Motherless Brooklyn

by Jonathan Lethem

  I braked to keep him in front of me. Tony’s lane began to slide ahead of the others and the giant merged into it without signaling, as though the Contour conveyed the authority of his brutish body. I was content to let some distance open between us, and before long Hartford’s miniature jam eased. Heartfood handfoot hoofdog horseradish went the tinny song in my brain. I took a cue from the giant’s chewing and rustled in the bag of sandwiches on the passenger seat. I groped for the hero, wanting to taste the wet crush of the Zeod’s marinated peppers mixed with the spicy, leathery pepperoni.

  I had the hero half devoured when I spotted Tony’s black Pontiac slowing into a rest area, while the giant’s Contour soared blithely past.

  It could mean only one thing. Having reached this point behind Tony, the giant didn’t need to trail him anymore. He knew where Tony was going and in fact preferred to arrive sooner, to be waiting when Tony arrived.

  It wasn’t Boston. Boston might be on the way, but it wasn’t the destination. I’d finally put men of peace and place of peace together. I’m not so slow.

  And appropriate to the manner of the evening’s stakeout and the morning’s chase, I still stood in relation to the giant as the giant stood to Tony. I knew where the giant was going—a freakshow chasing a context—I knew where they were both going. And I had reasons to want to get there soonest. I was still seeking my edge over the giant. Maybe I could poison his sushi.

  I pulled into the next rest stop and gassed up the car, peed, and bought some ginger ale, a cup of coffee and a map of New England. Sure enough, the diagonal across Connecticut pointed through Massachusetts and a nubbin of coastal New Hampshire to the entrance of the Maine Turnpike. I fished the “Place of Peace” brochure out of my jacket and found the place where the Turnpike left off and the brochure’s rudimentary map took over, a coastal village called Musconguspoint Station. The name had a chewy, unfamiliar flavor that tantalized my syndrome. I spotted others like it on the map. Whether or not Maine’s wilderness impressed me more than suburban Connecticut, the road signs would provide some nourishment.

  Now I had only to take the lead in this secret interstate race. I was relying on the giant’s overconfidence—he was so certain he was the pursuer he’d never stopped to wonder whether he might be pursued. Of course, I hadn’t spent a lot of time looking over my shoulder either. I twitched the notion off with a few neck-jerks and got back in my car.

  She answered on the second ring, her voiancittle groggy. “Kimmery.”

  “Lionel?”

  “Yessrog.”

  “Where did you go?”

  “I’m in—I’m almost in Massachusetts.”

  “What do you mean, almost? Is that like a state of mind or something, Massachusetts?”

  “No, I mean almost there, literally. I’m on the highway, Kimmery. I’ve never been this far from New York.”

  She was quiet for a minute. “When you run you really run,” she said.

  “No, no, don’t misunderstand. I had to go. This is my investigation. I’m—invest-in-a-gun, connect-a-cop, inventachusetts—” I mashed my tongue against the cage of my gritted teeth, trying to bottle up the flow.

  Ticcing with Kimmery was especially abhorrent to me, now that I’d declared her my cure.

  “You’re what?”

  “I’m on the giant’s tail,” I said, squeezing out the words. “Well, not actually on his tail, but I know where he’s going.”

  “You’re still looking for your giant,” she said thoughtfully. “Because you feel bad about that guy Frank who got killed, is that right?”

  “No. Yes.”

  “You make me sad, Lionel.”

  “Why?”

  “You seem so, I don’t know, guilty.”

  “Listen, Kimmery. I called because—Missmebailey!—because I missed you. I mean, I miss you.”

  “That’s a funny thing to say. Um, Lionel?”

  “Yes?”

  “Did you take my keys?”

  “It was part of my investigation. Forgive me.”

  “Okay, whatever, but I thought it was pretty creepy.”

  “I didn’t mean anything creepy by it.”

  “You can’t do that kind of thing. It freaks people out, you know?”

  “I’m really sorry. I’ll bring them back.”

  She was quiet again. I coursed in the fast lane with a band of other speeders, every so often slipping to the right to let an especially frantic one go by. The highway driving had begun to inspire a Touretic fantasy, that the hoods and fenders of the cars were shoulders and collars I couldn’t touch. I had to keep adequate distance so I wouldn’t be tempted to try to brush up against those gleaming proxy bodies.

  I hadn’t seen any sign of either Tony or the giant, but I had reason to hope that Tony at least was already behind me. The giant would have to stop for gas if he hadn’t, and that was when I would pass him.

  “I’m going to a place you might know about,” I said. “Yoshii’s. A retreat.”

  “That’s a good idea,” she said grudgingly, curiosity winning over her anger. “I always wanted to go there. Roshi said it was really great.”

  “Maybe—”

  “What?”

  “Maybe sometime we’ll go together.”

  “I should get off the phone, Lionel.”

  The call had made me anxious. I ate the second of the roast-beef sandwiches. Massachusetts looked the same as Connecticut.

  I called her back.

  “What did you mean by guilty?” I said. “I don’t understand.”

  She sighed. “I don’t know, Lionel. It’s just, I’m not really sure about this investigation. It seems like you’re just running around a lot trying to keep from feeling sad or guilty or whatever about this guy Frank.”

  “I want to catch the killer.”

  “Can’t you hear yourself? That’s like something O. J. Simpson would say. Regular people, when someone they know gets killed or something they don’t go around trying to catch the killer. They go to a funeral.”

  “I’m a detective, Kimmery.” I almost said, I’m a telephone. “You keep saying that, but I don’t know. I just can’t really accept it.”

  “Why not?”

  “I guess I thought detectives were more, uh, subtle.”

  “Maybe you’re thinking of detectives in movies or on television.” I was a fine one to be explaining this distinction. “On TV they’re all the same. Real detectives are as unalike as fingerprints, or snowflakes.”

  “Very funny.”

  “I’m trying to make you laugh,” I said. “I’m glad you noticed. Do you like jokes?”

  “You know what koans are? They’re like Zen jokes, except they don’t really have punch lines.”

  “What are you waiting for? I’ve got all day here.” In truth the highway had grown fat with extra lanes, and complicated by options and merges. But I wasn’t going to interrupt Kimmery while things were going so well, ticless on my end, bubbly with digressions on hers.

  “Oh, I can never remember them, they’re too vague. Lots of monks hitting each other on the head and stuff.”

  “That sounds hilarious. The best jokes usually have animals in them, I think.”

  “There’s plenty of animals. Here—” I heard a rustle as she braced the phone between her shoulder and chin and paged through a book. I’d had her in the middle of the big empty room—now I adjusted the picture, envisioned her with the phone stretched to reach the bed, perhaps with Shelf on her lap. “So these two monks are arguing over a cat and this other monk cuts the cat in half—Oh, that’s not very nice.”

  “You’re killing me. I’m busting a gut over here.”

  “Shut up. Oh, here, this is one I like. It’s about death. So this young monk comes to visit this old monk to ask about this other, older monk who’s just died. Tendo, that’s the dead monk. So the young monk is asking about Tendo and the old monk says stuff like ‘Look at that dog over there’ and ‘Do you want a bath?’—all this irrelevant
stuff. It goes on like that until finally the young monk is enlightened.”

  “Enlightened by what?”

  “I guess the point is you can’t really say anything about death.”

  “Okay, I get it. It’s just like in Only Angels Have Wings, when Cary Grant’s best friend Joe crashes his plane and dies and then Rosalind Russell asks him ‘What about Joe?’ and “Aren’t you going to do anything about Joe?’ and Cary Grant just says, ‘Who’s Joe?’ ”

  “Speaking of watching too much movies and television.”

  “Exactly.” I liked the way the miles were flying past for me now, ticless, aloft on Kimmery’s voice, the freeway traffic thinning.

  The moment I observed the way our talk and my journey were racing along, though, we lapsed into silence.

  “Roshi says this thing about guilt,” she said after a minute. “That it’s selfish, just a way to avoid taking care of yourself. Or thinking about yourself. I guess that’s sort of two different things. I can’t remember.”

  “Please don’t quote Gerard Minna to me on the subject of guilt,” I said. “That’s a little hard to swallow under the present circumstances.”

  “You really think Roshi’s guilty of something?”

  “There’s more I need to find out,” I admitted. “That’s what I’m doing. That’s why I had to take your keys.”

  “And why you’re going to Yoshii’s?”

  “Yes.”

  In the pause that followed I detected the sound of Kimmery believing me, believing in my case, for the first time. “Be careful, Lionel.”

  “Sure. I’m always careful. Just keep your promise to me, okay?”

  “What promise?”

  “Don’t go to the Zendo.”

  “Okay. I think I’m getting off the phone now, Lionel.”

  “You promise?”

  “Sure, yeah, okay.”

  Suddenly I was surrounded by office buildings, carports, stacked overhead freeways clogged with cars. I realized too late I probably should have navigated around Boston instead of through it. I suffered through the slowdown, munched on chips and tried not to hold my breath, and before too long the city’s grip loosened, gave way to suburban sprawl, to the undecorated endless interstate. I only hoped I hadn’t let Tony and the giant get ahead of me, lost my lead, my edge. Gotta have an edge. I was beginning to obsess on edge too much: edge of car, edge of road, edge of vision and what hovered there, nagging and insubstantial. How strange it began to seem that cars have bodies that never are supposed to touch, a disaster if they do.

  Don’t hover in my blind spot, Fonebone!

  I felt as though I would begin ticcing with the body of the car, would need to flirt with the textured shoulder of the highway or the darting, soaring bodies all around me unless I heard her voice again.

  “Kimmery.”

  “Lionel.”

  “I called you again.”

  “Aren’t these car-phone calls kind of expensive?”

  “I’m not the one paying,” I burbled. I was exhilarated by the recurrent technomagic, the cell phone reaching out across space and time to connect us again.

  “Who is?”

  “Some Zen doormat I met yesterday in a car.”

  “Doormat?”

  “Doorman.”

  “Mmmm.” She was eating something. “You call too much.”

  “I like talking to you. Driving is … boring.” I undersold my angst, let the one word stan for so many others.

  “Yeah, mmmm—but I don’t want anything, you know, crazy in my life right now.”

  “What do you mean by crazy?” Her tonal swerves had caught me by surprise again. I suppose it was this strange lurching dance, though, that kept my double brain enchanted.

  “It’s just—A lot of guys, you know, they tell you they understand about giving you space and stuff, they know how to talk about it and that you need to hear it. But they don’t really have any idea what it means. I’ve been through a lot recently, Lionel.”

  “When did I say anything about giving you space?”

  “I just mean this is a lot of calls in a pretty short period is all.”

  “Kimmery, listen. I’m not like other, ah, people you meet. My life is organized around certain compulsions. But it’s different with you, I feel different.”

  “That’s good, that’s nice—”

  “You have no idea.”

  “—but I’m just coming out of something pretty intense. I mean, you swept me off my feet, Lionel. You’re kind of overwhelming, actually, if you don’t already know. I mean, I like talking to you, too, but it isn’t a good idea to call three times right after, you know, spending the night.”

  I was silent, unsure how to decode this remarkable speech. “What I mean is, this is exactly the kind of craziness I just got through with, Lionel.”

  “Which kind?”

  “Like this,” she said in a meek voice. “Like with you.”

  “Are you saying Oreo Man had Tourette’s syndrome?” I felt a weird thrill of jealousy. She collected us freaks, I understood now. No wonder she took us in stride, no wonder she damped our symptoms. I was nothing special after all. Or rather my fistlike penis was my only claim.

  “Who’s Oreo Man?”

  “Your old boyfriend.”

  “Oh. But what’s the other thing you said?”

  “Never mind.”

  We were silent for a while. My brain went, Tourette’s slipdrip stinkjet’s blessdroop mutual-of-overwhelm’s wild kissdoom—

  “All I mean is I’m not ready for anything too intense right now,” said Kimmery. “I need space to figure out what I want. I can’t be all overwhelmed and obsessed like the last time.”

  “I think I’ve heard enough about that for now.”

  “Okay.”

  “But—” I gathered myself, made a plunge into territory far stranger to me than Connecticut or Massachusetts. “I think I understand what you mean about space. About leaving it between things so you don’t get too obsessed.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Or is that the kind of talk you don’t want to hear? I guess I’m confused.”

  “No, it’s okay. But we can talk about this later.”

  “Well, okay.”

  “Bye, Lionel.”

  Dial and redial were sitting on a fence. Dial fell off. Who was left?

  Ring.

  Ring.

  Ring.

  Click. “You’ve reached two-one-two, three-oh-four—”

  “HellokimmeryIknowIshouldn’tbecallingbutIjust—”

  Clunk. “Lionel?”

  “Yes.”

  “Stop now.”

  “Uh—”

  “Just stop calling now. It’s way too much like some really bad things that have happened to me, can you understand? It’s not romantic.”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay, bye, Lionel, for real now, okay?”

  “Yes.”

  Redial.

  “You’ve reached—”

  “Kimmery? Kimmery? Kimmery? Are you there? Kimmery?”

  I was my syndrome’s dupe once again. Here I’d imagined I was enjoying a Touretteless morning, yet when the new manifestation appeared, it was hidden in plain sight, the Purloined Tic. Punching that redial I was exhibiting a calling-Kimmery-tic as compulsive as any rude syllable or swipe.

  I wanted to hurl the doorman’s cell phone out onto the grassy divider. Instead, in a haze of self-loathing, I dialed another number, one etched in memory though I hadn’t called it in a while.

  “Yes?” The voice was weary, encrusted with years, as I remembered it.

  “Essrog?” I said.

  ut onto tht=”0em” width=”1em” align=”justify”>“Yes.” A pause. “This is the Essrog residence. This is Murray Essrog. Who’s calling, please?”

  I was a little while coming to my reply. “Eat me Bailey.”

  “Oh, Christ.” The voice moved away from the phone. “Mother. Mother, come here. I want you to listen to this.
”

  “Essrog Bailey,” I said, almost whispering, but intent on being heard.

  There was a shuffling in the background.

  “It’s him again, Mother,” said Murray Essrog. “It’s that goddamned Bailey kid. He’s still out there. All these years.”

  I was still a kid to him, just as to me he’d been an old man since the first time I called him.

  “I don’t know why you care,” came an older woman’s voice, every word a sigh.

  “Baileybailey,” I said softly.

  “Speak up, kid, do your thing,” said the old man.

  I heard the phone change hands, the old woman’s breathing come onto the line.

  “Essrog, Essrog, Essrog,” I chanted, like a cricket trapped in a wall.

  I’m tightly wound. I’m a loose cannon. Both—I’m a tightly wound loose cannon, a tight loose. My whole life exists in the space between those words, tight, loose, and there isn’t any space there—they should be one word, tightloose. I’m an air bag in a dashboard, packed up layer upon layer in readiness for that moment when I get to explode, expand all over you, fill every available space. Unlike an airbag, though, I’m repacked the moment I’ve exploded, am tensed and ready again to explode—like some safety-film footage cut into a loop, all I do is compress and release, over and over, never saving or satisfying anyone, least myself. Yet the tape plays on pointlessly, obsessive air bag exploding again and again while life itself goes on elsewhere, outside the range of these antic expenditures.

  The night before, in Kimmery’s alcove, suddenly seemed very long ago, very far away.

  How could phone calls—cell-phone calls, staticky, unlikely, free of charge—how could they alter what real bodies felt? How could ghosts touch the living?

  I tried not to think about it.

  I tossed the cell phone onto the seat beside me, into the wreckage of Zeod’s sandwiches, the unfurled paper wrapping, the torn chip bag, the strewn chips and crumpled napkins gone translucent with grease stains in the midmorning sun. I wasn’t eating neatly, wasn’t getting anything exactly right, and now I knew it didnșt matter, not today, not anymore. Having broken the disastrous flow of dialing tics, my mood had gotten hard, my attention narrow. I crossed the bridge at Portsmouth into Maine and focused everything I had left on the drive, on casting off unnecessary behaviors, thrusting exhaustion and bitterness aside and making myself into a vehicular arrow pointed at Musconguspoint Station, at the answers that lay waiting for me there. I heard Minna’s voice now in place of my incessant Tourettic tongue, saying, Floor it, Freakshow. You got something to do, do it already. Tell your story driving.