Motherless Brooklyn

Eatmeoreo, I mouthed inaudibly. I crinkled in the cellophane sleeve for another cookie, then nibbled off the overhang of chocolate top. I let the pulverized crumbs saturate my tongue, then reached for another, performed the same operation. They were identical. I put both nibbled cookies in the same pile. I needed to find a good one, or a bad one, before I could tell the difference.

Maybe I’d only ever eaten bad ones.

“I thought you didn’t believe me,” said Kimmery.

“Mushytest,” I mumbled, my lips pasty with cookie mud, my eyes wild as I considered the task my brain had set for my sorry tongue. There were three sleeves in the box of Oreos. We were into just the first of them.

She nodded at my pile of discards. “What are those, good ones or bad ones?”

“I don’t know.” I tried sniffing the next. “Was this guy your boyfriend or something?”

“For a little while.” “Was he a Zen Buddhist too?”

She snorted lightly. I nibbled another cookie and began to despair. I would have been happy now for an ordinary interruptive tic, something to throw my bloodhoundlike obsessions off the scent. The Minna Men were in shambles, yes, but I’d get to the bottom of the Oreo conundrum.

I jumped to my feet, rattling both our teacups. I had to get out of there, quell my panic, restart my investigation, put some distance between myself and the cookies.

“Barnamum Bakery!” I yelped, reassuring myself.

“What?”

“Nothing.” I jerked my head sideways, then turned it slowly, as if to work out a kink. “We’d better go, Kimmery.”

“Go where?” She leaned forward, her pupils big and trusting. I felt a thrill at being taken so seriously. This making the rounds without Gilbert could get to be a habit. For once I was playing lead detective instead of comic-or Tourettic-relief.

“Downstairs,” I said, at a loss for a better answer.

“Okay,” she said, whispering conspiratorially. “But be quiet.”

We crept past the half-open door on the second landing, and I retrieved my shoes from the rack. This time I got a look at Wallace. He sat with his back to us, limp blond hair tucked behind his ears and giving way to a bald spot. He wore a sweater and sweatpants and sat still as advertised, inert, asleep, or, I suppose, dead-though death was not a still thing to me at the moment, more a matter of skid marks in blood and the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. Wallace looked harmless anyway. Kimmery’s idea of a hippie, apparently, was a white man over forty-five not in a business suit. In Brooklyn we would have just said loser.

She opened the front door of the Zendo. “I’ve got to finish cleaning,” she said. “You know, for the monks.”

“Importantmonks,” I said, ticcing gently.

“Yes.”

“I don’t think you should be alone here.” I looked up and down the block to see if anyone was watching us. My neck prickled, alert to wind and fear. The Upper East Siders had retaken their streets, and walked obliviously crinkling doggie-doo bags and the New York Times and the wax paper around bagels. My feeling of advantage, of beginning my investigation while the world was still asleep, was gone.

“I’m con-worried,” I said, Tourette’s mangling my speech again. I wanted to get away from her before I shouted, barked, or ran my fingers around the neck of her T-shirt.

She smiled. “What’s that-like confused and worried?”

I nodded. It was close enough.

“I’ll be okay. Don’t be conworried.” She spoke calmly, and it calmed me. “You’ll come back later, right? To sit?”

“Absolutely.”

“Okay.” She craned up on her toes and kissed my cheek. Startled, I couldn’t move, stood instead feeling her kiss-print burning on my flesh in the cold morning air. Was it personal, or some sort of fuzzy Zen coercion? Were they that desperate to fill mats at the Zendo?

“Don’t do that,” I said. “You just met me. This is New York.”

“Yes, but you’re my friend now.”

“I have to go.”

“Okay,” she said. “Zazen is at four oclock.”

“I’ll be there.”

She shut the door. I was alone on the street again, my investigation already at a standstill. Had I learned anything inside the Zendo? Now I felt dazed with loss-I’d penetrated the citadel and spent my whole time contemplating Kimmery and Oreos. My mouth was full of cocoa, my nostrils full of her scent from the unexpected kiss.

Two men took me by the elbows and hustled me into a car waiting at the curb.

The four of them wore identical blue suits with black piping on the legs, and identical black sunglasses. They looked like a band that plays at weddings. Four white guys, assortedly chunky, pinched in the face, with pimples, and indistinct. Their car was a rental. Chunky sat in the backseat waiting and when the two who’d picked me up crushed me into the back beside him, he immediately put his arm around my neck in a sort of brotherly choke hold. The two who’d picked me off the street-Pimples and Indistinct-jammed in beside me, to make four of us on the backseat. It was a bit crowded.

“Get in the front,” said Chunky, the one holding my neck.

“Me?” I said.

“Shut up. Larry, get out. There’s too many. Go in the front.”

“Okay, okay,” said the one on the end, Indistinct or Larry. He got out of the back and into the empty front passenger seat and the one driving-Pinched-took off. Chunky loosened his hold when we got into the downtown traffic on Second Avenue, but left his arm draped over my shoulders.

“Take the Drive,” he said.

“What?”

“Tell him take the East Side Drive.”

“Where are we going?”

“I want to be on the highway.”

“Why not just drive in circles?”

“My car is parked up here,” I said. “You could drop me off. ”

“Shut up. Why can’t we just drive in circles?”

“You shut up. It should look like we’re going somewhere, stupid. We’re really scaring him going in circles.”

“I’m listening to what you say no matter how you drive,” I said, wanting to make them feel better. “There’s four of you and one of me.”

“We want more than listening,” said Chunky. “We want you scared.”

But I wasn’t scared. It was eight-thirty in the morning, and we were fighting traffic on Second Avenue. There weren’t even any co go in, just honking delivery trucks tied up by pedestrians. And the closer I looked at these guys the less I was impressed. For one thing, Chunky’s hand on my neck was soft, his skin was soft, and his hold on me rather tender. And he was the toughest of the bunch. They weren’t calm, they weren’t good at what they were doing, and they weren’t tough. None of them, as far as I could tell, was wearing a gun.

For another thing, all four of their sunglasses still bore price tags, dangling fluorescent orange ovals reading $6.99!

I reached out and batted at Pimples’s price tag. He turned away, and my finger hooked the earpiece and jerked the shades off his face, into his lap. “Shit,” said Pimples, and hurried the glasses back onto his face as if I might recognize him without them.

“Hey, none of that,” said Chunky, and hugged me again. He reminded me of my long-ago kissing tic, the way he was crowding me close to him in the car.

“Okay,” I said, though I knew it would be hard not to bat at the price tags if they came within reach. “But what’s the game here, guys?”

“We’re supposed to throw a scare into you,” said Chunky, distracted, watching Pinched drive. “Stay away from