The Blot

by Jonathan Lethem

  “Yeah,” she said apologetically. “Real health food. I don’t know what you like. I’m not much of a shopper.”

  “I appreciate it.”

  “I didn’t mean to bother you …” She fell silent, in shyness, he supposed. The silence in the empty apartment was overwhelming; Bruno might have wished for a window on the street now. The only contents of the single room was a bed, so they clung to the kitchen. Bruno felt absurdly grateful for his illness, which substituted its clarity for the ambiguity pooling everywhere around him, for his pointless desire for Keith Stolarksy’s middle-aged girlfriend, for his presence in Berkeley to begin with. Perhaps his tumor had arisen from a need to insist form upon the formlessness of his life. In the greater scheme, what Bruno did until the appointment with the miracle surgeon in San Francisco probably didn’t matter at all.

  “Is the apartment okay for you?” she asked.

  “Of course.” He was touched. She clung to some notion of splendor on his behalf, though he stood before her in mismatched CAL sportswear.

  “It smells like puke.”

  “A little, yes.” The shower’s steam had conveyed out some essence from before. He’d have to check the floor around the toilet.

  “I thought Keith hired someone to clean these places out.”

  “The smell may be coming from the street.”

  She frowned. “Do you want to take a walk around the block?” They understood each other: The apartment had to be fled, if for no other reason than to circumvent the starkness of the bed.

  Bruno had nothing but his dress shoes, Italian leather, absurd with the clothes. He put them on. He’d spend some of Stolarksy’s “walking-around money” on some cheap tennis shoes tomorrow, to complete his transformation.

  For the quiet of the inner courtyard, and his time-zone disenfranchisement, Bruno might have believed, despite Tira’s claim to the contrary, that it was three in the morning. Now they exited the Jack London Apartments and turned the corner to find Telegraph alive in a way it had given no evidence of even being capable earlier, when he’d arrived. The street vendors had doubled, squeezing the sidewalks. Pods of students and slumming tourists navigated between the open shop doors and the homeless and runaways who staked claim to any congenial doorway or stairwell. As for Zodiac Media, it pulsed like a nightclub, its three glass levels no longer reflective, instead like a triple-level wide-screen display now, the clothing level startlingly full of browsers, as if they’d replaced the merchandise with something actually desirable during the hours he’d lay in a coma in the empty apartment.

  Zombie Burger had come to life, too. The matte brown edifice was still like a thumb in the eye, a blot for anyone who lacked their own. But now the object bled laser-like beams of red light from various apertures that hadn’t been discernible in daylight, as if the meteorite bulged with molten lava. It also boasted a rattail-like queue of chattering, cell-texting students, wending from the door and choking off another portion of sidewalk. Those streaming out, who’d taken their meals to go, chomped on the outlandishly huge and drippy burgers with their backs hunched, arms bowed as if they blew on tremendous meat harmonicas, in the attempt to protect their clothes.

  Bruno had stopped on the sidewalk, without noticing. Following his gaze, Tira drew on his arm and said, “Promise me you’ll never go inside.”

  “Please excuse me, but it looks like someone moved their bowels, I mean in an architectural way.”

  “It’s supposed to be a burger, Alexander. Like, rare, with juice oozing out.”

  “Ah, not a bloody stool, then. I’m a bit slow. It’s sort of like a Hieronymus Bosch painting, isn’t it?”

  “You hit the nail on the head. Hooters in Hell, that’s Keith’s own words.”

  “I’m sorry, what’s … Hooters?”

  “Lord, you really are a big dumb delicate flower, aren’t you?”

  “Just explain.”

  “Keith doesn’t hire anyone but girls with really big tits, comprende?”

  “Be kind to me, I’m not from this planet. Is that legal?”

  “It’s not any kind of public policy, and you’re right, it wouldn’t be legal if it was, but anyone who goes in gets the point pretty quickly. The place is lit with only red bulbs except for these black lights and they all wear bright white T-shirts and so it’s like this hellish cavern of glistening red burgers with this big white tit show floating around everywhere, okay?”

  “And this bothers you?”

  “Some days it does, yeah. Today, for instance. See, Keith once told me he picked them to look like me, fifteen years ago, when he first met me. Dark hair, a little small, except for, you know, in the chest. I looked like that once. Just tell me you won’t go in.” They were past the entrance now, yet she clung harder, her grip on his bicep a plea. What did Bruno mean to her? Was she so afraid he’d rate her against those teenage body doubles? He crooked his arm, linking with Tira’s to convert their touch into something more formal, as much to relieve himself of her lopsided neediness as from any gallantry. “You have my word.”

  “Don’t even look.”

  “The burgers must be good, though, judging from the line. I remember Keith in Singapore, sizing up the international competition.”

  “The opposite: They’re total garbage. The students will eat anything, so long as it’s huge and costs four dollars. It’s like this slag of bun and processed cheese and unripe supermarket tomato. It looks big, but Keith has the cooks smash the patty flat on the grill so it’s all spread out and burned as hell. Keith wouldn’t eat there if you paid him.”

  “He only eats burgers abroad?” They walked arm in arm, more relaxed now as they crossed Channing Way, the Death Star behind them. The sidewalks were no more navigable, but Bruno and Tira proceeded like a bubble through a tube, sealed from what surrounded them.

  “There’s a place on Durant, almost to Bowditch Street, Kropotkin’s Sliders, you know it? It’s like the punk-rock alternative to Zombie. That’s where Keith eats, the hypocrite. We can go if you want.”

  “Oh, no, I’m not hungry.”

  “Jet lag?”

  “Several lags, I think. Jet might be the least of them.”

  “Are you … on medication?”

  “Nothing important. Tylenol.”

  “I guess you have to be dying to get the really cool drugs.”

  “I promise when that happens, I’ll share.”

  “When my father died I ended up with a whole bottle of Dilaudid. They’d refilled it just before he croaked. It was right when I met Keith, when I resembled the girls at Zombie. I was like a zombie, I think Keith had a nose for the land of the dead, for those of us with one foot in it, I mean. He took me in his convertible to Big Sur and we did a whole bunch of my father’s pills and went to Esalen and fucked in the hot tub on the cliffs until they kicked us out. Even then we were laughing our asses off.”

  “Why are you telling me this?”

  They’d turned up Channing, away from the avenue, into the eucalyptus cover. Now she turned to face him, without unhooking her arm from his. Hinged, they were drawn close.

  “I was in grad school, right here, Alexander. This is my life you floated into, this stupid town. If you didn’t want to meet me you shouldn’t have come.” Her reasoning was flawed; it wasn’t even reasoning. They’d met in Singapore. He understood her well enough, though.

  “I didn’t choose to, not exactly.” He kept his voice neutral, hoping it didn’t sound unkind. He couldn’t afford the story she seemed to wish to write for them, not just now.

  “Why’d you call Keith, Alexander?”

  “He didn’t say?”

  “Of course. You came to see a doctor.”

  “Yes.”

  “It just happens to be here.”

  “San Francisco. It’s a very particular doctor.”

  “You could have stayed in San Francisco, then.”

  He would have rather done that, but manners prohibited saying so. They’d resumed walki
ng, come out of the trees, to the corner of Bowditch, stopped again. If they turned the wrong way, People’s Park lay in wait, that dusty no-man’s-acre of rhetoric and human feces, of Bruno’s bad last glimpses of June and her boyfriend, when he’d tried to make them understand that he was leaving. “Keith’s paying,” he said, by way of explanation. “For everything.”

  “He told me that and I didn’t believe him.”

  “It’s true.”

  “Look at you. Where do you come from? Are you even real?”

  “Just barely.” A figment, he thought. That was what he’d wish to be, a figment of her desire, one incapable of disappointing or being destroyed. He felt destined to both.

  “Are you dying?”

  “I’m in need of radical intervention.”

  “Are they going to cut you up?”

  “The problem is inside, where it’s difficult to reach.”

  She reached a finger up, to touch the tip of his nose, then lay it across his upper lip, as if silencing him. Doing so, she vanished her hand entirely into the blot. Bruno felt a sudden violent wish to confront her with the contents of the compact disc, hidden in the pocket of the tuxedo, which lay in a corner near the Murphy bed. In his rage he wanted Tira to be met with the self behind his nose, his upper lip. His true self now. Certainly it was the self that had driven him here to within a block of People’s Park, the “People’s Pissoir” as they’d called it at Chez Panisse, the squalid quadrant he’d achieved nothing in his life except to avoid. This comically garbed body which now squired Tira Harpaz through the cool night, through the fog of eucalyptus, urine, and clove cigarettes, none enough to disguise the hamburger exhaust from Stolarsky’s dire meat factory, his black-light prison house of tits—Bruno’s outer form was nothing but an envelope for delivery of the blot to its destination, its rendezvous with the remarkable doctor.

  Stolarsky’s money was the fluid medium in this intercontinental transaction, the fuel jetting the blot across the sea. Unless it was made clear that it was what Stolarsky had summoned him for, Bruno wouldn’t dream of touching Tira Harpaz. Her own game wasn’t clear, anyhow. It might not be clear to her. This was the most generous thing he could manage to believe.

  “I have to sleep,” he said.

  “I’ll walk you back.”

  “I know the way.” He disguised his anger, or hoped he had. “Would you give me your copy of the key, please?” A guarantee of privacy wasn’t too much to ask, even for a beggar. The Jack London Apartments weren’t People’s Park.

  “What?”

  “The key.” She hadn’t misunderstood, so it didn’t really require explanation.

  “Of course.” Plainly she felt entitled to appear, to fill his refrigerator with doughnut holes at her whim. Her will was a function of Stolarsky’s, however she might present herself as her lord’s disgruntled peon. They were a power couple, into it.

  If disease and abjection freed Bruno from anything, it began here. Seeming to understand, she worked the key off the ring and placed it in his hand.

  “Good night,” he said.

  “Do you know how to reach me?” she asked, quietly.

  “I have a phone.” His pride was as cheap as the clothes he wore. He had no idea whether Edgar Falk would continue paying for the phone service. A small string connecting him to the larger world, enmeshing him in old obligations. Yet he hadn’t glanced to see if Madchen had called. Perhaps even that should be left behind, with Europe. What freedom was desirable, in Bruno’s situation? It wasn’t clear. Only that tonight he should free himself of Tira Harpaz before he accepted her pity.

  He pocketed the key. They stood in silence for a moment, until he said, “Should I walk you to your car?” Still a prisoner of chivalry.

  But now it was her turn to grow brusque. “It’s a block away.”

  “Of course.”

  At that, he retreated to the Jack London and fell almost instantly into thick and dreamless sleep.

  •

  He woke in darkness, the room lit only by the moon above the courtyard and the tepid glow of the cell phone, which delivered the unwholesome fact of the hour. From three to five he lay still on the Murphy bed, moving the blot along the wide blank ceiling experimentally. By six he had light, and resorted to orange juice and doughnut holes. At seven, he went downstairs and out, past a worker hosing the sidewalks in front of Amoeba Music, to find the Caffe Mediterraneum just opening its doors. From a heavy pint glass scored with what looked like decades of tiny scratches he gulped a latte, gratefully.

  He helped himself to a paperback from a carton someone had placed at the door of a closed bookstore. A donation, so fair game. The book was a thriller. He walked to campus and read absently on a grassy hill, stopping frequently to watch the students, then lost interest and left the paperback on a low concrete wall. He crossed to the mouth of Northside, where Euclid curved into the hills, then returned, skirting the Gourmet Ghetto, choosing not to haunt there. In present form he made a better fit for Telegraph. At the edge of campus, to complete the picture, he bought fifteen-dollar sneakers and wore them out of the store, placing his shoes in a bag.

  Telegraph was again innocuous, fangless, as when Stolarsky first deposited him at the curb in front of Zodiac. Birds whistled in the trees, the puppies on string leashes licked their owners’ dirty fingernails for traces of hummus, or dozed. The gigantic stores were reduced in the daylight, Zombie no worse than an architectural goof without its lasers and queue. Still, he honored Tira’s plea, despite his craving for the meat and smoke whose scent he’d been inhaling for what seemed an eternity now. At the very moment he acknowledged his hunger, Bruno found himself at the corner of Bowditch Street. A sign read KROPOTKIN’S SLIDERS.

  The shop was a walk-in closet. Its surfaces—countertop, stools, the small shelf full of transparent pump bottles of ketchup, mustard, and yellow-green relish—were everywhere coated with greasy spatter and drips, though the flattop grill itself was set against the rear wall, which was backed with a mirror, also ages deep in the droplets of slime that danced from the broiling miniature burgers. The picture window that ought to have allowed light and a view of the street was instead layered on its interior with Scotch-taped flyers and broadsides, most hand-scrawled or typed on a misaligned manual, and badly photocopied, as if the originals had been unavailable. Bruno didn’t trouble to read a word; the pages reeked of obsession and arcana.

  The man tending the burgers presented his back and a completely bald head, shaved and shined, though surely nature had given him a head start. He wore a threadbare gray T-shirt, from which his elbows dangled skeletally. A white ribbon at both his neck and lower down, strung in a loose bow over his black jeans, indicated an apron. He didn’t turn, but called out, “Cheese, or extra onions, and how many?” Presumably the counterman charted his clientele’s arrival in the filthy mirror.

  “What do you recommend?”

  “I don’t presume.”

  “What’s most typical?”

  “I’ll make you two with extra onions. In a bag?”

  “Mind if I eat them here?” At eleven thirty, the place was empty.

  “Nobody’s stopping you.”

  All this without turning. The counterman flapped his large spatula, shifting the disks of meat, which rode along the flat steaming surface on a carpet of onions, from the grill’s cooler zone to the hot, to speed their finish. Then he delved with the spatula into the onions, mincing them rapidly with the utensil’s bladed edge. The buns, too, were lifted from a steaming tray and separated with the spatula’s edge, and given an instant to warm atop the finishing burgers. Bruno had nothing to do but be hypnotized by the actions, what he could make of them in the fogged mirror.

  The man didn’t turn until he presented the finished results, side by side on a paper plate. When Bruno looked up he discovered a face younger than he’d imagined, though burdened with thick-lensed browline eyeglasses, like a farmer’s, making him appear ready for a retirement home. The man’s
nervous, undersize features clustered in the middle of his face. His gaze was an object closer than it appeared.

  “Five bucks.”

  Bruno offered up the last of Stolarsky’s twenties.

  “Nothing smaller?”

  “Sorry.”

  While the counterman made change, Bruno dug in the pockets of his new pants for coins to drop into a tip jar labeled, in black marker on translucent plastic, IT IS FORBIDDEN TO FORBID. The counterman had already lifted his murderous-looking spatula and resumed sorting his burgers’ placement, then turned the tool sideways to scrape char into the grill’s gutter. Bruno moved with his paper plate to the condiment shelf and blurted pools of red and yellow onto his plate.

  “Mad props to a dipper.”

  “Sorry?”

  “I’ve got maximum respect for those who leave the goop to one side for a more controlled dispersal, one bite at a time. Nothing’s irreversible, plus the bun doesn’t sog out. The only higher state is eschewing the goop altogether.”

  “Eschewing the goop?” This, Bruno actually understood. He repeated it just to hear it repeated.

  “You heard me.”

  “You feel the onions are enough?”

  “Onions, plus copious salt and pepper, for those in the know.” The counterman reached down and clapped twin shakers, glass with tin screw tops, like chess bishops, onto the counter.

  “I thought you didn’t presume.”

  “I take measure of who I’m dealing with.”

  “I’m honored.” Bruno lifted back both of the miniature buns and salt-and-peppered his onion slush.

  “You’re staying at the Jack London, aren’t you?”

  The counterman, having surprised Bruno mid-bite, stood and waited, his ferret-like attention concentrated by the thick lenses into something in the middle distance.

  Bruno swallowed and spoke. “At the moment, yes. How did you know?”

  “I live there. I saw you going out.”

  “Keith is loaning me one of the empty apartments.”

  “First-name basis, huh?”

  “He’s an old friend.”