Motherless Brooklyn

by Jonathan Lethem

  “Well, Roshi lives on the top floor.”

  “He’s up there now?” I said, startled.

  “Sure. He’s in sesshin—it’s like an extended retreat—because of these monks. He took a vow of silence, so it’s been a little quiet around here.”

  “Do you live here?”

  “No. I’m cleaning up for morning zazen. The other students will show up in an hour. They’re out doing work service now. That’s how the Zendo can afford to pay the rent here. Wallace is downstairs already, but that’s basically it.”

  “Wallace?” I was distracted by the tea leaves in my cup settling gradually into a mound at the bottom, like astronauts on a planet with barely any gravity.

  “He’s like this old hippie who hardly ever does anything but sit. I think his legs must be made of plastic or something. We went past him on the way up.”

  “Where? In the room with the mats?”

  “Uh-huh. He’s like a piece of furniture, easy to miss.”

  “Biggish, you mean?”

  “Not so big. I meant still, he sits still.” She whispered, “I always wonder if he’s dead.”

  “But he’s not a really big person.”

  “You wouldn’t say that.”

  I plunged two fingers into my cup, needing to unsettle the floating leaves again, force them to resume their dance. If the girl saw me do it she didn’t say anything.

  “You haven’t seen any really big people lately, have you?” Though I’d not encountered them yet, Roshi and Wallace seemed both unpromising suspects to be the Polish giant. I wondered if instead one might be the sardonic conversationalist I’d heard taunting Minna over the wire.

  “Mmmmm, no,” she said.

  “Pierogi monster,” I said, then coughed five times for cover. Thoughts of Minna’s killers had overwhelmed the girl’s calming influence—my brain sizzled with language, my body with gestures.

  In reply she only refilled my cup, then moved the pot to the countertop. While her back was turned I stroked her chair, ran my palm over the warmth where she’d been sitting, played the spokes of the chair’s back like a noiseless harp.

  “Lionel? Is that your name?”

  “Yes.”

  “You don’t seem very calm, Lionel.” She’d pivoted, almost catching my chair-molestation, and now she leaned back against the counter instead of retaking her seat.

  I didn’t ordinarily hesitate to reveal my syndrome, but something in me fought it now. “Do you have something to eat?” I said. Perhaps calories would restore my equilibrium.

  “Um, I don’t know,” she said. “You want some bread or something? There might be some yogurt left.”

  “Because this tea is corked with caffeine. It only looks harmless. Do you drink this stuff all the time?”

  “Well, it’s sort of traditional.”

  “Is that part of the Zen thing, getting punchy so you can see God?

  Isn’t that cheating?”

  “It’s more just to stay awake. Because we don’t really have God in Zen Buddhism.” She turned away from me and began rifling through the cabinets, but didn’t quit her musings. “We just sit and try not to fall asleep, so I guess in a way staying awake is seeing God, sort of. So you’re right.”

  The little triumph didn’t thrill me. I was feeling trapped, with the wizened teacher a floor above me and the plastic-legged hippie a floor below. I wanted to get out of the Zendo now, but I hadn’t figured a next move.

  And when I left I wanted to take Kimmery with me. I wanted to protect her—the impulse surged in me, looking to affix to a suitable target. Now that I’d failed Minna, who deserved my protection? Was it Tony? Was it Julia? I wished that Frank would whisper a clue in my ear from the beyond. In the meantime, Kimmery would do.

  “Here, do you want some Oreos?”

  “Sure,” I said distractedly. “Buddhists eat Oreos?”

  “We eat anything we want, Lionel. This isn’t Japan.” She took a blue carton of cookies and put it on the table.

  I helped myself, craving the snack, glad we weren’t in Japan.

  “I used to know this guy who once worked for Nabisco,” she said, musing as she bit into a cookie. “You know, the company that makes Oreos? He said they had two main plants for making Oreos, in different parts of the country. Two head bakers, you know, different quality control.”

  “Uh—” I took a cookie and dunked it in my tea.

  “And he used to swear he could tell the difference just by tasting them. This guy, when we ate Oreos, he would just go through the pack sniffing them and tasting the chocolate part and then he’d put the bad ones in a pile. And like, a really good package was one where less than a third had to go in the bad pile, because they were from the wrong bakery, you know? But sometimes there wouldn’t be more than five or six good ones in a whole package.”

  “Wait a minute. You’re saying every package of Oreos has cookies from both bakeries?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  I tried to keep from thinking about it, tried to keep it in the blind spot of my obsessiveness, the way I would flinch my eyes fro a tempting shoulder. But it was impossible. “What motive could they possibly have for mixing batches in the same package?”

  “Well, easy. If word got out that one bakery was better than the other, they wouldn’t want people, you know, shunning whole cartons, or maybe even whole truckloads, whole deliveries of Oreos. They’d have to keep them mixed up, so you’d buy any package knowing you’d probably get some good ones.”

  “So you’re saying they ship batches from the two bakeries to one central boxing location just to mix them together.”

  “I guess that’s what it would entail, isn’t it?” she said brightly.

  “That’s stupid,” I said, but it was only the sound of my crumbling resistance.

  She shrugged. “All I know is we’d eat them and he’d be frantically building this pile of rejected cookies. And he’d be pushing them at me saying, ‘See, see?’ I could never tell the difference.”

  No, no, no, no.

  Eatmeoreo, I mouthed inaudibly. I crinkled in the cellophane sleeve for another cookie, then nibbled off the overhang of chocolate top. I let the pulverized crumbs saturate my tongue, then reached for another, performed the same operation. They were identical. I put both nibbled cookies in the same pile. I needed to find a good one, or a bad one, before I could tell the difference.

  Maybe I’d only ever eaten bad ones.

  “I thought you didn’t believe me,” said Kimmery.

  “Mushytest,” I mumbled, my lips pasty with cookie mud, my eyes wild as I considered the task my brain had set for my sorry tongue. There were three sleeves in the box of Oreos. We were into just the first of them.

  She nodded at my pile of discards. “What are those, good ones or bad ones?”

  “I don’t know.” I tried sniffing the next. “Was this guy your boyfriend or something?”

  “For a little while.” “Was he a Zen Buddhist too?”

  She snorted lightly. I nibbled another cookie and began to despair. I would have been happy now for an ordinary interruptive tic, something to throw my bloodhoundlike obsessions off the scent. The Minna Men were in shambles, yes, but I’d get to the bottom of the Oreo conundrum.

  I jumped to my feet, rattling both our teacups. I had to get out of there, quell my panic, restart my investigation, put some distance between myself and the cookies.

  “Barnamum Bakery!” I yelped, reassuring myself.

  “What?”

  “Nothing.” I jerked my head sideways, then turned it slowly, as if to work out a kink. “We’d better go, Kimmery.”

  “Go where?” She leaned forward, her pupils big and trusting. I felt a thrill at being taken so seriously. This making the rounds without Gilbert could get to be a habit. For once I was playing lead detective instead of comic—or Tourettic—relief.

  “Downstairs,” I said, at a loss for a better answer.

  “Okay,” she said, whispering conspira
torially. “But be quiet.”

  We crept past the half-open door on the second landing, and I retrieved my shoes from the rack. This time I got a look at Wallace. He sat with his back to us, limp blond hair tucked behind his ears and giving way to a bald spot. He wore a sweater and sweatpants and sat still as advertised, inert, asleep, or, I suppose, dead—though death was not a still thing to me at the moment, more a matter of skid marks in blood and the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. Wallace looked harmless anyway. Kimmery’s idea of a hippie, apparently, was a white man over forty-five not in a business suit. In Brooklyn we would have just said loser.

  She opened the front door of the Zendo. “I’ve got to finish cleaning,” she said. “You know, for the monks.”

  “Importantmonks,” I said, ticcing gently.

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t think you should be alone here.” I looked up and down the block to see if anyone was watching us. My neck prickled, alert to wind and fear. The Upper East Siders had retaken their streets, and walked obliviously crinkling doggie-doo bags and the New York Times and the wax paper around bagels. My feeling of advantage, of beginning my investigation while the world was still asleep, was gone.

  “I’m con-worried,” I said, Tourette’s mangling my speech again. I wanted to get away from her before I shouted, barked, or ran my fingers around the neck of her T-shirt.

  She smiled. “What’s that—like confused and worried?”

  I nodded. It was close enough.

  “I’ll be okay. Don’t be conworried.” She spoke calmly, and it calmed me. “You’ll come back later, right? To sit?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Okay.” She craned up on her toes and kissed my cheek. Startled, I couldn’t move, stood instead feeling her kiss-print burning on my flesh in the cold morning air. Was it personal, or some sort of fuzzy Zen coercion? Were they that desperate to fill mats at the Zendo?

  “Don’t do that,” I said. “You just met me. This is New York.”

  “Yes, but you’re my friend now.”

  “I have to go.”

  “Okay,” she said. “Zazen is at four oclock.”

  “I’ll be there.”

  She shut the door. I was alone on the street again, my investigation already at a standstill. Had I learned anything inside the Zendo? Now I felt dazed with loss—I’d penetrated the citadel and spent my whole time contemplating Kimmery and Oreos. My mouth was full of cocoa, my nostrils full of her scent from the unexpected kiss.

  Two men took me by the elbows and hustled me into a car waiting at the curb.

  The four of them wore identical blue suits with black piping on the legs, and identical black sunglasses. They looked like a band that plays at weddings. Four white guys, assortedly chunky, pinched in the face, with pimples, and indistinct. Their car was a rental. Chunky sat in the backseat waiting and when the two who’d picked me up crushed me into the back beside him, he immediately put his arm around my neck in a sort of brotherly choke hold. The two who’d picked me off the street—Pimples and Indistinct—jammed in beside me, to make four of us on the backseat. It was a bit crowded.

  “Get in the front,” said Chunky, the one holding my neck.

  “Me?” I said.

  “Shut up. Larry, get out. There’s too many. Go in the front.”

  “Okay, okay,” said the one on the end, Indistinct or Larry. He got out of the back and into the empty front passenger seat and the one driving—Pinched—took off. Chunky loosened his hold when we got into the downtown traffic on Second Avenue, but left his arm draped over my shoulders.

  “Take the Drive,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Tell him take the East Side Drive.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “I want to be on the highway.”

  “Why not just drive in circles?”

  “My car is parked up here,” I said. “You could drop me off. ”

  “Shut up. Why can’t we just drive in circles?”

  “You shut up. It should look like we’re going somewhere, stupid. We’re really scaring him going in circles.”

  “I’m listening to what you say no matter how you drive,” I said, wanting to make them feel better. “There’s four of you and one of me.”

  “We want more than listening,” said Chunky. “We want you scared.”

  But I wasn’t scared. It was eight-thirty in the morning, and we were fighting traffic on Second Avenue. There weren’t even any co go in, just honking delivery trucks tied up by pedestrians. And the closer I looked at these guys the less I was impressed. For one thing, Chunky’s hand on my neck was soft, his skin was soft, and his hold on me rather tender. And he was the toughest of the bunch. They weren’t calm, they weren’t good at what they were doing, and they weren’t tough. None of them, as far as I could tell, was wearing a gun.

  For another thing, all four of their sunglasses still bore price tags, dangling fluorescent orange ovals reading $6.99!

  I reached out and batted at Pimples’s price tag. He turned away, and my finger hooked the earpiece and jerked the shades off his face, into his lap. “Shit,” said Pimples, and hurried the glasses back onto his face as if I might recognize him without them.

  “Hey, none of that,” said Chunky, and hugged me again. He reminded me of my long-ago kissing tic, the way he was crowding me close to him in the car.

  “Okay,” I said, though I knew it would be hard not to bat at the price tags if they came within reach. “But what’s the game here, guys?”

  “We’re supposed to throw a scare into you,” said Chunky, distracted, watching Pinched drive. “Stay away from the Zendo, that sort of thing. Hey, take the fucking Drive. Seventy-ninth Street there’s an on-ramp.”

  “I can’t get over,” complained Pinched, eyeing lanes of traffic.

  “What so great about the FDR?” said Indistinct. “Why can’t we stay on the streets?”

  “What, you want to pull over and rough him up on Park Avenue?” said Chunky.

  “Maybe just a scare without the roughing-up will do,” I suggested. “Get this over with, get on with the day.”

  “Stop him talking so much.”

  “Yeah, but he’s got a point.”

  “Eatmepointman!”

  Chunky clamped his hand over my mouth. At that moment I heard a high-pitched two-note signal. The four of them, and me, began looking around the car for the source of the noise. It was as if we were in a video game and had crossed up to the next level, were about to be destroyed by aliens we couldn’t see coming. Then I realized that the beeping issued from my coat pocket: Minna’s beeper going off.

  “What’s that?”

  I twisted my head free. Chunky didn’t fight me. “Barnamum Beeper,” I said.

  “What’s that, some special kind? Get it out of his pocket. Didn’t you chumps frisk him?”

  “Screw you.”

  “Jesus.”

  They puttheir hands on me and quickly found the beeper. The digital readout showed a Brooklyn-Queens-Bronx prefix on the number. “Who’s that?” said Pimples.

  I frowned and shrugged: didn’t know. Truly, I didn’t recognize the number. Someone who thought Minna was still alive, I guessed, and shuddered a little. That scared me more than my abductors did.

  “Make him call it,” said Pinched from the front.

  “You want to pull over to let him call?”

  “Larry, you got the phone?”

  Indistinct turned in his seat and offered me a cell phone.

  “Call the number.”

  I dialed, they waited. We inched down Second Avenue. The airspace of the car hummed with tension. The cell phone rang, dit-dit-dit, a miniature, a toy that effortlessly commanded our focus, our complete attention. I might have popped it in my mouth and gulped it down instead of holding it to my ear. Dit-dit-dit, it rang again, then somebody picked up.

  Garbage Cop.

  “Lionel?” said Loomis.

  “Mmmmhuh,” I replied, squelching
an outburst.

  “Get this. What’s the difference between three hundred sixty-five blow jobs and a radial tire?”

  “Don’tcare!” I shouted. The four in the car all jumped.

  “One’s a Goodyear, the other’s a great year,” said Loomis proudly. He knew he’d nailed the riddle, no faltering this time, not a word out of place.

  “Where are you calling from?” I asked. “You called me.”

  “You beeped me, Loomis. Where are you?”

  “I don’t know”—his voice dimmed—“hey, what’s the name of this place? Oh, yeah? Thanks. Bee-Bee-Que? Really, just like that, three letters? Go figure. Lionel, you there?”

  “Here.”

  “It’s a diner called B-B-Q, just like barbecue, only three letters. I eat here all the time, and I never even knew that!”

  “Why’d you beep me, Loomis?” Beep and Rebeep are sitting on a fence—

  “You told me to. You wanted that address, right? Ullman, the dead guy.”

  “Uh, that’s right,” I said, shrugging at Chunky, who still held my neck, but lightly, leaving me room to place the phone. He scowled at me, but it wasn’t my fault if he was confused. I was confused, too. Confused and conworried.

  “Well, I got it right here,” said the Garbage Cop pridefully.

  “What’s the good of driving him around watching him make a phone call?” complained Pimples.

  “Take it away from him,” said Pinched from the driver’s seat.

  “Just punch him in the stomach,” said Indistinct. “Make him scared.”

  “You got someone there with you?” said Loomis.

  The four in the car had begun to chafe at seeing their faint authority slip away, devolve to the modern technology, the bit of plastic and wire in my palm. I had to find a way to calm them down. I nodded and widened my eyes to show my cooperation, and mouthed a just-wait signal to them, hoping they’d recall the protocol from crime movies: pretend they weren’t there listening, and thus gather information on the sly.

  I couldn’t help it that they weren’t actually listening.

  “Tell me the address,” I said.

  “Okay, here goes,” said Loomis. “Got a pen?”