Motherless Brooklyn Read online

  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.

  “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 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.<
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  “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.”

  MOTHERLESS BROOKLYN

  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.