Motherless Brooklyn by Jonathan Lethem Read Free Book Online Page A

police passing through from the hospital coffee shop, into some part of the emergency room. Whether those particular police were there to detain us or not, it was clear the law wouldn’t be long in arriving.
    “We ought to go, Gilbert,” I told Coney. “Probably we ought to go right now.”
    Coney was inert.
    “Problyreallyoughttogo,” I said semicompulsively, panic rising through my sorrow.
    “You misunderstand,” said the doctor. “We’ll ask you to wait, please. This man will show you where to go—” He nodded at something behind us. I whipped around, my lizard instincts shocked at having allowed someone to sneak up on me.
    It was Albert. The Thin Rastafarian Line between us and departure.His appearance seemed to trigger comprehension in Coney: The security guard was a cartoon reminder of the real existence of police.
    “Outta the way,” said Coney.
    “We don’t serve string!” I explained.
    Albert didn’t look any more convinced of his official status than we were. At moments like this I was reminded of the figure we Minna Men cut, oversize, undereducated, vibrant wostility even with tear streaks all over our beefy faces. And me with my utterances, lunges, and taps, my symptoms, those extra factors Minna adored throwing into the mix.
    Frank Minna, unrevived, empty of blood in the next room.
    Albert held his palms open, his body more or less pleading as he said, “You better wait, mon.”
    “Nah,” said Coney. “Maybe another time.” Coney and I both leaned in Albert’s direction, really only shifting our weight, and he jumped backward, spreading his hands over the spot he’d vacated as if to say
It was someone else standing there just now, not I
.
    “But this is a thing upon which we must insist,” said the doctor.
    “You really don’t wanna insist,” said Coney, turning on him furiously. “You ain’t got the insistence required, you know what I mean?”
    “I’m not sure I do,” said the doctor quietly.
    “Well, just chew it over,” said Coney. “There’s no big hurry. C’mon, Lionel.”

MOTHERLESS BROOKLYN
     
    I grew up in the library of St. Vincent’s Home for Boys, in the part of downtown Brooklyn no developer yet wishes to claim for some upscale, renovated neighborhood; not quite Brooklyn Heights, nor Cobble Hill, not even Boerum Hill. The Home is essentially set on the off-ramp to the Brooklyn Bridge, but out of sight of Manhattan or the bridge itself, on eight lanes of traffic lined with faceless, monolithic civil courts, which, gray and distant though they seemed, some of us Boys had seen the insides of, by Brooklyn’s central sorting annex for the post office, a building that hummed and blinked all through the night, its gates groaning open to admit trucks bearing mountains of those mysterious items called letters, by the Burton Trade School for Automechanics, where hardened students attempting to set their lives dully straight spilled out twice a day for sandwich-and-beer breaks, overwhelming the cramped bodega next door, intimidating passersby and thrilling us Boys in their morose thuggish glory, by a desolate strip of park benches beneath a granite bust of Lafayette, indicating his point of entry into the Battle of Brooklyn, by a car lotsurrounded by a high fence topped with wide curls of barbed wire and wind-whipped fluorescent flags, and by a redbrick Quaker Meetinghouse that had presumably been there when the rest was farmland. In short, this jumble of stuff at the clotted entrance to the ancient, battered borough was officially Nowhere, a place strenuously ignored in passing through to Somewhere Else. Until rescued by Frank Minna I lived, as I said, in the library.

     
    I set out to read every book in that tomblike library, every miserable dead donation ever indexed and forgotten there—a mark of my profound fear and boredom at St. Vincent’s and as well an early sign of my Tourettic compulsions for counting, processing, and inspection. Huddled there in the