A Gambler's Anatomy

by Jonathan Lethem

  “Well, if my mother was dead I wouldn’t know. No one would.” Bruno let this remark sit dry and unadorned. He had no desire to cultivate Madchen’s pity. Bruno’s self-pity was already so luxuriant he could barely see over the top of it. Tira’s scorn, or even Stolarsky’s, would make a better tonic to his mood.

  But here was Bruno’s weakness. He relished the scorn of his enemies. It was one thing when he’d been suavely robbing them at clubs and in their private drawing rooms, then gliding like a knife through their four-star amenities. Now that he was cornered, a baited creature with a devastated face, Bruno couldn’t afford their contempt. Tira and Stolarsky meant to destroy him. He grabbed Madchen’s arm.

  “We have to leave this place.”

  “You mean the Menschenpark?”

  “Yes, but also Berkeley.” His mask told her nothing of his panic, restricted her from his thoughts. She merely waited, with a St. Bernard’s faithfulness. Bruno was beneficiary of the same implacable patience that had mired the Catholic girl in Konstanz, in a delayed virginity. He didn’t need her pity, no, but Madchen’s unfathomable faith in him was like a diamond found in a field of mud.

  “Don’t misunderstand,” he said. “I’m glad you came here, all this way. I needed you here. But now you have to help me escape.”

  “Of course, I will do this, Alexander.”

  “We’ll buy a car.” He heard himself falling helplessly into jumbled images of a frontier exodus, passage into some road movie. A car was meant to ramble west, and there was no farther west to go. Perhaps Big Sur, though Kerouac fantasies might be out-of-date, overwritten by the Esalen hot tubs of Tira’s account. Or Joshua Tree, Sedona. Germans loved the desert and canyonlands, the pure Martian America. “I just need to earn—to win us the money, and we’ll go.”

  “Okay.” Madchen smiled and touched his hand. “Alexander, when you spoke to me on the phone, of this man who had seen this woman on the Kladow boat, I understood you were my friend, ja? And that you had to find your way out. You sounded in a prison, or a tunnel. Maybe it is possible the prison is inside? Sorry, inside your…skull? I don’t have the better word.” Again Madchen employed her magic gesture: to reach for, but not quite to touch, Bruno’s mask. Then raised her hand to sketch the picture of where they sat on the bench in the shade of the sick, resigned trees, the park hemmed everywhere by the crooked sidewalks, the parked cars that looked as though they never moved. “Maybe there, not so much outside.”

  “Maybe both places,” he said.

  Madchen smiled lightly, as if she’d gained a concession but didn’t want to appear to rub it in. “You must need to see your doctors, ja?”

  “No.” In fact, Bruno had ignored the calls from Kate, Noah Behringer’s martinet assistant. Bruno’s new cell-phone petitioner, to replace Madchen. He’d erased the messages and switched off the ringer.

  “But you have your friend.”

  “He only seems like a friend.” Bruno restrained himself. Better not to panic Madchen into flight. She’d need to be comfortable at the Jack London, to hide safe in the trap until they could fully elude it. “You shouldn’t have anything to do with him.”

  “I’m confused, Alexander. Didn’t this person paid for your surgery, and also sent my airport car?”

  “Yes and no. I mean, it is the same person. He’s treated people…badly.” Bruno felt seasick with an onrush of guilt: He’d barely thought of Beth Dennis. “The girl who arranged your ticket, that’s your real friend—he fired her for it.”

  “Why?”

  “Because he could.”

  “But this is a terrible thing.”

  “I know.” He pulled her to her feet. “Come, let’s see her girlfriend, I should have thought of this sooner. She works at the art museum, we passed it, coming here—” They swept from the park, along Bowditch Street, aloft on his urgency. Madchen had a runner’s lightness, unlike most who slugged along these piss-soaked sidewalks—in her company, he might not even need a car to vanish.

  •

  The vast brutalist art museum seemed abandoned. Though the doors were open, the halls lay dark, apart from the café and gift shop, as though in a hideous concession to the fact that no one cared for art exhibits in the first place. But what of the film archive? The only person answerable for the conundrum was another clerk, manning the gift shop’s lonely counter, a near-teenager with green hair. Bruno marched up, oblivious to the effect of his mask. Madchen behind him, Alice to his Red Queen.

  “What happened to the film archive?”

  The green-haired boy opened his mouth soundlessly, both hands rising slightly into the air with surprise or perhaps fear. He might have believed he’d entered a crime story, might be about to break into sweat and mumble pleadingly that he didn’t have access to the store’s vault. At that moment Madchen leaned in and touched the clerk on the arm, and said, “Don’t worry, bitte. My friend was in the hospital. He recovers from an injury.”

  “Oh.”

  “We’re only looking for the film archive that used to be here,” said Bruno. “It was part of the museum.”

  “Ah, yes.” The green-haired boy rearranged his expression, landing on one simultaneously bored and placating. “Oh, the screenings are across the street now, on Bancroft. It’s a pretty good temporary venue, actually.”

  “I want to talk to one of the archivists.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry, the archive won’t reopen until the new building’s finished.”

  “A new building?”

  “This place isn’t earthquake safe, even though it looks like one big piece of concrete.” The clerk glanced at the ceiling. “We’re under the Sword of Damocles here.”

  “You’re quite brave,” said Bruno.

  “Heh.”

  “They didn’t fire the archivists, did they?” Had Keith Stolarsky arranged to have a museum condemned in retribution for Beth and Alicia’s defiance?

  “Fire them? No, the same people will run the new place, sir. At the moment they’re busy readying the collection for transfer.”

  “I’m looking for Alicia—do you know her?”

  “Alicia? Oh, yeah. I’m not sure, I think she’s on leave.”

  “Do you know Beth Dennis?”

  The green-haired clerk looked at him blankly.

  “Thanks anyway,” said Bruno.

  “Of course. They’re screening Rohmer’s Perceval le Gallois later today, a rare print. I’d go if I were you.”

  “Thank you,” said Madchen.

  Outside the museum door, Madchen climbed a low concrete wall, into the grounds of the strange condemned museum, the gated lawns punctuated with forgotten sculpture. Bruno followed. They slid into the shadow of a rusted-steel glyph bolted to a concrete apron. Madchen put her face near Bruno’s, as if they were under threat of surveillance beneath the California sunshine. She entered easily into his spirit of persecution; that might be what he loved in her.

  “Don’t be worried,” she breathed. “We’ll find your friends.”

  “I’m not sure how.”

  “You terrorized the young man, in your mask.” She took his hands, their fingers tangling splendidly.

  “All I have to do is interrogate all the clerks and waiters in this town, until one admits what he knows.” But Bruno’s guilt had evaporated into happy helplessness. It wasn’t his fault Stolarsky had the power to make people and archives disappear.

  “They will give you anything you want.”

  “No, but it’s the two of us that terrorized him. Alone I’m just another Berkeley street nightmare, and so practically invisible. A preposterously tall and elegant German at my side, that’s what made the impression.”

  “Ja, thought he met the Rote Armee Fraktion.”

  “The who?”

  “The Baader-Meinhof Gruppe, they are called also.”

  “Yes.” Bruno didn’t need to understand exactly. Likely it was some variant of the Nazi culpability Germans tended to confess at the slightest instigation.


  “But now, Alexander, you no longer need this.” She freed her hand to touch the nape of his neck, then sprung the bottom-most Velcro fastener.

  “I—”

  She was close to his ear, whispering again. “You will be more beautiful, also maybe more terrifying because more real. It’s okay.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Try for me, bitte. Here in this garden.”

  Why not? Bruno could shed the mask, and he and Madchen their clothes, to reenact Eden on the condemned museum’s grounds, claiming the real estate preemptively against Keith Stolarsky or any other speculator. Lay down and fuck before the bulldozers, a People’s Park of two. By the logic of Berkeley it was surprising it hadn’t happened already. Bruno only feared the unstoppering of his head’s two-way valve. It might be safe here, with the blob of sculpture for a barricade, an external blot against mental radiation. There was nothing to fear from Madchen. She wasn’t capable of it. If he read her mind she might only unwittingly unveil the street plan of Konstanz, the faces of those who’d spangled her torso with stars and moons, or the truth about the Baader-Meinhof Gruppe.

  She eased her hand up to the next of the Velcro fasteners. Bruno felt the mask slip loose, air circulating to the tender flesh beneath his eyes. She was a genius at undoing clothes one-handed. What that indicated, Bruno didn’t need to know. She slipped it loose, bunched it in her hand, and ran the fingers of her other hand through his hair.

  “I know what you need,” she said.

  “What’s that?”

  “Haarschnitt.” She mimed scissors with paired fingers, as if trimming along the curve of his ears.

  “The barbers near campus are for swimmers and wrestlers, they only buzz it off.” He made a fist, and the sound of an electronic clipper, moved it threateningly toward her long hair. They were like Crusoe and Friday, marooned on the museum’s lawn, reinventing human society.

  “No, no, we should find scissors.”

  “The candles.”

  Her eyes widened.

  “We forgot them.”

  They scurried back to People’s Park, Bruno barely noticing the absence of his mask. The white paper sack containing candles and incense was unstolen, safe beneath the splintery bench where they’d sat. On Telegraph, she stopped him in front of Walgreens, put the sack into his hands, a finger to her lips. “I’ll come back.” He was left to contemplate the sidewalk, full of listless earring vendors ready with their piercing guns. She’d lifted away his mask the way Behringer had lifted away the blot, so that more world could flood in. But it was nothing he’d particularly missed when it was gone. Madchen reappeared and took his arm. Halfway down the block she revealed the plastic-packaged scissors shoved up her sleeve.

  “I could have given you some dollars.”

  “It’s not crime to steal from a store like that.”

  Inside number 25 she stripped him and placed him in front of the mirror, where he studied his own altered face while she clipped and schnitted expertly away. Beautiful and terrifying: He could accept the verdict now. It helped that Madchen cleared the salt-and-pepper scruff, repairing the outlines of his last, too-long-ago haircut, in Berlin. Bruno could permit himself to enter the ranks of the legendary and scarred. Madchen evened his sideburns, then braced one foot on the tub to snip at his crown. As the tiny clipped lengths rained on Bruno’s shoulders and nose, she whisked them clear with puffs of her mild sweet breath. Within the narrow symmetry of his temples, the irregularity of his features was like an action painter’s gesture immaculately framed, hung on a museum wall. Finished, she stood beside him in the mirror, almost his height. Then she stripped off her own clothes and rotated the taps.

  “We wash each other.”

  They still hadn’t made love, or even made out. They didn’t now, under the shower. It was less than twenty-four hours since her arrival. Their purification rite could take longer, Bruno wasn’t sure. He wouldn’t tamper with a sequence that seemed foretold, beyond his control. Clipped hairs and glitter swirled together into the drain. The supply of glitter might be infinite, it might issue from some part of her body, who was he to presume?

  Afterward, in a fresh ABIDE shirt and sweatpants, he left his mask aside. He switched on the cell, not because he was curious about calls—there were none—but because it was the only timepiece in the apartment. The Kropotkin’s night shift began at five. Bruno went into the kitchen and took some pills, though he’d stopped knowing exactly what they were for, nor had he kept to any schedule. He’d finish the bottles, anyway. For now he’d follow orders, lay low, though Madchen had given him new courage. She’d returned Bruno’s face to him. It might not be the same face, but he had something he could work with.

  “Will you be comfortable staying here alone?” he asked her. She’d helped herself to one of the ABIDE shirts as well, sat dressed in only the T-shirt at the joint of the wall and the Murphy bed’s mattress. “I have to go out for a few hours.”

  “You are going to gamble for money?”

  He nodded. The lie assembled itself so neatly, it seemed pointless to resist.

  “Please be careful, Alexander.”

  “I’m not doing anything dangerous. I’ll simply be relieving some undergraduates of a few of their parents’ dollars.” This was effectively truthful. Bruno reached for his sweatshirt hoodie.

  “Do you need this?” She offered his backgammon set from beside the bed. It was the first she’d remarked on it.

  “That won’t be needed, thank you.”

  “Okay.”

  There was something plaintive beneath her consent. As though the girl from Konstanz had offered up her father’s briefcase when he departed for the train to Frankfurt, and been refused. She needed a deeper assurance, but Bruno hadn’t much to give.

  “I’ll be fine.”

  “You have the keys if you want to go out.”

  “Ja. I might be sleeping.”

  “You should.”

  Bruno felt in the pocket of the sweatshirt, confirming Stolarsky’s Halloween sack-and-noose was bundled there, where Bruno had left it. He’d don it outside, or maybe stop in the bushes of People’s Park. She might have restored his face to him, yes. But Bruno remained, like Madchen in Kladow, a performer designated to appear in a mask.

  IV

  They weren’t burgers. They weren’t to be called burgers, nor mini-burgers, nor burgerettes. They were sliders, a whole other species. This was the first thing to know. Garris Plybon had said before that assembling the Kropotkin’s specialty wasn’t a “prohibitively difficult formula”—but on Alexander Bruno’s arrival for the night shift Plybon bore down like a drill sergeant to be certain Bruno had grasped its intricacies. The buns were steamed. Actually, news of this particular fetish had reached Bruno’s ears. His Gourmet Ghetto days had left him alert to such distinctions. But steamed in beef and onion broth, rather than water? That he couldn’t have known. The patties themselves, despite the delectable char wafting up, were principally steamed as well. The flattop grill was kept at a moderate heat and sprinkled with the same broth to keep it moist, beads that hopped among the rivulets of grease which melted free of the fatty ground chuck.

  “The patties barely touch the grill, see?”

  “I see,” said Bruno, the rapt student. Indeed, the patties reclined, like in The Princess and the Pea, on a heavily salted bed of vaporizing onions.

  “White Castle never even flips ’em,” said Plybon. “That’s why they punch the little holes, so the beef cooks through from one side. Highly efficient, cuts down on smoke, but you’re basically eating meat loaf. The Kropotkin’s way is to flip. We keep the grill hotter over here”—he indicated the area nearest the gutter—“for one quick scorch at the end. You know the word rime? Like frost?”

  “A poetical word.” The burlap mask’s mouth hole hung loosely, unlike that of Bruno’s medical garment. Still, he could make himself heard. Despite the burlap’s rough outer surface, the interior was satin-smooth and fit comfortably, cinc
hing securely at the nape of his neck. The noose was ballast, its knot bumping annoyingly below his Adam’s apple.

  “Sure, poetical. Well, we give these puppies a rime of carbon—you read me?”

  “I think so.”

  “Cheese, too, if they want it, goes at the last possible second.” Plybon, demonstrating, reversed a quartet of sliders off their pallet of onion, to kiss the greater heat. He flopped on thin squares of orange cheese, peeled from a nearby stack. This the steam flash-dissolved, so the cheese donated its own grease to the reservoir. Then, just as rapidly, Plybon shifted them off, between steamed buns and into the tiny paper wrappers.

  Orders flew, for burgers eaten at the counter or taken out in grease-spotted white bags. Plybon, energized in congenial chaos, cooked, waged his tutorial, bagged, and rang the register, like some mad organist operating a Wurlitzer; still, his customers were backed up through the door. At the peak the line went nearly to Bowditch. After the counterman pushed the almighty bladed spatula into Bruno’s hands, he only seized it back when the outcome of some patty or batch of onions didn’t suit his perfectionism. Then he’d scrape the result into the grill’s gutter and slap down new raw ingredients. When Bruno got it right, Plybon merely rang the register and regaled the clientele with non sequitur proclamations: “In times of revolution one can dine contentedly enough on bread and cheese while eagerly discussing events!” he’d shout. Or: “The house was not built by its owner, nor the sandwich by its eater!”

  Those who’d gotten through the door, suffering their hunger pangs in the savory fumes, groaned when seemingly perfect sliders went into the bin. This might have been Plybon’s desired effect: Let them suffer, force them to dwell on the agitprop taped or stenciled on every available surface. Don’t like waiting? There’s always Zombie Burger. No one ever surrendered their place in line. They gabbled on devices or among themselves, or tittered in fascination at the show, a tandem act starring the famous geek-revolutionary slider cook and his tall apprentice in burlap and noose. The boldest, usually healthy frat-boy types decorated in extra hair or sleeve tattoos or seashell necklaces, minimal renovations acquired overnight, after disappointing the hopes of the swim coach who’d ratified their scholarship, threw out half-assed provocations of their own.