Now, two years later, Ebdus phoned Hagopian directly, knowing that to circumvent the dealer-a secret that wouldn’t keep for a so-called New York minute if Hagopian actually purchased any art-was to burn a bridge to his old career, a bridge to SoHo, to Manhattan. Abraham Ebdus would be perfectly glad if the bridge was gone. He’d turned his back on the city which lay across that river and was stalking off in the opposite direction, into a desert of his own making, a desert of celluloid.
Erlan Hagopian, for his own purring reasons, didn’t hesitate. He seemed to recognize the logic of Abraham Ebdus’s capitulation: Having asked you to set your price for a roomful of paintings you refuse to sell me even one-and in that overcompensating gesture, that childish underestimation of money’s force, is the seed of the moment to come, when you will inevitably come begging to sell me the roomful. Naturally.
Perhaps Erlan Hagopian had always wanted to buy a whole roomful of nudes, and now would be able to say he had. Perhaps he bought roomfuls of nudes every week. Perhaps he’d intuited the death of Abraham’s career in painting and knew he was collecting a luminous mass tombstone, perhaps Rachel Ebdus was now his mistress, captive in luxury in a Park Avenue penthouse, and the paintings were only the seal on an invisible deal Abraham Ebdus couldn’t sense he was making. Anyway, Erlan Hagopian didn’t ask to see the paintings a second time. He sent a check, and a truck.
Dylan Ebdus’s friendship with Mingus Rude lived in brief windows of time, punctuation to the unspoken sentences of their days. There was no single story: for all he knew Mingus might be off fighting the Mole Men at the I. S. 293 annex, where sixth graders went, while Dylan, in fifth grade, was still trapped in the Negative Zone-it didn’t matter, didn’t contradict, they weren’t the Fantastic Four, after all, just a couple of kids. By the time Dylan saw Mingus again what had happened in between was too much to explain, for either of them. For Dylan sensed that Mingus had his own secret burden, his own changed world beating away under the silence. There was nothing to do but pick up where they’d left off, pool what they still had in common. What was new in the other you pretended to take for granted, a bargain instinctively struck to ensure your own coping on the other end.
In between anything could happen and was beginning to. One example: the day Robert Woolfolk effortlessly corralled Dylan in the schoolyard, by gesturing with his slanted shoulders and saying, “Yo, Dylan, man, let me see you for a minute.” See you, like Dylan himself was now a bottle of Yoo-Hoo to be gulped or a bicycle to steer around the block forever. Dylan had stepped once, twice in Robert Woolfolk’s direction, not understanding how to refuse, and found himself alone with him.
Robert said, sleepily, “I saw them take yo mama outside the house naked.”
Dylan said, “What?”
“In the truck. They wrapped her all in blankets but they fell off. I saw her hanging out all over the street like a ho.”
Dylan calculated distances between the spot where they stood and the four exits from the schoolyard, despairing at the emptiness of a November afternoon that had succumbed to the Woolfolk Principle of human desertion. “That wasn’t my mother,” was what came out of his mouth. It wasn’t half an answer to Robert’s craziness.
“Came out of your house, man, naked like a witch. Don’t lie. They put her in a police truck and took her away.”
Now Dylan was baffled. Had Robert Woolfolk seen something Dylan hadn’t? He couldn’t really be confusing paintings with a person, art handlers with police.
At the same time a glow of fear rose in him, knowing that however muddled, Robert Woolfolk grasped that Rachel was no longer around to kick his ass.
Robert went on, in a reasonable tone of commiseration. “Threw her in jail, I expeck. Locked her up for being too motherfuckin’ loud and crazy.”
“She wasn’t naked,” Dylan defended, laps behind. “Those were paintings.”
“She weren’t wearing no paintings when I saw her. She was hanging out all over the street for anyone to see. Ask somebody if you think I’m a lion.”
“A liar?” In dizziness Dylan wanted to lead Robert Woolfolk back to his home, to show him the trails of dust and shadows of faded housepaint on the parlor walls marking where the nudes had hung, missing pictures of a missing woman, ghosts of ghosts.
“Don’t call me no fuckin’ lion, man. I’ll fuck up your white ass before I’m done. Show me your hand.”
“What?”
“Your hand. Right here. Let me show you something.” Robert encircled Dylan’s wrist with his long fingers and turned it downward-Dylan watching in fascination as though from a vast distance-then curled it in one sharp motion toward Dylan’s shoulder blade, so Dylan doubled at the waist, following the line of force. Dylan’s knapsack tumbled over his head, notebook pages spilling to the concrete in view between his knees. His face flooded with blood and breath.
“See, don’t let nobody get you like that,” said Robert. “You do anything they want, they get you arm twisted back. I’m just telling you for your own good. Pick up your shit and clear out of here now.”
None of this was tellable. As they sat in the winter-squeezed light of Mingus Rude’s backyard window, Barrett Rude Junior upstairs, strains of the Average White Band and his slippered footfalls trickling through the hardwood, Dylan and Mingus downstairs with their two heads bent together, leafing through the new issues of Luke Cage, Hero for Hire and Warlock, Dylan couldn’t ask Mingus whether he’d also seen the art handlers loading their truck or whether he’d instead somehow witnessed Robert Woolfolk’s imaginary police. It was outside speech. To begin with, Rachel’s disappearance didn’t want to be given a name, a form to etch it in Dean Street history. And if Mingus had seen that parade of fleshy canvases, Dylan didn’t want to know. Too, he couldn’t describe how the balance of terror Rachel had struck in Robert Woolfolk was now tipped, because he felt a queasy instinct that Mingus and Robert should be kept ignorant of each other. If they were destined to meet Dylan didn’t want to be the one who introduced them, and if they were already familiar it was another thing Dylan was in no hurry to learn. Finally, Dylan couldn’t ask Mingus Rude if black people called liars lions because Mingus Rude was black. Sort of.
So silence and comic-book word balloons and the bass thump of the stereo upstairs.
One December afternoon Mingus tossed down his loose-leaf binder, bowed cardboard pressed with blue fabric, fraying at the corners, and Dylan saw that on every surface surrounding Mingus’s old Philadelphia Flyers sticker the binder was laced with ballpoint scrawlings, lines dug in repetition like Spirograph ovals, gestures toward some perfect, elusive form. Here was the scribble from schoolyard walls, now carried home to Dean Street and plopped on Dylan’s stoop.
“That’s my tag,” said Mingus when he caught Dylan studying the cloud of visual noise. “Here.” He tore out a page and, holding his pen with fingers close to the point, tongue curling against his cheek in concentration, wrote DOSE in angled block letters. Then he drew it again in a clumsy balloon font, the D and O barely distinguishable, the E swollen so its three digits overlapped-faint mimicry, it seemed to Dylan, of a Marvel Comics sound-effect panel.
“What’s it mean?”
“It’s my tag, Dose. It’s what I write.”
It was a new given. Anyone might have a tag. Dylan might have one himself any day now. Further explanations were or weren’t coming. The narrowed hours of winter light were a form of patience themselves, a stoic reply to no question. Rachel had vacated a certain hysteria from the house, replaced it with the telephone and assorted other ringing tones. A day had a hum like a seashell. Dylan watched television, watched the mails, watched his father trudge upstairs to his studio. He listened to his mother’s abandoned records at low volume, Carly Simon, Miriam Makeba, Delaney & Bonnie. From the barred window of his second-floor classroom he watched janitors trudge through a thin carpet of snow to Dumpsters, which were covered with the newly visible scribble. Dylan had begun to pick out names, layers in the mess. Most things had happened some time before Dylan came along, that’s why taking them for granted was so crucial. You could dial up any example in reruns, Room 222, The Courtship of Eddie’s Father, The Mod Squad. All was exemplary of daily life, the undertow of the normal.