Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe

All that summer, we swam and read comics and read books and argued about them. Dante had all his father’s old Superman comics. He loved them. He also liked Archie and Veronica. I hated that shit. “It’s not shit,” he said.

Me, I liked Batman, Spider-Man, and the Incredible Hulk.

“Way too dark,” Dante said.

“This from a guy who loves Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.”

“That’s different,” he said. “Conrad wrote literature.”

I was always arguing that comic books were literature too. But literature was very serious business for a guy like Dante. I don’t remember ever winning an argument with him. He was a better debater. He was also a better reader. I read Conrad’s book because of him. When I finished reading it, I told him I hated it. “Except,” I said, “it’s true. The world is a dark place. Conrad’s right about that.”

“Maybe your world, Ari, but not mine.”

“Yeah, yeah,” I said.

“Yeah, yeah,” he said.

The truth is, I’d lied to him. I loved the book. I thought it was the most beautiful thing I’d ever read. When my father noticed what I was reading, he told me it was one of his favorite books. I wanted to ask him if he’d read it before or after he’d fought in Vietnam. It was no good to ask my father questions. He never answered them.

I had this idea that Dante read because he liked to read. Me, I read because I didn’t have anything else to do. He analyzed things. I just read them. I have a feeling I had to look up more words in the dictionary than he did.

I was darker than he was. And I’m not just talking about our skin coloring. He told me I had a tragic vision of life. “That’s why you like Spider-Man.”

“I’m just more Mexican,” I said. “Mexicans are a tragic people.”

“Maybe so,” he said.

“You’re the optimistic American.”

“Is that an insult?”

“It might be,” I said.

We laughed. We always laughed.

We weren’t alike, Dante and I. But we did have a few things in common. For one thing, neither one of us was allowed to watch television during the day. Our parents didn’t like what television did to a boy’s mind. We’d both grown up with lectures that sounded more or less like this: You’re a boy! Get out there and do something! There’s a whole world out there just waiting for you…
Dante and I were the last two boys in America who grew up without television. He asked me one day. “Do you think our parents are right-that there’s a whole world out there waiting just for us?”

“I doubt it,” I said. He laughed.

Then I got this idea. “Let’s ride the bus and see what’s out there.”