want you back Oh, baby give me one more chance, I want you back. She punched the air. And Dylan wondered guiltily why the white girls on skates hadn't called to him instead. Knowledge of this heretical wish was his second wound. It wasn't like the dead kitten: this time no one would judge whether Dylan had understood in the first place, whether he had forgotten after. Only himself. It was between Dylan and himself to consider forever whether to grasp that he'd felt a yearning preference already then, that before the years of seasons, the years of hours to come on the street, before Robert Woolfolk or Mingus Rude, before "Play That Funky Music, White Boy," before Intermediate School 293 or anything else, he'd wished, against his mother's vision, for the Solver girls to sweep him away into an ecstasy of blondness and matching outfits, tightened laces, their wheels barely touching the slate, or only marking it with arrows pointing elsewhere, jet trails of escape.

Marilla whirled in place, singing When I had you to myself I didn't want you around, those pretty faces always seemed to stand out in a crowd When I had you to myself I didn't want you around, those pretty faces always seemed to stand out in a crowd - - Isabel Vendle found the name in a tattered, leather-bound volume at the Brooklyn Historical Society: Boerum. As in the Boer War. A Dutch family, farmers, landowners. The Boerums kept their wealth in Bedford-Stuyvesant, had actually come nowhere near Gowanus, none except a wayward, probably drunken son, named Simon Boerum, who built a house on Schermerhorn Street and died in it. He'd been exiled here, perhaps, a prodigal, a black sheep sleeping off a long bender. Anyway, he'd lend his name-he wasn't about to say no!-to the band of streets laced between Park Slope and Cobble Hill, because Gowanus wouldn't do. Gowanus was a canal and a housing project. Isabel Vendle needed to distinguish her encampment from the Gowanus Houses, from Wyckoff Gardens, that other housing project which hemmed in her new paradise, distinguish it from the canal, from Red Hook, Flatbush, from downtown Brooklyn, where the Brooklyn House of Detention loomed, the monolith on Atlantic Avenue, ringed with barbed wire. She was explicating a link to the Heights, the Slope. So, Boerum Hill Boerum Hill, though there wasn't any hill. Isabel Vendle wrote it and so it was made and so they would come to live in the new place which was inked into reality by her hand, her crabbed hand which scuttled from past to future, Simon Boerum and Gowanus unruly parents giving birth to Boerum Hill, a respectable child.

The houses here were sick. The Dutch-style row houses had been chopped into pieces and misused as rooming houses for men with hot plates and ashtrays and racing forms, or floor-through apartments, where sprawling families of cousins were crammed into each level, their yards and stoops teeming with uncountable children. The houses had been slathered with linoleum and pressed tin, the linoleum and tin had later been painted, the paint painted again. It was like a coating on the tongue and teeth and roof of a mouth. The lines of the rooms, the fine moldings, had been broken by slapdash walls to make hallways, the bathrooms had had Sears Roebuck shower stalls wedged into them, the closets had been turned into kitchens. The hallways had been pissed. These brownstones, these upright Dutch houses, were bodies, bodies abused, but Isabel would make them well again, she'd fill them with couples, renovators who'd replaster the ornate ceilings, refurbish the marble hearths. She'd already lured a few. The first renovators were motley, truth be told. Disappointing to her, the beatniks who came, the hippies making communes little better than rooming houses. But someone had to be first. They were Isabel's ragged first recruits, not good, only good enough.

For instance Abraham and Rachel Ebdus. The encountered reality of a marriage was always wearying to Isabel. She, Rachel, was wild-eyed, chain-smoking, too young, too Brooklyn Brooklyn, actually. Isabel had seen her talking Spanish to the men on the crates on the corner. That wasn't going to solve anything. And he, Abraham, was a painter, splendid-but need the walls of the house be filled top-to-bottom with nude portraits of his wife? Need the paintings in the front parlor sometimes be visible from the corner of Dean and Nevins, scumbled flesh beaming past half-drawn curtains?

Wife supported husband, working half days at a desk at the Department of Motor Vehicles on Schermerhorn Street. Talking Spanish to the undershirts who polished cars in front of rooming houses.

While the husband stayed home and painted.

They had a boy.

Isable tore a thread of smoked turkey from the periphery of her dry sandwich and draped it across the orange cat's incurious nose, until the doltish thing fathomed what was offered and engaged it with clacking, machinelike teeth.

There were two worlds. In one his father paced upstairs, creaked chairs, painting at his tiny light box, making his incomprehensible progress, his mother downstairs played records, ran water over dishes, laughed on the telephone, her voice trailing up the curve of the long stair, the backyard ailanthus brushed his bedroom windows, dappling the sun into tropical, liquid blobs of light against the wallpaper which itself depicted a forest full of monkeys and tigers and giraffes, while Dylan read and reread Scrambled Eggs Super Scrambled Eggs Super and and Oobleck Oobleck and and If I Ran the Zoo If I Ran the Zoo or pushed his Matchbox car, #11, dreamily with one finger down its single length of orange track or exposed the inadequacy of the Etch A Sketch and the Spirograph again, the stiffness of the knobs, the recalcitrance of the silvery ingredient behind the Etch A Sketch's smeared window, the untrustworthiness of the Spirograph's pins, the way they invariably bent at perihelion when the pressure of the drawing pen grew too much, so that every deliciously scientific orbit blooped and bent at the crucial moment into a ragged absurdity, a head with a nose, a pickle with a wart. If the Etch A Sketch and the Spirograph had really worked they would probably be machines, not toys, they would be part of the way the adult universe operated, and be mounted onto the instrument panels of cars or worn on the belts of policemen. Dylan understood and accepted this. These things were broken because they were toys, and vice versa. They required his pity and patience, like retarded children who'd been entrusted to his care. or pushed his Matchbox car, #11, dreamily with one finger down its single length of orange track or exposed the inadequacy of the Etch A Sketch and the Spirograph again, the stiffness of the knobs, the recalcitrance of the silvery ingredient behind the Etch A Sketch's smeared window, the untrustworthiness of the Spirograph's pins, the way they invariably bent at perihelion when the pressure of the drawing pen grew too much, so that every deliciously scientific orbit blooped and bent at the crucial moment into a ragged absurdity, a head with a nose, a pickle with a wart. If the Etch A Sketch and the Spirograph had really worked they would probably be machines, not toys, they would be part of the way the adult universe operated, and be mounted onto the instrument panels of cars or worn on the belts of policemen. Dylan understood and accepted this. These things were broken because they were toys, and vice versa. They required his pity and patience, like retarded children who'd been entrusted to his care.

In his indoor world Dylan could float in one of two directions. One was upstairs, grasping at the loose, rattling banister, sliding his small hand around a portion of its burnished smoothness, then hopping his fingers over the gapped joints, to knock on the studio door and be permitted to stand at his father's elbow and try to watch what couldn't be watched, the incomprehensible progress of an animated film painted by single brushstrokes directly onto celluloid. For Abraham Ebdus had renounced painting on canvas. The canvases which filled the halls, those lavish, painterly nudes, were his apprentice work, the sentimental traces of his progress toward what had become his lifework, an abstract painting unfolding in time, in the form of painted frames of film. Abraham Ebdus had perhaps finished two minutes of this film. There was nothing to show except the sketches and notes pinned to the walls where the canvases had been before. The large brushes were all stiffened and dry in cans. They'd been replaced with brushes like those a jeweler uses to smooth away diamond dust, and in that third-story studio where window fans whirred, pushing the yellow August sky in to dry the paint, Abraham Ebdus hunched like a jeweler, or a monk copying scrolls, and licked with the tiny brushes at his celluloid frames, his work grown reverent and infinitesimal. Dylan stood at his side and smelled the paint, the thin acrid plume of freshly mixed pigment. He was at the height of the light table on which his father painted, his eyes level and close, and he wondered if his tiny hands might be more suited to the work than his father's. Bored after a while, he'd sit cross-legged on the floor and draw with his father's abandoned oil crayons, carefully unpacking them from the metal tin with the French label. Or run his Matchbox car, #11, along the painted floorboards. Or wrestle open an enormous book of reproductions, tipped-in plates, Brueghel or Goya or Manet or De Chirico, and become lost, briefly dreaming himself into a window in the Tower of Babel or a circle of witches sitting with a goat beside a campfire at night or a line of boys with sprouted branches chasing pigs across a brook. In Brueghel and De Chirico he found children playing with hoops like Marilla's and wondered if he might be allowed to turn her hula on its side and run it down Dean Street with a stick. But the girl with the hoop and the stick on the lonely street in De Chirico had flowing hair like the Solver girls, so never mind.

"That looks the same," Dylan said, watching his father finish a frame, turn to the next.

"It changes very slightly."

"I can't see."

"You will in time."

Time, he'd been told, would speed up. Days would fly. They didn't fly there, on the floor of his father's studio, but they would. They'd fly, the film would speed up and run together so fast it would appear to move, summer would end, he'd be in school, he was growing up so fast growing up so fast, that was the consensus he alone couldn't consent to, mired as he felt himself to be, utterly drowning in time there on the studio floor, gazing into Brueghel, searching for the other children among the dogs under the banquet table at the feet of the millers and their wives. Retreating from his father's studio he'd count the whining stairs.

Downstairs was another problem entirely. His mother's spaces-the parlor full of her books and records, the kitchen where she cooked food and laughed and argued on the phone, her table full of newspapers and cigarettes and wineglasses-were for Dylan full of unpredictability and unrest, like his mother herself. Mornings she was gone to Schermerhorn Street where she worked. Then Dylan could dwell in the downstairs like a ghost, curling over his own books or in a sun-dazzled nap on the couch, eating leftovers from the fridge or spoonfuls of dry cocoa powder directly from the tin so that his mouth became thick with a clay of cocoa, examining the half-finished crossword on the table, running his Matchbox car, #11, through the ashtrays or around the rim of the pot that housed the gigantic jade plant, which with its thick, rubbery, treelike limbs was another world for Dylan's specklike self to adventure in and be lost. Then, always before he could compose himself or decide what he wanted from her, Rachel Ebdus would be home, and Dylan would discover that he did not control his mother. Dylan's solitude which his father left unbruised his mother burst like a grape. She might clutch him and with fingers kneading his skull through his hair say, "You're so beautiful, so beautiful, you're such a beautiful boy" or just as likely sit apart from him smoking a cigarette and say, "Where did you come from? Why are you here? Why am I here?" or "You know, precious child, that your father is insane." Frequently she would show him a magazine with a picture labeled CAN YOU DRAW SPARKY? CAN YOU DRAW SPARKY? and say, "That would be easy for you, if you wanted you could win this contest." When Rachel wanted to fry an egg she'd ask Dylan to stand beside her, then crack the egg on his head and hurry it into the frying pan before it spilled. He'd rub his head, half hurt, half in love. She played him Beatles records, and say, "That would be easy for you, if you wanted you could win this contest." When Rachel wanted to fry an egg she'd ask Dylan to stand beside her, then crack the egg on his head and hurry it into the frying pan before it spilled. He'd rub his head, half hurt, half in love. She played him Beatles records, Sergeant Pepper Sergeant Pepper, Let It Be Let It Be, then asked which was his favorite Beatle.

"Ringo."

"Children like Ringo," she told him. "Boys do. Girls like Paul. He's sexy. You'll understand."

She might be crying or laughing or cleaning up a broken dish or clipping the nails of the cats who lived in the backyard, the two who'd stayed from the litter downstairs and had grown and now killed birds regularly among the bricks and vines. "See," she'd say, squeezing the cat's paw to extend its claws, "you can't clip them too close, there's a blood vessel there, they'll bleed to death." She was wild with information he couldn't yet use: Nixon was a criminal, the Dodgers moved to California, Chinese food gives you a headache, Muhammad Ali resisted the war and went to jail, Hitchcock's British films were better than his American ones, circumcision was unnecessary but women preferred it. She was too full for the house, had to vent herself constantly into the telephone, and too full for Dylan who instead worked Rachel's margins, dodging her main force to dip sidelong into what he could make sense of. He might creep downstairs to slink at her shelves, in the shadows, under the nudes. There he could pretend to consider her books- Tropic of Cancer Tropic of Cancer, Kon-Tiki Kon-Tiki, Letting Go Letting Go, Games People Play Games People Play -his eyes blurring while he eavesdropped on her calls, calls,". . . he's upstairs . . . California never mattered . . . paying all the bills . . . said the texture of the mushrooms reminded me of something and he turned bright red . . . playing that Clapton record at four in the morning . . . completely lost my French . . ." Alternately, Dylan tiptoed close under the cover of Rachel's monologue, thinking it was another phone call, to find someone seated at her table instead, drinking iced tea, sharing Rachel's ashtray, laughing, listening, detecting Dylan's footfalls which Rachel had ignored. -his eyes blurring while he eavesdropped on her calls, calls,". . . he's upstairs . . . California never mattered . . . paying all the bills . . . said the texture of the mushrooms reminded me of something and he turned bright red . . . playing that Clapton record at four in the morning . . . completely lost my French . . ." Alternately, Dylan tiptoed close under the cover of Rachel's monologue, thinking it was another phone call, to find someone seated at her table instead, drinking iced tea, sharing Rachel's ashtray, laughing, listening, detecting Dylan's footfalls which Rachel had ignored.

"There he is," they'd say, as if Dylan were always the topic just abandoned.

Then he was beckoned to the table to be met. Dylan would recall the visitors only as Rachel described them later, to Abraham at dinner: the not-brilliant folksinger who'd opened for Bobby Dylan once and wouldn't let you forget it, the horny yippie who faced prosecution for stuffing subway turnstiles with slugs, the rich homosexual who collected art but wouldn't buy one of Abraham's nudes because they were women, the radical black minister from Atlantic Avenue who had to scrutinize everyone new in the neighborhood, the old boyfriend who now worked as a piano tuner at Carnegie Hall but might join the Peace Corps to keep out of Vietnam, the Gurdjieff-quoting English couple on their way to bicycle across Mexico, the woman from the Brooklyn Heights consciousness-raising group who just couldn't believe they'd bought on Dean Street. So many of them, all reaching for Dylan's head to muss his hair and ask why Rachel let it grow into his eyes, grow to his shoulders. Dylan looked like a girl-that was agreed on by pretty much everyone.

Then-and this was finally always the essential problem with floating downstairs-Rachel would stir from her chair, cigarette in her fingers, and usher Dylan to the front door, point out the children playing on the sidewalk, insist that he join them. Rachel had a program, a plan. She had grown up a Brooklyn street kid and so would Dylan. And so she'd eject him from the first of his two worlds, the house, into the second. The outside, the block. Dean Street.

The second world was an arrangement of zones in slate, and the peeling painted fronts of the row houses-pink, white, pale green, various tones of red and blue, always giving way to the brick underneath-those were the flags of undiscovered realms which lay behind and probably determined the system of slate zones. As far as Dylan could tell no kid ever went into another's home. They didn't talk about their parents either. Dylan knew nothing else to talk about, and so drifted silently into the group of children, who seemed to understand this, and vaguely parted their ranks to make room for him. Maybe every kid had drifted in this way.

Nevins and Bond Streets, which bracketed the block at either end, were vents into the unknown, routes to the housing projects down on Wyckoff Street. Anyway, the Puerto Rican men in front of the bodega on Nevins owned the corner. Another group, black men mostly, lingered in the doorway of a rooming house between the Ebduses' and Isabel Vendle's, and they would shoo away the ball-playing boys, yelling at them to watch out for the windshield of a car forever parked in front of the rooming house, a Stingray, which one Puerto Rican man with a waxed mustache frequently polished and rarely drove. Finally, a mean black man who glared but never spoke broomed the slate and scissored weeds in front of two houses close to Bond Street. So the children of Dean Street instinctively bunched in the middle of the block.

Henry was a black kid with a younger brother, Earl, and a front yard which was paved flat instead of a plot of ruined or halfheartedly gardened ground. The low fence dividing Henry's paved housefront from the slate of the sidewalk was stone as well, poured cement. Henry was three years older than Dylan. His stoop and yard formed the meeting point, the base of operations. Older boys from farther down the block would arrive and choose sides. Principally Davey and Alberto from across the street and near the corner, from the house which overflowed with cousins and whose stoop was for teenagers smoking. They'd arrive arms swinging, bouncing a new spaldeen. They'd buy a strawberry Yoo-Hoo and share it and give Henry or Henry's friend Lonnie the cap for skully. Dylan sat with Earl on Henry's stoop and watched. Marilla's fiefdom of black girls was across the street. Dylan never went there after the first time, but words crossed Dean Street between Marilla's yard and Henry's, and the girls sometimes crossed too. Henry's yard was the center and Henry was the center. Henry always chose the game.

Two doors from Henry's was the abandoned house. It wore cinderblock bandages over the windows and doorway like a mummy with blanked eyes and stilled howling mouth, and had a blasted yard with no fence or gate. The stoop was barren too, no rail. Possibly someone had taken the ironwork for scrap. The mummy house was a flat surface with no windows, so it made a high wall for wallball, a game where a spaldeen was bounced high against the wall by a thrower and caught by a catcher standing in the field of the street, zipping between cars to make the catch.

A spaldeen fit a hand perfectly and often seemed to be magnetized there. Henry and Davey in particular seemed only to have to lope a step or two and raise their hand to have a ball appear in their palms. A shot winged off the third floor of the abandoned house flew out the farthest, and one which cleared the gates on the opposite side of the street was a home run. Henry seemed able to do this at will and the fact that he didn't each time was mysterious. Henry could err too, throw too high and roof a spaldeen, and then the groan would go out to buy another, and pocket change was collected. "That's how many up there by now?" mused Alberto one day. "If I could get up there I'd be throwing them down all day."

Dylan and Earl would be sent to visit the bodega and say the pregnant word, spaldeen spaldeen, and Old Ramirez would supply another one suspiciously, resenting the business. Dylan would fondle the newborn pink spaldeen but surrender it instantly to Henry, and likely not touch it again until it was scuffed and enervated, bounced out from a thousand angled hurls. That was if Dylan touched it again at all. His chance came between games, the airy transitions when all arms unexplainedly dropped and someone asked for a suck of someone else's Yoo-Hoo and someone else turned their T-shirt inside out stretched over their elbows, to the laughter of the girls. The spaldeen would roll inert to the gutter and Dylan could retrieve it and marvel at its destruction. Now it deserved roofing. Maybe Henry had a system, like an umpire taking baseballs out of circulation.

The stoop of the abandoned house was also a proscenium stage for secrets, hidden in plain sight in the middle of the block. The broken slate in front of the abandoned house was thirty feet of no-man's-land. Dean Street's trees bunched, like the kids, in the center of the block. They seemed particularly inclined to cover the abandoned house in dappled shade, blobs of light like those thrown by the backyard ailanthus into Dylan's bedroom, and to muffle the sound of parents calling kids' names in for dinner into distant phenomena, like birds' cries. Dylan walked his side of Dean with his head lowered and memorized the slate, could say when he was in front of Henry's or the abandoned house without glancing up, just by the shapes at his feet, the long tilted slabs or the one sticking-up moonlike shape or the patch of concrete or the shattered pothole which always filled with water after those summer thunderstorms which came and instantly broke the humid afternoons into dark, electrified pieces.

Wallball, stickball, stoopball, touch. Henry and Lonnie played Alberto and Davey most afternoons, touch in the street, Puerto Rican against black, two-man football, screaming for a long catch in the stolen time between passing cars and the Dean Street bus. The bus stopped the game the longest, the players pressed impatiently against the doors of parked cars to make room, waving the bus on, faster, faster, go. Don't be afraid of hitting us, they waved at the drivers. Just go, damn, don't watch us, we watch ourselves.

One day Henry slapped the side of the bus hard with his palms, then lay flat in the street as though hit. The big bus ground to a halt and stood pulsing in the middle of the block, passengers craning heads to peer open-mouthed through the windows while the driver stepped out to see. Then Henry stood and laughed and ran, freakily fast, feet kicking back like a cartoon, and disappeared around the corner. Lonnie and Alberto laughed at the driver and then pointed down the block. "It wasn't me, man," said Lonnie, still laughing, spreading his hands wide in innocence. "Fuck you want me to do? I don't even know the guy, he's a crazy kid from the projects." This lie was told in the street in front of Henry's yard, his home. But the projects the projects explained pretty much anything, so the driver shook his head and got back in the bus. Dylan watched. explained pretty much anything, so the driver shook his head and got back in the bus. Dylan watched.

The girls might play tag. There was something faintly regrettable and unmanly about tag but if the girls played Henry and Lonnie played too, and then Dylan and Earl were slipped into the circle of tapped feet-Eeny, meeny, miney, Moe, my-mother-says-to-pick-the-very-next-one. You might be It It. As It It Dylan floundered madly and sometimes heard himself yell. Dylan floundered madly and sometimes heard himself yell. It It made him a little yellish, he couldn't say why. Nobody cared, everybody yelled sometimes seemed to be the verdict. Games dissolved mysteriously, groups bunched, made him a little yellish, he couldn't say why. Nobody cared, everybody yelled sometimes seemed to be the verdict. Games dissolved mysteriously, groups bunched, It It split into two, a boy chased a girl to the corner and out of the game. Subjects of focus changed like the angle of light. A kid might have a bunch of baseball cards one day, there was no explanation. Potential skully caps were collected, the need for wax discussed, but skully was never played. Maybe nobody knew how. Isabel Vendle looked out her window. The men on the corner arranged clacking dominoes, the fish store on Nevins Street was full of sawdust, a kid would come up from the projects and pierce the privacy of the Dean Street kids and everyone would be mysteriously jangled. Whole days were mysterious, and then the sun went down. split into two, a boy chased a girl to the corner and out of the game. Subjects of focus changed like the angle of light. A kid might have a bunch of baseball cards one day, there was no explanation. Potential skully caps were collected, the need for wax discussed, but skully was never played. Maybe nobody knew how. Isabel Vendle looked out her window. The men on the corner arranged clacking dominoes, the fish store on Nevins Street was full of sawdust, a kid would come up from the projects and pierce the privacy of the Dean Street kids and everyone would be mysteriously jangled. Whole days were mysterious, and then the sun went down.

Dylan didn't recall giving out his name but everyone knew it and nobody cared what it meant. They might sometimes bother to mention that he looked like a girl but it wasn't apparently his fault. He couldn't throw or catch but that was just too bad. Not everyone could was the general drift. So Dylan communed with the spaldeen in distaff moments, when it went dribbling to the curb or was punched down the street by the fender of a passing car. Dylan was pleased to fetch it then for the older boys who stood aggrieved, shaking their heads. The ball might be swept nearly to Nevins Street, to the bodega, it might be stopped by one of the grizzled domino players on the crates who'd peruse it briefly before turning it over. The spaldeen was always scarred from its encounter. "Roof it, Henry," Dylan would whisper as he ran it back, whisper it to himself, but to the ball too, an incantation. Sometimes roofing it was the very next thing Henry would do. Then instead of calling for a new spaldeen the older boys would abruptly slink off, to hang on Alberto's gate at the other end of the block and bathe in innuendoes and flicked cigarette butts from the teenagers on the stoop there. The teenagers were waiting for night. Dylan stuck to Henry's concrete fence, the white kid. He could hear Rachel call from there, beyond he wasn't so sure. From Henry's and the abandoned house to his own Dylan knew the slate precisely.

The boy lingered in the study and paged through Isabel's photo albums while the mother sat on the back terrace, smoking. Isabel watched a squirrel ribbon the telephone pole, begin to scurry across the fence top. The squirrel moved as an oscillating sequence of humps, tail and spine bunching in counterpoint. Some humped things are elegant, Isabel mused, thinking of her own shape.

Inside, an Italian plasterer reshaped a florette on the parlor ceiling, sweating atop a ladder in the corner by the high front window. The boy at Isabel's table flapped the laden pages, absorbed as if he were reading.

The boy was humped too, over the book. More a hedgehog than a squirrel, Isabel decided.

"Can you get any flavor out of this?" said Isabel to the young mother, frowning.

"Sure," said Rachel. She hadn't extinguished her cigarette to accept the beaded glass of ice and soda. The smoke drifted into the August air unstirred.

"For all of me that's dying my tongue is dying soonest."

"Maybe put lemon in it," Rachel suggested.

"I put lemon in my soup. I can't also put it in my soda. Take the bottle with you when you go. I should drink formaldehyde."

Rachel Ebdus ignored the remark. She was unshockable, a bad sign if Isabel was looking. The young mother leaned back in her chair perilously, cigarette between fingers on a hand propped over her shoulder. Her black unbrushed hair was madness. Isabel pictured it on fire on her patio in the deafened afternoon.

The man on the ladder gathered excess with his blade and allowed it to drip heavily to the butcher paper on the parlor floor, which crackled as it accepted the weight.

The boy's intensity, his gaze, might be wearing the gloss off her old photographs. He hadn't turned a page for a whole minute. He remained curled around the album as Isabel was curled involuntarily around her whole self.

Isabel saw that Rachel Ebdus watched the plasterer. "The old art lives in him," she told the younger woman. "He drinks beer on his breaks and talks like John Garfield, but look at the ceiling."

"It's beautiful."

"He says his father taught him. He's only bringing out the beauty which was hiding. He's an instrument of the ceiling. He doesn't need to understand."

Isabel felt irritation with herself or Rachel Ebdus, she wasn't sure which. She hadn't brought the image entirely into the light: that though mute, the house conveyed a language of itself, as the plasterer carried forward his father's trade.

"He's got a great ass," said Rachel.

Outside, the squirrel shrieked.