The Blot

by Jonathan Lethem

  “You’re a magical specimen, too good for me by far, and yet here you stand. So close and out of reach at the same time.” If his harassment the morning before had served to settle his nerves, this now was to prove that he still existed, to restore his contact with a world outside that of the gory cavity through which he’d plunged by binocular microscope. All during his uneasy five-hour sleep Behringer had dreamed of the inside of the German’s face. “Someday I’ll pull you into a broom closet. It would be today if I wasn’t so damn wrung out.”

  Kate ignored him in turn. She’d had the benefit of the procedure’s interval to sleep, to return to whatever she called a life—Behringer had no inkling, really—and to ready herself for presiding over the patient’s first and most crucial forty-eight hours of recovery, here in the ICU. Kate never entered the surgical room during his procedures, which kept her sacrosanct, his alone, untainted by the collegiality of his residents and OR nursing staff.

  “I feel like a boxer who’s gone fifteen rounds,” he said, yearning for her admiration and pity.

  “Have you boxed?”

  “The way I imagine a boxer would feel.”

  As much as he wished to molt the shell of the operating room, the spell of entrancement there, Behringer knew he clung to it too. Was reluctant to exit the drama of his centrality, that sphere of absorption and urgency. Until the final out he’d stood on the mound, pitching a no-hitter. Now he had to wander back into the prosaic days between such importances.

  “Hurry up,” said Kate.

  “I don’t have time for a shower and a dump?”

  She shook her head. “Mr. Bruno woke early. They tried stepping him off by degrees, but he surprised them.”

  The German had needed to be restrained to prevent his struggling. He’d been trying to remove the IVs and breathing tube, the ICU nurse explained, and to examine by touch the bandages covering his eyes and the tracheotomy bandage at his throat. Now he lay, only moderately sedate, mostly helpless, surely confused. Where the patient’s skin was visible it was deep gray.

  Behringer touched the German’s hand where it was strapped to the gurney and half covered with IV tape. Did he do this for Kate’s sake, or the nurse’s? No, nobody judged him. Behringer’s gesture was sincere, even if he was self-conscious about it.

  “They were thinking if we cut the steroids it might ease his belligerency,” said Kate. “We could get him out of the restraints sooner.”

  “No, I want the steroid regimen. Give him morphine.”

  “Yes,” said Kate, not quibbling.

  “Did you reach his friend? The one who pays?”

  “I spoke with him briefly.”

  “Good. I’ll call him tomorrow.” Behringer gave up stroking the pallid flesh, put his own hand in his pocket. Then he spoke for the sake of the unbandaged ears, whose function should not have been in any way impaired. “Mr. Bruno, this is Dr. Behringer. Your surgery was a success.” The German would remember none of this, but it might soothe his sleep. “We removed your tumor. Now you have to rest.”

  You asked me to save you, Behringer thought. Though in fact the dissolute German had never used that word, not that Behringer recalled. You asked me to save you, but to save you I had to destroy you. That is what I do.

  Sixteen

  I

  Alexander Bruno had been hospitalized in Oakland as a child, for burns. He’d spent almost a month there, including six days in intensive care.

  Since that time, he’d never stayed overnight in a hospital, apart from his adventure at Charité. He’d barely entered a doctor’s office. The helplessness he endured now, in recovery from his meningioma’s resection, had formerly seemed to him purely a condition of childhood. It mingled in his imagination with his mother’s reality zones—the Marin cult, his and June’s tiny apartment in the Berkeley flats, the plaster-casting workshop on San Pablo Avenue, even the homeless shelter where he’d visited her after he’d begun living with the waiters at Chez Panisse. Now he seemed to have been force-shifted by sense memory back to that time.

  Where was Bruno, now? The answer to his unasked question had come repeatedly, in voices bearing accents Filipino, Thai, and Mexican, voices now sympathetic, now impassive and hurried: “You’re in the hospital, sweetie. Rest.” The voices might add, “That’s right, your face is covered, you’re on a ventilator, but stop touching it or we’ll have to tie you.” Or: “You breathe good now. No need talk.” He’d been informed of his status until he believed it and could recover the belief upon waking anew. It was then he began to knit it together with the memory of arriving at the hospital and placing himself in their care. The chubby, vivacious Scottish woman, who’d joked to him about offering him a cocktail as she plunged a syringe not into Bruno’s flesh but into the tangle of plastic tubing taped across his hand.

  What he couldn’t conjugate was what he somehow recalled of the time between—between his intake, that was, and his immobilization now. Those events comprised a film reeling on a screen in the dark, glitchy with blood and feedback, from which he had to avert his awareness. And so, under the night of his bandages, seduced by the resemblance of one set of beeping, whining bedside machines to another, so long ago, and dislocated by blindness from any purchase in time and space, Bruno lapsed gratefully into a trance of memory.

  •

  He’d been burned by a pot of hot coffee. It had spilled on him while he sat at the breakfast nook of the apartment on Chestnut Street, the summer he turned eleven, just before the explosion of his puberty. Not coffee, actually, for the top of the Chemex was full of boiling water that hadn’t trickled through the grounds and into the bottom of its hourglass form—it was the water that had seared him when the pot tipped.

  June, who’d poured the kettle into the top of the coffeepot, was destined to award herself the guilt; who was there to contradict her? Bruno, however, blamed himself: The pot had been placed on a wooden trivet, shaped like a turtle, with four wooden balls for feet, one of which had come off. The trivet had been the product of a fifth-grade shop class. Once finished, it had struck Bruno as a gift his mother would cherish, despite the abject disinterest he’d felt in the tasks of cutting the turtle template, applying the feet, and a glossy laminate. He wasn’t the sort of child to come home with stacks of drawings, parental valentines, glaze-globbed ashtrays. The turtle’s foot had come off by virtue of Bruno’s shitty gluing job—he’d done this to himself.

  While the grounds belched harmlessly onto the plate of toast before him, the boiling water arced and splashed. It scalded Bruno along one bare forearm, his chest, stomach, and groin. It soaked into the Jockey underwear that had been his only sleeping costume the night before, in an apartment lacking air-conditioning. His mother, after one shocked interval of disbelief, had moved with swift efficiency, stripping off the underwear and plunging Bruno into a cold, shallow bathtub. Tatters of his skin floated gently free in bands at his inner thighs, where the underwear’s thick seams had held the boiling water against him for crucial instants longer. These memories, and of her transportation of him to the emergency room, were kaleidoscopic, not sustained. Though Bruno must have been screaming, he recalled the sight of his own flesh unspooling from his body dispassionately, as if a page in a photo album. It was his weeks of recovery in Alta Bates hospital, laden with tedium and wonder, that had become a personal experience. He’d had his first orgasm there.

  He’d been placed first in the ICU, under a sheet tented by an iron framework to prevent contact with his damaged skin. His burns were largely first- or second-degree, over half his skin surface. The third-degree burns were limited to those bands along his inner thighs and a small patch of his hairless pubis, where the underwear’s fly had similarly trapped the boiling water. His penis had escaped damage—no miracle, since it was at this point barely larger than a hazelnut. At the start, though, the distinction between these burns and the others seemed moot, given how the second-degree wounds began peeling like accelerated sunburn. In the first twenty
-four hours Bruno was in danger for his life, he understood later, from dehydration and the risk of uncontrollable infection across so much scalded flesh. Gloved hands smeared him nearly up to his neck in gel, while intravenous lines flooded his veins with nutrient fluid.

  Bruno spent the next days under that tented sheet returning to himself. “Hospital” turned out to represent a punctuated tedium, the recurrence of blood pressure and temperature checks, the placement and emptying of bedpans and painful switching of IV lines from the crook of one elbow to the other, and the switching of nurses as day and night were destroyed and replaced with tripartite shifts. These women, mostly matronly blacks, treated the burned boy with affectionate exasperation, as an object blockading their efficiency and a confidant in their war on the obtuse and elusive doctors.

  After a five-day stand in the ICU, his crisis passed, and Bruno had been moved to a quiet, ugly ward, into a room with an empty bed for a companion. The rate of attention slowed to a crawl, days yawning into chasms. Bruno succumbed to boredom, but there was something else as well. Though June appeared at his bedside, he was more often alone. His school friends weren’t allowed to visit, if they’d even learned of his accident during summer break. The nurses weren’t interested in him, and Bruno’s burn injuries kept him bedridden, incapable of exploring the ward. Daytime television—soap operas, talk shows, game shows—was useless to fill the void. For the first time, it felt, Bruno was away from the babble of other children, or of June and her friends or boyfriends, who struck him suddenly as no different from children. With the toppling of the coffeepot he’d lucked out of his regular state, that of the intrusion of other voices into his mind.

  By the accident of his injury, at eleven, Bruno had floated loose of the prison of his childhood, like an inmate of an open-roofed cell swimming to freedom in a flood.

  He heard the talk the nurses conducted over his head, and the muttered remarks of the doctors as they glanced at the clipboard attached to the bed frame at his feet. None of it was directed at Bruno’s attention, nor was it concealed. Bruno’s invisibility at the center of this set of actions freed him to perceive his own outline, possibly for the first time. Emptied of his involuntary self, Bruno could refill the container with whatever interested him. He could manage the thoughts and feelings of others, those things that had formerly overridden his boundary, and manage which of his own thoughts and feelings leaked out for exhibition. He only had to understand his curse as a gift to control it. And, unlike a curse, a gift could be handed back or abandoned.

  A nun came to his bedside. She seemed old to Bruno, at least by comparison to his mother, though the nun would probably only have been in her forties, he’d think later. She wore jeans and white tennis shoes and a cotton blouse with her brown-and-white habit, and a large pendant cross at her breasts. The nun wanted to know where his parents were, and Bruno explained that he had only a mother, and that she was “working”—he didn’t know what June was doing with her days while he was in the hospital. Based on how she spent them in Bruno’s company, no guess was safe.

  The nun asked if she could sit and read to him, but when it turned out she had the Bible in mind, Bruno asked whether they could play cards instead. She located a deck and they played gin rummy. At first she let him win. He didn’t guess this; he read her mind. Then he deliberately angered her by pointing it out, and she tried to win, and he beat her anyway. It was with the nun that Bruno first experimented with the control and limitation of his boundary. He’d detected the nun’s conscious intentions, and also her helpless desires, the craven and keening portion of her brain, but now he simply shuttered those out. He only wanted to know what cards she held.

  When he grew bored he let the nun win a game, then said he was tired.

  The same method worked on June when she visited the hospital. At first, Bruno opened to her as always. His mother was typically hectic, fearful, preening. Flirtatious with the doctors and subservient even to the nurses, situating herself automatically on the lowest rung on any available ladder, arousing Bruno’s contempt in the process. She asked repeatedly how long her son would have to remain hospitalized, and spoke openly of her fear of the mounting costs to attending doctors who even Bruno saw had no interest, nor the capacity to influence her situation. Anyway, she’d default on these bills, something Bruno knew already too—June might be the only person in the room with any doubt of it.

  And then, as with the nun, Bruno simply retreated behind his own newly discovered boundary. He tuned June down, then out. In fact, he found once he had done so that it was difficult to tune her in again.

  It was his encounter with the whirlpool attendant that sealed the transformation. In the last ten days of Bruno’s hospital stay he’d begun to move gingerly to the bathroom by himself instead of using the bedpan. The majority of his burns had resolved into tender new flesh, and his treatment now centered on just the small areas of third-degree burns—his inner thighs and the patch above his penis. These areas remained raw and had to be salved against infection and to prevent scars. In this regimen, once a day an attendant ferried him, by wheelchair, to a strange, seemingly desolate wing of the third floor, into a room containing a large steel whirlpool. The hydrotherapy, a doctor explained, was believed to stimulate growth of new tissue and minimize scarring. There would be scarring, this doctor and others hastened to say, despite Bruno never having asked.

  The whirlpool attendant was an angry black man with a salt-and-pepper beard and no bedside manner. His lack of solicitude was so total it was a kind of electricity, an assertion; this being Oakland, the man might have been a former or current Black Panther in his time away from the hospital. Each afternoon he delivered Bruno to this room, which was several degrees warmer than the rest of the hospital, and indistinct apart from the titanic whirlpool. The attendant then stripped Bruno of his gown and seated him in the water, on a steel bench bolted across the tub’s center. Once the water was switched on, and a strong current swirled around Bruno’s body where he sat on the bench, the attendant took a chair against the far wall to count the minutes. The metal tub vibrated steadily, its noise precluding talk. Afterward Bruno found himself lifted free and laid on a paper-covered table, and his wounds were regreased with a heavy yellow balm different from that which the nurses upstairs employed.

  The second day, the attendant observed Bruno watching and volunteered a comparison.

  “This stuff was used on napalm cases in Vietnam. I saw it done bunch of times myself.”

  He was a veteran. It wasn’t a surprise. There were so many, both black and white, haunting Berkeley and Oakland, working as school custodians and liquor store clerks, or homeless in wheelchairs like the one in which this man pushed Bruno. Bruno had met them as a small child, too, at the guru’s compound in San Rafael, men dressed as hippies who bragged of killing—a sniper’s head count, or at close quarters, one swift punch to the throat. Like these men, the attendant’s mind seethed with defiance, even as he preferred to imagine he eased through situations like a Buddha, or a jazz musician tempered to a different key and tempo than those around him. Enormous energy was involved in the man’s not understanding how much he broadcast violence at a glance.

  Bruno, fascinated and terrified, said nothing.

  “They didn’t use it on civilians back then, it was still an experimental thing,” the veteran continued. “Tested on the battlefield.” He then added, as kindly as might be possible for him, “It’s good stuff. Do you good.”

  The attendant spoke as though he’d somehow prescribed this treatment himself, as a special favor to the boy. But no. Bruno knew no such prerogative existed. The connection of this medicine to whatever the man had witnessed during the war was either fantasy or happenstance.

  Bruno, surprising himself, said, “I’m going to go there someday.” He hadn’t intended this as a provocation, let alone cruelly. He only felt that he craved destinations, anywhere far from where he was. To hear a place named was to have this desire given a foca
l point.

  “What, Vietnam?”

  “Yes.”

  “Don’t know why anybody’d wanna do that.”

  In fact, Bruno was destined eventually to spend many months in Ho Chi Minh City and Vung Tau. For now, the remark returned the attendant to silence, though his mind still boiled in Bruno’s direction.

  Bruno’s third time in the tub, the orgasm came unbidden. His erection had been trapped between his leg and the metal seat, which vibrated when the waters spun to their peak. He’d already accustomed himself to the dreamy, amorphous feeling the seat induced, when it culminated in a pitch of sensation he couldn’t have known to bargain for. Then the magic vanished, to wonder at. Everything had happened, and nothing at all—nothing, Bruno imagined, that would have given him away, not over the grinding whir of the motorized pool. Yet when the attendant lifted Bruno free again, the man appeared to find something objectionable and applied the yellow gel roughly, with cavalier distaste.

  Bruno didn’t care. He simply ceased absorbing the veteran’s surly charisma, that whole crude turmoil of envy and contempt. He blunted his own shame at exposure, or fear. Any deference toward blacks, inculcated by his mother and her circle, this he shed too. On his next visits to the whirlpool, Bruno walled himself in a silo of bliss. The game was solely between himself and the vibrating tub, while the attendant was quarantined to one side, as if sealed in plastic. Sensing his irrelevance, the man’s fits of conversation ceased. The attendant was reduced to a function of the hospital, on a par with the wheelchair and elevator.