Motherless Brooklyn

“You mean like no apartment and no cat? How detached can you get?” My voice was irrationally bitter. Disappointment had crept over me, impossible to justify or perfectly define. I suppose I’d imagined us sheltered in Kimmery’s childlike foyer, her West Side tree house, three cats hiding. But now I understood that she was rootless, alienated in this space. The Oreo Man’s house was her home, or possibly the Zendo, just as L &L was mine, just as Shelf’s was elsewhere, too. None of us could go to those places, so we huddled here together, avoiding the big room and the forest of skyscrapers.

Now, before Kimmery could reply, I ticced loudly, “Detach-me-not!” I tried to block myself, interrupt my own ticcing with the glass of water, which I moved to my lips just in time to shout into the glass, fevering the surface of the water with my breath, “Go-shelf-a-lot!”

“Wow,” said Kimmery.

I didn’t speak. I gulped down water and fondled the stitching of her coverlet again, seeking to lose my Tourette’s self in texture. “You say really weird stuff when you get angry,” she said.

“I’m not-” I turned my neck, put the glass of water down on the floor. This time I jostled Shelf, who looked up at me with jaded eyes. “I’m not angry.”

“What’s wrong with you, then?” The question was delivered evenly, without sarcasm or fear, as though she really wanted an answer. Her eyes no longer looked small to me without the black frames around them. They felt as round and inquisitive as the cat’s.

“Nothing-at least from a Zen outlook. I just shout sometimes. And touch things. And count things. And think about them too much.”

“I’ve heard of that, I think.”

“You’re the exception to the rule if you have.”

She reached into my lap and patted Shelf’s head, distracting the cat from its interrogative gaze. Instead it squeezed its eyes together and craned its neck to press back against her palm. I’d have craned as far.

“Don’t you want to know Roshi’s real name?” I said. “Why should I?”

“What?”

“Unless you’re really going to shock me and say he’s, like, J. D. Salinger, what’s the difference? I mean, it’s just going to be Bob or Ed or something, right?”

“Gerard Minna,” I said. I wanted it to mean as much to her as Salinger, wanted her to understand everything. “He’s Frank Minna’s brother.”

“Okay, but who’s Frank Minna?”

“He’s the guy who got killed.” Strangely, I had a name for him now, a name flat and terrible and true: the guy who got killed. When before I could never have answered that question, or if I started answering it I’d never have finished. Frank Minna is the secret king of Court Street. Frank Minna is a mover and a talker, a word and a gesture, a detective and a fool. Frank Minna c’est moi.

“Oh, that’s terrible.”

“Yes.” I wondered if I could ever share with her how terrible it was. “I mean, that’s got to be one of the worst things I’ve ever heard, practically.”

Kimmery leaned closer, comforting the cat, not me. But I felt comforted. She and I were drawn close within her dawning understanding. Perhaps this foyer had only waited for this moment, for me and my story, to become a real space instead of a provisional one. Here Minna would be properly mourned. Here I’d find surcease for my pain and the answer to the puzzle of Tony and The Clients and why Minna and Ullman had to die and where Jua was and who Bailey was, and here Kimmery’s hand would move from Shelf’s head to my thigh and I would never tic again.

“He sent his brother out to die,” I said. “He set him up. I heard it happen. I just don’t know why yet.”

“I don’t understand. How did you hear?”

“Frank Minna was wearing a bug when he went into the Zendo. I heard him and Gerard talking. You were there too, in the building.” I recalled revising my surveillance note, trying to decide whether to declare Kimmery girl or woman, and my writing hand twitched, reenacting my crossing-out across the soft threads of her coverlet.

“When?”

“Yesterday,” I said, though it seemed a long time ago now.

“Well, that’s impossible. It must have been someone else.”

“Tell me why.”

“Roshi is under a vow of silence.” She whispered, as if she were breaking such a vow at this moment. “He hasn’t said a word for the last five days. So you couldn’t have heard him talk.”

I was tongue-tied for once. It was the logic of the Oreo Man, invading my moral puzzle. Or another Zen conundrum: What’s the sound of a silent monk condemning his brother to death?

The quieter the monk, the gaudier the patter I thought, remembering the conversation on the wiretap.

“I can’t believe you go around bugging people,” she said, still whispering. Perhaps she imagined there was a bug in the room now. “Were you trying to frame this Frank person?”

“No, no, no. Frank wanted me to listen.”

“He wanted to be caught?”

“He didn’t do anything,” I said. “Except get bumped off by his brother, the silent monk.”