Motherless Brooklyn

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.