Jonathan Lethem - Motherless Brooklyn

“I don’t see him,” said Coney.

“Just wait. He’ll come out, with some other guys probably.” Probably, gobbledy . I lifted one of the headphones to my right ear. No voices, nothing but clunking sounds, maybe the stairs.

“What if they get into a car behind us?” said Coney.

“It’s a one-way street,” I said, annoyed, but glancing backward at this cue to survey the parked cars behind us. “Just let them pass.”

“Hey,” said Coney.

They’d appeared, slipping out the door and rushing ahead of us on the sidewalk while I’d turned: Minna and another man, a giant in a black coat. The other man was seven feet tall if he was an inch, with shoulders that looked as though football pads or angel wings were hidden under his coat. Or perhaps the petite short-haired girl was curled under there, clutching the tall man’s shoulders like a human backpack. Was this giant the man who’d spoken so insinuatingly? Minna hurried ahead of the giant, as if he were motivated to give us the slip instead of dragging his heels to keep us in the game. Why? A gun in his back? The giant’s hands were hidden in his pockets. For some reason I envisioned them gripping loaves of bread or large chunks of salami, snacks hidden in the coat to feed a giant in winter, comfort food.

Or maybe this fantasy was merely my own self-comfort: a loaf of bread couldn’t be a gun, which allotted Minna the only firearm in the scenario.

We watched stupidly as they crossed between two parked cars and slid into the backseat of a black K-car that had rolled up from behind us in the street, then immediately took off. Overanxious as we were, Coney and I had at some level timed our reactions to allow for their starting a parked car, and now they were getting away. “Go!” I said.

Coney swerved to pull the Lincoln out of our spot, batted bumpers, hard enough to dent. Of course we were locked in. He backed, more gently thumped the rear end, then found an arc sufficient to free us from the space, but not before a cab had rocketed past us to block the way. The K-car tucked around the corner up ahead, onto Second Avenue. “Go!”

“Look,” said Coney, pointing at the cab. “I’m going. Keep your eyes up.”

“Eyes up?” I said. “Eyes out. Chin up.” Correcting him was an involuntary response to stress.

“Yeah, that too.”

“Eyes open, eyes on the road, ears glued to the radio-” I suddenly had to list every workable possibility. That was how irritating eyes up had been.

“Yeah, and trap buttoned,” said Coney. He got us right on the tail of the cab, better than nothing since it was moving fast. “What about gluing your ears to Frank while you’re at it?”

I raised the headphones. Nothing but an overlay of traffic sounds to substitute for the ones I’d blotted out. Coney followed the cab onto Second Avenue, where the K-car obligingly waited in a thicket of cabs and other traffic for the light to change. We were back in the game, a notion exhilarating and yet pathetic by definition, since we’d lost them in the space of a block.

We merged left to pull around the first cab and into position behind another in the same lane as the car containing Minna and the giant. I watch the timed stoplights a half mile ahead turn red. Now there, I thought, was a job for someone with obsessive-compulsive symptoms-traffic management. Then our light turned green and we lurched all together, a floating quilt of black- and dun-colored private cars and the bright-orange cabs, through the intersection.

“Get closer,” I said, pulling the phones from my ears again. Then an awesome tic wrenched its way out of my chest: “Eat me Mister Dicky-weed!”

This got even Gilbert’s attention. “Mister Dicky-weed?” As the lights turned green in sequence for us the cabs threaded audaciously back and forth, seeking advantage, but the truth was the lights were timed for twenty-five-mile-an-hour traffic, and there wasn’t any advantage to be gained. The still-unseen driver of the K-car was as impatient as a cabbie, and moved up to the front of the pack, but the timed lights kept us all honest, at least until they turned a corner. We remained stuck a car back. This was a chase Coney could handle, so far.

I was another story.

“Sinister mystery weed,” I said, trying to find words that would ease the compulsion. It was as if my brain were inspired, trying to generate a really original new tic. Tourette’s muse was with me. Rotten timing. Stress generally aggravated tics, but when I was engaged in a task the concentration kept me tic-free. I should have done the driving, I now realized. This chase was all stress and no place for it to go.

“Disturbed visitor week. Sisturbed.”

“Yeah, I’m getting a little sisturbed myself,” said Coney absently as he jockeyed for an open spot in the lane to the right.

“Fister-” I sputtered.

“Spare me,” groused Coney as he got us directly behind the K-car at last. I leaned forward to make out what I could of the interior. Three heads. Minna and the giant in the backseat, and a driver. Minna was facing straight ahead, and so was the giant. I picked up the headphones to check, but I’d guessed right: no talk. Somebody knew what they were doing and where they were going, and that somebody wasn’t even remotely us.

At Fifty-ninth Street we hit the end of the cycle of green lights, as well as the usual unpleasantness around the entrance to the Queensborough bridge. The pack slowed, resigning itself to the wait through another red. Coney sagged back so we wouldn’t too obvious pulling in behind them for the wait, and another cab slipped in ahead of us. Then the K-car shot off through the fresh red, barely missing the surge of traffic coming across Fifty-eighth.

“Shit!”

“Shit!”

Coney and I both almost bounced out of our skins. We were wedged in, unable to follow and brave the stream of crosstown traffic if we’d wanted to try. It felt like a straitjacket. It felt like our fate overtaking us, Minna’s losers, failing him again. Fuckups fucking up because that’s what fuckups do. But the K-car hit another mass of vehicular stuff parked in front of the next red and stayed in sight a block ahead. The traffic was broken into chunks. We’d gotten lucky for a minute, but a minute only.

I watched, frantic. Their red, our red, my eyes flicked back and forth. I heard Coney’s breath, and my own, like horses at the gate-our adrenalinated bodies imagined they could make up the difference of the block. If we weren’t careful, at the sight of the light changing we’d pound our two foreheads through the windshield.

Our red did change, but so did theirs, and, infuriatingly, their vehicular mass surged forward while ours crawled. That mass was our hope-they were at the tail end of theirs, and if it stayed densely enough packed, they wouldn’t get too far away. We were almost at the front of ours. I slapped the glove-compartment door six times. Coney accelerated impulsively and tapped the cab in front of us, but not hard. We veered to the side and I saw a silver scrape in the yellow paint of the cab’s bumper. “Fuck it, keep going,” I said. The cabbie seemed to have the same idea anyway. We all screeched across Fifty-ninth, a madcap rodeo of cabs and cars, racing to defy the immutable law of timed stoplights. Our bunch splayed and caught up with the rear end of their splaying bunch and the two blended, like video spaceships on some antic screen. The K-car aggressively threaded lanes. We threaded after them, making no attempt to disguise our pursuit now. Blocks flew past.

“Turning!” I shouted. “Get over!” I gripped the door handle as Coney, getting fully into the spirit of things, bent topological probability in moving us across three crowded lanes full of shrieking bald rubber and cringing chrome. Now my tics were quieted-stress was one thing, animal fear another. As when an airplane lands shakily, and all on board concentrate every gram of their will to stabilize the craft, the task of imagining I controlled things I didn’t (in this case wheel, traffic, Coney, gravity, friction, etc.), imagining it with every fiber of my being-that was engagement enough for me at the moment. My Tourette’s was overwhelmed.