The Blot

by Jonathan Lethem

  Dr. Scheel possessed, or anyway revealed, no English. To translate on his behalf had come Bruno’s second bedside visitor, Claudia Benedict. She was older, quite tall, with owlish glasses beneath her platinum bangs, and craggy, sunken cheeks, severe in aspect. Yet she offered Bruno the solace of his mother tongue. “Dr. Scheel asked me to be present to avoid any potential misunderstandings,” she explained. “I’m an Englishwoman actually, though I’ve been in Berlin for more than twenty years.”

  “I’m awfully glad to meet you, Dr. Benedict,” said Bruno. Dr. Scheel, for his part, had shaken Bruno’s hand, then stood aside, waiting for the cessation of niceties. “Pardon my appearance. These hospital pajamas aren’t too flattering.” Bruno gestured at the narrow wardrobe closet, behind which hung his tuxedo, invoking other options. He’d checked: The shirt had been laundered. He supposed the hospital had a special aptitude for bloodstains.

  “I actually am a physician,” said Benedict, “though I’ve never been licensed here in Germany. Please understand that I’m not your doctor.”

  Then can you be my mommy? Bruno beamed at her, his rote test. If Claudia Benedict read his thoughts, she didn’t show it, in either warmth or disdain.

  “Dr. Scheel wants you to understand that he’s examined your case carefully, and he regards it as a highly serious one. I’ve made myself familiar with his written reports, and I’ll try to answer any questions you may have, but I’m primarily here to function as a translator.” Was Benedict’s slightly shocked look that of meeting a dead man who didn’t know it? She turned now to Scheel. The oncologist nodded brusquely, and they conducted a rapid exchange in German.

  “… Frag ihn, ob er die radiologischen Befunde selbst sehen möchte, oder ob die mündliche Diagnose ausreicht. In solchen Fällen irritieren die Aufnahmen einen Patienten oft …” At these words from Scheel, Benedict paused, then turned back to Bruno.

  “Yes, um, Dr. Scheel asks whether you would like to see the images yourself, or only have the situation described. He’s afraid you may be disturbed by them.”

  “You mean … all the CAT scans and so forth?”

  “Yes.”

  He smiled in a way he hoped was courageous. “I’m ready for my close-up, Mr. DeMille.”

  The joke was lost on her, and on the German. It occurred to Bruno that he was being readied for that moment when anything endearing about you was revealed as etched in dust, then swept over a cliff. This would be doubly true if one were without family or other social bonds—if one were largely endeared only by, and to, oneself.

  Dr. Scheel slid the transparencies from the folder and laid them out over Bruno’s bedsheeted knees. Bruno saw amorphous ghostly gray-and-black mud puddles, veins of white mineral running through a rock, nothing he’d identify with himself or any other human being. The images were peppered with tiny arrows and brackets and miniature handwriting in red ballpoint. While Bruno avoided seeing more, Scheel spoke softly and steadily in German, then waited for Benedict to render the sentences in English.

  “Dr. Scheel believes you are suffering from a meningioma—a tumor of the central nervous system. Are you at all familiar with that term?”

  “No.”

  “Meningiomas are commonly associated with the brain, but not exclusively, they’re—excuse me, this is far from my specialty. They frequently occur along the central brain stem, intracranially, I mean, inside.” She put a knuckle to her forehead. “Yours is in an unusual but not unknown position, an anterior cranial fossa filling the olfactory groove. It has also inserted itself … behind your eyes, the cause of the optical dysfunction you’ve reported.”

  “The blot.”

  “Yes—excuse me.” She turned and resumed in rapid-fire German. Then back. “He says it’s likely you’ve also lost your sense of smell, though patients are frequently unaware of this until it’s pointed out to them.”

  “Tell him he’s wrong. I smell things especially vividly, in fact. For instance, the lunch they’re preparing for us now—I can tell they’re grilling sausages.”

  Benedict and Scheel exchanged a look, and then another string of irritated-sounding phrases. “Neither of us smells sausages grilling, I’m afraid.”

  “Well, there you go!” said Bruno. “My groove is wide open and ready for business.” It was as if he’d disproved the new word, meningioma, without having even once said it aloud.

  “Olfactory hallucinations are not excluded,” said Benedict, with as much sympathy as could be imparted to these words. “Though such presentations are a great deal less common …”

  At this Benedict stalled. Scheel had stepped nearer to the bed and was putting his finger to one of the transparencies, meanwhile filling her ear with German that might be industrial or military jargon. The oncologist tapped again at the page, never glancing, however, at Bruno himself. Having the benefit of a translator, Scheel appeared to feel no need to grant Bruno’s existence. This affair was strictly between Scheel and blot.

  “He’s keen that you understand the severity of your case,” said Benedict, when she was allowed to resume. “Many such growths are nonmalignant and respond to resection—to surgical removal. Dr. Scheel regrets to say that the placement and size are in your case utterly prohibitive. He says it’s extraordinary to discover one so developed. He’s surprised you’ve reported no symptoms before now.”

  “Let me get this straight,” said Bruno. Giddiness overtook him, unleashed by this triangular arrangement and the prospect of death by blot. “I’ve been neglecting to apprise Dr. Scheel of the symptoms of my giant fucking outlandish and unprecedented nose cancer, is that right?”

  “Mr. Bruno.”

  “Pardon my awkwardness with the medical terminology, but that’s what I’ve got, yes?”

  “Herr Bruno!” It was Scheel this time.

  “Because, tell fucking Dr. Scheel I’m sorry I didn’t notice, it’s just that I’ve never had a giant nose cancer before, so I didn’t recognize the symptoms.”

  “Herr Bruno.” Scheel stepped between Benedict and the bed, and tapped with the point of his pen at the images strewn across Bruno’s knees. “It is not that I cannot understand English at all,” Scheel said.

  “Ah!” said Bruno, unashamed. The nurses had vaporized. Bruno felt their absence as a pulsation. They might have fled the ward, the entire hospital building.

  “You are misinformed when you say nose,” said Scheel. “Nose is incorrect.”

  “You’re saying it’s not my nose but some other olfactory part of me.”

  “Nein. Here. You asked to look, but you have not chosen to see.” With the plastic cap of his pen, Scheel circled again and again the black blotch dominating one of the images. “Here, bitte. You see this shape?”

  “Paging Dr. Rorschach! It looks like a horseshoe crab. Is that the right answer?”

  “It is not your nose. It is between the casing of your brain, you see, and your face. It is pressuring behind your face, from underneath. Behind your eyes and the flesh of your entire Antlitz—your countenance.”

  “How unfortunate.”

  “Very much so.”

  “Because if it were just a fucking nose cancer, you could probably just take off my nose and be done with it, but this, it’s not so simple.”

  “Nein, it is not simple at all.”

  Scheel appeared suddenly to tire, as if it had cost him too much, after all, to meet Bruno’s outburst in its own tongue. He muttered in German. “Er kann den Rat eines Chirurgen einholen, wenn er möchte, aber das ändert auch nichts. Es gibt jedoch verschiedene Palliativtherapien, die unmittelbaren Symptome lindern können …”

  Benedict spoke again, without moving nearer to the bed this time, as if Scheel’s role here needed to be honored by her deference. Her voice was muted and distant, like that of a translator on a radio broadcast, flattening the rhetoric of some terrorist or despot. “Dr. Scheel wishes you to know you have the option of meeting with a surgeon, but he doubts anyone would seriously consider such a procedure. H
is recommendation is for … palliative care. He believes your immediate symptoms can be managed, at least for the time being.” She paused. When she spoke again, it was clearly on her own behalf, or of that humane part of herself that had been present when she’d first entered the room. “I understand you have no insurance, Mr. Bruno. Nor relatives in Germany.”

  “No.”

  “Do you have friends here?”

  He thought of the woman on the ferry. Hello, Madchen, I have cancer. “Not apart from you beautiful people right in front of me.”

  Scheel forced more English out of himself. “What is the reason?”

  The question was bewildering. The reason for cancer? “I’m sorry?”

  “The reason that are you here. Was it business that brought you?”

  “It was this that brought me!” Bruno pulled the stone die from beneath his sheets and thrust it at Scheel. Letting evidence of the open gravesite that was Berlin be his reply to the martinet doctor. Now, as if according to some prearranged signal, the nurses flooded back in. Bruno was wrong, they’d been close by, concealed just outside his door, waiting to reclaim command of his temperature and blood pressure, to resume plying him with regular and unexplained medications. Probably they’d try again to take his stone from him and wash it, too.

  Scheel, in his distaste, was the one who was a million miles away, even before he’d passed through the door. He spoke only through Benedict, who absorbed the brunt of his crisp German, then turned to Bruno and said, “Your attending physician will be given Dr. Scheel’s recommendations. The treatment is in any event quite minimal, since it seeks merely to … abate your discomfort. He says he’s sorry.” Scheel gave Benedict a glance of reproach, as if she’d improvised this flourish.

  “May I keep these?” asked Bruno, placing his free hand on the printed-out images scattered over his legs.

  “Ja.” Scheel moved his hand dismissively. Of course they had their proof locked deep in the machines, engraved on hard drives …

  Bruno shoved the pages, with the stone, into the drawer of his bedside table.

  At that, Scheel was gone. Bruno found himself ministered by three sets of hands, as the nurses performed their trick of changing the sheets beneath him without moving him from the bed. They’d enfeebled him by design, it was a lie, he could still walk, talk, probably fuck. He receded behind the blot, into his sorrow. Claudia Benedict spoke some slight words of departure herself, took his hand for an instant, and then she too vanished into the corridor.

  He refused lunch and possibly dozed. Before long the nurses brought the artificial night, which might have no relation to the world beyond these walls. He sought consolation in the idea that he would die within the ancient preserve of Charité, the plague asylum, but in this antiseptic modern wing it was no good. Perhaps they would release him to the streets, and he could expire on the lawn before some nineteenth-century brickwork renamed for a Nazi doctor, or atop a cairn of paving stones. He wanted to imagine that Berlin had cast him as Hamlet, vital in the dirt, contemplating skulls, but it was the other way. He’d be Yorick, tossed aside.

  •

  The next morning, Claudia Benedict reappeared. She was alone.

  “Mr. Bruno, I wonder if I could have a word with you?”

  “I thought you weren’t a doctor here, only a ventriloquist’s dummy.” He was startled by his own uncontrollable bitterness.

  “It’s true that I have no jurisdiction in this hospital. I only thought I might offer you some advice.”

  “Things to do in Berlin before you’re dead?”

  “I’m not certain you should stay in Berlin.”

  So this was the reward for his imperial stubbornness in not attempting to speak German. A higher class of pity was the best he could expect now. Maybe she’d glimpsed the pressed tuxedo in the wardrobe and been somehow impressed, poor old bird. Maybe she was lonely. “See the world?” he said. “No, Berlin seems like a good place to die.”

  “Mr. Bruno, you’ve lived a long while with this disease to this point, and you might live a while yet. I spent last night browsing the current research on meningiomas, and speaking with a surgeon I know in London.”

  “He’ll take my case?”

  “No. But there is someone who might, who would at least be worth your meeting.” She unfolded from her jacket pocket a medical article, “A Surgical Approach to Complex Intraorbital Meningioma,” five or six stapled pages printed from a PDF copy of The Journal of Head and Neck Surgery, volume XXI, April 2011. Beyond the title page lay columns of dull text ruptured by black-and-white surgery photos so much worse, so much more literal than the modernist scans of his blot that Bruno had to flip the pages shut.

  Benedict pointed to the name at the top, Noah R. Behringer, MD, FACS. “He’s a senior fellow in surgery at a hospital on the West Coast of America, a very long way from here. I’d never heard his name, but he’s created a bit of a stir with several quite radical resections in deep areas of the face. I think there’s a chance you’d be able to interest him in your situation, precisely for the reasons most other doctors, like Scheel here, will regard you as beyond surgical treatment.”

  “The West Coast?”

  “A very fine hospital in San Francisco. I’ve never been there myself.”

  Northern California, where Bruno least wished to return. He gave no indication it had special importance. “Does Charité have a working relationship with this hospital?”

  “Charité isn’t likely to be tremendously helpful to you, Mr. Bruno. You’re an American, and, excuse me for this, but, unless I’m mistaken, an impoverished one. A derelict.”

  “I prefer the terms lush or rake.”

  She arched an eyebrow. “Berlin is tolerant of the tide of young expatriates and backpackers arriving here on a daily basis, but they’re relied upon to tend to themselves.”

  “I’m almost fifty.”

  “Your behavior yesterday morning didn’t reflect it. The attitude of the oncologist will not have been a unique one, I’m afraid. Have you heard of the German concept of therapie hoheit—therapeutic sovereignty?”

  “No.”

  “Essentially, the physician’s right to be unquestioned. You’ll not find anyone here necessarily keen to defer to a California surgeon, especially one with a beard and ponytail.”

  “Can you help me?”

  “Apart from the fact that I’m overstepping my bounds even now, I think a … personal appeal to your countryman would be better, frankly.”

  “Throw my derelict American self on the mercy of Dr. Beardinger, you mean.”

  She carried on as if he hadn’t spoken. “May I suggest one more thing? If you are discharged from here, be certain you request a CD with a full set of your radiological images. They can’t deny you that in any event, but it may be subject to certain bureaucratic delays if you don’t leave here with it on your person.”

  Bruno experienced a flood of mute feeling toward Benedict, precisely at the instant she was bound to refuse him anything further. He’d been ungrateful. But he’d been speaking as a dead man. Now she’d enriched and burdened him with the return of his human hopes, his credentials for species participation. Benedict had no way of knowing how little he’d tended to these before his death sentence.

  “Thank you,” he said. “I’ll do that.”

  “If I may say, it’s perfectly human to look for someone to blame, or to blame yourself—essentially, to make a story, or a moral, out of what has befallen you.”

  “I … wouldn’t. I won’t.”

  “The temptation will be strong, but far better if you accept that it is quite random.”

  “Yes. Of course.”

  “Mr. Bruno, I’ll leave you now. Do you possess means for traveling to America?”

  “I’ll manage.”

  “Is there someone who might assist you on your return? Have you friends in the San Francisco area?”

  For decades now, Bruno would have replied, I’ve made certain not to. That was
before Singapore.

  Two

  I

  He’d recognized Keith Stolarsky, but not before thinking, How could they let that bum in here? Casual Western dress wasn’t frowned on in Singapore, so long as that meant appalling tourist pastels, striped Lacoste polo shirts, and rack-fresh sports or hip-hop gear, Juicy Couture, and so forth. And that was what you saw. Not this. The American, who had a posture like a question mark, was dressed in layers of baggy, unwashed black polyester, too tight on his paunch, and a windbreaker over black jeans and worn running shoes—a costume exhumed from some Dungeons & Dragons basement. His hair, greasy over his ears, had been combed back from a widow’s peak that revealed an unhealthy scalp; his shave looked five days old. Of course, that Bruno found this presentation arresting was perhaps a sign, one among many, that he’d been in Singapore too long. The man would be invisible in America, unless he buttonholed you for a handout.

  Then the man’s features, and general comportment, his warped grin and pigeon walk, resolved into those of Bruno’s boyhood acquaintance Keith Stolarsky. Throughout the next days, which he would spend partly in Stolarksy’s company, Bruno was made to marvel at the treacherous intensity of restored memory. Until the man walked into the Smoker’s Club, Bruno never would have believed that he recalled the child, or young teenager, named Keith Stolarsky. Indeed, Stolarsky had been purposely forgotten, with so much else. Yet in his presence, each lost gesture and intonation of Stolarsky’s lined up on the front shelf of Bruno’s awareness, waiting to be retrieved. By this process, Stolarsky was magically doubled in Bruno’s gaze. He was simultaneously a forty-seven-year-old wreck—Stolarsky had been a year behind Bruno at Berkeley High, as Bruno now easily remembered—and a frisky, provocative thirteen- or fourteen-year-old, late to mature physically but with an insinuating, gremlin wit.

  “Someone you know?” asked Edgar Falk, at the instant Bruno suffered this first recognition. Nothing escaped Falk. Anyhow, there was nothing to hide.

  “Yes,” said Bruno. “From long ago.”