Motherless Brooklyn (32 page)

“Mhrrggh.”

“I brought your shoes.”

“Oooh.”

“I think we should go. Can you stand?”

“Rrrrssp.”

“Lean against the wall. Careful. I’ll get a cab.”

“Cabbabbab.”

I flickered awake again and we were slicing through the park, East Side to West, in that taxicab channel of tree-topped stone, my head on Kimmery’s bony shoulder. She was putting my shoes back on, lifting my leaden feet one after the other, then tying the laces. Her small hands and my large shoes made this an operation rather like saddling a comatose horse. I could see the cabbie’s license—his name was Omar Dahl, which invited tics I couldn’t muster in my state—and a view upward through the side window. For a moment I thought it was snowing and everything seemed precious and distant—Central Park in a snow globe. Then I realized it was snowing inside the cab, too. The grains again. I closed my eyes.

Kimmery’s apartment was on Seventy-eighth Street, in an old-lady apartment building, gloriously shabby and real after the gloss of the East Side, the chilling dystopian lobby of 1030 Park Avenue especially. I got upright and inhe elevator on my own steam, with only Kimmery to hold the doors for me, which was how I liked it—no doormen. We rode to the twenty-eighth floor in an empty car, and Kimmery leaned against me as if we were still in the cab. I didn’t need the support to stand anymore, but I didn’t stop it from happening. My head throbbed—where Pierogi Man had clubbed me, it felt as though I were trying to grow a single horn, and failing—and the contact with Kimmery was a kind of compensation. At her floor she parted from my side with that nervous quick walk I already considered her trademark, her confession of some kernel of jerkiness I could cultivate and adore, and unlocked the door to her place so frantically I wondered if she thought we’d been followed.

“Did the giant see you?” I said when we were inside.

“What?”

“The giant. Are you afraid of the giant?” I felt a body-memory, and shuddered. I was still a little
unsteady on my pins
, as Minna would have said.

She looked at me strangely. “No, I just—I’m an illegal sublet here. There are people in this building who can’t mind their own business. You should sit down. Do you want some water?”

“Sure.” I looked around. “Sit where?”

Her apartment consisted of a brief foyer, a minuscule kitchen—really more an astronaut’s cockpit full of cooking equipment—and a large central room whose polyurethaned floor mirrored the vast moonlit city nightscape featured in its long, uncurtained window. The reflected image was uninterrupted by carpet or furniture, just a few modest boxes tucked into the corners, a tiny boom box and a stack of tapes, and a large cat that stood in the center of the floor, regarding our entrance skeptically. The walls were bare. Kimmery’s bedding was a flattened mattress on the floor of the foyer where we stood now, just inside the apartment’s door. We were almost on top of it.

“Go ahead and sit on the bed,” she said, with a nervous half smile.

Beside the bed was a candle, a box of tissues, and a small stack of paperbacks. It was a private space, a headquarters. I wondered if she hosted much—I felt I might be the first to see past her door.

“Why don’t you sleep in there?” I said, pointing at the big empty room. My words came out thickened and stupid, like those of a defeated boxer in his dressing room, or a Method actor’s, while playing a defeated boxer. My Tourette’s brain preferred precision, sharper edges. I felt it waking.

“People look in,” said Kimmery. “I’m not comfortable.”

“You could have curtains.” I gestured at the big window.

“It’s too big. I don’t really like that room. I don’t know why.” Now she looked like she regretted bringing me here. “Sit. I’ll bring you some water.”

The room she didn’t like was the whole of the apartment. She lived instead in the foyer. But I decided not to say anything more about it.
There was something anyway that suited me in her use of the space, as though she’d planned to bring me here to hide, knew I’d have something to fear from the skyline, the big world of conspiracies and doormen that was Manhattan.

I took a seat on her bed, back against the wall, legs straightened to cross the mattress, so my shoes reached the floor. I felt my tailbone meet the floor through the pancake-thin mattress. Now I saw that Kimmery had double-knotted my laces. I lingered awkwardly over this detail, used it to measure my returning consciousness, allowing my obsessiveness to play over the intricacy of the knots and my stroboscopic memories of Kimmery tugging at my feet in the cab. I imagined I could feel the dented place in my skull and the damaged language flowing in a new direction through this altered inner topography and the words went
sandwiches sandwiches I scream for ice cream dust to dust
and so on.

I decided to distract myself with the books stacked near the bed. The first was called
The Wisdom of Insecurity
, by Alan Watts. Tucked into it as an oversize bookmark was a pamphlet, a glossy sheet folded in thirds. I pulled out the pamphlet. It was for Yoshii’s, a Zen Buddhist retreat center and roadside Thai and Japanese restaurant on the southern coast of Maine. The phone number beneath the schematic road map on the back was circled with blue ballpoint. The heading on the front of the pamphlet said
A PLACE OF PEACE
.

Pleasure police.

Pressure peas.

The cat walked in from the main room and stood on my outstretched thighs and began kneading them with its front paws, half-retracted claws engaging the material to make a
pocka-pocka-pocka
sound. The cat was black and white with a Hitler mustache, and when it finally noticed I had a face it squeezed its eyes at me. I folded the pamphlet into my jacket pocket, then took off my jacket and put it on the corner of Kimmery’s bed. The cat went back to working my thighs.

“You probably don’t like cats,” said Kimmery, returning with two glasses of water.

“Chickencat,”
I said, ticcing stupidly.
“Cream of soup salad sandwich.”

“Are you hungry?”

“No, no,” I said, though maybe I was. “And I like cats fine.” But I kept my hands away, not wanting to begin obsessing on its body—kneading back or mimicking its uneven, cackling purr.

I can’t own a cat, because my behaviors drive them insane. I know because I tried. I had a cat, gray and slim, half the size of Kimmery’s, named Hen for the chirping and cooing sounds she made, for the barnyard pecking motions her initial sniffing inspections of my apartment reminded me of. She enjoyed my attentions at first, my somewhat excessive fondling. She’d purr and push against my hand as I tapped her, taking her pleasure. I’d refine my impulses toward her as well as I could, stroking her neck smoothly, rubbing her cheeks sideways to stimulate her kittenish memories of being licked, or whatever it is that makes cats crave that sensation. But from the very first Hen was disconcerted by my head-jerks and utterances and especially by my barking. She’d turn her head to see what I’d jumped at, to see what I was fishing for in the air with my hand. Hen recognized those behaviors—they were supposed to be
hers
. She never felt free to relax. She’d cautiously advance to my lap, a long game of half measures and imaginary distractions before she’d settle. Then I’d issue a string of bitten-off shrieks and bat at the curtain.

Worse, her bouts of joy at my petting hands became a focal point for Tourettic games of disruption. Hen would purr and nudge at my hand, and I’d begin stroking her smooth, sharklike face. She’d lean into the pressure, and I’d push back, until she was arched into my hand and ready to topple. Then the tic—I’d withdraw my hand. Other times I’d be compelled to follow her around the apartment,
reaching for her when she’d meant to be sly or invisible; I’d stalk her, though it was obvious that like any cat her preference was to come to me. Or I’d fixate on the limits of her pleasure at being touched—would she keep purring if I rubbed her fur backward? If I tickled her cheeks would I be allowed to simultaneously grasp her sacrosanct tail? Would she permit me to clean the sleep from her eyes? The answer was often yes, but there was a cost. As with a voodoo doll, I’d begun investing my own ticcishness in my smaller counterpart: Tourette’s Cat. She’d been reduced to a distrustful, skittish bundle of reactions, anticipatory flinchings and lashings-out. After six months I had to find her a new home with a Dominican family in the next building. They were able to straighten her out, after some cooling-off time spent hidden behind their stove.

The big Nazi cat went on raking up thread-loops from my trousers, seemingly intent on single-handedly reinventing Velcro. Meanwhile Kimmery had placed the two glasses of water on the floor near my feet. Though the room was dim—we were lit as much by the reflected skyline in the big room behind us as by the faint bulb there in the foyer—she’d removed her eyeglasses for the first time, and her eyes looked tender and small and searching. She slid down to seat herself against the wall, so we were arranged like clock hands on the face of the floor, our shoes at the center. According to the clock of us it was four o’clock. I tried not to root for midnight.

“Have you been living here long?” I asked.

“I know, it looks like I’m camping out,” she said. “It’s been about a month. I just broke up with this guy. It’s pretty obvious, isn’t it?”

“The Oreo Man?” I pictured a weather-beaten cowboy in front of a sunset, holding a cookie to his lips like a cigarette. Then, in frantic compensation, I conjured a tormented nerd in goggle-glasses, peering
at cookie crumbs through a microscope, trying to discern their serial numbers.

“Uh-huh,” said Kimmery. “A friend was moving out and she gave me this place. I don’t even like it. I’m hardly ever here.”

“Where instead—the Zendo?”

She nodded. “Or the movies.”

I wasn’t ticcing much, for a couple of reasons. The first was Kimmery herself, still an unprecedented balm to me this late in the day. The second was the day itself, the serial tumult of unsorted clues, the catastrophe of my visit to the Zendo; that extra track in my brain had plenty of work to do threading beads together, smoothing the sequence into order: Kimmery, doormen, Matricardi and Rockaforte, Tony and Seminole, Important Monks, Gerard Minna and the killer. Minna’s killer.