Jonathan Lethem - The Fortress of Solitude

But Thursday the story had grown, and graduated to the front page. MYSTERY SHOOTER DESCRIBED AS URBAN AVENGER, that was the hook. The two victims had given witness now, and, with the brothers Kenneth and Dorey Hammond, owners of the house and garage, all on the scene concurred: the mystery white boy had come in with gun blazing, having trailed their distant cousin and good friend Orthan Jackson from Bosun’s Locker. The bartender weighed in with a description of my scrawny, nervous demeanor , confirmed that I’d been behaving strangely and had approached OJJJ first. OJJJ, who’d been photographed in hospital gown and a bulging white patch from ear to clavicle, explained that he knew I’d been looking for trouble from the start. Though he hadn’t been fooled for a moment, I’d been pretending to be a nark, had inquired about the local dealers. He should have known, he said, that I was another crazy white motherf****r gaming to cap some n****rs . If it was the journalist, Vance Christmas, who in the following paragraph coined the phrase “ Oakland ’s Bernhard Goetz,” OJJJ had led him there deftly enough. Vance Christmas would have had to be no journalist at all not to coin it. Goetz was still very much in the air those days.

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.”