Motherless Brooklyn

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.