The Blot

by Jonathan Lethem

  “Does it involve a whirlpool?”

  “Sorry?”

  Bruno waved his hand, without shifting it from where it lay on his gown-clad thigh. He didn’t wish to be corrected again.

  “Do you want to use a mirror?” Behringer spoke gently for the first time. Bruno suspected this meant it was a bad idea. He’d already glanced into the rounded black eye of the TV mounted high in the corner, which displayed the same dire Polaroid, only reversed: two solicitous pygmies before an elongated straw man, one who lay vein-sucked by an array of devices. The features topping the straw man’s withered form, too minuscule to examine in the screen’s reflection, were easily imagined. A former face, crazy-quilted into a semblance.

  “No, thank you,” Bruno said to the offer of the mirror. His jigsawed exterior was the least of his problems. The vision he’d suppressed came to claim him now: his memory of his surgery as he’d suffered it through the anesthesia. Bruno had seen his own face converted into a flesh culvert, the root-gully voided by a toppled tree. He’d undergone a dream-voyage between two milky planets he was fairly positive had been his own unhinged eyeballs.

  How to explain this to Behringer? “There’s something I need to tell you,” Bruno began.

  “Of course.”

  “I can … read minds … again. I can read yours.”

  “That’s terrific. How about scent? Can you read smells?”

  “Sorry? Smells? No, nothing.”

  “See, I heard you were complaining about the food—that’s less a tongue thing than a nose thing. Not that with the food here you’re missing much.”

  “It mostly tastes like rubber or shit.”

  “It mostly is! No more phantom barbecue odors? You were babbling about pork ribs before you went in.”

  “No … no.”

  “We didn’t damage the olfactory nerve, I don’t think. The ‘old factory,’ I call it. Sometimes it takes a while, like a system reboot—”

  “You don’t understand. I watched you operate.”

  “Well, that would be impossible, but anesthesia can provoke some wild hallucinations.”

  “I saw the whole thing.”

  “Your eyes were, uh, let me just suggest they were securely out of commission.”

  “I didn’t need my eyes. I saw it through yours.” Bruno couldn’t stop himself. He’d grown more certain of his miracle and catastrophe, and the need to make Behringer grasp it. No matter how flippantly he spoke, the surgeon was party to Bruno’s disjointing.

  “Nurse, will you excuse us? Mr. Bruno and I should talk alone, I think.”

  It seemed absurd to require Oshiro to leave the room, she was already so diminished. But so was Behringer and the room. Doctor and nurse, a pair of canceled postage stamps on a scrap of envelope. Had Bruno grown enormous, or was the hospital so small? He observed that though the surgeon had relied upon Oshiro to rehabilitate his victim, Behringer couldn’t recall her name. Bruno, for his part, wanted to object that Oshiro should be allowed to stay, but couldn’t find the strength. He watched her go, the only witness to what the bearded imp had done to him and still might do.

  But no, Behringer was a reputed famous healer, he’d operated out of charity, munificently. He and Bruno were meant to be on the same team. These detrimental effects were wholly unintended. Bruno only needed to explain.

  “When I was a child …” he began, slowly. Each word dredged from the past should be essential. What had happened was so strange. He’d have to forgo irony and indirection completely. “When I was five, I lived with my mother in an encampment in San Rafael—”

  “I see.”

  “The adults around me … this was, you know, the seventies …” No, this wasn’t the approach, he saw he’d lose his audience. A surgeon after all, not a priest or shrink, not a confessor. A surgeon’s million-dollar minutes, ticking away. “But that isn’t important. There used to not be any boundary, between myself and other people—”

  “Yes?”

  “You’ve probably heard this kind of thing before. I could read minds.”

  “Oh, sure.”

  “I mean, it wasn’t a pleasant thing.”

  “I imagine it would be sheer hell.”

  This was easier than Bruno had bargained. “Well, yes, actually. I developed some defenses—”

  “Who wouldn’t?”

  “Dr. Behringer, did you … keep what you took from me?”

  “Keep?”

  “The thing.”

  “Oh, huh, it doesn’t really come out in one coherent piece. The opposite, actually. But for biopsy, sure, we kept segments.”

  “Right, well, I ask because, when I speak of my defenses, it appears you took one out. The blot. I know you meant well.”

  “I’m not following you.”

  “I developed the blot as a barricade. When you said it was pressing on things, deforming their function—apparently it was meant to restrict the kind of thought leakage that I suffered during the surgery.”

  Behringer retreated from the bedside. Brow furrowed, he clamped his hand over his lips and beard. The postage stamp now was a commemorative one, a depiction of Sigmund Freud in slippers, pacing in his study.

  “I need it back,” said Bruno, wishing to be absolutely clear.

  “Yes, we’ve seen more of this,” said Behringer, as if talking to himself. “It’s the power of suggestion, of course. The notion of intraoperative consciousness has pervaded the popular imagination in the form of horror movies and television talk shows, but as with so many popular nightmares, it’s much rarer than anyone realizes.”

  “I had it when I was a child,” said Bruno.

  “Intraoperative consciousness?”

  “Mind reading.”

  “Ah. But, Alex, in a procedure like yours, we monitored your nervous activity by means of what’s called ‘evoked potentials’—that’s what the surgical neurologist was there to do. We know whether you were in or out. You were out. Zonked, more dead than alive. In fact, it’s the intensity of the anesthetic fugue that explains your bewilderment and paranoia—that, and the steroidal regimen, which I’m going to restrict for you now, beginning immediately.”

  “You listened to Jimi Hendrix.”

  Behringer looked at him sharply, then issued a single laugh, one so abrupt and bitter in tone that it was nearly a shout of rebuke. “Very good! You saw the poster in my consulting office.”

  “I need back what you took from me.”

  “It isn’t there to give back. And I wouldn’t—put it back. I can’t believe I’m even answering these questions of yours, Alex. You’re suffering from a marvelous delusion. Unprecedented, actually, in my experience.”

  “Listen, Doctor. Will you just do one thing for me?”

  “That depends what you mean.”

  “My things. When I was admitted for surgery, the nurses gathered up my clothes and possessions. I was told they’d travel with me to my recovery room—”

  “Yes,” said Behringer. “Of course! That’s so.” He seemed unnaturally delighted by this prospect. “Let’s find them!” The surgeon moved to the narrow closet beside the bathroom. In Bruno’s unsteady passages in and out of the toilet, wheeling his tubes on a metal stand, it hadn’t occurred to him to try the closet’s handle. He lacked the energy to spare.

  “Well, look at that,” said Behringer. The closet revealed Bruno’s clothes, neatly folded onto shelves, apart from the sweatshirt, which hung, falsely formal. On the highest shelf, his cell phone and charger, his wooden backgammon set, a ziplock baggie containing balled dollar bills, change, and the keys to the apartment at the Jack London Apartments, and a twice-folded San Francisco Chronicle he’d been reading in the surgery intake waiting room, a week or a lifetime earlier. Behringer treated this dreary cache as a revelation. “That’s the ticket! You need to get up and out of this place. You’ll feel more like your old self in your own clothes—”

  “Those aren’t my clothes.”

  “You don’t recognize the
m?” The surgeon sounded giddy and panicked at once.

  “No, I was wearing them, they’re just not really my clothes.”

  Behringer presented Bruno’s phone as if it were a prize in a game show. “You want to call your friends?”

  “I don’t have any.”

  “Your pal in Berkeley—”

  “Not right now. There, you see that wooden case?”

  “This?”

  “Thank you.” Bruno took it between his trembling hands, rattled it slightly, confirming its contents. He unclasped the top.

  “Are we going to play a game?”

  The Sigmund Freud figure standing before Bruno was ersatz. Nevertheless, he was all Bruno had to work with. Bruno concentrated himself on the fact that it was this toy person who had split him open, that indeed, he’d been sent across the ocean to meet the one man capable of that act, and therefore also capable of reversing it. Everything was circular. In much the same way, it was in Bruno’s childhood hospitalization that he’d obviously gained the protection of the blot—though how it had been induced in him, by salve or whirlpool or orgasm, presently mystified him—and now it was in his second that he’d been robbed of it! But Bruno couldn’t afford to dwell long on the perversities of his fate.

  He widened the case just enough to draw out the Berlin paving stone. The daubs indicating the pips of the die had blackened and flaked. He doubted Behringer would notice them, and just as well, since the surgeon might be concerned about biological contamination. Then again, it was Bruno’s own blood, in fact had seeped from his nose and so would be restored to its right place, in his head. But this was all too much to explain.

  Bruno held the cobblestone out to Behringer. “Use this.”

  “What is it?”

  “That isn’t important.” Bruno spoke carefully. “Use it to replace what you took.”

  “What I took?”

  “Put it here.” Bruno lifted his tubes, to draw a finger just short of contact with the bridge of his nose, or whatever disaster now dwelled instead between his eyes. “I want it put back.”

  “Put back? That was never in you!”

  “It’s the right size. It’s the right … thing.” Re-install Berlin, he wished to say, but he couldn’t risk confusing the neurosurgeon.

  “Remarkable,” muttered Behringer.

  “It was a simple mistake,” said Bruno. “I don’t hold it against you.”

  “We’ll have to continue this conversation another time,” said Behringer weakly.

  “When?” Bruno felt no hope of seeing the pixilated clown-doctor regain his stature, let alone reclaim the wild confidence that had allowed him to inside-out Bruno’s head in the first place. Bruno wondered if he’d erred mentioning Jimi Hendrix, the evidence of Bruno’s mind reading which had seemingly left the neurosurgeon irreversibly rattled.

  “When you’re feeling more like yourself.”

  “That’s the whole point. I feel too much like myself.”

  “Time is the great healer,” said Behringer, in a tone suggesting he knew he’d offered up the greatest lie ever told.

  “Please—” said Bruno.

  But the rapidly diminishing figure opened what appeared to be a tiny flap in the corner of the Polaroid—Bruno supposed it was actually the door of the hospital room—and wordlessly exited the picture.

  IV

  The face—you’d call it a face, certainly—wasn’t bad. It wasn’t Alexander Bruno as he’d been before, and it wasn’t not-Bruno, either, but a fascinating amalgam, flesh turned dough, swollen and mottled, here and there puffy or sagging, in other cases lightly flaking, and everywhere joined in sections to adhere to his skeleton’s contour. This puzzle-putty grew increasingly sensible, alert to the fiery caterpillar of the incision knitting it together, and operable by his old and instinctive muscular reactions. He could make the face smile, for instance, without much pain. Oshiro, who used a six-inch cotton swab to stripe Neosporin along the length of the seams, encouraged it. Bruno smiled for her at least daily.

  He used a mirror to examine the face until he grew bored with the effects. When surveyed up close, these approximated NASA stills of a blasted moonscape. Meanwhile, if he allowed Oshiro to hold the mirror at a certain distance the reflection offered a bleary approximate self, a stand-in he found barely worth the effort. There was no right proximity for his self-seeing. Any close-up was all useless turmoil, while the wide shots were too generic to tell him anything at all.

  Should he mourn his beauty? Bruno found it difficult to bother. He’d never doubted his looks nor their effect on others, yet a life spent hanging on the fall of a die or the turn of a card had inured him to the abrupt loss of what was never earned in the first place. The thing that mattered, enduring such disaster, was one’s comportment: not what lay on the table between yourself and another player, but one’s inner mask. If he followed this logic to its conclusion, Bruno might be waiting for a new deal, another pair of numbers, a next face. What he glimpsed in Oshiro’s mirror was just a bad roll. He might have to pay now for a run of facial luck that had gone decades. If it was the gambler’s fallacy that luck could be cumulative—well, he was a gambler.

  Or again, Bruno might be dead already and not know it. If he was dead, he could live with that.

  If only Behringer had found a way to mutilate his name as well as his features, Bruno could pass from the small purgatory of his recovery anonymous, broke, yet by the logic of his destruction indebted to no one, including and perhaps most crucially his former self. Bruno’s expectations that Behringer could do anything for him besides save his life—a paltry gesture, it turned out!—had collapsed. This freed Bruno from contrasts of before and after. Where he presently dwelled, this archipelago of bathroom, television, and gurney, notions of fortune or beauty seemed fatally preposterous. When Oshiro had trained him to apply his own balms, and to massage the anesthesia cramps from his own thighs and calves, when he’d been weaned from his last tube and his digestion could tolerate any old garbage, not just hospital garbage, Bruno felt ready to slink off ungratefully into the faceless crowd. He wouldn’t beg another plane ticket, in fact wouldn’t accept one if offered. He might live under a bridge.

  On Bruno’s tenth day in the hospital, Oshiro began preparing him for something, though she wouldn’t say what. Behringer, perhaps spooked by their last encounter, hadn’t visited again. Could anyone besides the neurosurgeon sign his discharge? Oshiro wouldn’t say. Yet she was shooing Bruno like a cat to the door.

  “I’m not ready,” he told her, when she insisted he dress in his street clothes and visit the dayroom, a dry run for expulsion. “I’m still sick.”

  “No, the doctor fixed you, Mr. Bruno.”

  “People stay in the hospital for weeks or months after a surgery like mine.”

  She shook her head. “That’s the old way. You’ll recover better at home. You stayed too long already.”

  “I have no home.” This was a simple enough declaration. In another life Bruno might have uttered it across a backgammon board, with brittle vanity, to the envy of a club man who’d only dream of saying the same.

  “With your friends.”

  A shudder went through him. “What friends?”

  “A mister and missus. They’ve been looking after you. The missus was here while you were sleeping.”

  “Miss Harpaz?”

  “Yes, that’s the one. Nice lady. They’re taking you home tomorrow.”

  With that his despondency collapsed on itself, a dead star turning black hole. He’d been kidding himself. His ruined face, his shredded costume of defenses, these were sufficient only to this poor room. Sufficient only to the witness of Oshiro. Bruno had standards, after all. He was a terrible snob. His hands flew to his face, as if to contain what had ruptured. His hands weren’t enough. He felt the grease of his jigsaw-stitchery imprint to his palms.

  “I … can’t be seen.”

  “Don’t be foolish, Mr. Bruno. You look good.”

  �
�Never. I won’t even go to the dayroom.”

  “You must do this, please. Your discharge is tomorrow. Your friend will come.”

  “I forbid her to.” Bruno’s claim of authority was surely absurd. He had none. Hearing Tira Harpaz’s name introduced into the pale void of his recovery made Bruno realize he’d been working to forget it—Tira’s name, and Keith Stolarsky’s, and the conundrums that lay behind them. Why was Tira coming, and not Stolarsky, if Stolarsky was supposed to be his friend? What was Stolarsky’s motive in paying for the surgery? Only amusement? Did Stolarsky have such surplus lying around? It was possible. It was always possible. Money pointlessly pooled, to extents few believed, few who’d never been in the practice, as Bruno had, of siphoning the pools. Yet if Stolarsky was so wealthy, why was he so juvenile, so squalid, so unrenovated? Where was his entourage? Money magnetized flattery and avarice, drew to itself toadies, under names like adviser or secretary, those who’d stalk the perimeter, jealous of the incursion of others like themselves. What was Keith Stolarsky’s stake in Alexander Bruno? And why had he been jovially shoving his girlfriend into Bruno’s lap?

  Perhaps Bruno would find out. With the blot obliterated, his childhood porousness restored, Bruno might find Stolarsky’s motives naked to him. Yet Bruno could only think of how he’d be naked to Stolarsky in turn.

  “I need a mask,” he said to Oshiro, in terror.

  “What?”

  “For my face. For my head, a covering of some kind. I won’t see anyone, or leave this room, until I’m protected somehow.”

  Oshiro stood and stared, a rare heartbeat of stillness in her campaign forever to be adjusting, cleaning, or correcting some part of Bruno’s setup. Her face, round and smooth, was a sort of mask. Sadly plain, forgettable, the wrong sex, yet Bruno could envy its impassivity. Could Oshiro imagine how it felt to gaze out through his own detonated minefield?

  Her indefatigable pragmatism cut in. “Would you like to try a post-surgical mask?”

  “There is such a thing?”