Jonathan Lethem - The Fortress of Solitude

“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 Avengerand 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.

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.”