Duo.

On Thanksgiving weekend in 2009, my wife and I visited my parents for Thanksgiving then drove back to the D.C. area so I could get back to work for a Friday shift. My brother stayed until sometime that weekend and they drove him to the airport and he caught his flight back to LaGuardia.

As they drove back home, my parents spoke of this and that: how the weekend had gone, what the Christmas plan was and so on. When they turned into their subdivision they saw a four-door sedan that had gone off the road and hit a tree head-on hard enough to start a fire under the hood. There were at least three other pedestrian cars on the scene, their passengers standing outside staring at the car and the four unconscious bodies inside.

The tire tracks in the grass told the story leading to the collision. Their length and angle indicated a possible drunk driver driving 50 miles per hour in a 35 zone who had likely misgauged a turn, fallen asleep at the wheel or swerved to avoid a deer in the road – their neighborhood is swarmed with deer – and gone into the trees that were only separated from the road that ventured into the neighborhood by a 20-foot wide grass embankment. When the front of the car impacted, all four passengers were knocked unconscious and the driver’s side was blocked against another tree.

By the time my folks arrived, a half-dozen people – including parents with children – stood and stared, waiting to see God knows what. The police were on their way with the fire trucks but dad stopped as a man held his arms out to their car. “Get away, get away!” he said. “Everyone needs to get back; this car could blow at any minute!” Mom and dad looked at each other and mom rushed to help the victims while dad parked the car.

Another man ushered his daughter back into his car and they drove off. Dad parked the car with some difficulty – yet another car was stopped, gawking at the wreck – and grabbed a blanket to put on the fallen autumn leaves that were burning from the wreck.

“We couldn’t have been carrying or dragging these people away from a car if the ground under our feet was on fire,” dad said.

Mom helped the front passenger-side victim get out after she had pulled her door open. The woman was dazed, half-awake, and mom walked her away from the car. She came to, for the most part, but wasn’t making any sense. She had a large gash on her head and was bleeding profusely from it. Mom talked her down and convinced her not to stand.

The driver had gotten out of the car somehow and was walking around in a haze, begging everyone to help his wife, who mom had already gotten out of the car. By this point dad arrived with the blankets and he and another man who had decided to help were trying to get the rear passengers out of the car when the police arrived.

My father, the other good Samaritan and the cops helped remove the final two passengers from the car and get them away from it. The police used four full fire extinguishers and still couldn’t put out the flaming hood of the car. An ambulance with two EMTs arrived then and saw the nearest two victims – the last two to be removed – and looked at my dad, confused.

“I was told there were four victims,” one EMT said.

“There are. This guy and his wife are over there,” dad said, pointing at the stumbling driver and the woman mom was with. Both the driver and his wife were covered – “I mean, covered,” dad said – with blood. “It wasn’t like one straight line, y’know, like they’d each had a cut that dripped down their shirts. They were soaked.”

It was enough to shock the EMT, who exclaimed “Oh shit!” and ran back to the ambulance, already calling in backup. “I have four red, repeat four red right now!” The fire trucks came and once my parents realized the professionals didn’t need them anymore, they got in their car and went home.

“This woman’s blood was all over me,” mom said. “My hands, my jacket, my shirt and pants…we just couldn’t believe it.”

They were notified months after this that someone on the scene had gotten dad’s license plate number or name and the police wanted to honor them at a police officers’ banquet in September. An announcer told their story briefly and the police chief presented my parents with a plaque.

But before the banquet, before the plaque and the free dinner and the round of applause for my folks, Kristy and I visited them about two months after the whole incident. As the ladies fine-tuned dinner, dad and I sat in their family room with some music on in the background and we were talking about the whole thing over a beer each.

“What was the spark that made you and mom realize you were going to go help those people?”

“Well, we couldn’t just leave ‘em there,” dad said. “As soon as the guy was telling us to get back, and we looked and saw that there were people in this car who were at least too out of it to get out of the car if not unconscious, it was like, ‘Well, we have to go. They could die.

“We…couldn’t just leave them there.”

* * *

I felt something changing inside myself. Where once hid a ridicule and contempt of a sub-culture I couldn’t fathom grew instead a drive to understand, and even a vague admiration or respect for the hearts and minds who truly thought out their lives making an enemy of apathy, of fear, of isolation.

The days got hotter. May drew on like a blade and air-conditioning bills swelled as I awaited reply from my next two contacts. We drank four glasses of ice water each per day and as many cans of Coke. I’d taken to walking around shirtless, only opening our balcony doors at night to let cool air in.

In school they always told us not to let a source dominate an interview…but the more I listened, the more I wanted to listen. My interview with Fear was almost three and a half hours, initially, and we’ve talked several times since then.

By the time Fear asked me if there were any other heroes I’d like to speak with, it was hard not to respond, “Everyone.” I didn’t want to be biased in their favor and lose my perspective. I didn’t want to be biased against them, either; they deserved a fair shot at representing their stories to me. I just wanted to know. In the end, he helped me speak to Amazonia and Geist, both of whom I e-mailed in the same afternoon before running out the door for a night shift at my last job.

I may have been beginning to paint a portrait of the “average” masked citizen, but I still knew nothing about their codes of conduct or if their ship had a captain. When my allotted time to interview Amazonia finally came, I embraced the black unknown to once again confront my fear of it. It was like walking into a thick fog, not knowing where it was taking me. I booted up the computer, put my phone on speaker and sat it next to me as it dialed her number and rang.