A Gambler's Anatomy

by Jonathan Lethem

  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?

  “I was just getting Madchen up to speed on your ATM action,” Beth explained lazily. “She thinks Alexander would be perfect.”

  “Perfect for what?” said Bruno, caught entranced by the soup.

  “Garris is part of the East Bay Countersurveillance Group,” said Beth. “They’re planning this thing with the banks. I want to film it.” She hefted an imaginary palm video recorder, aimed at Bruno. “You explain, Garris.”

  Plybon concluded a draft on a joint. “A little how-do-you-do to the cameras at the ATMs, that’s all…” The slider cook detailed the scheme: At noon on May 15, the anniversary of the People’s Park Riots, dozens in masks would each withdraw twenty dollars from every automatic teller machine in Berkeley. A coordinated action and totally legal, but calculated to alarm the authorities into an overreaction. “The girls have a point,” said Plybon. “You’ve already got your Lon Chaney thing going.” The joint passed to Beth, then Madchen, the room clouding.

  “I’m afraid I have no bank account.”

  “You’ll use my card,” said Beth. “With your medical thing, you’ve got full deniability, it’ll be a cause célèbre. Plus for the cameras, you’re intense. Tall and weird, if you don’t mind me saying.”

  “I don’t mind. I am tall and weird.” His hand drifted up to fondle the scars parenthesizing his nose. Once, the blot had been something only Bruno could see, forever between him and the world. Now that his disfigurement was visible to others, Bruno often forgot it was there.

  “It is brilliant, I think,” said Madchen. “I would enjoy to go to one of the bank machines too.”

  Plybon shook his head. “As a foreign national you’d be assuming too much risk.”

  “Okay.”

  “If you want to help, you can cover the shop for me and Bruno.”

  “Ja.” Madchen stretched from her cushions to return what remained of the joint.

  Plybon mopped his hands hurriedly on a dish towel, placed the remnant on his tongue, and gulped. “Waste not, want not.”

  “Tell them about the Million Masked, Garris,” said Beth, her tone seductive. Bruno was overtaken by a vision of Plybon as a kind of pimp, his apartment a harem with its cushions and red wine in jam jars.

  Plybon flipped his hand. Civilian, he still wielded a phantom spatula. “Just a little concept I was fooling with. Since Seattle they’ve employed facial recognition tech in protest surveillance, you know.”

  “I didn’t,” said Bruno.

  “Black bloc and Zengakuren and Anonymous, they all rely on concealment. Sikhs remove their turbans at airports, we persecute black kids in hoodies and women in burkas. So, what about a Million Masked March?”

  “Fascinating.”

  “Sure, but it’ll never happen. That committee’s all green-flag Bookchinite types. Not a Situationist bone in their bodies.” Plybon hovered over Bruno. “You gonna eat that soup or just stare into it?”

  “I’m savoring it,” said Bruno apologetically.

  “I can reheat.”

  “It’s fine.”

  Plybon made a face and went into the kitchen. The wiry counterman’s dissidence was like an epileptic upwelling within his body, possibly the result of pressure on some lobe. If you were Noah Behringer, the essential fact of anyone might be lopped out, leaving the patient to reconfigure around its absence. Bruno, for instance, had forsaken luxury, possessiveness, wagering, everything that made him himself. Yet he still existed, custodian of a tall, weird body on a rudderless voyage through time.

  “Wir sollten ihn davon überzeugen, auch am Millionen-Maskierte-Marsch, teilzunehmen.” The women resumed their conspiracy. Bruno didn’t need to understand their words. Whether it was a baseline condition of telepathy or the background hum of the pot, he felt embraced in the sanctum of Plybon’s soup-scented harem.

  “Ja, verdammt. Er sollte ganz vorne mitmarschieren.”

  Madchen smiled at Bruno. He smiled back, blinked at her. Having crossed to the Kladow landing and kissed across her bicycle, bounced their voices off lonely satellites, flown thousands of miles to lotion each other’s scarred and spangled bodies, his and the German’s intimacy was still opaque, inchoate.

  “It might be hard to persuade the women in burkas,” said Beth, still working on Plybon’s march.

  “It wouldn’t matter who was underneath,” said Plybon from the kitchen. “You chicks could volunteer, for instance.”

  “Ja, why not?” said Madchen. Her air suggested she’d been a burka protester many times before. Madchen and Plybon drifted together in Bruno’s mind’s eye: The lanky, smooth German, with her undemolished innocence, her eruptions of glitter. The pale wretched anarchist, his elbows like branches of a diseased tree, eyes blinking like a mole’s the moment he laid aside his Coke-bottle spectacles. Impossible and yet not, since all human conjunctions were possible, after all.

  The idyll eased Bruno’s guilt. He wanted to tumble into the abyss of Tira Harpaz’s contemptuous wit and chunky nipples, the magic cyst at her inner thigh. Having retired his backgammon board he mentally shifted the humans before him, like checkers, to favorable positions. Madchen might be a trailing runner, a piece he’d ushered a wild distance against titanic odds. She had to be played safe, for Bruno’s own absolution. Bruno himself could be left uncovered, Bruno was the stray, always. He was the blot.

  “And you’d be perfect,” said Beth. “The Nooseman, at the head of the column.”

  “I’m perfect for anything,” said Bruno. “That’s why nobody knows what to do with me.”

  •

  Beth, with the help of Alicia and Madchen, groomed Bruno for a star turn in her video. She armed him with her debit card and password, and a stack of tiny photocopied slips, to be presented to any authority, reading:

  I am a participant in a nonviolent social experiment, with no wish or intention to harm anyone or any institution in any way whatsoever. Thank you for your interest, and have a nice day.

  They chose his outfit, too, the tuxedo and dress shoes he’d sidelined in favor of sweatpants and ABIDE shirts. His medical mask, in place of the burlap and noose. The action wasn’t a comedy, shouldn’t fall under the sign of the Hanged Food Worker. Madchen worked on him again with her shears, perfecting the line of his ears and neck, her chaste ministrations not unlike Oshiro’s. Then Bruno showered, carefully shaved, and tried on his outfit, dress rehearsal for Beth’s camera. Privately, he guessed he’d disappoint their hopes for photogenic catastrophe. The tuxedo made Bruno unapproachable, as unlikely to be arrested as a stage magician in mid-performance. He’d used it to withdraw untaxed income from protectorates and emirates; it was hard to imagine that withdrawing twenty dollars in broad daylight would be the downfall of its Teflon privilege.

  Wearing it, though, was agreeable. On Plybon’s soup and pilfered sliders Bruno had fleshed out, regained his form, and the tuxedo fit. He was healing, he supposed. He glanced once at his abandoned backgammon set, but there was no one to play. Instead, toes creaking in Italian leather for the first time since he’d bought the cheap sneakers, he reached to pull Madchen to him, hand gently pressuring the small of her back as in a tango. She laughed as he dipped her. He had an erection. He didn’t care if the lesbians saw.

  He’d wear the mask for their nonviolent social experiment, yes. But it was the last time. Overnight Bruno had become cruelly handsome, more striking than before the opening of his face’s door. He wished to hear someone call him Flashman, though there was no way to explain this. When Garris Plybon returned late from his closing shift at Kropotkin’s, Bruno changed again, into an ABIDE shirt, and removed the shoes. In bare feet he joined the w
omen for an anticipatory celebration in Plybon’s apartment, more red wine and salvage pot. By the time he and Madchen tottered back to 25 these new energies were dissipated, and they only slept. But he wouldn’t forget.

  II

  As Beth and Alicia trailed him with their video camera from the Jack London, Telegraph was already like a muddied pond. The People’s Park Riot anniversary had roiled the street’s psychosis from underneath, mixing the park’s population, the righteous aggrieved and forlornly traumatized, the recyclable-gleaners, with the frat boys and tourists, the midmorning vomiters. Someone with a bullhorn recited an ancient speech on the subject of speech, words lying in bunches in this district to be seized up at any moment. No one listened. The words had triumphed and failed entirely, a puzzle impossible to solve. Traffic was halted while someone rolled a wheeled pallet bearing a fifteen-foot-tall puppet down the center of the avenue.

  Bruno kept his medical mask in his tuxedo jacket’s right pocket, though he passed others with their faces covered, likely sharers in his own conspiracy. Others wore only a mask of pain. In his breast pocket, Bruno carried his cell phone and forty dollars, all that remained; in his pants pocket, for luck, the Berlin paving stone. If he’d taken the backgammon case, too, he might have discharged the apartment to its rightful owner, along with the phone charger and the supply of soiled T-shirts and sweatpants. Another opportunity to keep walking and never return.

  Beth backed her way through the swirling confusion on the sidewalks, capturing the tuxedoed man’s approach, while Alicia set picks in the crowd, protecting her girlfriend’s back. Madchen wasn’t with them, instead off on her own small adventure, manning the Kropotkin’s counter alone, freeing Plybon to join in the action.

  At the point of noon Bruno fell into alignment with the others at the row of seven ATMs facing campus. The other six wore Guy Fawkes masks. Looking to have been drinking all night, they careened and roared and drew hoots from passersby, hardly the ideal of serene provocation Plybon had described. In their company, Bruno’s tall overdressed presence was as invisible as he’d predicted. He formed the opposite of a sensation, a blinding outline, a vacancy of light. He Velcro-fitted the medical mask over his face but it added hardly anything, possibly subtracted. He might have done better with the noose but it lay in the drawer at Kropotkin’s.

  Bruno entered the code, then handed Beth her card and receipt, with the twenty-dollar bill, but she palmed the cash back into his hand.

  “It’s my dad’s account, you might as well keep it.”

  He and Alicia backed across the street, through more halted traffic. Beth kept her camera trained on the site. Two of the Guy Fawkes had gotten into a shoving match with a Wells Fargo guard, a short Mexican, hardly a strikebreaking Pinkerton type. It was unlikely that this took place near enough to the teller machines’ cameras to matter—but it had been explained to Bruno that urban surveillance was omnipresent, as in a casino. The little tableau of unrest might conceivably become a matter of public record and outcry, though rival unscripted disruptions were unfolding close by. Bruno was relieved, in any case, to have completed his assignment. He removed his mask, shoving it into his pocket beside the Berlin stone.

  Alicia offered her warmest gold-toothed smile. She stroked Bruno’s sleeve. “You did good.”

  He was a dog taking its treat. “Thank you.”

  “We’re gonna circulate,” Alicia said. Beth craned on her toes, trying to point her lens above the milling scene. No one had been arrested at the teller machines, a disappointment. The new energy seemed to be locating a little ways into campus, near Sather Gate. “Soak up some of the vibrations.”

  “There are a lot to soak up,” he agreed.

  Now Bruno was alone, to be drawn into and repulsed by the street’s air of incipient chaos. His primordial knowledge of Telegraph suggested that what would happen waited for nightfall. He wasn’t certain he cared. What mattered was to make his way to Kropotkin’s, to discover how Madchen had managed the grill, rescue her if she needed rescue. A roadblock of orange cones had appeared at the mouth of Telegraph, whether official or not, Bruno couldn’t tell. He wasn’t the only one confused. Someone plopped an amplifier at the barricade of cones, then plugged in an electric guitar.

  •

  Bruno knew the Kropotkin’s regulars by now, but in his tuxedo and scars he moved unseen among them. The scheduled riot had had no dampening effect on the lunchtime rush. If anything, it flushed more slider types from the woodwork. Servicing this demand with his usual panache was Garris Plybon, with Madchen nowhere in sight. Plybon wore a semitransparent Ronald Reagan mask, souvenir of his own turn in the ATM-withdrawal action.

  “Well well well, it’s Dapper Dan. You eluded the fuzz.”

  “Where’s Madchen? I thought she was helping.”

  Plybon-Reagan shrugged. “She got a better offer. Happens to me all the time.”

  “What better offer?”

  Plybon rustled thumb and forefinger together, tipping his head knowingly. “When in doubt, follow the money.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Big Chief Come Take Kraut Squaw.” Now Plybon jerked his thumb over his shoulder, a gesture familiar from his references to his raids on Tira Harpaz’s Volvo. “The Folks That Live on the Hill,” he’d once called them. Bruno’s heart lurched.

  “Do you mean Stolarsky?”

  “Yeah. His Jaguar was double-parked when I turned up. The Pharaoh self-soothes by eating his way through a pyramid of sliders from time to time, but he never puts bubkes in the tip jar.”

  “What happened?”

  “They were talking when I came in. He asked if she’d step outside for a word, so I took over. About ten minutes later he comes back in alone, hands me the sack”—Plybon poked with his spatula to point out a to-go bag, crushed whole atop the garbage bin—“and said they were going off to lunch.”

  “How could you let him?”

  “Let him? His Excellency Lord of all the Beasts of Earth and Fishes of the Sea wasn’t asking my permission.”

  “You could at least have warned her.”

  “Madchen’s a grown-up, from what I can see. Anyhow, comrade, do I look like I’m in the business of telling other people what to do?” All the while Plybon flipped, chopped, cheesed, and bunned, managing the line’s progress with minute nods and scowls. Plybon’s business might be acting as dictator of the tiniest possible nation on earth.

  “Do you know where they went?”

  Plybon again shrugged. “He’s probably pouring a sequence of martinis into her, at the Paragon bar at the Claremont. It’s the best place around here for saying, ‘Look, baby, someday all this could be yours.’ ”

  “Was he alone?”

  “Look at you, the great stone face. Your scars are turning red. Was he alone? He was until he led her out of here like a cat on a leash, yes. Then he was no longer alone.”

  “No sign of…Tira?”

  “In my experience those two don’t travel together. She’s no Kropotkin’s devotee, either.”

  “We have to go get her. Madchen, I mean.”

  Plybon arched his eyebrows above his glasses, then gestured at the mob of eaters stretching through the door. “Even if I had the first idea where to look, I’m on here until the kid comes in at six. Why don’t you just go cool your jets? I bet Stolarsky’ll drop her back at the apartments, especially the minute he gets a load of her conversation.”

  Standing aloof in his tuxedo, Bruno imagined vaulting the counter to strangle Plybon backward against the grill. But this was the impulse of someone wholly other than himself—one of the young men now agitating to the condiment shelf for mustard or ketchup, say—and so it evaporated.

  •

  He sat alone in number 25, facing not the door but the open windows. Distant bullhorns and the thud of reggae were punctuated by the sporadic crackle of laughter or sirens. The sky darkened slowly, low and orange, as if hills burned somewhere. His thoughts remained opaque. Not so much
waiting, since he’d guessed Madchen wouldn’t return, or told himself he’d guessed it. She didn’t. He waited for Plybon, perhaps. Bruno had accustomed himself to the sound of Plybon’s bicycle clanking out of the elevator, through their corridor. Plybon didn’t return, either.

  He went back to Kropotkin’s. Two bicycles were chained to the lamppost now. Plybon had been joined by his fresh-faced protégé, Robin to his Batman. Bruno went inside. The younger counterman did all the work, serving the excitable rabble, the would-be revolutionaries and vicarious lookers-on, while Plybon berated them.

  “So this is what passes for the People’s Park Riot anniversary nowadays. Like twitches in Freedom’s corpse. It boils down to an excuse to break windows and steal bongs and leather and distressed-denim keepsakes. You probably lack the wherewithal to invert even a single police car. Kids these days.”

  “I waited for you.” Bruno stepped in to speak low and close.

  “Okay, you waited for me. Here I am.”

  “Madchen’s still…kidnapped.”

  “What do you expect me to do about it?”

  “Take me up the hill.”

  “It seems like I should stick around,” said Plybon. “Things look to get a little feisty around here tonight.”

  “You want me to tell them you work for Stolarsky?”

  Plybon made a long, sour face, his eyes like two magnified oysters. Bruno wasn’t certain his blackmail amounted to much, but Plybon appeared to reconsider. He smoothed his sweaty dome with both hands, then extended and interwove them to crack his knuckles. He looked to his protégé. “You cool for half an hour or so?”

  The kid gave a thumbs-up. “Why not?”

  “Can Alexander borrow your bike?” Perhaps it had been Bruno’s purposeful tone. Or maybe Plybon’s imagination had caught the scent of something, another action he didn’t want to miss out on.