Motherless Brooklyn

by Jonathan Lethem

Tourette’s is just one big lifetime of tag, really. The world (or my brain—same thing) appoints me it, again and again. So I tag back. Can it do otherwise? If you’ve ever been it you know the answer.

Tourette’s teaches you what people will ignore and forget, teaches you to see the reality-knitting mechanism people employ to tuck away the intolerable, the incongruous, the disruptive—it teaches you this because you’re the one lobbing the intolerable, incongruous, and disruptive their way.

Consensual reality is both fragile and elastic, and it heals like the skin of a bubble.

The barbers were taken care of because this was Brooklyn, where people looked out. Why would the prices go up, when nobody walked in who wasn’t part of this conspiracy, this trust?—though if you spoke of it you’d surely meet with confused denials, or laughter and a too-hard cuff on the cheek.

“Wow,” I said. “This was unexpected. You’re like good cop and bad cop rolled into one.” “Yeah, used to be they could afford two different guys. Now with all the budget cuts and shit they’ve got us doing double shifts.”

The body and the blood, I couldn’t keep from thinking, though I was as distant from any religious feeling as a mourning man could be. The turkey and the booze, I substituted.

Here’s the strangeness of having a Tourette’s brain, then: no control in my personal experiment of self. What might be only strangeness must always be auditioned for relegation to the domain of symptom, just as symptoms always push into other domains, demanding the chance to audition for their moment of acuity or relevance, their brief shot—coulda been a contender!—at centrality. Personalityness. There’s a lot of traffic in my head, and it’s two-way.

I was interesting, but he didn’t know how to be interested.

I won’t be making the same mistake.” “No, you’ll think up a whole bunch of new ones.”

We’ll work on your posture some other time—for now you can sit and concentrate on your breathing.” “I’ll do that.” I followed her up the stairs. “That’s really everything anyway, breathing. You could work on just that for the rest of your life.” “I’ll probably have to.”

She slid down to seat herself against the wall, so we were arranged like clock hands on the face of the floor, our shoes at the center. According to the clock of us it was four o’clock. I tried not to root for midnight.

“He’s a giant?” “Well, what do you call it?” “Isn’t gigantism a genetic condition?” “I’d say it is. He didn’t earn that height.”

The distance between us had narrowed, but the distance between me and me was enormous.

Smith Street showed a bit more life, Zeod’s Market lit up like a beacon, catering to the all-night cigarette cravings, to the squad-car cops in need of a bagel or LifeSaver or some other torus.

I could see this called for the oldest investigatory technique of them all: I opened my wallet and took out a twenty.

New York City: land of opportunity for monks and crooks and mooks alike.

I wondered if I would ever get used to facing gunpoint, and then I wondered if that was really anything to aspire to.