Motherless Brooklyn (31 page)

“All these moods, impulses, this daily life, nothing wrong with them. But daily life, island, dinner, airplane, cocktail, daily life is not Zen. In zazen practice all that matters is the sitting, the practice. American, Japan, doesn’t matter. Only sitting.”

I vant to speak to the Lama!
The American monk, Roshi, had half turned in his spot to better contemplate the master from across the ocean. The profile below Roshi’s gleaming dome stirred me unexpectedly. I recognized some terrible force of authority and charisma in his features.

Jerry-Roshi?

Meanwhile the giant sat disrespectfully pinching the skin of a kumquat, pressing it to his monstrous lips, sucking its juice.

“It is easy practice zazen in its external form, sit on the cushion and waste time on the cushion. So many forms of nothing-Zen, meaningless Zen, only one form of true Zen: actual making contact with own Buddha-self.”

The High Lama will grant you an audience
.

“There is
chikusho
Zen, Zen of domesticated animals who curl up on pillows like cats in homes, waiting to be fed. They sit to kill time between meals. Domesticated animal Zen useless! Those who practice chikusho should be beaten and thrown out of the zendo.”

I obsessed on Jerry-Roshi’s face while the monk sputtered on.

“There is
ningen
Zen, Zen practiced for self-improvement. Ego-Zen. Make skin better, make bowel movement better, think positive thoughts and influence people. Shit! Ningen Zen is shit Zen!”

Irving, come home
, went my brain.
No soap, Zendo. Tibettapocamus. Chickenshack Zen. High Oscillama Talkalot
. The monk’s wonky syllables, the recursions of the Tibet joke, my own fear of the giant—all were conspiring to bring me to a boil. I wanted to trace Roshi’s enthralling profile with my fingertip—perhaps I’d recognize its significance by touch. Instead I practiced Essrog Zen, and stifled myself.

“Consider also
gaki
Zen: the Zen of insatiable ghosts. Those who study gaki Zen chase after enlightenment like spirits who crave food or vengeance with a hunger can never be satisfied. These ghosts never even enter the house of Zen they are so busy howling at the windows!”

Roshi looked like Minna.

Your brother misses you, Irving
.

Irving equals Lama, Roshi equals Gerard.

Roshi was Gerard Minna.

Gerard Minna was the voice on the wire.

I couldn’t say which got me there first, his profile in front of me or the joke’s subliminal nagging. It felt like a dead heat. Of course, the joke had been designed to get me there sooner, spare me figuring it out while in the belly of the whale. Too bad.

I tried to quit staring, failed. Up front, the monk continued to enumerate false Zens, the various ways we could go wrong. I personally could think of a few he probably hadn’t come across yet.

But why had Minna buried the information in a joke to begin with? I thought of a couple of reasons. One: He didn’t want us to know about Gerard
unless
he died. If he survived the attack he wanted his secret to survive as well. Two: He didn’t know who among his Men to trust, even down to Gilbert Coney. He could be certain I’d puzzle over the Irving clue while Gilbert would write it off as our mutual inanity.

And he felt, rightly, that no conspiracy around him could possibly include his pet Freakshow. The other Boys would never let me play. I could be flattered at the implied trust, or insulted by the dis. It didn’t really matter now.

I stared at Gerard. Now I understood the charismatic force of his profile, but it inspired only bitterness. It was as though the world imagined it could take Minna away and offer this clumsy genetic substitution. A resemblance.

“California Roll Zen. This is the Zen of sushi so full of avocado and cream cheese might as well be a marshmallow for all you know. The pungent fish of zazen smothered in easy pleasures, picnics, get-togethers, Zendo becomes a dating service!”

“Zengeance!”
I shouted.

Not every head turned. Gerard Minna’s did, though. So did Pinched’s, and Indistinct’s. And so did the giant’s. Kimmery was among those who practiced their calm by ignoring me.

“Ziggedy zendoodah,” I said aloud. My erection dimmed, energy venting elsewhere.
“Pierogi Monster Zen master zealous neighbor
. Zen zaftig Zsa Zsa go-bare.” I rapped the scalp of the sitter in front of me. “Zippity go figure.”

The roomful of gurus and acolytes came to agitated life but not one of them spoke a word, so my burst of verbiage sang in the silence. The lecturing monk glared at me and shook his head. Another of his posse
rose from his cushion and lifted a wooden paddle I hadn’t previously noticed from a hook on the wall, then started through the rows of students in my direction. Only Wallace sat immobile, eyes shut, still meditating. I began to appreciate his reputation for imperturbability.

“Pierogi kumquat sushiphone! Domestic marshmallow ghost! Insatiable Mallomar!
Smothered pierogiphone!”
The flood came with such force, I twisted my neck and nearly barked the words.

“Silence!” commanded the lecturing monk. “Very bad to make disturbance in the Zendo! Time and place for everything!” Anger wasn’t good for his English. “Shouting is for outside, New York City full of shouting! Not in Zendo.”

“Knock knock Zendo!” I shouted. “Monk monk goose!”

The monk with the paddle approached. He gripped it cross-handed, like Hank Aaron. The giant stood, shoved his baggie of kumquats into the pocket of his Members Only jacket and rubbed his sticky hands together, readying them for use. Gerard turned and stared at me, but if he recognized in me the twitchy teenager he’d left behind at the St. Vincent’s schoolyard fence nineteen years before, he didn’t show any sign. His eyebrows were delicately knit, his mouth pursed, his expression bemused. Kimmery put her hand on my knee and I put my hand on hers, reciprocity-ticcing. Even in a shitstorm such as I was in at this moment, my syndrome knew that God was in the details.

“Keisaku is more than ceremonial implement,” said the monk with the paddle. He applied it to my shoulder blades so gently it was like a caress. “Unruly student can do with a blow.” Now he clouted my back with the same muscular Buddhist glee his colleague had applied to my scalp.

“Ouch!” I fished behind me for the paddle, snagged it, tugged. It came out of the monk’s grasp and he staggered backward. By now the giant was headed in our direction. Those between us rolled or scuttled out of his path, according to their ability to unlock their elaborately folded legs. Kimmery darted away just as he loomed over us,
not wanting to be crushed. Pierogi Man hadn’t checked his shoes at the door.

That was when I saw the nod.

Gerard Minna nodded ever so slightly at the giant, and the giant nodded back. That was all it took. The same team that had doomed Frank Minna was back in the saddle. I would be the sequel.

The giant wrapped me in his arms and lifted, and the paddle clattered to the floor.

I weigh nearly two hundred pounds, but the giant didn’t strain at all moving me down the stairs and out onto the street, and when he plumped me onto the sidewalk I was more shaken and winded than he by far. I straightened my suit and confirmed the alignment of my neck with a strig of jerks while he unloaded his bag of kumquats and got back to sucking out their juice and pulp, reducing their bodies to husks that looked like orange raisins in his massive hands.

The narrow street was nearly dark now, and the dog-walkers were far enough away to give us privacy.

“Want one?” he said, holding out the bag. His voice was a dull thing where it began in his throat but it resonated to grandeur in the tremendous instrument of his torso, like a mediocre singer on the stage of a superb concert hall.

“No, thanks,” I said. Here was where I should grow large with anger, facing Minna’s killer right at the spot of the abduction. But I was diminished, ribs aching from his squeezing, confused and worried—conworried—by my discovery of Gerard Minna inside the Zendo, and unhappy to have left Kimmery and my shoes upstairs. The pavement was cold through my socks, and my feet tingled oddly as they flushed with the blood denied them by Zen posture.

“So what’s the matter with you?” he said, discarding another of the withered kumquats.

“I’ve got Tourette’s,” I said.

“Yeah, well, threats don’t work with me.”

“Tourette’s,” I said.

“Eh? My hearing’s not so good. Sorry.” He put the bag of fruit away again, and when his hand reemerged it was holding a gun. “Go in there,” he said. He pointed with his chin at the three steps leading to the narrow channel between the Zendo and the apartment building on the right, a lane filled with garbage cans and darkness. I frowned, and he reached out and with the hand not holding the gun shoved me backward toward the steps. “Go,” he said again.

I considered the giant and myself as a tableau. Here was the man I’d been hunting and wishing to go up against, howling for a chance at vengeance like an insatiable ghost or marshmallow—yet had I planned a way to take advantage of him, a method or apparatus to give me any real edge, let alone narrow the immense gap in force his size presented? No. I’d come up pathetically empty. And now he had a gun to ice the cake. He shoved me again, straight-armed my shoulder, and when I tried, ticcishly, to shove his shoulder in return I found I was held at too great a distance, couldn’t brush his shoulder even with long-stretched fingertips, and it conjured some old memory of Sylvester the Cat in a boxing ring with a kangaroo. My brain whispered,
He’s just a big mouse, Daddy, a vigorous louse, big as a house, a couch, a man, a plan, a canal, apocalypse
.

“Apocamouse,” I mumbled, language spilling out of me unrestrained. “Unplan-a-canal. Unpluggaphone.”

“I said get in there, Squeaky.” Had he caught my mouse reference, even with his impaired hearing? But then, who wouldn’t be squeaky to him? He was so big he only had to shrug to loom. I took a step backward. I had Tourette’s, he had threats. “Go,” he said again.

It was the last thing I wanted to do and I did it.

The minute I stepped down into the darkness he swung the gun at my head.

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.