The Blot

by Jonathan Lethem

  “Mr. Bruno?” The doctor held out his hand.

  “Yes.”

  “I’m sorry you had to wait so long. It might have been preferable to dismiss you.”

  “Are you—American?”

  The young doctor smiled. “No, I’m German, but thank you. I studied in Columbus, Ohio, and for a while in Scotland.”

  “Ah.” Looking up from his seat, Bruno’s blot made the young doctor with the perfect English a faceless Aryan angel, his curls a blond halo.

  “You must be exhausted. Let’s talk about your results so you can go—I see you’ve listed a hotel.”

  “Yes.”

  The doctor sat across the circular Formica table and lifted the clipboard’s covering sheet. Nothing he saw there required more than a glance. “Your blood glucose levels are normal. The examining doctor was confident in ruling out stroke.”

  “Yes …” he said.

  “And no history of migraine with visual field distortion?”

  “I’ve never been diagnosed. I have been suffering from headaches.”

  “Migraine onset can be possible in later life.”

  Later life—so that was what had come to Bruno. Next, a discount on movie tickets.

  “Okay, but also, the visual disturbance you detailed, there is a chance of temporal arteritis—an inflammation of small vessels of the eye. However, this would be premature. I’ve prepared information on two specialists you might wish to visit immediately, an Augenarzt—an eye doctor. And as well a neurologist.”

  “But … I did suffer the seizure.”

  “So, but, reflex analysis indicates not.” The doctor glanced again at the page. “Is this correct, that you fainted upon sight of the blood from your nose?”

  “Yes.”

  “And not again after?”

  “No … no.”

  “I see a suggestion from the doctor you saw: vasovagal syncope response. Did he discuss this with you?”

  “No.”

  “Are you familiar with this term?”

  “I’m sorry, no.”

  “Ah. With vasovagal, one loses consciousness at the sight of one’s own blood. An autonomic response, impossible to regulate with the will. It can be highly inconvenient for routine procedures—we are often having patients fall unconscious upon having their blood drawn, for instance. But it is a silly abnormality, of no consequence.”

  A silly abnormality? Bruno would trade it for a death sentence. The young doctor’s smile was evident, even at the edges of the blot. Was his unusual kindness merely an impression given by his unaccented English? Possibly Bruno’s spell here had softened him up, like Patty Hearst in her closet.

  “Please don’t misunderstand. The migraine diagnosis is a speculation, we really recommend you visit the specialists noted here, okay? But—headache and nosebleed, a single episode of fainting. One thing is clear, you needn’t be here any longer.”

  “Okay.”

  “You’re a visitor to Germany, Mr. Bruno?”

  “Yes.”

  “You have no insurance of any kind?”

  “No.”

  “Please do not let that keep you from making these appointments. Or if you are leaving, see your doctor in the States.”

  “I … have no plan to return.” Bruno was self-conscious again of his worn tuxedo, his brown-crusted shirtfront, his lost cuff link, and the mysterious wooden case he still clutched, white-knuckled, in his lap. If only it contained radioactive isotopes or microfilm. Or stacks of cold currency, unmarked. He’d purchased the inlaid wooden set at a games shop in Zurich, with a fresh check for thirteen thousand Swiss francs in his breast pocket. From Bruno’s present juncture, such triumph seemed as exotic as microfilm or isotopes.

  “Do you know the way home from here to your hotel?” Perhaps the angelic doctor had been inspecting Bruno too. After all, they’d tested his blood and had surely noted the presence of paracetamol and Wolf-Dirk Köhler’s scotch. The intern’s diagnosis, unspoken behind vasovagal and migraine, might have simply been alcoholic bender. Given the plentiful men wandering Berlin’s streets at midday with unconcealed liters of beer, the emergency room likely knew this type of patient.

  “If you can direct me to the S-Bahn, I’ll be okay.”

  “We’re just across the river here from the Hauptbanhof. It’s a very pleasant walk across the old section of the hospital—come, I’ll point you in the right direction.” Another angelic service? Perhaps the young doctor wished to observe Bruno placing one foot in front of the other before releasing him to his fate. Moving together to the sliding entry doors, they stepped across the red footprints.

  “What are these for?”

  “Excuse me?”

  Bruno pointed. “They seem to lead nowhere.”

  “Oh, those! The red lead to the red zone, the yellow to the yellow zone. For when it is needed.”

  “I don’t understand.” Outdoors, Bruno was overwhelmed by the world’s resumption: the smell of exhaust and rotting grass clippings, the angled light, humans with a purpose on earth, with paper cups of coffee in their hands. He and the doctor walked together across the endless cobblestones, the cobble-dice, and out from under the pedestrian bridge.

  “Yes, it’s odd, but no one ever thinks of it. It’s a plan for some catastrophe greater than the system can handle. The footpaths show where the more badly injured should congregate, as opposed to those with minor injuries.” Under the effort of this explanation, the young doctor’s accent began to revert. “There’s a green zone too, for those not requiring a doctor, but who have come to the hospital because of losing their homes, or to donate blood, or so forth.”

  They’d crossed out of the grimly utilitarian modern complex into another, more serene century. The old hospital was a grassy campus of red-brick buildings, each with Shakespearean alcoves and porticoes. Dawn had broken out on the wide paths, a pale-pink sky visible through the greenery, and impossible numbers of birds twittering overhead. But when Bruno raised his eyes to the branches, the blot intruded. It dominated the upper half of his field of vision more than the lower. No wonder he’d become so concerned with what lay underfoot.

  His escort had stopped on the path, to fish in his scrubs and come out with a pack of smokes, likely his real motive for stepping outside the ER. “You’re well on your way,” the young doctor said, lighting a cigarette. “Just follow the main road here through the old Charité, and you’ll hit the river. You’ll then see the train station. Just cross the river and you’re there.”

  “How charming it is here.”

  “Charité was first built as a plague sanitarium, so it’s a city within the city.”

  “It makes a pleasant sort of preserve.”

  “Yes,” said the doctor, assuming a wry look, “with a great number of buildings and streets named for famous Nazi physicians.”

  Berlin, tomb city. Everywhere you walked on graves or bunkers, or the ghostly signature of the Wall. And so the red footprints: Why shouldn’t future catastrophes be legible too, trudging columns of dirty-bomb refugees or zombie-plague survivors traced in advance? Between cigarette and cheap Teutonic irony, the blond doctor had surrendered his angelic aspect, but no matter. He’d delivered Bruno from the terminal sector to this little paradise of birdsong. Bruno was ready to part with him.

  “I’ll be fine.”

  “I’m sure you will.”

  Alone, Bruno settled into a false exultation. His condition could as easily have been the result of an all-night fleecing of some puffed-up financial wizard or real-estate baron much like Wolf-Dirk Köhler (who Bruno now understood could only have been sincere in his pomposity and his fortune, and the beneficiary of an ordinary lucky streak). It wouldn’t make the first time he’d wandered the dawn streets of a foreign town looking like a daylight vampire. The only difference was the absence of the money he should have had to show for it. And what was money?

  Bruno smiled greetings in passing, swinging his backgammon case as he walked. The medical studen
ts, one younger than the next, answered with their eyebrows, beguiled from their Prussian reserve. One or two even gave forth with an awkward “Morgen!” Armed with a fresh shirt and a double espresso Bruno might not even need sleep, though nothing stood between him and eight or fifteen hours dozing in a curtained room except the brief journey back to Charlottenburg and his hotel. He might even sleep away the blot, he felt now. Why not? Though he had no way of paying the bill, he assumed the keycard in his pocket still worked.

  Crossing out of Charité and over the river, the Hauptbanhof in sight, Bruno’s spirit only soared higher. Berlin’s sprawling indifference, its ungainly, crane-pierced grandeur, liberated him. Perhaps he’d only needed to blow the Kladow opportunity Edgar Falk had flung his way, and his subsequent vigil in the ER, to understand. He’d wanted to dissolve his tie to Falk, not reconstitute it. Let the whole absurd episode—his being gammoned, his nosebleed—be taken as a departing fuck-you.

  As he slid into the morning crowds approaching the sun-twinkling central glass atrium at the Hauptbanhof—the train station another city unto itself, more chilly and anonymous than the medieval campus of Charité but also, therefore, more familiar, with its Sushi Express and Burger King and international newsstand, its dozens of tracks leading anywhere he might wish to escape to—Bruno had in his giddy escapes from death and from his former profession concluded he needed only a new name. Mr. Blot. Blotstein. Blottenburg. It was there he fell. Not across the Hauptbanhof’s threshold but before it, just past a construction barricade at the river side of the station entrance.

  He fell into a shallow rupture in the walkway, a section where the cobblestones had been disrupted, the earth below laid bare. A small pile of the granite paving cubes lay to one side, at a point now level to his view. Bruno’s legs had gone. He didn’t try to stand again. The blot made everything confusing. His backgammon set was clutched to his chest still, or again. He saw the station looming, a Zeno’s paradox target now. He’d been nearer to it standing on the other side of the river. The front of his face bled again. He moved his legs now, but only swam in the dirt and the rubble of stones. No one paid attention. He smelled dust, mud, sunlight, and grilling sausages, nauseating so early in the morning.

  If only he had a wooden mallet, Bruno could pretend to be working. Did a vast supply of older cobblestones circulate throughout Berlin, endlessly repurposed, or did fresh ones need to be quarried and shaped? What would happen if he kidnapped a stone, took it out of circulation? Would the system collapse? Bruno could enjoy contemplating the rough cubes forever, now that they’d captivated his imagination, if he weren’t lying sideways, watching blood from his nose drip into the dusty soil, if he weren’t embarrassed to be seen here. Forever had become a squishy concept, anyway. Time slipped from him in blacked-out instants, like a film in which one blotted passerby was replaced by the next—a jump cut. How ironic, he thought, that behind him, across the river, on the idyllic campus, a crumpled figure would surely find himself swarmed by compassionate attention, the medical students competing to show off their training. On this side of the bridge, below the edifice of the Hauptbanhof, he lay beneath consideration, resembling as he did the contemptible derelicts and drifters accumulating at major train stations all over the universe.

  He’d met a just reward for flirtation with the wish to disappear.

  For amusement, Bruno reached out for one of the squarish stones. The result was more than he could have hoped for. He’d unknowingly been touching at his nose or lip; the fingers that seized up the stone dotted it with brash bloody fingerprints. Three fingertip prints on one face of the stone, a thumbprint on another. Three-one, always a pleasant roll at the start of a game. Just close up the so-called golden point on one’s own inner board, though this term had later been disputed, once computer algorithms confirmed it wasn’t as valuable as the bar-point. But Bruno had decided to give up backgammon, so never mind. He brought the bloodstained cobblestone nearer. Touching his nose again—there was plenty of blood!—he carefully daubed the remaining faces, making a two, a four, a five, and a six. Between glaring sun and absorbent stone, the dots of fresh blood dried almost instantly. The challenge was to keep from staining it further. Bruno wiped his fingers on his shirt, which had been sacrificed hours ago. The task was amusing enough to distract him from the matter of the opinions of passersby, or even whether they glanced his way or not. When the rough granite die was complete, he rotated it in all directions to confirm, around the obstacle of the blot, that he’d made no error. No. It was perfect. Bruno grunted in satisfaction. Then he opened his set, which was itself printed with flurries of reddish fingerprints. There, to accompany the two sets of wooden dice, the blond and the ebony, and his doubling cube, he pushed the giant die inside. He was just able to clasp the set around it, then let the entirety slip from his arms, into the sidewalk’s seam, into the dust. That the blunt object would damage the smooth inlaid wood of his board, Bruno was certain. He didn’t care. The cobblestone die might be the most valuable thing he owned. It was proof, at least, of what Berlin otherwise denied: that he existed, here, now.

  IV

  Bruno awakened inside the hospital. He needed to be roused intermittently for the X-rays, the CT scan, and the MRI, so woke to discover himself an object in custody of German orderlies and technicians scarcely interested in consoling him in English, or even explaining their purposes in composing this escalating series of deep inner portraits of Bruno’s face and head. In between, he slumbered, slurped broth and tested bites of flavorless meat and vegetables on bedside trays whose arrival and departure usually eluded him, and learned to use the bedpan.

  Had he succumbed to a sleeping sickness or been tranquilized? He supposed he was exhausted by his ordeal, his all-nighter. In fact the illusion of days slipping past was only that, an illusion, brought on by the timeless vacuity of the windowless room, and by the frequent wakings by nurses to check his vital signs, a routine punctuated by those more dramatic sequences when he was wheeled up to and engulfed by the gigantic thrumming machines.

  When Bruno recovered consciousness more completely, only a day and a night had passed. His backgammon case had been placed into the cabinet section of his bedside table. He opened it to discover the blood-dotted cobblestone. It took this evidence to persuade him he’d ever departed the hospital, so nearly had his brief sojourn across the river resembled a dream or hallucination. He found his wallet and passport in the table’s drawer, along with his cell phone, gone dead. Its battery life had been a shrinking hourglass, one he should have heeded. Also in the drawer, the slip of paper naming the two specialists he’d been commended to visit. Bruno showed this to the doctor on rounds, but he seemed unimpressed. Bruno’s emergency-room diagnosis might only have been a poor hasty guess, the bum’s rush. He’d entered some other situation entirely, he only didn’t know what it was.

  This second, more lucid phase of his hospitalization had begun on a Thursday evening. Bruno was informed it would be Monday morning before he was visited by der Onkologe—the oncologist. He had a weekend to kill. The second bed in the room remained, mercifully, empty. Bruno asked the nurses to switch off the babbling German television, the soap operas and soccer, the dubbed Mel Gibson revenge stories. The barrage of incomprehension seemed to taunt him; Bruno wanted only silence. He took the cobblestone into his sheets, nestling it under his right hand, refusing all petition of the nurses to take it away and wash it for him.

  The blot was with him, invisible to others. Or not: Maybe the machines had taken its portrait from the inside. Bruno waited to know. In the meantime, the stone was its crooked, obtrusive twin. With these sole companions, Bruno spent two days contemplating the mystery of his changed relationship to luck. From the vantage of a hospital ward the lows of Singapore and Kladow were magnificent attainments, sacred stations of a vanished existence. He’d gladly lose a thousand games to Köhler, gladly go back and spend an eternity prone on Köhler’s carpet, even, basking in hideous jazz on crackly records.
If granted an eternity, Bruno might spend it regretting he’d failed to caress the bottom of the masked woman, a chance that had at the time seemed squalid and negligible but now might be a shrine he’d failed to honor. He should have eaten his share of shrimp and dill sandwiches, manna beside the hospital fare. It was as though Bruno had rolled a die and revealed some previously unknown face: zero. Perhaps that was the cobblestone’s significance. In Germany, dice roll you!

  •

  Was it only Bruno’s imagination that the nurses put an extra effort into neatening him up, tightening the sheets of his bed, straightening his little tabletop’s possessions, like realtors prepping a house? No accident, anyway, that they wheeled him to a sink with a mirror low enough so he could shave, and provided a clean disposable razor. The nurses wished to sell him to the oncologist. For his part, Bruno eschewed the bedpan, insisted on his own toilet. At this minor attainment, his own sense of excitement was wakened. In this slough of time, everything ached for some major happening, even if it was death. Perhaps the nurses were more like nuns, then, preparing themselves or him to see God.

  At midmorning his visitor was ready. In fact it was two visitors. Der Onkologe, Dr. Scheel, was attractive, tense-jawed, with salt-and-pepper brush-cut hair but younger than Bruno, and impatient from the moment he came through the door. His suit, three-piece brown flannel, was the nicest thing Bruno had laid eyes on since entering the hospital. He carried a large flat envelope. Its contents, perhaps, Bruno’s fate.