The Blot

by Jonathan Lethem

  “Certainly. They call this a compression garment. It’s made of fabric that can breathe, a very good device. You see this mostly with plastic surgery patients.”

  “Do they … cover the whole face?”

  “With holes for your eyes and mouth, nostrils. You don’t want that, we can’t help you. Then you better hide your head under a blanket, Mr. Bruno.”

  “No, no, I want that, very much.”

  “I have to get a referral from the attending doctor, but it shouldn’t be a problem.”

  “Please.”

  “I’ll bring a selection. Will you promise to visit the dayroom?”

  “I promise.”

  He felt her relief. Bruno had absolved Oshiro of his existential conundrum, in favor of a task to accomplish. The patient wants masking? Let him be masked. In this, the nurse’s impulse wasn’t so different from Behringer’s: to hustle Bruno into street clothes and be shed of him. Bruno had to grow accustomed to his new role as an unwelcome guest. It mirrored his earlier life, in which he’d made his living as a form of human decoration, a perfume or mood to amplify an evening. Now he had the power to improve a scene by exiting it.

  Oshiro, wizard of competence, cleared any paperwork hurdles at the nursing station, and within the hour returned to present him with a small array of the masks. These resembled Mexican wrestlers’ costumes, or items from a masochist’s toy kit, only purged of florid decoration in favor of the uniform sallow color of a Band-Aid, with neatly tailored Velcro fasteners for ease of removal. They roused some feeling of solace in Bruno. He allowed himself to touch them, the fine antibacterial mesh, both grainy and smooth, and warming to the touch, like the skin of a robot designed to soothe the elderly or dying.

  While he browsed options Oshiro lay his folded clothes and sweatshirt across his knees, and placed his crappy sneakers at the bed’s side, insisting in her quiet way on his keeping his promise of a dress rehearsal. She also withdrew his cell phone and charger, plugging it in within reach at his bedside table, and moved his backgammon set and the folded Chronicle to the shelf beneath the drawer there, to join the paving stone. Everything he’d brought to the hospital, a kit for reentry to a world in which he possessed barely more. In Berkeley, in the apartment he’d been loaned out of pity, there waited his shoes and tuxedo, and a few spare ABIDE shirts.

  “This one.” He found the mask with the narrowest eyeholes. The gaps at the bridge of his nose would reveal only glimpses of a jigsaw-self.

  Oshiro had learned when best to goose Bruno and when to revert to the solemnity of ceremony. She silently guided his hands to fasten the mask, aiding and instructing him simultaneously—everything was homework for Bruno’s next phase, in which he’d be nursing himself. She drew him to the mirror, placing his clothes in his hands as she did and shutting him into the small bathroom to change. Awarding him the dignity of modesty was another milestone—days earlier, Oshiro had bathed him neck to toe with a rough white washcloth.

  Seeing himself in the mirror, Bruno realized why the mask had offered consolation: It recalled Madchen, her mute mouth behind zippered leather. He slipped into his T-shirt and began immediately to abide. Madchen had been the counterforce, the angel who’d attempted to intervene on the Kladow ferry, if it hadn’t been in fact too late. Every person he’d encountered since then had conspired to hurl him into this dungeon, beginning with the monstrous jazz-loving German real-estate speculator, his opponent the night he’d gone to Charité—what was his name? At first Bruno could only think of Bix Beiderbecke.

  Wolf-Dirk Köhler, of course. How could he forget? The mask, in containing and hiding Bruno, also restored his memories. And Köhler had been another pygmy. For that was part of being reminded of Madchen, in the mirror—the mask sat atop a full-size human. Straightening his shoulders, Bruno towered in the little restroom, as the bottomless girl in the mask had made a homunculus of her supposed enslaver. Behind the closed door Bruno could hear Oshiro scurrying, preparing his room, moving like a rat in a box. Readying him to be discharged by the rat-pygmy Behringer, into the care of the rat-pygmies Stolarsky and Harpaz. Never trust anyone shorter than 160 centimeters; if the axiom hadn’t existed before now, Bruno had just coined it. What a relief to be thinking clearly again. The cell phone was charged. He’d return Madchen’s calls. Not here, though. Not in this place.

  The mask was good, but it wasn’t enough. In the hard overhead light he made out too much, at the eyeholes and around the rim of his mouth. His ears, too, though they hadn’t been carved up and reassembled, looked doofy jutting from the mask. A halo in his visual field, that phantom-limb version of the blot, only heightened the effect. He opened the door, just slightly.

  “My sweatshirt, please.”

  “Are you cold?”

  “No.”

  The nurse handed over the sweatshirt and he closed the door again. “Are you okay?” Her voice was anxious and he understood that the balance had shifted once he’d donned his clothes. He had leverage. In fact, Oshiro was the penitent now.

  “Please intercept my friend, I don’t want to see her today. No visitors.”

  “If you wish, Mr. Bruno.”

  “And tomorrow, I’ll meet her downstairs. I don’t want her coming up to the room, do you understand?”

  “Yes.”

  Bruno had always found the gamblers who veiled themselves behind mirrored shades and sweatshirt hoods laughable. Their feeble armor a kind of fundamental tell. Unabombers, that was Edgar Falk’s derisive nickname. Now, however, the hood cloaked Bruno’s ears and put the rest in shadow, shrouding the pale mask as though in fog and distance. It changed, from something baldly medical, to an apparition. When he stepped from the bathroom, Oshiro stepped back.

  Behringer had been right, in fact. These were his clothes.

  •

  The neurosurgeon made one final appearance, at the last possible moment. He signed Bruno’s discharge—though, as Oshiro had indicated, any attending physician could have done it. Indeed, Behringer left it to a younger doctor to ask Bruno to remove his mask, to make a final examination of his incisions, and to test certain muscular actions, the rotation of the eyes as they followed a penlight through the air, the mime show of chewing and swallowing Bruno had by this time performed a dozen times before.

  Behringer presented himself only when Bruno was dressed again and remasked, with his tiny stash of possessions bagged on the bed. A wheelchair had materialized in the corridor outside the room. Bruno knew Oshiro would insist on wheeling him into the elevator and to the curb, where Tira Harpaz waited for him; it might even be required in the hospital’s protocols. It was Oshiro’s last moment, and Bruno had no motivation to deny it to her. She’d moved to the door, and out, when Behringer entered the room.

  “I couldn’t be happier,” said Behringer, his tone suggesting the precise opposite.

  “To wash your hands of me?”

  Behringer ignored him. “Your recovery is exemplary. In my notes I’m chalking up any stray delusional episode to a derangement associated with abreaction to the steroid regimen. Post-anesthetic trauma is a very real thing. But everything in the nurse’s observations suggests a nice turnaround. I’ve no doubt you’ll thrive in an outpatient recovery. Is the mask a comfort?”

  “I require it.”

  “You don’t! But wear it if it makes you feel better. You’ll freak out cats and children. You’re freaking me out right now.”

  “I didn’t have a delusional episode.”

  “No?” Behringer’s tone was falsely merry. In fact he seemed on the verge of crisis, as if any interruption to his filibuster would be fatal.

  “You couldn’t remember my name.”

  “It’s right here on the chart! Alexander Bruno.”

  “In the midst of the procedure, I meant.”

  “Your hostility fascinates me. Who knows, it might seem entirely reasonable from your perspective. Still, no matter what you say, I’m going to claim you as one of my triumphs, Mr. Bruno. I’m
one hundred percent delighted with what happened in there.”

  Bruno saw that Behringer had nowhere better to be, or he’d have been there. For all the deference the nurses and younger doctors gave the neurosurgeon, this maestro of disaster was otherwise essentially a thumb-twiddler, helpless to occupy himself until a next disaster strolled through his door. He’d come here killing time, neither concerned for Bruno nor seriously engaged with the puzzle his patient had presented when they last spoke. Still, for reasons of his own, Bruno wished to put Behringer in mind of it again.

  “You imagined yourself as a baseball pitcher.”

  “Sorry?”

  “On the mound at the Oakland Coliseum. Pitching a no-hitter. I don’t know what it meant to you.”

  “Perhaps you’re right,” said Behringer, after a moment. “That sounds like me. But I suggest we discuss it in a few weeks. Kate’ll call you to schedule a follow-up.”

  Behringer held out his hand. From appearances, he’d made himself impervious again. This was obviously a generic capacity, drawn out of the doctor’s kit bag. Bruno, weary of probing fissures in the surgeon’s vanity, accepted his hand clasp.

  “I’ll look forward to that,” Bruno said. In fact he never saw Noah Behringer again.

  Thirty-Two

  I

  Crossing the refurbished bridge for a second time, in Tira Harpaz’s Volvo, Bruno saw he’d been wrong. The redundant span was already spidered with cranes, paused in the act of unmaking the gray steel armature. Since that day, weeks ago now, when Bruno was first retrieved from the airport, the demolition crews had severed the abandoned portion at both ends from the land. The pilings nearest Treasure Island and Oakland were reduced to bare pillars, sentinels in the water. The span that remained was unreachable unless by helicopter or parachute.

  It was an error of sight. He’d been working around the blot, in denial, guessing. Now the former blot was flooded with light and information, his interior eyelid stripped away. Journeying from the hospital, Bruno found himself in the grip of a world both riotous and raw. The morning’s light danced on the spine of the new bridge, which towered like the guts of a cosmic piano. The same light that agitated the picture windows of the gaudy homes tumbled so recklessly into the seams of the Oakland hills.

  The hospital dayroom, the afternoon before, hadn’t confronted him with such marvels.

  It might be a rebus of Bruno’s cleaved self. His obliterated past, charismatic and pitiable, an island at sea. Unreachable. Bruno had been turned from Tira to study the bridge; she might think he was ignoring her. But driver and passenger proceeded in silence, reaching the long eastern causeway before she finally spoke.

  “Tell me something,” she said.

  “Tell you what?”

  “Am I dreaming?”

  “I might not be qualified to say.”

  “Because this all feels like the weirdest fucking dream I ever had. No offense, but I just wonder if you realize, Alexander, how it feels from my side. I dropped off a person, a new friend, someone at least I felt I could talk to for a change, a sort of weird sad gorgeous man who supposedly hung out with Keith when they were kids, though I can’t really tell if you like Keith, or ever did, actually. So, anyway, I dropped this guy off at the hospital for some kind of life-saving operation that I don’t understand at all. And I don’t mind saying I’ve been thinking about you a lot. And now the day comes and I’ve picked up some—I don’t know, what are you, like, the Ghost Rider or something? What are you hiding in there?”

  “The Ghost Rider?”

  “You know, a flaming skull, that type of thing.”

  “I don’t have a flaming skull.”

  “I know that, for God’s sake. It was just a figure of speech.”

  “‘Have you or haven’t you got a flaming skull’ isn’t a figure of speech I happen to be familiar with, pardon me, I’ve been abroad and I missed a certain amount of—”

  “Shut up, Alexander. Why didn’t you let me visit you yesterday?”

  “You’ve done enough.”

  It wasn’t impossible to bruise her. Her tone showed evidence of it now. “I was in San Francisco for some other stuff.”

  “Good, I’d hate to waste your time.”

  “Fuck off. You want to get high?” As if oblivious to their presence in five lanes of zooming traffic along Berkeley’s waterfront, Tira fished in her purse, which lay sagged on the cup holders between them, and pulled out a fat joint. Driving with one hand, she fished again for a lighter, then made several angry, failed attempts, the joint braced in scowl-tightened lips, to spark the tip. Bruno took it from her hand and steadied the flame to the paper for ignition.

  “Have some.”

  “I doubt I have a choice.” The car’s airspace had filled instantly.

  She drew again, then passed it to him.

  “I’m probably on enough drugs as it is,” he said. Oshiro had filled his prescriptions at the hospital’s in-house pharmacy. They sat bagged in Tira’s backseat, with a package of the long swabs, gauze, and ointment for incision self-care; a baggie containing balled-up paper money, coins, and keys; Bruno’s backgammon set and, hidden inside, his stone die. The drugs had been courtesy, once more, of Stolarsky’s largesse—Stolarsky, who couldn’t be bothered to retrieve Bruno from the hospital.

  “Well, put that out, then,” Tira was saying. “Stuff nowadays gets you too fucked up to put two words together, if you take more than a couple of tokes.”

  “Why didn’t Keith come?” Bruno snuffed the lit end between his fingertips, a teenage practice he’d never shed. Painful then, and painful now. He’d adopted it from a certain Spenger’s dishwasher with an El Cerrito white-trash allure—these uncorked Berkeley memories had Bruno at their mercy, apparently.

  “Chuck it anywhere,” said Tira. Only at this did Bruno notice how five or six half-smoked, stubbed-out joints were littered underfoot. He glanced into the open mouth of the purse and saw a dozen identical joints piled there, each rolled with professional rigor. It figured that even in the unkempt and depressed mien of Tira’s decade-old Volvo—nothing so ostentatious as Stolarksy’s Jaguar—she’d find a way to underline the gratuitous waste that extended from Stolarsky’s fortune.

  Tira caught Bruno’s glance. “Help yourself, if you want something for your wine cellar, so to speak.”

  He ignored her, to persist with his question. “Where’s Keith? Why didn’t he come to the hospital?”

  “I have no idea where he fucking is, okay? Quit asking. You made your point: I’m not good enough, even for the man in the Styrofoam mask.”

  “You’re not … in touch?”

  “Actually, I do know where he is, or most likely. He owns a winery in Glen Ellen and he’s been known to just take off up there and get shitfaced for days in the loft above the barrel room, like some kind of mad monk. Or not a monk, judging from the one time he dragged me along. We’re not in touch, no, not strictly speaking.”

  “He knows you’re picking me up.”

  “I’m sure he figures I’m picking you up, probably figures I appeared at the hospital nude under a trench coat, and that’s what he’s off getting drunk and jerking himself or getting blown by a hooker about.” Her voice had closed, as though she might be near tears, but her face remained fierce, her position at the steering wheel windward-leaning and vigilant, as if outracing a field of pursuers. At the first red light she repeated the farce with her purse, a fresh joint, and the lighter. This time she got it sparked herself.

  “Seems like you’re on a bit of a binge yourself.”

  “Cat’s away, et cetera.”

  They came up Ashby Avenue to Shattuck and coursed around the BART pavilion. He should have ridden the underground train and stayed innocent of the soap operatics in which Tira Harpaz seemed bound to enmesh him.

  “Keith believes he’s purchased the rights to me,” said Bruno.

  “If you say so.”

  “And he’s ceded me to you.”

  “You
’ve got us all figured out, so could we quit talking? I’ll take you to the Jack London and you’ll be a free operator, Alexander. I won’t even get out of the car, just drop you at the curb.”

  “If you roll down the window just the right amount I’ll be able to float up to the second floor on a gust of fumes.”

  “Now you’re trying to make me laugh, which I guess has some potential in that getup, like a total deadpan thing. There was that Gong Show guy, right—the Unknown Comic?”

  “I could be billed as the Unknown Tragic,” he suggested. Their banter flowed, despite himself. His capacity for enjoyment of Tira: If he wasn’t careful, Bruno might be forced to admit it. The situation between them was hopeless, but that traditionally was the point at which Bruno liked women best.

  “Sounds like Henry James.”

  “I’ll take your word for it.”

  “Oh, yeah, I forgot, you don’t read or watch TV or listen to contemporary popular music, blah blah blah. Well, Henry James is a gangsta-rap star, he’s pretty much the biggest thing out there. Here’s your stop.” They’d slid toward the nightmare bleeding patty of Zombie Burger, dull and anodyne in the morning light, also the glistening face of Zodiac Media, its windows like teeth with braces. Then turned the corner of Haste Street, into the shade. Now Tira double-parked at the door of the Jack London Apartments. She turned to arch an eyebrow at Bruno’s jumble of possessions, while stubbing her second joint on the scarred dashboard then adding it to the mess on the floor.

  “I guess you don’t need help with your luggage,” she said.

  “No.” Bruno reached to collect his paltry props, humiliated. The key to the apartment, in its baggie—that was his salvation. He only needed to retreat behind the sealed door of number 25 to end the farce for now. Never mind whose auspices that sanctuary placed him under.

  “Is Keith really gone?” he asked, cradling the baggie, the paper sack of swabs and prescription drugs, the backgammon case with its secret rider.

  “Gone today, here tomorrow, don’t let it trouble you, sweetie. We’re all Unknown Tragics on this bus.”