The Blot

by Jonathan Lethem

  “Oh, fucking fantastic, you’re feeling each other out! You find anything … hard?” Now the women screeched. “’Cause we’ve been out feeling around for that ourselves, but no cigar is sometimes just no cigar—”

  Tira launched herself from the couch in an attempt to perch in Stolarsky’s lap, in doing so jarring the board, as she pushed herself between it and Stolarsky. Checkers were sent clattering—fortunately not a position in progress, only a game set to play. Stolarsky widened his knees and let her tumble to the carpet.

  “Hey!”

  “Chill out.”

  “Oh, I get it, you wanted me down here.” She knelt between Stolarsky’s knees and tugged at the waistband of his lounge shorts. He clapped his hand over hers.

  “Quit, Tira.”

  “I’m just feeling you out.”

  “You guys can watch, if you want—”

  “Watch what?”

  Cynthia Jalter draped her arms over Bruno’s shoulders, from behind. “She told me you looked like James Bond, but I didn’t believe it,” she stage-whispered.

  “Now, see, that’s just outstandingly stupid,” said Stolarsky. He brushed Tira’s hands from him and began restoring the checkers to their right points. “Because James Bond has been played by, like, twelve different actors by this point, so he doesn’t look like anything at all, except, like, the default masculine blur. Which I guess is pretty much what you’re getting with Alexander here, so you may have a point, but then again it’s on top of your head.”

  Nothing made enough sense to matter. Bruno was made aware, though, of his prudishness in fearing that Tira might succeed in pulling off Stolarsky’s shorts—he dreaded beholding the man’s underwear, if he wore underwear—and his surprise at Stolarsky’s insulting a woman he’d met moments before. Very much on the other hand, and though he’d found her peroxided hair and jowly, excessively rouged face decidedly unattractive when faced with her, Cynthia Jalter’s arms, and her heavy chest, didn’t feel in any way terrible against Bruno’s shoulders. He marveled at his twenty-four-hour descent, from that first disquieting glance of Stolarsky in the Smoker’s Club to this homely immersion into Americana-style cocktail-hour debauchery. Bruno had never visited Missouri, but he felt he might be there now.

  They were seven or ten moves into a game to which he’d barely attended when he found himself with three of Stolarsky’s men on the bar and his tongue down Cynthia Jalter’s throat. At that proximity he could see nothing at all wrong with her face, though she seemed a risk for suctioning his tongue from its root.

  “You’re patronizing me,” said Stolarsky. “Take my fucking money when it’s there on the table.”

  “I’m a little distracted—”

  “Here, I’ll put the doubling cube down her fucking shirt where you can find it.”

  “Mmmmghh-um—” Cynthia Jalter unpeeled her face from his long enough to say, “Take his money, baby, it’s what we’re all here to see. I’m not going aaanywhere.” To prove this, she bent and began addressing his neck with a blunt force that suggested she might be a trumpet or French horn aficionado.

  “Yeah, Alexander,” added Tira, “for fuck’s sake, put him out of his misery.”

  Bruno felt reasonably certain Cynthia Jalter wasn’t Edgar Falk’s mole, but he wasn’t taking anything for granted. “Okay, I double you.”

  “And I accept. Roll the dice.”

  “Why why why would you do that?” said Tira.

  “It’s called recirculation, sweetheart, it’s called a back game, so keep your kibitzing to yourself.”

  “It wouldn’t be kibitzing if I did.”

  “Back game?” gasped Cynthia Jalter, coming up for air. “I haven’t gotten into one of those in a long time. Maybe tonight’ll be the night.”

  “You play backgammon?” said Bruno.

  The others all found this hilarious.

  IV

  In the taxicab en route to Billy Yik Tho Lim’s residence in Sentosa Cove, a passing car flooded their backseat with light and Edgar Falk leaned in and scrutinized Bruno’s neck.

  “Driver, would you give us the light?” said Falk.

  “What?” said Bruno, rubbing at the spot. “A mosquito bite?” Then it occurred to him he knew what had drawn Falk’s attention.

  “A blemish. Keep still.” Falk reached into his interior jacket pocket and produced a small vial, which he opened to reveal a chamois pad drenched in greasy, flesh-colored powder.

  “You’re putting makeup on my neck?”

  “That I am doing, yes.”

  “I can’t believe you even carry that around with you.”

  “You’ll find yourself wanting to be prepared sooner or later, Alexander. It’s a situation that comes with age.” If Falk recognized that the bluish mark on Bruno’s throat was a hickey—he did, of course—he said nothing. Instead he gazed out the window. “I am getting older, you know.”

  “Yes.”

  “I could retire here,” Falk mused. “I like it. Sentosa Cove in particular.”

  “Now?”

  Falk didn’t speak.

  In the end, Bruno’s and Cynthia Jalter’s clothes had stayed on. She’d merely barnacled to his neck and gripped his cock through his pants while he lost the last six games in a row to Keith Stolarsky, either willfully or not, Bruno couldn’t tell, but he let Stolarsky double him out of each of them and as a result gave back many thousands of the Singapore dollars he’d won, and with relief. Bruno didn’t want to take Stolarsky for too much, he couldn’t say why. He’d lost the last six and then begged off. The cocaine was gone, leaving a hole in the center of his attention, of his sight. There, with Stolarsky, had come the official start of the losing streak, unrecognized by Bruno, along with his early gleanings of the blot.

  Bruno had gotten out without looking Tira Harpaz in the eye, and that, in the end, was what had seemed to matter most.

  At the Sentosa Cove beach house it wasn’t until nearly one in the morning, when Bruno was already more than a hundred thousand in the hole, that Billy Yik Tho Lim said anything about the mark on Bruno’s neck. Either Bruno had sweated off the makeup Falk had applied or he’d rubbed at the mark in some unconscious nervous action. Or, perhaps, Yik Tho Lim had spied it from the start but delayed mentioning what he saw. Yik Tho Lim wore a pistol he never removed, which made two in the room, or two visible, since his bodyguard wore one as well. The beach house was among mansions that crowded the beach and wasn’t particularly well appointed or charming, though it was close enough to hear the surf crashing beneath the covered rooftop deck when the sliding doors were opened. Bruno imagined how human screams could be covered by the surf’s roar and then decided he was being silly. Yik Tho Lim was retired, this was his pleasure house, however spartan, and the former director’s current occupations were more along the lines of fixing football matches.

  “Your luck is no good,” Yik Tho Lim had said at first, making no direct reference to the hickey. The former director’s English was governmentally genteel, but with a blunt overtone.

  “Not at the moment,” admitted Bruno.

  “You shouldn’t have played tonight,” said Yik Tho Lim, grinning. “You been kissed by an octopus.” It was then he pointed at Bruno’s neck.

  Two hours later, after too few good turns and very many worse ones, Edgar Falk’s entire stake was gone.

  A week after that, Bruno was on an airplane to Berlin.

  Four

  I

  Now, departing Berlin by the portal through which he’d entered it, Bruno had only the contents of his hospital room to his name. Wallet, passport, battery-null phone, backgammon case with its secret bloodied stone. All else, abandoned to his Charlottenburg hotel in lieu of payment. The orderlies had washed and returned his tuxedo, which he wore, with its bleached shirt beneath, as he moved through Tegel’s Terminal E for the short jump to Amsterdam.

  From Amsterdam, there to continue on to San Francisco. Keith Stolarsky had booked the ticket, and paid as well, when B
runo had called him from the hospital. Stolarsky was to meet him at the airport and had promised to provide him a bed too, in Berkeley. Bruno’s last-chance credit card, which had in the past been guaranteed by one of Edgar Falk’s accounts, was dead. Bruno had asked the hospital accountant who’d established its uselessness to scissor the card into fragments and dispose of them. It was the last string to his old life, to Singapore—if Falk were even still in Singapore.

  Though the hospital’s crude, starchy laundering should if anything have shrunk the tuxedo, it hung too loosely on Bruno, and too heavily. Without radiation or chemotherapy he’d achieved the cancer patient’s ghastly pallor, and seemingly the weight loss as well. Or was it that the hospital gowns had conditioned him to feel his clothing as feeble cover, on a form eligible to be stripped and washed at any instant? Shifting through the terminal’s crowds in the tux, even as he absorbed the attentions of those who seemed to find him amusingly sinister or odd, or of women who persisted in finding him something more than sinister or odd—he’d shaved that morning, preparing for his discharge from Charité, and discovered the bones of his glamour still lurking beneath the week’s beard—he was unable to avoid the sensation that his pants were open at the ass.

  At check-in he turned his head to meet the representative’s gaze around the blot.

  “Bags to check?”

  “Just carry-on.”

  She’d seen it all. He felt ethereal, a vision who might float across the ocean with no need of an airplane. Even at security, he met only slight resistance. He placed his shoes and the inert phone into a plastic bin, along with the CD of medical scans, which he’d requested just as Claudia Benedict had suggested he do. Then he laid the backgammon case on the belt.

  “Open duh computer.”

  Germans ought to farm out all positions of petty authority. The accent remained too full of implication.

  “It’s not a computer.”

  “Open, please.”

  Travelers stacked wearily behind Bruno as he displayed the wooden set and the square painted stone that was steadily degrading its interior.

  He braced for further inquiry, but no. The security man merely gestured to show that Bruno could close the set and send it through. It’s a computer for fates, Bruno wanted to say. The stone is a virus.

  I am a tumor that might infect the plane.

  He wasn’t dangerous, and they knew it. He retied his shoelaces. There was nothing needed of Bruno but to wait, to be passive and orderly, and in this regard, the airport was at last no more than an elaboration of the hospital. Charité’s nurses had trained him well. He could shuffle in the manner of a patient through corridors of the sky, unprotesting, in pursuit of mercy. He shouldn’t mistake that it would be found here. He took a seat near the gate and folded his hands in the lap of his tux.

  The novelty of his restored anonymity, moving through international airspace, could be enough to keep Bruno content to Amsterdam. Except he was hungry. With nothing in his pocket, he decided to wait for a meal over the Atlantic. Maybe after, he’d sleep. The others waiting to board his plane all stared at live screens, deepening Bruno’s apartness. Yet he couldn’t imagine he was any lonelier than they appeared, seeking into their void reflections. Then he noticed a chubby college girl tethered to a tree of outlets, gathering electricity.

  “Excuse me, could I possibly?” Bruno raised up his phone, identical to hers. “I’ve died completely. My cable is in my checked luggage.” Never mind that none existed. Should she be booked with him all the way through to San Francisco, he’d be discredited at the carousel. But what odds?

  She stared.

  “If I could connect for just a moment, and see my messages—”

  “Suuuure.” She measured him with the syllable. He smiled into the gray pudding of the blot and let his tuxedo beguile or baffle her from her distrust. My lies are harmless, he added, in the event she could peer into his thoughts.

  “Uh, just a minute.”

  “Take your time.”

  The girl handed him the bare end of the cable just as boarding began. His phone wouldn’t even glimmer, at first. Then it managed an icon of a sickened battery, warning not to disconnect. “I should go,” the girl said.

  “Just another moment—” He’d begun to beg.

  She glared while he drew another minute of charge into the device, then stuffed the cable into her knapsack. Bruno let her proceed before him, to the dwindling line for departure. He’d no need to compete for an overhead bin, might just as well be the last on the plane.

  He nearly was. The girl with the charger wasn’t to be seen. Bruno smiled tepidly as he moved down the aisle, past those now free to examine him brazenly, bolstered by the slight but unmistakable moral advantage of having seated themselves first. The plane smelled of charred meat, which made no sense—what could they serve during the brief hop to Amsterdam? Bruno settled into a window seat, tucking his backgammon case at his feet, then examined the phone. Nothing from Falk, but three missed from the same unknown caller. The enfeebled battery allowed him to hear the sole voice mail.

  “Alexander, I leave you a message this time.” A woman’s voice, German-accented, and with some urgency. A nurse? Or the front desk of his hotel, in hot pursuit? Had he been so foolish as to give out the number? “I was trying to reach you at the hospital, but I’m not knowing your family name.” Then as if answering his unspoken question: “It is Madchen. I hope you don’t mind I call.”

  The bicyclist on the ferry, a thousand years ago.

  “I was present when you became ill, but I could say nothing,” she continued. The meaning here was unclear, perhaps a failing of her English. Yet the reference to illness confused him. Unless she’d visited the hospital, present when or how?

  At an instant’s contemplation, the puzzle collapsed. Madchen had ferried to Kladow for nothing to do with babysitting anyone’s niece. She’d crossed the Wannsee for a gig, as Wolf-Dirk Köhler’s bottomless masked server. At that, the flight attendant leaned in, rendering Madchen’s last words inaudible, to request that Bruno switch off and stow the phone.

  As they bent toward Schiphol, the suburbs of Amsterdam hovering into view, Bruno played his customary landing game, a secret matter between him and himself: to spot a human form before the plane berthed at its Jetway. Evidence of human life, to prove the world in which the plane arrived hadn’t been vacated during the flight’s duration. Difficult in the best of circumstances, never mind the blot. To see a distant truck in motion, on a lane between two furrowed fields, this wasn’t rare but didn’t count—what evidence the truck wasn’t an automated thing?

  Human beings, it turned out, were scarce and largely remained indoors: Flip the rock of the world, and the ants declined to appear. More landings than not, Bruno lost his game. Today, at the last possible second, just beyond the fence marking the edge of the landing field, at the loading dock of some vast warehouse that suckled a hundred trucks, a shadow stepped into the light. A man, perhaps lighting a cigarette? Bruno leaned to the window, turned his head, navigating his blot.

  The man looked up as the plane’s shadow crossed the lot before him. He was tall and wore a tuxedo. Was it possible?

  Yes, Bruno admitted to his double on the warehouse dock. I am here only to change planes. I am exiting the wider world, to return to my homeland of bullying, psychosis, and bad taste.

  Forgive me. It is a medical matter.

  Once on the tarmac, when permission was granted and a hundred cell phones were hustled from stowage and powered up, Bruno tried to listen again to the German prostitute’s message, but by that time his battery was drained.

  II

  Bruno crossed the ocean in a middle seat. He’d fallen asleep with his shoes on and clutching the backgammon case to his chest under crossed arms, never waking long enough to solve the conundrum of how best, in the crowded row, to shift it to a position beneath the seat in front of him. A savage weariness had overtaken him, some bill come due. He missed the meal. What
ever meat they’d been roasting for hours—they appeared to have carried it through the Dutch airport as well, and shifted it from the European flight to the transatlantic one—he tasted only in his dreams.

  When the flight attendant shook him awake the plane had emptied. He might have been twitching continuously over the ocean. More drool soaked his chin and collar than remained in his mouth; his lips and eyelids seemed pasted together. The airplane might have passed through several nights’ worth of dark, but now the lifted shades bled scalpel-sharp California daylight. The flight attendant tucked an arrival card between his sleeve and the case, though basic behaviors might already have discredited him for arrival in this or any other city.

  Last in the line for mild interrogation by border agents, Bruno filled out the landing card with a borrowed pen, meanwhile licked his cracked lips, tried to swallow off the knot in his throat. The array of posted warnings and admonitions surpassed any European port of call, or Singapore’s, or Abu Dhabi’s. He tried to recall whether the United States had worn its police-state ambitions so brazenly at his last return, but it was too long ago. No one, in any event, paid him notice. The tuxedo might represent a guarantee of irrelevancy—who’d travel on a mission of deceit in such an eccentric costume? Or perhaps his blot had swollen into a field, an aura, within which he traveled unseen.

  “Tira and I thumb-wrestled to see who’d get to pick you up, and I won.” Keith Stolarsky waited outside customs, where Bruno emerged swinging his backgammon case amid the travelers wheeling trains of luggage. “I figured she’d probably discreetly pack a bag and whisk you down the coast to Big Sur, check in at Esalen, and rape you in a hot tub, and I’d never hear from either of you again.” Stolarsky, in black cargo pants and a zipped windbreaker, his hair greasy, looked as exposed in the airport as in the Singapore casino: a figure exhumed from night into day. He reached up to pluck at Bruno’s collar, as if discovering a thread of lint there. “Look at you, dressed to sweep her off like Cary goddamn Grant, which leaves me grasping the Ralph Bellamy end of the stick. You’re confirming all my worst suspicions.”