The Blot

by Jonathan Lethem

“Then what are we waiting for?”

  III

  The house on The Crescent, stepped into the hillside, had no face. In the darkness it presented as a lip of driveway, beneath which the tails of the Jaguar and the Volvo were just visible, tipped up on a slanted driveway that terminated in a barred garage door and a high wooden gate. The low roof was blurred on one side in dark leaves, the other in pink blossoms glowing in the moonlight; beyond it lay the hint of hills, carving to the canyon below. The two men approached on, or with, bicycles. The first, the rangy bespectacled bald man, wore a bike helmet, and scythed efficiently up the grade to the driveway’s lip, where he dismounted. The second, the tall man in the tuxedo, who’d refused a helmet, arrived with shoulders bent, walking his bicycle, heaving it before him like a dogless sled.

  Cicadas chirped—either that, or some transformer high on a telephone pole shorted in a circular rhythm in the silence.

  The hill-etched homes opened to the rear, with picture windows and sliding doors, with decks and patios; at the street side they presented like bunkers. If the two men had picked their way up from the canyon, like coyotes, they could have gained an element of surprise. Alexander Bruno might have suggested it, if he hadn’t been winded and bleeding, his tuxedo both sweated through and torn at the knees. It was enough to have arrived.

  Garris Plybon leaned his bike into the springy hedge. Bruno did the same. His knuckles bled, too, from his tumble from the bicycle—fortunately, he’d missed the road, or the parked cars along Euclid, with his bare head. He hardly noticed his knees or knuckles for the tight burning band of his ribs, the effect not of falling but of the climb, before he’d abandoned the pedals and begun pushing the bike uphill. Something, maybe blood, trickled in his lungs.

  Bruno gripped the Berlin stone, deep in his pocket. An element of riot, perhaps, in this placid, implacable dominion. But he could see no window through which to toss the stone. Then he spotted it, a small triangle, just above the dark door and beneath the roof’s pitch, its glass reflecting blue night and black leaf cover. Another of Stolarsky’s one-way mirrors. Bruno hefted the stone, curled his wrist, and heaved. A perfect strike, it dashed the reflection with a thin, tinkling sound. Bruno’s Berlin talisman vanished inside. The house was unimpressed.

  “What are you doing?” hissed Plybon, who’d just then opened the passenger’s-side door of Tira Harpaz’s unlocked Volvo.

  “Announcing myself,” Bruno managed, his breath stolen by pedaling what had seemed miles.

  “He’s got a doorbell for that, but I admire your style, comrade.”

  “Thank you.” Bruno stood at the top of the drive, peering down at the house. The street behind them was still. The bay, necklace of bridges, distant towers, all they’d glimpsed at the curve of the Rose Garden, lay concealed behind the rise. The Berkeley of the flats, People’s Park, as distant from this preserve as Neukölln from Kladow. Bruno had fired his one shot, was bankrupt. Stolarsky’s compound had no reason to acknowledge him. Could he release the Jaguar’s brake, roll it through the garage door? Not only hadn’t Stolarsky left the keys in the ignition—unlikely after all—but the car was locked.

  “Plybon, you shit-squirrel, is that you?”

  Bruno had missed the click of the door. Stolarsky stood half hidden behind it, in darkness. Plybon didn’t speak.

  “The fuck you do to my window?”

  Again, no reply from Plybon, and Bruno didn’t volunteer.

  “You brought company?” Perhaps he’d seen the bicycles in the hedge.

  “Don’t shoot,” said Plybon.

  “Step into the light, you anarchist motherfuckers.”

  “There isn’t any, Keith.” Plybon slid into the Volvo’s passenger seat and left the door open, to make himself visible in the car’s interior light. He raised his hands.

  “Who’s that with you? Your radical cohort, shit-squirrel? Is this your big play, finally? Two dudes and a rock? Is there a note tied to it reading ‘Eat the rich’?”

  “It’s me.” Bruno spoke feebly, his voice shredded. He stepped down the drive, moving around the Volvo’s open door.

  “Holy shit, look at you, putting on the Ritz, covered in blood and guts and French cuffs. You look like Frankenstein and his own monster, all stitched together.”

  As Bruno neared, Stolarsky stepped from behind the door. His feet and legs were bare. He held a pistol, loosely, and wore nothing but a thin T-shirt. The darkness beneath its hem revealed as a scribble of genitals and hair, his penis like a second sarcastic nose.

  “Why don’t you gather your harvest and get lost, shit-squirrel.” Stolarsky’s voice had turned, grown mossy and insinuating. He twitched his gun to give direction, as casually as if sliding an image from a screen.

  Plybon shamelessly loaded his pockets with joints. “I’ll be needed down at the shop now.”

  “I bet.”

  Plybon turned and mounted his bicycle and was gone.

  “Step inside, Flashman.”

  Bruno followed the half-naked man down a corridor illuminated here and there by the tiny red and blue lights at baseboard sockets, toward an open area lit only by the sky’s pale shadows. Bruno heard his own rasping breath. The picture window widened before them as they reached the corridor’s end, expected but still startling: dense treetops, rooted beneath the limit of view on the vertiginous pitch of hillside, then the stark rise on the far side of the canyon. There, the dirt and rock was yellow, clung with scrubby growth, sideways trees like cartoon witchy fingers. The three-quarter moon reached in and silvered the room’s contents: couch and chairs, low bookshelves, framed prints, free-standing bar littered with bottles, ice bucket, and balled-up napkins, a podlike device that might have been a humidifier or ion generator, Stolarsky’s hairy-pudding buttocks, the low modernist coffee table on which he’d carelessly placed the pistol, first rotating it with a flourish as if proposing a round of spin the bottle.

  “You need something to drink?”

  Bruno wanted water, but wanted more to accept nothing from Stolarsky. He shook his head.

  “Band-Aids?”

  “No.”

  “Then what the fuck are you here for?”

  “Where’s Madchen?”

  “Madchen’s fine. What are you, her valet?”

  “I want to talk to her.”

  “Ah, sorry, she can’t talk, she’s in-this-pose at the moment.” Stolarsky buckled his knees and grabbed his genitals with both hands, briefly lolled his head and stuck out his tongue. “Get it, in-this-pose?” Stolarsky snorted and went to the bar and refilled a glass from a bottle of scotch. “Just pulling your leg, Flash. She’s doing great. I think I scored myself a new personal assistant, in fact. These German people are so organized, it’s like a compulsion with them. She’ll help me get my shit in order. Here, take a load off.” Stolarsky, gesturing at the couch, caught Bruno’s glance at the gun. He added, “Don’t mind that, I guess I must have heard a bird or bat going through the attic window. I got spooked.”

  Stolarsky’s bullshit was a fog, making it hard for Bruno to think. “She’s really going to … work for you?”

  “Sure, why not?” Stolarsky turned his back, moving toward the broad window. “I mean, I said that off the top of my head, but she already does, if you look at it a certain way.”

  “I don’t agree.”

  “No, you wouldn’t—because you’ve got no sense of gratitude yourself.”

  “Is Tira here?”

  “Nah, she took a powder. She’s got this little cottage up in Sonoma, she likes to disappear up there—”

  “At a winery in Glen Ellen?”

  Stolarsky turned and grinned. “How’d you guess?”

  “That’s where she told me you go.” Bruno was strung between them, Tira and Stolarsky and possibly Plybon, in a mad web of untruths. Perhaps Stolarsky had never been out of town—now that Bruno had laid eyes on the compound’s interior, it seemed possible Stolarsky had been squatted on this hill as trolls dwelled beneath bri
dges. Perhaps there was no winery, no such place as Glen Ellen to begin with.

  “Why is her car in the driveway, in that case?”

  Stolarsky pointed at Bruno. “You got me. She’s actually in a trench at the property line, I was just going to the shed for a bag of quicklime.” He smacked his forehead theatrically. “The car! Why didn’t I think of that, such an obvious fucking clue.”

  Bruno measured his nearness to the gun against Stolarsky’s. The toadlike man stood almost pressed to the window now, to make a black blot against the glinting foliage and pale sky, the moonlight outlining his bandy legs in a halo of coarse hairs. Bruno could reach the weapon. Then Stolarsky beckoned to him, and the opportunity, if it was one, had passed. “Look.”

  “What is it?”

  “You wanted to see she’s okay, right? So come see. It’s a nice view, anyhow. She hasn’t aged too bad.”

  Bruno stepped forward, and felt as if he were plummeting into the picture window’s expanse. The room, which Bruno had taken for the whole house, was a matchbox perched atop a larger structure, impossible to guess from the bungalow visible from the street. He and Stolarsky stood pitched over a house nested half underground, with a long, low wing running down the steep hill, joining there to a smaller house, a guest quarters or studio, far below. The windows of the smaller house were lit.

  Between these, in the hive of patios and miniature gardens below, sat a built-in redwood hot tub, steam whispering into the trees, disheveled clothing and flip-flops and empty tumblers scattered on the neighboring planks. Half immersed, leaning dreamily on her elbows, nipple-deep in foam, was Madchen. She didn’t look up.

  “I’d invite you to join us for a soak, but forgive me, it’s a water-recycling system and the introduction of blood and cum and bodily substances generally just wrecks the pH for weeks, I’ve learned that lesson the hard way.”

  Bruno had to hand it to Stolarsky: Madchen liked her baths. If it had only been Plybon’s soup into which she’d fallen, Bruno could have reached down with his spoon and ladled her out. He wondered if she’d even hear if he shouted her name. He didn’t try.

  “You want to know the funny thing, though? It handles cocaine just fine, no problem. You could practically use it instead of chlorine, even.”

  Bruno had quit breathing through his mouth, and the constriction at his ribs had loosened. But he had no voice.

  “That lady sure likes her drugs, though. Slowing her down could end up somebody’s full-time job.”

  Bruno wasn’t listening, just gazing at the ferry angel he’d found no use for, and who’d found no use for him.

  “Lucky thing for me I wasn’t in the mood to slow her down.”

  Stolarsky could say what he liked. It made little difference now.

  “Here, I found these in her bag, I think they might belong to you.” Stolarsky had reached to grab something off the bar—three blue vials, childproof-capped, which he now pushed into Bruno’s hands. Bruno recognized the labels: the prescription painkillers given to him by Oshiro, those he’d failed to exhaust before quitting the regimen. Bruno shoved them into his pocket where the Berlin stone had been.

  “Yummy fucking picture, huh?”

  But Bruno looked past Madchen in her tub to the windows of the small house below, nearly shrouded in foliage—was it motion there, behind the curtains? Tira Harpaz? If only he’d made that coyote-approach from the canyon below, Bruno would have encountered the little house first, found Tira there. Then—what? Would they have absconded together, never looked back, Bruno junking his naïve gallantry and leaving Madchen behind? Or would Tira have enmeshed him in further bewilderment, claimed to have murdered Stolarsky, or Stolarsky and Madchen both? Bruno’s purposes were in tatters, yet he still cared what Tira thought of him, would have been ashamed of his bleeding knees and the nude German cooking in Stolarsky’s pot, of his foolish mistakes. Just as well that he’d approached the house from the front.

  “Cocaine Suppe Mit Tittenschnakken,” said Stolarsky from behind him.

  “What?”

  “Just thinking what you’d say as you set the dish on the table, Mr. Chez Panisse.”

  “You read my mind,” Bruno blurted.

  “Like reading a Bazooka Joe comic,” said Stolarsky. “Doesn’t take more than a glance, but good for a quick laugh. Then you crumple it up and hope it doesn’t get stuck to your shoe …” He quit, for a slurp of scotch. Otherwise, Stolarsky surely could have amused himself in this vein indefinitely.

  “Did you know?”

  “Know what?”

  “The surgery, it brought my telepathy back. Did you … know this from before?”

  “Before what?”

  “As a child, I mean. Did I confess it to you? There’s a lot I’ve forgotten.”

  “Confess you had telepathy?” Stolarsky scratched his bulging stomach, under the dirty T-shirt, exposing himself further.

  “Yes.”

  “Flashman, get serious. You might be the least telepathic creature stalking the earth. You think being easy to see through adds up to some kind of superpower, or what?”

  “It’s unreliable,” Bruno admitted. “I’ve never cultivated the gift. For years I avoided it—that’s how I formed this block, this blot in my skull. From the desire not to hear the voices—”

  “You’re insane.”

  “No, it’s true. When Dr. Behringer removed the growth, he freed the flow of … thoughts, back and forth.”

  “I’ve just about discharged my fascination with you, Flashman. But tell me, how can somebody so shallow be so deeply fucked up?”

  “Don’t you see, it might be the source of your fascination.” Bruno, immune to insult, only wished to break through. “You sensed I was like you. That’s why you remembered me all this time—”

  “Nah, you and me have nothing in common. Except, I guess … you know.” Stolarsky winked lewdly and tipped his head at the window, the cottage beyond. “She gave you a feel of her secret cyst, huh?”

  “But you are a mind reader, yes?” He’d bow to Stolarsky, in exchange for the satisfaction of an answer.

  “Hey, compared to you, who isn’t?”

  “You’ve misunderstood—”

  “Where do we even start? When’s the last time you recall being on top of one single human situation, instead of it being on top of you? You had no idea the ding-a-ling was abusing your cancer drugs, did you? And she was sleeping right there in your bed, though apparently unfucked, poor thing. What, was she too wrinkled-up around the edges for you?”

  “I don’t have cancer.”

  “Oh yeah, I forgot, I’m supposed to talk in euphemisms around you. What should we call it, your growth? Your little friend? The drugs for that thing that was pushing your eyeballs out of your head—that better?”

  “Let me talk to her.”

  “Which one?”

  In the interval of Bruno’s hesitation, Stolarsky retrieved his gun. He weighed it casually, in both hands. “Trundle onto your Schwinn and roll out of here now. Schadenfreude has its limits, even for me.”

  “I won’t leave without her.” It might have been the most hopeless phrase Bruno had ever heard himself utter.

  “What are you going to do, break all my windows? It looks to me like you’re out of rocks.”

  “I thought you said it was a bird.”

  “Grow up. I was watching on the security cameras the minute you and that shit-squirrel crossed the motion detector. Or maybe I used my telepathy, who knows?”

  “Why do you let him steal from Tira’s car?”

  Stolarsky shrugged. “I dunno. ‘Keep your friends high, keep your enemies higher’?”

  “Put the gun down.”

  “Let’s not kid around. If you’d brought one of your own we could duel, ten paces, then pow, it’s settled. Too bad. I guess we could’ve played backgammon over her, but you didn’t bring your set either, did you?”

  “No.”

  “See, you’re not even good for that anymore.�
�

  Bruno leaned into the glass and opened his mouth, but nothing came out.

  “Go ahead, she’ll never hear you over the roar of the bubbles, including the ones in her head. Or don’t bother, just take one last look, then find the horse you rode in on.”

  “What’s going to happen?”

  “You go help shit-squirrel flip burgers, maybe after getting cleaned up a little.”

  They’re not burgers, they’re sliders, Bruno almost said. Instead he asked, “What about Madchen?”

  “Here, we’ll test your powers. You see if you can read my mind while I tell you the exact same fucking words with my mouth, okay? Madchen’s gonna practice her craft, since unlike you she didn’t forget the one thing she was good at, until she’s in the black and I’m bored and then she’s gonna get a plane ticket and a nice tip. Beats sitting around eating Cheerios on Haste Street, wouldn’t you say? So quit worrying about her and focus on your own situation.”

  “I don’t have a situation.”

  “Go write a Beckett play on your own time. To the street, Flashman.”

  Stolarsky shut the door unceremoniously, stranding Bruno with the cars, his borrowed bicycle, the indifferent moon. Bruno supposed even Stolarsky drew the line at raving around his own driveway half dressed. He surely wasn’t the only one among his neighbors possessing surveillance apparatus. Bruno’s medical mask remained bundled in his pocket, not that it would have disguised him from the cameras he presumably acted for, having bumbled at the proscenium of Stolarsky’s curb for so long. Could he pick his way around the back, the coyote raid? But no. Having steeped in Stolarsky’s humiliation bath, Bruno couldn’t imagine facing Tira Harpaz.

  •

  Lacking a rear brake, Bruno crashed the bicycle twice more on Euclid’s steep grade. He managed to land upright the first time, to clatter to a stop leaning sideways against a parked car the second, so added only scraped palms and a twisted ankle to his woes. Even in this, there was consolation; downhill he could coast, rather than exhaust himself pedaling.

  He reentered the barricaded street, vacated of cars and lit by the flares of a police occupation. Telegraph’s riot had come as scheduled. The sight stirred a primal and incoherent memory: the tang of a childhood tear-gas canister; huddling for shelter with June in a feminist bookstore. Now, carousers milled, waiting for something to happen. The crowd was too dense to thread on the bicycle, so Bruno dismounted to push it, as he had up the hill.