Motherless Brooklyn

His bedroom had the integrity of his self-reinvention. It was bare of furnishings except for a long low shelf against the wall, a board, really, propped on bricks and bearing a few candles and books, a glass of water and a small bowl of ashes, decorated with Japanese script, presumably some kind of tiny shrine. The spareness reminded me of Kimmery’s empty studio apartment but I resented the echo, not wishing to see Kimmery as influenced by Gerard’s Zen pretensions, not wishing to imagine her visiting his private floor, his lair, at all. Gerard sat propped on pillows on a flat mattress on the floor, his legs crossed, the book at his knees shut, his posture calm, as though he’d been waiting for me. I faced him head on for what might have been the first time-I don’t know that I’d ever addressed him directly, stolen more than a glance as a teenager. In the candlelight I first made out his silhouette: He’d thickened around the jaw and neck, so that his bald head seemed to rise from his round shoulders like the line of a cobra’s hood. I might have been overly influenced by that bald head but as my eyes adjusted I couldn’t keep from understanding the difference between his features and Frank Minna’s as the same as that between Brando’s in Apocalypse Now! and On the Waterfront.

“Thehorrorthehorror,” I ticced. “Icouldabeenacontender!” It was like a couplet.

“You’re Lionel Essrog, aren’t you?”

“Unreliable Chessgrub,” I corrected. My throat pulsed with ticcishness. I was overly conscious of the open door behind me, so my neck twitched, too, with the urge to look over my shoulder. Doormen could come through open doors, anyone knew that. “Is there anyone else in the building?” I said.

“We’re alone.”

“Mind if I close this?”

“Go ahead.” He didn’t budgfrom his position on the mattress, just gazed at me evenly. I closed the door and moved just far enough into the room not to be tempted to grope behind me for the door’s surface. We faced each other across the candlelit gloom, each a figure out of the other’s past, each signifying to the other the lost man, the man killed the day before.

“You broke your vow of silence just now,” I said.

“I’m finished with my sesshin,” he said. “Anyway, you brought silence to a rather conclusive finish during today’s sitting.”

“I think your hired killer had something to do with that.”

“You’re speaking without thinking,” he said. “I recall your difficulties in that area.”

I took a deep breath. Gerard’s serenity called out of me a storm of compensatory voices, a myriad possible shrieks and insults to stanch. A part of me wanted to cajole him out from behind his Zen front, expose the Lord of Court Street lurking, make him Frank’s older brother again. What came out of my mouth was the beginning of a joke, one from the deepest part of the made-Frank-Minnalaugh-once archive:

“So there’s this order of nuns, right?”

“An order of nuns,” Gerard repeated.

“Ordinary nunphone!-an order of nuns. Like the Cloisters. You know, a monastery.”

“A monastery is for monks.”

“Okay, a nunastery. A plannery, a nunnetarium!-a nunnery. And they’ve all, these nuns, they’ve all taken a vow of silence, a lifetime vow of silence, right?” I was driven, tears at the edges of my eyes, wishing for Frank to be alive to rescue me, tell me he’d heard this one already. Instead I had to go on. “Except one day a year one of the nuns gets to say something. They take turns, one nun a year. Understand?”

“I think I understand.”

“So the big day comes-Barnamum-big-nun! Domesticated ghost-phone!-the big day is here and the nuns are all sitting at the dinner table and the one who gets to talk this year opens her mouth and says ‘The soup is terrible.’ And the other nuns all look at each other but nobody says anything because of the vow of silence, and that’s it, back to normal. Another year of silence.”

“A very disciplined group,” said Gerard, not without admiration.

“Right. So a year later the day comes and it’s this other nun’s turn. So they’re sitting and the second nun turns to the first and says ‘I don’t know, maybe it’s just me, but I don’t think the soup’s that bad’-and that’s it, silence. Another year.”

“Hmmm. Imagine the states of contemplation one could achieve in such a year.”

Flip-a-thon! Fuck-a-door! Flipweed! Fujisaki! Flitcraft!-the special day comes around again. This third nun, it’s her turn-Nun-fuck-a-phone!-so this third nun, she looks at the first nun and the second nun and she says ‘Bicker, bicker, bicker.’ ”

There was silence, then Gerard nodded and said, “That would be the punch line.”

“I know about the building,” I said, working to catch my breath. “And the Fujisaki Corporation.” Unfuckafish whispered under my palate.

“Ah. Then you know much.”