The Fortress of Solitude by Jonathan Lethem Page B

that minute he and Isabel had the exact same dream but when they awoke neither of them remembered.
     
    “Let me see it for a minute.”
    Let me see it : you saw a basketball or a pack of baseball cards or a plastic water gun by taking it into your hands, and what happened after that was in doubt. Ownership depended on mostly not letting anyone see anything. If you let a kid see a bottle of Yoo-Hoo for a minute he’d drink what was left in it.
    “Let me see it, let me check it out. I only want to take it for a ride.”
    Dylan gripped the handlebars. Abraham had pried off the training wheels the day before, and Dylan still wobbled, still scuffed with his sneakers groping away from the pedals to steady and brake against the sidewalk. “Only if you stay on the block,” Dylan said, miserably.
    “You afraid I’m gonna take it? I just want a ride. You get it back after that, you got it all day, man. Just let me go around the block.”
    It was a trap or puzzle, the way Robert Woolfolk already knew to work Dylan’s guiltiness. And the empty block conspired to leave Dylan alone to solve it. Robert Woolfolk carried a vacuum around with him, or revealed by his presence the vacuum on Dean Street, the expanse of moments when no one saw and no one knew what happened in plain sight, when all of the block was shrouded in daylight like the abandoned house was shrouded in leaf shade.
    Old Ramirez stood in front of his store and sipped a Manhattan Special and squinted at them from under his fisherman’s hat. He was beyond appeal, watching them like television.
    Robert Woolfolk added his hands to the bars beside Dylan’s and tugged gently at the bike.
    “Stay on the block.”
    “Around once, that’s all.”
    “No, I mean stay in front of the house.”
    “What, you think I’m not coming back? Just around the block.”
    What came out of Robert Woolfolk’s mouth was petition and chant, irresistible in its illogic. His eyes, meanwhile, were hard, a little bored.
    “Just once around.”
    Robert Woolfolk’s legs were too long to unfold in the span between seat and pedals, so he rode with his knees doubled and knobbing up near the handlebars, like a clown on a tricycle. Then he changed his approach, elevated his hips above the seat to stand on the pedals and pump side to side, elbows flaring. The bike teetered, annexed to Robert Woolfolk’s stretching limbs. Like that, a vanishing pile of elbows, he took the bike around Nevins.
    When Dylan used the word block he didn’t mean Bergen Street, the other side.
    How long did it take to go around the block?
    How long was twice as long as that?
    The tonguelike latch of Dylan’s black ironwork gate rattled with the vibration of the bus going by. Though there were no trees on the Nevins end of Dean Street red fallen leaves had blown into the gutter from somewhere. The plastic milk cartons in front of the bodega claimed you could be fined or go to jail for not returning them to May Creek Farm, Incorporated, a fairly unlikely destination if you gave it any thought.
    The afternoon withered like a balloon around Dylan on his stoop, waiting for Robert Woolfolk to return. Old Ramirez wasn’t watching, there was nothing to watch. Dylan stood naked in the minutes as they accumulated, as they stacked up indifferently on the distant face of the Williamsburg Savings Bank tower clock. The day was like an unanswered telephone, the mute slate ringing. The call of Dylan’s arm-swinging vigil went unreplied.
    Nevins Street might as well have been a canyon into which Robert Woolfolk had vanished like a cartoon coyote, wordlessly, trailing puffs of dust. When Lonnie wandered up bouncing a Super Ball and asked what Dylan was doing Dylan said he wasn’t doing anything. It was pretty much as if there had never been a bike.
     
    Abraham Ebdus lost a day to finding the boy’s bicycle. He stalked Wyckoff and Bergen and Nevins, thinking unavoidably that Rachel would have found it herself in the first half hour.