The Blot

by Jonathan Lethem

  Tira Harpaz collared him at the Jack London’s door. She’d parked in an illegal spot, blocking the alleys where the Dumpsters lay, and wolf-whistled to bring him to the Volvo’s open window. There, she sat low and complacent behind the wheel, smoking a joint. Despite all this, and despite how Bruno could easily have walked on, ignoring her, he felt firmly apprehended.

  Her first words informed him of the charges. “So you went to Zombie despite my pleas.”

  “I only heard one plea. Were there more?”

  “Okay, wise guy. Wanna go for a drive?”

  He entered her car on what he supposed was a voluntary basis. She wore a strangely fluorescent polyester blouse, with lime-colored flowers stretched too tight over her breasts and stomach, and tight white sleeves half covering her surprisingly articulated biceps. It might have fit her once. The long arm of the law, he found himself thinking, continuing to hallucinate Tira Harpaz as a policewoman. Or she and Stolarsky could be a team of detectives, of the disheveled, throwing-you-off stride variety.

  “Were you staking out the entrance here? How long would you have waited for me to come out?”

  “I just drove up.”

  “How long would you have been prepared to wait? I realize you may have no idea.”

  “About forty-five minutes, then I’d have let myself in.”

  “I thought you gave me back the extra key.”

  “Oh, yeah, that’s right, you wanted me to pretend there was only one. Sorry.”

  “What about Zombie Burger? Were you following me personally, or did you hire someone?”

  “The manager bundles up the security tapes once a week and sends them to Keith, with the highlights flagged. I usually watch them for kicks before posting the best ones to YouTube. There was a pretty good one just now, this guy with a glowing mask. You should have seen it.”

  “I can’t actually tell which part of all that is meant as a joke.”

  “That’s an improvement on what I was thinking you’d say, which was that you’d never heard of YouTube.”

  “No, I’m familiar with YouTube. It’s one of the places people go to become heroically incompetent at backgammon.” Accepting the joint from her, Bruno positioned it through the mouth hole for a drag. Beneath the mask, the muscles of his face steadily strengthened, readying to meet the world.

  “Don’t you get hot under that thing?”

  “All the time.” In this light he noticed for the first time that her raven hair was surely dyed. He felt obsessively aware of Tira’s physical presence. Likely he’d been mulling over her body in absentia, without noticing he was doing so. For the past days he’d felt an unaffiliated buoyancy to his existence on Telegraph, as if Tira had followed Stolarsky in vanishing from town. Past and future had floated away, leaving only Bruno’s gently widening circuit of cappuccinos and sidewalks, at least until the twenties ran out. He’d even wandered as far as the campus of Berkeley High School and begun cutting across People’s Park with impunity, as though these carried no intimate associations. Now Tira had come to present her bill of arrears.

  She turned and drove him north, on Shattuck. After a couple of tokes he held the joint up to her attention, then nodded at the floor, miming tossing it there, and she said, “Go ahead.”

  Strangely, though the Volvo had hardly been cleaned, the little haystack of Tira’s half-smoked reefers was missing. He tossed this new one instead onto a floor strewn with candy wrappers, balled tissues, a knuckle Band-Aid with a scab-dark stain. “You’ve been recycling?”

  “One of Keith’s minions knows I leave my car unlocked. The guy takes my discards for his stash. It’s an example of the myriad thankless ways we keep the whole machine humming along around here.”

  “A personal assistant around the house?”

  “Creepier than that. One of his shop dorks. Comes prowling around on his bicycle, doesn’t imagine I see him. The revolutionist, your apartment-mate, Plybon. From what I gather, you’ve been whooping it up with the kids in the rumpus room quite a lot since I saw you last.”

  “Wait, Garris Plybon works for Keith?”

  “You kidding? You think Keith wouldn’t have a rival burger place under his control? It isn’t public information. People like to fantasize that they’re putting a thumb in Keith’s eye by preferring the anarchist sliders.”

  “I thought he and Plybon were mortal enemies.”

  “That’s not a mutually exclusive situation. Plenty of people draw a salary from their mortal enemy.”

  Bruno sat, staring ahead as they crossed into Northside, overturned, feeling his cheeks burn beneath the mask. Meanwhile Tira went on in her garrulous way. “Keith calls it a move from the Stalin playbook. Why bother infiltrating dissident cells, when you can start one yourself, just to see what grows there?”

  “Does Plybon know?”

  She made a sound like the air going out of a tire. “What do you think?”

  “Where are you taking me?” he asked, to change the subject. He didn’t really believe the destination was a secret interrogation chamber.

  “I wondered when you’d ask. I’ve got a surprise planned out. You’re not dressed appropriately, but you’re not really dressed appropriately for anything.”

  “Do I guess, or do you tell me? Should I put a sack over my head?”

  “You already have a sack over your head. I got us a table at Chez Panisse.”

  For the second time in the space of a minute Bruno was rendered dumb.

  “What do you think?” Now Tira’s voice betrayed the strand of vulnerability that all her chafing repartee was devised to conceal. Or perhaps it was a masterly brushstroke of calculation—why should Bruno abandon his paranoia?

  “Just the café,” she said, reasoning with him. The central restaurant, with its set menu, would be too ostentatious for a pair like them. The café was looser, a place you could hide, a place you could flee.

  “My last meal?” he said.

  “Huh?”

  Why should she understand his joke? He doubted it would be worth the effort to explain that he’d fantasized her as a policewoman.

  “Sure, let’s eat.”

  “Then shoot and leave.”

  “Sorry?”

  “You know, like a panda? Eats shoots and leaves.” She grinned. The further they wallowed in bafflement and mutual misunderstanding, the more she appeared to feel at home. Perhaps this derived from her life with Keith Stolarsky, himself so addicted to the gnomic reference.

  “I no longer shoot and leave,” Bruno said. He touched his T-shirt. “I only abide.”

  “Cool, then, we’ll abide, just lemme find a parking spot.”

  Bruno knew that even the café was devised to usher a table through a sequence of gastronomic ideas, but Tira derailed the waiter’s presentation of the elaborate menu in favor of a series of glasses of pink champagne. He supposed that money, even slovenly money, got what it wanted, was able to carve Chez Panisse into little more than a cocktail bar, just as it had partitioned Singapore into an air-conditioned hotel room and a bag of burgers. Money, in this case, backed with the silencing enigma of a figure in a mask.

  Bruno caused a little stir, he felt it. He lowered his hood, to improve his peripheral vision and to dissipate the strangeness—to allow the covert gawkers in the kitchen and at other tables to see his ears and neck, to confirm him as human. For his part, drinking not at Tira’s pace but drinking enough, barely listening to her left-field forays while he picked at the rounds that had begun to arrive, trout roe and potato pizzetta, chicken livers and peas crostini, nothing remotely suited to the sparkling rosé with which Tira kept topping his glass, Bruno suffered hallucinations that those who served him, or those breezing past to the upstairs kitchen, were his old company. His dissolute mentor, Konrad, and others, young waiters and bussers and sous chefs with vanished names. But of course those would be aged now, as old as Bruno, older, if not as ruined. These faces were young not because time was stopped but because they had been repl
aced with newer versions. Who had replaced Bruno?

  Tira had ignored the waiter’s attempts to describe a special or confirm their satisfaction, seeming intent on broadcasting her crassness. Now, a second bottle almost polished, she captured the waiter’s sleeve and pulled him close, a slurring policewoman this time.

  “This place used to be good.”

  “Is there something I can help with?”

  “No. It’s just it used to be special. Now it’s ordinary. You know that, right?”

  “I believe it’s still special.” The waiter’s formulation left various exits open.

  “How old are you?”

  “Twenty-six.”

  “Well, see? Alexander, tell him.”

  “Everything’s been wonderful,” said Bruno.

  “He used to work here, you know that? So he’s in the cult, same as you. But the ironic thing is he should know better than anyone, better than me. He was there. It’s just ordinary now.”

  “I’ll clear these,” said the waiter smoothly, freeing himself to begin corralling their plates.

  “Is there a peach galette?” said Tira.

  “Not tonight.”

  “I want a galette, any galette you got.”

  Their exit was a blur. They finished with something chocolate and a dessert wine. If Tira paid, Bruno didn’t see. She’d palmed a card onto a check, perhaps. Or Stolarsky had an account, if such a thing existed. Dark had fallen and Bruno felt benumbed by the drink and though he ought to have been fearful of her driving he was barely conscious of returning to the Jack London. She was upstairs and at his door without Bruno being party to any decision. At least she waited for him to produce his own key.

  The obnoxious overhead he left off, in favor of the kitchen light.

  “What’ve you got?” He heard her shoes, kicked off to tumble on the floor.

  “I don’t need more to drink, and I doubt you do, either.” He fixed them cool tap water, in the single jam jar he’d borrowed from Garris Plybon.

  “You’re right, I’m shitfaced. Let’s smoke and mellow out instead.” Before he could protest her fuming up the apartment, there came the click of her lighter. “So, you know that thing you said about YouTube and backgammon?”

  “More or less.”

  “Well, I’ve been following in Keith’s footsteps. Not on YouTube, but this tutorial site called Gammaniacs.”

  “I don’t really know anything about it, you’ll have to excuse me if I was rude.”

  “Rude, crude, lewd, nude, and apt to be misconstrued.”

  “Sorry?”

  “You’re, like, the least rude person I ever met, Alexander. It’s practically a crippling deficiency.” Tira had laid open his backgammon set across the Murphy bed’s sheets. As he turned back from the kitchen she was chucking aside his Berlin stone with a complete lack of curiosity. “I got good enough in the last week to lose five thousand dollars on the Ladbrokes site, you should be very proud of me.”

  “Yes, that’s an accomplishment.” He shed his sneakers and sweatshirt and joined her on the bed.

  “I’m sure you should be able to take me for everything I’ve got in three or four games.”

  “We’re playing?”

  “Yep.” She handed him the joint. “I can never remember how to set up these little fuckers, though. I guess that’s a classic symptom of playing online, huh?”

  “I don’t know if I would call it classic.” He knelt on the bed, feeling the urge to straighten out her confused placement of the checkers, if nothing else. Having drawn once on the joint, and fearing the effects of more, he tried to return it. She shook her head.

  “Do you have a phobia of other people’s saliva?” It could explain Plybon’s cornucopia, the discarded half joints in her passenger’s-side footwell.

  “I like other people’s saliva fine,” she said. “Assuming it’s the right person. I have a phobia of my own saliva. I don’t dig wet rolling paper.”

  Bruno extinguished it as before, between his fingers, feeling more accustomed to the spark of pain. If he worked at it, he could regress all the way to high school. Yet his board was before him, rosy with innate glamour, promising, as ever, transportation. The Berlin stone had scuffed the playing surface surprisingly little. “So I have to earn my nest egg of twenties this time?”

  “Nope. You’re not playing for twenties, you’re playing for my clothes.”

  “Your clothes?”

  “To remove them, dummy. Don’t be evasive, you were gobbling my stuff with your ghosty eyes all through dinner.” She slung one arm beneath her breasts, hoisting them like an infant offered into his embrace. They swarmed together near the strained top button of the sheer polyester blouse, that mystic margin Bruno couldn’t doubt he’d rained with glances. “Double me, gammon me, make me bare my tits.”

  He slurped water from the jam jar, felt it soak the lip of his mask. It was too late to reclaim his hood—anyhow he was hot from the drink. He wouldn’t need it. The board arranged, Tira threw both blond dice into the board, drawing double fours.

  “It’s customary to roll one die to see who’ll go first.”

  “I’ve never played a human before, so I’m not customary. You can afford to give me the advantage, spookyman.”

  Bruno shrugged. She shifted the pale checkers into a strong starting position. He rolled a two-three, dropped lazy descenders into his outer board. There should be time enough to play more boldly. First he’d see what lessons she’d absorbed and wait out the blurring effects of the champagne. Whatever his and Tira’s involvement, it had commenced some time ago, before the start of this game. She was right: Bruno could afford the amusement. With Tira humiliated in defeat it might be possible to reclaim number 25, though that presumed she had the capacity for humiliation.

  She offered to double immediately. Inside the mask he raised an eyebrow. “What’s the hurry?”

  “We need to make this worth something. Or, you know, resign if you feel you’re beat.”

  He accepted the cube from her, then built a five-prime. She wasn’t lucky. He watched her run in panic, then caught and demolished the blot she left behind. The game devolved into a race, and Tira was behind. Rather than double again to make this point, Bruno let her play it out. She grunted in anger at dice that refused her a miracle.

  Then, when Bruno parked his last checker, she began balling off her ankle socks, which she threw one after the next at his head. He ducked.

  “If I understand the international rules of strip backgammon, socks are a single garment, not two.”

  “Right—and you won once.”

  “You doubled the stakes. That’s what the cube is for. I’ll have your pants as well, thank you.”

  “If you’d been boning up on the rules of international strip backgammon, or strip anything, you’d know that the loser gets to take off whatever the fuck she wants to take off.” Tira unbuttoned her blouse and laid it aside, giving air to the bulkily architectural black brassiere he’d extrapolated from a thousand angles. “You’ll appreciate the rules when it comes your turn to lose.”

  “Based on what I’ve seen, my turn isn’t coming.”

  “Fuck you. And I’d be insulted if you didn’t want to get my shirt off except you’re exactly the kind of avoiding-the-obvious person who’d want to go at this thing backward. Because you’re going to love my tits.”

  “Self-abnegating, that’s what Edgar Falk always called it.”

  “Your twisted old pansy Gandalf, you mean? I guess he’d be qualified to know.”

  Bruno reset the pieces and took the privilege of rolling first. With a six-three he again seeded his backfield, daring her to hit. He felt the effect of her poor play dragging him down, as much a suppressant as the champagne and marijuana. Yet no blot obtruded between him and the board, or her body, so he studied Tira. She bore down like a teenager over a standardized test, tongue protruding as she shook the dice, then surveyed her options. Playing through a screen had taught her nothing of a
player’s attitude or comportment. She resembled the sort of computer-bred gaming nerd Bruno had begun to encounter in the clubs in recent years, but her moves betrayed a hopeless deafness to the command of the pips.

  This time, Bruno turned the doubling cube. An act of mercy either way—if Tira were smart enough to refuse, she’d economize on shed clothing. If she accepted, a swifter end to the farce. She cast him a shocked look.

  “Don’t be so surprised,” he said. “This is how the game is played.”

  She made a face, took the cube, and ground on. Bruno nearly gammoned her, but at the last moment double sixes enabled a stray blond checker to race home to her inner board, and another to bear off.

  “Two items again,” he reminded her.

  She unhooked the bra, then stood on the bed, looming above him, and wriggled free of her jeans. Her underwear, which hoved into the center of his vision, didn’t match the brassiere, was instead pink and cottony, worn. It was also capacious, grandmotherly, though not enough to quarantine a wild black pubic thatch defaulting every boundary at her thigh and stomach, inch-wide on the flesh of her thighs, trailing to tiny hairs at her navel. Bruno caught himself elaborating a comparison between the black bra beneath the sheer blouse and the bush erupting behind the underwear, that which is hidden erupting through its paltry veil. Pubic hair itself a further concealment, a beard for beckoning flesh. But really, it was his distractible mind that formed the true veil. All his foolish comparisons, Bruno’s attempt to dissociate from what he wanted and that he wanted it, the startling absolutes of the body before him.

  Pants discarded, Tira swayed wonderfully back into place behind the board, crossing her legs. Her underwear stretched, a feeble screen. Oddly, Bruno found himself staring at her sole item of clothing—he supposed this could be the fatal politeness of which she’d accused him, though it also meant he glared at her crotch. Her breasts and stomach deluged his sight anyhow, triple globes triply eyeing Bruno in return. No blot to save him now. Though he leaned in to reorder the checkers and seize the dice, the board would need to be ten times its present size for him to pretend not to see, or to be seen seeing.