The Blot

by Jonathan Lethem

  “What happens if he doesn’t come back?”

  “I should be so lucky. In the will, I get the Evil Empire.” She waved, indicating the apartment building and, beyond, the grotesque cash-factories of Zombie and Zodiac.

  “Why does Keith need a will? Is he sick?” What if Stolarsky’s generosity, then subsequent total avoidance of the hospital, and all his nihilistic benders, too, were the behaviors of a doomed man, with one eye on the hourglass?

  “He’s not sick, except in the soul.”

  “Why, then?”

  “Because he’s rich and paranoid. Also because, you know, just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean somebody isn’t out to get you. In fact, maybe I’ll concoct the perfect murder. I’ve got a job opening for an accomplice, give me a shout if you’re interested in the position. All this could be yours. Or half yours, at least until the day you murder me. Now get the fuck out of my car, masked man.”

  II

  He was his own Oshiro now. There lay the man on the unfolded Murphy bed: wan, abstracted, waiting for the indirect sunlight and the faint sounds and scents of street life trickling through the apartment’s cracked-open windows to seduce him to vitality, and finding that they did not. From another vantage, he regarded the figure on the bed with pity and became the attendant, moving to the sink for a glass of cold water, allocating a handful of pills to swallow, stripping off a foul T-shirt or sweatpants in favor of another less foul, widening or narrowing the open windows to regulate the temperature, and applying antibiotic ointment to the long ridged incisions that covered the patient’s face. Then, rounds accomplished, he slipped back into the body helpless on the bed. In this state he passed two or three days. Each might have been a week except for night’s failure to come and close the deal.

  When darkness did fall he lay awake or slept and had no way of knowing the difference. If Bruno played possum, less sick than he pretended, he had only himself to persuade. The nylon mask barred him from what seemed a world grown remote, but the same was true of the hot, tightening mask of his flesh. He’d wake unsure of whether he wore the mask or not. Within the apartment it didn’t matter, since there was no one to see him. He used the mirror only long enough to salve the wounds.

  Eventually he had to eat.

  The answer was nearer than he’d imagined. When Bruno opened his door into the Jack London’s corridor he found someone had leaned a titanic yellow box of Cheerios and a quart carton of milk there. Both toppled at his feet. He looked both ways, as if for a ring-and-run artist, though of course there had only been silence, and in fact the milk was tepid, droplets of sweat from its cooling soaking the carton’s footprint into the hallway carpet.

  Hidden, tucked behind the cereal and milk, came further tribute, an unmarked envelope full of twenties. Another Stolarsky stipend. Though delivered, Bruno guessed, by Tira Harpaz. He brought it all inside. Opening the carton, Bruno found the milk was sour, likely placed there days ago. Standing at the kitchen counter, he pushed a few dry handfuls of Cheerios through the slot of his mask, washing them down, like his morning’s array of tablets and capsules, with tap water. With the dollars he could of course buy fresh milk or something else entirely.

  Telegraph Avenue didn’t flinch at Bruno’s mask, if it was even noticed beneath the sweatshirt hood. Probably it wasn’t. Though the sun had found a route over the low rooftops, the avenue, set to a student’s clock, was slow to wake. At ten thirty it still had a breakfasty, groggy vibe, vendors setting up, shopping-cart rangers poking through the previous night’s recyclables, café tables full of cooling lattes and broken scones. Berkeley had no eye for a lone eccentric strolling. By local standards for eccentricity, anyway, Bruno still fell short.

  Kropotkin’s Sliders was just waking too, readying for a lunch-hour rush, a pyramid of tiny raw burgers massed in abeyance on a cool sideboard, flame heating as the bald counterman scraped the broad flat grill.

  “First of the day,” said the counterman, not glancing inside Bruno’s hood to find his mask. “Two with onions?”

  “Same as last time, yes.”

  “Do I know you?” The strange, fist-like face now queried Bruno’s through the retro glasses, its magnified eyes resembling oysters.

  “We met before. You gave me a third on the house.”

  “Always brings ’em back around.”

  “A kindness, but if I want another this time I can pay for it.”

  “You’re flush, eh? Oh, Pig Stolarsky’s ward, I recognize you even in the spooky getup.” The counterman’s large bladed spatula flashed out, at the end of his gangly arm, and deposited two patties onto the onion carpet. “You get your special-delivery Cheerios?”

  “I did.”

  “I don’t mean to make you feel under surveillance. Though we’re all embraced in the panopticon these days, huh? You’re my next-door neighbor.”

  “I remember.”

  “You fortifying yourself to rob a bank today?” The counterman spoke breezily, while prepping onion slush on a cooler quadrant of the vast grill.

  “I had surgery.”

  “Witness protection, I get it. Need a new face. Corporate criminal operator of some type, I’m sure—I had you made the first time you came in here. But don’t worry, I’m unusually expert in these things, nobody else would see past that getup. Berzerkeley’s the last place anyone would look, it’s a brilliant destination.”

  Berzerkeley? Stolarsky had used the same joke. Bruno didn’t point it out. “I’m not a corporate operator,” he said instead.

  “Pig Stolarsky’s personal Swiss banker?”

  “Really, just a high-school friend.” Even this was more than Bruno cared to claim. “Does Keith really require a Swiss banker? Why do you keep calling him that?”

  “You think he sinks it all into hamburgers and crumbling apartment buildings? Nah, he’s gotta be shifting the skim offshore. I call him that to provoke you, comrade.”

  “Yet you inhabit his crumbling apartment building yourself.”

  “There’s two principles embodied. The true anarchist in an oligarchical society lives as an unembarrassed, even brazen parasite on the corpus of wealth. The second is likelier to be familiar to you: Keep your enemies close.”

  “That could be Keith’s reasoning as much as yours. If he even knows how you despise him.”

  “Oh, he knows. He just hasn’t figured out what to do about it.”

  “Everybody despises him in this town, from what I hear. Do you present him with some direct challenge that I’m not seeing?”

  “No more than the cancer of bad conscience should present to the whole rotten system. I don’t actually blame Stolarsky personally. His corruption isn’t exceptional, it’s just in the foreground of the local picture. Berkeley needs a face to hate, Stolarsky provides one. They should raise their sights.”

  “The word is he likes your burgers better than his own.”

  “Hah!”

  The counterman’s chaotic nerviness was wearing on Bruno. “Could you make those to go this time?”

  “Eh?”

  “In a bag.”

  “What about that third you’re expecting to want?”

  “My stomach’s shrunken, thanks. Two should be about right.”

  “If you say so.” Was the Kropotkin’s counterman really hurt? He must have his conversational gambits walked out on a hundred times a day. Yet he sulked as he prepared the burgers for takeout.

  “Listen,” said the counterman as he handed over Bruno’s change, though not before frowning at the bank-crispness of the twenty-dollar bill, “my door’s open. In the Jack London, I mean.”

  Bruno’s surprise went undisclosed. He couldn’t arch an eyebrow that anyone would know of. But he widened his aggrieved sockets under the mask.

  “Folks come around, you should drop in if you want, there’s often something stewing in the pot.” The slider cook’s awkwardness made this attempt pathetic. He still hadn’t given Bruno his name.

  What kind of stew wo
uld be found in the counterman’s pot? Bruno couldn’t think. At the smell of the burgers his hunger was like a dog howling in a pit. “Thank you,” he said impassively.

  “De nada.”

  Then, while Bruno passed onto the noon sidewalk, the counterman flung, with heavy sarcasm, “Don’t forget to ‘Like’ us on Facebook!”

  •

  Bruno avoided the Jack London for a few hours. He gobbled the sliders on foot, strolling up to College Avenue, then above campus, toward the Greek Theatre, through groves of crisp-fallen eucalyptus. The aroma rising from the dusty ground was full of hints, inchoate memoranda Bruno ignored. Scuffing back down into the city, he found a men’s bathroom in the low murmuring corridor of a campus building. His mask went unnoticed.

  At the Jack London’s door he puzzled at the tattered resident nameplates. Next-door neighbor put the slider cook on the building’s second floor. Three apartments: “O. Hill,” “G. Plybon,” or another that had been defaced with a key’s tip. But even the legible names might be generations out-of-date, evidence of nothing. Bruno went upstairs.

  He’d exhausted himself walking and was barely aware of putting himself into the Murphy bed. He woke hours later, with a start, to the acrid scent of the soured milk he’d neglected to pour out earlier. He staggered into the kitchen and dispensed with it now. Then, with a cool glass of water, he gobbled a palmful of the new medications, with no regard for the timetables on their labels, which he couldn’t read in the dark anyway. As the scent of the milk dissolved from the kitchen, another reached him, roiling his appetite. The stew in the Kropotkin’s counterman’s pot, planted like a hypnotic suggestion, now wafting down the corridor.

  Bruno stepped through his door before he’d even cleared his head. His old colleagues, espresso and paracetamol, had deserted him. He likely stank, sleeping in his sweatpants and ABIDE shirt; he’d need to spend some of the twenties on new clothes, or do laundry. His mask, too, was grubby with ointment and sweat. None of this troubled Bruno now, as he moved in the corridor. He felt willing to become a monster, something enticed from a swamp by the hubbub and savor of human activity. The cooking smells were intense enough to be another hallucination. Bruno was willing to concede this to Behringer, that he’d conjured the seared meat that had enticed or repulsed him all the way from Berlin to San Francisco.

  But no. Bruno creaked open the door to the counterman’s studio apartment, which lay ajar as promised. Number 28, facing the block’s interior courtyard. Though layered with bookshelves and posters, the apartment’s dimensions mirrored Bruno’s, the Murphy bed propped up to make room for the three figures squatted on cushions on the floor, crouching as if at a hearth around bowls of soup and a board with torn chunks of bread and smeared crusts of cheese. Squawking jazz sprang from an actual turntable resting on boards and cinder blocks beneath the window.

  “We have the temerity to declare that all have a right to bread, that there is bread enough for all, and that with this watchword of Bread for All, the revolution will triumph.” The counterman grinned beneath his bald dome and goggle-glasses, and raised a mason jar half full of red wine. “Come in, comrade.”

  “I didn’t mean to interrupt.”

  “Interrupt what? This party is for you.”

  Bruno stepped inside. He recognized one woman, seated beside the counterman and in black glasses frames that seemed intended to match his. Beth, the floor manager at Zodiac Media, she who’d handed over the clothes Bruno now wore. Her short black hair was still slicked back, and her white shirt buttoned to the neck. The nerdiest man’s outfit made for the most stylish lesbians. A sturdily attractive black woman sat cross-legged to Beth’s left, likely Beth’s girlfriend.

  Neither woman seemed in any way surprised by the appearance of this masked petitioner who’d come begging a bowl of whatever the cooking pot contained. Though they didn’t bother rising from their cushions, they scooted to widen their circle, and together patted an empty spot between them, as though to encourage a shy housecat. Perhaps the gathering really had been conceived in Bruno’s honor. At least the Kropotkin’s patty-flipper must have spoken of Bruno, to inoculate the women against reacting with surprise to his eerie mask.

  “I’m Beth, we met before.”

  “Of course. Coincidentally, I was just thinking I ought to visit again for more of your wonderful T-shirts.”

  “Hell, I can bring you a dozen if you want, you don’t have to darken the door of that shithole.”

  “That would be kind.”

  “This is my partner, Alicia.” The black woman nodded hello, and Bruno took her hand for a moment. “I’m Alexander. I will sit, if you really don’t mind—”

  “Sit, Alexander,” said Alicia. Her smile was warm and featured one gold tooth. She wore a yellow jumpsuit sewn from parachute cloth, with stylish pockets on the shoulders and thighs. Meanwhile, Beth poured inches of red wine into another jam jar and put it at the open place, for Bruno.

  “But I don’t know our host’s name.” Even as Bruno settled himself onto the cushion between the two women the Kropotkin’s counterman had jumped up and gone into his narrow kitchen, which also mirrored Bruno’s. Now he returned, cradling a full bowl of the chunky red soup, which he placed in Bruno’s lap.

  “I’m Garris. You want some hot sauce?”

  “Do you recommend it? I recall you as a goop-eschewer.”

  “Different context. Soup is goop, I suggest you hot it up. I grind my own chipotle.”

  “I wouldn’t miss it for the world.”

  Garris—the “G. Plybon” from the nameplate at the door—grinned as he shook his concoction into Bruno’s bowl. The soup was minestrone, or something even more various, featuring both rice and twists of pasta, chickpeas, red beans, stringy chunks of chicken. With the fiery pepper sauce, it was delicious. Bruno felt it wetting the tight-seamed mouth hole of his mask, but he couldn’t pace himself. “You should feature this at the counter of Kropotkin’s,” he suggested. “The sauce, I mean.”

  “Not a bad idea. I could call it ‘A Dash of Insight.’”

  “Who minds the store when you’re off duty?”

  “There’s always someone who can put together a slider, it isn’t a prohibitively difficult formula. Fraternity kid named Jed has the night shift at the moment, though I usually take evenings myself—conversation’s better.”

  “I imagine there’s a sharp drop-off in philosophical content when you’re away.”

  “The decor has a certain dissident vibe that impacts even the least willing minds.”

  “I’m sure you’re right.”

  “Beth told me you’re an old friend of Keith Stolarsky’s,” said Alicia, gold-tooth-grinning with conviviality as Bruno slurped. Her tone held both sympathy and implication. “What’s that like?”

  “Oh, it’s not like much of anything, actually. He’s never around. I think he’s left town for some reason.”

  “Sure, we all know that,” said Garris Plybon, with a trace of aggression Bruno couldn’t account for. “We feel it like a black cloud lifted, when he absents himself from this town. Allah be praised for his whoring jaunts.”

  “Is that what he does?” asked Bruno. “Whoring?”

  Plybon shrugged. “No idea,” he admitted.

  Alicia handed Bruno a section of paper towel, torn from a nearby roll, for a too-late napkin. “So what does your friendship with him … consist of? I’d really be interested to know. He’s famous for not having friends, not that that’s the only reason we’re glad to meet you, Alexander.”

  “It consists of … remembering him from high school,” said Bruno. “Except mostly Keith does the remembering.” That, and several times nearly fucking his girlfriend, Bruno thought but didn’t say. I don’t like him either, he’d add, if that was the ticket for entry into their peculiar club. Though it seemed Bruno was already included. “Do you work for Keith too?” he asked Alicia. How strange, their sycophantic distaste for his old acquaintance, while either drawing his pay or liv
ing under his roof.

  But no. “I work at the Pacific Film Archive,” said Alicia. When Bruno responded with blankness, she added, “It’s part of Cal’s art museum. I’m a film and video librarian, basically.”

  “Ah.”

  “Beth and I met because she’s doing a dissertation on Abraham Polonsky.”

  “I’m in the Rhetoric program,” Beth explained, though this hardly made the reference less opaque. “I’m just moonlighting as a shop clerk, to keep from racking up too much student debt.”

  “Of course.” Bruno basked in their sincerity, to drink it in as he did the soup.

  “And what do you do, Alexander?”

  Ah, the abyss. Bruno’s life had been struck open, as much as his face. But there was no mask for his life. Bruno’s new companions, however unglamorous, functioned in the petty workaday realm he’d so long ridden above, aloof, and which now had spit him out. The others at least existed in economic relation to Keith Stolarsky, while Bruno relied on handouts: Cheerios, envelopes of twenties, and Beth’s offer of fresh T-shirts.

  “I’m between things.” A mention of backgammon seemed out of the question.

  “He’s sick, ’Licia,” said Beth. She nodded at Bruno’s face, acknowledging the mask at last. “He just needs time to get it together.”

  “Yes, I see that.”

  “I’m cured, that’s the funny thing,” said Bruno, wonderingly. “I was sick before—as it was explained to me, I may have been sick nearly my whole life. It’s the cure I need to get over.”

  “Western medicine is a motherfucker.” Garris Plybon produced this like a worn and familiar maxim.

  “Well, you’ve come to the right place,” said Beth. Did she mean Plybon’s apartment or the building as a whole?

  “I feel that, at the moment.” Bruno held his soup bowl with two hands, put aside his spoon, and slurped the dregs.

  Plybon clarified with another witticism: “Sure, Telegraph Avenue, the island of lost toys.”

  Here people reached fame with a trademark costume or spiel, by a hand-printed book of tirades, by nudity or a ritual utterance bellowed at top volume. With mask and hood, Bruno could join their ranks. Yet the soup beggar tried not to take it personally. Open your door under the watchword Bread for All—shouldn’t it be lost toys who’d wander through?