Motherless Brooklyn Read online

  Acclaim for JONATHAN LETHEM’s

  MOTHERLESS BROOKLYN

  “Under the guise of a detective novel, Lethem has written a more piercing tale of investigation, one revealing how the mind drives on its own ‘wheels within wheels.’ ”

  –The New York Times Book Review

  “Who but Jonathan Lethem would attempt a half-satirical cross between a literary novel and a hard-boiled crime story narrated by an amateur detective with Tourette’s syndrome? … The dialogue crackles with caustic hilarity.… Jonathan Lethem is a verbal performance artist.”

  –The Boston Globe

  “Part detective novel and part literary fantasia, [Motherless Brooklyn] superbly balances beautiful writing and an engrossing plot.”

  –The Wall Street Journal

  “Intricately and satisfyingly plotted.… Funny and dizzying and heart-breaking.”

  –Luc Sante, Village Voice Literary Supplement

  “A tour de force.… With one unique and well-imagined character, Jonathan Lethem has turned a genre on its ear. He doesn’t just push the envelope, he gives it a swift kick.”

  –The Denver Post

  “Aside from being one of the most inventive writers on the planet, Lethem is also one of the funniest.”

  –San Francisco examiner & Chronicle

  “In Essrog.… Jonathan Lethem has fashioned a lovably strange man-child and filled his cross-wired mind with a brilliant, crashing, self-referential interior monologue that is at once laugh-out-loud funny, tender and in the honest service of a terrific story.”

  –The Washington Post Book World

  “A true risk-taker.… Lethem uses a familiar genre as the backdrop for his own artistic flourishes.”

  –The Hartford Courant

  “Wildly inventive.… Jonathan Lethem has a knack for pushing commonplace ideas to absurdly literal ends.”

  –City Pages

  “Marvelous.… Motherless Brooklyn is, among other things, a tale of orphans, a satire of Zen in the city and a murder mystery.”

  –Time Out New York

  “Finding out whodunit is interesting enough, but it’s more fun watching Lethem unravel the mysteries of his Tourettic creation.”

  –Time

  “Wonderfully inventive, slightly absurdist.… [Motherless Brooklyn] is funny and sly, clever, compelling and endearing.”

  –USA Today

  “Utterly original and deeply moving.”

  –Esquire

  “Motherless Brooklyn is a whodunit that’s serious fiction.… Lethem is a sort of Stanley Kubrick figure … stopping off in flat genres to do multidimensional work, blasting their hoary conventions to bits.”

  “A pure delight.”

  –The New York Observer

  “A detective story, a shrewd portrait of Brooklyn, a retold Oliver Twist and a story so baroquely voiced (the hero has Tourette’s syndrome) that Philip Marlowe would blush. And tip his fedora.”

  –Newsweek

  “Wildly imaginative.”

  –Minneapolis Star Tribune

  “Funny, delightfully complicated and so outrageously inventive that no pitch could do it justice.”

  –Baltimore Sun

  “A multi-layered novel that’s fast-paced, witty and touching.… Prose diatpunches its way down the page, every word loaded with energy and ready to explode.”

  –The Oregonian

  “Compulsively readable.… Genuinely entertaining.… Improbably hilarious.… Lethem is at his peak Nabokov-meets-Woody-Allen verbal frenzy.”

  –Bookforum

  “Most rewarding.… Delightfully oddball.”

  –The New Yorker

  “Motherless Brooklyn is Lethem’s finest work yet-exciting, strange, original, hilarious, human and soulful.”

  –The Memphis Commercial Appeal

  “A staggering piece of writing.… On the edge of genius.… The accents, class distinctions, highways, neighborhoods, grocery stores, flavors, scents and, yes, car services in a certain corner of [Brooklyn] are made vividly tangible, arising from these pages as if scratch-and-sniffs were embedded in the margins.”

  –San Jose Mercury News

  “Imagine the opportunities to explore language that arise when the narrator of a novel has Tourette’s syndrome.… Unforgettable.”

  –Los Angeles Times

  JONATHAN LETHEM

  MOTHERLESS BROOKLYN

  Jonathan Lethem is the author of six novels, including the bestsellers The Fortress of Solitude, which was a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice for one of the best books of 2003, and Motherless Brooklyn, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award and was named novel of the year by Esquire. His stories and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, Esquire, McSweeney’s, Tin House, The New York Times, the Paris Review, and a variety of other periodicals and anthologies. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, and in Maine.

  Books by JONATHAN LETHEM

  Men and Cartoons

  The Fortress of Solitude

  This Shape We’re In

  Motherless Brooklyn

  Girl in Landscape

  As She Climbed Across the Table

  The Wall of the Sty, the Wall of the Eye (Stories)

  Amnesia Moon

  Gun, with Occasional Music

  WITH CARTER SCHOLZ

  Kafka Americana

  AS EDITOR

  The Vintage Book of Amnesia

  The Yearest Music Writing 2002

  FIRST VINTAGE CONTEMPORARIES EDITION, OCTOBER 2000

  Copyright © 1999 by Jonathan Lethem

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 1999.

  Vintage is a registered trademark and Vintage Contemporaries and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the Doubleday edition as follows:

  Lethem, Jonathan.

  Motherless Brooklyn / by Jonathan Lethem.

  p. cm.

  I. Title.

  PS3562.E8544M68 1999

  813′.54-dc21 99-18194

  eISBN: 978-0-307-78912-9

  Authorphotograph © Mara Faye Lethem

  www.vintagebooks.com

  v3.1

  For my Father

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Author

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter 1 - Walks Into

  Chapter 2 - Motherless Brooklyn

  Chapter 3 - Interrogation Eyes

  Chapter 4 - Bad Cookies

  Chapter 5 - One Mind

  Chapter 6 - Auto Body

  Chapter 7 - Formerly Known

  Chapter 8 - Good Sandwiches

  Acknowledgments

  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, nudgin
g. 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 behi
nd 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.”