Jonathan Lethem - Motherless Brooklyn

The huff of my own exhausted breath, pounding of blood in my ears, squall of a gull and shush of the surf below-all were overtaken by the squeal of the giant’s wheels: His Contour scaped into the restaurant lot just as I got my key into the ignition. His car barreled toward mine. The cliff was near enough that he might push me off. I revved into reverse and jerked my car backward out of his path and he skidded sideways to stop, nearly slamming into the nearest of the parked pickup trucks. I floored it and beat him back out of the lot, down onto Route 1, pointed south. The giant fell in right behind me. In my rearview I saw him bearing down, one hand on the wheel, the other gripping a gun.

Minna and Tony-I’d let them both be gently escorted to their quiet murderings. Mine looked to be a little noisier.

I screwed the steering wheel to the left, twitching myself off the highway toward the ferry dock. The giant wasn’t fooled. He hung right on my bumper, as if the red compact were as correspondingly huge as his body and could climb over or engulf my Tracer. I veered right and left, contacting the ragged edges of the paved road to the dock in some half-symbolic finger-wagging or shooing maneuver, trying to dislodge the giant from my tail, but he matched my every vehicular gesture, Contour on Tracer now. Pavement gave way to gravel and I ground braking and sliding to the right to avoid riding straight up onto the dock and into the water. Instead I steered for the ferry’s parking area, where Tony’s Pontiac still sat, where the gun he hadn’t gotten to use on the giant still waited under the driver’s seat.

Gottagettagun , screamed my brain, and my lips moved trying to keep up with the chant: Gottagettagun gottagettagun .

Gun Gun Gun Shoot!

I’d never fired a gun.

I broke through the entrance, snapping the flimsy gate back on its post. The giant’s car chewed on my bumper, the metal squeaking and sighing. Exactly how I would find breathing room enough to get out of my car and into Tony’s to lay hands on the gun remained to be seen. I curled past Tony’s car, to the left, opening a moment’s gap between me and my pursuer, and rode for the rock barrier. Shreds of the torn file still fluttered here and there in the wind. Maybe the giant would do me the favor of plummeting into the sea. Maybe he hadn’t gotten around to noticing it-since it was only the Atlantic it might not have been big enough to make an impression.

He caught me again as I turned the other way to avoid a swim myself, and veered with me around the outer perimeter of the lot. DON’T BACK UP! SEVERE TIRE DAMAGE! shouted the signs at the exit, warning of the one-way spikes meant to prevent free use of the lot. Well, I’d gotten around that one. The giant’s car made contact again, rammed me so we both slid off to the left, toward the exit, away from Tony’s car.

Suddenly inspired, I darted for the exit.

I hit the brake as hard as I could as I passed over the flexible spikes, came shrieking and skidding to a halt about a car’s length past the grate. The giant’s car smashed against my rear end so that my car was driven another couple of yards forward and I was slapped back against the seat, hard. I felt something in my neck click and tasted blood in my mouth.

The first blast was the giant’s air bag inflating. In my rearview I saw a white satin blob now filling the interior of the Contour.

The second blast was the giant’s gun firing as he panicked or his fingers clenched around the trigger in traumatic reflex. The glass of his windshield splintered. I don’t know where the shot went, but it found some target other than my body. I shifted into reverse and floored the gas pedal.

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.