Motherless Brooklyn (43 page)
Read Motherless Brooklyn Online
Authors: Jonathan Lethem
I shifted into first, swerved forward and left, then reversed into the giant’s car again, crumpling the metal along the driver’s-side door, deforming the contour of the Contour, wrinkling it like foil, hearing it creak and groan at being reshaped.
I might have stopped then. I believed the giant was unconscious under the air bag. He was at least silent and still, not firing his gun, not struggling to free himself.
But I felt the wild call of symmetry: His car ought to be crumpled on both sides. I needed to maul both of the Contour’s shoulders. I rolled forward and into position, then backed and crashed against his car once more, wrecking it on the passenger side as I had on the driver’s.
It’s a Tourette’s thing—you wouldn’t understand.
I moved the map and cell phone to Tony’s Pontiac. The keys were still in the ignition. I drove it out of the lot through the smashed entrance gate, and steered past the vacant ferry landing, up to Route 1. Apparently no one had heard the collisions or gunshot in the lot by the sea. Foible hadn’t even poked out of his shack.
Friendship Head was an outcropping on the coast twelve miles north of Musconguspoint Station. The lighthouse was painted red and white, no atrocity of Buddhist earth tones like the restaurant. I trusted that the Scientologists hadn’t gotten to it either. I parked the Pontiac as close to the water as I could and sat staring out for a while, feeling the place where I’d bitten my tongue slowly seal and testing out the damage to my neck. Free movement of my neck was crucial to my Tourettic career. I was like an athlete in that regard. But it felt like whiplash, nothing worse. I was chilled and tired, the replenishing effects of the lemongrass broth long since gone, and I could still feel
my head throb in the place the giant had clubbed it twenty-four hours and a million years ago. But I was alive, and the water looked pretty good as the angle of the light grew steeper. I was half an hour early for my date with Julia.
I dialed the local police and told them about the sleeping giant they’d find back at the Muscongus Island ferry.
“He might be in bad shape but I think he’s still alive,” I told them. “You’ll probably need the Jaws of Life to pull him out.”
“Can you give us your name, sir?”
“No, I really can’t,” I said. They’d never know how true it was. “My name doesn’t matter. You’ll find the wallet of the man he killed in the water near the ferry. The body’s more likely to wash up on the island.”
Is guilt a species of Tourette’s? Maybe. It has a touchy quality, I think, a hint of sweaty fingers. Guilt wants to cover all the bases, be everywhere at once, reach into the past to tweak, neaten, and repair. Guilt like Tourettic utterance flows uselessly, inelegantly from one helpless human to another, contemptuous of perimeters, doomed to be mistaken or refused on delivery.
Guilt, like Tourette’s, tries again, learns nothing.
And the guilty soul, like the Tourettic, wears a kind of clown face—the Smokey Robinson kind, with tear tracks underneath.
I called the New Jersey number.
“Tony’s dead,” I told them.
“This is a terrible thing—” Matricardi started.
“Yeah, yeah, terrible,” I said, interrupting. I was in no mood. Really no mood at all. The minute I heard Matricardi’s voice, I was something worse or less than human, not simply sorrowful or angry or ticcish
or lonely, certainly not moody at all, but raging with purpose. I was an arrow to pierce through years. “Listen carefully to me now,” I said. “Frank and Tony are gone.”
“Yes,” said Matricardi, already seeming to understand.
“I’ve got something you want and then that’s the end of it.”
“Yes.”
“That’s the end of it, we’re not bound to you any longer.”
“Who is we? Who is speaking?”
“L and L.”
“There’s a meaning to saying L and L when Frank is departed, and now Tony? What is it to speak of L and L?”
“That’s our business.”
“So what is this thing you have we want?”
“Gerard Minna lives on East Eighty-fourth Street, in a Zendo. Under another name. He’s responsible for Frank’s deat”
“Zendo?”
“A Japanese church.”
There was a long silence.
“This is not what we expected from you, Lionel.”
I didn’t speak.
“But you are correct that it is of interest to us.”
I didn’t speak.
“We will respect your wishes.”
Guilt I knew something about. Vengeance was another story entirely.
I’d have to think about vengeance.
There once was a girl from Nantucket.
No, really, that’s where she was from.
Her mother and father were hippies and so she was a little hippie child. Her father wasn’t always there on Nantucket with the family. When he was there he didn’t stay long, and over time the visits grew both briefer and less frequent.
The girl used to listen to tapes her father would leave behind, the Alan Watts Lecture Series, an introduction to Eastern thought for Americans in the form of a series of rambling, humorous monologues. After the girl’s father stopped coming at all, the girl would confuse her memories of her father with the charming man whose voice she heard on the tapes.
When the girl got older she sorted this out, but she’d listened to Alan Watts hundreds of times by then.
When the girl turned eighteen she went to college in Boston, to an art school that was part of a museum. She hated the school and the
other students there, hated pretending she was an artist, and after two years she dropped out.
First she went back to Nantucket for a little while, but the girl’s mother had moved in with a man the girl didn’t like, and Nantucket is, after all, an island. So she went back to Boston. There she found a lousy job as a waitress in a student dive, where she had to fend off an endless series of advances from customers and co-workers. At night she’d take yoga classes and attend Zen meetings in the basement of a local YWCA, where she had to fend off an endless series of advances from instructors and other students. The girl decided she didn’t hate only school, she hated Boston.
A year or so later she visited a Zen retreat center on the coast of Maine. It was a place of striking beauty and, apart from the frantic summer months when the town became a resort for wealthy Bostonians and New Yorkers, splendid isolation. It reminded her of Nantucket, the things she missed there. She quickly arranged to study at the center full-time, and to support herself she took a job waitressing at the seafood restaurant next door, which at that time was a traditional Maine lobster pound.
It was there the girl met the two brothers.
The older brother first, during a series of short visits to the retreat with his friend. The friend had some experience with Buddhism, the older brother none, but they were both a disconcerting presence there in placid Maine—vibrant with impatience and a hostile sort of urban humor, yet humble and sincere in their fledgling approach to Zen practice. The older brother was solicitous and flattering to the girl when they were introduced. He was a talker like none she’d never met, except perhaps on the Alan Watts lecture tapes, which still shaped her yearnings so powerfully—but the older brother was no Watts. His stories were of ethnic Brooklyn, of petty mobsters and comic scams, and some of them had a violent finish. With his talk he made this world seem as near and real to her as it was actually distant.
In some way Brooklyn, where she’d never been, became a romantic ideal, something truer and finer than the city life she’d glimpsed in Boston.
The girl and the older brother were lovers after a while.
The older brother’s visits grew both briefer and less frequent.
Then one day the older brother returned, in an Impala filled with paper shopping bags stuffed full of his clothes and with his younger brother in tow. After a sizable donation to the Zen center’s petty-cash fund the two men moved into rooms in the retreat center, rooms that were out of sight of the coastal highway. The next day the older brother drove the Impala off and returned with a pickup truck, with Maine plates.
Now whenever the girl tried to visit the older brother in his room, he turned her away. This persisted for a few weeks before she began to accept the change. The lovemaking and talk of Brooklyn were over between them. It was only then that the younger brother came into focus for the girl.
The younger brother wasn’t a student of Zen. He’d also never been out of New York City until his arrival in Maine, and it was a destination as mysterious and absurd to him as he was mysterious and absurd to her. To the girl the younger brother seemed an embodiment of the stories of Brooklyn the older brother had entranced her with. He was a talker, too, but rootless, chaotic in the stories he told. His talk entirely lacked the posture of distance and bemusement, the gloss of Zen perspective that characterized the older brother’s tales. Instead, though they sat together on the Maine beaches, huddling together in the wind, he seemed still to inhabit the streets he described.
The older brother read Krishnamurti and Watts and Trungpa, while the younger read Spillane and Chandler and Ross MacDonald, often aloud to the girl, and it was in the MacDonald especially that the girl heard something that taught her about a part of herself not covered by Nantucket or Zen or the bit she’d learned in college.
The younger brother and the girl became lovers after a while.
And the younger brother did what the older would never have done: He explained to the girl the situation that had driven the two brothers out of Brooklyn, to come and seek refuge in the Zen center. The brothers had been acting as liaisons between two aging Brooklyn mobsters and a group of suburban Westchester and New Jersey bandits who hijacked trucks on small highways into ork City. The aging mobsters were in the business of redistributing the goods seized by the truck pirates, and it was a business that was profitable for everyone associated with it. The brothers had made it more profitable for themselves than they should have, though. They found a place to warehouse a percentage of the goods, and a fence to take the goods off their hands. When the two mobsters discovered the betrayal, they decided to kill the brothers.