Motherless Brooklyn (47 page)

“You’re a little too strange for that.”

“So what am I, then?” I asked. “I don’t know, kid. I guess I’d call you King Tugboat.”

I must have laughed or at least smiled.

“That’s nothing to be proud of, you radish rosette.”

What about vengeance?

I gave it five or ten minutes of my time once. That’s a lot, a lifetime, when it comes to vengeance. I had wanted to think vengeance wasn’t me, wasn’t Tourettic or Essroggian at all. Like the subway, say.

Then I took the V train. I did it with a cell phone and a number in Jersey, I did it standing by a lighthouse in Maine. I did it with a handful of names and other words, strung together into something more effective than a tic. That was me, Lionel, hurtling through those subterranean tunnels, visiting the labyrinth that runs under the world, which everyone pretends is not there.

You can go back to pretending if you like. I know I will, though the Minna brothers are a part of me, deep in my grain, deeper than mere behavior, deeper even than regret, Frank because he gave me my life and Gerard because, though I hardly knew him, I took his away.

I’ll pretend I never rode that train, but I did.

The next call that came in that night was a pickup on Hoyt Street for a trip out to Kennedy Airport. It was Loomis who took the call, and he grimaced exaggeratedly when he offered it to the three of us, knowing that according to L&L lore JFK was an exasperating destination. I put up my hand and said I’d take it, just to deny him the point.

For another reason, too. There was a snack I had a hankering for. At the International Terminal at Kennedy, upstairs by the El Al gates, is a single kosher-food stand called Mushy’s, run by a family of Israelis, with sauce-spattered metal tins full of stewig kasha and gravy and handmade knishes, a place utterly unlike the chain restaurants elsewhere in the terminal. Anytime I took a passenger out to the airport, night or day, I’d park the car and slip up to Mushy’s for a bite. Their chicken shwarma, carved fresh off the roasting pin, stuffed into a pita and slathered in grilled peppers, onions and tahini is one of the
great secret sandwiches of New York, redemption for a whole soulless airport. Permit me to recommend it if you’re ever out that way.

Kimmery and lemongrass broth hadn’t ruined my taste for the finer things.

The ghosts I felt sorriest for weren’t the dead ones. I’d imagined Frank and Tony were mine to protect, but I’d been wrong. I knew it now.

It was Julia I couldn’t shrug off, though she was hardly more mine than the others, though she’d barely recognized my human existence. Still, my tic of guilt took the form of her shape, standing in the wind on the lighthouse rail, standing still in a mist of bullets and shoes and salt air and my saliva, like the cursed icon from a black-and-white-movie poster she’d resembled when first glimpsed so long ago, or perhaps a figure of Zen contemplation, a mark of ink brushwork on a scroll. But I didn’t try to find Julia—simple as it would have been, I knew better than that. Instead I let my obsessive instinct get to work tracing that figure, waiting for it to turn abstract and disappear. Sooner or later it would.

That left who? Only Ullman. I know he haunts this story, but he never came into view, did he? The world (my brain) is too full of dull men, dead men, Ullmen. Some ghosts never even get into your house they are so busy howling at the windows. Or as Minna would say, you pick your battles—and you do, whether you subscribe to that view or not, you really do. I can’t feel guilty about every last body. Ullman? Never met the guy. Just like Bailey. They were just guys I never happened to meet. To the both of them and to you I say: Put an egg in your shoe, and beat it. Make like a tree, and leave. Tell your story walking.

I’m deeply indebted to the books of Lawrence Shainberg, Kosho Uchiyma, and Oliver Sacks, the words of Tuli Kupferberg, and to conversations with Blake Lethem, Cara O’Connor, David Bowman, Eliot Duhan, Matthew Burkhard
t, Scott McCrossin, Janet Farrell, Diane Martel, Alice Ressner, and Maureen Linker and the Linker family.

Thanks also to Richard Parks, Bill Thomas, Walter Donohue, Zoe Rosenfeld, Tooley Cottage, the Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie (ZKM) and the Corporation of Yaddo.

The name Saint Vincent’s is here used fictionally and is in no way meant to impugn the venerable charitable institution nor the venerated saint of the same name.