Motherless Brooklyn

by Jonathan Lethem

  And plowed the giant’s car backward toward the spikes.

  I heard his rear tires pop, then hiss. The giant’s rear end slumped, his tires lanced on the spikes.

  For a moment I heard only the hiss of escaping air, then a gull screamed, and I made a sound to answer it, a scream of pain in the form of a birdcall.

  I shook my head, glanced in the mirror. The giant’s air bag was sagging slowly, silently. Perhaps it had been pierced by the bullet. There wasn’t any sign of motion underneath.

  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.

  FORMERLY KNOWN

  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.

  Hence, Maine.

  The younger brother did another thing his older brother might never have done: He fell in love with the strange angry girl from Nantucket. And one day in the flush of this love he explained to her his great dream: He was going to open a detective agency.

  The older brother in the meantime had grown distant from them both, and more deeply and sincerely involved in Zen practice. In the manner of so many spiritual practitioners past and present he seemed to draw away from the world of material concerns, to grow tolerant and wry but also a little chilly in his regard for the people and things he’d left behind.

  When the younger brother and the girl were away from the retreat center they’d refer to the older brother as “Rama-lama-ding-dong.” Before too long they even began to call him that to his face.

  One day the younger brother tried to telephone his mother and found that she’d been taken to the hospital. He conferred with his older brother; the girl overheard some of their bitter, fearful conversations. The older brother was persuaded that their mother’s hospitalization had been arranged as a trap to lure them back to Brooklyn for their punishment. The younger disagreed. The next day he bought a car and loaded it with his belongings, and announced he was going back to the city. He invited the girl to join him, though he warned her of the possible danger.

  She considered her life at the retreat, which had grown as close and predictable around her as an island, and she considered the younger brother and the prospect of Brooklyn, his Brooklyn, of living there by his side. She agreed to leave Maine.

  On the way they were married in Albany, by a justice of the peace at the state capital. The younger brother wanted to surprise and please his mother, and perhaps also wished to offer some excuse for his long disappearance. He took the girl shopping for clothes in Manhattan before they crossed the famous bridge into Brooklyn, and then, as an afterthought, he brought her to a salon on Montague Street, where they bleached her dark hair to platinum blond. It was as though she were the one who should be in disguise here.

  The mother’s sickness wasn’t a trap. She was dead of a stroke by the time the younger brother and his new wife reached the hospital. But it was also true that the mobsters were aware of everything that happened in the neighborhood and were watching the hospital closely. When the younger brother was spotted there, it wasn’t long before he was brought in to answer for his and his brother’s misdeeds.

  He begged for his life. He explained that he’d just gotten married.

  He also blamed his brother for the crimes they’d both committed. He claimed to have lost touch with his brother completely.

  He ende by promising to spend his life in service as the gangsters’ errand boy.

  On that condition his apology was accepted by the gangsters. They permitted him to live, though they swore again a vow of death against the older brother, and made the younger promise that he’d turn his brother in if and when he reappeared.

  The younger brother moved his new wife into his mother’s old apartment and the woman from Nantucket began her adjustment to life in Brooklyn. What she encountered was first intoxicating and frightening, then disenchanting. Her husband was a small-time operator, his “agents,” as he called them, a motley gang of high-school-dropout orphans. For a while he installed her as a secretary in a friend’s law office, where she worked as a notary public, humiliatingly on view in a shop window out on Court Street. When she protested, he allowed her to recede into privacy in the apartment. The old gangsters paid the couple’s rent anyway, and most of the younger brother’s detective work was on their behalf. The woman from Nantucket didn’t like what passed for detective work in Brooklyn. She wished he genuinely ran a car service. Their married life was chilly and glancing, full of unexplained absences and omissions, no walk on the beach. In time she began to understand that there were other women, too, old high-school girlfriends and distant cousins who’d never left the neighborhood and never really been very far from the younger brother’s bed either.

  The woman from Nantucket survived, found occasional lovers herself, and spent most of her days in the movie theaters on Court and Henry streets, shopping in Brooklyn Heights, drinking in the hotel lobbies there and then taking slow walks on the Promenade, where she fended off an endless series of advances from college boys and lunch-hour husbands, spent her days any way except musing on the serene rural life she’d left behind in Maine, the faint uncontroversial satisfactions she’d known before she’d met the two brothers and been taken to Brooklyn.

  One day the younger brother told his wife a dire secret, which she had to be sure to keep from leaking to anyone in Brooklyn, lest it reach the ears of the gangsters: The older brother had returned to New York City. He’d declared himself a roshi, an elder teacher of Zen, and started a Zendo on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, in Yorkville. This Yorkville Zendo was subsidized by a powerful group of Japanese businessmen he’d met in Maine, where they’d taken over and renovated top to bottom the homely Zen center and the lobster pound next door: the Fujisaki Corporation.

  The men of Fujisaki were highly spiritual, but had found themselves in disrepute in their native country, where monkhood is reserved only for those born into certain esteemed bloodlines, and where capitalistic rapaciousness and spiritu
al devotion are viewed as mutually exclusive. Money and power, it seemed, couldn’t buy Fujisaki the precise sort of respect its members craved at home. Here, first in Maine, now in New York City, they would make themselves credible as penitents and teachers, men of wisdom and peace. In the process, as the older brother explained to the younger, the younger then to his wife, the men of Fujisaki and the older brother hoped to do a little “business.” New York City: land of opportunity for monks and crooks and mooks alike.

  We stood at the rail at the sea edge of the lighthouse tfaint unclooking out. The wind was still strong, but I was used to it now. I had my collar up, the way Frank Minna would. The sky out past the island was gray and uninspiring, but there was a nice line of light where it met the water, an edge I could work with my eyes like a seam of stitching between my fingers. The birds harassed the foam below, looking for urchin, perhaps, or discarded hot-dog ends among the rocks.

  I had Tony’s gun in my jacket, and from this vantage we could see for miles down Route 1 in both directions should anyone approach. I had a strong urge to protect Julia, to hold her or cover her with my presence, so as to feel that I’d helped someone safely through besides myself. But I doubted that the Fujisaki Corporation cared about me or Julia directly. She and I each had been part of Gerard Minna’s problem, not Fujisaki’s. And Julia showed no interest in my protective urges.

  “I know what happened next,” I told her. “Eventually the brothers dipped into the till again. Frank got involved in a scam to siphon money away from Fujisaki’s management company.” That part of what Gerard told me wasn’t a lie, I understood now, just an artfully mangled version of the truth. Gerard had been leaving himself out of it, playing the Zen innocent, when in fact he was the wheel’s hub. “With a bookkeeper named—Dullbody, Allmoney, Alimony—ah, a guy named Ullman.”