Motherless Brooklyn

So many detectives have been knocked out and fallen into such strange swirling darknesses, such manifold surrealist voids (“something red wriggled like a germ under a microscope”-Philip Marlowe, The Big Sleep), and yet I have nothing to contribute to this painful tradition. Instead my falling and rising through obscurity was distinguished only by nothingness, by blankness, by lack and my resentment of it. Except for grains. It was a grainy nothing. A desert of grains. How fond can you be of flavorless grains in a desert? How much better than nothing at all? I’m from Brooklyn and I don’t like wide-open spaces, I guess. And I don’t want to die. So sue me.

Then I remembered a joke, a riddle like one the Garbage Cop would tell, and it was my lifeline, it sang like a chorus of ethereal voices beckoning me from the brink of darkness:

Why don’t you starve in the desert?

Because of the sand which is there.

Why didn’t I want to die or leave New York?

The sandwiches. I concentrated on the sandwiches. For a while that’s all there was, and I was happy. The sandwiches were so much better than the desert of grains.

“Lionel?”

It was Kimmery’s voice.

“Mhrrggh.”

“I brought your shoes.”

“Oooh.”

“I think we should go. Can you stand?”

“Rrrrssp.”

“Lean against the wall. Careful. I’ll get a cab.”

“Cabbabbab.”

I flickered awake again and we were slicing through the park, East Side to West, in that taxicab channel of tree-topped stone, my head on Kimmery’s bony shoulder. She was putting my shoes back on, lifting my leaden feet one after the other, then tying the laces. Her small hands and my large shoes made this an operation rather like saddling a comatose horse. I could see the cabbie’s license-his name was Omar Dahl, which invited tics I couldn’t muster in my state-and a view upward through the side window. For a moment I thought it was snowing and everything seemed precious and distant-Central Park in a snow globe. Then I realized it was snowing inside the cab, too. The grains again. I closed my eyes.

Kimmery’s apartment was on Seventy-eighth Street, in an old-lady apartment building, gloriously shabby and real after the gloss of the East Side, the chilling dystopian lobby of 1030 Park Avenue especially. I got upright and inhe elevator on my own steam, with only Kimmery to hold the doors for me, which was how I liked it-no doormen. We rode to the twenty-eighth floor in an empty car, and Kimmery leaned against me as if we were still in the cab. I didn’t need the support to stand anymore, but I didn’t stop it from happening. My head throbbed-where Pierogi Man had clubbed me, it felt as though I were trying to grow a single horn, and failing-and the contact with Kimmery was a kind of compensation. At her floor she parted from my side with that nervous quick walk I already considered her trademark, her confession of some kernel of jerkiness I could cultivate and adore, and unlocked the door to her place so frantically I wondered if she thought we’d been followed.

“Did the giant see you?” I said when we were inside.

“What?”

“The giant. Are you afraid of the giant?” I felt a body-memory, and shuddered. I was still a little unsteady on my pins, as Minna would have said.

She looked at me strangely. “No, I just-I’m an illegal sublet here. There are people in this building who can’t mind their own business. You should sit down. Do you want some water?”

“Sure.” I looked around. “Sit where?”

Her apartment consisted of a brief foyer, a minuscule kitchen-really more an astronaut’s cockpit full of cooking equipment-and a large central room whose polyurethaned floor mirrored the vast moonlit city nightscape featured in its long, uncurtained window. The reflected image was uninterrupted by carpet or furniture, just a few modest boxes tucked into the corners, a tiny boom box and a stack of tapes, and a large cat that stood in the center of the floor, regarding our entrance skeptically. The walls were bare. Kimmery’s bedding was a flattened mattress on the floor of the foyer where we stood now, just inside the apartment’s door. We were almost on top of it.

“Go ahead and sit on the bed,” she said, with a nervous half smile.

Beside the bed was a candle, a box of tissues, and a small stack of paperbacks. It was a private space, a headquarters. I wondered if she hosted much-I felt I might be the first to see past her door.

“Why don’t you sleep in there?” I said, pointing at the big empty room. My words came out thickened and stupid, like those of a defeated boxer in his dressing room, or a Method actor’s, while playing a defeated boxer. My Tourette’s brain preferred precision, sharper edges. I felt it waking.

“People look in,” said Kimmery. “I’m not comfortable.”

“You could have curtains.” I gestured at the big window.

“It’s too big. I don’t really like that room. I don’t know why.” Now she looked like she regretted bringing me here. “Sit. I’ll bring you some water.”