The Blot

by Jonathan Lethem

  Certain shopwindows boasted fitted-plywood shields, a routine, even ritual precaution. Not Stolarsky’s, however. Zodiac Media’s glass edifice was lit like a beacon, brazening it out. The store might rely on its monolithic aura for a certain inviolability; that, and the security guards. Beyond, Zombie Burger, that meat sculpture, glowed out its obdurate unholy weirdness. It still featured a tail of patrons, mingled into throngs crossing from the pavement into the roadway, a confusion of hungers that might be unimportant to sort out.

  “Holy shit, look what the cops did to this guy!”

  “It’s the Dude, man, I almost didn’t recognize you in that monkey suit. Where’s your mask? You’re looking bad.”

  “You need us to bust some heads?”

  “Thanks, but no. Actually, I took a spill.”

  Bruno turned off Telegraph, up Durant. Filtering through the crowds to Kropotkin’s, he found the shop alive with eaters, some tucked at the narrow counter, some arrayed on the sidewalk, even seated on the curb, all wild-eyed and chomping sliders. Inside, Plybon and his ward appeared to have quit charging for the meals they handed out, making the shop a protein-distribution cell for the larger unrest. Plybon, his back turned, used his spatula to scour carbon detritus from the grill. Bruno went unnoticed. He leaned the bicycle, only scuffed and with a few spokes bent, against the lamppost.

  Kropotkin’s was safe from rioters, since no one knew the shop belonged to Keith Stolarsky. It struck Bruno that he might owe his presence in Berkeley, the whole joke of his current existence, to Stolarsky’s Stalin impulse to arrange for a thorn in his own paw. Garris Plybon might be right, righter than he knew. Bruno was meant to replace him, not at the slider counter, no, but as Stolarsky’s antagonist. Stolarsky’s local adversaries were too easily vanquished, Plybon included. So Stolarsky had plucked Bruno up from afar, a new enemy to stem his boredom.

  Bruno had failed the test. He could have had the gun when Stolarsky first put it down. He could have saved his Berlin stone for the picture window, or smashed the glass with a piece of furniture. But no, the glass would have rained down into the hot tub. On the hill Bruno had been paralyzed by the matter of Madchen, a checker he never ought to have shifted from its place of safety. Here, at street level, he could see more clearly: She’d never been the point. If Bruno had rescued Madchen, Stolarsky would have answered with a shrug. The ugly man had no vanity to destroy. To make Stolarsky regret stirring the Flashman part of him to life, Bruno had to rob him of something that actually counted.

  Plybon only had to first be brushed aside. He deserved it for his cowardice on the hill. Bruno stepped swiftly in behind the counter and opened the drawer of potholders in which he’d stashed the burlap mask. A last hurrah for this face, to stir his audience, which might not know him without it. He turned to rinse his bloody knuckles and stinging palms in the small stainless-steel sink. The counter concealed his ragged knees, and the mask took care of the rest, covered the general disaster and despair that was his face, his person now.

  “We don’t need three cooks,” complained Plybon.

  “He should chain his bicycle,” said Bruno. “And he might be due for a break, don’t you think?” He pulled the mask over his face.

  “Yeah, well, we hardly need two.”

  “Deadman!” someone called.

  “The Martyr of Anarchism,” Bruno corrected quietly. He felt animated by a calm ferocity. “Garris, will you hand me your implement, please?” Plybon’s protégé had gone, to protect his bicycle, perhaps also sensing trouble.

  “What happened with your girlfriend?”

  “The situation is still unresolved. Hand me the spatula.”

  “I’m just scraping the flattop here,” said Garris, puzzled. “Then you can help me put on onions and start a batch.”

  “I have something else in mind.”

  “Okay, then, how about you take your cryptic ominous shit out of here and let me do my work?”

  “Do you want me to explain who you do your work for?”

  “Sorry, what?”

  “I’ll tell them you’re Stolarsky’s employee,” said Bruno in a low voice. “His patsy, is that the word?”

  “It’s not the night for high jinks, comrade.”

  “Oh, I think it’s very much the night. Here, allow me.” Bruno hadn’t brought himself to seize Stolarsky’s gun from a table but had no trouble wrenching the spatula from Plybon’s grip. Perhaps it was the power of the mask. “I’ll give you a fighting chance. Do you play backgammon?”

  “Board games, opium of the masses? As a lonely child lost in the bourgeois dream, I played ’em all. What’s your point?”

  “I’ll refresh you on the rules.” Bruno spilled out the aluminum bin of chopped onions, to blanket the grill. The vegetable matter began its gentle sizzling. With the keen edge of the spatula, Bruno chopped and sluiced, sketching in onions a rudimentary game board, twenty-four points and a central bar. Bruno skipped the broth—too much moisture and the onions would swim, wrecking the playing field.

  “You move your pieces in this direction,” he explained to Plybon, using the spatula as a pointer. “I pass you, the opposite way.” Seizing up a tall stack of raw patties, he laid them into the starting positions on the onion-points. “The goal is to move your men off first.”

  “Hey, it’s too soon for cheese—” Plybon protested as Bruno began laying the orange squares onto one set of meat-checkers.

  “It’s necessary to tell our men apart. You’ll play the bare patties, I’ll play the cheesed ones. Is it coming back? A simple, elegant game. Like riding a bicycle, once you’ve learned you can hardly fail to pick it up again, that is unless the brakes are out of order.”

  “Sure, I remember.” Plybon eyed the slider-board with his grim nerd’s intensity. He was drawn, despite himself, to anything cultish. “But what are we supposed to do for dice?”

  “The register,” Bruno improvised. “We’ll hit the keys blind. The first two numbers of the total make up a dice roll—skipping zeroes, of course.”

  “Zeroes don’t occur in the wild, you know, they’re abstractions, a step toward the denaturing of human labor.”

  “Good then, we’ll do away with them.” Bruno put last touches on the opening positions, the raw pink checkers already starting to singe and brown atop the frying onions. The cheese had relaxed, to drape securely over his own pieces.

  “You first,” said Bruno.

  “Here I come.” Plybon punched at the register’s keys theatrically. It was true the counterman frequently operated the device without glancing; with rapid enough addition in his head, he might be able to dictate his throws. But no. Bruno saw Plybon had to squint at the total to learn his numbers. A six-two wasn’t anyone’s idea of an advantageous opening. Plybon plucked up a fork and stuck it in one of his back men, then counted steps, one-two-three-four-five-six, no sense of where his man would land, hallmark of a rube. The back man secured on the eighteen-point, Plybon moved his second two spaces, further confession of cluelessness.

  Bruno tapped at the register’s keys. It was easy to use the register-dice honestly, thanks to the mask’s narrowing of his peripheral vision. A six-one. He hit and covered. An innocuous play, yet the three-prime was already advantage enough that Bruno would have doubled, had he a doubling cube. He could mash one together out of the softened buns, but no. Bruno didn’t look to win but to play. He sought some deeper outcome from these meat-checkers than Plybon’s surrender. The scent rising from the brothless grill was crucially sharp and dangerous, the meat-game a kind of oracular device, a Ouija board or Magic 8 Ball. No rush to see what it unveiled.

  “Check it out, they’re playing Parcheesi!”

  “Shut up, nigga, that ain’t Parcheesi. It’s whatchoocallit.”

  “Lemme get a couple of those when they’re captured—”

  Plybon held up a stern hand. “Wait.” He worked the register again and drew up a four-three, to bring his man off the bar, then open another random blot in hi
s backfield. He smirked at Bruno, daring critique with the same inverted defensiveness with which he plopped down bowls of his latest soup.

  The onion-points at the hot end of the grill began to smolder. Plybon switched the overhead exhaust fan to high, a gentle roar.

  Bruno hit Plybon three more times in the next three rolls, a punishing surplus of good fortune. Plybon’s men danced on the bar, then trickled onto Bruno’s home points in unruly clusters, so many it was nearly annoying—the game might only take an hour to win at this rate.

  “You’ve fallen into my little trap,” Plybon crowed with maximum irrelevance.

  “The People like a back game, apparently.”

  “You bet your sweet ass.”

  They’d gathered a fair crowd, including Plybon’s apprentice, who’d taken it as his task to hush the viewers and stall demands for food. The sliders on the grill were carbon-checkers now, inedible. Bruno found it harder to shift his shrunken men with the giant spatula, so he followed Plybon’s example, traded for a fork. As the distinguishing cheese had boiled off in rank smoke, Bruno laid fresh orange squares atop the remains. The heat rising off the grill forced him to lay his tuxedo jacket aside—it was nearly spoiled anyhow. He sweated heavily under his burlap but left it on, just tugged the noose upward to momentarily ventilate his neck. Plybon pressed Play on his infernal Sonny Sharrock CD, cranking the volume to drown the roar of the exhaust and the clamor of the gallery.

  It was just as Plybon reached in to fork another captured patty off the bar, that two of Bruno’s checkers—his prime at the nineteen-point—burst into flame. The counterman only grunted, unimpressed, and smothered the fire with forkfuls of spare onions, enough for the moment.

  “Better hurry!” Plybon shouted over the noisy music. “I’ve got you right where I want you.”

  They had to lean back against the counter between moves, for oxygen. Bruno, already playing down to Plybon’s Cro-Magnon level, now struck at near random, opening blots in his home board simply in order not to have to stretch over the noxious fumes of the backfield. Both players had men on the bar when the captured pieces exploded into blue-hot fire.

  “I’d accept your resignation at this point!” shouted Plybon, reaching for the ladle to apply broth to extinguish the flames. “Ow, FUUUCCCK!” The stainless-steel ladle, extended over the silo of heated air drawn upward into the exhaust, was impossible to touch; Plybon shook his scalded hand over his head in a mad dance. All the sliders were on fire now.

  “Let it burn,” said Bruno. “It wasn’t a high-quality contest to begin with.”

  The watchers had sagged out beyond the doors for air. Bruno rushed to join them. Only Plybon remained inside, barely visible in the smoke. Fumbling under the counter, perhaps for a fire extinguisher, the counterman had come up instead with Bruno’s tuxedo jacket, which he flipped out above the flames like a toreador. Too late: the coat exploded. Plybon’s protégé rushed inside and dragged his mentor free and to the curb, where the slider cook sat stunned. He removed his glasses, dazedly. The thick lenses had protected his eyes. Around them, a blast pattern of instant sunburn, eyebrows that might crisp off into dust if touched. The tiny shop blazed, black flumes coursing to the roofline and into the night sky, reverse waterfalls.

  “Holy hell, Nooseman, you blew up Kropotkin’s!”

  “It belonged to Keith Stolarsky,” Bruno said, to whomever had levied the accusation.

  “Darth Vader?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well shit, that’s not right!”

  “No.”

  “We gotta blow up the Death Star!”

  “Yes, that’s what we must do.”

  “Death to Zodiac!”

  •

  The loose arrangement of bodies resolved into two parties: those fleeing the arriving sirens and others at Bruno’s back, as he drifted through the debris along Durant’s car-vacated white center line toward Telegraph. The burlap mask spotlit Bruno’s next destination, sparing distraction at what lay behind, either the ruin of the shop—now the theatrical crash and screams as the manifesto-plastered plate glass splintered and gave way—or the number or character of the loose army gathered in thrilled fascination as he marched.

  A phalanx of policemen greeted them at Durant and Telegraph, behind roadblocks and flares seemingly meant to steer any rioters southward, away from the sanctuary of campus, back in a loop toward People’s Park, the long-conceded ground. Zodiac Media blazed like a lampfish lure behind this defense, made unreachable.

  “To Zombie,” suggested Bruno. He barely had to speak to lead his followers, whatever sort of rats or children made up his parade.

  “Fuck yes! Burn down mo-fo capitalist tittyburger!”

  Zombie Burger lay undefended by any official presence. Instead, the tower, like some horrific Dr. Seuss drawing, steamed away at its gross purposes, humans steadily plunging through its cavelike entrance, reemerging handcuffed to giant narcotic sandwiches, a method of crowd control far more effective than plastic shields and batons. Should Bruno elbow past the line to invade the overpopulated kitchen and incinerate the pumpkin palace from within, by its own fire and grease? Or burn it from the outside? Before he’d settled on an approach, the students who’d trailed him from Kropotkin’s were at work, busy shattering a wooden sawhorse with high-flying kicks and idiotic kung fu yells, taking turns as if at a piñata.

  “Let me build it, I was a Boy Scout! You need surface area and airflow—”

  “Tinder, I mean, like, kindling—”

  “Fuck tinder! Fuck kindling!” Another masked body wheeled up, dancing maniacally, and jetted copious lighter fluid from a tin held provocatively low, between his legs. The liquid fell in pissy loops along the Zombie’s hammered-metal exterior, and down onto the smashed remnants of the barricade, the splintered blue two-by-fours that had been hurriedly kicked up in a ragged heap against the wall.

  Were these forces really under Bruno’s command? A pointless question. Another somebody struck a series of matches and tossed them at the cold pyre. One finally sparked the lighter fluid, but the result was less than explosive. The sawhorse began to burn, yes, but Zombie’s outer surface was indifferent to the little fire. One of the burger girls appeared in the doorway, apparitional in the nimbus of her black-lit uniform. A massive fire extinguisher on her back—she gave the appearance of an angel or scuba diver—from which she casually blew cascades of chunky white foam on the flames. One of Bruno’s foot soldiers, masked with a train-robber’s bandanna, ran at her, in chaotic defense of the hard-won, pitiable blaze. She raised the extinguisher’s nozzle threateningly in his direction and he sheared off sideways, as if dodging a policeman’s Taser.

  Zombie’s odor of char was nearly unbearable, its upper stories beaming lasers into the void, too much a totem of fire to succumb. The building might have been specially formulated as riot-proof, perhaps even to survive a nuclear war, after which it would remain standing in Berkeley’s blasted desert, an ironic emblem of human voraciousness.

  “I know another Stolarsky building.” Bruno barely had to whisper it. “This way.” He started off down Channing Way, circling the block—a longer route, but it put the rising sirens and uncomfortable scrutiny of a fevered crowd likely full of undercover policemen behind him. There was no need to glance, his lieutenants stayed at his heels, an effective cell of four or five, no more than was called for. Plybon, advocate for the value of small audiences, would have been proud. He strolled downhill in the cool and quiet, People’s Park at his back. He no longer felt his knees or knuckles. Numbness, always among Bruno’s talents. Another chance, perhaps, to wander out of his own wearisome destiny? But no, he turned the corner on Dana Street. Then again, up Haste.

  As the door shut behind them, the Jack London’s inlaid-wood lobby formed a temple of caramel light and calm. The riot seemed miles and possibly years removed. It was as if Bruno and his followers had snuck off, a posse of Samurai, to invade some European drawing room. Or—what had Madchen called th
em?—the Baader-Meinhof Gruppe. One member, still in kung fu mode, howled and leaped to kick at one of the foyer’s blond panels, which instantly stove in.

  “No,” said another. “The elevator.”

  Lighter fluid soaked its graffiti into the raw-surfaced wooden interior, sadly un-refinished for years. The first lit match, touched to each of the car’s three walls, took easily too.

  “Send it upstairs!”

  The doors closed and the elevator rose like a burning paper lamp into the throat of the building.

  It was only then that Bruno turned to search out the masked face of the bestower of lighter fluid: another burlap-nooseman like himself. Stolarsky had said he had dozens of the masks, if not hundreds. Bruno had never been out of sight of Stolarsky’s operatives, he realized too late. He might even be an operative himself.

  IV

  Near as he’d come, in so many exotic locales, he’d never spent a night in jail before. It had taken California policemen to bring him to ground. They’d shepherded him the brief and familiar distance to Berkeley’s jail, on Martin Luther King Jr. Way—for a moment Bruno imagined they were dragging him back to high school, but they passed it by.

  It might be a lesson in the gravity of native places, their ability to demolish pretensions; never mind the interlude between, in which you’d dreamed some weightless escape. What remained of Bruno’s jacketless tuxedo—grease-spattered shirt with cuffs rolled up and singed, pants with tatterdemalion knees—held no sway with the authorities, either during his arrest outside the burning apartment building or through the night and morning in various holding pens. There, Bruno blended more or less gratefully into the derelict population, much as he had on the broken sidewalk in the shadow of the Berlin Hauptbanhof. No one had said anything about his face. There were worse faces to be seen.