The Flying Man

                Earlier in the book, Dylan looked up at the rooftops of the buildings above and said that he saw a man, jumping from rooftops impossibly, flying. Now the flying man has come back, except he has fallen to the ground, and is just another poor black guy on the streets, homeless, jobless, and penniless. He was likely all of these things before as well, but now that he is no longer “flying”, he seems to have lost all of the richness and grandeur that the ring once brought him.

                Dylan and Mingus are “tagging up” – scribbling Mingus’s tag, “DOSE”, on everything they can. Dylan had already tried to come up with a tag for himself, but could not think of any and so contented himself to perfect the artistry of Mingus’s tag (another thing I find symbolic, but I’ll think I’ll end up stuffing all of the symbols I can think of into one post later on). Suddenly, Mingus decides to draw his tag on the sleeping bag of the grounded flying man, whom the two of them are not even sure is alive, and then both run away after Mingus’s action.

Following this, Dylan and his father are traveling through New York, and Abraham sees the flying man, newly tagged. He knows that the tag is Dylan and Mingus’s, and after getting mad at Dylan, checks to see if the flying man is alive. They both thought he was dead, and are surprised to see that he’s alive after all. Abraham wastes no time in getting the flying man medical attention. Dylan finds himself in the man’s hospital room, and is told to look in a drawer. He finds the flying man’s identity, Aaron X. Doily, and a ring that the flying man wore. Without being told, he believed that the ring was the source of the flying man’s powers of flight.

Dylan got into comic books after bring introduced to them by Mingus, and so he associated the power of flight, or any power not naturally available to humans, really, to be something of superheroes.

In his first attempt to throw himself off of a building and fly, he chickened out.