Jonathan Lethem - Motherless Brooklyn

I began to need to touch the doctor, to deliver small taps on either shoulder, in a pattern that was absolutely symmetrical. He stood for it, not pushing me away. I tugged his collar straight, matching the line to his salmon-colored T-shirt underneath, so that the same margin showed at either side of his neck.

Coney stood in deflated silence now, absorbing pain. We all stood waiting until I finally finished tucking and pinching the doctor’s collar into place.

“Sometimes there is nothing we can do,” said the doctor, eyes flicking to the floor now.

“Let me see him,” said Coney.

“That isn’t possible-”

“This place is full of crap,” said Coney. “Let me see him.”

“There is a question of evidence,” said the doctor wearily. “I’m sure you understand. The examiners will also wish to speak with you.”

I’d already seen police passing through from the hospital coffee shop, into some part of the emergency room. Whether those particular police were there to detain us or not, it was clear the law wouldn’t be long in arriving.

“We ought to go, Gilbert,” I told Coney. “Probably we ought to go right now.”

Coney was inert.

“Problyreallyoughttogo,” I said semicompulsively, panic rising through my sorrow.

“You misunderstand,” said the doctor. “We’ll ask you to wait, please. This man will show you where to go-” He nodded at something behind us. I whipped around, my lizard instincts shocked at having allowed someone to sneak up on me.

It was Albert. The Thin Rastafarian Line between us and departure. His appearance seemed to trigger comprehension in Coney: The security guard was a cartoon reminder of the real existence of police.

“Outta the way,” said Coney.

“We don’t serve string!” I explained.

Albert didn’t look any more convinced of his official status than we were. At moments like this I was reminded of the figure we Minna Men cut, oversize, undereducated, vibrant wostility even with tear streaks all over our beefy faces. And me with my utterances, lunges, and taps, my symptoms, those extra factors Minna adored throwing into the mix.

Frank Minna, unrevived, empty of blood in the next room.

Albert held his palms open, his body more or less pleading as he said, “You better wait, mon.”

“Nah,” said Coney. “Maybe another time.” Coney and I both leaned in Albert’s direction, really only shifting our weight, and he jumped backward, spreading his hands over the spot he’d vacated as if to say It was someone else standing there just now, not I .

“But this is a thing upon which we must insist,” said the doctor.

“You really don’t wanna insist,” said Coney, turning on him furiously. “You ain’t got the insistence required, you know what I mean?”

“I’m not sure I do,” said the doctor quietly.

“Well, just chew it over,” said Coney. “There’s no big hurry. C’mon, Lionel.”

I grew up in the library of St. Vincent’s Home for Boys, in the part of downtown Brooklyn no developer yet wishes to claim for some upscale, renovated neighborhood; not quite Brooklyn Heights, nor Cobble Hill, not even Boerum Hill. The Home is essentially set on the off-ramp to the Brooklyn Bridge, but out of sight of Manhattan or the bridge itself, on eight lanes of traffic lined with faceless, monolithic civil courts, which, gray and distant though they seemed, some of us Boys had seen the insides of, by Brooklyn’s central sorting annex for the post office, a building that hummed and blinked all through the night, its gates groaning open to admit trucks bearing mountains of those mysterious items called letters, by the Burton Trade School for Automechanics, where hardened students attempting to set their lives dully straight spilled out twice a day for sandwich-and-beer breaks, overwhelming the cramped bodega next door, intimidating passersby and thrilling us Boys in their morose thuggish glory, by a desolate strip of park benches beneath a granite bust of Lafayette, indicating his point of entry into the Battle of Brooklyn, by a car lot surrounded by a high fence topped with wide curls of barbed wire and wind-whipped fluorescent flags, and by a redbrick Quaker Meetinghouse that had presumably been there when the rest was farmland. In short, this jumble of stuff at the clotted entrance to the ancient, battered borough was officially Nowhere, a place strenuously ignored in passing through to Somewhere Else. Until rescued by Frank Minna I lived, as I said, in the library.

I set out to read every book in that tomblike library, every miserable dead donation ever indexed and forgotten there-a mark of my profound fear and boredom at St. Vincent’s and as well an early sign of my Tourettic compulsions for counting, processing, and inspection. Huddled there in the windowsill, turning dry pages and watching dust motes pinball through beams of sunlight, I sought signs of my odd dawning self in Theodore Dreiser, Kenneth Roberts, J. B. Priestley, and back issues of PopulMechanics and failed, couldn’t find the language of myself, as I failed to in watching television, those endless reruns of Bewitched and I Dream of Jeannie and I Love Lucy and Gilligan and Brady Bunch by which we nerdish unathletic Boys pounded our way through countless afternoons, leaning in close to the screen to study the antics of the women-women! exotic as letters, as phone calls, as forests, all things we orphans were denied-and the coping of their husbands, but I didn’t find myself there, Desi Arnaz and Dick York and Larry Hagman, those harried earthbound astronauts, weren’t showing me what I needed to see, weren’t helping me find the language. I was closer on Saturday mornings, Daffy Duck especially gave me something, if I could bear to imagine growing up a dynamited, beak-shattered duck. Art Carney on The Honeymooners gave me something too, something in the way he jerked his neck, when we were allowed to stay up late enough to see him. But it was Minna who brought me the language, Minna and Court Street that let me speak.

We four were selected that day because we were four of the five white boys at St. Vincent’s, and the fifth was Steven Grossman, fat as his name. If Steven had been thinner, Mr. Kassel would have left me in the stacks. As it was I was undersold goods, a twitcher and nose-picker retrieved from the library instead of the schoolyard, probably a retard of some type, certainly a regrettable, inferior offering. Mr. Kassel was a teacher at St. Vincent’s who knew Frank Minna from the neighborhood, and his invitation to Minna to borrow us for the afternoon was a first glimpse of the glittering halo of favors and favoritism that extended around Minna-“knowing somebody” as a life condition. Minna was our exact reverse, we who knew no one and benefited nothing from it when we did.

Minna had asked for white boys to suit his clients’ presumed prejudice-and his own certain ones. Perhaps Minna already had his fantasy of reclamation in mind, too. I can’t know. He certainly didn’t show it in the way he treated us that first day, a sweltering August weekday afternoon after classes, streets like black chewing gum, slow-creeping cars like badly projected science-class slides in the haze, as he opened the rear of his dented, graffitied van, about the size of those midnight mail trucks, and told us to get inside, then slammed and padlocked the doors without explanation, without asking our names. We four gaped at one another, giddy and astonished at this escape from our doldrums, not knowing what it meant, not really needing to know. The others, Tony, Gilbert and Danny, were willing to be grouped with me, to pretend I fit with them, if that was what it took to be plucked up by the outside world and seated in the dark on a dirty steel truck bed vibrating its way to somewhere that wasn’t St. Vincent’s. Of course I was vibrating too, vibrating before Minna rounded us up, vibrating inside always and straining to keep it from showing. I didn’t kiss the other three boys, but I wanted to. Instead I made a kissing, chirping sound, like a bird’s peep, over and over: “Chrip, chrip, chrip.”