Motherless Brooklyn

“I’m going to a place you might know about,” I said. “Yoshii’s. A retreat.”

“That’s a good idea,” she said grudgingly, curiosity winning over her anger. “I always wanted to go there. Roshi said it was really great.”

“Maybe-”

“What?”

“Maybe sometime we’ll go together.”

“I should get off the phone, Lionel.”

The call had made me anxious. I ate the second of the roast-beef sandwiches. Massachusetts looked the same as Connecticut.

I called her back.

“What did you mean by guilty?” I said. “I don’t understand.”

She sighed. “I don’t know, Lionel. It’s just, I’m not really sure about this investigation. It seems like you’re just running around a lot trying to keep from feeling sad or guilty or whatever about this guy Frank.”

“I want to catch the killer.”

“Can’t you hear yourself? That’s like something O. J. Simpson would say. Regular people, when someone they know gets killed or something they don’t go around trying to catch the killer. They go to a funeral.”

“I’m a detective, Kimmery.” I almost said, I’m a telephone. “You keep saying that, but I don’t know. I just can’t really accept it.”

“Why not?”

“I guess I thought detectives were more, uh, subtle.”

“Maybe you’re thinking of detectives in movies or on television.” I was a fine one to be explaining this distinction. “On TV they’re all the same. Real detectives are as unalike as fingerprints, or snowflakes.”

“Very funny.”

“I’m trying to make you laugh,” I said. “I’m glad you noticed. Do you like jokes?”

“You know what koans are? They’re like Zen jokes, except they don’t really have punch lines.”

“What are you waiting for? I’ve got all day here.” In truth the highway had grown fat with extra lanes, and complicated by options and merges. But I wasn’t going to interrupt Kimmery while things were going so well, ticless on my end, bubbly with digressions on hers.

“Oh, I can never remember them, they’re too vague. Lots of monks hitting each other on the head and stuff.”

“That sounds hilarious. The best jokes usually have animals in them, I think.”

“There’s plenty of animals. Here-” I heard a rustle as she braced the phone between her shoulder and chin and paged through a book. I’d had her in the middle of the big empty room-now I adjusted the picture, envisioned her with the phone stretched to reach the bed, perhaps with Shelf on her lap. “So these two monks are arguing over a cat and this other monk cuts the cat in half-Oh, that’s not very nice.”

“You’re killing me. I’m busting a gut over here.”

“Shut up. Oh, here, this is one I like. It’s about death. So this young monk comes to visit this old monk to ask about this other, older monk who’s just died. Tendo, that’s the dead monk. So the young monk is asking about Tendo and the old monk says stuff like ‘Look at that dog over there’ and ‘Do you want a bath?’-all this irrelevant stuff. It goes on like that until finally the young monk is enlightened.”

“Enlightened by what?”

“I guess the point is you can’t really say anything about death.”

“Okay, I get it. It’s just like in Only Angels Have Wings, when Cary Grant’s best friend Joe crashes his plane and dies and then Rosalind Russell asks him ‘What about Joe?’ and “Aren’t you going to do anything about Joe?’ and Cary Grant just says, ‘Who’s Joe?’ ”

“Speaking of watching too much movies and television.”

“Exactly.” I liked the way the miles were flying past for me now, ticless, aloft on Kimmery’s voice, the freeway traffic thinning.

The moment I observed the way our talk and my journey were racing along, though, we lapsed into silence.

“Roshi says this thing about guilt,” she said after a minute. “That it’s selfish, just a way to avoid taking care of yourself. Or thinking about yourself. I guess that’s sort of two different things. I can’t remember.”

“Please don’t quote Gerard Minna to me on the subject of guilt,” I said. “That’s a little hard to swallow under the present circumstances.”

“You really think Roshi’s guilty of something?”

“There’s more I need to find out,” I admitted. “That’s what I’m doing. That’s why I had to take your keys.”

“And why you’re going to Yoshii’s?”

“Yes.”

In the pause that followed I detected the sound of Kimmery believing me, believing in my case, for the first time. “Be careful, Lionel.”

“Sure. I’m always careful. Just keep your promise to me, okay?”

“What promise?”

“Don’t go to the Zendo.”

“Okay. I think I’m getting off the phone now, Lionel.”

“You promise?”

“Sure, yeah, okay.”

Suddenly I was surrounded by office buildings, carports, stacked overhead freeways clogged with cars. I realized too late I probably should have navigated around Boston instead of through it. I suffered through the slowdown, munched on chips and tried not to hold my breath, and before too long the city’s grip loosened, gave way to suburban sprawl, to the undecorated endless interstate. I only hoped I hadn’t let Tony and the giant get ahead of me, lost my lead, my edge. Gotta have an edge. I was beginning to obsess on edge too much: edge of car, edge of road, edge of vision and what hovered there, nagging and insubstantial. How strange it began to seem that cars have bodies that never are supposed to touch, a disaster if they do.

Don’t hover in my blind spot, Fonebone!

I felt as though I would begin ticcing with the body of the car, would need to flirt with the textured shoulder of the highway or the darting, soaring bodies all around me unless I heard her voice again.

“Kimmery.”

“Lionel.”

“I called you again.”

“Aren’t these car-phone calls kind of expensive?”

“I’m not the one paying,” I burbled. I was exhilarated by the recurrent technomagic, the cell phone reaching out across space and time to connect us again.

“Who is?”

“Some Zen doormat I met yesterday in a car.”

“Doormat?”

“Doorman.”

“Mmmm.” She was eating something. “You call too much.”

“I like talking to you. Driving is… boring.” I undersold my angst, let the one word stan for so many others.

“Yeah, mmmm-but I don’t want anything, you know, crazy in my life right now.”

“What do you mean by crazy?” Her tonal swerves had caught me by surprise again. I suppose it was this strange lurching dance, though, that kept my double brain enchanted.