And he felt, rightly, that no conspiracy around him could possibly include his pet Freakshow. The other Boys would never let me play. I could be flattered at the implied trust, or insulted by the dis. It didn’t really matter now.
I stared at Gerard. Now I understood the charismatic force of his profile, but it inspired only bitterness. It was as though the world imagined it could take Minna away and offer this clumsy genetic substitution. A resemblance.
“California Roll Zen. This is the Zen of sushi so full of avocado and cream cheese might as well be a marshmallow for all you know. The pungent fish of zazen smothered in easy pleasures, picnics, get-togethers, Zendo becomes a dating service!”
“Zengeance!” I shouted.
Not every head turned. Gerard Minna’s did, though. So did Pinched’s, and Indistinct’s. And so did the giant’s. Kimmery was among those who practiced their calm by ignoring me.
“Ziggedy zendoodah,” I said aloud. My erection dimmed, energy venting elsewhere. “Pierogi Monster Zen master zealous neighbor. Zen zaftig Zsa Zsa go-bare.” I rapped the scalp of the sitter in front of me. “Zippity go figure.”
The roomful of gurus and acolytes came to agitated life but not one of them spoke a word, so my burst of verbiage sang in the silence. The lecturing monk glared at me and shook his head. Another of his posse rose from his cushion and lifted a wooden paddle I hadn’t previously noticed from a hook on the wall, then started through the rows of students in my direction. Only Wallace sat immobile, eyes shut, still meditating. I began to appreciate his reputation for imperturbability.
“Pierogi kumquat sushiphone! Domestic marshmallow ghost! Insatiable Mallomar! Smothered pierogiphone!” The flood came with such force, I twisted my neck and nearly barked the words.
“Silence!” commanded the lecturing monk. “Very bad to make disturbance in the Zendo! Time and place for everything!” Anger wasn’t good for his English. “Shouting is for outside, New York City full of shouting! Not in Zendo.”
“Knock knock Zendo!” I shouted. “Monk monk goose!”
The monk with the paddle approached. He gripped it cross-handed, like Hank Aaron. The giant stood, shoved his baggie of kumquats into the pocket of his Members Only jacket and rubbed his sticky hands together, readying them for use. Gerard turned and stared at me, but if he recognized in me the twitchy teenager he’d left behind at the St. Vincent’s schoolyard fence nineteen years before, he didn’t show any sign. His eyebrows were delicately knit, his mouth pursed, his expression bemused. Kimmery put her hand on my knee and I put my hand on hers, reciprocity-ticcing. Even in a shitstorm such as I was in at this moment, my syndrome knew that God was in the details.
“Keisaku is more than ceremonial implement,” said the monk with the paddle. He applied it to my shoulder blades so gently it was like a caress. “Unruly student can do with a blow.” Now he clouted my back with the same muscular Buddhist glee his colleague had applied to my scalp.
“Ouch!” I fished behind me for the paddle, snagged it, tugged. It came out of the monk’s grasp and he staggered backward. By now the giant was headed in our direction. Those between us rolled or scuttled out of his path, according to their ability to unlock their elaborately folded legs. Kimmery darted away just as he loomed over us, not wanting to be crushed. Pierogi Man hadn’t checked his shoes at the door.
That was when I saw the nod.
Gerard Minna nodded ever so slightly at the giant, and the giant nodded back. That was all it took. The same team that had doomed Frank Minna was back in the saddle. I would be the sequel.
The giant wrapped me in his arms and lifted, and the paddle clattered to the floor.
I weigh nearly two hundred pounds, but the giant didn’t strain at all moving me down the stairs and out onto the street, and when he plumped me onto the sidewalk I was more shaken and winded than he by far. I straightened my suit and confirmed the alignment of my neck with a strig of jerks while he unloaded his bag of kumquats and got back to sucking out their juice and pulp, reducing their bodies to husks that looked like orange raisins in his massive hands.
The narrow street was nearly dark now, and the dog-walkers were far enough away to give us privacy.
“Want one?” he said, holding out the bag. His voice was a dull thing where it began in his throat but it resonated to grandeur in the tremendous instrument of his torso, like a mediocre singer on the stage of a superb concert hall.
“No, thanks,” I said. Here was where I should grow large with anger, facing Minna’s killer right at the spot of the abduction. But I was diminished, ribs aching from his squeezing, confused and worried—conworried—by my discovery of Gerard Minna inside the Zendo, and unhappy to have left Kimmery and my shoes upstairs. The pavement was cold through my socks, and my feet tingled oddly as they flushed with the blood denied them by Zen posture.
“So what’s the matter with you?” he said, discarding another of the withered kumquats.
“I’ve got Tourette’s,” I said.
“Yeah, well, threats don’t work with me.”
“Tourette’s,” I said.
“Eh? My hearing’s not so good. Sorry.” He put the bag of fruit away again, and when his hand reemerged it was holding a gun. “Go in there,” he said. He pointed with his chin at the three steps leading to the narrow channel between the Zendo and the apartment building on the right, a lane filled with garbage cans and darkness. I frowned, and he reached out and with the hand not holding the gun shoved me backward toward the steps. “Go,” he said again.
I considered the giant and myself as a tableau. Here was the man I’d been hunting and wishing to go up against, howling for a chance at vengeance like an insatiable ghost or marshmallow—yet had I planned a way to take advantage of him, a method or apparatus to give me any real edge, let alone narrow the immense gap in force his size presented? No. I’d come up pathetically empty. And now he had a gun to ice the cake. He shoved me again, straight-armed my shoulder, and when I tried, ticcishly, to shove his shoulder in return I found I was held at too great a distance, couldn’t brush his shoulder even with long-stretched fingertips, and it conjured some old memory of Sylvester the Cat in a boxing ring with a kangaroo. My brain whispered, He’s just a big mouse, Daddy, a vigorous louse, big as a house, a couch, a man, a plan, a canal, apocalypse.
“Apocamouse,” I mumbled, language spilling out of me unrestrained. “Unplan-a-canal. Unpluggaphone.”
“I said get in there, Squeaky.” Had he caught my mouse reference, even with his impaired hearing? But then, who wouldn’t be squeaky to him? He was so big he only had to shrug to loom. I took a step backward. I had Tourette’s, he had threats. “Go,” he said again.
It was the last thing I wanted to do and I did it.
The minute I stepped down into the darkness he swung the gun at my head.
So many detectives have been knocked out and fallen into such strange swirling darknesses, such manifold surrealist voids (“something red wriggled like a germ under a microscope”—Philip Marlowe, The Big Sleep), and yet I have nothing to contribute to this painful tradition. Instead my falling and rising through obscurity was distinguished only by nothingness, by blankness, by lack and my resentment of it. Except for grains. It was a grainy nothing. A desert of grains. How fond can you be of flavorless grains in a desert? How much better than nothing at all? I’m from Brooklyn and I don’t like wide-open spaces, I guess. And I don’t want to die. So sue me.
Then I remembered a joke, a riddle like one the Garbage Cop would tell, and it was my lifeline, it sang like a chorus of ethereal voices beckoning me from the brink of darkness:
Why don’t you starve in the desert?
Because of the sand which is there.
Why didn’t I want to die or leave New York?
The sandwiches. I concentrated on the sandwiches. For a while that’s all there was, and I was happy. The sandwiches were so much better than the desert of grains.
“Lionel?”
It was
Kimmery’s voice.
“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.
Motherless Brooklyn Page 21