Crossing the refurbished bridge for a second time, in Tira Harpaz’s Volvo, Bruno saw he’d been wrong. The redundant span was already spidered with cranes, paused in the act of unmaking the gray steel armature. Since that day, weeks ago now, when Bruno was first retrieved from the airport, the demolition crews had severed the abandoned portion at both ends from the land. The pilings nearest Treasure Island and Oakland were reduced to bare pillars, sentinels in the water. The span that remained was unreachable unless by helicopter or parachute.
It was an error of sight. He’d been working around the blot, in denial, guessing. Now the former blot was flooded with light and information, his interior eyelid stripped away. Journeying from the hospital, Bruno found himself in the grip of a world both riotous and raw. The morning’s light danced on the spine of the new bridge, which towered like the guts of a cosmic piano. The same light that agitated the picture windows of the gaudy homes tumbled so recklessly into the seams of the Oakland hills.
The hospital dayroom, the afternoon before, hadn’t confronted him with such marvels.
It might be a rebus of Bruno’s cleaved self. His obliterated past, charismatic and pitiable, an island at sea. Unreachable. Bruno had been turned from Tira to study the bridge; she might think he was ignoring her. But driver and passenger proceeded in silence, reaching the long eastern causeway before she finally spoke.
“Tell me something,” she said.
“Tell you what?”
“Am I dreaming?”
“I might not be qualified to say.”
“Because this all feels like the weirdest fucking dream I ever had. No offense, but I just wonder if you realize, Alexander, how it feels from my side. I dropped off a person, a new friend, someone at least I felt I could talk to for a change, a sort of weird sad gorgeous man who supposedly hung out with Keith when they were kids, though I can’t really tell if you like Keith, or ever did, actually. So, anyway, I dropped this guy off at the hospital for some kind of life-saving operation that I don’t understand at all. And I don’t mind saying I’ve been thinking about you a lot. And now the day comes and I’ve picked up some—I don’t know, what are you, like, the Ghost Rider or something? What are you hiding in there?”
“The Ghost Rider?”
“You know, a flaming skull, that type of thing.”
“I don’t have a flaming skull.”
“I know that, for God’s sake. It was just a figure of speech.”
“‘Have you or haven’t you got a flaming skull’ isn’t a figure of speech I happen to be familiar with, pardon me, I’ve been abroad and I missed a certain amount of—”
“Shut up, Alexander. Why didn’t you let me visit you yesterday?”
“You’ve done enough.”
It wasn’t impossible to bruise her. Her tone showed evidence of it now. “I was in San Francisco for some other stuff.”
“Good, I’d hate to waste your time.”
“Fuck off. You want to get high?” As if oblivious to their presence in five lanes of zooming traffic along Berkeley’s waterfront, Tira fished in her purse, which lay sagged on the cup holders between them, and pulled out a fat joint. Driving with one hand, she fished again for a lighter, then made several angry, failed attempts, the joint braced in scowl-tightened lips, to spark the tip. Bruno took it from her hand and steadied the flame to the paper for ignition.
“Have some.”
“I doubt I have a choice.” The car’s airspace had filled instantly.
She drew again, then passed it to him.
“I’m probably on enough drugs as it is,” he said. Oshiro had filled his prescriptions at the hospital’s in-house pharmacy. They sat bagged in Tira’s backseat, with a package of the long swabs, gauze, and ointment for incision self-care; a baggie containing balled-up paper money, coins, and keys; Bruno’s backgammon set and, hidden inside, his stone die. The drugs had been courtesy, once more, of Stolarsky’s largesse—Stolarsky, who couldn’t be bothered to retrieve Bruno from the hospital.
“Well, put that out, then,” Tira was saying. “Stuff nowadays gets you too fucked up to put two words together, if you take more than a couple of tokes.”
“Why didn’t Keith come?” Bruno snuffed the lit end between his fingertips, a teenage practice he’d never shed. Painful then, and painful now. He’d adopted it from a certain Spenger’s dishwasher with an El Cerrito white-trash allure—these uncorked Berkeley memories had Bruno at their mercy, apparently.
“Chuck it anywhere,” said Tira. Only at this did Bruno notice how five or six half-smoked, stubbed-out joints were littered underfoot. He glanced into the open mouth of the purse and saw a dozen identical joints piled there, each rolled with professional rigor. It figured that even in the unkempt and depressed mien of Tira’s decade-old Volvo—nothing so ostentatious as Stolarksy’s Jaguar—she’d find a way to underline the gratuitous waste that extended from Stolarsky’s fortune.
Tira caught Bruno’s glance. “Help yourself, if you want something for your wine cellar, so to speak.”
He ignored her, to persist with his question. “Where’s Keith? Why didn’t he come to the hospital?”
“I have no idea where he fucking is, okay? Quit asking. You made your point: I’m not good enough, even for the man in the Styrofoam mask.”
“You’re not … in touch?”
“Actually, I do know where he is, or most likely. He owns a winery in Glen Ellen and he’s been known to just take off up there and get shitfaced for days in the loft above the barrel room, like some kind of mad monk. Or not a monk, judging from the one time he dragged me along. We’re not in touch, no, not strictly speaking.”
“He knows you’re picking me up.”
“I’m sure he figures I’m picking you up, probably figures I appeared at the hospital nude under a trench coat, and that’s what he’s off getting drunk and jerking himself or getting blown by a hooker about.” Her voice had closed, as though she might be near tears, but her face remained fierce, her position at the steering wheel windward-leaning and vigilant, as if outracing a field of pursuers. At the first red light she repeated the farce with her purse, a fresh joint, and the lighter. This time she got it sparked herself.
“Seems like you’re on a bit of a binge yourself.”
“Cat’s away, et cetera.”
They came up Ashby Avenue to Shattuck and coursed around the BART pavilion. He should have ridden the underground train and stayed innocent of the soap operatics in which Tira Harpaz seemed bound to enmesh him.
“Keith believes he’s purchased the rights to me,” said Bruno.
“If you say so.”
“And he’s ceded me to you.”
“You’ve got us all figured out, so could we quit talking? I’ll take you to the Jack London and you’ll be a free operator, Alexander. I won’t even get out of the car, just drop you at the curb.”
“If you roll down the window just the right amount I’ll be able to float up to the second floor on a gust of fumes.”
“Now you’re trying to make me laugh, which I guess has some potential in that getup, like a total deadpan thing. There was that Gong Show guy, right—the Unknown Comic?”
“I could be billed as the Unknown Tragic,” he suggested. Their banter flowed, despite himself. His capacity for enjoyment of Tira: If he wasn’t careful, Bruno might be forced to admit it. The situation between them was hopeless, but that traditionally was the point at which Bruno liked women best.
“Sounds like Henry James.”
“I’ll take your word for it.”
“Oh, yeah, I forgot, you don’t read or watch TV or listen to contemporary popular music, blah blah blah. Well, Henry James is a gangsta-rap star, he’s pretty much the biggest thing out there. Here’s your stop.” They’d slid toward the nightmare bleeding patty of Zombie Burger, dull and anodyne in the morning light, also the glistening face of Zodiac Media, its windows like teeth with braces. Then turned the corner of Haste Street, into the shade. Now Tira double-parked at the door of the Jack London Apartments. She turned to arch an eyebrow at Bruno’s jumble of possessions, while stubbing her second joint on the scarred dashboard then adding it to the mess on the floor.
“I guess you don’t need help with your luggage,” she said.
“No.” Bruno reached to collect his paltry props, humiliated. The key to the apartment, in its baggie—that was his salvation. He only needed to retreat behind the sealed door of number 25 to end the farce for now. Never mind whose auspices that sanctuary placed him under.
“Is Keith really gone?” he asked, cradling the baggie, the paper sack of swabs and prescription drugs, the backgammon case with its secret rider.
“Gone today, here tomorrow, don’t let it trouble you, sweetie. We’re all Unknown Tragics on this bus.”
“What happens if he doesn’t come back?”
“I should be so lucky. In the will, I get the Evil Empire.” She waved, indicating the apartment building and, beyond, the grotesque cash-factories of Zombie and Zodiac.
“Why does Keith need a will? Is he sick?” What if Stolarsky’s generosity, then subsequent total avoidance of the hospital, and all his nihilistic benders, too, were the behaviors of a doomed man, with one eye on the hourglass?
“He’s not sick, except in the soul.”
“Why, then?”
“Because he’s rich and paranoid. Also because, you know, just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean somebody isn’t out to get you. In fact, maybe I’ll concoct the perfect murder. I’ve got a job opening for an accomplice, give me a shout if you’re interested in the position. All this could be yours. Or half yours, at least until the day you murder me. Now get the fuck out of my car, masked man.”
He was his own Oshiro now. There lay the man on the unfolded Murphy bed: wan, abstracted, waiting for the indirect sunlight and the faint sounds and scents of street life trickling through the apartment’s cracked-open windows to seduce him to vitality, and finding that they did not. From another vantage, he regarded the figure on the bed with pity and became the attendant, moving to the sink for a glass of cold water, allocating a handful of pills to swallow, stripping off a foul T-shirt or sweatpants in favor of another less foul, widening or narrowing the open windows to regulate the temperature, and applying antibiotic ointment to the long ridged incisions that covered the patient’s face. Then, rounds accomplished, he slipped back into the body helpless on the bed. In this state he passed two or three days. Each might have been a week except for night’s failure to come and close the deal.
When darkness did fall he lay awake or slept and had no way of knowing the difference. If Bruno played possum, less sick than he pretended, he had only himself to persuade. The nylon mask barred him from what seemed a world grown remote, but the same was true of the hot, tightening mask of his flesh. He’d wake unsure of whether he wore the mask or not. Within the apartment it didn’t matter, since there was no one to see him. He used the mirror only long enough to salve the wounds.
Eventually he had to eat.
The answer was nearer than he’d imagined. When Bruno opened his door into the Jack London’s corridor he found someone had leaned a titanic yellow box of Cheerios and a quart carton of milk there. Both toppled at his feet. He looked both ways, as if for a ring-and-run artist, though of course there had only been silence, and in fact the milk was tepid, droplets of sweat from its cooling soaking the carton’s footprint into the hallway carpet.
Hidden, tucked behind the cereal and milk, came further tribute, an unmarked envelope full of twenties. Another Stolarsky stipend. Though delivered, Bruno guessed, by Tira Harpaz. He brought it all inside. Opening the carton, Bruno found the milk was sour, likely placed there days ago. Standing at the kitchen counter, he pushed a few dry handfuls of Cheerios through the slot of his mask, washing them down, like his morning’s array of tablets and capsules, with tap water. With the dollars he could of course buy fresh milk or something else entirely.
Telegraph Avenue didn’t flinch at Bruno’s mask, if it was even noticed beneath the sweatshirt hood. Probably it wasn’t. Though the sun had found a route over the low rooftops, the avenue, set to a student’s clock, was slow to wake. At ten thirty it still had a breakfasty, groggy vibe, vendors setting up, shopping-cart rangers poking through the previous night’s recyclables, café tables full of cooling lattes and broken scones. Berkeley had no eye for a lone eccentric strolling. By local standards for eccentricity, anyway, Bruno still fell short.
Kropotkin’s Sliders was just waking too, readying for a lunch-hour rush, a pyramid of tiny raw burgers massed in abeyance on a cool sideboard, flame heating as the bald counterman scraped the broad flat grill.
“First of the day,” said the counterman, not glancing inside Bruno’s hood to find his mask. “Two with onions?”
“Same as last time, yes.”
“Do I know you?” The strange, fist-like face now queried Bruno’s through the retro glasses, its magnified eyes resembling oysters.
“We met before. You gave me a third on the house.”
“Always brings ’em back around.”
“A kindness, but if I want another this time I can pay for it.”
“You’re flush, eh? Oh, Pig Stolarsky’s ward, I recognize you even in the spooky getup.” The counterman’s large bladed spatula flashed out, at the end of his gangly arm, and deposited two patties onto the onion carpet. “You get your special-delivery Cheerios?”
“I did.”
“I don’t mean to make you feel under surveillance. Though we’re all embraced in the panopticon these days, huh? You’re my next-door neighbor.”
“I remember.”
“You fortifying yourself to rob a bank today?” The counterman spoke breezily, while prepping onion slush on a cooler quadrant of the vast grill.
“I had surgery.”
“Witness protection, I get it. Need a new face. Corporate criminal operator of some type, I’m sure—I had you made the first time you came in here. But don’t worry, I’m unusually expert in these things, nobody else would see past that getup. Berzerkeley’s the last place anyone would look, it’s a brilliant destination.”
Berzerkeley? Stolarsky had used the same joke. Bruno didn’t point it out. “I’m not a corporate operator,” he said instead.
“Pig Stolarsky’s personal Swiss banker?”
“Really, just a high-school friend.” Even this was more than Bruno cared to claim. “Does Keith really require a Swiss banker? Why do you keep calling him that?”
“You think he sinks it all into hamburgers and crumbling apartment buildings? Nah, he’s gotta be shifting the skim offshore. I call him that to provoke you, comrade.”
“Yet you inhabit his crumbling apartment building yourself.”
“There’s two principles embodied. The true anarchist in an oligarchical society lives as an unembarrassed, even brazen parasite on the corpus of wealth. The second is likelier to be familiar to you: Keep your enemies close.”
“That could be Keith’s reasoning as much as yours. If he even knows how you despise him.”
“Oh, he knows. He just hasn’t figured out what to do about it.”
“Everybody despises him in this town, from what I hear. Do you present him with some direct challenge that I’m not seeing?”
“No more than the cancer of bad conscience should present to the whole rotten system. I don’t actually blame Stolarsky personally. His corruption isn’t exceptional, it’s just in the foreground of the local picture. Berkeley needs a face to hate, Stolarsky provides one. They should raise their sights.”
“The word is he likes your burgers better than his own.”
“Hah!”
The counterman’s chaotic nerviness was wearing on Bruno. “Could you make those to go this time?”
“Eh?”
“In a bag.”
“What about that third you’re expecting to want?”
“My stomach’s shrunken, thanks. Two should be about right.”
“If you say so.” Was the Kropotkin’s counterman really hurt? He must have his conversational gambits walked out on a hundred times a day. Yet he sulked as he prepared the burgers for takeout.
“Listen,” said the counterman as he handed over Bruno’s change, though not before frowning at the bank-crispness of the twenty-dollar bill, “my door’s open. In the Jack London, I mean.”
Bruno’s surprise went undisclosed. He couldn’t arch an eyebrow that anyone would know of. But he widened his aggrieved sockets under the mask.
“Folks come around, you should drop in if you want, there’s often something stewing in the pot.” The slider cook’s awkwardness made this attempt pathetic. He still hadn’t given Bruno his name.
What kind of stew would be found in the counterman’s pot? Bruno couldn’t think. At the smell of the burgers his hunger was like a dog howling in a pit. “Thank you,” he said impassively.
“De nada.”
Then, while Bruno passed onto the noon sidewalk, the counterman flung, with heavy sarcasm, “Don’t forget to ‘Like’ us on Facebook!”
•
Bruno avoided the Jack London for a few hours. He gobbled the sliders on foot, strolling up to College Avenue, then above campus, toward the Greek Theatre, through groves of crisp-fallen eucalyptus. The aroma rising from the dusty ground was full of hints, inchoate memoranda Bruno ignored. Scuffing back down into the city, he found a men’s bathroom in the low murmuring corridor of a campus building. His mask went unnoticed.
At the Jack London’s door he puzzled at the tattered resident nameplates. Next-door neighbor put the slider cook on the building’s second floor. Three apartments: “O. Hill,” “G. Plybon,” or another that had been defaced with a key’s tip. But even the legible names might be generations out-of-date, evidence of nothing. Bruno went upstairs.
He’d exhausted himself walking and was barely aware of putting himself into the Murphy bed. He woke hours later, with a start, to the acrid scent of the soured milk he’d neglected to pour out earlier. He staggered into the kitchen and dispensed with it now. Then, with a cool glass of water, he gobbled a palmful of the new medications, with no regard for the timetables on their labels, which he couldn’t read in the dark anyway. As the scent of the milk dissolved from the kitchen, another reached him, roiling his appetite. The stew in the Kropotkin’s counterman’s pot, planted like a hypnotic suggestion, now wafting down the corridor.
Bruno stepped through his door before he’d even cleared his head. His old colleagues, espresso and paracetamol, had deserted him. He likely stank, sleeping in his sweatpants and ABIDE shirt; he’d need to spend some of the twenties on new clothes, or do laundry. His mask, too, was grubby with ointment and sweat. None of this troubled Bruno now, as he moved in the corridor. He felt willing to become a monster, something enticed from a swamp by the hubbub and savor of human activity. The cooking smells were intense enough to be another hallucination. Bruno was willing to concede this to Behringer, that he’d conjured the seared meat that had enticed or repulsed him all the way from Berlin to San Francisco.
But no. Bruno creaked open the door to the counterman’s studio apartment, which lay ajar as promised. Number 28, facing the block’s interior courtyard. Though layered with bookshelves and posters, the apartment’s dimensions mirrored Bruno’s, the Murphy bed propped up to make room for the three figures squatted on cushions on the floor, crouching as if at a hearth around bowls of soup and a board with torn chunks of bread and smeared crusts of cheese. Squawking jazz sprang from an actual turntable resting on boards and cinder blocks beneath the window.
“We have the temerity to declare that all have a right to bread, that there is bread enough for all, and that with this watchword of Bread for All, the revolution will triumph.” The counterman grinned beneath his bald dome and goggle-glasses, and raised a mason jar half full of red wine. “Come in, comrade.”
“I didn’t mean to interrupt.”
“Interrupt what? This party is for you.”
Bruno stepped inside. He recognized one woman, seated beside the counterman and in black glasses frames that seemed intended to match his. Beth, the floor manager at Zodiac Media, she who’d handed over the clothes Bruno now wore. Her short black hair was still slicked back, and her white shirt buttoned to the neck. The nerdiest man’s outfit made for the most stylish lesbians. A sturdily attractive black woman sat cross-legged to Beth’s left, likely Beth’s girlfriend.
Neither woman seemed in any way surprised by the appearance of this masked petitioner who’d come begging a bowl of whatever the cooking pot contained. Though they didn’t bother rising from their cushions, they scooted to widen their circle, and together patted an empty spot between them, as though to encourage a shy housecat. Perhaps the gathering really had been conceived in Bruno’s honor. At least the Kropotkin’s patty-flipper must have spoken of Bruno, to inoculate the women against reacting with surprise to his eerie mask.
“I’m Beth, we met before.”
“Of course. Coincidentally, I was just thinking I ought to visit again for more of your wonderful T-shirts.”
“Hell, I can bring you a dozen if you want, you don’t have to darken the door of that shithole.”
“That would be kind.”
“This is my partner, Alicia.” The black woman nodded hello, and Bruno took her hand for a moment. “I’m Alexander. I will sit, if you really don’t mind—”
“Sit, Alexander,” said Alicia. Her smile was warm and featured one gold tooth. She wore a yellow jumpsuit sewn from parachute cloth, with stylish pockets on the shoulders and thighs. Meanwhile, Beth poured inches of red wine into another jam jar and put it at the open place, for Bruno.
“But I don’t know our host’s name.” Even as Bruno settled himself onto the cushion between the two women the Kropotkin’s counterman had jumped up and gone into his narrow kitchen, which also mirrored Bruno’s. Now he returned, cradling a full bowl of the chunky red soup, which he placed in Bruno’s lap.
“I’m Garris. You want some hot sauce?”
“Do you recommend it? I recall you as a goop-eschewer.”
“Different context. Soup is goop, I suggest you hot it up. I grind my own chipotle.”
“I wouldn’t miss it for the world.”
Garris—the “G. Plybon” from the nameplate at the door—grinned as he shook his concoction into Bruno’s bowl. The soup was minestrone, or something even more various, featuring both rice and twists of pasta, chickpeas, red beans, stringy chunks of chicken. With the fiery pepper sauce, it was delicious. Bruno felt it wetting the tight-seamed mouth hole of his mask, but he couldn’t pace himself. “You should feature this at the counter of Kropotkin’s,” he suggested. “The sauce, I mean.”
“Not a bad idea. I could call it ‘A Dash of Insight.’”
“Who minds the store when you’re off duty?”
“There’s always someone who can put together a slider, it isn’t a prohibitively difficult formula. Fraternity kid named Jed has the night shift at the moment, though I usually take evenings myself—conversation’s better.”
“I imagine there’s a sharp drop-off in philosophical content when you’re away.”
“The decor has a certain dissident vibe that impacts even the least willing minds.”
“I’m sure you’re right.”
“Beth told me you’re an old friend of Keith Stolarsky’s,” said Alicia, gold-tooth-grinning with conviviality as Bruno slurped. Her tone held both sympathy and implication. “What’s that like?”
“Oh, it’s not like much of anything, actually. He’s never around. I think he’s left town for some reason.”
“Sure, we all know that,” said Garris Plybon, with a trace of aggression Bruno couldn’t account for. “We feel it like a black cloud lifted, when he absents himself from this town. Allah be praised for his whoring jaunts.”
“Is that what he does?” asked Bruno. “Whoring?”
Plybon shrugged. “No idea,” he admitted.
Alicia handed Bruno a section of paper towel, torn from a nearby roll, for a too-late napkin. “So what does your friendship with him … consist of? I’d really be interested to know. He’s famous for not having friends, not that that’s the only reason we’re glad to meet you, Alexander.”
“It consists of … remembering him from high school,” said Bruno. “Except mostly Keith does the remembering.” That, and several times nearly fucking his girlfriend, Bruno thought but didn’t say. I don’t like him either, he’d add, if that was the ticket for entry into their peculiar club. Though it seemed Bruno was already included. “Do you work for Keith too?” he asked Alicia. How strange, their sycophantic distaste for his old acquaintance, while either drawing his pay or living under his roof.
But no. “I work at the Pacific Film Archive,” said Alicia. When Bruno responded with blankness, she added, “It’s part of Cal’s art museum. I’m a film and video librarian, basically.”
“Ah.”
“Beth and I met because she’s doing a dissertation on Abraham Polonsky.”
“I’m in the Rhetoric program,” Beth explained, though this hardly made the reference less opaque. “I’m just moonlighting as a shop clerk, to keep from racking up too much student debt.”
“Of course.” Bruno basked in their sincerity, to drink it in as he did the soup.
“And what do you do, Alexander?”
Ah, the abyss. Bruno’s life had been struck open, as much as his face. But there was no mask for his life. Bruno’s new companions, however unglamorous, functioned in the petty workaday realm he’d so long ridden above, aloof, and which now had spit him out. The others at least existed in economic relation to Keith Stolarsky, while Bruno relied on handouts: Cheerios, envelopes of twenties, and Beth’s offer of fresh T-shirts.
“I’m between things.” A mention of backgammon seemed out of the question.
“He’s sick, ’Licia,” said Beth. She nodded at Bruno’s face, acknowledging the mask at last. “He just needs time to get it together.”
“Yes, I see that.”
“I’m cured, that’s the funny thing,” said Bruno, wonderingly. “I was sick before—as it was explained to me, I may have been sick nearly my whole life. It’s the cure I need to get over.”
“Western medicine is a motherfucker.” Garris Plybon produced this like a worn and familiar maxim.
“Well, you’ve come to the right place,” said Beth. Did she mean Plybon’s apartment or the building as a whole?
“I feel that, at the moment.” Bruno held his soup bowl with two hands, put aside his spoon, and slurped the dregs.
Plybon clarified with another witticism: “Sure, Telegraph Avenue, the island of lost toys.”
Here people reached fame with a trademark costume or spiel, by a hand-printed book of tirades, by nudity or a ritual utterance bellowed at top volume. With mask and hood, Bruno could join their ranks. Yet the soup beggar tried not to take it personally. Open your door under the watchword Bread for All—shouldn’t it be lost toys who’d wander through?
An egalitarian rabble of burger flippers, shop clerks, and film archivists: Bruno could be their pet. In Monaco once, in the early months under Edgar Falk, Bruno had left the Café de Paris with two women, lovers, elegant as film stars. He’d let them make him their diversion and toy. It was as near as Bruno had ever come to fulfilling Keith Stolarsky’s suggestion that he was a gigolo and Falk his pimp, though there’d been no motive for Falk in it and no money changed hands. It wasn’t so different from Bruno’s dalliances as a nineteen-year-old with Chez Panisse customers, older women with an appetite for Bruno’s body and grateful for his seeming disposability. Here, worlds removed, Bruno would be lucky enough to be fed soup and swaddled in T-shirts by these sweet, innocuous humans, at whom he’d never have glanced in his former life.
If Bruno hoped to disguise his new wretchedness, he’d failed. “Do you really have nobody here at all to care for you?” said Alicia.
“Not in Berkeley, no.”
“Someone elsewhere?” Bruno needed no further evidence the blot had wrecked his quarantine; Alicia’s tenderness made it seem likely he’d translated the contents of his brain into hers.
He’d test it with an outright lie. “My girlfriend is in Germany.” The lesbians might like him better with warranty of female approval.
Alicia reached for his chin with her own napkin. Bruno instinctively flinched, then leaned forward. She might as well be Oshiro.
“Your mask is a mess,” she said.
“That’s okay, I’ve got another one.” A second lie.
“Do you want to take it off?”
“No.”
“Why isn’t she here?” asked Beth.
“Who?”
“Your girlfriend. Why isn’t she taking care of you?” Her tone was tough, an instinctive “bad cop” to complement her partner.
“We … couldn’t afford the ticket.”
“That’s fucked up,” said Beth. “I thought Keith was, like, giving you a blank check, the royal treatment.”
“Not beyond sweatpants and Cheerios,” he said. This glossed over a hospital bill that might have mounted into the tens of thousands. But casting aspersions on Stolarsky was the currency in the social economy of the Jack London Apartments. Bruno doubted he could further damage Stolarsky’s abysmal reputation.
“Well, shit,” said Beth. “I’ve got access to petty cash dispersal. He lets me sign off on the business account, and nobody’s gonna blink, especially when Wells Fargo knows he’s out of town.”
“You never told me that,” said Plybon.
“It was none of your business,” said Beth, curtly. “There’s a travel agency on Shattuck,” she continued, to Bruno. “We can go down there tomorrow.”
“She’s … a German national,” said Bruno. “She’ll need a visa, I think. I don’t even know if she’s got a passport.”
“Well, find out!”
“She’s a sex worker,” Bruno blurted. “A dominatrix.” She wasn’t, so far as he knew, but it sounded more empowered than a half-nude waitress in a torture mask. His whimsical lie blossomed into a wild fictional vehicle, one swerving out of his control.
“Good for her. What’s her name?”
“Madchen.”
“So, flexible schedule then,” said Beth, the pragmatist.
“I bet she’s a cutie-pie,” said Alicia.
“Yes.”
“Has she seen … your face?”
“Not yet.”
“That’s why you’re reluctant, isn’t it?”
“Maybe.”
“You’ve got to tell her,” said Alicia. “Share your fears, let her in.”
“I’ve been ignoring her calls.”
“He’s right to worry,” said Plybon. “You know what Renzo Novatore called woman, right? ‘The most brutal of enslaved beasts.’”
“Shut up, Garris.” Alicia drew herself nearer on the cushions and put her arm around Bruno’s back, touching his knee with her free hand.
With that Plybon was shunted to the margins of his own gathering. Bruno didn’t think it was worth asking who Renzo Novatore was. Instead he leaned into Alicia’s strong, soft shoulder. If Beth joined herself to their embrace from his other side, Bruno wouldn’t mind. Perhaps even Garris Plybon could benefit from a group hug—at the moment, Bruno couldn’t begrudge it. But Plybon went into the kitchen and returned with four shot glasses, each painted with the word Arizona and a tiny cactus and roadrunner, and a bottle of single-malt scotch, as well as a large irregular chunk of dark chocolate wrapped in butcher paper, as if hacked off a massive block. The Gourmet Ghetto had infiltrated the anarchist bread party, at least a little.
Later, returned to number 25, Bruno removed the mask, to rinse in the bathroom sink. He palpated the fabric with his thumbs, working red soup blotches and smears of chocolate free of the mesh. Then hung it over the shower-curtain rod to dry and put himself to bed, but not before checking his cell, charging at the wall socket. No new calls. Madchen’s last attempt dated from before his surgery. But the phone still glowed, ready. Falk, Bruno’s distant benefactor, continued to foot the bill.
The Phantom of the Jack London slept for ten and twelve hours at a stretch, took pills in a sporadic and careless fashion, and anointed his incisions before bed. His mask, his underwear and socks, he cleaned in the sink and air-dried as required. Copious ABIDE shirts and Cal sweatpants had appeared at his door, bundled in a large plastic Zodiac bag, the day after Plybon’s soup party. There was no evidence of Tira Harpaz’s presence. The Phantom allocated the twenties from the envelope parsimoniously, fed himself at student haunts at random hours, the international grub a thin echo of his expatriate life: Mongolian barbecue, soggy sushi, falafel. On daily strolls he’d roam Shattuck, or College Avenue, unkinking his anesthesia-withered limbs, testing his strength. At café counters he gathered discarded American newspapers and read them in the open air, on a bench at Willard Park, accompanied by the pong of tennis. The papers barely caught his interest. He greeted no one. With his mask, he went unapproached, except by the mad.
He avoided Kropotkin’s. It was enough that he might run into Garris Plybon in the building’s corridors. On the fifth or sixth day of his solitude he did, meeting the slider cook in the building’s lobby.
Bruno thanked him for the soup and the company.
Plybon raised a forbidding finger. “Nothing more than the mutual aid any random human soul ought to transact with any other.”
“Well, it made a nice evening. Have you seen Beth and Alicia? I need to thank them for the clothing.”
“Those girls are all right,” groused Plybon. “They believe radical fucking can alter collective reality. It’s a nonviable approach, but I grudgingly admire their spirit.”
“That makes two of us.”
“I do have a message for you. The ladies were beside themselves hearing about your dominatrix. I guess Beth took it upon herself to confer with the travel agent, some former lover of hers. They booked an open ticket from Berlin, off the Zodiac slush fund, ordinarily used for hiring ringer citizens to create false-flag diversions during public meetings of the Telegraph Avenue Business Owners Association. You only have to call your Kraut and substitute her name for Beth’s, from what I hear.”
“That’s astonishing.”
“One shark, many remoras, all swim in the same direction.”
“Sorry?”
“Just remember, your old friend Stolarsky makes money faster than his flunkies could possibly redistribute it. All this shit”—Plybon gestured around him, seeming to indicate a conspiracy palace that lay around them, invisible—“is nothing more than rooms in a house that needs burning to the ground. But meantime, I’m sure it’ll be a relief to see your girlfriend.”
“Yes.” Bruno felt wearied by the counterman’s baited conundrums. Next time they met, Bruno hoped it was with Beth and Alicia. The odds of that, Bruno couldn’t guess.
“I gotta go open the shop.”
This ended their exchange.
•
When he found himself craving a hamburger, the Phantom passed through the prohibited doorway into Zombie. The molten-looking building was too present for him to ignore, throbbing with dance beats and bleeding its red lasers into the dark sky. He picked an early hour, hoping to avoid the lines that extended once night fell, then cinched his hood tight to make a small port window, a reversal of the blot, the world condensed to one bright hole. How bad could the burgers be? Bruno was willing to find out.
The line wasn’t through the door, but inside it snaked three layers deep before the counter, like an airport security queue, marked with a heavy velvet sash clipped to brass stanchions. The students waited in bunches or alone. In either case their faces were lit, within the deep crimson glow of the building’s vaulted ceiling, by the glow of their cell phones. This miasma was punctured by the blazing-white low-cut T-shirts of the Zombie staff, and the glow of tiny Z toothpick flags stuck in the burgers, which flared in the black-light bulb as violently as the shirts. Here and there another detail picked up the luminescence: a pair of Converse sneakers, the collar and cuffs of a Lacoste shirt. The servers, as advertised by Tira Harpaz, were zaftig to a fault.
Behind them, deeper in the murk, those not taking their burgers out into the evening sat on long picnic-table benches across from one another, laboring over their sloppy plates, any attempt at conversation surely drowned in the noisy disco. The scene resembled that old story about the cave, spotlit breasts standing in for shadows.
Bruno felt invisible until he reached the head of the line and saw the reaction of the cashier. She pointed and giggled, drawing the attention of one of her fellow workers, who’d just then returned from the tables, bearing trays of detritus.
“That’s freaky, man!”
“Sorry?”
“Your face is glowing!”
The mask’s mesh was alive to the black light, strongest at the counter to highlight the T-shirts and burger flags. Bruno cinched his hood tighter, restricting his peripheral vision, shrinking the reverse-blot. This might not have been a winning move. Other voices clamored to know what had triggered the outcry. Soon curious faces, both servers and clientele, bobbled past his porthole window, to steal a glimpse of the mask’s effect: the full moon trapped in the bottom of a well.
“Could I just order a meal?” he said.
“Sure, Jason!”
“Better make it bloody rare for the man in the mask.”
“Treat him right, we don’t want a mass-slaying incident!”
The attention was intolerable. Bruno turned away. He had to jostle through the surrounding bodies, less a matter of a mob with pitchforks than of navigating in the gloom. Bruno had no doubt he was forgotten once he plunged in dismay into the open air.
He settled for a bag of tortilla chips and a plastic container of guacamole from an indifferent clerk in a brightly lit grocery. With these spoils Bruno retreated to number 25. Shedding his sweatshirt on the bed, he noticed the cell phone, at the baseboard. He detached it from the charger for the first time since returning from the hospital and hit Call Back.
Her meek “Hallo?” came only after the fifth ring, when he’d become certain the call would bounce to a mailbox.
“Madchen?”
“Ja?”
Her voice was faint, clouded with what he instantly knew must be sleep. Was it ten hours later? Well, so he hadn’t diverted her from the action in some all-night leather-masked bottomless dungeon. Bruno knew nothing. His stories were only stories.
“It’s me, Alexander. You’ve been calling my phone.”
“So sorry—bitte—I was mistaken.”
“No, don’t be sorry. I’m glad.”
She was only silent, the ocean between them roaring in the electronic vacuum as if in a seashell.
“No,” he said. “It’s meant a great deal to me, in fact.”
“Then I am glad too.” On the telephone, in the second language, half asleep, Madchen was like a baby bird. He had to keep in mind the forthrightness she’d projected on the Kladow ferry, in her leather mask and bare ass, in her persistent calls to his phone.
“Did I wake you?”
“No,” she obviously lied.
“I’m the one who should apologize,” he said. “I’ve ignored your messages. I mean, I haven’t ignored them. But I should have called before now.”
“I was afraid you had died.”
It was still possible the Jack London Apartments were Bruno’s franchise in the afterlife. But he said, “No.”
“At Charité I could discover nothing.”
“I suppose they wanted to protect my privacy.” You should have claimed to be my girlfriend, he thought. Seeing as I’ve taken the same liberty, on my side.
“Have you been extremely sick?”
“Truthfully, yes.”
“You’re … better now?”
“Better, and worse, both.” Could he divert the obvious topic? He wished to keep Madchen from waking, to appear to her as a figure in a dream. “I feel very far away.”
“Are you in America?”
“California.”
“It’s very late, you know—Gott, it is nearly morning.”
“Is it still dark, Madchen?”
“Ja.”
“Don’t turn on the light.” He lay on the bed, his room lit only by the street, mediocre guacamole warming untouched in a sack on the floor. If the staticky-seashell call made room for all the ocean between them, it was also a nest in which their two voices mingled, a virtual enclosure against that measureless galaxy of rooms unfilled by their two bodies.
“The light is off.”
“Good.”
“Are you going to ask me if I’m alone?”
“Are you alone?”
“Ja.”
You’re not anymore, he wanted to say, but didn’t.
“Do you want to ask me what I’m wearing?”
“No,” said the man in the dark in a mask.
“Okay.”
“We don’t need to do that.”
“Ja.”
“Let me tell you a story. There was a man, a man on a ferry once, and he saw a person, another person, a woman, a very beautiful woman. This man and this woman person, their eyes met and something was communicated very quickly, I’m certain you understand. But the man was very stupid, very dense and shortsighted, and when he was given a chance to do something very important for the woman, a short time later, he missed that chance, missed it badly. And this, for whatever reason, this was the end for him. Like in some fairy tale, but this isn’t a fairy tale. The very next thing for this man was that he took a sudden fall. He tumbled off a cliff into the underworld. Into a kind of twilight in his life. The woman, of course, was there to see it. She’s the only one who has any idea what happened. She’s the witness. The woman could no more help the man than he had been willing to help her. But that she was present to see was still his salvation. There’s no other word for it.”
They were more words than he was accustomed to hearing himself speak. The story was the least he owed her, he felt now, to reward the string of unanswered calls that made a trail of bread crumbs or pomegranate seeds pointing to freedom, from the dungeon of his illness but also of California, of Keith Stolarsky and Tira Harpaz, of Bruno’s enslavement to their patronage.
He listened to her breathing. He could think of nothing more sublime than gratifying Madchen in her astonished bedroom in the Berlin dawn. They could have sex on the phone, she’d already more or less suggested it. Given Bruno’s ruined looks, it might be all he should want. Yet there was a higher game here, beyond his volition. It was as though the dice had presented numbers dictating a blitzing game. He blitzed.
“The man, he took with him into this underworld a kind of dream of this woman. He was her witness too, you see. She’d entrusted him with her secret, almost accidentally. Through chance, he might know her better than men who’d known her for years, or who thought they knew her. This knowledge was his sustenance in the dark place. It kept him alive. She kept him alive, I mean.” The clarity necessitated by the tongues dividing them, on the call bounced by satellite across zones and boundaries, purified Bruno’s language. This was an advantage, since he spoke of the deeper erotics of fate. “There’s something I need from you, Madchen.”
“Ja?”
“To come and care for me. I’m among enemies.”
“To come … to where?”
“California.”
“Now?”
“Is there a reason you can’t?”
“I don’t know.”
“I have a ticket for you.”
“Nein, Alexander! Can this be true?”
“It is true.”
Without speaking, Madchen sounded more distant. As though she’d exited the seashell. A ticket, a summons to him? He’d lose her now to this improbability.
“Madchen?”
“I have to think.”
“Naturally. If it’s too much—”
“I could travel in one week, maybe.”
“Don’t decide now.”
“I’ll come.”
“But Madchen—”
“Ja?”
“I don’t look the way you remember me.”
“Oh, Alexander, my dear Alexander, do you think this matters to me at all?”
The afternoon before Madchen’s arrival, Tira Harpaz reappeared in Alexander Bruno’s life. It was six days later, the same day he’d reached the bottom of the stash of twenties, the life support he both resented and denied. Money, like anesthesia, kept you alive and asleep.
Tira’s own extrasensory gift might be to reappear precisely as Bruno wondered whether he’d need to go begging for food at Plybon’s door or to search out Beth Dennis at the counter of Zodiac. Days before, Beth had taken Madchen’s phone number from him; the next day she’d knocked on his door, to grinningly hand him a printout of Madchen’s e-ticket confirmation, the ferry woman’s full name revealed as Madchen Abplanalp, her age as thirty-two. Since then, Bruno hadn’t laid eyes on either Beth or Plybon, though he’d made no special effort to avoid them. Bruno hadn’t even put aside the price of a BART ticket in order to go and collect his German visitor from the San Francisco Airport. He had no idea how he’d explain his situation to her when she came.
Tira Harpaz collared him at the Jack London’s door. She’d parked in an illegal spot, blocking the alleys where the Dumpsters lay, and wolf-whistled to bring him to the Volvo’s open window. There, she sat low and complacent behind the wheel, smoking a joint. Despite all this, and despite how Bruno could easily have walked on, ignoring her, he felt firmly apprehended.
Her first words informed him of the charges. “So you went to Zombie despite my pleas.”
“I only heard one plea. Were there more?”
“Okay, wise guy. Wanna go for a drive?”
He entered her car on what he supposed was a voluntary basis. She wore a strangely fluorescent polyester blouse, with lime-colored flowers stretched too tight over her breasts and stomach, and tight white sleeves half covering her surprisingly articulated biceps. It might have fit her once. The long arm of the law, he found himself thinking, continuing to hallucinate Tira Harpaz as a policewoman. Or she and Stolarsky could be a team of detectives, of the disheveled, throwing-you-off stride variety.
“Were you staking out the entrance here? How long would you have waited for me to come out?”
“I just drove up.”
“How long would you have been prepared to wait? I realize you may have no idea.”
“About forty-five minutes, then I’d have let myself in.”
“I thought you gave me back the extra key.”
“Oh, yeah, that’s right, you wanted me to pretend there was only one. Sorry.”
“What about Zombie Burger? Were you following me personally, or did you hire someone?”
“The manager bundles up the security tapes once a week and sends them to Keith, with the highlights flagged. I usually watch them for kicks before posting the best ones to YouTube. There was a pretty good one just now, this guy with a glowing mask. You should have seen it.”
“I can’t actually tell which part of all that is meant as a joke.”
“That’s an improvement on what I was thinking you’d say, which was that you’d never heard of YouTube.”
“No, I’m familiar with YouTube. It’s one of the places people go to become heroically incompetent at backgammon.” Accepting the joint from her, Bruno positioned it through the mouth hole for a drag. Beneath the mask, the muscles of his face steadily strengthened, readying to meet the world.
“Don’t you get hot under that thing?”
“All the time.” In this light he noticed for the first time that her raven hair was surely dyed. He felt obsessively aware of Tira’s physical presence. Likely he’d been mulling over her body in absentia, without noticing he was doing so. For the past days he’d felt an unaffiliated buoyancy to his existence on Telegraph, as if Tira had followed Stolarsky in vanishing from town. Past and future had floated away, leaving only Bruno’s gently widening circuit of cappuccinos and sidewalks, at least until the twenties ran out. He’d even wandered as far as the campus of Berkeley High School and begun cutting across People’s Park with impunity, as though these carried no intimate associations. Now Tira had come to present her bill of arrears.
She turned and drove him north, on Shattuck. After a couple of tokes he held the joint up to her attention, then nodded at the floor, miming tossing it there, and she said, “Go ahead.”
Strangely, though the Volvo had hardly been cleaned, the little haystack of Tira’s half-smoked reefers was missing. He tossed this new one instead onto a floor strewn with candy wrappers, balled tissues, a knuckle Band-Aid with a scab-dark stain. “You’ve been recycling?”
“One of Keith’s minions knows I leave my car unlocked. The guy takes my discards for his stash. It’s an example of the myriad thankless ways we keep the whole machine humming along around here.”
“A personal assistant around the house?”
“Creepier than that. One of his shop dorks. Comes prowling around on his bicycle, doesn’t imagine I see him. The revolutionist, your apartment-mate, Plybon. From what I gather, you’ve been whooping it up with the kids in the rumpus room quite a lot since I saw you last.”
“Wait, Garris Plybon works for Keith?”
“You kidding? You think Keith wouldn’t have a rival burger place under his control? It isn’t public information. People like to fantasize that they’re putting a thumb in Keith’s eye by preferring the anarchist sliders.”
“I thought he and Plybon were mortal enemies.”
“That’s not a mutually exclusive situation. Plenty of people draw a salary from their mortal enemy.”
Bruno sat, staring ahead as they crossed into Northside, overturned, feeling his cheeks burn beneath the mask. Meanwhile Tira went on in her garrulous way. “Keith calls it a move from the Stalin playbook. Why bother infiltrating dissident cells, when you can start one yourself, just to see what grows there?”
“Does Plybon know?”
She made a sound like the air going out of a tire. “What do you think?”
“Where are you taking me?” he asked, to change the subject. He didn’t really believe the destination was a secret interrogation chamber.
“I wondered when you’d ask. I’ve got a surprise planned out. You’re not dressed appropriately, but you’re not really dressed appropriately for anything.”
“Do I guess, or do you tell me? Should I put a sack over my head?”
“You already have a sack over your head. I got us a table at Chez Panisse.”
For the second time in the space of a minute Bruno was rendered dumb.
“What do you think?” Now Tira’s voice betrayed the strand of vulnerability that all her chafing repartee was devised to conceal. Or perhaps it was a masterly brushstroke of calculation—why should Bruno abandon his paranoia?
“Just the café,” she said, reasoning with him. The central restaurant, with its set menu, would be too ostentatious for a pair like them. The café was looser, a place you could hide, a place you could flee.
“My last meal?” he said.
“Huh?”
Why should she understand his joke? He doubted it would be worth the effort to explain that he’d fantasized her as a policewoman.
“Sure, let’s eat.”
“Then shoot and leave.”
“Sorry?”
“You know, like a panda? Eats shoots and leaves.” She grinned. The further they wallowed in bafflement and mutual misunderstanding, the more she appeared to feel at home. Perhaps this derived from her life with Keith Stolarsky, himself so addicted to the gnomic reference.
“I no longer shoot and leave,” Bruno said. He touched his T-shirt. “I only abide.”
“Cool, then, we’ll abide, just lemme find a parking spot.”
Bruno knew that even the café was devised to usher a table through a sequence of gastronomic ideas, but Tira derailed the waiter’s presentation of the elaborate menu in favor of a series of glasses of pink champagne. He supposed that money, even slovenly money, got what it wanted, was able to carve Chez Panisse into little more than a cocktail bar, just as it had partitioned Singapore into an air-conditioned hotel room and a bag of burgers. Money, in this case, backed with the silencing enigma of a figure in a mask.
Bruno caused a little stir, he felt it. He lowered his hood, to improve his peripheral vision and to dissipate the strangeness—to allow the covert gawkers in the kitchen and at other tables to see his ears and neck, to confirm him as human. For his part, drinking not at Tira’s pace but drinking enough, barely listening to her left-field forays while he picked at the rounds that had begun to arrive, trout roe and potato pizzetta, chicken livers and peas crostini, nothing remotely suited to the sparkling rosé with which Tira kept topping his glass, Bruno suffered hallucinations that those who served him, or those breezing past to the upstairs kitchen, were his old company. His dissolute mentor, Konrad, and others, young waiters and bussers and sous chefs with vanished names. But of course those would be aged now, as old as Bruno, older, if not as ruined. These faces were young not because time was stopped but because they had been replaced with newer versions. Who had replaced Bruno?
Tira had ignored the waiter’s attempts to describe a special or confirm their satisfaction, seeming intent on broadcasting her crassness. Now, a second bottle almost polished, she captured the waiter’s sleeve and pulled him close, a slurring policewoman this time.
“This place used to be good.”
“Is there something I can help with?”
“No. It’s just it used to be special. Now it’s ordinary. You know that, right?”
“I believe it’s still special.” The waiter’s formulation left various exits open.
“How old are you?”
“Twenty-six.”
“Well, see? Alexander, tell him.”
“Everything’s been wonderful,” said Bruno.
“He used to work here, you know that? So he’s in the cult, same as you. But the ironic thing is he should know better than anyone, better than me. He was there. It’s just ordinary now.”
“I’ll clear these,” said the waiter smoothly, freeing himself to begin corralling their plates.
“Is there a peach galette?” said Tira.
“Not tonight.”
“I want a galette, any galette you got.”
Their exit was a blur. They finished with something chocolate and a dessert wine. If Tira paid, Bruno didn’t see. She’d palmed a card onto a check, perhaps. Or Stolarsky had an account, if such a thing existed. Dark had fallen and Bruno felt benumbed by the drink and though he ought to have been fearful of her driving he was barely conscious of returning to the Jack London. She was upstairs and at his door without Bruno being party to any decision. At least she waited for him to produce his own key.
The obnoxious overhead he left off, in favor of the kitchen light.
“What’ve you got?” He heard her shoes, kicked off to tumble on the floor.
“I don’t need more to drink, and I doubt you do, either.” He fixed them cool tap water, in the single jam jar he’d borrowed from Garris Plybon.
“You’re right, I’m shitfaced. Let’s smoke and mellow out instead.” Before he could protest her fuming up the apartment, there came the click of her lighter. “So, you know that thing you said about YouTube and backgammon?”
“More or less.”
“Well, I’ve been following in Keith’s footsteps. Not on YouTube, but this tutorial site called Gammaniacs.”
“I don’t really know anything about it, you’ll have to excuse me if I was rude.”
“Rude, crude, lewd, nude, and apt to be misconstrued.”
“Sorry?”
“You’re, like, the least rude person I ever met, Alexander. It’s practically a crippling deficiency.” Tira had laid open his backgammon set across the Murphy bed’s sheets. As he turned back from the kitchen she was chucking aside his Berlin stone with a complete lack of curiosity. “I got good enough in the last week to lose five thousand dollars on the Ladbrokes site, you should be very proud of me.”
“Yes, that’s an accomplishment.” He shed his sneakers and sweatshirt and joined her on the bed.
“I’m sure you should be able to take me for everything I’ve got in three or four games.”
“We’re playing?”
“Yep.” She handed him the joint. “I can never remember how to set up these little fuckers, though. I guess that’s a classic symptom of playing online, huh?”
“I don’t know if I would call it classic.” He knelt on the bed, feeling the urge to straighten out her confused placement of the checkers, if nothing else. Having drawn once on the joint, and fearing the effects of more, he tried to return it. She shook her head.
“Do you have a phobia of other people’s saliva?” It could explain Plybon’s cornucopia, the discarded half joints in her passenger’s-side footwell.
“I like other people’s saliva fine,” she said. “Assuming it’s the right person. I have a phobia of my own saliva. I don’t dig wet rolling paper.”
Bruno extinguished it as before, between his fingers, feeling more accustomed to the spark of pain. If he worked at it, he could regress all the way to high school. Yet his board was before him, rosy with innate glamour, promising, as ever, transportation. The Berlin stone had scuffed the playing surface surprisingly little. “So I have to earn my nest egg of twenties this time?”
“Nope. You’re not playing for twenties, you’re playing for my clothes.”
“Your clothes?”
“To remove them, dummy. Don’t be evasive, you were gobbling my stuff with your ghosty eyes all through dinner.” She slung one arm beneath her breasts, hoisting them like an infant offered into his embrace. They swarmed together near the strained top button of the sheer polyester blouse, that mystic margin Bruno couldn’t doubt he’d rained with glances. “Double me, gammon me, make me bare my tits.”
He slurped water from the jam jar, felt it soak the lip of his mask. It was too late to reclaim his hood—anyhow he was hot from the drink. He wouldn’t need it. The board arranged, Tira threw both blond dice into the board, drawing double fours.
“It’s customary to roll one die to see who’ll go first.”
“I’ve never played a human before, so I’m not customary. You can afford to give me the advantage, spookyman.”
Bruno shrugged. She shifted the pale checkers into a strong starting position. He rolled a two-three, dropped lazy descenders into his outer board. There should be time enough to play more boldly. First he’d see what lessons she’d absorbed and wait out the blurring effects of the champagne. Whatever his and Tira’s involvement, it had commenced some time ago, before the start of this game. She was right: Bruno could afford the amusement. With Tira humiliated in defeat it might be possible to reclaim number 25, though that presumed she had the capacity for humiliation.
She offered to double immediately. Inside the mask he raised an eyebrow. “What’s the hurry?”
“We need to make this worth something. Or, you know, resign if you feel you’re beat.”
He accepted the cube from her, then built a five-prime. She wasn’t lucky. He watched her run in panic, then caught and demolished the blot she left behind. The game devolved into a race, and Tira was behind. Rather than double again to make this point, Bruno let her play it out. She grunted in anger at dice that refused her a miracle.
Then, when Bruno parked his last checker, she began balling off her ankle socks, which she threw one after the next at his head. He ducked.
“If I understand the international rules of strip backgammon, socks are a single garment, not two.”
“Right—and you won once.”
“You doubled the stakes. That’s what the cube is for. I’ll have your pants as well, thank you.”
“If you’d been boning up on the rules of international strip backgammon, or strip anything, you’d know that the loser gets to take off whatever the fuck she wants to take off.” Tira unbuttoned her blouse and laid it aside, giving air to the bulkily architectural black brassiere he’d extrapolated from a thousand angles. “You’ll appreciate the rules when it comes your turn to lose.”
“Based on what I’ve seen, my turn isn’t coming.”
“Fuck you. And I’d be insulted if you didn’t want to get my shirt off except you’re exactly the kind of avoiding-the-obvious person who’d want to go at this thing backward. Because you’re going to love my tits.”
“Self-abnegating, that’s what Edgar Falk always called it.”
“Your twisted old pansy Gandalf, you mean? I guess he’d be qualified to know.”
Bruno reset the pieces and took the privilege of rolling first. With a six-three he again seeded his backfield, daring her to hit. He felt the effect of her poor play dragging him down, as much a suppressant as the champagne and marijuana. Yet no blot obtruded between him and the board, or her body, so he studied Tira. She bore down like a teenager over a standardized test, tongue protruding as she shook the dice, then surveyed her options. Playing through a screen had taught her nothing of a player’s attitude or comportment. She resembled the sort of computer-bred gaming nerd Bruno had begun to encounter in the clubs in recent years, but her moves betrayed a hopeless deafness to the command of the pips.
This time, Bruno turned the doubling cube. An act of mercy either way—if Tira were smart enough to refuse, she’d economize on shed clothing. If she accepted, a swifter end to the farce. She cast him a shocked look.
“Don’t be so surprised,” he said. “This is how the game is played.”
She made a face, took the cube, and ground on. Bruno nearly gammoned her, but at the last moment double sixes enabled a stray blond checker to race home to her inner board, and another to bear off.
“Two items again,” he reminded her.
She unhooked the bra, then stood on the bed, looming above him, and wriggled free of her jeans. Her underwear, which hoved into the center of his vision, didn’t match the brassiere, was instead pink and cottony, worn. It was also capacious, grandmotherly, though not enough to quarantine a wild black pubic thatch defaulting every boundary at her thigh and stomach, inch-wide on the flesh of her thighs, trailing to tiny hairs at her navel. Bruno caught himself elaborating a comparison between the black bra beneath the sheer blouse and the bush erupting behind the underwear, that which is hidden erupting through its paltry veil. Pubic hair itself a further concealment, a beard for beckoning flesh. But really, it was his distractible mind that formed the true veil. All his foolish comparisons, Bruno’s attempt to dissociate from what he wanted and that he wanted it, the startling absolutes of the body before him.
Pants discarded, Tira swayed wonderfully back into place behind the board, crossing her legs. Her underwear stretched, a feeble screen. Oddly, Bruno found himself staring at her sole item of clothing—he supposed this could be the fatal politeness of which she’d accused him, though it also meant he glared at her crotch. Her breasts and stomach deluged his sight anyhow, triple globes triply eyeing Bruno in return. No blot to save him now. Though he leaned in to reorder the checkers and seize the dice, the board would need to be ten times its present size for him to pretend not to see, or to be seen seeing.
“Your roll,” he croaked.
Tira’s cascade of luck began with sixes. She played them properly—not difficult—and offered Bruno the doubling cube on her next turn. He didn’t refuse. He again dropped builders, his play leaden and automatic. This time, her roll placed his two undefended checkers on the bar. By the time he’d danced for three rolls she’d assembled a six-prime. Could her nakedness be warping the action of the dice? No, it was his brain her nakedness addled; dice were impartial to breasts, as to everything. He supposed that by playing in such a deliberate style he’d accidentally schooled Tira in the worth of a blockade, a textbook instance of playing a mediocre opponent up to your level.
Fate, unforgiving of his blunder, rewarded her with doubles twice as she bore off. The gammon cost him nearly everything: socks, sweatpants, ABIDE. He felt free of shame. His body might be withered, collapsed on itself from the starvation of recovery, yet the hospital had killed his embarrassment. It was only a body, a poor object hurtling through time, and anyhow what he’d lost weren’t his clothes, were hardly clothes at all.
Owing Tira one more, Bruno faced a decision that was no decision at all. He stripped off his underwear, addressed her in nothing but his mask. His cock had flushed, grown rigid without his noticing. Now it trembled in the air. It might be the first erection of a new self-epoch.
“The puppets come onstage at last!”
“Puppets?”
“That’s what Keith calls them.”
“Calls what, penises?”
“Genitals, both kinds. They’re the puppets. All floppy, like scraps of cloth, until the show starts.” She reached across the board and held him as if in a handshake. Bruno grunted, the pleasure almost intolerable. Just when he’d managed to exhale, she gripped him harder, tweaking, and let go. Then began shoving checkers into their proper starting places, a fast learner.
“Aren’t we done?”
“No way, Jose.” She pointed at his mask.
He threw a two-one, split his back men. Tira grazed him again as she gathered her dice to throw.
“Don’t.”
“You’re sticking out.” She gave out with her seal bark.
“I can’t play if you’re touching me.”
“Fine.” She took her roll, three-one, built a point on her inner board. “I’ll touch myself instead.” Her hands ran crotchward along her thighs, fingertips passing behind the scrim.
“I can’t tell if I’m losing or winning,” Bruno said. A whine, not what he’d intended. He threw his dice, could barely read their faces. His checkers seemed of varying size and without gravity, drifting unmoored between points.
“Could be both at once.”
“I think I’d like the puppet show.” His voice was helplessly diminished, but she heard.
She turned the doubling die and moved it toward him. “Resign and we’ll see.”
“But you still have … a scrap of cloth covering your … scraps of cloth.”
“So let’s double resign.” Tira reached across again and caught up the rim of his cockhead with her fingertips. At her encouragement it might float thrillingly free, to the ceiling. With her other hand she threaded her underwear around each hip in turn, and clambered forward, upsetting the board. “Open your mouth,” she commanded. He obliged. She jammed the underwear between his teeth, then reached behind to grapple at the mask. “Where’s the zipper on this thing?”
“It doesn’t—” he mumbled through the gag.
“Never mind.” She tore the Velcro fasteners loose, then swept the mask over his skull, bundling it in one hand with the fragrant underwear. Reluctantly, he opened his jaw, and she tossed both aside, their last disguises.
She fingertip-traced the toughening stitchery that framed his eyes.
“Gentle.”
“I used to have these tan alligator-leather pumps, fabulous shoes, they were in some luggage that was stolen in Costa Rica, I’m still pissed. You feel like you’re made of that stuff.”
“I’m a work in progress. I tenderize my alligator parts with vitamin E.”
“You’ll never look the same, Alexander. You’re wearing a mask that won’t come off.”
Had she plucked it from his thoughts? He’d never suspected Tira of such powers. His head uncontainerized, anything was possible now. “As above, so below,” he said, and guided her hand from his cock to the time-lost scars nested deep at its root.
“You’re still fucking gorgeous,” she said.
“Thank you.”
“Now feel this.” She guided his hand to her crotch, but surprised him, veering left. In the dense hair at the joint of her thigh, his fingers discovered a hard lump, golf-ball size, floating beneath the silken skin.
“A cyst,” she said. “It’s benign, I’ve had it for years.”
“Oh.” He caressed her there, drunk on confusion.
“They told me they could remove it,” she said, defiantly. “I said not to bother, it wasn’t troubling me.”
If this was her test, it was easily passed. “You feel amazing.”
The board was elbowed into the jumble with balled socks, his Berlin stone, the empty jam jar. A checker and a die slid into the sheets, clattering gently where Bruno’s and Tira’s bodies caved a depression in the tired mattress. Her presence was sturdy and watery at once, arms weirdly muscled, nipples like small tongues riding on the mercurial flesh that glided on his surface, thighs smooth to where his fingers plummeted inside, followed by the rest of him. The golf-ball cyst swam too, faintly present against him, a feature, not a bug. Tira, for all her usual chatter, wasn’t a screamer or even a moaner. In the silence their breaths fell into concert with the whining Murphy springs. Bruno’s mind felt poured into hers as well, at least conveyed a great distance out of his body.
The kitchen’s light blocked by his own shadow, he couldn’t read her face.
“I feel … swallowed,” he said.
“Eat or be eaten,” she whispered. “Engulf and Devour. That’s our motto.”
“Our?”
“It’s a thing Keith says.”
“Could we leave Keith out of it?” Bruno was no longer amused by puppets or anything else bearing Stolarsky’s cloying trademark. He fought the suspicion that Stolarsky and Tira were one person, or that they at least assumed only a single attitude toward him. If there was no other reason to have fucked Tira, it would be to plant a definite secret between her and Stolarsky.
“Why bother to try?”
“Perhaps because he is out of it.”
Unable to contain her hilarity, Tira issued a string of barks. She pushed Bruno off and rolled free, her postcoital transition palpable as steam or frost. “In what sense is Keith out of it?”
“He’s left town.” Bruno raised his hand, vaguely indicating Telegraph, the commercial row Stolarsky might rule but had mercifully abdicated, in favor of the mice who played. At least to claim number 25, their clandestine cell. “I don’t want to presume, but I gathered he might have left you.”
“I don’t know what you’re gathering or smoking. Moss maybe? Keith’s been back for a couple of days. Actually, he wants to see you in his office tomorrow.”
“His office?”
“Yeah.” Now Tira was the one to gesture, with a nod of her chin. “Over at Zodiac.” She rescued her clothing from the morass of sheets and checkers. Deftly restringing her brassiere over her shoulders, she groped behind to bring it taut. “He said the free ride is over now that you’re well. That’s what I came over here to tell you in the first place.”