A Gambler's Anatomy

by Jonathan Lethem

  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.

  “Your roll,” he croaked.

  Tira’s cascade of luck began with sixes. She played them properly—not difficult—and offered Bruno the doubling cube on her next turn. He didn’t refuse. He again dropped builders, his play leaden and automatic. This time, her roll placed his two undefended checkers on the bar. By the time he’d danced for three rolls she’d assembled a six-prime. Could her nakedness be warping the action of the dice? No, it was his brain her nakedness addled; dice were impartial to breasts, as to everything. He supposed that by playing in such a deliberate style he’d accidentally schooled Tira in the worth of a blockade, a textbook instance of playing a mediocre opponent up to your level.

  Fate, unforgiving of his blunder, rewarded her with doubles twice as she bore off. The gammon cost him nearly everything: socks, sweatpants, ABIDE. He felt free of shame. His body might be withered, collapsed on itself from the starvation of recovery, yet the hospital had killed his embarrassment. It was only a body, a poor object hurtling through time, and anyhow what he’d lost weren’t his clothes, were hardly clothes at all.

  Owing Tira one more, Bruno faced a decision that was no decision at all. He stripped off his underwear, addressed her in nothing but his mask. His cock had flushed, grown rigid without his noticing. Now it trembled in the air. It might be the first erection of a new self-epoch.

  “The puppets come onstage at last!”

  “Puppets?”

  “That’s what Keith calls them.”

  “Calls what, penises?”

  “Genitals, both kinds. They’re the puppets. All floppy, like scraps of cloth, until the show starts.” She reached across the board and held him as if in a handshake. Bruno grunted, the pleasure almost intolerable. Just when he’d managed to exhale, she gripped him harder, tweaking, and let go. Then began shoving checkers into their proper starting places, a fast learner.

  “Aren’t we done?”

  “No way, Jose.” She pointed at his mask.

  He threw a two-one, split his back men. Tira grazed him again as she gathered her dice to throw.

  “Don’t.”

  “You’re sticking out.” She gave out with her seal bark.

  “I can’t play if you’re touching me.”

  “Fine.” She took her roll, three-one, built a point on her inner board. “I’ll touch myself instead.” Her hands ran crotchward along her thighs, fingertips passing behind the scrim.

  “I can’t tell if I’m losing or winning,” Bruno said. A whine, not what he’d intended. He threw his dice, could barely read their faces. His checkers seemed of varying size and without gravity, drifting unmoored between points.

  “Could be both at once.”

  “I think I’d like the puppet show.” His voice was helplessly diminished, but she heard.

  She turned the doubling die and moved it toward him. “Resign and we’ll see.”

  “But you still have…a scrap of cloth covering your…scraps of cloth.”

  “So let’s double resign.” Tira reached across again and caught up the rim of his cockhead with her fingertips. At her encouragement it might float thrillingly free, to the ceiling. With her other hand she threaded her underwear around each hip in turn, and clambered forward, upsetting the board. “Open your mouth,” she commanded. He obliged. She jammed the underwear between his teeth, then reached behind to grapple at the mask. “Where’s the zipper on this thing?”

  “It doesn’t—” he mumbled through the gag.

  “Never mind.” She tore the Velcro fasteners loose, then swept the mask over his skull, bundling it in one hand with the fragrant underwear. Reluctantly, he opened his jaw, and she tossed both aside, their last disguises.

  She fingertip-traced the toughening stitchery that framed his eyes.

  “Gentle.”

  “I used to have these tan alligator-leather pumps, fabulous shoes, they were in some luggage that was stolen in Costa Rica, I’m still pissed. You feel like you’re made of that stuff.”

  “I’m a work in progress. I tenderize my alligator parts with vitamin E.”

  “You’ll never look the same, Alexander. You’re wearing a mask that won’t come off.”

  Had she plucked it from his thoughts? He’d never suspected Tira of such powers. His head uncontainerized, anything was possible now. “As above, so below,” he said, and guided her hand from his cock to the time-lost scars nested deep at its root.

  “You’re still fucking gorgeous,” she said.

  “Thank you.”

  “Now feel this.” She guided his hand to her crotch, but surprised him, veering left. In the dense hair at the joint of her thigh, his fingers discovered a hard lump, golf-ball size, floating beneath the silken skin.

  “A cyst,” she said. “It’s benign, I’ve had it for years.”

  “Oh.” He caressed her there, drunk on confusion.

  “They told me they could remove it,” she said, defiantly. “I said not to bother, it wasn’t troubling me.”

  If this was her test, it was easily passed. “You feel amazing.”

  The board was elbowed into the jumble with balled socks, his Berlin stone, the empty jam jar. A checker and a die slid into the sheets, clattering gently where Bruno’s and Tira’s bodies caved a depression in the tired mattress. Her presence was sturdy and watery at once, arms weirdly muscled, nipples like small tongues riding on the mercurial flesh that glided on his surface, thighs smooth to where his fingers plummeted inside, followed by the rest of him. The golf-ball cyst swam too, faintly present against him, a feature, not a bug. Tira, for all her usual chatter, wasn’t a screamer or even a moaner. In the silence their breaths fell into concert with the whining Murphy springs. Bruno’s mind felt poured into hers as well, at least conveyed a great distance out of his body.

  The kitchen’s light blocked by his own shadow, he couldn’t read her face.

  “I feel…swallowed,” he said.

  “Eat or be eaten,” she whispered. “Engulf and Devour. That’s our motto.”

  “Our?”

  “It’s a thing Keith says.”

  “Could we leave Keith out of it?” Bruno was no longer amused by puppets or anything else bearing Stolarsky’s cloying trademark. He fought the suspicion that Stolarsky and Tira were one person, or that they at least assumed only a single attitude toward him. If there was no other reason to have fucked Tira, it would be to plant a definite secret between her and Stolarsky.

  “Why bother to try?”

  “Perhaps because he is out of it.”

  Unable to contain her hilarity, Tira issued a string of barks. She pushed Bruno off and rolled free, her postcoital transition palpable as steam or frost. “In what sense is Keith out of it?”

  “He’s left town.” Bruno raised his hand, vaguely indicating Telegraph, the commercial row Stolarsky might rule but had mercifully abdicated, in favor of the mice who played. At least to claim number 25, their clandestine cell. “I don’t want to presume, but I gathered he might have left you.”

  “I don’t know what you’re gathering or smoking. Moss maybe? Keith’s been back for a couple of days. Actually, he wants to see you in his office tomorrow.”

  “His office?”

  “Yeah.” Now Tira was the one to gesture, with a nod of her chin. “Over at Zodiac.” She rescued her clothing from the morass of sheets and checkers. Deftly restringing her brassiere over her shoulders, she groped behind to bring it taut. “
He said the free ride is over now that you’re well. That’s what I came over here to tell you in the first place.”

  BOOK THREE

  Sixty-Four

  I

  Keith Stolarsky’s office was hidden at the back of Zodiac’s second floor, behind a door layered with Nike posters, its doorknob a negligible detail anyone might overlook. Inside, it featured a long window, mirrored on the side the customers faced, like an archer’s slit in a medieval battlement, so Stolarsky could peer out unseen. He might even have been here, spying, the day Alexander Bruno first discovered the ABIDE shirts and sweat gear in which he now stood arrayed before Stolarsky’s desk—who knew?

  The office was worse than ill-furnished and generic. It was like something an unmarried super might throw together at the back of a boiler room, a refuge whose walls investigators would later pry apart in search of hidden bodies. The huge, battered steel desk could have been salvaged from the Department of Motor Vehicles. Files bulged in the opened drawers of a metal cabinet, but also from cardboard boxes, on bracket shelves bolted into the concrete-block rear wall, and on the floor. On the desk before Stolarsky no computer, only a desk lamp, a scattering of paperback books and pornographic magazines, a tan Slimline telephone, a vintage Cal Bears ashtray, paper cups stained with evaporated coffee, a Polaroid camera, and Stolarsky’s hands, which twitched and picked and abraded each other as though managing a craving for cigarettes or self-abuse. This was a bunker for firings, a black site for interrogating cornered shoplifters, or headquarters for plotting dark interventions at gatherings of the Telegraph Avenue Business Owners Association. Its existence ratified every worst implication in Garris Plybon’s arsenal.

  Bruno had come at noon, on Tira’s instructions. The store was empty, Telegraph still yawning. He’d been guided to the secret door by an unfamiliar clerk running the upstairs counter. Beth wasn’t on the floor, that Bruno could see. Perhaps she slaved over receipts in another hidden room.

  Keith Stolarsky didn’t rise, or greet Bruno, just said, “Shut the door,” then belched, stared, smacked his lips. The trollish face twitched, as if in strain at avoiding some too-obvious thought. Bruno stood, sealed in mask and hood, feeling at once mummified in his apartness from Stolarsky—and from the human species—and utterly naked. The room had one chair, besides Stolarsky’s own, but it was a sorry thing, a plastic folding chair leaned against the side wall. To fetch it, in order to sit across from the man behind the desk, seemed a losing move. Bruno stood.

  “So,” said Stolarsky at last. “More hurt birds on my dime, eh?”

  “Hurt birds?”

  “Your poor pitiable dominatrix from the Fatherland.”

  “You know about her?” Either another human being was scanning every part of Bruno’s mind, sifting it like sand, or wasn’t. Bruno reminded himself this was the permanent situation, whether he troubled to think of it or not.

  “Hey, I forked up her plane fare, I should know a thing or two.”

  “I apologize for that.”

  “Don’t be sorry for me, be sorry for Beth.”

  “What happened to Beth?”

  “Unemployment happened to Beth. She’s out on her dyke ass for that horseshit. In fact, I was thinking of giving you her job, but then I got a better idea. Tira showed me that tape of you at Zombie. You made an impression. You’re a spook-and-a-half, a legend in the making.”

  The lowliest European functionary—a border inspector, say—dressed immaculately, and furnished even a cubicle to lend an impression of respectability. A truly wealthy man, like Stolarsky, pronounced his status in paneling, burnished wood, fountain pens, leather volumes. Bruno banished the despondent thought; this baleful room was Europe’s nullification.

  “What’s the matter, I trample on your delicate sensibilities? Look at you, Flashman. You’re all nobly damaged now, sealed in your face condom. What’re you going to look like when you come out from under there—Jonah Hex?”

  “It’s a medical mask.”

  “Oh, sure. Don’t worry, you should embrace the tall-dark-and-strange thing. You’ll slay the ladies. It’s that added layer of tragic mystery, like Bob Dylan or Lawrence of Arabia after the motorcycle accident.”

  “If I remember correctly, Lawrence of Arabia didn’t survive his motorcycle accident.”

  “Whatever.”

  “Did you really fire Beth?”

  “Let me put it to you this way: Is a high-end Nazi hooker really deplaning at SFO in two hours? One question answers the other.”

  Bruno didn’t speak. Into the silence beats trickled through the tiles, something funky the clerks had cranked loud to salve their retail angst. Bruno glanced again at the chair, his fellow captive, the only thing less free to depart this room than he.

  “What, you want to sit?”

  “No.”

  “Should I make this more pleasant for you? Perhaps a drink? Maybe I should lay out some antipasto? Forgive me, it’s hard to know how to make a man in a hood comfortable.”

  “I’m fine.”

  “You know, Flashman, when we were at Berkeley High, you were the most advanced kid I ever saw. It was thrilling, believe me. Like the girls, I practically came in my pants when you went walking by. Now I look at your life, and I think under the bogus mid-Atlantic accent and world-weary Man of La Mancha shit you probably never matured another inch beyond where I first laid eyes on you. You’re stuck, while everyone else kept growing.”

  “I sip from a fountain of eternal youth.” He meant to lampoon Stolarsky’s fulminations, but circumstance had spoiled Bruno’s tone. His ironies were ghoulish now.

  “Yeah, well, contrary to a lot of wishful thinking on this avenue, I do not spend from a wallet of fathomless wealth,” said Stolarsky. “You owe me.”

  Bruno fell silent at what was, after all, incontestable. Did Stolarsky regard Tira Harpaz as a feature of this debt? Bruno didn’t want to know.

  “I talked with your surgeon, he’s wiping his hands of you. I wish I could say the same about the bills from intensive care, or the anesthesiology group—great racket!—or a hundred other fucking invoices coming out of the woodwork. You got an expensive new face, not that I’m noticing any gratitude. Are you in there, Flashman?”

  “I’ll honor the debt.”

  “We’re not playing backgammon here. I’ve got businesses to run. Not to mention I could be taking rent out of that unit you’re in.”

  “I can vacate the premises.”

  “That’s how you’re planning to greet your warm leatherette? Heil Hitler, and by the way, we’re sleeping at the homeless shelter?”

  German history, that wound gaping for anyone to poke a stick in; Bruno wouldn’t be goaded into a defense. “I wouldn’t worry. She should have them up and into boxcars in no time.”

  “Good one! Now there’s the spirit we’ve been waiting for.”

  “Honestly, I have no idea where we’ll go. It isn’t your problem.”

  “Oh, it is, it is. My money, my problem. You know how it works in Native American lore, right? We all had to take that class at Malcolm X, it was as mandatory as gym or fractions. You save a man’s life, he’s your responsibility.”

  “That may not actually have been Native American lore, it might be from Kung Fu or F Troop. Anyway, I hereby absolve you.”

  “No dice. I got another one for you, Flash: my money, my problem, but also my opportunity. Here.” Stolarsky slid open a wooden drawer, not smoothly, and pulled out something, a lump of cloth and rope, and shoved it onto the desktop. His smirk invited Bruno to understand this presentation as significant, a trump card played.

  “What is it?”

  “You can’t serve food in that mask, it’s too unsavory. You look like a burn victim, like there’s no skin underneath. Nobody’ll want to eat. I got you this instead. It goes perfectly with the Zombie Burger motif. Like I said, you’ll be a sensation. All you have to do is stand there, just like you’re doing now. Hand the meals across, don’t say a word. Here, try
it on, I’ll turn my back.”

  Bruno stepped nearer to see. He spread the loose-bunched object on the desk. A burlap hood, with precise, machine-sewn openings for the eyes, nostrils, and mouth. The thick rope hung at the neck, noose-knotted.

  “You had this made?”

  “Nah, it was lying around at Zodiac, from some Halloween crap we never could sell. Whole box of ’em. Just dumb luck.”

  The room seemed to incline beneath Bruno’s feet. The desolate folded chair now stood uphill.

  “It should light up pretty sweet,” Stolarsky continued. He seemed abruptly cheery, high on his conceit. “If not, we’ve got this black-light-sensitive treatment we can douse it with, we keep it around. Sometimes the girls get crazy, use the stuff instead of lipstick.”

  “I’m not working at Zombie Burger.” These words themselves seemed to Bruno to emanate from a zombie region of his anatomy, a howl of last resort.

  “The hell you say.”

  “I can’t.” Now he pleaded. “I’m too old.”

  “You’re not old, you’re a ‘totemic figure.’ And you’ll pull action like nobody’s business. Everybody knows, they’ve been trained by the movies, that the guy in the Elephant Man sack is always gorgeous, it’s always Mel fucking Gibson or David Bowie under there.”

  “I couldn’t bear it.”

  “What, some sort of misguided loyalty to Tira?” It was the first time Stolarsky had mentioned her. So she’d told Stolarsky her request: that Bruno boycott Zombie. Bruno should accept it, he was encircled.

  “Loyalty to myself,” said Bruno. “Let me work at Kropotkin’s instead.”

  “Shit. You like the little slider joint better?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s fucking great, actually. I think I love it. Horn in on Plybon’s scene, eh? You can even keep tabs on the righteous little bastard for me. Of course, it’s a lot more work, you realize? You’re destined to come home with twenty pounds of cancer smoke in your clothes. That hoodie’s gonna soak up the carcinogens like a sponge. You sure it’s recommended by your doctor?”