Jonathan Lethem - Motherless Brooklyn

“She’s going in,” said Coney.

“Look, she’s got a key,” I said.

“What’s Frank want us to do?”

“Just watch. Take a note. What time is it?”

Coney crumpled another Castle wrapper and pointed at the glove compartment. “You take a note. It’s six forty-five.”

I popped the compartment-the click-release of the plastic latch was a delicious hollow sound, which I knew I’d want to repeat, at least approximately-and found the small notebook inside. GIRL, I wrote, then crossed it out. WOMAN, HAIR, GLASSES, KEY. 6:45. The notes were to myself, since I only had to be able to report verbally to Minna. If that. For all we knew, he might want us out here to scare someone, or to wait for some delivery. I left the notebook beside the Castles on the seat between us and slapped the compartment door shut again, then delivered six redundant slaps to the same spot to ventilate my brain’s pressure by reproducing the hollow thump I’d liked. Six was a lucky number tonight, six burgers, six forty-five. So six slaps.

For me, counting and touching things and repeating words are all the same activity. Tourette’s is just one big lifetime of tag, really. The world (or my brain-same thing) appoints me it , again and again. So I tag back.

Can it do otherwise? If you’ve ever been it you know the answer.

“Boys” came the voice from the street side of the car, startling me and Coney both. “Frank,” I said.

It was Minna. He had his trench-coat collar up against the breeze, not quite cloaking his unshaven Robert-Ryan-in- Wild-Bunch grimace. He ducked down to the level of my window, as if he didn’t want to be seen from the Yorkville Zendo. Squeaky cabs rocking-horsed past over the pothole in the street behind him. I rolled down the window, then reached out compulsively and touched his left shoulder, a regular gesture he’d not bothered to acknowledge for-how long? Say, fifteen years now, since when I’d first begun manifesting the urge as a thirteen-year-old and reached out for his then twenty-five-year-old street punk’s bomber-jacketed shoulder. Fifteen years of taps and touches-if Frank Minna were a statue instead of flesh and blood I’ve have buffed that spot to a high shine, the way leagues of touri burnish the noses and toes of bronze martyrs in Italian churches.

“What you doing here?” said Coney. He knew it had to be important to not only get Minna up here, but on his own steam, when he could have had us swing by to pick him up somewhere. Something complicated was going on, and-surprise!-we stooges were out of the loop again.

I whispered inaudibly through narrowed lips, Stakeout, snakeout, ambush Zendo .

The Lords of Snakebush .

“Gimme a smoke,” said Minna. Coney leaned over me with a pack of Malls, one tapped out an inch or so for the boss to pluck. Minna put it in his mouth and lit it himself, pursing his brow in concentration, sheltering the lighter in the frame of his collar. He drew in, then gusted smoke into our airspace. “Okay, listen,” he said, as though we weren’t already hanging on his words. Minna Men to the bone.

“I’m going in,” he said, narrowing his eyes at the Zendo. “They’ll buzz me. I’ll swing the door wide. I want you”-he nodded at Coney-“to grab the door, get inside, just inside, and wait there, at the bottom of the stairs.”

“What if they come meet you?” said Coney.

“Worry about that if it happens,” said Minna curtly.

“Okay, but what if-”

Minna waved him off before he could finish. Really Coney was groping for comprehension of his role, but it wasn’t forthcoming.

“Lionel-” started Minna.

Lionel, my name. Frank and the Minna Men pronounced it to rhyme with vinyl. Lionel Essrog. Line-all .

Liable Guesscog.

Final Escrow.

Ironic Pissclam.

And so on.

My own name was the original verbal taffy, by now stretched to filament-thin threads that lay all over the floor of my echo-chamber skull. Slack, the flavor all chewed out of it.

“Here.” Minna dropped a radio monitor and headphones in my lap, then patted his rib pocket. “I’m wired. I’ll be coming over that thing live. Listen close. If I say, uh, ‘Not if my life depended on it,’ you get out of the car and knock on the door here, Gilbert lets you in, two of you rush upstairs and find me quick, okay?”

Eat me, dickweed was almost dislodged from my mouth in the excitement, but I breathed in sharply and swallowed the words, said nothing instead.

“We’re not carrying,” said Coney.

“What?” said Minna.

“A piece, I don’t have a piece.”

“What’s with piece? Say gun , Gilbert.”

“No gun, Frank.”

“That’s what I count on. That’s how I sleep at night, you have to know. You with no gun. I wouldn’t want you chuckleheads coming up a stairway behind me with a hairpin, with a harmonica, let alone a gun. I’ve got a gun. You just show up.”

“Sorry, Frank.”

“With an unlit cigar, with a fucking Buffalo chicken wing.”

“Sorry, Frank.”

“Just listen. If you hear me say, uh, ‘First I gotta use the bathroom,’ that means we’re coming out. You get Gilbert, get back in the car, get ready to follow. You got it?”

Get, get, get, GOT! said my brain. Duck, duck, duck, GOOSE!

“Life depended, rush the Zendo,” was what I said aloud. “Use the bathroom, start the car.”

“Genius, Freakshow,” said Minna. He pinched my cheek, then tossed his cigarette behind him into the street, where it tumbled, sparks scattering. His eyes were far away.

Coney got out of the car, and I scooted over to the driver’s seat. Minna thumped the hood once, as if patting a dog on its head after saying stay , then slipped past the front bumper, put his finger up to slow Coney, crossed the pavement to the door of One-oh-nine, and hit the doorbell under the Zendo sign. Coney leaned against the car, waiting. I put on the headphones, got a clear sound of Minna’s shoe scraping pavement over the wire so I knew it was working. When I looked up I saw the doorman from the big place to the right watching us, but he wasn’t doing anything apart from watching.

I heard the buzzer sound, live and over the wire both. Minna went in, sweeping the door wide. Coney skipped over, grabbed the door, and disappeared inside, too.

Footsteps upstairs, no voices yet. Now suddenly I dwelled in two worlds, eyes and quivering body in the driver’s seat of the Lincoln, watching from my parking spot the orderly street life of the Upper East Side, dog-walkers, deliverymen, girls and boys dressed as grownups in business suits shivering their way into gimmicky bars as the nightlife got under way, while my ears built a soundscape from the indoor echoes of Minna’s movement up the stair, still nobody meeting him but he seemed to know where he was, shoe leather chafing on wood, stairs squeaking, then a hesitation, a rustle of clothing perhaps, then two wooden clunks, and the footsteps resumed more quietly. Minna had taken off his shoes.

Ringing the doorbell, then sneaking in? It didn’t follow. But what in this sequence did follow? I palmed another Castle out of the paper sack-six burgers to restore order in a senseless world.