Red Hook, Fort Greene, Atlantic Terminals.
You built up associations, which would pass for understanding. Nobody was explaining anything. Fifth grade was an abstract art, painted one frame at a time.
Dylan could still hear the telephone ring from the kitchen while he sat on his stoop, waiting, watching, afternoons sliding to twilight, air chilling so the bodega sitters left their milk crates, shaking their heads, pinching their cold noses, leaving Old Ramirez alone. Dylan and Ramirez were paired in their two doorways, keeping watch, ignoring each other. Dylan watched the traffic trickle down Nevins, watched the mothers walking kindergartners home from the YWCA, counted the buses which drifted like humming loaves to the stoplight, waited, drifted on. Henry’s yard was empty, Marilla’s yard was empty, somebody saw a rat in the yard of the abandoned house. Bruce Lee and Isabel Vendle were dead and Nixon was strolling on a beach. Nobody moved, nobody played, strange kids walked the block in groups. It was a season of vanishing, of a silence like raw stupidity, like the unbearable ticking silence of a teacher expecting an answer from a kid everyone knew couldn’t even say his own name right.
Let Abraham answer the phone, if he could even hear it. Let Abraham say she’s not here.
Most days Dylan waited alone until Abraham called him in for dinner. Mingus Rude had other places to go, sixth-grader places, I.S. 293 places-other friends, Dylan guessed, then kept his own guessing hidden from himself. One or two afternoons a week Mingus would lope down the block and raise his hand. His coat was brown corduroy with a sheepskin collar, not the shiny plastic-stuffed bubblecoats every other kid wore. Mingus Rude carried his notebook and textbooks loose under his arm, no bag, and he’d clatter them on the stoop carelessly, expressing something less than utter disdain and more than total mastery.
The comic books Mingus Rude treated as a presence delicately alive, some piece of still-beating flesh he and Dylan might be capable of healing by their absolute fixity of attention, by their reverence. The overlapping storylines were a field of expertise, skully again, all fine print and ritual. Dylan was really horrified to learn he’d let so much time slip past, so much essential cultural history. Forget what you thought you knew. The Silver Surfer, for example, was a situation you couldn’t really understand if you came in too late. Mingus only shook his head. You didn’t want to try to explain something so tragic and mystical.
New comics arrived at newsstands on Tuesdays. Mingus Rude would have an armload, bought or stolen, Dylan didn’t ask. Some were bimonthly, some monthly, you learned by reading the letters page, you built up anticipation for special issues, too, oversized Annuals and one-time special events like the Avengers-Defenders Wars or Origins. In Origins you learned how superheroes got started, the answer generally being: radiation. In the Annuals and Wars you satisfied, at least provisionally, questions of who could take who. Hulk and Iron Man would face-off for a page or two, always vowing to settle it for good another time.
Spider-Man’s girlfriend, Gwen, had been killed by the Goblin, it wasn’t funny in the least. That’s why Spider-Man was so depressed all the time.
Captain Marvel wasn’t Shazam, it was confusing. He’d been revived to assert a copyright on the name, and nobody could say whether he really fit into the Marvel Universe all that well. DC Comics, Marvel Comics’ antithesis, presented a laughable, flattened reality-Superman and Batman were jokes, ruined by television.
In truth, Superman in his Fortress of Solitude reminded you all too much of Abraham in his high studio, brooding over nothing.
Swamp Thing was a rip-off of Man-Thing, or vice versa.
An uneasiness hung over certain titles. Different artists drew the same characters different ways-you could hurt your eyes trying to account for it, to grant continuity to these hobbled stories. Weaker superheroes were propped up with guest appearances by Spider-Man or the Hulk, confusing chronology terribly. An Einstein could lose his mind trying to explain how the Fantastic Four had helped the Inhumans fight the Mole Men when by clear testimony of their own magazine they were trapped in the Negative Zone the whole time.
The Incredible Hulk, if you followed him closely over time, lost the use of pronouns.
Two afternoons a week, sitting in the dimming light on Dylan’s stoop, never discussing fifth or sixth grade, stuff too basic and mysterious to mention. Instead just paging through, shoulders hunched to protect the flimsy covers from the wind, puzzling out the last dram, the last square inch of information, the credits, the letters page, the copyright, the Sea-Monkeys ads, the insult that made a man out of Mac. Then, just when you thought you were alone, Dean Street came back to life, Mingus Rude knowing everyone, saying Yo to a million different kids coming out of Ramirez’s store with a Yoo-Hoo or a Pixy Stix, to Alberto fetching Schlitz and Marlboros for his older brother and his older brother’s girlfriend. The block an island of time, school a million miles away, mothers calling kids inside, the bus lit inside now, fat ladies coming home from offices at the Board of Education on Livingston Street, their weary shapes like black teeth inside the glowing mouth of the bus, Marilla strolling by a million times singing It’s true, hah, sometimes you rilly do abuse me, you get me in a crowd of high-class pee-pul, then you act real rude to me, the light fading anxiously, streetlights buzzing as they lit, their arched poles decorated with boomeranged-up sneakers, and Mingus Rude saying, one dying afternoon, eyes never ungluing from a panel in Marvel’s Greatest Comics in which Mr. Fantastic had balled himself into an orb the size of a baseball, his tiny face including signature gray temple hair still visible in incredible wrinkled detail, in order to be shot from a bazooka into the vulnerable mouth of an otherwise impervious fifty-foot-tall robot named Toomazooma, the Living Totem, “Your moms is still gone?”
“Yeah.”
“Dang, man. That’s fucked up.”
chapter 5
After five weeks he was ready to sell the nudes. They nagged at his mind, they spoke to each other from opposite walls in distorted whispers, they reflected him back to himself like fun-house mirrors, they, along with the ringing telephone, the abandoned kitchen counter, the stale unemptied ashtrays, made the parlor floor of the brownstone seem a skull lacking a brain, an empty skull decorated with memories, déjà vu. She wasn’t coming back, and his knowledge of it throbbed from the canvases like heat traces.
Erlan Hagopian, an Armenian collector who lived on the Upper East Side, had looked at the paintings two years before. He’d asked to see them after one had been hung in a group show on Prince Street, at Abraham Ebdus’s old teacher’s request-a request Abraham should have refused, a vanity, a mistake. Hagopian and the Prince Street dealer had come around to Dean Street wanting to see the paintings and also wanting to see the studio. Abraham had refused them that, protecting the film, protecting his secret work, and inadvertently extending the confusion that the nudes were recent, or that his work on canvas continued. It didn’t. His larger brushes rotted, not even properly cleaned the last time he’d touched them. That day Erlan Hagopian had made a production of asking the price of the whole roomful, of wanting to be told the number which would need to be written on a check to rob the parlor of its fleshy insulation in one grand gesture. Confident, surely, that it would be denied-the Armenian had read Abraham Ebdus’s diffidence at least that well. Perhaps not so well, though, that he’d expected what he got: being refused even one of the paintings. Abraham Ebdus’s reward was the sorry, grumbling shake of the Prince Street dealer’s sunglass-bearing, golden-maned head. That look was worth any number on a check.