The Fortress of Solitude

by Jonathan Lethem

  I moped around KALX for hours before doing that night’s show, a mechanically thorough tribute to Bobby “Blue” Bland I’d prepared weeks before. The grim purple welt on my eyelid I explained, to those who asked, by recounting the collision on Shattuck, leaving out the part about invisibility. My time in the Hammond garage itself had left me unmarked. After the show, I bought the Friday papers. I scanned the Tribune, found it mercifully clear of reference to the Tuesday-night shooting. Then I curled in a ball and slept until dark.

  This false calm lasted until Sunday, when Vance Christmas had his way with me on the weekend op-ed page. EAST BAY AVENGER , LIKE NEW YORK SUBWAY SHOOTER BERNHARD GOETZ , BETRAYS A LYNCH-MOB SENTIMENT NEVER FAR FROM SURFACE took its inspiration from a scattering of letters in support of the mysterious white gunman the Tribune had received since its Wednesday coverage. The long piece began as a psychological exposé of Goetz, New York’s soft-spoken would-be quadruple murderer. It was an aging story, but Christmas gave it fresh life and a local angle by cobbling the bartender’s and OJJJ’s quotes into a speculative portrait of an “East Bay Avenger” cut from Goetz’s cloth. There was no mention of what Horton Cantrell and the Hammonds (the fourth man had vanished from the story entirely) might have been doing in the garage, apart from waiting for OJJJ, and for their fateful moment of terror at the hands of the warped vigilante. The initial encounter at Bosun’s Locker was given peculiar emphasis. Christmas wondered: Had the Avenger any idea that Bosun’s Locker was the same bar where Bobby Seale and Huey Newton once sat together drafting the Black Panther Manifesto? (I hadn’t.) This led to a digression on the poor state of black radicalism, the rise of drug lords and gangstas in the Panthers’ former place of pride in the community. Had white scaremongering—and episodes like Goetz and the Avenger—been partly the cause of the substitution? Christmas’s conclusion was a pregnant perhaps.

  The Oakland Tribune was a black-owned paper, in a city with a black mayor, and when on Monday I telephoned the newspaper from a pay phone in the Cal Students Union building and asked the switchboard for Vance Christmas, the Panther-obsessed journalist, I expected a black man’s voice on the line. His name sounded black to me. But Christmas was white, I could tell immediately by his voice. I told him he had the story wrong.

  “Hmmm, yeah, how’s that?” He was chewing something.

  “Orthan Jackson fired the gun.”

  Christmas wasn’t terribly interested. “He shot himself?”

  “It fell.”

  “Right, huh, and what’s your name?”

  “I can’t tell you my name.”

  He was quiet for a moment. “So how would you know this?”

  “I’m in a position to know.”

  “Why would I believe you knew anything?” There wasn’t any note of hostility—it was a sincere question.

  “The gun fell in vomit,” I said. There’d been no mention in any article, that I’d seen. “Check the police report.”

  “Would you hold for a minute?”

  “No. Give me your direct line and I’ll call back.”

  He asked for ten minutes. I hung up, bought a blueberry smoothie from a cart on Bancroft, found another phone booth and called again.

  Now Christmas said: “I’m listening.”

  “They’re dealers.” In my mind I was on a tight clock: as in a million movies, police experts were tracing the call to this booth, and soon SWAT teams would swarm the building. I only wanted to say enough to put an end to it—or I told myself that was all I wanted.

  “Sure,” he said gently. “They’re known dealers, you’re right. The question is, what are you?”

  “I only wanted to help. OJJJ was messed up on crack, and I think he’d been stealing from those guys. He might have been planning to start shooting before we went in.”

  “Who were you trying to help?”

  “Help catch them,” I said impatiently.

  “By killing them?”

  “I didn’t shoot anyone. I’d never fire a gun.”

  “You mean, like Batman?”

  “What?”

  “That’s what Batman always vowed: that he’d never fire a gun.”

  This stopped me. I tried to picture Vance Christmas, but nothing came. I suppose we were each trying to picture the other. His breathing was calm on the line while he waited for me to speak again—perhaps he knew he had me hooked—but I could hear something like a frantic whisper in the background: a pencil’s soft scribbling on a page.

  No, I wanted to say, Batman’s DC, and I like Marvel. DC sucks.

  “So you really didn’t mean things to turn out the way they did.” Christmas didn’t force the tone of sympathy. He seemed to be musing on the misinterpretation which had snared us both. “That’s why you called, to set things straight.”

  “Sure.”

  “You don’t hate black people, then?”

  For a moment, it nearly poured out of me: the yearning to compensate for “Play That Funky Music,” the desolation which had once birthed Aeroman and now brought him back to life. But that path from Dean Street to Bosun’s Locker was too much. I only said, “No.”

  “It must be pretty strange to find yourself in this position, huh?”

  Now I felt I was being patronized. “What I’m trying to do isn’t easy,” I said. “I screwed up, that’s all.”

  “You’ve had better days.”

  “Plenty.”

  “A history of successes, then?”

  Vance Christmas had begun to remind me of a computer program designed to mimic a psychiatrist, or a scratch on my cornea: he’d follow anywhere. So I led. “When it goes well, someone like you wouldn’t even learn about it,” I said. “The satisfaction is in helping.”

  “You eschew publicity.”

  “Ordinarily I do.”

  “Well, I’m lucky,” he said. “You’ve given me a big exclusive.”

  “Don’t call me the East Bay Avenger.”

  “What can I call you?”

  “Aeroman.”

  “A-R-R-O-”

  “No, no.” I spelled it for him.

  “When is your next scheduled, uh, event?” he asked.

  “I go where I’m needed.”

  “Wow, yeah. Of course. Listen, do you have an, um, a distinctive appearance ? I mean, would a person know you if they saw you?”

  “Definitely not.”

  “And you wouldn’t be someone already known in the community? Like the way, you know, Clark Kent or Bruce Wayne are.”

  “No.”

  “Not a name I’d know? Because it’s funny, but your voice seems familiar.”

  My heart began pounding. Could Vance Christmas be a night-owl KALX listener? Again I tried to see him: racial muckraker, Batman fan—how old was he? Once I’d had the thought I couldn’t bring myself to utter another word. So I hung up the phone. I’d said too much, stayed on too long, as it was. But no SWAT team ringed the Student Union, and I figured I’d gotten away with it.

  Christmas’s exclusive ran above Tuesday’s fold. None of my attributed quotes were outright lies, but their context was awfully bad: “ I GO WHERE I’ M NEEDED”/ AVENGER TO TRIB: I ’ LL STRIKE AGAIN. Oakland, according to Christmas, ought to brace itself, for a fantasizing madman was running amok. I’d bragged of a legacy of covert attacks, reserving a righteous vigilante authority while admitting to a slight “screwup” in this case. I denied my hatred of blacks—sure. Still, I took “satisfaction.” And, though I’d acted as judge and jury in accusing Jackson and Cantrell of being “dealers,” the story’s new wrinkle was a report I’d been using crack in the Bosun’s Locker rest room prior to the shooting. Aeroman’s name didn’t appear—it might be the only word I’d uttered which didn’t. Perhaps that was Christmas’s bait. He’d sensed my eagerness on that point, and hoped I’d call in again to push for the correction. He was almost right.

  Wednesday it crossed the Bay. An Examiner editorial scolded Avenger and Christmas alike for creating a sideshow, one dwarfed
by the real crisis engulfing Oakland. Meanwhile, Herb Caen’s column asked: “Oakland’s East Bay Avenger and Taxi Driver’s Travis Bickle . . . have they ever been photographed together? . . . Just wondering . . .” Those were the mentions I found, before I lost heart and quit looking. There may have been others.

  Christmas hadn’t forgotten the name Aeroman. On the contrary, he’d taken it and done some good work with a microfiche. A week later, after I’d begun to believe the story’s coals were damp, the Tribune ’s front page boasted an NYPD mug shot: Mingus Rude, front and profile. They’d been taken later that distant Sunday afternoon, the day of the shooting—this was Mingus caught exactly where I’d left him. AVENGER LINK TO NEW YORK KILLER ? was the slug along the top.

  Mingus was still in prison at Elmira, I learned from the paper. His first parole hearing came in three months, and he’d been nowhere near Bosun’s Locker anytime lately. Nevertheless, exclusive sources pointed to a connection. Aeroman’s name was still coyly withheld. Instead, Vance Christmas proposed it as a puzzle, and the paper had put up a reward for the solution: a thousand dollars to anyone who could connect the dots between a six-year-old incident in the Walt Whitman housing projects in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, and the fresh atrocity on Sixtieth Street, between this pathetic black face in lockup and our elusive white maniac on the loose. Had Rude taken a fall for the Avenger, so long ago?

  Christmas had called me out, but I was staying in. The reward was one I wouldn’t collect, the question one I couldn’t begin to answer. I retired the ring. My Bosun’s Locker jaunt was essentially the last time I touched it, until that morning when Abigale Ponders plucked it out of a mess of memorabilia and returned it to my attention.

  chapter 10

  Arthur Lomb asked me to meet him at a restaurant called Berlin, on Smith at the corner of Baltic. The place was one of a run of glossy new restaurants and boutiques on the old Hispanic strip, dotted in among the botanicas and social clubs, and the shuttered outlets full of dusty plastic furniture and out-of-date appliances. Abraham had tried to explain it a dozen times, but there was no understanding until I saw with my own eyes: impoverished Smith Street had been converted to an upscale playground. I suppose it was susceptible to such quick colonization precisely because so many stores had been boarded and dark. The street would be barely recognizable for how chic it had become, except the Puerto Ricans and Dominicans had stuck around. They were refugees in their own land, seated on milk cartons sipping from paper bags, wheeling groceries home from Met Food, beckoning across the street from third-floor sills, trying to pretend gentrification hadn’t landed like a bomb.

  Arthur wasn’t at Berlin when I arrived. It was eleven in the morning and I was the first customer. The place showed evidence of a fresh, expensive renovation, one hip to the virtues of a century-old shopfront. They’d preserved the tin ceiling and exposed and varnished the brickwork on each side wall. The floor was glistening blond hardwood, quite new.

  The maître d’ had been smoking at the back bar when I entered, but he stubbed it quickly, and faked a smile. He was tall and slouchy, a little glum for so early in the day. He offered me a window table and a minimalist menu: one soup, one sandwich, one crepe, today’s oyster. I still felt the effects of my two-night’s-before binge with Katha Purly, and of my overfeeding, last night on arrival from La Guardia, at the hands of Francesca Cassini. When the maître d’ returned I only asked for a cappuccino, and studied him more closely. The shock of black hair was gone, trimmed close and salted white, but it was Euclid Barnes.

  He went and worked the foam-hissing machine himself. When he set the coffee down he caught me looking, and looked back.

  “Do I know you?”

  “Dylan Ebdus.”

  He blinked.

  “We went to school together.”

  “Dylan from Camden?”

  “Right.”

  “I never thought I’d see you again.”

  I didn’t point out that he was working in my backyard, my stomping ground. I’d visited Boerum Hill three or four times in nearly two decades, and the place wasn’t mine anymore, obviously.

  “Are you in touch with anyone from before?” I asked. I realized I was a little dumb at seeing Euclid again—at being served a cappuccino by Euclid Barnes at a fancy café a block from Intermediate School 293.

  “God, I don’t know. Every one, no one, you know how it happens.”

  “Sure.” I said, though of course I didn’t. I’d never heard from any Camdenites again. Moira Hogarth and I had been off speaking terms at the end of that one semester.

  “Can I sit down?” Euclid asked.

  “Please.”

  “Smoke?”

  “Go ahead.”

  He was dressed in a black turtleneck, a bit hot for this September, which had been warm on both coasts. He tugged it from his neck and I saw how soft the skin around his throat had become: Euclid was nearly chinless. Apart from that, and from a deep weariness around his eyes, he’d retained his mournful glamour, had gained, even, for the way flesh had slightly sunk from his high cheekbones. The sparkle of beard at his lips showed gray, as mine did when I let it appear.

  Seeing him, a flood of useless memories returned, hard on top of those I’d just triggered walking the distance from Abraham’s house to Smith Street. It was of course Dean Street that had provoked the deepest calamity of resonances. But I’d come here to invite those. Euclid was an unexpected factor.

  He stared at me as he lit a cigarette. “What happened to you?”

  I understood what he meant. “I dropped out.”

  “I remember you but I don’t,” he admitted.

  “The feeling’s mutual,” I said, though it wasn’t as hard for me, I knew. In my life Camden was a singular episode, a window in time. Euclid had been there for four years, among cohorts from his boarding-school life, and others he’d carried on knowing after. I was a blip.

  “I transferred to Berkeley,” I told him. “Then stayed in California. I’m just visiting back here.”

  “What do you do?”

  I was briefly tempted to claim I was writing a movie for Dreamworks. “I’m a journalist,” I said. “Mostly music stuff.”

  “Smart boy.”

  “And you? You own this place, or just run it?”

  “Why own a restaurant when you can wait tables?”

  “Ah.”

  “I used to get shifts at Balthazar, but a certain person decided I wasn’t charming anymore, and I got canned.”

  “So you moved out here?”

  “Christ, I haven’t been able to afford Manhattan for years. I can barely hack Boerum Hill.”

  Of course. From my lousy vantage I’d seen the wealth at Camden as an edifice, seamless, without variations. But it wasn’t. It was a milieu, a money style, sustained even in cases where money itself was gone. Euclid’s parents’ checks were always late, I remembered now.

  “This neighborhood’s gotten pretty swanky,” I said, still playing possum.

  “I hate it, it’s too trendy. In just like six months everybody came and spoiled it. Smith Street just got listed in some German tourist book as ‘the new Williamsburg.’ They’re like real estate vampires.”

  “You’re part of the old guard around here.”

  “I’m old, anyhow. Thanks for noticing.”

  “This place looks like it opened yesterday.”

  “This place is a fucking fake,” he stage-whispered. Since I’d ordered nothing the chef had wandered from the back and taken Euclid’s place at the bar, but Euclid wasn’t really concerned about being heard by the chef. “The owner’s the landlord,” he explained. “He owns the whole block. He saw his tenants were all getting two stars from Eric Asimov in the Times and thought he’d make a killing with his low overhead. He’s just some fat local fuck. Everybody in this community despises him.”

  By community I understood Euclid meant the true foodies, chefs who’d risked their careers to open doors in this hinterland.

  “
What are you doing here, anyway?” he asked.

  “Meeting an old friend. He’s late.”

  Perhaps Euclid saw some expression cross my face, for now he remembered. “You’re from Brooklyn, aren’t you?”

  “Right around here.” I did feel weirdly bitter, but it was hardly Euclid’s fault. My possessive feelings were silly. I saw meanings encoded everywhere on these streets, like the DMD and FMD tags still visible where they’d been sprayed twenty years before. I saw the changes here in terms of Rachel’s war on the notion of gentrification, which had been conducted mostly in the battlefield of my skull. I walked an invisible map of incidents, shakedowns, hurled eggs, pizza muggings, my own stations of the cross. But imagining those terms should be relevant to the hipsters who’d colonized this place was like imagining that “Play That Funky Music” heard on a taxicab’s radio was a message of guilt and shame intended for my ears. No, Isabel Vendle was dead and forgotten, and Rachel was gone. Euclid’s Boerum Hill was the real one. The fact that I could see Gowanus glinting under the veneer wasn’t important, wasn’t anything more than interesting.

  “How’s Karen Rothenberg?” I asked, shifting to safer ground.

  Euclid goggled. “She quit calling when she came back from Minneapolis—rehab. Now she’s got this custom hat shop on Ludlow Street. They look like hemorrhoids, if you ask me. But Dashiell Marks—you remember Dashiell?”