The Blot

by Jonathan Lethem

“He’s a lynched man, can’t you see? I think Johnny Depp shot him off a tree branch in Lone Ranger.”

  “Django Unchained, you mean.”

  “Sterling Hayden in Johnny Guitar,” Garris Plybon corrected in passing. Bruno said nothing until a young woman in bangs and glasses, waiting for her food to come off the grill, asked quietly, “Who are you?”

  Bruno demurred. “Just the new guy at the shop. A trainee.”

  “No. What are you meant to be?” She spoke as if Bruno’s costume was a cipher demanding decryption.

  “The Martyr of Anarchy,” Bruno replied. The deeper he hid within Stolarsky’s charade, the less he’d give away. A holding game: count the pips, obey the dice, and move his trailing checkers to safety.

  “Anarchism doesn’t produce martyrs,” said Plybon. “The state makes martyrs.” The slider cook’s jaw was clenched, his eyes black and hard inside their magnifying prisms.

  “What does anarchism produce?” asked the young woman.

  “Anarchism produces humans, thanks for asking. And meals. You want extra onions?” Extra onions remained Plybon’s quiet high sign of respect. “Go ahead, I can see you want to say yes. Anyone put off by onion breath isn’t who you want to know in the first place.”

  Plybon refused her money, shifting it back without explanation. Ever mercurial, he was set off again. “An apple a day keeps the doctor away, you’ve heard that one?” He looked to the slider line for some “yea”s. “Right, it’s like the rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain, we’re all drilled on this shit in the Fordist factories that pass for primary school. Well, an apple a day keeps the doctor away, right, sure, but an onion a day keeps the whole world at bay.” This drew laughs, but Plybon raised his hand for silence. “My colleague here, he can’t show his face to the world, in point of fact he’s one of the famous disasters of Western medicine. You think I’m kidding, right? But I’m not. Tell them, comrade.”

  “Tell them … what?”

  “Who did this to you, the so-called health industry or anarchism?”

  “It’s true I had a run-in with a neurosurgeon. It seemed necessary at the time.”

  “You should have stuck to onions.” At this, Plybon lost his audience, who’d perhaps found the medical explanation for the Halloween mask unsavory. “I shall continue to be an impossible person,” Plybon snarled, turning back to the grill, “so long as those who are now possible remain possible! Bakunin said that, suckers.”

  At that, Plybon jammed a scuffed compact disc, Sharpie-marked “Sonny Sharrock,” into a boom box, let the resultant skronking guitar be his proxy. Bruno had found a reliable rhythm of production at the grill. He’d stopped sizzling up rejects. Moving like an agitated puppet, Plybon bagged the results and worked the register, slapping change into palms, impounding dollar-bill tips for the plastic tip jar on his own prerogative, glaring with his X-Ray Spex to dare anyone to complain.

  As suddenly as he and Bruno became a systematic team, the line evaporated. Plybon raised the volume to an intolerable level, scouring the counter seats free of loiterers. For a while the counterman ignored Bruno, scraping at the grill, loading the steaming trays with fat pale buns, and restacking the raw patties and cheese slices. Then he reduced the volume and turned on Bruno, startling him. “Do you know the first fucking thing about the Haymarket Trial?”

  “Sorry? No.”

  “‘The Martyr of Anarchy’? Who came up with that crapola, you or Lord Zodiac?”

  “It was Stolarsky,” Bruno admitted.

  “Eight anarchists in Chicago, 1886, four hanged by the neck after a frame-up and kangaroo trial. They were left dangling, instead of dropped properly through a trapdoor, so they died by slo-mo strangulation. I guess that’s your childhood playmate’s idea of yuks.”

  Bruno understood: It was the noose mask that had offended him. “I’m not sure Keith knew the historical reference. It seemed more impulsive, really. If he’d had a mask lying around with a fake butcher’s cleaver stuck in the forehead, he’d probably have given me that.”

  “Don’t underestimate Stolarsky. Look at you, for instance. He’s fucking slaughtered your pride six ways from Sunday just for … what, being handsomer than him on the playground one day in 1978?”

  “The surgery saved my life.”

  “Riiiight, but what’s it worth?” The counterman’s eyes pinwheeled behind his goggly lenses.

  Bruno wasn’t certain he understood the question. “My life?”

  “Yeah, to Stolarsky. Count up his outlay on the surgery, flying you across the ocean, forgoing rent, et cetera. Because whatever the price tag, Stolarsky never lays a bet with less than a ten-to-one payout. It may appear he’s doing charity, but trust me, you’re human capital. The Tsar of Telegraph may hang fire awhile. Hell, he bought up vacant lots he’ll pay taxes on for a decade just to ensure his competition does business in what looks like Dresden after the war. But he’s got something cooking on the back end, he always does. He’s got a role for you, O Martyr. You just don’t know what it is yet.”

  “What about Beth? Was she also human capital? Keith seems willing to take a loss there.”

  “Listen, Stolarsky’s been looking to fire Beth for a while now, she was a huge disappointment to him.”

  “Disappointment how?”

  “He was cultivating a lieutenant. Beth was meant to be his set of eyes, his mole in the burrow. Instead she got heavy into workplace solidarity, a syndicalist tendency I’ll admit I encouraged. Among other things, she was originally supposed to spy on me, just like he probably asked you.”

  “Not in so many words.”

  “Ha!”

  “I won’t.”

  “You’ll do it despite yourself, comrade. You’re a leaky sieve. I don’t hold it against you. Listen, you want a taste of what you’re up against? The sheer vindictiveness? Stolarsky gave her notice on her apartment.”

  “Wait, she’s in the Jack London?”

  “Nah, just some antiseptic cracker-box complex on Bowditch, but Stolarsky owns that, too.”

  “That’s cruel.”

  “I’m not done yet. He made certain Beth’s dissertation committee heard about her so-called white-collar crime spree. She was scheduled to make her defense in six weeks. Now she’s run back to Chicago in a vale of tears. Alicia had to take a leave from the archive just to help usher home the tattered remnants of her girlfriend.”

  Stolarsky’s Berkeley was a chessboard, where ignominious pawns evaporated without notice. Bruno had always loathed chess for its ironclad hierarchies and the bullying invulnerability of its champions, their belief that they stood outside fate.

  “He really has the power to make people disappear.”

  “He’s just the local model. ‘No revolution can be truly and permanently successful unless it puts its emphatic veto upon all tyranny and centralization—the complete reversal of these authoritarian principles will alone serve the revolution.’ That’s Emma Goldman.”

  “I beg your pardon, but why doesn’t he fire you? You were party to Beth’s insurrection, for one thing.”

  “That’s an excellent question. I see you’re beginning to examine for the strings and levers, it’s the first glimmer of awakening.”

  “Yes, but why?”

  “Mainly overconfidence on his part. Plus I’m the face of the franchise. He handed me a script and I made it real and it amuses him, I guess.”

  “What script?”

  “He named the place Kropotkin’s. Not that he grasped the implications, I had to school him in that. But the reputation depends on Stolarsky’s stake being hidden, right? Plus he wouldn’t have the least hope of replacing me.” As if in demonstration, Plybon was cooking. Almost without glancing he’d begun sliding buns into the steamer, flapping patties onto slow-broiling onions, ladling out broth to reinvigorate the cloud of steam. New patrons had appeared, and though Plybon made no communication with them—they might be regulars, or Plybon a mind reader—the sliders were bagged and traded for doll
ars. Perhaps they’d been too buffaloed by Bruno and Plybon’s talk even to introduce their wishes for marginal adjustments—cheese? more onions or less?—to the baseline artifact. The slider cook was a mind reader by default, since everyone walked in here wanting the exact same thing. Human life, reduced to a bottom line of animal want, and Plybon an assembly-line machine for supplying bread and meat. Did this support or undermine Plybon’s ideological premise? Bruno wasn’t qualified to judge.

  Now Plybon reversed his previous verdict. “Actually, I shouldn’t be so obtuse. Stolarsky might have a scheme for replacing me, one staring me right in the face—you.”

  “I’m not versed in Kropotkinism.”

  “Ha! No, this would be a rebranding along the spooky lines of Zombie Burger. ‘Elephant Man Sliders, come one come all and buy a sack from the notorious pitiable enigma!’”

  In fact, Plybon sounded so much like Stolarsky now, the two antagonists might be one man, split to play a doppelgänger game, with Bruno as the shuttlecock. Before he could reply, Plybon shoved the bladed spatula into Bruno’s hands. “Here. You give it a go, a dry run for total usurpation, Hooded One.” Another pair of customers had appeared. As Plybon began to snap on his bicycle helmet, he nodded at the newcomers. “My comrade will be helping you, just belly up to the bar.”

  “Wait,” Bruno protested. “I don’t know how to run the register.”

  Plybon shrugged as he went outside. “Then give ’em away.”

  A restaurant worker’s obeisance lurked deep in Bruno’s psyche. He set up a new flotilla of sliders, for this couple and the next. The night was young, the earlier rush just the first wave on this shore. Plybon, meanwhile, was visible between the manifestos Scotch-taped to the window. He freed a gigantic chain and padlock from where it bound a partly disassembled bicycle to a lamppost, then lashed it around his shoulder, bike-messenger-style.

  The food was safe for now in its onion-steam cloud. “One moment,” Bruno said to those waiting. He ducked around the counter and outside to the sidewalk, to catch Plybon before he wheeled off. Bruno still held the spatula, a greased onion snaking slowly down its handle. Plybon reattached his front wheel with a stage magician’s ease.

  “You can’t go.” Despite this protest, Bruno found himself thinking that alone at the grill, he’d feel free to wolf a couple of the sliders, in hope of ballasting himself to the earth.

  “Sure I can. You’re authorized to weaponize the People’s caloric bombs. I’ll be back to help you close shop, don’t worry.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “I’ve got a hankering for cannabis. Figured I’d take a spin up to the imperial palace and see if they’ve replenished my stash.”

  “Your stash?”

  “Don’t play dumb,” said Plybon. His bald, hatchet-shaped head couldn’t grin. Instead it seemed to hinge Muppetishly open in a mirthless laugh. “My stash lives in Lady Macbeth’s Volvo.”

  •

  With that, the counterman whirred off uphill, toward Stolarsky’s unknown demesne. Bruno went inside: Sliders needed flipping. He’d had the clock installed in him, a circadian rhythm of the grill. He prepared the meal, then futzed open the register and collected the cash. For the next hour he left the drawer open, making change not by keying the device’s tabs but by doing the math in his head. He finally resorted to shoving a few sliders across free of charge during a rush, when in a clamor of mockery he’d lost count of whom he’d already fed once, twice, or not at all. Plybon had instilled a mood of permanent combativeness in his regulars, who jeered and complained with impunity. For them it was a game with no stakes. A few tourists snapped his picture. One frat boy leaned across to grab at the end of Bruno’s noose. Bruno obliged by silently raising the bladed spatula high as if to sever the hand, which was withdrawn to a gratified chorus of shrieks.

  When the wave passed, Bruno found Madchen standing in a corner by the agitprop-encrusted mirror, watching. Her expression was as gentle as on the ferry, when she thought Bruno had lost a contact lens. She wore one of his Cal hoodies, zipped and laced. The night outside must have cooled, though Bruno sweated beneath his flocked burlap.

  “Did you follow me?”

  She didn’t hear it as an accusation. “Nein, I found you. I felt you here, I think. I was only walking.”

  “Of course.”

  “It is good you are not gambling, Alexander.”

  “Yes.” Should he correct her assumption? It was as though they’d forged a twelve-step deal to relieve Bruno of his tendency to wager, while preventing Madchen doing precisely whatever it was she’d last been doing in Berlin.

  “You have found a job, ja?”

  “Yes,” he admitted. A quiet satisfaction had overtaken him. As a waiter, he’d known it too, the minute but distinct pleasure of freeing another human from hunger, like easing someone’s dress jacket from their arms.

  “You are alone?”

  “For now.”

  “May I join you?” Madchen asked. “To help?”

  “Yes—yes.”

  And so, with the same frictionless elegance with which she’d immersed in the Jack London bathtub, Madchen tucked herself behind the Kropotkin’s counter, and Bruno taught the Vegetarierin to compose a perfect slider.

  Gammon

  I

  In his extreme youth Alexander Bruno had imagined life to have a top side and an underneath. The underneath was embodied by all he saw around him in San Rafael, then in Berkeley, in People’s Park and on Telegraph Avenue; it was populated by his mother and by the two plaster-pediment artisans in their sea of white dust, berating his mother; by the landlord evaded in his visits to the apartment on Chestnut Street; by the barely coping public-school teachers who corralled Bruno, and the other children they corralled; by the pitying volunteers filling trays at the soup kitchens to which June too frequently resorted for their meals.

  Bruno had at first only clawed his way into a vibrant layer of that underneath: the realm of dishwashers and waiters at Spenger’s, then Chez Panisse, their cheap white drugs and horny remarks transacted just out of sight and earshot of those who sat at the tables they serviced. It was at the tables where, as if through a one-way mirror, the top layer was made visible to those below. That zone of privilege and luxury, the only destination worth attaining. Or so Bruno had thought at the time. If this view was one he’d never questioned, now, on return from the near-death of surgery, it dissolved in a new understanding. Keith Stolarsky might be emperor of the plastic facade of Telegraph Avenue—its top layer, which held no allure—but Garris Plybon was king of Telegraph’s underneath. It was to this layer that Bruno had sunk, or been reduced, gladly. This wasn’t a matter of embracing a past he’d once discarded as if it were something stuck to his shoe. Bruno was done wondering what had become of June, or schoolmates beyond Stolarsky, or other waitstaff, or even Konrad. Bruno didn’t need Berkeley to remember him. At Kropotkin’s, he felt reinstated in a timeless freakish demimonde to which he’d always belonged.

  The restaurant was a theater. On leaving, Bruno shoved the mask and noose into an unused drawer full of potholders. On the street he was anonymous to the same students who’d gleefully addressed him as “dead man” at the counter. He’d retired his medical mask now, too, become one with his scarred face. It still startled him, caught in passing, reflected in a storefront window. Yet his old face would have startled him just as badly. It was startling, to a dead man, to be alive.

  •

  Beth Dennis returned from Chicago and reappeared at Garris Plybon’s. On leave from the Rhetoric Department, shorn of her own retail perch at Zodiac, Beth’s slicked-back hair and angry glasses seemed less drolly ironic, more dangerous. Sexier, too, in the manner of a 1950s gang girl, or cellblock boss in a female prison movie. She was like Bruno, another soldier in Plybon’s secret cadre. At her first chance, hunkering around Plybon’s fathomless soup, Beth latched on to Madchen Abplanalp. They were joined in ironic conspiracy, Madchen the passenger on the airplane t
icket whose purchase had gotten Beth canned. And Beth spoke German. The women vanished into talk Bruno couldn’t follow even if they hadn’t been shrouded in mutual admiration. “Alexander wäre perfekt für dein Bankautomatenprojekt. Das Blöde ist nur, dass er kein Girokonto hat …”

  Bruno, happy to be invisible, dredged material from his bowl, trying to parse the soup’s theme. He found carrots and celery, as always, but also miniature tentacles, yellow beardy mussels, caraway seeds. The soup is a picture of my life now, Bruno thought. The soup is me. At any moment a baby sea monster … yet now, here, a soft lump of potato … Plybon, meanwhile, had returned from the kitchen bearing a small Tupperware container loaded with the recycled joints he’d gathered from Tira Harpaz’s passenger’s-side footwell. Everywhere in his new life Bruno traveled in a fog of pot, the sole drug that had never interested him in the slightest. No matter: He no longer identified with his own preferences but with those of his natural homes in the world, Kropotkin’s and the Jack London. The smell of ancient dope lay deep in the boards and millwork of the apartment building—you could probably smoke the moldings if your supply ran out.

  “Er kann meine Karte benutzen, um Geld abzuheben. Es ist völlig egal, wessen Konto das ist.”

  “What the hell are you two on about?” Plybon’s tone of maximum irritation made no impression on Beth and Madchen, who sat entwined. Bruno had heard no mention of Alicia, but he wouldn’t presume their relationship excluded one behavior or another: Among lesbians, among humans generally, there was always so much you didn’t understand. As for Madchen, though his German roommate had transformed number 25 into an intimate shrine of incense and candles, she and Bruno hadn’t consummated their nightly spooning. Bruno wasn’t jealous. They were all in it together, whatever it was.

  Possibly, even, Bruno might be a lesbian.

  Anyway, in his guilty heart he desired Tira Harpaz. Yet there was no evidence of Tira and Stolarsky anywhere that Bruno could tell. Regular abdication was a feature of Stolarsky’s reign over Telegraph, an imperial refusal to appear. Or was Stolarsky a scientist, peering in from a hidden vantage while mice worked his maze?