WALKS INTO
Context is everything. Dress me up and see. I’m a carnival barker, an auctioneer, a downtown performance artist, a speaker in tongues, a senator drunk on filibuster. I’ve got Tourette’s. My mouth won’t quit, though mostly I whisper or subvocalize like I’m reading aloud, my Adam’s apple bobbing, jaw muscle beating like a miniature heart under my cheek, the noise suppressed, the words escaping silently, mere ghostf themselves, husks empty of breath and tone. (If I were a Dick Tracy villain, I’d have to be Mumbles.) In this diminished form the words rush out of the cornucopia of my brain to course over the surface of the world, tickling reality like fingers on piano keys. Caressing, nudging. They’re an invisible army on a peacekeeping mission, a peaceable horde. They mean no harm. They placate, interpret, massage. Everywhere they’re smoothing down imperfections, putting hairs in place, putting ducks in a row, replacing divots. Counting and polishing the silver. Patting old ladies gently on the behind, eliciting a giggle. Only—here’s the rub—when they find too much perfection, when the surface is already buffed smooth, the ducks already orderly, the old ladies complacent, then my little army rebels, breaks into the stores. Reality needs a prick here and there, the carpet needs a flaw. My words begin plucking at threads nervously, seeking purchase, a weak point, a vulnerable ear. That’s when it comes, the urge to shout in the church, the nursery, the crowded movie house. It’s an itch at first. Inconsequential. But that itch is soon a torrent behind a straining dam. Noah’s flood. That itch is my whole life. Here it comes now. Cover your ears. Build an ark.
“Eat me!” I scream.
“Maufishful,” said Gilbert Coney in response to my outburst, not even turning his head. I could barely make out the words—“My mouth is full”—both truthful and a joke, lame. Accustomed to my verbal ticcing, he didn’t usually bother to comment. Now he nudged the bag of White Castles in my direction on the car seat, crinkling the paper. “Stuffinyahole.”
Coney didn’t rate any special consideration from me. “Eatmeeatmeeatme,” I shrieked again, letting off more of the pressure in my head. Then I was able to concentrate. I helped myself to one of the tiny burgers. Unwrapping it, I lifted the top of the bun to examine the grid of holes in the patty, the slime of glistening cubed onions. This was another compulsion. I always had to look inside a White Castle, to appreciate the contrast of machine-tooled burger and nubbin of fried goo. Kaos and Control. Then I did more or less as Gilbert had suggested—pushed it into my mouth whole. The ancient slogan Buy ’em by the sack humming deep in my head, jaw working to grind the slider into swallowable chunks, I turned back to stare out the window at the house.
Food really mellows me out.
We were putting a stakeout on 109 East Eighty-fourth Street, a lone town house pinned between giant doorman apartment buildings, in and out of the foyers of which bicycle deliverymen with bags of hot Chinese flitted like tired moths in the fading November light. It was dinner hour in Yorktown. Gilbert Coney and I had done our part to join the feast, detouring up into Spanish Harlem for the burgers. There’s only one White Castle left in Manhattan, on East 103rd. It’s not as good as some of the suburban outlets. You can’t watch them prepare your order anymore, and to tell the truth I’ve begun to wonder if they’re microwaving the buns instead of steaming them. Alas. Taking our boodle of thusly compromised sliders and fries back downtown, we double-parked in front of the target address until a spot opened up. It only took a couple of minutes, though by that time the doormen on either side had made us—made us as out-of-place and nosy anyway. We were driving the Lincoln, whe didn’t have the “T”-series license plates or stickers or anything else to identify it as a Car Service vehicle. And we were large men, me and Gilbert. They probably thought we were cops. It didn’t matter. We chowed and watched.
Not that we knew what we were doing there. Minna had sent us without saying why, which was usual enough, even if the address wasn’t. Minna Agency errands mostly stuck us in Brooklyn, rarely far from Court Street, in fact. Carroll Gardens and Cobble Hill together made a crisscrossed game board of Frank Minna’s alliances and enmities, and me and Gil Coney and the other Agency Men were the markers—like Monopoly pieces, I sometimes thought, tin automobiles or terriers (not top hats, surely)—to be moved around that game board. Here on the Upper East Side we were off our customary map, Automobile and Terrier in Candyland—or maybe in the study with Colonel Mustard.
“What’s that sign?” said Coney. He pointed with his glistening chin at the town house doorway. I looked.
“ ‘Yorkville Zendo,’ ” I read off the bronze plaque on the door, and my fevered brain processed the words and settled with interest on the odd one. “Eat me Zendo!” I muttered through clenched teeth.
Gilbert took it, rightly, as my way of puzzling over the unfamiliarity. “Yeah, what’s that Zendo? What’s that?”
“Maybe like Zen,” I said.
“I don’t know from that.”
“Zen like Buddhism,” I said. “Zen master, you know.”
“Zen master?”
“You know, like kung-fu master.”
“Hrrph,” said Coney.
And so after this brief turn at investigation we settled back into our complacent chewing. Of course after any talk my brain was busy with at least some low-level version of echolalia salad: Don’t know from Zendo, Ken-like Zung Fu, Feng Shui master, Fungo bastard, Zen masturbation, Eat me! But it didn’t require voicing, not now, not with White Castles to unscrew, inspect and devour. I was on my third. I fit it into my mouth, then glanced up at the doorway of One-oh-nine, jerking my head as if the building had been sneaking up on me. Coney and the other Minna Agency operatives loved doing stakeouts with me, since my compulsiveness forced me to eyeball the site or mark in question every thirty seconds or so, thereby saving them the trouble of swiveling their necks. A similar logic explained my popularity at wiretap parties—give me a key list of trigger words to listen for in a conversation and I’d think about nothing else, nearly jumping out of my clothes at hearing the slightest hint of one, while the same task invariably drew anyone else toward blissful sleep.
While I chewed on number three and monitored the uneventful Yorkville Zendo entrance my hands busily frisked the paper sack of Castles, counting to be sure I had three remaining. We’d purchased a bag of twelve, and not only did Coney know I had to have my six, he also knew he was pleasing me, tickling my Touretter2019;s obsessive-compulsive instincts, by matching my number with his own. Gilbert Coney was a big lug with a heart of gold, I guess. Or maybe he was just trainable. My tics and obsessions kept the other Minna Men amused, but also wore them out, made them weirdly compliant and complicit.
A woman turned from the sidewalk onto the stoop of the town house and went up to the door. Short dark hair, squarish glasses, that was all I saw before her back was to us. She wore a pea coat. Sworls of black hair at her neck, under the boyish haircut. Twenty-five maybe, or maybe eighteen.
“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.
“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.
“Frank,” came a voice over the wire.
“I came,” said Minna wearily. “But I shouldn’t have to. You should clear up crap on your end.”
“I appreciate that,” went the other voice. “But things have gotten complicated.”
“They know about the contract for the building,” said Minna.
“No, I don’t think so.” The voice was weirdly calm, placating. Did I recognize it? Perhaps not that so much as the rhythm of Minna’s replies—this was someone he knew well, but who?
“Come inside, let’s talk,” said the voice.
“What about?” said Minna. “What do we have to talk about?”
“Listen to yourself, Frank.”
“I came here to listen to myself? I can do that at home.”
“But do you, in fact?” I could hear a smile in the voice. “Not as often, or as deeply as you might, I suspect.”
“Where’s Ullman?” said Minna. “You got him here?” “Ullman’s downtown. You’ll go to him.”
“Fuck.”
“Patience.”
“You say patience, I say fuck.”
“Characteristic, I suppose.”
“Yeah. So let’s call the whole thing off.”
More muffled footsteps, a door closing. A clunk, possibly a bottle and glass, a poured drink. Wine. I wouldn’t have minded a beverage myself. I chewed on a Castle instead and gazed out the windshield, brain going Characteristic autistic mystic my tic dipstick dickweek and then I thought to take another note, flipped open the notebook and under WOMAN, HAIR, GLASSES wrote ULLMAN DOWNTOWN, thought Dull Man Out of Town. When I swallowed the burger, my jaw and throat tightened, and I braced for an unavoidable copralalic tic—out loud, though no one was there to hear it. “Eat shit, Bailey!”
Bailey was a name embedded in my Tourette’s brain, though I couldn’t say why. I’d never known a Bailey. Maybe Bailey was everyman, like George Bailey in It’s a Wonderful Life. My imaginary listener, he had to bear the brunt of a majority of my solitary swearing—some part of me required a target, apparently. If a Touretter curses in the woods and there’s nobody to hear does he make a sound? Bailey seemed to be my solution to that conundrum.
“Your face betrays you, Frank. You’d like to murder someone.”
“You’d do fine for a start.”
“You shouldn’t blame me, Frank, if you’ve lost control of her.”
“It’s your fault if she misses her Rama-lama-ding-dong.
You’re the one who filled her head with that crap.”
“Here, try this.” (Offering a drink?)
“Not on an empty stomach.”
“Alas. I forget how you suffer, Frank.”
“Eat shit, Bailey!” The tics were always worst when I was nervous, stress kindling my Tourette’s. And something in this scenario was making me nervous. The conversation I overheard was too knowing, the references all polished and opaque, as though years of dealings lay underneath every word.
Also, where was the short-dark-haired girl? In the room with Minna and his supercilious conversational partner, silent? Or somewhere else entirely? My inability to visualize the interior space of One-oh-nine was agitating. Was the girl the “she” they were discussing? It seemed unlikely.
And what was her Rama-lama-ding-dong? I didn’t have the luxury of worrying about it. I pushed away a host of tics and tried not to dwell on things I didn’t understand.
I glanced at the door. Presumably Coney was still behind it. I wanted to hear not if my life depended on it so we could rush the stairs.
I was startled by a knock on the driver’s window. It was the doorman who’d been watching. He gestured for me to roll down the window. I shook my head, he nodded his. Finally I complied, pulling the headphones off one ear so I could listen.
“What?” I said, triply distracted—the power window had seduced my magpie mind and now demanded purposeless raising and lowering. I tried to keep it subtle.
“Your friend, he wants you,” said the doorman, gesturing back toward his building.
“What?” This was thoroughly confusing. I craned my neck to see past him, but there was nobody visible in the doorway of his building. Meanwhile, Minna was saying something over the wire. But not bathroom or depended on it.
“Your friend,” the doorman repeated in his clumsy Eastern European accent, maybe Polish or Czech. “He asks for you.” He grinned, enjoying my bewilderment. I felt myself knitting my brow exaggeratedly, a tic, and wanted to tell him to wipe the grin off his face: Everything he was seeing was not to his credit.
“What friend?” I said. Minna and Coney were both inside—I would have noticed if the Zendo door had budged
“He said if you’re waiting, he’s ready,” said the doorman, nodding, gesturing again. “Wants to talk.”
Now Minna was saying something about “… make a mess on the marble floor …”
“I think you’ve got the wrong guy,” I said to the doorman. “Dickweed!” I winced, waved him off, tried to focus on the voices coming over the headphones.
“Hey, hey,” the doorman said. He held up his hands. “I’m just bringing you a message, friend.”
I zipped down the power window again, finally pried my fingers away. “No problem,” I said, and suppressed another dickweed into a high, chihuahuaesque barking sound, something like yipke! “But I can’t leave the car. Tell my friend if he wants to talk to come out and talk to me here. Okay, friend?” It seemed to me I had too many friends all of a sudden, and I didn’t know any of their names. I repeated my impulsive flapping motion with my hand, an expedient tic-and-gesture combo, trying to nudge this buffoon back to his doorway.
“No, no. He said come in.”
“… break an arm …” I thought I heard Minna say.
“Get his name, then,” I said, desperate. “Come back and tell me his name.”
“He wants to talk to you.”
“Okay, eatmedoorman, tell him I’ll be right there.” I powered up the window in his face. He tapped again, and I ignored him.
“… first let me use your toilet …”
I opened the car door and pushed the doorman out of the way, went to the Zendo door and knocked, six times, hard. “Coney,” I hissed. “Get out here.”
Over the headset I heard Minna shut the bathroom door behind him, begin running water. “Hope you heard that, Freakshow,” he whispered into his microphone, addressing me directly. “We’re getting in a car. Don’t lose us. Play it cool.”
Coney popped out of the door.
“He’s coming out,” I said, pulling the headphones down around my neck.
“Okay,” said Coney, eyes wide. We were in the thick of the action, for once.
“You drive,” I said, touching my fingertip to his nose. He flinched me away like a fly. We hustled into the car, and Coney revved the engine. I threw the bag of cooling Castles and paper wreckage into the backseat. The idiot doorman had vanished into his building. I put him out of my mind for the moment.
We sat facing forward, our car shrouded in its own sam, waiting, vibrating. My brain went Follow that car! Hollywood star! When you wish upon a cigar! My jaw worked, chewing the words back down, keeping silent. Gilbert’s hands gripped the wheel, mine drummed quietly in my lap, tiny hummingbird motions.
This was what passed for playing it cool around here.
“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.
“Thirty-sixth,” said Coney as we rattled down the side street.
“What’s that mean?”
“I dunno. Something.”
“Midtown Tunnel. Queens.”
There was something comforting about this. The giant and his driver were moving onto our turf, more or less. The boroughs. Not quite Brooklyn, but it would do. We bumped along with the thickening traffic into the two dense lanes of the tunnel, the K-car safe tied up two cars ahead of us, its windows now black and glossy with reflections from the strips of lighting that laced the stained tile artery. I relaxed a bit, quit holding my breath, and squeaked out a teeth-clenched, Joker-grimacing eat me just because I could.
“Toll,” said Coney.
“What?”
“There’s a toll. On the Queens side.”
I started digging in my pockets. “How much?”
“Three-fifty, I think.”
I’d just put it together, miraculously, three bills, a quarter, a dime and three nickels, when the tunnel finished and the two lanes branched out to meet the six or seven toll booths. I balled the fare and held it out to Coney in a fist. “Don’t get stuck behind them,” I said. “Get a fast lane. Cut someone off.”
“Yeah.” Coney squinted through the windshield, trying to work an angle. As he edged to the right the K-car suddenly cut out of the flow, moving to the far left.
We both stared for a moment.
“Whuzzat?” said Coney.
“E-Z Pass,” I said. “They’ve got an E-Z Pass.”
The K-car slid into the empty E-Z Pass lane, and right through the booth. Meanwhile Coney had landed us third in line for EXACT CHANGE OR TOKEN.
“Follow them!” I said.
“I’m trying,” said Coney, plainly dazed by this turn of events. “Get over to the left!” I said. “Go through!”
“We don’t got an E-Z Pass.” Coney grinned painfully, displaying his special talent for rapid reversion to a childlike state.
“I don’t care!”
“But we—”
I started to pry at the wheel in Coney’s hands, to try and push us to the left, but it was too late by now. The spot before us opened, and Coney eased the car into place, then rolled down his window. I plopped the fare into his open palm, and he passed it over.
Pulling out of the tunnel to the right, we were suddenly in Queens, facing a tangle of indifferent streets: Vernon Boulevard, Jackson Avenue, Fifty-second Avenue. Et cetera.
The K-car was gone.
“Pull over,” I said.
Chagrined, Coney parked us on Jackson. It was perfectly dark now, though it was only seven. The lights of the Empire State and the Chrysler loomed across the river. Cars whirred past us out of the tunnel, toward the entrance to the Long Island Expressway, mocking us in their easy purposefulness. With Minna lose were nobodies, nowhere. “Eatmepass!” I said.
“They could of just been losing us,” said Coney. “I’d say they were, yes.”
“No, listen,” he said feebly. “Maybe they turned around and went back to Manhattan. Maybe we could catch them—”
“Shhh.” I listened to the earphones. “If Frank sees we’re off his tail, he might say something.”
But there was nothing to hear. The sounds of driving. Minna and the giant were sitting in perfect silence. Now I couldn’t believe that the man in the Zendo was the same as the giant—that garrulous, pretentious voice I’d heard couldn’t have shut up this long, it seemed to me. It was surprising enough that Minna wasn’t chattering, making fun of something, pointing out landmarks. Was he scared? Afraid to let on he was miked? Did he think we were still with him? Why did he want us with him anyway?
I didn’t know anything.
I made six oinking sounds.
We sat waiting.
More.
“That’s the way of a big Polish lug, I guess,” said Minna. “Always gotta stay within sniffing distance of a pierogi.”
Then: “Urrhhf.” Like the giant had smashed him in the stomach. “Where’s Polish?” I asked Coney, lifting away one earphone.
“Wha?”
“Where around here’s Polish? Eat me pierogi lug!”
“I dunno. It’s all Polish to me.”
“Sunnyside? Woodside? Come on, Gilbert. Work with me. He’s somewhere Polish.”
“Where’d the Pope visit?” mused Coney. It sounded like the start of a joke, but I knew Coney. He couldn’t remember jokes. “That’s Polish, right? What’s it, uh, Greenpoint?”
“Greenpoint’s Brooklyn, Gilbert,” I said, before thinking. “We’re in Queens.” Then we both turned our heads like cartoon mice spotting a cat. The Pulaski Bridge. We were a few yards from the creek separating Queens and Brooklyn, specifically Greenpoint.
It was something to do anyway. “Go,” I said.
“Keep listening,” said Coney. “We can’t just drive around Greenpoint.”
We soared across the little bridge, into the mouth of Brooklyn.
“Which way, Lionel?” said Coney, as if he thought Minna were feeding me a constant stream of instructions. I shrugged, palms up toward the roof of the Lincoln. The gesture ticcified instantly, and I repeated ieight=”0emrug, palms flapped open, grimace. Coney ignored me, scanning the streets below for a sign of the K-car, driving as slow as he could down the Brooklyn side of the Pulaski’s slope.
Then I heard something. Car doors opening, slamming, the scuff of footsteps. Minna and the giant had reached their destination. I froze in mid-tic, concentrating.
“Harry Brainum Jr.,” said Minna in his mockingest tone. “I guess we’re gonna stop in for a quick installation, huh?”
Nothing from the giant. More steps.
Who was Harry Brainum Jr.?
Meanwhile we came off the lit bridge, where the notion of a borough laid out for us, comprehensive, had been briefly indulgeable. Down instead onto McGuinness Boulevard, where at street level the dark industrial buildings were featureless and discouraging. Brooklyn is one big place, and this wasn’t our end of it.
“You know—if you can’t beat ’em, Brainum, right?” Minna went on in his needling voice. In the background I heard a car horn—they weren’t indoors yet. Just standing on the street somewhere, tantalizingly close.
Then I heard a thud, another exhalation. Minna had taken a second blow.
Then Minna again: “Hey, hey—” Some kind of struggle I couldn’t make out.
“Fucking—” said Minna, and then I heard him get hit again, lose his wind in a long, mournful sigh.
The scary thing about the giant was that he didn’t talk, didn’t even breathe heavy enough for me to hear.
“Harry Brainum Jr.,” I said to Coney. Then, afraid it sounded like a tic to him, I added, “Name mean anything to you, Gilbert?”
“Sorry?” he said slowly.
“Harry Brainum Jr.,” I repeated, furious with impatience. There were times when I felt like a bolt of static electricity communing with figures that moved through a sea of molasses.
“Sure,” he said, jerking his thumb in the direction of his window. “We just passed it.”
“What? Passed what?”
“It’s like a tool company or something. Big sign.” My breath caught. Minna was talking to us, guiding us. “Turn around.”
“What, back to Queens?”
“No, Brainum, wherever you saw that,” I said, wanting to strangle him. Or at least find his fast-forward button and push it. “They’re out of the car. Make a U-turn.”
“It’s just a block or two.”
“Well, go, then. Brain me, Junior!”/p>
Coney made the turn, and right away there it was. HARRY BRAINUM JR. INC. STEEL SHEETS., in giant circus-poster letters on the brick wall of a two-story plant that took up a whole block of McGuinness, just short of the bridge.
Seeing BRAINUM on the wall set off a whole clown parade of associations. I remembered mishearing Ringling Bros. Barnum & Bailey Circus as a child. Barnamum Bailey. Like Osmium, Cardamom, Brainium, Barnamum, Where’smymom: the periodic table of elements, the heavy metals. Barnamum Bailey might also be George and Eat Me Bailey’s older brother. Or were they all the same guy? Not now, I begged my Tourette’s self. Think about it later.
“Drive around the block,” I said to Coney. “He’s here somewhere.”
“Quit shouting,” he said. “I can hear you.”
“Shut up so I can hear,” I said.
“That’s all I said.”
“What?” I lifted an earphone.
“That’s all I said. Shut up.”
“Okay! Shut up! Drive! Eat me!”
“Fucking freakball.”
The block behind BRAINUM was dark and seemingly empty. The few parked cars didn’t include the K-car. The windowless brick warehouse was laced with fire escapes, wrought-iron cages that ran the length of the second floor and ended in a crumpled, unsafe-looking ladder. On the side street a smallish, graffitied Dumpster was tucked halfway into the shadow of double doorway. The doors behind were strapped with long exterior hinges, like a meat locker. One lid of the Dumpster was shut, the other open to allow some fluorescent bulbs sticking up. Street rubbish packed around the wheels made me think it hadn’t moved in a while, so I didn’t worry about the doors behind it. The other entrance was a roll-up gate on a truck-size loading dock, right out on the brightly lit boulevard. I figured I would have heard the gate sing if it had been raised.
The four stacks of the Newtown Creek Sewage Treatment Plant towered at the end of the street, underlit like ancient pylons in a gladiator movie. Fly an inflatable pig over and you’d have the sleeve of Pink Floyd’s Animals album. Beneath its shadow we crept in the Lincoln around all four corners of the block, seeing nothing.
“Damn it,” I said.
“You don’t hear him?”
“Street noise. Hey, hit the horn.”
“Why?”
“Do it.”
I concentrated on the earphones. Coney honked the Lincoln’s horn. Sure enough, it came through.
“Stop the car.” I was in a panic now. I got out onto the sidewalk, slammed the door. “Circle slow,” I said. “Keep an eye on me.”
“What’s the deal, Lionel?”
“He’s here.”
I paced the sidewalk, trying to feel the pulse of the blackened building, to take the measure of the desolate block. It was a place made out of leftover chunks of disappointment, unemployment and regret. I didn’t want to be here, didn’t want Minna to be here. Coney paced me in the Lincoln, staring dumbly out the driver’s window. I listened to the phones until I heard the approach of my own steps. My own heart beating made a polyrhythm, almost as loud. Then I found it. Minna’s wire had been torn from his shirt and lay tangled in a little heap on the curb of the side street, at the other end of the block from the Dumpster. I picked it up and pushed it into my pants pocket, then ripped the headphones off my neck. Feeling the grimness of the street close around me I began to half-run down the sidewalk toward the Dumpster, though I had to stop once and mimic my own retrieval of the wire: hurriedly kneel at the edge of the sidewalk, grab, stuff, remove phantom headphones, feel a duplicate thrill of panic at the discovery, resume jogging. It was cold now. The wind punched me and my nose oozed in response. I wiped it on my sleeve as I came up to the Dumpster.
“You jerks,” Minna moaned from inside.
I touched the rim of the Dumpster and my hand came away wet with blood. I pushed open the second lid, balanced it against the doorway. Minna was curled fetally in the garbage, his arms crossed around his stomach, sleeves covered in red.
“Jesus, Frank.”
“Wanna get me out of here?” He coughed, burbled, rolled his eyes at me. “Wanna give me a hand? I mean, no sooner than the muse strikes. Or possibly you ought to get out your brushes and canvas. I’ve never been in an oil painting.”
“Sorry, Frank.” I reached in just as Coney came up behind me and looked inside.
“Oh, shit,” he said.
“Help me,” I said to Coney. Together we pulled Minna up from the bottom of the Dumpster. Minna stayed curled around his wounded middle. We drew him over the lip and held him, together, out on the dark empty sidewalk, cradling him absurdly, our knees buckled toward one another’s, our shoulders pitched, like he was a giant baby Jesus in a bloody trench coat and we were each one of the Madonna’s tender arms. Minna groaned and chuckled, eyes squeezed shut, as we moved him to the backseat of the Lincoln. His blood made my fingers tacky on the door handle.
“Nearest hospital,” I breathed as we got into the front.
“I don’t know around here,” said Coney, whispering, too.
“Brooklyn Hospital,” said Minna from the b, surprisingly loud. “Take the BQE, straight up McGuinness. Brooklyn Hospital’s right off DeKalb. You boiled cabbageheads.”
We held our breath and stared forward until Coney got us going the right way, then I turned and looked in the back. Minna’s eyes were half open and his unshaven chin was wrinkled like he was thinking hard or sulking or trying not to cry. He saw me looking and winked. I barked twice—“yipke, yipke”—and winked back involuntarily.
“Fuck happened, Frank?” said Coney without taking his eyes off the road. We bumped and rattled over the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, rottenest surface in the boroughs. Like the G train, the BQE suffered from low self-esteem, never going into citadel Manhattan, never tasting the glory. And it was choked with forty- or fifty-wheel trucks, day and night.
“I’m dropping my wallet and watch back here,” said Minna, ignoring the question. “And my beeper. Don’t want them stolen at the hospital. Remember they’re back here.”
“Yeah, but what the fuck happened, Frank?”
“Leave you my gun but it’s gone,” said Minna. I watched him shuck off the watch, silver smeared with red.
“They took your gun? Frank, what happened?”
“Knife,” said Minna. “No biggie.”
“You’re gonna be all right?” Coney was asking and willing it at once.
“Oh, yeah. Great.”
“Sorry, Frank.”
“Who?” I said. “Who did this?”
Minna smiled. “You know what I want out of you, Freakshow? Tell me a joke. You got one you been saving, you must.”
Minna and I had been in a joke-telling contest since I was thirteen years old, primarily because he liked to see me try to get through without ticcing. It was rare that I could.
“Let me think,” I said.
“It’ll hurt him if he laughs,” said Coney to me. “Say one he knows already. Or one that ain’t funny.”
“Since when do I laugh?” said Minna. “Let him tell it. Couldn’t hurt worse than your driving.”
“Okay,” I said. “Guy walks into a bar.” I was watching blood pool on the backseat, at the same time trying to keep Minna from tracking my eyes.
“That’s the ticket,” rasped Minna. “Best jokes start the same fucking way, don’t they, Gilbert? The guy, the bar.”
“I guess,” said Coney.
“Funny already,” said Minna. “We’re already in the black here.”
“So guy walks into a bar,” I said again. “With an octopus. Says to the bartender ‘I’ll bet a hundred dollars this octopus can play any instrument in the place.’ ”
“Guy’s got an octopus. You like that, Gilbert?”
“Eh.”
“So the bartender points at the piano in the corner says, ‘Go ahead.’ Guy puts the octopus on the piano stool—Pianoctamus! Pianoctamum Bailey!—octopus flips up the lid, plays a few scales, then lays out a little étude on the piano.”
“Getting fancy,” said Minna. “Showing off a little.”
I didn’t ask him to specify, since if I had he’d surely have said he meant me and the octopus both, for the étude.
“So guys says ‘Pay up,’ bartender says ‘Wait a minute,’ pulls out a guitar. Guy gives the octopus the guitar, octopus tightens up the E-string, closes its eyes, plays a sweet little fandango on the guitar.” Pressure building up, I tagged Coney on the shoulder six times. He ignored me, driving hard, outracing trucks. “Guy says ‘Pay up,’ bartender says ‘Hold on, I think I’ve got something else around here,’ pulls a clarinet out of the back room. Octopus looks the thing over a couple of times, tightens the reed.”
“He’s milking it,” said Minna, again meaning us both.
“Well, the octopus isn’t good exactly, but he manages to squeak out a few bars on the clarinet. He isn’t going to win any awards, but he plays the thing. Clarinet Milk! Eat Me! Guy says ‘Pay up,’ the bartender says ‘Just wait one minute,’ goes in the back rummages around finally comes out with a bagpipes. Plops the bagpipes up on the bar. Guy brings the octopus over, plops the octopus up next to the bagpipes. Octapipes!” I paused to measure my wits, not wanting to tic out the punch line. Then I started again, afraid of losing the thread, of losing Minna. His eyes kept closing and opening again and I wanted them open. “Octopus looks the bagpipes over, reaches out lifts one pipe lets it drop. Lifts another lets it drop. Backs up, squints at the bagpipes. Guy gets nervous, comes over to the bar says to the octopus—Accupush! Reactapus!—says to the octopush, fuckit, says gonnafuckit—says ‘What’s the matter? Can’t you play it?’ And the octopus says ‘Play it? If I can figure out how to get its pajamas off, I’m gonna fuck it!’ ”
Minna’s eyes had been closed through the windup and he didn’t open them now. “You finished?” he said.
I didn’t speak. We circled the ramp off the BQE, onto DeKalb Avenue.
“Where’s the hospital?” said Minna, eyes still shut.
“We’re almost there,” said Coney. “I need help,ȁsaid Minna. “I’m dying back here.”
“You’re not dying,” I said.
“Before we get in the emergency room, you want to tell us who did this to you, Frank?” said Coney. Minna didn’t say anything.
“They stab you in the gut and throw you in the fucking garbage, Frank. You wanna tell us who?”
“Go up the ambulance ramp,” said Minna. “I need help back here. I don’t wanna wait in some goddamn walk-in emergency room. I need immediate help.”
“We can’t drive up the ambulance ramp, Frank.”
“What, you think you need an E-Z Pass, you stale meat loaf? Do what I said.”
I gritted my teeth while my brain went, Guy walks into the ambulance ramp stabs you in the goddamn emergency gut says I need an immediate stab in the garbage in the goddamn walk-in ambulance says just a minute looks in the back says I think I’ve got a stab in the goddamn walk-in immediate ambuloaf ambulamp octoloaf oafulope.
“Oafulope!” I screamed, tears in my eyes.
“Yeah,” said Minna, and now he laughed, then moaned. “A whole fucking herd of ’em.”
“Someone ought to put you both out of your misery,” muttered Coney as we hit the ambulance ramp behind Brooklyn Hospital, driving against the DO NOT ENTER signs, wheels squealing around a pitched curve to a spot alongside double swinging doors marked with yellow stencil EMS ONLY. Coney stopped. A Rastafarian in the costume of a private security guard was on us right away, tapping at Coney’s window. He had bundled dreadlocks pushing sideways out of his hat, chiba eyes, a stick where a gun should be, and an embroidered patch on his chest indicating his first name, Albert. Like a janitor’s uniform, or a mechanic’s. The jacket was too big for his broomstick frame.
Coney opened the door instead of rolling down the glass.
“Get this car out of here!” said Albert.
“Take a look in the back,” said Coney.
“Don’t care, mon. This for ambulances only. Get back in the car.”
“Tonight we’re an ambulance, Albert,” I said. “Get a stretcher for our friend.”
Minna looked terrible. Drained, literally, and when we got him out of the car you could see what of. The blood smelled like a thunderstorm coming, like ozone. Two college students dressed as doctors in green outfits with rubber-band sleeves took him away from us just inside the doors and laid him onto a rolling steel cart. Minna’s shirt was shreds, his middle a slush of itself, of himself. Coney went out and moved the car to quiet the security guard pulling on his arm while I followed Minna’s stretcher inside, against the weak protestsf the college students. I moved along keeping my eyes on his face and tapping his shoulder intermittently as though we were standing talking, in the Agency office perhaps, or just strolling down Court Street with two slices of pizza. Once they had Minna parked in a semiprivate zone in the emergency room, the students left me alone and concentrated on getting a line for blood into his arm.
His eyes opened. “Where’s Coney?” he said. His voice was like a withered balloon. If you didn’t know its shape when it was full of air it wouldn’t have sounded like anything at all.
“They might not let him back here,” I said. “I’m not supposed to be here myself.”
“Huhhr.”
“Coney—Eatme, yipke!—Coney kind of had a point,” I said. “You might want to tell us who, while we’re, you know, waiting around here.”
The students were working on his middle, peeling away cloth with long scissors. I turned my eyes away.
Minna smiled again. “I’ve got one for you,” he said. I leaned in to hear him. “Thought of it in the car. Octopus and Reactopus are sitting on a bench, a fence. Octopus falls off, who’s left?”
“Reactopus,” I said softly. “Frank, who did this?”
“You know that Jewish joke you told me? The one about the Jewish lady goes to Tibet, wants to see the High Lama?”
“Sure.”
“That’s a good one. What’s the name of that lama? You know, at the end, the punch line.”
“You mean Irving?”
“Yeah, right. Irving.” I could barely hear him now. “That’s who.” His eyes closed.
“You’re saying it was someone named—Dick! Weed!—Irving who did this to you? Is that the name of the big guy in the car? Irving?”
Minna whispered something that sounded like “remember.” The others in the room were making noise, barking out instructions to one another in their smug, technical dialect.
“Remember what?”
No answer.
“The name Irving? Or something else?”
Minna hadn’t heard me. A nurse pulled open his mouth and he didn’t protest, didn’t move at all. “Excuse me.”
It was a doctor. He was short, olive-skinned, stubbled, Indian or Pakistani, I guessed. He looked into my eyes. “You have to go now.”
“I can’t do that,” I said. I reached out and tagged his shoulder.
He didn’t flinch. “What’s your name?” he asked gently. Now I saw in his worn expression several thousand nights like this one.
“Lionel.” I gulped away an impulse to scream my last name.
“Tourette’s?”
“Yessrog.”
“Lionel, we’re going to do some emergency surgery here. You must go wait outside.” He nodded his head quickly to point the way. “They’ll be needing you to handle some papers for your friend.”
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.
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 elsewhere.” 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—”
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.”