They circled as if Dylan were a beehive, daring themselves to prod.

“What’s the matter, whiteboy?”

“Your friends leave you all alone?”

“What, you can’t go home? You lost?”

“You crying, whiteboy?”

“He ain’t talkin’.”

“Boy’s stupid or retarded.”

“Check his pockets.”

“You do it, man.”

Dylan looked up and they danced back. There was really no chance they’d touch him. He wasn’t Aeroman, but he’d gained in gravity, was something middle-sized, neither gull nor mole.

“Ooh, ooh, he’s mad now.”

“He’s gonna grab you, man, you better book!”

“Nah, he’s going back to his crying.”

“He a stupid whiteboy.”

“He stoopid.”

“Stoo -pid.”

“Nigger’s a faggot.”

It was enough to make you miss Robert Woolfolk. The situation minus fear was only idiotic. Dylan was sick of it, the racial rehearsal. He’d been identified as whiteboy a thousand times and there was nothing more to learn. Another option, Manhattan, was so prominent it was nearly sticking in his eye. If Aaron X. Doily’s ring was gone Dylan might be done with Brooklyn for a while, be done vindicating fifth grade, be through with Mingus’s fucked-up mysteries and ready to complete his escape.

The two black kids grew bored of him and wandered, maybe to find some Packer or Saint Ann ’s kid and work off steam, pick up a dollar or two.

A barge grunted from the docks with a three-color throw-up by Strike on its side, a strong piece of work.

He sat and sat, chanting Clash songs in his head, “I’m So Bored with the USA,” “Julie’s in the Drug Squad,” records he’d never played for Mingus Rude because they embarrassed him on Dean Street, because he didn’t know how. Then the Talking Heads, Find myself, find myself a city to live in. He sat and measured skyscrapers through bars and when he was done sitting the sun had fallen, squinting its narrowed orange beams through towers and bridges, the honey light flared and grew dull, and Dylan had missed Abraham’s dinner, he’d sat all day.

In darkness he returned to the block and tried Mingus’s door.

Mingus Rude appeared at the gate of the basement entrance, himself, intact, dope-eyed. He showed no particular objection to Dylan being there.

“D-Man. What up?”

“Where’s the ring?”

“I got it, it’s cool, don’t worry.”

“Where?” Dylan looked up and down the block, fearing surveillance of some kind. There was nothing, his paranoia wasn’t even mirrored in Mingus. Two nights later nobody cared, Aeroman or Errorman was a joke, a name passed along stoops before fading from memory.

“I hid it away.”

“Did the police see you fly?”

“The cops, man? They think I sprung out a tree.”

“What-”

Mingus put up his hand to say Enough, not now. “You wanna come in? I got King Arthur here.”

The shelf was empty, no costume, no ring, just the football helmet, Manayunk Mohawks, its bowling-ball curve now tagged in soppy marker by Art and Dose. “Get Off” was on the stereo, the needle hadn’t actually plowed the music off the vinyl yet though it sounded like it was getting close. Arthur Lomb lay on his side on the bed, his cruddy Pumas on the bedspread, sifting seeds from a nickel bag in the gatefold crotch of the Spinners’ Pick of the Litter. Crumpled rolling paper lay balled in a loose circle around him, failed tries, like some ring of dubious enchantment. He grinned at seeing Dylan: Welcome to my chamber, bluh-hah-hah!

Arthur Lomb had become a foul gnome. He seemed smaller. That was likely an optical illusion, a matter of losing himself inside titanic hooded sweatshirts and droopy military pants which could have held dozens of his pipe-cleaner legs. Arthur’s clothes were growing though he wasn’t. He completed a joint at last, repulsively swooping it through his mouth to cauterize the paper with saliva. He only spoke after it was lit, in order to demonstrate expertise in speaking through gagged breath, his voice helium-dwindled with effort:

“You heard Gus got arrested?”

“Shut up, Arthur.”

Arthur handed the joint to Dylan, his own held toke exploding in a gust from his lips. “He went to the Myrtle Avenue projects at midnight and jumped out of a tree in his underwear. I suppose if you’re tripping on LSD or heroin it might strike you as a good idea. I saw something like that on The FBI once. A girl ate the bark off a tree in a vacant lot. She was pretty hot, too.”

“I’m right about to kick your ass.”

“Do it, superhero.”

“When I do you’ll be weeping.”

“I’ll look forward to that day, it’ll be worth seeing you dress up in your homo suit, Arrow Man. ”

Arthur needled like he moved rooks, unashamed of the obvious. He was monotonous and punishing, easy to tune out. Mingus had seemingly acquired the skill.

“What’s your power going to be, Dylan? Because we all need powers now, we’re Superfriends. I was thinking maybe I’d be able to undress people with my mind, I mean like their clothes would really actually vanish, criminals would be humiliated and surrender on the spot. I’ll call myself Fig Leaf Man. ”

Mingus didn’t meet Dylan’s eyes when they handed off the joint. Questions remained simpler to leave unanswered, Mingus flying solo, Aeroman’s agenda at the Walt Whitman Houses. If he’d wanted to bust up a drug deal he only had to go as far as Bergen, or Atlantic, the foyer of the prostitute hotel. Or upstairs, for that matter, to Junior’s apartment, where deals occurred on a daily if not an hourly basis.

But maybe that was the dilemma which had spun Aeroman off his usual orbit-the risk of meeting someone familiar in a local deal. Up to and including Barrett Rude Junior or Senior.

“Yo, D-Man, you got to hear this record ‘King Tim Personality Jock’ by Fatback-” Mingus began. He moved to the stereo, marking the conclusion of his two-night’s-ago adventure as a topic, announcing the resumption of the real story: they lived in a famous era where heroic advances in musical styles, the discovery of a new break previously unheard, could happen at any moment. “Shit is seriously dope, check it out.”

Mingus only turned away briefly to punch Arthur Lomb on the arm. Arthur shouted “Mother fucker! ” and stroked the punched spot, but didn’t shift from where he lay sprawled, a cackling, smoke-numbed dwarf on the bedspread.

Aeroman was dead or at least on hiatus, a serious layoff. He’d likely never appear in the same form again. Dylan was certain the costume was lost or destroyed. The costume was irrelevant anyway. With its bedsheet stripes and wobbly Spirograph emblem it had been too personal, too tender for the street, Dylan understood that now. Aaron X. Doily was right to renounce his cape, Dylan had missed the hint. Now Doily’s ring was hidden and it should be. The ring was an enigma to contemplate, a subject for further review. The costume was likely just as stoopid as Arthur Lomb made it sound but the ring wasn’t a part of Arthur’s story, or for that matter the cops’, or The New York Times ’s.

They got stoneder and stoneder and quit talking.

The three together might have been a normal occasion if you didn’t think about it too hard. From one perspective it was odd it hadn’t happened before.

But Dylan Ebdus and Mingus Rude still had secrets, even if those were on ice, hidden somewhere unspecified behind Mingus’s thousand-yard stare.

Dylan Ebdus told stories and drew pictures, Arthur Lomb carped and needled, but Mingus Rude possessed a greater force, moods which prevailed, moods like laws. He cold-shouldered whole unwished regions of existence, his scowl chopping down fathers, grandfathers, schools. It wasn’t an argument. For now, Aeroman was vanished, painted out.