Motherless Brooklyn

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.”

Though she regarded me skeptically, Kimmery went on rubbing the cat’s neck and head while it nestled in my lap. I had more than the usual panicky reasons to ignore the captivating sensations, the fricative purring and chafing down there. I was suppressing two different kinds of response, two possible ways of poking back. I kept my eyes level on Kimmery’s face.

“I think you’ve got a few things mixed up,” she said gently. “Roshi’s a very gentle man.”

“Well, Gerard Minna’s a punk from Brooklyn,” I said. “And they’re positively the same guy.”

“Hmmm. I don’t know, Lionel. Roshi once told me he’d never been to Brooklyn. He’s from Vermont or Canada or something.”

“Maine?” I asked, thinking of t pamphlet I’d secreted in my jacket, the retreat center by the water.

She shrugged. “I don’t know. You should take my word for it, though, he isn’t from Brooklyn. He’s a very important man.” She made it sound as if the two were mutually exclusive.

“Eat me Brooklyn Roshi!”

I was ticcing out of sheer frustration. In squaring her perceptions to mine I not only had a world of knowledge to build up but a preexisting one to tear down. Anyone faintly Zen was to her beyond reproach. And Gerard Minna, for the cheap act of shaving his likely-already-balding head, was secure in a pantheon of the holy.

And Gerard had a lot of damn gall to renounce the borough.

“Lionel?”

I grabbed for my glass, took another sip of water, averted my eyes from Kimmery’s.

“How does it feel when you do that?” she said. “I mean, what are you thinking?”

She was close enough now, and I succumbed completely and reached for her shoulder, tapped it five times quickly with paired fingertips. Then I moved my water glass to the floor and leaned forward, forcing Shelf to make another bleary, pleasure-addled adjustment to his position in my lap, and straightened Kimmery’s collar with both hands. The material was floppy, and I tried to prop it up as if it were starched, put the collar-tips on point like a ballerina’s toes. And my brain went, How are you feeling and how are you thinking and think how you’re feeling, and that became the chorus, the soundtrack to my adamant necessary collar-play.

“Lionel?” She didn’t push my hands away.

“Liable,” I said softly, my gaze lowered. “Think-a-mum Feely.”

“What do the words mean?”

“They’re just words. They don’t mean anything.” The question depressed me a little, took the wind out of my sails, and this was a good thing: I was able to release her collar, still my wriggling fingers.

Kimmery touched one hand, just briefly, as I withdrew it. I was numb to her now, though. She no longer soothed my tics, and the attention she’d begun to give them was humiliating. I needed to get this interview back on an official basis. Sitting here purring and being purred at wasn’t going to accomplish anything. In the city on the other side of the door a giant killer lurched around unafraid, and it was my job to find him.

“What do you know about ten-thirty Park Avenue?” I said, resuming my investigation, the legitimate inquiry.

“Is that that big apartment building?” Her hand was back riffling Shelf’s fur, her body ever closer to mine.

“Big building,” I said. “Yes.”

“A lot of Roshi’s students do theork service there,” she said lightly. “Working in the kitchen, cleaning up, that kind of thing. I was telling you about it, remember?”

“Doormen? Any-doormen?” My syndrome wanted to call them dogshirts, doorsnips, diphthongs. I gritted my teeth.

She shrugged. “I think so. I never went there myself. Lionel?”

“Yes?”

“You didn’t really come to the Zendo because you were interested in Buddhism, did you?”

“I guess I thought that was obvious by now.”

“It is obvious.”

I wasn’t sure what to say. I was narrowed to a fine point, thinking only of Frank and Gerard and the places I might have to go to finish my investigation. I’d shuttered myself against Kimmery’s tenderness toward me, even shuttered away my own tenderness toward her. She was an incompetent witness, beyond that a distraction. And I was an investigator who supplied plenty of my own distractions, too many.

“You came to make trouble,” she said.

“I came because of trouble, yes.”

Kimmery rubbed the fur of Shelf’s flank in the wrong direction, aggravating my senses. I put my hand on the cat for the first time, nudged Kimmery’s fingers away from the chaos of up-sticking fur she’d caused, and smoothed the fur back into place.

“Well, I’m glad I met you anyway,” she said.

I made a sound, half dog, half cat, something like “Chaarff.”

Our hands collided in Shelf’s fur, Kimmery’s moving to rough up the area I’d just smoothed into sense, mine preemptively slipping underneath to preserve my work. It took a big indifferent loaf of a cat like Shelf to withstand it; Hen would have been across the room reordering herself with her own tongue by now.

“You’re strange to me,” said Kimmery.

“Don’t feel bad about it,” I said.

“No, but I mean strange in a good way, too.”

“Uh.” She was tugging on my fingers, and I tugged systematically back, so our hands were tangling, squirming, the cat a benign mattress underneath, one vibrating like a cheap hotel’s.

“You can say whatever you want,” Kimmery whispered.

“What do you mean?”

“The words.”

“I don’t really need to when you’re touching my hand like that.”