The Blot

by Jonathan Lethem

  “Speaking of appetite,” said Köhler, “I’ve asked my kitchen to prepare some delicious dinner sandwiches. We’ll have them brought in, so as not to interrupt our wonderful game.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Alexander, do you like women?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then I have another delightful surprise prepared for you!”

  It’s your turn. Köhler annoyed Bruno now by not playing. At the current price, Bruno wanted to climb back in. It would be a matter of orchestrating a dogged holding game, and he wanted to get on with it. Or had he blundered? Köhler reached not for his dice but for the cube. A blunder, yes. Bruno conceded, reminding himself he’d intended to bring the German back, though that had presupposed the rich man needed encouragement to continue playing; Köhler now seemed more than game. Bruno’s bigger kill felt remoter than he preferred. His temples throbbed.

  They were halfway into Bruno’s second defeat when the woman entered the study. She wore a trim leather mask, with tight-stitched apertures for her eyes and nostrils, and an impassive zipper muting her lips. Otherwise, a black shirt, a man’s collared shirt, buttoned to the top, and nothing on beneath it apart from low black heels. Her legs were elegantly long and smooth, twitching through the gloom as though spotlit. The hair between her legs was fawn-colored, trimmed close. As the woman lowered a silver tray heaped with tiny sandwiches to the level of the board, Bruno glimpsed the hearth’s orange glow between her knees. Thanks to the blot, his gaze averted itself.

  Two of Bruno’s checkers sat on the bar, a gamble annihilated. “After you,” said Köhler. Bruno’s host held the dice, keeping the game hostage in favor of his splendid presentation.

  Bruno lifted a triangle from the tray. Tiny shrimp curled in cream, and lettuce, on crustless toast. “Thank you,” he said to no one in particular, splitting the difference between addressing the midsection of the woman who’d served him and the rich man’s grin. His own backgammon set caught his attention, where it leaned untouched against a chair’s leg. He bit a corner of the sandwich, tasting not the shrimp but the tart cream. He pushed the remainder into his mouth and rinsed it down with the scotch. His lips were again strangely numb, though the room was hot.

  “You see, it is a question of where one’s attention falls,” said Köhler.

  “Excuse me?”

  The rich man gestured at the woman, unabashed. “With the face and the breasts concealed, there is nowhere else to look. The astounding mystery is right before you.”

  Bruno believed he understood. If Köhler could have had the woman’s body borne in headless on a silver tray, the German might have done so. Bruno wondered if it qualified as an act of solidarity to look upward instead, to try and make contact with the tall woman’s eyes through her mask, or whether this would only add to her shame. There was nothing Bruno could look at directly anyhow. The headache that had begun in his temples now pulsed precisely between his eyebrows, as if a third eye—one capable, as the others were not, of penetrating to the reality behind the blot—sought to force itself to the surface.

  “You may touch her, if you like.”

  “I’ll keep it in mind,” said Bruno.

  “Yes, yes, there’s no hurry …”

  “Are we playing?” Bruno asked with irritation. Köhler had risen to the phonograph again, and he dropped the needle now on an even scratchier recording. The woman stood silent to one side, the tray dividing her at the waist, the shirttail concealing nothing. In his mind Bruno rearranged the silver platter into a game board, the triangular sandwiches into points. There was no appeal in any of Köhler’s offerings, Bruno wished only to play, to return to the points and checkers, his urgent business. This was ungracious, he knew. Köhler was providing for his own evening’s entertainment, in order that Bruno could be relieved of any duty except taking the German’s money. Yet the night was going wrong.

  The jazz shrieked and cackled. Köhler dived in like a fiend and grabbed the dice, shook them excessively, and rolled double sixes. His checkers swept past Bruno’s feeble broken prime. When Köhler offered a double, Bruno conceded.

  “Bix Beiderbecke!” Köhler shouted, the rich man apparently reverting to some arcane taunt in his mother tongue.

  “Play again,” muttered Bruno.

  “Of course,” said Köhler. Bizarrely, he stood and placed the needle at the record’s start, leaving Bruno to sort the checkers onto their points. The woman stood with her tray, legs goose-pimpled as the flames waned to orange shards of coal. Though Bruno felt warm. Köhler returned, threw a die to open the game, and then called to her: “Come closer!”

  She stepped up again, her puzzle of sandwiches intact apart from the sole triangle Bruno had lifted out. Bruno felt he could retch it out exactly into position if she brought the scent of dill any nearer. He won the opening with a weak four-one and used it to split his runners. Köhler began immediately to smash at them with an anarchic blitzing game. His and Bruno’s positions were reversed now. Köhler had become unpredictable.

  Bruno, not even conscious he’d turned to look, was suddenly aware of the woman’s lips moving beneath the tight-zippered leather. Was Bruno supposed to be able to lip-read under these conditions? A cry for help? No. He shouldn’t be naïve, she was a professional, as much as Bruno. This was Berlin. Traditions existed which Bruno ought to be able to take for granted. A warning, then? His host still hadn’t reached for one of the sandwiches. Had Bruno been poisoned?

  Köhler gammoned. It was Bruno’s luck that had been poisoned. His money, which had never been his, and had never been money, was gone. He owed some amount, was losing track. It was only numbers in his head, not so much as a dime had been laid on the table. A gentlemanly game, on friendly terms Bruno knew well: one shark, one whale. Bruno would have to steel himself, play it out. This couldn’t be Singapore, he couldn’t allow it. He’d rebelled against Falk, run to Europe, and now he had to make it good, had to persist with the evening, build his bankroll again. At such stakes it shouldn’t take long. He rolled a single die to start the game and turned his head to read it: three.

  Köhler reached out, as if for a sandwich, but bypassed the tray. He rubbed his palm talismanically on the server’s buttocks and scatted along with the trumpeter’s hectic solo. Then he threw a four to win the opening and dropped his builders. Bruno, snakebit, failed to hit. Köhler cocked his head as Bruno faltered at choosing a play for his roll, a useless four-one. Was the German about to reach for the doubling cube again? Was he turning bully?

  Instead, Köhler asked, “Alexander, are you completely well?”

  “Why?”

  “I wondered if something was wrong with your eyesight.”

  “No.”

  “You appear to be … listening to the actions of the backgammon pieces. Perhaps it is common among players of your caliber? I admit the method is unfamiliar.”

  Bruno caught himself. His head was inches from the board. He’d imagined that his tilt, if it had been noticed at all, would be taken for leering. Stolen glances at that cosmic mystery between the masked woman’s legs. Now, understanding fell on him: his denial of the blot. For how many weeks had he been managing this affliction? It had been with him in Singapore as well, even if it was worse now. It was certainly worse now.

  Bruno had been giving lessons without knowing. If a fish like the German could absorb and mimic Bruno’s practice by studying him, what might the sharper gamblers in Singapore have taken away? Though perhaps Köhler wasn’t so daft. He was looking sharkish, for a whale. Bruno had lost everything, including the stake he didn’t have in his pocket when he entered the room. He tried to tally his debt here and in Singapore cumulatively, but couldn’t. But, Bruno reminded himself, Falk had promised to make his stain in Singapore evaporate; tonight was all that mattered.

  “When I listen to them I can hear the sea,” said Bruno flippantly. If you’d just turn down this damn music.

  “Ich habe die Meerjungfrauen einander zusingen hören,” sai
d Köhler. He turned his wrist, dropped a perfect number. The German closed his primes like clockwork now.

  “Sorry?” said Bruno. He answered with another calamitous roll. A universe of misfortune was at Bruno’s fingertips, he only had to touch the dice. Usually just single games of backgammon were prone to such abrupt reversal. Here the whole evening had hinged irreversibly, into defeat.

  “The mermaids singing, one after the next, of course. T. S. Eliot!” And now the German proffered the doubling cube.

  “Each to each,” Bruno corrected, the line recalled from some memory swamp. He waved off the double, having had enough. A further five thousand down, but it expunged the game in favor of a fresh one. Bruno reached into his tuxedo’s inner breast pocket, hooked another paracetamol with a finger, and pushed it quietly into his mouth. To swig it down he gulped scotch across his numb tongue. “Another game.”

  The woman in the mask had turned to Bruno. She rubbed one finger above her zipper, beneath her cipher nostrils. A further signal? Or was she about to sneeze? How would that work, behind the mask? In place of either beauty or a hideous disfigurement beneath the leather disguise, Bruno now conjured eyes grown puffy and watery, sinuses draining down the throat, a coughing spasm suppressed. The life of a professional half-nude masked housemaid; just another day at the office.

  But no. The issue wasn’t the woman’s nose, but Bruno’s own. He sensed the trickle, the coolness across his lip, at the exact moment Köhler spoke.

  “Your nose, Alexander. It is bleeding.”

  “It’s nothing,” Bruno said, his fingers trailing away crimson. There was the problem of where to wipe them. Then, without transition, Bruno found himself looking at Köhler and the masked woman from below, from the carpet. He raised himself on his elbows—where was his chair? Gone. Some interval had passed, and when his elbows failed to support him he discovered that a large cushion waited beneath his head. Köhler stood above, holding a smartphone. The phonograph was mercifully silenced. Instead, Köhler and the woman spoke German, in tones of argument—or was it only that German always sounded argumentative?

  “Ich kenne ihn. Ich kann ihm helfen.”

  “Halt dich zurück, Schlampe. Bitte!”

  “Lass mich ihm doch—”

  “Ich lass ihn in die Charité einweisen. Da wird man sich um ihn kümmern.”

  “Ich fahre mit ihm—”

  “Das wirst du nicht tun! Ich werde mich nicht noch einmal wiederholen.”

  The blood on Bruno’s fingers had crusted. When he touched them to his nose again it was repainted fresh. The blood had stained his white shirt, perhaps also the black tuxedo, though that had been laid open and so possibly spared. The woman stood quite near, all legs and mystery. She should have seemed absurd now, but what embarrassed Bruno most was her lack of embarrassment, as though his nosebleed had unmanned him.

  Noticing Bruno lifting his head again from the cushion, Köhler knelt and spoke to him in painstaking English.

  “Listen, Alexander. You’ve suffered some kind of seizure. Do you remember where you are?”

  “Yes.”

  “The same driver who fetched you at the ferry is bringing the car around.”

  “I’ll be fine—we can play again—” It was only that music, he wanted to say.

  Köhler ignored him. “He’ll bring you to the emergency room, at this time of night the journey by car won’t be at all long. The hospital is called Charité, there you’ll be cared for—”

  “I’m not some charity case.”

  “No, no, that’s only its name. Charité is one of the most important hospitals in Europe.”

  By all means, then, thought Bruno in his despair. Nothing less than an important hospital.

  •

  Through blinding confusion Bruno nevertheless grasped that he’d been returned to the backseat of the limousine and was being driven the long way off Kladow, in avoidance of the ferry. Light flashed across the car’s interior roof as he lay on the seat. It was then that he recognized the tug of memory represented by the shorebird, the cormorant.

  At age six Bruno had moved, with his mother, June, from her guru’s cultish compound in Marin County to Berkeley. He remembered little before Berkeley, which suited his preference—if he could, he’d forget Berkeley too, all his California life. The commune itself, in San Rafael, he recalled only in flashes of gabbling confusion, hippies at vast smoky spaghetti dinners, their voices and wide-open minds seeming to overrun his boundaries, and communal outdoor showers where women other than his mother herded him with gangs of muddy children for scrubbing. Bruno’s clearest recollection, before June had rescued him from that place, was of a visit he’d taken alone, with his mother’s bearded guru, to Stinson Beach on a cold morning when they had it to themselves. If there had been an explanation or reason for this special attention it was never offered, then or after.

  There in Köhler’s car, Bruno remembered it: The guru had pointed out the cormorants, where the rocky cliffs met the infinite basin of the Pacific.

  “You’re some kind of a kid, Alexander,” the guru had said to him, trying to lock on his gaze while Bruno remained focused on the water’s lapping, and the black diving crow-ducks that rode the waves. “I can see you watching June, I see you watching everyone. You’re deep.”

  I don’t want to be deep, the child had thought. I want to quiet the voices, the crazy shrieking voices of all of you, June included. I want to be like that bird.

  III

  Long past his fifth, then sixth hour in the emergency-room waiting area, seated clutching his wooden backgammon set to his dried-bloody shirtfront, head against the chair’s stiff, sleep-defeating back, Alexander Bruno had been reduced to wondering: What were the red footprints for? These were painted, or stickered, across the floor. He sat contemplating them, under garish fluorescents, at a Formica table, in a room of false-wood paneling, beneath a flat-screen flaring muted German newscasts, with the unused trauma doors to his back. Minutes died serially into hours.

  Bruno shared this zone, for whatever reason, primarily with not quite elderly women, four or five at a given time. He should have been able to tabulate their comings and goings, to fathom who among them was sick and who waited on some other family member’s sickness, to discern fine differences, but no. They melted into a drab resemblance: Older Woman in Waiting Room, a series. The blot didn’t help, of course, remaining centered in his vision, obliterating their faces.

  For brief variation, a young couple with a shrouded baby had appeared and been ushered inside, not to return. One or two policemen had ambled through, and plenty of weary orderlies, but never with any urgency, never appearing less than explicitly bored. They merely paced out the night’s smallest hours. No one in Berlin, apparently, was ever shot or stabbed or crushed in a vehicle. Or at least not tonight. Bruno’s bloodstain was anomalous. If he’d memorized one useful phrase in German, which of course he hadn’t, it should have been, It’s only a nosebleed.

  Bruno’s quarantine from the intrusion of human language was as total as he could ever have wished. No one spoke. When they did, it was inaudible. When audible, it was German. Bruno’d had his flash in the pan of relevance here, but it seemed years ago. They’d been excited about him, once; he clung to the memory. When Köhler’s driver had dropped him off, they thought he’d had a stroke. The triage nurse had shown him to a doctor, and the doctor had spoken to him in coldly accented English, with simple questions, ones Bruno could answer with relative confidence. The blot itself had caused the excitement—that and his brief passage of unconsciousness or seizure. Though of course Bruno had only Köhler’s testimony to suggest a seizure. The rich man wasn’t available now to explain, and when they asked Bruno what he meant by the word he realized he had no idea.

  The doctor tested his visual field. What had been Bruno’s private meditation upon the blot, his own small esoteric mystery, was now common currency—but at least it was currency. In everything else, he felt he’d only disappointed the
doctor. Numbness or tingling in his limbs? No. Difficulties recalling words? Sorry, no. Inability performing a series of routine movements, walking, raising his arms, following the doctor’s commands? No. Bruno was, sadly, capable of performing each simple action. As he performed them, giving the doctor little or nothing to inscribe on his clipboard chart, Bruno felt the energy drain from the examination room. He further disappointed by confessing to the headache, the drinking of undiluted scotch, and the use—overuse, frankly—of paracetamol. At the last moment, before dismissal, Bruno mentioned the sensation of numbness in his lips. The doctor raised one eyebrow. Nearly of interest but, alas, no. Bruno fulfilled far too few of the assessment criteria for stroke, and so it was as if he did not exist. He’d been returned to the waiting area.

  The question of how to interpret the trail of red footprints—which ran from the entry doors through the waiting area and down one corridor of the hospital—was now Bruno’s sole preoccupation and solace. He had nothing else to contemplate. Nothing, that was, apart from the blot, or the course his evening at Köhler’s home had taken—the result, even if the reasons remained puzzling.

  The sudden change of fortunes, timed to Köhler’s raising the stakes: Could Köhler have hustled Bruno? It should be impossible. Yet Bruno was haunted by the irrational certainty that Köhler had been the shark. He wondered now if the German had come to the encounter with as little ready cash in his pocket as had Bruno. Perhaps the mansion in Kladow wasn’t really even Köhler’s. Perhaps the person Bruno had met wasn’t named Köhler. It was madness, thinking this way; better to consider the red footprints. The waiting-room floor featured yellow footprints too, actually, leading in another direction. Bruno would get to the bottom of it. Why not? He had time enough, and the talent, apparently, for finding the bottom of any circumstance, of his own life.

  The ER entrance doors lay under a pedestrian bridge, and little natural light reached the antiseptic purgatory of the waiting room. Still, signs of dawn crept in. The clock read 4:45. If Bruno strained, he thought he heard a bird twittering. The older women were unmoving, though they’d slept as little as Bruno. When a young doctor in mint-green scrubs emerged and stood with a clipboard in front of his chair, it took Bruno a long moment to understand he’d been drawn back into the realm of the visible. The young man was skinny, with blond curls. He appeared untroubled by the long night, perhaps had just signed in or woken from a refreshing nap on a surgical table. Did the word intern apply in Germany? Bruno couldn’t know.