Jonathan Lethem - Motherless Brooklyn

I stood stupefied, looking at Minna, wanting to tell him another joke, or hear one of his. Guy walks into -

A nurse was fitting a hinged plastic tube, like a giant Pez dispenser, into Minna’s mouth.

I walked out the way I’d come in and found the triage nurse. Thinking arbitrage, sabotage , I told her I was with Minna and she said she’d already spoken to Coney. She’d call out when she needed us, until then have a seat.

Coney sat crossed-legged and cross-armed with his chin clamped up angrily against the rest of his face, corduroy coat still buttoned, filling half of a kind of love seat with a narrow shelfload of splayed dingy magazines attached to it. I went and filled the other half. The waiting area was jammed with the sort of egalitarian cross-section only genuine misery can provide: Hispanics and blacks and Russians and various indeterminate, red-eyed teenage girls with children you prayed were siblings; junkie veterans petitioning for painkillers they wouldn’t get; a tired housewife comforting her brother as he carped in an unceasing stream about his blocked digestion, the bowel movement he hadn’t enjoyed for weeks; a terrified lover denied attendance, as I’d been, glaring viciously at the unimpressible triage nurse and the mute doors behind her; others guarded, defiant, daring you to puzzle at their distress, to guess on behalf of whom, themselves or another, they shared with you this miserable portion of their otherwise fine, pure and invulnerable lives.

I sat still for perhaps a minute and a half, tormented images of our chase and the Brainum Building and Minna’s wounds strobing in my skull, tics roiling in my throat.

“Walksinto,” I shouted.

A few people looked up, confused by my bit of ventriloquism. Had the nurse spoken? Could it have been a last name? Their own, perhaps, mispronounced?

“Don’t start now,” said Coney under his breath.

“Guywalks, walksinto, guywalksinto,” I said back to him helplessly.

“What, you telling a joke now?”

Very much in the grip, I modified the words into a growling sound, along the lines of “whrywhroffsinko,” -but the effort resulted in a side-tic: rapid eye blinks.

“Maybe you ought to stand outside, you know, like for a cigarette?” Poor dim Coney was just as much on edge as I was, obviously.

“Walks walks!”

Some stared, others looked away, bored. I’d been identified by the crowd as some sort of patient: spirit or animal possession, verbal epileptic seizure, whatever. I would presumably be given drugs and sent home. I wasn’t damaged or ailing enough to be interesting here, only distracting, and slightly reprehensible in a way that made them feel better about their own disorders, so my oddness was quickly and blithely incorporated into the atmosphere.

With one exception: Albert, who’d been nursing a grudge since our jaunt up the ambulance ramp and now stood inside to get away from the cold, perhaps also to keep a bloodshot eye on us. I’d given him his angle, since, unlike the others in the waiting room, he knew I wasn’t the patient in my party. He stepped over from where he’d been blowing on his hands and sulking in the doorway and pointed at me. “Yo, mon,” he said. “You can’t be like that in here.”

“Be like what?” I said, twisting my neck and croaking “Sothisguysays!” as an urgent follow-up, voice rising shrilly, like a comedian who can’t get his audience’s attention.

“Can’t be doing that shit,” he said. “Gotta take it else where.” He grinned at his own verbal flourish, openly pleased to provide this contrast to my lack of control.

“Mind your own business,” said Coney.

“Piece! Of! String!” I said, recalling another joke I hadn’t told Minna, also set in a bar. My heart sank. I wanted to barge in and begin reciting it to his doctors, to his white intubed face. “String! Walks! In!”

“What’s the matter with you, mon?”

“WEDON’TSERVESTRING!”

I was in trouble now. My Tourette’s brain had shackled itself to the string joke like an ecological terrorist to a tree-crushing bulldozer. If I didn’t find a way out I might download the whole joke one grunted or shrieked syllable after another. Looking for the escape hatch I began counting ceiling tiles and beating a rhythm on my knees as I counted. I saw I’d reattracted the room’s collective attention, too. This guy might be interesting after all .

Free Human Freakshow.

“He’s gotta condition,” said Coney to the guard. “So lay off.”

“Well, tell the mon he best stand up and walk his condition out of here,” said the guard. “Or I be calling in the armada, you understand?”

“You must be mistaken,” I said, in a calm voice now. “I’m not a piece of string.” The bargain had been struck, at a level beyond my control. The joke would be told. I was only a device for telling it.

“We stnd up we’re gonna lay a condition on your ass, Albert,” said Coney. “You unnerstand that?”

Albert didn’t speak. The whole room was watching, tuned to Channel Brooklyn.

“You gotta cigarette for us, Albert?” said Coney.

“Can’t smoke in here, mon,” said Albert softly.

“Now, that’s a good, sensible rule,” said Coney. “ ’Cause you got all these people in here that’s concerned about their health.”

Coney was occasionally a master of the intimidating non sequitur. He certainly had Albert stymied now.

“I’m a frayed knot,” I whispered. I began to want to grab at the nightstick in Albert’s holster-an old, familiar impulse to reach for things dangling from belts, like the bunches of keys worn by the teachers at St. Vincent’s Home for Boys. It seemed like a particularly rotten idea right now.

“Afraid of what?” said Albert, confused, though understanding the joke’s pun, in a faint way.

“Afrayedknot!” I repeated obligingly, then added, “Eatmestringjoke!” Albert glared, unsure what he’d been called, or how badly to be insulted.

“Mr. Coney,” called the triage nurse, breaking the stalemate. Coney and I both stood at once, still pathetically overcompensating for losing Minna in the chase. The short doctor had come out of the private room. He stood behind the triage nurse and nodded us over. As we brushed past Albert I indulged in a brief surreptitious fondling of his nightstick.

Half a fag , that’s what Minna used to call me.

“Ah, are either of you a relative of Mr. Minna’s?” The doctor’s accent rendered this as misdemeanors .

“Yes and no,” said Coney before I could answer. “We’re his immediates, so to speak.”

“Ah, I see,” said the doctor, though of course he didn’t. “Will you step this way with me-” He led us out of the waiting area, to another of the half-secluded rooms like the one where they’d wheeled Minna.

“I’mafrayed,” I said under my breath.

“I’m sorry,” said the doctor, standing oddly close to us, examining our eyes. “There was little we could do.”

“That’s okay, then,” said Coney, not hearing it right. “I’m sure whatever you can do is fine, since Frank didn’t need so much in the first place-”

“I’mafrayedknot.” I felt myself nearly choke, not on unspoken words for once but on rising gorge, White Castle-flavored bile. I swallowed it back so hard my ears popped. My whole face felt flushed with a mist of acids.

“Ahem. We were unable to revive misdemeanor.”

“Wait a minute,” said Coney. “You’re saying unable to revive?”

“Yes, that’s right. Loss of blood was the cause. I am sorry.”

“Unable to revive!” shouted Coney. “He was revived when we brought him in here! What kind of a place is this? He didn’t need to be revived, just patched up a little-”