The Blot

by Jonathan Lethem

  Was Stolarsky trying to kid him out of his condition? Irradiate his tumor with crass hysterics? Bruno’s appointment to meet the famous and iconoclastic surgeon was two days from now. Until then, at least, Stolarsky was Bruno’s sole patron.

  “Where’s your bags? You got nada?”

  “Everything was left at the hotel.” Bruno’s voice emerged as a croak.

  “You should’ve told me. I’d have paid it off, have the stuff sent.”

  “You still could.”

  Stolarsky poked at the backgammon case. “Just your lucky box of kryptonite for the whole fucking universe, huh? What were you, working the plane? Gammon your way up to first class?”

  “I slept.” Or died and was only quarter-resurrected.

  “Of course you did.”

  The sarcastic, grubby entrepreneur, who’d agreed to pretend to a long history of friendship with Bruno based on a trifling familiarity, and then paid for Bruno’s ticket out of pity, had nonetheless no pity in him, or no language with which to let it out. So he’d picked up where he’d left off, treating Bruno as he had in Singapore. But now he said, “You must be starved. Let’s get you a meal.”

  “Yes, please.”

  “We got a table waiting for us at Zuni.”

  Plainly Bruno was expected to recognize the name. The land of his homecoming was an island shrouded in its distinct code and idiom, as much as Zurich or Marrakech. This realm, like those, he’d navigate by ear. “Lovely,” he said.

  Stolarsky’s car was a Jaguar, an older model, bronze paint worn to a matte finish. Its floors, Bruno discovered when he slid inside, were covered with candy wrappers and crushed soda cups. Stolarsky yammered into Bruno’s insensate ears as they carved their way up the peninsula, through hills littered with pastel cigar-box homes and incoherent billboards for Backblaze and DuckDuckGo and Bitcoin. The sales pitches converged, in Bruno’s bafflement and dismay, with Stolarsky’s attempts at small talk. Bruno’s brain might have parachuted somewhere over the Atlantic.

  “What do you love?” said Stolarsky, breaking through his haze.

  “Sorry?”

  “What do you love, you stupid motherfucker? Because we’re gonna get you some of that.”

  “At the restaurant?”

  “In life.”

  “Let me think about it.”

  “You do that, Godot, you puzzle on that real good.”

  Zuni occupied a storefront formed of two corner stories of a triangular block of Market Street, the restaurant a glass prow of street views and exposed laminated beams, struck open by the blazing flat sunshine. There was nowhere to hide, no trace of discretion or shame in the arrangement of tables or their visibility to the street. And no one inside seemed leery of the beetle-like man in his homeless garb or his companion in the hospital-starched tuxedo. Indeed, Stolarsky drew immediate fawning attention, was obviously a regular here, if he wasn’t in fact a part owner. Having communicated with the maître d’ only in grunts, when the waitress arrived Stolarsky preempted the menu, ordering prosecco and oysters and roast chicken for two.

  “The German ambassador hasn’t eaten in two days,” he told the waitress, who wore a white button shirt with sleeves rolled to unveil forearms entirely blued with floral tattoos.

  “The roast chicken might take twenty-five—”

  “Right, so be like the little fucking engine that could.”

  The fizz of the prosecco stung Bruno’s nostrils and made his eyes water. He blinked against the tears and sun, his lids heavy. Could he possibly want to sleep again? His words came slow, as though the thing pressing against his eyes lay against the root of his tongue as well.

  “You’re known here.”

  “The opposite, actually. I come to San Francisco to go incognito. Dunno if Tira told you, I can’t go around in Berzerkeley anymore for risk of being lynched by my enemies, from the fields of both real estate and proletarian revolution.”

  “Darth Vader, she called you.”

  “Heh.”

  They slurped oysters from icy shells and tore apart roast chicken while Bruno considered the life moving beneath the tilted city’s glare, bike messengers with padlock necklaces, bald-shaved business-suited men on long skateboards, Amazonian transsexuals who might not be transsexuals. He imagined for an instant he’d spotted the man from the Amsterdam loading dock, the tuxedoed watcher of airplanes, but it was a trick of Zuni’s plate glass, his own reflection. He nudged his backgammon case with his toe to be certain it was where he’d placed it. The Berlin paving stone was within it, hidden like the thing in his face.

  “You know, Alexander, I like eating with you just fine, it’s only that you’re a little retarded on conversation.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Fuck it, you got depths, that’s what I like about you.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Listen, I made a plan. There’s a vacant apartment in this building I own on Haste. I got a key for you.”

  Bruno was surprised. They’d specified nothing, when he’d reached Stolarsky on the telephone from the hospital, but Bruno had imagined himself a houseguest. He couldn’t decide whether to be disappointed or relieved. “That’s generous.”

  “Forget it. We’ll snag you some clothes, a toothbrush and shampoo and some stuff like that, then you can go to sleep for a million years.”

  “That’s actually what I’m hoping to avoid.”

  “I didn’t mean anything you couldn’t wake up from.”

  “I’m sure you didn’t.”

  In Stolarsky’s Jag they crossed the Bay Bridge, its futuristic new length from Treasure Island like a bridge soaring between planets. Yet the new span was still shadowed by its decaying industrial twin, which Bruno supposed would have to be bombed by drones to collapse it into the water. On Shattuck Avenue, a block or two from their old high school, they parked in front of a CVS. Nothing was familiar. After Europe, Berkeley appeared flattened by sunlight, made of stacked concrete slabs and received cultural notions, a font squeezed out of a computer printer five minutes earlier. Stolarsky gave him three twenties and waited in the car while Bruno went inside to walk the aisles and round up the designated items, toothpaste and brush, soap for his body and hair, and a bottle of Tylenol—the nearest thing, he hoped, to his late lamented paracetamol. He swallowed a handful of pills without water before leaving the store.

  Returned to the car, he shoved the plastic bags down at his feet, a shame creeping over him at his pitiable new dependency. Stolarsky possibly sensed this and grew sparing in his remarks. Something had damped in the retailer, anyway, as they crossed the bridge, into what was ostensibly Stolarsky’s domain. He edged around the campus and up Channing Way, onto Telegraph, then slid the Jaguar into an illegal spot at the curb in front of Zodiac Media. Stolarsky’s emporium was three stories high, a shadowed edifice of neon and glass. It was as if Zuni had been intended to sound the architectural note, a glass box’s false modesty, here carried to ponderous extremes. Instead of transparency, though, Zodiac’s facade mirrored glints of the street, their car, the smaller, more traditional storefronts—a tattoo parlor, leather goods, a head shop—in the brash flat sunlight behind them.

  If Zodiac was a kaleidoscope, Zombie Burger, farther down the block, was a rusted meteorite crashed to earth. Or a giant turd, with signage. The restaurant was made of hammered, irregular steel corroded to earthy brown. Its surface was impaled everywhere, like a whale laden with harpoons, by flagpoles, many flying only the letter Z in bloody red on black. The building sucked light toward itself. It seemed calculated to animate hatred.

  “Your fiefdom,” said Bruno.

  “Yeah. Half the street. Real estate falls on me like rain falls on other guys.” Stolarsky sounded unimpressed with himself. “I got the building I’m putting you in as a throw-in when I did a back-taxes deal on a condemned warehouse. Nobody knows what anything is worth.”

  “Except you.”

  “Not even me. Here’s the keys.” Stolarsky plopped a simple
key ring with a pair of new-cut keys into Bruno’s palm. “The building’s around the corner, 2400 Haste. It’s called the Jack London Apartments, you know, like White frigging Fang, you’ll see it painted in gold above the door. Number 25 is yours.” He sounded tired, suddenly. “You can grab some clothes at Zodiac first. Here.” He followed the keys by shoving a handful of twenties at Bruno.

  “For the clothes?”

  “Nah, you take what you want, complimentary. Ask for Beth Dennis at the front counter, the floor manager. She’s expecting you—I called while you were in the drugstore. You got the run of the place. This is just walking-around money.”

  “Is the apartment—furnished?”

  “There’s a Murphy bed. Tira took care of sheets and some other crap.” Stolarsky failed to conceal his impatience, his stare verging on hostile now. He’d hunkered into the Jaguar’s bucket seat, a turtle with an overlarge shell. Bruno folded the money into the tux’s interior breast pocket. He didn’t bother asking whether the proprietor meant to enter his own store.

  “Thanks for everything, then—”

  “Don’t go sincere on me, Flashman. You lose your irony, the terrorists win.”

  With that, Bruno stepped from the car to the curb, and Stolarsky was gone.

  Bruno crossed to the entrance of Zodiac Media through a small, desolate mob of curb-sitting, punked-out runaways, impossibly young, impossibly filthy. Despite the begging appeals on their hand-lettered signs they seemed enclosed in a bubble immune to his concern, cooing to puppies leashed with strings, speaking among themselves in a family tongue that might no longer consist of English. When Bruno departed California he would have searched such faces for members of his Berkeley High cohort, the druggier, tie-dyed sort that had never attended class, had been an inch from dereliction even at thirteen, even while their parents still made their beds after rousing them off to the school grounds on Grove Street. Now Bruno could be the parent. He’d as soon lead one of the teenagers by a string leashed to its neck as try to engage in conversation.

  Inside, a sleepy-eyed security guard gave Bruno something short of the once-over but required him to check his backgammon case. The guard placed it in a warren of cubicles empty apart from three or four backpacks, in exchange handing Bruno a playing card, the six of spades. At two in the afternoon the ground-level electronics showroom was occupied by just a scattering of clientele, if that was the right name for the slack-eyed undergraduates testing themselves on the newest flat and folding screens. Some might have been staff, in fact, playing games or checking Twitter on the blinking devices. Bruno wandered upstairs. The glass tower’s second story was filled with racks of flannel and spandex and T-shirts, much of it blue and gold and emblazoned with the University of California logo. Bruno found a lone employee leaning on one elbow at the register. It was a tomb, despite the pulsing dance music. The Death Star slumbered.

  Stolarksy’s clerk was a small, nattily dressed woman with short dark Brylcreemed hair and heavy black glasses frames.

  “Pardon me, are you Beth?”

  “You’re Keith’s old friend, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, go crazy.” Beth spread her hands wide. “Mi boss’s casa es su casa, apparently.”

  “Excuse me?”

  Now she looked him over, adjusted her glasses. “Take free clothes.”

  “Yes, I was told to do that.”

  “I can give you some shopping bags. I just have to scan it all first. We don’t have, uh, the kind of stuff you’re wearing.”

  “I wasn’t expecting so. Is there more upstairs?”

  “Nah. Upstairs is games, comics, figurines, that kind of stuff. The basement is Blu-Rays and audio. This is all the clothes.”

  “Thank you.”

  At the rack nearest the window, where he browsed the darkest, least athletic-looking black polyester lounge wear—the pants eschewed a stripe, but a cursive Golden State Warriors still ran up the leg—Bruno gained a view up Telegraph, toward Sather Gate, with a glimpse of the campanile and the scrubby yellow-earth hills. Farther, beyond sight, lay Northside, Euclid Avenue, the Gourmet Ghetto. Memories might be strewn in this landscape, early cigarettes and blow jobs, if he troubled to collect them. Yet all sealed, pleasantly enough for the moment, behind glass. More immediate, this side of the pane, the horrendous clothes and vapid music, the monotonous oppressions of the present life, the fact that not only was Bruno surely dying but he might have to do so in a flamingo pink or lime green T-shirt reading Marilize Legijuana or All Aboard The Hot Mess Express!

  Was there authentic heartsickness for Bruno here? He doubted it. The nemesis growing inside his face eclipsed such vanity. So what if he didn’t like it here? Nothing in Stolarsky’s shop should be any more an affront to him than what he’d encounter flipping through a hotel television’s thousand channels. Zodiac Media made no particular incursion on any special Berkeley of the soul, for Bruno had no such thing. Telegraph Avenue was the same as it had always been, muddled, obscene, in an endless fall from a distant glory Bruno hadn’t known and wouldn’t have enjoyed in the first place.

  He found a T-shirt he actually liked, for its coal-gray shade, and for the enigma of its logo, silk-screened in white, red, and bronze. The shirt depicted a middle-aged man, bearded, with soulful brow and bemused mouth, above the single word ABIDE. The letters looked engraved, like those on U.S. currency. In the middle of racks of fluorescent pastels screaming inanities and insults, or Cal sports affiliation, the ABIDE T-shirt seemed to be espousing its own method of survival. Bruno preferred it so completely to anything else in Stolarsky’s inventory that he gathered up the whole supply: four large, two medium. To that he added one zippered Cal sweatshirt with a hood, though he could hardly afford sacrifices in peripheral vision at the moment.

  “You like this one, huh?” said Beth, as she scanned and bagged the six T-shirts, along with the sweatshirt and the lounge pants and crew socks and Jockey shorts he’d chosen for himself. The girl obviously found Bruno an amusing pendant on her loathsome employer. Stolarsky’s decision not to accompany Bruno into the shop now seemed merciful.

  “I do.” Bruno hid the young lesbian behind the blot and pretended to smile along with her condescension, scouring up what dignity was available. Beth, the day will come where you too shall be called upon to abide. But she either failed his mind-reading test or couldn’t be troubled in his case.

  “One further thing,” he asked her. “Is there any chance this shop has a charger for this phone?”

  “Accessories, downstairs. It’s a separate register. I’ll page the front and tell ’em to comp you.”

  “Thank you.”

  The Jack London Apartments was a building he’d likely walked past a hundred times in his prehistoric Berkeley life but never taken note of, a prewar with brown inlaid panels and a wooden elevator in the lobby. He chose instead wide creaking stairs to the second floor, there to find the empty number 25, a one-room studio with cool hardwood floors and the promised Murphy bed levered into the wall. Bruno placed his backgammon case and the lurid Zodiac Media shopping bag just inside the door. He removed only the charger, which he cracked from its plastic shell, then laced between his phone and a wall socket. He couldn’t face his new clothes, not yet.

  The Murphy bed, too, he left stowed for the moment, as it promised to fill half the room’s space. He went instead to the windows, which opened to the placid interior courtyard, the backyards beyond, no hint of Telegraph’s atmosphere, though he was barely half a block away. Another mercy. Bruno might be drowning in them. Distantly he smelled jasmine or honeysuckle, and cooking meat. He withdrew his head, electing not to foul the yard. In the bathroom someone—Tira Harpaz, that was—had placed a neat stack of white sheets, a pillow, and two towels on the toilet lid, the studio’s only elevated surface apart from the kitchen counter. Bruno shifted them to the floor and raised the lid and his stomach erupted, as it had threatened to ever since he’d woken on the airplane, loosing an oil-spil
l rainbow slurry of oysters, roast chicken, and prosecco.

  III

  He had no way of knowing the hour when he woke in terror, having dreamed that a person had entered the room. He might still be in the ward at Charité. But no. The airplane, San Francisco, the Jack London Apartments; all trickled back in, much as light leaked through the unshaded window to outline the barrenness of the radiator and floor, his legs under the sheet. He’d pulled open the Murphy bed and collapsed on it, late afternoon, he supposed, and night had come. The terror dream had been inchoate at first, without logical boundary, then drawn itself to a point of focus, a visceral panic: the presence of an intruder. He touched his face, his eyelids. The blot was a piece of night he couldn’t rub away. At that instant he detected the intake of breath that precedes speech, a living body apart from his own. No dream, someone had entered the room. A woman’s voice spoke his name, Alexander. She stood by the door. It was Tira Harpaz.

  “I let myself in.”

  “Why?”

  “I thought you were out. I brought you some groceries.”

  “What time is it?”

  “Almost ten.”

  “Will you excuse me?”

  “Should I leave?”

  “No, stay. I’ll shower.” Wrapping the sheet around himself, he gathered the shopping bag into the bathroom and switched on the bare bulb inside, leaving her behind, in darkness. The water brought him out of the dream. When he opened the door, wearing his fresh strange clothes from Stolarsky’s store, sweatshirt zipped over the ABIDE T-shirt to warm him, he found her in the kitchen, leaning against the counter, where the courtyard’s light was strongest.

  “I packed it in the fridge,” she said. “Just yogurt and bread and cold cuts and some other crapola. Orange juice. There’s nowhere to shop around Telegraph.”

  He opened the refrigerator door. “Doughnut holes,” he said, squinting into its light. Beads of water from his hair dotted his fresh white socks.