The Blot

by Jonathan Lethem

  Alexander Bruno at eleven had become exquisite.

  Still waiting to be proven was what he’d become exquisite for. To what purpose or for whom, beyond himself. Yet after discharge from the hospital, returned into June’s care, to his mother’s Berkeley, and to the schoolyard of Malcolm X Elementary, Bruno was no longer subject to the unwanted migration of thoughts or feeling across his boundary of self. His gift, once discarded, was a lost toy for which he barely troubled to search. What remained was the sporadic luxury of testing another, as he’d tested the nun. Hello, can you hear me? No? The absence of reply was only a relief.

  One person in—what? ten million?—might spot him in his hiding place. Well, one had, eventually. Edgar Falk. This, Bruno, lying beneath his mask of bandages now, didn’t want to think of. He thought of Falk too much. How often had Bruno rehearsed his trajectory from his exquisite isolation, the sultry implacable hauteur that had conveyed him to Chez Panisse and beyond, to his first passport and flight, to the first of so many private clubs and casino back rooms, to the night a decade ago, at White’s in London, when he’d met Falk and become exquisitely enslaved?

  No. Bruno, who usually preferred never to recollect at all, now languished in memory of the years after his burn injury. Sixth grade, seventh, Berkeley High. The reminiscences Stolarsky had tried to spur—now they came freely. The changes in his body, so soon after, the wild swift attainments of height and jawline. Hair covered his pubic scar, making it irrelevant. Girls, and women, when Bruno removed his underwear, never saw what he might have feared they’d recoil from. He’d need to point out the scars to have them noticed at all, and then they gained useful sympathy. See, he’d joke, it’s like I’m wearing phantom underwear! Bruno’s easy discovery of sex was only matched by the speed with which his teen conquests curdled into ennui. He needed games with a more definite score.

  Flashman? Yes, he remembered the books now. And others, traded with boys like Stolarsky as talismans: The Ginger Man, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Albert Camus’s The Stranger and Colin Wilson’s The Outsider. The books Bruno poached from the hippies’ shelves, from the Soup Kitchen’s free box, devastated every platitude the hippies claimed to exalt. Flashman had indeed been Bruno’s idol, for an instant, sure. Except the point was that Bruno, like Flashman, was his own idol.

  Bruno floated loose of June’s orbit. The busboys and waiters he fell in with at Spenger’s and then at Chez Panisse schooled him in what he’d pretended to know already, things he’d glimpsed in books and films and from Roxy Music and Robert Palmer on MTV. Matters concerning himself and the world and how one might be induced to glide along the surface of the other. The busboys and waiters introduced him to cocaine and to the after-hours life of dining staff, in bars that closed at five and six in the morning. It was there that he’d seen his first real gamblers. He spotted them at pool tables and card games, or at the bar, trading one-upmanship in sly or obvious anecdotes. For the time being Bruno couldn’t sort the winners from the losers, and he left them alone. It occurred to him now that by present standards he’d have rated them losers, to a man.

  Then again, lying here, how else to rate himself?

  It was soon after escaping Spenger’s, to the more rarified atmosphere of the Gourmet Ghetto, that Bruno had come under the tutelage of Konrad, a failed ballet dancer, a proud accentless Polish émigré and the café manager at the elite restaurant whose telephone he’d answer with the clearly enunciated words “Cheese Penis.” Konrad’s months-long siege on the sixteen-year-old Bruno’s homosexual virginity was abandoned with the declaration that the boy’s looks were a tragic waste; only afterward had Konrad’s mentorship begun. Once Konrad showed Bruno how to dress and walk, Bruno didn’t know how he’d managed either to that point. When, at an after-hours card game at a house perched on Wildcat Canyon, owned by a dissolute history professor who’d opened his hot tub and billiards room to the Chez Panisse staff, Bruno had begun with regularity taking money off waiters five and ten years his senior, it was glowering Konrad who’d informed Bruno that poker wasn’t a gentleman’s game. And yes, it was Konrad who’d introduced him to backgammon. The café manager played the game with a severe focus, though he refused to gamble himself.

  Konrad also taught lessons in behaviors others believed unconscious: the correct place in a room to rest one’s gaze, and how to arrange one’s limbs in parallel and turn one’s hips in counterpoint, to make a pleasing, classical composition. Konrad wasn’t so much feminizing Bruno—the impression Konrad himself conveyed wasn’t feminine—only encouraging him to be aware of how he could make his newly strapping body both unthreatening and fascinating. In many ways it was as if Konrad were extending the principles Bruno had discovered in the hospital. Where Bruno had sealed himself within an internal distance, Konrad taught him that same distance could be externalized, worn as a cloak of unapproachability, rendering you hypnotic to others. The result was to induce the same longing you concealed.

  The deeper magic was this: In the process of layering performance onto the outside of his container, Bruno could forget what the container disguised. All and anything was eligible for this amnesiac relief.

  For years after Konrad had been dismissed from Chez Panisse, and departed Berkeley overnight, Bruno felt the café manager’s tutorials as a somatic language rustling inside his body. Yet until this second recuperation, under the long night of gauze and bandages, he’d forgotten even Konrad’s name. Now it was returned to him, like excavating a single jigsaw puzzle piece from beneath a sofa cushion. Could Konrad be found, Bruno wondered? Was he still alive, or an AIDS casualty? But no. The impulse was hopeless, sentimental. Bruno had done nothing more than regain a lost name. It meant nothing.

  Why had Stolarsky wanted to save Bruno?

  What was his life for?

  Bruno had nothing but his questions. His chest shuddered. Air wheezed and whistled in the plastic tube and Bruno knew it was himself he heard, that beneath his bandages the numbed flesh of his face convulsed in sorrow. Whether his ducts could produce tears was anyone’s guess. He wouldn’t feel them if they could.

  Yet all this, ancient formless memory and grief, was preferable to the alternative: remembering the surgery as if through Dr. Behringer’s eyes.

  II

  Day and night, sleep and waking, past and present, all had lost their definition, until one morning Bruno was awakened by a Japanese nurse. He knew she was Japanese because she said, “My name is Nurse Oshiro, I’m from Japan”; he knew it was morning because she declared it so. She then removed his breathing tube and told him to swallow. With that, though his eyes remained bandaged, Bruno rose from his miasma. It was as if Oshiro had thrown a line into his well of dread and memory and drawn him up toward the light—though not so far that he could see.

  Attempting speech, he produced a shredded whisper and a surfeit of pain.

  “You want to write me a note?” asked Oshiro.

  “Yes.” The word came out wrecked. She understood nonetheless.

  She brought him a small plastic slate and a blunt marker. “You write what you need to say. I’ll wipe it clean.”

  WHERE IS MY DOCTOR?

  “Your doctor’s been here three times. He talked with you, you don’t remember.” He felt her seize the slate, and return it to him. He wrote again.

  AM I DYING?

  “It’s a big success, everybody told you already. We told you lots of times. This time, you remember.”

  Oshiro’s tone was ceaselessly chipper and admonitory. It gradually dawned on Bruno that she bore some special authority in his case. She’d been appointed his taskmaster, to teach him to swallow, to suck from a straw, and to cooperate with the management of his bedridden body, which, according to Oshiro, the nurses and orderlies were tired of negotiating during his long fugue. He must learn to help in their efforts to change his sheets and shift his bedpan.

  “See,” said Oshiro, “you’re not too lazy!”

  IT HURTS.

  “You h
ave to move, it’s good for you. Soon you’ll walk to the bathroom. Tomorrow you’ll eat.”

  Next he endured Oshiro’s removal of the heart monitoring stickers and redundant IV lines, the litter strewn everywhere on his body. Then, horribly, she dethreaded the catheter from his penis. Bruno’s reward for answering Oshiro’s beckoning him back to life was to undergo one painful and humbling effort after another.

  Not that Bruno imagined he had any choice in the matter.

  “Tomorrow we will change your bandage, too,” she said, when he was exhausted.

  MY EYES?

  “Your eyes stay closed tomorrow, the gauze stays on. Doctor has to see your eyes.”

  AM I BLIND?

  “I told you, Mr. Bruno, everything went good, you’re very lucky. You should be happy.”

  I AM HAPPY.

  “Good, now go to sleep.”

  III

  Another day passed under the fresh bandage before Behringer came to examine Bruno’s incisions and invite him to open his eyes.

  This was a spell of wretched boredom. Bruno had started sitting in a chair beside his bed. After permitting himself to be guided to the bathroom once or twice, he’d begun shrugging off the attendants and nurses to grope his way there himself—it wasn’t so far. His voice returned, a rasp but recognizable. He’d eaten, gelatin at first, and broth, then as swallowing grew less painful and he gained confidence in the disconcerted muscles of his face, soggy sandwiches and vegetables cooked to a paste. Nothing he ate, however, conveyed any taste at all, and Bruno made lavish complaints to whomever presented the portions of flavorless goo.

  His irritation gave him courage. They switched on a television in his room, and Bruno demanded they switch it off. It was replaced by nothing, by the sounds of the machines and the nurses in the corridor and at the station at the end of the corridor, sometimes the sound of another patient’s doctors in discussion with that patient’s visitors. None of this diverted him, but neither did it bewilder him as the television had. For one thing, he could command they close his door and leave him alone; sometimes they complied. The other nurses had accepted his preference for Oshiro, and so they handled him lightly, with minimal talk, navigating his petulance as if he were a blind boorish lord, though no matter his complaints, they never apologized for anything. Increasingly they ignored him. For this, he began to abuse them under his breath, in arch tones, like a blind boorish lord. Of course it was Bruno who owed the apology; Oshiro informed him of this.

  Night lasted forever. Bruno believed he never slept.

  His second hospitalization revealed none of the mysterious depth or savor of his first. There were no whirlpool orgasms, no nuns to perplex. In these stark days, even his grasp of those recollections, which had overrun his first hours after the surgery, slipped away. What did such tatters of memory amount to? Now Bruno could picture the green, pocket-size paperback of Flashman that he’d carried in his trench-coat pocket—so what? He wouldn’t stoop to retrieve it if he saw it on the street, so faint was his curiosity.

  Oshiro prepared the patient, and his room, for Behringer’s arrival. The ripple of quickened attention preceding a major doctor’s entry to the ward had become familiar to Bruno.

  “He’s taking off your bandage today.”

  “Who, God?”

  “You’re a foolish man.”

  “He who shall not be named, but comes bearing scissors?”

  “It’s important to make the room dark, Mr. Bruno. Your eyes will be very sensitive.”

  “So you hope. Or not sensitive at all. I could be free to stare at the sun. Or sleep with the lights on.”

  “No, Mr. Bruno, they tested your eyes.”

  “That’s good enough, then. I have eyes that pass tests. We can leave the bandages on.” Bruno felt on the brink of being driven from a sanctuary, into the unknown.

  “Tsk tsk.” At her most censorious, Oshiro resorted to syllables, clicking sounds, as if she were scouring out a puppy’s soiled crate.

  At that moment Bruno felt the man enter the room—in fact, understood that the man had already entered, had indeed been listening to Bruno’s moronic bantering for who knew how long.

  “Sure, leave ’em on, if you want. But you’d be cheating us both of a gander at my masterpiece.”

  It was the voice of Bruno’s champion and nemesis, the man who’d murdered his face. A man who addressed his quarry always in the superior and ebullient tone of a being utterly apart from his species. He was a god, perhaps, or at least a kind of medical Santa Claus. The air had dropped, seeming cooled and depressurized instantaneously, as if the room had been ejected like a capsule into space. Or possibly this was the air of the operating room; the neurosurgeon carried it around with him, a barometric and refrigerated wrongness.

  “Did I frighten you?”

  Bruno had raised his hands, involuntarily, lifting his IV tubing with them, his palms facing outward as if to fend off savagery from the direction of the voice.

  “Frighten me? No … no. You surprised me.”

  “It’s Noah Behringer.”

  “Of course.”

  “I heard you forgot my earlier visits.”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, the resection was a triumph. I can answer any questions if you like. We’ll have a follow-up MRI, of course. But I took out your tumor, Alex.”

  “Nurse Oshiro explained it to me.”

  “I mean, I’m thrilled with what we did in there.” The neurosurgeon seemed in search of adoration, a victory lap. Bruno couldn’t be bothered. He rotated his raised hands slightly, miming an examination of them through the baffling thickness that bound his face, and which so far as he knew was all that was holding it together.

  “What will I see when you remove the bandage?”

  “Ha! Aside from me and your beautiful nurse, you mean? Who knows? Light sensitivity shouldn’t bug you more than an hour or two. There could be some lingering fuzziness. My only concern is that the optic nerve may retain a phantom image of what you called your blot. Something like the visual-field equivalent of tinnitus. It may take some time for the receptors to reeducate themselves, now that they’re relieved of the pressure, but they’re adept little guys, receptors. Should we find out?”

  Bruno soothed himself inside the blizzard of terminology and what passed for doctor wit. He lowered his hands and allowed Behringer to approach his face. Oshiro too. Her touch was known to Bruno, hands that worked with the same brisk chiding precision as her talk. Surgeon and nurse clipped and fussed at his edges, then levitated the weight of the bandages, like a clay mask, from the raw sealed mystery of what lay beneath. Bruno’s eyelids remained shut beneath individual pads of gauze, around the periphery of which air now circulated, awakening the scourged contours of his former skin.

  Behringer carried on intermittently jabbering—“You’re healing beautifully,” and so forth. Bruno barely heard. He felt himself rise through veils of stupefaction in the direction of a world vaster and more blazed by light than he’d recalled. He’d been a cave creature, sealed in mud and measuring distance in pebbles, in grains. The world was huge.

  There remained some miles to cross to make contact with it. He still wasn’t freed, Bruno now understood. The hands continued. Behringer merrily clipped and snipped, while Oshiro, teasing gauze membranes from beneath his eyes, opened him like a flower.

  At the last layer it felt as if they’d lifted Bruno’s nose and cheeks away to expose his uncooked skull. He felt no pain, though he was surely still dealt numbing medications through the vents of his inner elbows. Was this cultivating brutal addictions Bruno would need to sweat off later? He supposed he’d be grateful in any case.

  Bruno thought of the coins placed on a dead man’s eyes: The procedure was reversed now. Oshiro relieved his lids’ burden, then told him to wait. She gently rinsed a superglue of sleep gunk from his lashes, painting saline with her cotton swabs downward across his cheeks as if bathing him in tears. He rolled them open.

&nbs
p; Blurriness, yes, and double vision, until he could rein the split scene together, a mild muscular effort, still painless. He did retain a version of the blot, one which hovered translucently at the center of sight, a thing seen but not seen. Glitches peeled at the rim of his vision’s field, too—as if the blot had been shattered, then swept to the far horizon of his gaze. Yet none of this was impairment enough to prevent the ruin of his romance with the formerly unseen world. Bruno’s sight worked well enough—too well—to deny the crushing fact that there was nothing worth seeing.

  God? Not even Santa Claus. Bruno had been mutilated by a pompous hippie in a corduroy suit. Oshiro was round-faced, short, pleasant, and a totally inadequate harbor for erotic fantasies Bruno had no clue he’d constructed until the instant they collapsed. The two figures stood in a room the size and vitality of a faded Polaroid. Bruno had been laboriously revived into a world unworthy of the name. If it were a page in a magazine, he’d have turned it.

  “Don’t touch,” commanded Oshiro. Bruno’s intubated hands had again drifted up, near his face.

  “So, your eyes work,” said Behringer. “I can see you’re tracking.”

  “Tracking?”

  “Be patient if there’s some overlay, or floaters.”

  “Can I define you as a floater?”

  “That depends. How many noses do I have?”

  “The same number as you have beards, and half the number of your eyes.” Bruno was tired already.

  “He’s joking! And he looks great, doesn’t he?” Behringer’s heartiness seemed not so much false as slipshod. And irrelevant. The surgeon had no purpose here. He’d had his way with Bruno and could muster nothing better than boorish gloating.

  “I can just imagine,” said Bruno. “My mouth feels like you sewed it on upside down.”

  “Ah, well, heh, we didn’t actually remove your entire mouth. Sure, you’ve got some healing to do, but the latest stitching techniques are miraculous. The nurse is going to show you how to maintain the incisions to minimize scarring, you can do it yourself—”