A Gambler's Anatomy

by Jonathan Lethem

  “I didn’t have cancer.”

  “Sure. Cool. You can still wear this.” Stolarsky pushed the sack-and-noose to the edge of the desk, near to falling at Bruno’s feet. “In fact, that’s the deal, from my end. Rent, medical bills”—he waved both hands outward, as if clearing steam from a windshield—“poof, finito. You only have to flip sliders in a noose.”

  “Thank you,” Bruno heard himself say.

  “We’ll call you, I don’t know, Le Martyre de Anarchie. Is that a real thing? It sounds real.” Stolarsky’s French accent was surprisingly good, at least for the duration of one phrase.

  “Real enough.”

  “Plybon’s gonna shit his pants.”

  Bruno could think of nothing to say to this. He gathered the Halloween mask and bunched it into one pocket of his sweatshirt, to contemplate later. He felt dizzy with submission. As well as famished at all the talk of burgers. Had he done enough, been served adequate justice, to be excused from detention?

  “I don’t care if you don’t want to try it on. Lemme see your face now.”

  “Sorry?”

  “I paid for it, I want to look.”

  Bruno loosened the Velcro at the back of the medical mask. If he’d complied in the hope of jolting Stolarsky into decency, he was disappointed. Stolarsky grabbed the Polaroid camera from the junk heaped on his desk and pulled the trigger—a flash, then a mechanical wheeze as the device produced its black, chemical-smelling tongue.

  “What’s that for?” Bruno replaced his mask.

  Stolarsky jerked his thumb at the wall. “Rogue’s gallery.” Polaroid shots were stuck on a bulletin board in a loose collection, each a surly portrait of a startled subject. “Shoplifters. We bring ’em back here and take a picture, so we’ll recognize ’em if they come back. Don’t worry, I won’t hang yours up.”

  “Thank you,” said Bruno stupidly.

  “So, Flashman’s returning to his roots,” said Stolarsky, expansive again. “Scene of the crime, just like back in the day.” He spoke as if envious of some romantic fate Bruno were about to enjoy.

  “How so?”

  “East Bay, serving grub. Like you never went away.”

  “I think it’s like I went very far away indeed.”

  “Oh, indeed, indeed.” Generous in victory, Stolarsky seemed to believe his taunting could be taken as affectionate. “So what’s with the German paramour, how come you didn’t mention her? Why wasn’t she at your bedside?”

  “It’s a…new thing.”

  “A leap into the unknown!”

  Would he never shut up? “Yes. Excuse me, Keith, I should go. I have to take BART to the airport, to meet her flight.” Bruno didn’t mention his hunger.

  “Are you kidding? That’s a hell of a flight, you don’t want her to have to ride public transportation after a crossing like that.”

  “I’m not sure I have another option,” said Bruno neutrally. He didn’t want a handout, let alone a ride in the Jag.

  “Relax, I wouldn’t dream of it. Tira got her arrival gate off the receipt, so I sent a car. The Kraut’ll be delivered with her luggage right to your door. You can go buy some flowers, air out the sheets, get prettied up, whatever that means in your current condition.”

  Bruno struggled to find his voice. “You didn’t have to do that.”

  “Well, I did. She’s under my wing now—just like you.”

  II

  In a daze that seemed to command him to locomotion, Bruno crossed campus to Northside. There he found a panini, a concession to hunger and a minor gesture of resistance against his burger fate. Strolling clear of the shops, up Euclid Avenue toward the hills, he entertained a modest fantasy of wending into Wildcat Canyon and vanishing from Berkeley altogether. Ironically, now it was Madchen who bound him, his obligation to her arrival that kept him from rupturing his bubble of captivity. Bruno reversed course, out of the eucalyptus-crisp hillside, back to the beer- and clove-tainted avenue, back among the street vendors and runaways. He entered the Jack London fearful of running into Plybon, not knowing how he’d account for himself if he did, but saw no one.

  In the stillness of number 25, Bruno waited through the afternoon and until after dark. The previous night he’d rinsed and wrung his mask, hand-washed his dirty clothes, spread all on the shower-curtain rod to dry. Now, defying the sense that he obeyed Stolarsky’s command, Bruno neatened his rooms, tightened the sheets on the Murphy bed, folded the towels, swabbed the counters, the little there was to do.

  •

  Hours later, Madchen knocked. Opening the door, Bruno found her standing, tall and pensive, sallow in the corridor’s light, with a single large backpack she’d removed and set beside her like a teenage backpacker on a train platform.

  She stared and lifted her hand as if to touch his mask, but stopped short. “Alexander?”

  “Yes.”

  He took the backpack inside. She stepped in wonderingly, taking the measure of the apartment’s modesty; a reassurance, it seemed. She smiled shyly and put herself forward, into his embrace. He marveled again at her superb height. They jostled together, chins delicately perched over each other’s shoulders, arms mingling with a goofy hesitancy. She unclenched her hand to reveal a ring with two fresh-cut keys.

  “I was given this key, by the driver—”

  “Yes, I know.” He spoke soothingly, not wanting to jar her. “Was your plane late?”

  “Only a little—he drove me to a restaurant, this was very strange for me.”

  “Who drove you?”

  “The driver of the car, I don’t know the word. I was sent alone inside, to eat. A meal was ordered for me—you know this, ja?”

  “I didn’t, but I can guess. Was the restaurant called Zuni?”

  “Alexander, are you a wealthy man?”

  “No, the opposite.” You and I are the captives, together, of a wealthy man. He didn’t speak the words. There was time. “So, you ate.”

  Madchen shook her head firmly. “I was given chicken and seafood, but I can’t eat this, I’m a vegetarierin, Alexander. A vegetarian.” So the avalanche of all he didn’t know about this woman would now come loose. Bruno would have to let it come. He rehearsed her peculiar last name silently, Abplanalp, Abplanalp the Vegetarian…

  “You didn’t explain?”

  “The food was waiting for me. And the driver, outside. I ate salad.”

  Bruno offered Madchen water in the jam jar and fixed her Cheerios and milk in his single bowl. She sat on the edge of the bed. He watched. As she chewed Madchen offered the wary grateful glances of a creature lured indoors, a feral pet rescued. Finishing, she put the bowl aside. She must be tired; he’d put her to bed. He reached to smear away a dribble of milk on her chin. She took the gesture, though, as a call to reach out in turn. With the barest of touches, she located not the mask itself but his throat, at the margin above his shirt.

  “About your sickness, I don’t understand, Alexander.”

  “I’ll explain. There’s no hurry.”

  “Ja.” Her hand lingered at his throat, with the opposite of urgency. As when she’d entered, half dressed, into Wolf-Dirk Köhler’s study, even walking her bike off the ferry, Madchen drew from a reservoir of stillness, as though her movements were dictated by an offstage choreographer whose motifs she rendered dispassionately, though they might stir passion in others. Or was she depressed? She might be traumatized, bullied, in flight not from a choreographer but from a pimp. Or more simply an anemic, jet-lagged vegetarian barely able to lift her arms.

  Now she traced the mask’s seam at the chin. Bruno felt the awful perplexity of her arrival here, the duty incurred, the bomb dropped into his solitude.

  “You should sleep,” he said.

  “No.”

  “No?”

  “I don’t want to sleep. I slept in the airplane.”

  “Yes.”

  “May I go now in the bath?”

  “Yes, of course.” Bruno had never filled the tub, only draw
n the curtain to use the shower. He moved into the bathroom and ran it now, first stopping the drain with a clunky metal lever. The porcelain tub was short and steep, half Madchen’s length. The taps gushed torrentially.

  “Have you candles?”

  “No, I’m sorry. I can get some.”

  “It’s okay, Alexander. Just shut the light.” Bruno obeyed, also turning the handles to stop the water, which had quickly risen to the level of the gulping overflow drain. He immersed his hand, testing the temperature, swirling to mix the currents of hot and cold. High moonlight leaked in across the courtyard, outlining Madchen as she shed her clothes and pushed past him, to lower herself into the water. Her lithe body seemed to sparkle uncannily, as though she’d captured some radiation from her passage through the lower stratosphere; perhaps it was this layer she wished to sluice off. She hugged her knees and bent her head back against the porcelain, showing her long throat, careless of her hair soaking and drifting on the water’s surface. Her eyes were shut, allowing him to inspect her face, to rediscover the discrete net of wrinkles at the corners of her mouth and eyes, the coarser hairs, white hiding among the blond.

  “Please, take away your clothes and your mask.”

  “Are we going to make love?”

  “Only I want to see your face, Alexander.”

  He stripped, lay the mask on the sink, knelt again. She turned enough to see, stretched her hand out again, not quite to touch his chin.

  “Oh, baby.”

  “Yes.”

  “They hurt you, baby.”

  “They did their best,” he said stupidly, not even knowing what he meant.

  “Wash my back.”

  Gratefully Bruno placed both hands in the water, took up the soap and the thin cloth. She bent forward, gathered her hair to the far shoulder, stretching a sweet dinosaur’s spine. As he rinsed foam from her ribs he saw in the moonlight that a portion of Madchen’s sparkle, her weird radiation, had transferred to him, was blended in the hair of his forearms. Peering closer, Bruno determined it was glitter, infinitesimal foil stars and hearts and half-moons. Mixing with silt and soap, the stuff was everywhere, had formed a ring on the porcelain, above the waterline.

  “From a party,” said Madchen unapologetically.

  “Okay.”

  She rose shimmering and allowed him to wrap her in a towel. She gripped her loose hair in both hands and squeezed it like a sponge, trailing drops on the floor and soaking the towel where it made a collar at her neck.

  “Now I will wash you.”

  “It’s okay, I showered before.” The gray glittered soup wasn’t completely appealing.

  “Stay with your clothes off, bitte.”

  “Yes.”

  “And no light too.”

  “Yes.”

  She took him by the hand to the bed and they lay side by side. Bruno didn’t ask again whether they were going to make love. He wasn’t against or for it, couldn’t locate desire. The moonlight cast planetary shade hollows at her cheek and clavicle and hip bone. Bruno’s hand felt made of cheese, something heavy and yellow, left out too long and sweating. He didn’t dare lift it.

  Then Madchen touched his face, at last, and he began to weep, the first evidence that his ducts lived. Once loosed, he couldn’t stop. Her hand moved to his chest, fingers nestled in the hairs, and as if activated by her touch his chest began heaving too, carving out sea-lion or water-buffalo sounds it was an effort to believe he was the source of. He felt the saltwater’s course complicated by irregular topography, his map of facial disaster. Madchen lay simply parallel, as though obeying the command of Bruno’s discarded T-shirt. After some time her unjudgmental stillness seemed to reach into Bruno and cool his seething. She rolled the other way so he could spoon her, and they both slept. Neither woke, neither heard, when the envelope was slipped beneath his door, to be discovered in daylight. Its contents, another clutch of twenties, three hundred dollars in total, and a note in Garris Plybon’s handwriting, which Bruno knew instantly from the conspiratorial scrawlings annotating the printouts and manifestos Scotch-taped to the walls of Kropotkin’s: Come for the night shift, Fuckface. And don’t forget the noose. Bruno pocketed the money and crumpled the note, with the envelope, discreetly into his kitchen trash.

  III

  Madchen Abplanalp wasn’t from Berlin to begin with. Like so many young Germans, she’d had to arrive there. The only child of strict and straitlaced Catholic parents, Madchen came of age in the city of Konstanz, on Bodensee Lake and the Rhine River, a town which had spared itself from Allied bombing—spared its great cathedral, spared its picturesque “old town,” spared its historical traces, its medieval bridge pilings—by pretending to be part of Switzerland. Madchen’s father, a corporate lawyer working in patents, adored and ignored her, spending more weeknights in Frankfurt, at an apartment he kept there ostensibly for business purposes, than he did at home. Weekends, resplendent at a beach-house camp that stood as compensation for both his absences and for their small, too-formal suburban home, he fished and cooked and doted on his daughter while neglecting his wife. Madchen’s mother, in turn, clung to the girl and confided what she had—which was nothing.

  This was a childhood of lakes, chocolate, and boredom. At eighteen, when Madchen’s escape should have come in the form of entrance to Goethe University Frankfurt, reward for diligence in her studies, her father wrecked it. On the day of his daughter’s acceptance to university he announced his demand for a divorce, from the mother and from Konstanz. As soon as possible he sold the beach house and was gone. He seemed to think he’d served his time, done his duty, and that he and Madchen would be fellow escapees, but the result was the opposite: the mother collapsed.

  It was their family priest who contacted Madchen, a week into residency in her first-year dormitory room, to say she was needed at home. Madchen’s compliance, her return to that house, closed the door on Frankfurt. Madchen was required to mourn with her mother, to hate with her mother, and it was only at twenty-two, still a virgin, at the age she should have been finishing a degree, that she broke away, shifted responsibility to their remaining church friends, and fled the cloistering atmosphere of Konstanz and the mother and former wife so totally unstrung.

  Madchen attained entry at the Freie Universität in Berlin, far from Konstanz but also from her father’s Frankfurt, though she continued to take his money, the allowance she’d hidden from her mother and had largely squirreled away. There’d been nothing to spend it on in Konstanz; now it purchased an apartment in Neukölln.

  But the punishments didn’t stop, because life isn’t like that. Her mother died three months after Madchen left. This was the blow that sent Madchen reeling, after such dutifulness. Perhaps she’d inherited, after all, her father’s sense that familial allegiance could be paid off, as if on account. Now Madchen hated him for her own part, not her mother’s. In fresh defiance, she found a way to inflict punishment as well as absorb it: She refused his money and broke contact, but not before alluding to a heroin problem. This last, a sly torpedo to her father’s long-range filial vanity, but unfortunately also real. For the second time, she dropped out of university, but not to return to Konstanz. She never did return to Konstanz. Berlin was home.

  •

  She’d spoken as they walked, this bright cool morning, launching from a breakfast of croissants and lattes at Café Mediterraneum, along College Avenue to the BART overpass at Rockridge. There they found a boutique and spent a couple of Bruno’s twenties on candles and incense. Then back, to inhabit a bench in People’s Park. Seated here, the paper sack at her feet, she and Bruno dwelled nominally in Berkeley’s open-air communal armpit, but her narration made a bubble around them, and no one approached. The German’s company had elevated the man in the mask to something invulnerable, perhaps sublime, not to be mistaken for another eccentric denizen here. The park couldn’t touch him.

  Madchen didn’t specify how heroin desolation had led, in the decade that followed, to vegetari
anism and bicycles, to serving shrimp sandwiches in a zippered mask on the island of Kladow, or occasions that left her slimy with spangles. Bruno didn’t need to read her mind to guess at the corrupting boyfriends, shitty jobs, the solidarity of Berlin’s sex workers. The drugs were surely put behind her; Madchen radiated good health, expert dentistry, the Alexander Technique, a vitality that made the sun-beaten dreadlocked urban campers roaming the park resemble by contrast the dazed survivors of a neutron bomb.

  At the exact moment Madchen touched his arm and asked about his parents Bruno was startled, even panicked, by the sight of an elderly woman pushing a rusted shopping cart that trailed rattling bags of aluminum cans up Haste Street. The woman made an emblem, a Sisyphean tableau. Of course it wasn’t June. June was gone.

  “I grew up here.” It was more precisely true than she could know. If Madchen had delivered him, with her tale, to Konstanz, he’d walked her into his own unbearable ground zero. But he felt disinclined even to say his mother’s name aloud. She felt present, anyhow, evoked somewhere in the distance between the hag now rattling mercifully beyond hearing and the woman on the bench beside him, Madchen with her strange innocent worldliness. Not everything needed to rise to converge: It could just drift together into the indiscernible middle, and bewilder you. All sad bereft girls were prone to fall, and to fall prey. Some pulled themselves up, at least partway. Bruno fooled with such thoughts, then abandoned them. Madchen waited.

  “I never knew my father at all,” he said at last.

  “But your mother?”

  Oh, that’s her right there. But the woman with the cart was gone from sight.

  “Do you know whether your father is still alive?” Bruno asked instead.

  She shrugged. “He must be alive. Or some lawyer would be calling me, ja? I would be getting his houses, I think.”