We kissed then, so I couldn't reply, didn't want to. I felt her press her thumb very gently against the point of my Adam's apple, a touch I couldn't exactly return. I stroked her ear and jaw instead, urging her nearer. Then her hand fell lower, and mine too, and at that moment I felt my hand and mind lose their particularity, their pointiness, their countingness, instead become clouds of general awareness, dreamy and yielding with curiosity. My hand felt less a hand than a catcher's mitt, or Mickey Mouse's hand, something vast and blunt and soft. I didn't count her where I touched her. I conducted a general survey, took a tender sampling.

"You're excited," she breathed.

"Yes."

"It's okay."

"I know."

"I just wanted to mention it."

"Okay, yes."

She unbuttoned my pants. I fumbled with hers, with a thin sash knotted at her front for a belt. I couldn't undo it with one hand. We were breathing into one another's mouths, lips slipping together and apart, noses mashed. I found a way in around the knotted sash, untucked her shirt. I put my finger in her belly button, then found the crisp margin of her pubic hair, threaded it with a finger. She tremored and slid her knee between mine.

"You can touch me there," she said.

"I am," I said, wishing for accuracy.

"You're so excited," she said. "It's okay."

"Yes."

"It's okay. Oh, Lionel, that's okay. Don't stop, it's okay."

"Yes," I said. "It's okay." Okay, okay: Okay, okay: Here was Kimmery's tic, in evidence at last. I couldn't begrudge it. I turned my whole hand, gathering her up, surrounding her. She spilled as I held her. Meanwhile she'd found the vent in my boxer shorts. I felt two fingertips contact a part of me through that window, the blind men and the elephant. I wanted and didn't want her to go on, terribly. Here was Kimmery's tic, in evidence at last. I couldn't begrudge it. I turned my whole hand, gathering her up, surrounding her. She spilled as I held her. Meanwhile she'd found the vent in my boxer shorts. I felt two fingertips contact a part of me through that window, the blind men and the elephant. I wanted and didn't want her to go on, terribly.

"You're so excited," she said again, incantatory.

"Uh." She jostled me, untangled me from my shorts and my self.

"Wow, God, Lionel you're sort of huge."

"And bent," I said, so she wouldn't have to say it.

"Is that normal?"

"I guess it's a little unusual-looking." I panted, hoping be past this moment.

"More than a little, Lionel."

"Someone-a woman once told me it was like a beer can."

"I've heard of that," said Kimmery. "But yours is, I don't know, like a beer can that's been crushed, like for recycling."

So it was for me. In my paltry history I'd never been unveiled without hearing something about it-freak shows within freak shows. Whatever Kimmery thought, it didn't keep her from freeing me from my boxer shorts and palming me, so that I felt myself aching heavily in her cool grasp. We made a circuit: mouths, knees, hands and what they held. The sensation was okay. I tried to match the rhythm of her hand with mine, failed. Kimmery's tongue lapped my chin, found my mouth again. I made a whining sound, not a part of any word. Language was destroyed. Bailey, he left town.

"It's okay to talk," she whispered.

"Uh."

"I like, um, I like it when you talk. When you make sounds."

"Okay."

"Tell me something, Lionel."

"What?"

"I mean, say something. The way you do."

I looked at her open-mouthed. Her hand urged me toward an utterance that was anything but verbal. I tried to distract her the same way.

"Speak, Lionel."

"Ah." It really was all I could think to say.

She kissed me gaspingly and drew back, her look expectant.

"One Mind!" I said.

"Yes!" said Kimmery.

"Fonebone!" I shouted. I shouted.

Another key contributor to my Tourette's lexicon was a cartoonist named Don Martin, first encountered in a pile of tattered Mad Mad magazines in a box in the Ping-Pong room in the basement of St. Vincent's when I was eleven or twelve. I used to pore over his drawings, trying to find what it was about his characters, drawn with riotously bulging eyes, noses, chins, Adam's apples and knees, elongated tongues and fingers and feet that flapped like banners, named Professor Bleent, P. Carter Franit, Mrs. Freenbeen and Mr. Fonebone, that stirred such a deep chord in me. His image of life was garish and explosive, heads being stretched and shrunk, surgeons lopping off noses and dropping brains and sewing hands on backward, falling safes and metal presses squashing men flat or into boxlike packages, children swallowing coat hangers and pogo sticks and taking on their shapes. His agonized characters moved through their panels with a geeky physicality, seeming to strain toward ther catastrophic contact with fire hoses, whirring blades, and drawbridges, and his sophomoric punch lines mostly hinged on reversals or literalizations-"The kids are upstairs with their ears glued to the radio"-or else on outright destruction. magazines in a box in the Ping-Pong room in the basement of St. Vincent's when I was eleven or twelve. I used to pore over his drawings, trying to find what it was about his characters, drawn with riotously bulging eyes, noses, chins, Adam's apples and knees, elongated tongues and fingers and feet that flapped like banners, named Professor Bleent, P. Carter Franit, Mrs. Freenbeen and Mr. Fonebone, that stirred such a deep chord in me. His image of life was garish and explosive, heads being stretched and shrunk, surgeons lopping off noses and dropping brains and sewing hands on backward, falling safes and metal presses squashing men flat or into boxlike packages, children swallowing coat hangers and pogo sticks and taking on their shapes. His agonized characters moved through their panels with a geeky physicality, seeming to strain toward ther catastrophic contact with fire hoses, whirring blades, and drawbridges, and his sophomoric punch lines mostly hinged on reversals or literalizations-"The kids are upstairs with their ears glued to the radio"-or else on outright destruction. Mad Mad often held the concluding panel of a Don Martin cartoon to the following page, and part of the pleasure of his work was never knowing whether the payoff would be a visual pun or verbal riff or merely the sight of a man in a full-body cast falling out a window into the path of a steamroller. Mostly, though, I recall the distortion, the torque in the bodies he drew: These characters had met disaster in being born onto the page, and their more extreme fates were only realizations of their essential nature. This made sense to me. And Fonebone made sense, too. He had a name I could get behind. For a while he almost supplanted Bailey, and he was lastingly traceable in my tendency to append often held the concluding panel of a Don Martin cartoon to the following page, and part of the pleasure of his work was never knowing whether the payoff would be a visual pun or verbal riff or merely the sight of a man in a full-body cast falling out a window into the path of a steamroller. Mostly, though, I recall the distortion, the torque in the bodies he drew: These characters had met disaster in being born onto the page, and their more extreme fates were only realizations of their essential nature. This made sense to me. And Fonebone made sense, too. He had a name I could get behind. For a while he almost supplanted Bailey, and he was lastingly traceable in my tendency to append phone phone or or bone bone to the end of a phrase. to the end of a phrase.

When I had sex with another person and my body began to convulse and move faster, my toes to curl, my eyes to roll, I felt like a Don Martin character, a Fonebone, all elbows and bowlegs and boomerang penis and gurgling throat in a halo of flung-off sweat drops and sound effects: Fip, Thwat, Zwip, Sproing, Flabadab Fip, Thwat, Zwip, Sproing, Flabadab. More than Daffy Duck, more than Art Carney, more than any other icon of my discomfort. Don Martin's drawings throbbed with the suggestion that disruptive feeling was all sexual. Though his venue denied him any overt reference his characters overflowed with lewd energies, which had to be manifested instead in tics and seizures, eruptions and deformations. His poor doomed Fonebones seemed to chart my path from twitch to orgasm, the way sex first smoothed away tics, then supplanted them with a violent double: little death, big tic. So perhaps it was Don Martin's fault that I always expected a punishment after sex, cringed in anticipation of the steamroller or plummeting anvil to follow.

Possibly Kimmery sensed it in me, this dread of a page about to be turned, revealing some ludicrous doom on the last panel of my cartoon. Another fact about Don Martin: He never used the same character twice-each was an innocent pawn with no carry-over from one episode to the next, no understanding of his role or fate. A Fonebone was a placeholder, a disposable clone or stooge. A member of the Butt Trust.

"Is something the matter?" she said, stopping what she was doing, what I was doing.

"Everything's fine. I mean, better than fine."

"You don't look fine."

"Just one thing, Kimmery. Promise me you won't go back to the Zendo. At least for a few days."

"Why?"

"Just trust me, okay?"

"Okay."

With that, her magic word, we were done talking.

Once Kimmery was asleep I dressed and tiptoed to her phone, which was on the floor in the big room. Shelf followed me in. I tapped his head five times, instantly reigniting his ragged purring, then pushed him away. The phone showed a number under its plastic window. I fed the number into the speed dial of the doormen's cell phone, wincing at the beeping tones, which echoed in the silent empty room like musical gunshots. Kimmery didn't stir on her mattress, though. She lay splayed like a child making a snow angel. I wanted to go and kneel and trace her shape with my fingertips or my breath. Instead I found her key ring and separated the five keys. The key to the apartment was easy to identify, and that was the only one I left behind-she'd have to deal with her suspicious neighbors to get into the lobby downstairs. I took the other four, figuring one would get me into the Zendo. The last two probably unlocked Oreo Man's place. Those I'd lose.

AUTO BODY.

See me now, at one in the morning, stepping out of another cab in front of the Zendo, checking the street for cars that might have followed, for giveaway cigarette-tip glows through the windows of the cars parked on the deadened street, moving with my hands in my jacket pockets clutching might-be-guns-for-all-they-know, collar up against the cold like Minna, unshaven like Minna now, too, shoes clacking on sidewalk: think of a coloring-book image of the Green Hornet, say. That's who I was supposed to be, that black outline of a man in a coat, ready suspicious eyes above his collar, shoulders hunched, moving toward conflict.

Here's who I was instead: that same coloring-book outline of a man, but crayoned by the hand of a mad or carefree or retarded child, wild slashes of idiot color, a blizzard of marks violating the boundaries that made man man distinct from distinct from street street, from world world. Some of those colors were my fresh images of Kimmery, flashing me back to the West Side an hour before, crayon stripes and arrows like flares over Central Park in the night sky. Others weren't so pretty, roaring scrawls of mania, find-a-man-kill-a-phone-fuck-a-plan find-a-man-kill-a-phone-fuck-a-plan in sloppy ten-foot-high letters drawn like lightning bolts or Hot Wheels race-car flames through the space of my head. And the blackened steel-wool scribble of my guilt-deranged investigation: I pictured the voices of the two Minna brothers and Tony Vermonte and The Clients as gnarled above and around me, in a web of betrayal I had to penetrate and dissolve, an ostensible world I'd just discovered was really only a private cloud I carried everywhere, had never seen the outside of. So, crossing the street to the door of the Zendo, I might have appeared less a single Green Hornet than a whole inflamed nest of them. in sloppy ten-foot-high letters drawn like lightning bolts or Hot Wheels race-car flames through the space of my head. And the blackened steel-wool scribble of my guilt-deranged investigation: I pictured the voices of the two Minna brothers and Tony Vermonte and The Clients as gnarled above and around me, in a web of betrayal I had to penetrate and dissolve, an ostensible world I'd just discovered was really only a private cloud I carried everywhere, had never seen the outside of. So, crossing the street to the door of the Zendo, I might have appeared less a single Green Hornet than a whole inflamed nest of them.

My first act was to drop in next door. I found the original doorman, Dirk, asleep on his stool.

I lifted his head up with my hand and he jerked awake and away from my grasp. "Hello!" he shouted.

"You remember me, Dirk?" I said. "I was sitting in a car. You told me I had a message from my 'friend.'"

"Oh? Sure, I remember. Sorry, I was just doing what I was told."

"Sure you were. And I suppose you never saw the guy before, did you-dirtyworker, dirketyname?"

"I never saw the guy before." He breathed out, wide-eyed.

"He was ery big man, yes?"

"Yes!" He rolled his eyes upward to show it. Then he held his hands out, begging my patience. I backed off a little and he stood and neatened his coat. I helped him with it, especially around the collar. He was too sleepy or confused by my questions to object.

"He pay you or just scare you into giving me the bum steer?" I asked more gently. My anger was wasted on Dirk. Anyway, I felt vaguely grateful to him for confirming the giant's existence. My only other sure witness was Gilbert, in jail. Kimmery had begun to make me doubt my eyes.

"A man that big doesn't have to pay," said Dirk honestly.

One of the stolen keys got me inside. This time I held on to my shoes as I passed the sitting room and headed upstairs, past the floor where Kimmery and I had sat at tea, up to the Roshi's private quarters-a.k.a. Gerard Minna's hideout. The halls were darker the higher I climbed, until at the top I could only grope my way toward a thin margin of light squeezed out underneath a sealed door. I turned the handle and pushed the door open, impatient with my own fear.

His bedroom had the integrity of his self-reinvention. It was bare of furnishings except for a long low shelf against the wall, a board, really, propped on bricks and bearing a few candles and books, a glass of water and a small bowl of ashes, decorated with Japanese script, presumably some kind of tiny shrine. The spareness reminded me of Kimmery's empty studio apartment but I resented the echo, not wishing to see Kimmery as influenced by Gerard's Zen pretensions, not wishing to imagine her visiting his private floor, his lair, at all. Gerard sat propped on pillows on a flat mattress on the floor, his legs crossed, the book at his knees shut, his posture calm, as though he'd been waiting for me. I faced him head on for what might have been the first time-I don't know that I'd ever addressed him directly, stolen more than a glance as a teenager. In the candlelight I first made out his silhouette: He'd thickened around the jaw and neck, so that his bald head seemed to rise from his round shoulders like the line of a cobra's hood. I might have been overly influenced by that bald head but as my eyes adjusted I couldn't keep from understanding the difference between his features and Frank Minna's as the same as that between Brando's in Apocalypse Now! Apocalypse Now! and and On the Waterfront On the Waterfront.

"Thehorrorthehorror," I ticced. I ticced. "Icouldabeenacontender!" "Icouldabeenacontender!" It was like a couplet. It was like a couplet.

"You're Lionel Essrog, aren't you?"

"Unreliable Chessgrub," I corrected. My throat pulsed with ticcishness. I was overly conscious of the open door behind me, so my neck twitched, too, with the urge to look over my shoulder. Doormen could come through open doors, anyone knew that. "Is there anyone else in the building?" I said. I corrected. My throat pulsed with ticcishness. I was overly conscious of the open door behind me, so my neck twitched, too, with the urge to look over my shoulder. Doormen could come through open doors, anyone knew that. "Is there anyone else in the building?" I said.

"We're alone."

"Mind if I close this?"

"Go ahead." He didn't budgfrom his position on the mattress, just gazed at me evenly. I closed the door and moved just far enough into the room not to be tempted to grope behind me for the door's surface. We faced each other across the candlelit gloom, each a figure out of the other's past, each signifying to the other the lost man, the man killed the day before.

"You broke your vow of silence just now," I said.

"I'm finished with my sesshin," he said. "Anyway, you brought silence to a rather conclusive finish during today's sitting."

"I think your hired killer had something to do with that."

"You're speaking without thinking," he said. "I recall your difficulties in that area."

I took a deep breath. Gerard's serenity called out of me a storm of compensatory voices, a myriad possible shrieks and insults to stanch. A part of me wanted to cajole him out from behind his Zen front, expose the Lord of Court Street lurking, make him Frank's older brother again. What came out of my mouth was the beginning of a joke, one from the deepest part of the made-Frank-Minnalaugh-once archive: "So there's this order of nuns, right?"

"An order of nuns," Gerard repeated.

"Ordinary nunphone!-an order of nuns. Like the Cloisters. You know, a monastery."

"A monastery is for monks."

"Okay, a nunastery. A plannery, a nunnetarium! A plannery, a nunnetarium!-a nunnery. And they've all, these nuns, they've all taken a vow of silence, a lifetime vow of silence, right?" I was driven, tears at the edges of my eyes, wishing for Frank to be alive to rescue me, tell me he'd heard this one already. Instead I had to go on. "Except one day a year one of the nuns gets to say something. They take turns, one nun a year. Understand?"

"I think I understand."

"So the big day comes-Barnamum-big-nun! Domesticated ghost-phone!-the big day is here and the nuns are all sitting at the dinner table and the one who gets to talk this year opens her mouth and says 'The soup is terrible.' And the other nuns all look at each other but nobody says anything because of the vow of silence, and that's it, back to normal. Another year of silence."

"A very disciplined group," said Gerard, not without admiration.

"Right. So a year later the day comes and it's this other nun's turn. So they're sitting and the second nun turns to the first and says 'I don't know, maybe it's just me, but I don't think the soup's that bad'-and that's it, silence. Another year."

"Hmmm. Imagine the states of contemplation one could achieve in such a year."

Flip-a-thon! Fuck-a-door! Flipweed! Fujisaki! Flitcraft!-the special day comes around again. This third nun, it's her turn-Nun-fuck-a-phone!-so this third nun, she looks at the first nun and the second nun and she says 'Bicker, bicker, bicker.'"

There was silence, then Gerard nodded and said, "That would be the punch line."

"I know about the building," I said, working to catch my breath. "And the Fujisaki Corporation." Unfuckafish Unfuckafish whispered under my palate. whispered under my palate.

"Ah. Then you know much."

"Yeah, I know a thing. And I've met your killing machine. But you saw that, when he dragged me out, downstairs. The kumquat-eater."

I was desperate to see him flinch, to impress him with the edge I had, the things I'd learned, but Gerard wasn't ruffled. He raised his eyebrows, which got a lot of play across the empty canvas of his forehead. "You and your friends, what are their names?"

"Who? The Minna Men?"

"Yes-Minna Men. That's a very good description. My brother was very important to the four of you, wasn't he?" I nodded, or not, but anyway he went on.

"He really taught you everything, I suppose. You sound just like him when you speak. What an odd life, really. You realize that, don't you? That Frank was a very odd man, living in a strange and anachronistic way?"

"What's cartoonistic cartoonistic about it?" about it?"

"Anachronistic," said Gerard patiently. "From another time."

"I know what it means," I said. "I mean what's so akakonistic akakonistic about it?" I was too wound up to go back and repair the tic-pocked surface of my speech. "Anyway, about it?" I was too wound up to go back and repair the tic-pocked surface of my speech. "Anyway, enactoplasmic enactoplasmic as opposed to what? A million-year-old mystical Japanese cult?" as opposed to what? A million-year-old mystical Japanese cult?"