The Blot

by Jonathan Lethem

  An egalitarian rabble of burger flippers, shop clerks, and film archivists: Bruno could be their pet. In Monaco once, in the early months under Edgar Falk, Bruno had left the Café de Paris with two women, lovers, elegant as film stars. He’d let them make him their diversion and toy. It was as near as Bruno had ever come to fulfilling Keith Stolarsky’s suggestion that he was a gigolo and Falk his pimp, though there’d been no motive for Falk in it and no money changed hands. It wasn’t so different from Bruno’s dalliances as a nineteen-year-old with Chez Panisse customers, older women with an appetite for Bruno’s body and grateful for his seeming disposability. Here, worlds removed, Bruno would be lucky enough to be fed soup and swaddled in T-shirts by these sweet, innocuous humans, at whom he’d never have glanced in his former life.

  If Bruno hoped to disguise his new wretchedness, he’d failed. “Do you really have nobody here at all to care for you?” said Alicia.

  “Not in Berkeley, no.”

  “Someone elsewhere?” Bruno needed no further evidence the blot had wrecked his quarantine; Alicia’s tenderness made it seem likely he’d translated the contents of his brain into hers.

  He’d test it with an outright lie. “My girlfriend is in Germany.” The lesbians might like him better with warranty of female approval.

  Alicia reached for his chin with her own napkin. Bruno instinctively flinched, then leaned forward. She might as well be Oshiro.

  “Your mask is a mess,” she said.

  “That’s okay, I’ve got another one.” A second lie.

  “Do you want to take it off?”

  “No.”

  “Why isn’t she here?” asked Beth.

  “Who?”

  “Your girlfriend. Why isn’t she taking care of you?” Her tone was tough, an instinctive “bad cop” to complement her partner.

  “We … couldn’t afford the ticket.”

  “That’s fucked up,” said Beth. “I thought Keith was, like, giving you a blank check, the royal treatment.”

  “Not beyond sweatpants and Cheerios,” he said. This glossed over a hospital bill that might have mounted into the tens of thousands. But casting aspersions on Stolarsky was the currency in the social economy of the Jack London Apartments. Bruno doubted he could further damage Stolarsky’s abysmal reputation.

  “Well, shit,” said Beth. “I’ve got access to petty cash dispersal. He lets me sign off on the business account, and nobody’s gonna blink, especially when Wells Fargo knows he’s out of town.”

  “You never told me that,” said Plybon.

  “It was none of your business,” said Beth, curtly. “There’s a travel agency on Shattuck,” she continued, to Bruno. “We can go down there tomorrow.”

  “She’s … a German national,” said Bruno. “She’ll need a visa, I think. I don’t even know if she’s got a passport.”

  “Well, find out!”

  “She’s a sex worker,” Bruno blurted. “A dominatrix.” She wasn’t, so far as he knew, but it sounded more empowered than a half-nude waitress in a torture mask. His whimsical lie blossomed into a wild fictional vehicle, one swerving out of his control.

  “Good for her. What’s her name?”

  “Madchen.”

  “So, flexible schedule then,” said Beth, the pragmatist.

  “I bet she’s a cutie-pie,” said Alicia.

  “Yes.”

  “Has she seen … your face?”

  “Not yet.”

  “That’s why you’re reluctant, isn’t it?”

  “Maybe.”

  “You’ve got to tell her,” said Alicia. “Share your fears, let her in.”

  “I’ve been ignoring her calls.”

  “He’s right to worry,” said Plybon. “You know what Renzo Novatore called woman, right? ‘The most brutal of enslaved beasts.’”

  “Shut up, Garris.” Alicia drew herself nearer on the cushions and put her arm around Bruno’s back, touching his knee with her free hand.

  With that Plybon was shunted to the margins of his own gathering. Bruno didn’t think it was worth asking who Renzo Novatore was. Instead he leaned into Alicia’s strong, soft shoulder. If Beth joined herself to their embrace from his other side, Bruno wouldn’t mind. Perhaps even Garris Plybon could benefit from a group hug—at the moment, Bruno couldn’t begrudge it. But Plybon went into the kitchen and returned with four shot glasses, each painted with the word Arizona and a tiny cactus and roadrunner, and a bottle of single-malt scotch, as well as a large irregular chunk of dark chocolate wrapped in butcher paper, as if hacked off a massive block. The Gourmet Ghetto had infiltrated the anarchist bread party, at least a little.

  Later, returned to number 25, Bruno removed the mask, to rinse in the bathroom sink. He palpated the fabric with his thumbs, working red soup blotches and smears of chocolate free of the mesh. Then hung it over the shower-curtain rod to dry and put himself to bed, but not before checking his cell, charging at the wall socket. No new calls. Madchen’s last attempt dated from before his surgery. But the phone still glowed, ready. Falk, Bruno’s distant benefactor, continued to foot the bill.

  III

  The Phantom of the Jack London slept for ten and twelve hours at a stretch, took pills in a sporadic and careless fashion, and anointed his incisions before bed. His mask, his underwear and socks, he cleaned in the sink and air-dried as required. Copious ABIDE shirts and Cal sweatpants had appeared at his door, bundled in a large plastic Zodiac bag, the day after Plybon’s soup party. There was no evidence of Tira Harpaz’s presence. The Phantom allocated the twenties from the envelope parsimoniously, fed himself at student haunts at random hours, the international grub a thin echo of his expatriate life: Mongolian barbecue, soggy sushi, falafel. On daily strolls he’d roam Shattuck, or College Avenue, unkinking his anesthesia-withered limbs, testing his strength. At café counters he gathered discarded American newspapers and read them in the open air, on a bench at Willard Park, accompanied by the pong of tennis. The papers barely caught his interest. He greeted no one. With his mask, he went unapproached, except by the mad.

  He avoided Kropotkin’s. It was enough that he might run into Garris Plybon in the building’s corridors. On the fifth or sixth day of his solitude he did, meeting the slider cook in the building’s lobby.

  Bruno thanked him for the soup and the company.

  Plybon raised a forbidding finger. “Nothing more than the mutual aid any random human soul ought to transact with any other.”

  “Well, it made a nice evening. Have you seen Beth and Alicia? I need to thank them for the clothing.”

  “Those girls are all right,” groused Plybon. “They believe radical fucking can alter collective reality. It’s a nonviable approach, but I grudgingly admire their spirit.”

  “That makes two of us.”

  “I do have a message for you. The ladies were beside themselves hearing about your dominatrix. I guess Beth took it upon herself to confer with the travel agent, some former lover of hers. They booked an open ticket from Berlin, off the Zodiac slush fund, ordinarily used for hiring ringer citizens to create false-flag diversions during public meetings of the Telegraph Avenue Business Owners Association. You only have to call your Kraut and substitute her name for Beth’s, from what I hear.”

  “That’s astonishing.”

  “One shark, many remoras, all swim in the same direction.”

  “Sorry?”

  “Just remember, your old friend Stolarsky makes money faster than his flunkies could possibly redistribute it. All this shit”—Plybon gestured around him, seeming to indicate a conspiracy palace that lay around them, invisible—“is nothing more than rooms in a house that needs burning to the ground. But meantime, I’m sure it’ll be a relief to see your girlfriend.”

  “Yes.” Bruno felt wearied by the counterman’s baited conundrums. Next time they met, Bruno hoped it was with Beth and Alicia. The odds of that, Bruno couldn’t guess.

  “I gotta go open the shop.”

  This
ended their exchange.

  •

  When he found himself craving a hamburger, the Phantom passed through the prohibited doorway into Zombie. The molten-looking building was too present for him to ignore, throbbing with dance beats and bleeding its red lasers into the dark sky. He picked an early hour, hoping to avoid the lines that extended once night fell, then cinched his hood tight to make a small port window, a reversal of the blot, the world condensed to one bright hole. How bad could the burgers be? Bruno was willing to find out.

  The line wasn’t through the door, but inside it snaked three layers deep before the counter, like an airport security queue, marked with a heavy velvet sash clipped to brass stanchions. The students waited in bunches or alone. In either case their faces were lit, within the deep crimson glow of the building’s vaulted ceiling, by the glow of their cell phones. This miasma was punctured by the blazing-white low-cut T-shirts of the Zombie staff, and the glow of tiny Z toothpick flags stuck in the burgers, which flared in the black-light bulb as violently as the shirts. Here and there another detail picked up the luminescence: a pair of Converse sneakers, the collar and cuffs of a Lacoste shirt. The servers, as advertised by Tira Harpaz, were zaftig to a fault.

  Behind them, deeper in the murk, those not taking their burgers out into the evening sat on long picnic-table benches across from one another, laboring over their sloppy plates, any attempt at conversation surely drowned in the noisy disco. The scene resembled that old story about the cave, spotlit breasts standing in for shadows.

  Bruno felt invisible until he reached the head of the line and saw the reaction of the cashier. She pointed and giggled, drawing the attention of one of her fellow workers, who’d just then returned from the tables, bearing trays of detritus.

  “That’s freaky, man!”

  “Sorry?”

  “Your face is glowing!”

  The mask’s mesh was alive to the black light, strongest at the counter to highlight the T-shirts and burger flags. Bruno cinched his hood tighter, restricting his peripheral vision, shrinking the reverse-blot. This might not have been a winning move. Other voices clamored to know what had triggered the outcry. Soon curious faces, both servers and clientele, bobbled past his porthole window, to steal a glimpse of the mask’s effect: the full moon trapped in the bottom of a well.

  “Could I just order a meal?” he said.

  “Sure, Jason!”

  “Better make it bloody rare for the man in the mask.”

  “Treat him right, we don’t want a mass-slaying incident!”

  The attention was intolerable. Bruno turned away. He had to jostle through the surrounding bodies, less a matter of a mob with pitchforks than of navigating in the gloom. Bruno had no doubt he was forgotten once he plunged in dismay into the open air.

  He settled for a bag of tortilla chips and a plastic container of guacamole from an indifferent clerk in a brightly lit grocery. With these spoils Bruno retreated to number 25. Shedding his sweatshirt on the bed, he noticed the cell phone, at the baseboard. He detached it from the charger for the first time since returning from the hospital and hit Call Back.

  Her meek “Hallo?” came only after the fifth ring, when he’d become certain the call would bounce to a mailbox.

  “Madchen?”

  “Ja?”

  Her voice was faint, clouded with what he instantly knew must be sleep. Was it ten hours later? Well, so he hadn’t diverted her from the action in some all-night leather-masked bottomless dungeon. Bruno knew nothing. His stories were only stories.

  “It’s me, Alexander. You’ve been calling my phone.”

  “So sorry—bitte—I was mistaken.”

  “No, don’t be sorry. I’m glad.”

  She was only silent, the ocean between them roaring in the electronic vacuum as if in a seashell.

  “No,” he said. “It’s meant a great deal to me, in fact.”

  “Then I am glad too.” On the telephone, in the second language, half asleep, Madchen was like a baby bird. He had to keep in mind the forthrightness she’d projected on the Kladow ferry, in her leather mask and bare ass, in her persistent calls to his phone.

  “Did I wake you?”

  “No,” she obviously lied.

  “I’m the one who should apologize,” he said. “I’ve ignored your messages. I mean, I haven’t ignored them. But I should have called before now.”

  “I was afraid you had died.”

  It was still possible the Jack London Apartments were Bruno’s franchise in the afterlife. But he said, “No.”

  “At Charité I could discover nothing.”

  “I suppose they wanted to protect my privacy.” You should have claimed to be my girlfriend, he thought. Seeing as I’ve taken the same liberty, on my side.

  “Have you been extremely sick?”

  “Truthfully, yes.”

  “You’re … better now?”

  “Better, and worse, both.” Could he divert the obvious topic? He wished to keep Madchen from waking, to appear to her as a figure in a dream. “I feel very far away.”

  “Are you in America?”

  “California.”

  “It’s very late, you know—Gott, it is nearly morning.”

  “Is it still dark, Madchen?”

  “Ja.”

  “Don’t turn on the light.” He lay on the bed, his room lit only by the street, mediocre guacamole warming untouched in a sack on the floor. If the staticky-seashell call made room for all the ocean between them, it was also a nest in which their two voices mingled, a virtual enclosure against that measureless galaxy of rooms unfilled by their two bodies.

  “The light is off.”

  “Good.”

  “Are you going to ask me if I’m alone?”

  “Are you alone?”

  “Ja.”

  You’re not anymore, he wanted to say, but didn’t.

  “Do you want to ask me what I’m wearing?”

  “No,” said the man in the dark in a mask.

  “Okay.”

  “We don’t need to do that.”

  “Ja.”

  “Let me tell you a story. There was a man, a man on a ferry once, and he saw a person, another person, a woman, a very beautiful woman. This man and this woman person, their eyes met and something was communicated very quickly, I’m certain you understand. But the man was very stupid, very dense and shortsighted, and when he was given a chance to do something very important for the woman, a short time later, he missed that chance, missed it badly. And this, for whatever reason, this was the end for him. Like in some fairy tale, but this isn’t a fairy tale. The very next thing for this man was that he took a sudden fall. He tumbled off a cliff into the underworld. Into a kind of twilight in his life. The woman, of course, was there to see it. She’s the only one who has any idea what happened. She’s the witness. The woman could no more help the man than he had been willing to help her. But that she was present to see was still his salvation. There’s no other word for it.”

  They were more words than he was accustomed to hearing himself speak. The story was the least he owed her, he felt now, to reward the string of unanswered calls that made a trail of bread crumbs or pomegranate seeds pointing to freedom, from the dungeon of his illness but also of California, of Keith Stolarsky and Tira Harpaz, of Bruno’s enslavement to their patronage.

  He listened to her breathing. He could think of nothing more sublime than gratifying Madchen in her astonished bedroom in the Berlin dawn. They could have sex on the phone, she’d already more or less suggested it. Given Bruno’s ruined looks, it might be all he should want. Yet there was a higher game here, beyond his volition. It was as though the dice had presented numbers dictating a blitzing game. He blitzed.

  “The man, he took with him into this underworld a kind of dream of this woman. He was her witness too, you see. She’d entrusted him with her secret, almost accidentally. Through chance, he might know her better than men who’d known her for years, or who thought the
y knew her. This knowledge was his sustenance in the dark place. It kept him alive. She kept him alive, I mean.” The clarity necessitated by the tongues dividing them, on the call bounced by satellite across zones and boundaries, purified Bruno’s language. This was an advantage, since he spoke of the deeper erotics of fate. “There’s something I need from you, Madchen.”

  “Ja?”

  “To come and care for me. I’m among enemies.”

  “To come … to where?”

  “California.”

  “Now?”

  “Is there a reason you can’t?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I have a ticket for you.”

  “Nein, Alexander! Can this be true?”

  “It is true.”

  Without speaking, Madchen sounded more distant. As though she’d exited the seashell. A ticket, a summons to him? He’d lose her now to this improbability.

  “Madchen?”

  “I have to think.”

  “Naturally. If it’s too much—”

  “I could travel in one week, maybe.”

  “Don’t decide now.”

  “I’ll come.”

  “But Madchen—”

  “Ja?”

  “I don’t look the way you remember me.”

  “Oh, Alexander, my dear Alexander, do you think this matters to me at all?”

  IV

  The afternoon before Madchen’s arrival, Tira Harpaz reappeared in Alexander Bruno’s life. It was six days later, the same day he’d reached the bottom of the stash of twenties, the life support he both resented and denied. Money, like anesthesia, kept you alive and asleep.

  Tira’s own extrasensory gift might be to reappear precisely as Bruno wondered whether he’d need to go begging for food at Plybon’s door or to search out Beth Dennis at the counter of Zodiac. Days before, Beth had taken Madchen’s phone number from him; the next day she’d knocked on his door, to grinningly hand him a printout of Madchen’s e-ticket confirmation, the ferry woman’s full name revealed as Madchen Abplanalp, her age as thirty-two. Since then, Bruno hadn’t laid eyes on either Beth or Plybon, though he’d made no special effort to avoid them. Bruno hadn’t even put aside the price of a BART ticket in order to go and collect his German visitor from the San Francisco Airport. He had no idea how he’d explain his situation to her when she came.