Girl in Landscape

by Jonathan Lethem

  Pella willed herself to meet Efram’s eyes, and saw only distance. He was done with his shadow play. His disaster. Efram didn’t really care about Hugh Merrow, Pella understood.

  What, then? Could this have been for her sake?

  The door open, the room flooded with sun. Pella walked out onto Merrow’s porch. Joe Kincaid, Ben Barth, and Doug Grant abandoned the squalid house, began back up the ridge.

  “It’s good you came,” said Efram to Clement. “It should have been you in the first place. I’m no politician.”

  “This wasn’t a politician’s job—” Clement stopped, crossed up. Efram had made him complicit again.

  Hugh Merrow didn’t look up. Efram glanced at him, then raised an eyebrow at Clement. “Let’s clear out. Leave Merrow alone with his thoughts. And his pictures.”

  Clement didn’t move.

  “If you want to talk more,” said Efram, “keep Wa’s place in mind. After hours, I mean.”

  Pella thought, he’s inviting him to school.

  Twelve

  A household deer was running across the valley. It had no destination. It darted from shadow to shadow, uninterested in the towers or arches that cast them.

  Its pure interest was in being a thing running, and its concern in knowing where the human places lay in the landscape was only to avoid those places, the identical homesteads.

  So it ran.

  From the left, another deer dashed up alongside the first. They ran zigzagging, bound together, though it wasn’t love that bound them. There wasn’t anything nearly that strong between the deer. Nor was it fondness, or concern. Only adjacency.

  It was a relationship that could be sustained, didn’t conceal any pitfalls. It worked, adjacency. Like running worked. So they zipped along in flawless formation, jumping a gap in the valley floor, one, two. They ignored the sky, which had nothing to do with them. They weren’t afraid. It was running time, not hiding time.

  Maybe today wouldn’t be a spying day at all, thought the first of the deer. Maybe for once they didn’t care what the humans or Archbuilders were doing.

  Then the second of the household deer skipped off to the right, ducked off a ledge and over, into a gully. There was a puff of dust in the air where it had last stood. After that, nothing. The first deer stopped, ran alone for a minute, then, recognizing the spot, turned and slipped into the gully from around the corner of a broken edifice.

  The second deer wasn’t visible, but the first knew where it was.

  This would be a spying day after all.

  The toppled spire that the girl had made into her hideaway had been a convenient hovel for the deer, before the girl had arrived. They didn’t object to her occupying it, however. The deer didn’t object to things. Only kept an eye on them. Anyway, the girl’s presence didn’t keep the deer from going there. It simply changed it from a place where they hid and nibbled at the potatoes that grew in the corner to a place where they hid and watched the girl.

  The doorway was half-buried in rubble. The girl had been at work again, disguising it. And there was something new, set just inside the entrance. A bundle, two bottles of pills inside a knotted plastic bag, labelled in block letters, FOR PELLA, and signed with the single letter B.

  So the sneaky boy had been around. The household deer knew him, knew about his visits here.

  The first deer climbed over the obstacles and slipped inside. The second deer had settled in the corner near the sealed bottles of water, with another deer who had already been inside, watching. The girl was curled in her usual position, in a sickly looking sleep, clutching the blanket, which was bunched under her arms.

  The first deer felt a queasy sort of contempt for the girl. The feeling was betraying. The deer knew it shouldn’t care, knew it was thinking and feeling too much, knew it should only be a set of feet and eyes. Taking a post behind the water bottles and between the other two deer, it pretended it too was watching indifferently, just keeping track. But in truth it felt an inarticulate misery. Looking at the girl as she lay there was somehow overwhelming, nauseating.

  The problem was the girl was a mixed-up thing, a combination of two things. If not more. She was growing a new body, a woman’s body, raw new shapes under her clothes. It made the deer tired and annoyed to see it. If only the blanket were covering the girl the deer wouldn’t have to consider the deformed body, the new breasts.

  The girl’s body was pretentious with womanhood.

  The girl shifted, and suddenly the deer was nervous, not wanting to see her waken. That had to be avoided. It was a mistake to come here and look. When the girl stirred further, tossing her impossible, objectionable new body, tugging uselessly at the blanket, the deer jumped out of its place with the others and scrabbled out of the chamber and across the rubble at the entrance, as much in a panic as if threatened by a poking stick or foot.

  The other two deer caught up with the first a moment later, and they climbed together up the steepest side of the ravine, back onto the flat of the valley.

  The deer ran to deny its mistake now, to forget the person in the chamber. Running to forget wasn’t as pure as running for no reason at all, but it was still a consolation to zip along implacably, three now, making silent ribbons across the surface of the world. So when the others halted the first halted too. Wishing to stay buried deep in deer life, in skittish curiosity, it noticed too late that they’d stopped to peek over a crest at an unexpected sight. A figure huddled at the base of a ruin, in a nest of vines, fiddling with an array of objects.

  The place was a nowhere on the human map of the valley, as distant from any house or trail as the girl’s hideaway. There shouldn’t have been anyone there. But there was. The figure was bent, with its back to them, impossible to identify from this distance except as human, not Archbuilder. And young.

  The other two deer, being deer, snuck up for a better view. The first had no reasonable choice except to follow.

  It was the girl’s brother. Raymond Marsh. He squatted in the center of a half ring of trinkets and photographs, fetishes placed carefully in the vines and rubble, in the shade of a jagged ruin.

  All three of the deer crept insistently nearer, the first compelled by something more than companionship with the others now. Was Raymond assembling his own hideaway, a place to sleep during the day? But that wasn’t it, not exactly. The deer craned its neck to see. The photographs were of Caitlin, pictures taken in Brooklyn. Some were cameos, Caitlin-faces trimmed out of group photos, family scenes. The rest was jewelry and keepsakes, souvenirs of Caitlin, borrowed or stolen from Clement’s drawer.

  Raymond was mourning his mother.

  At this the deer confessed to herself what she’d been evading. That she was Pella. Visiting herself in the hideout hadn’t stirred her out of her disguise from herself, but Raymond had.

  It was a small, vivid loss, like waking from a dream of solving a problem to find that the solution didn’t make sense, that the problem had only been contemplated, not solved.

  Raymond went on touching the photographs, adjusting their places, his head bowed. Lost in his own conjured space. Had he come here before? Pella wondered. Was this a regular spot, were the objects stored in some cubby or pit in the rocks? Or did the ritual consist of walking out into the valley and arranging a new shrine each time?

  Maybe there was no ritual. This could be the first time. But she feared she’d discovered too late. She’d been ignoring Raymond, and now it turned out he was mortifying himself in sorrow.

  Pella was not the only one trying to find her mother somewhere in the valley.

  She wanted to reach out, touch his shoulder. Instead she ran into the middle of his circle, in front of his folded knees, and stared up at him stupid, voiceless, wide-eyed. Raymond looked up, and swept his hand, whisking her out of the ring. Then he turned and saw the other two deer staring from behind him. Before he could reach them they’d darted off to a safer distance. He waved his arm anyway, trying to frighten them away.

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nbsp; Pella trembled in confusion behind a fragment of pillar, but Raymond was already back to his fugue. Household deer were a familiar interruption anywhere. Not worth a second glance.

  Still a deer, Pella rushed back to the house, looking for Clement. The house was empty, but there were noises in back, from Clement’s new garden. She went to look.

  It was David, and Martha Kincaid, and Morris Grant. They knelt in the planted rows, Morris rooting in the dirt with a stick on either side of a row of tiny sprouts.

  “See how they’re so small?” Morris was saying. “That’s because the deer eat the roots.”

  “How?” said David.

  “From underneath, they dig tunnels. They have tunnels all over the place, you know.”

  “I thought they were small because they’re baby plants,” said Martha, squinting in the bright sun, knitting her forehead.

  “No, they’re dying. See, that’s why Efram keeps all his stuff in pots, because of the deer tunnels.” He twisted his stick in the ground, closer and closer to the new sprouts.

  Pella thought, Deer tunnels?

  Morris was playing expert, like Bruce Kincaid. The difference being Morris was making it up as he went along. Pella wondered what idiocies she would hear, if she followed this little group through a day.

  Morris worked his forked stick under a sprout, right below the soil line, then jerked it up out of the ground, tearing it. “See?” he said. “No roots.”

  “Clement just planted that,” said David. His protest was uncertain, at best.

  “Well it isn’t going to grow,” said Morris admonishingly, and holding it on the extended stick like it was tainted, he flicked it away, to wither on a bare rock.

  Pella wished she could tunnel under Morris, hollow out all but a crust of earth, so that he fell through and was humiliated, went home muddy and sniffling. She wished Bruce were here to give him a shove.

  “Hugh Merrow’s going to move away,” said Morris.

  “He is?” said David. “Why?”

  “How do you know?” said Martha.

  “Because everybody hates him. Doug told me about it.”

  “Everybody hates him why?” said David.

  “He fooled around with Archbuilders.”

  Pella went back on her silent feet to the porch. The urge to hear more was checked by her disinclination to play the part of the deer in Morris’s malicious fantasies, to be screamed at and chased with a stick.

  She wished Clement were here, wished she could take his hand and direct him to Raymond, out in the valley, direct him to the torn sprout on the rock, and say, Caitlin’s not here anymore. Look what’s happening to your family. To your lettuce and chard.

  She searched the house again, looking for Clement or for clues to where he’d gone. But the house was empty. No, that was wrong. It was the valley that was simply empty. The house was something worse. It was a failure, a travesty. The signs were everywhere. Here was her room, where she did nothing but sleep, and that only in short, angry bursts. Here Raymond’s toys, abandoned for pictures of Caitlin. Here Clement’s dust-gathering computer—who was there for Clement to conference with? Caitlin had said Clement was here to do Clement things, but there weren’t any Clement things to do. Clement was nobody now. Here in a corner of the living room was the stack of chairs, forgotten since the school disaster. Here was the jar that held David’s potato fish until the morning, a week ago, when they’d suddenly died. Here on the table, a batch of plastic-wrapped sandwiches with a note, reading, Juice in fridge. Dinner at Kincaids’ tonight, meet you there. Clement.

  And only a household deer to witness this. But not for long. She dashed across the porch, into the unhaunted, impersonal emptiness of the ruined land. As she ran she felt and heard herself jerking with little shrill hiccups. The deer was doing what the girl in her own body hadn’t done since that day, which seemed ages ago now, when she’d climbed into her father’s lap: crying.

  Diana Eastling was back. Pella in her deer body had scampered up the side of a column and unexpectedly seen the signs of life from Diana’s house. Lit windows, a pile of burned garbage in the backyard that still smoldered. Pella checked herself. It could be Efram. But if Diana Eastling were there—

  Finding Diana Eastling was better than finding Clement. Pella would make her listen, tell her everything, Pella’s whole strange new life. Diana Eastling knew about the people here, no matter how much she tried to play dumb. She’d explain what Efram wanted, and Pella would use that knowledge to protect Clement. And Diana Eastling knew about the planet, too. She’d help Pella decide whether to take the pills Bruce had stolen for her.

  Diana Eastling was who she’d been looking for, she decided. She half-ran, half-tumbled down the column and started over the ridge. She’d only make sure Diana was there, then dash back to the hiding place and reclaim her human body. Then come back and knock on the door—

  She stopped short. On the porch was Clement’s bicycle.

  Enthusiasm suspended, she made her way inside, through an open back window.

  Clement and Diana Eastling sat together on the couch in the living room, and even if Diana Eastling hadn’t had her left leg across Clement’s right leg, Pella would have understood instantly from the dreamy, self-congratulatory smiles they both wore. But anyway, there was her leg, over his. Pella snuck up under the kitchen table and stared, and the crossed legs, the point where Clement’s and Diana’s bodies intersected, seemed to burn itself into her vision. It was so simple, one limb piled on another, two dumb slabs of meat, yet it was like an optical illusion too, some impossible four-dimensional figure whose existence warped the rest of the world out of shape.

  “That’s part of why I left,” Diana Eastling was saying. “I didn’t know what to do, it was ridiculous.”

  “I wondered,” said Clement.

  “You were being such a dolt,” she continued. “I couldn’t stand watching you fumbling around, getting your sea legs here. It was going to keep me from liking you. And I was beginning to like you.”

  “That’s unfair.”

  Pella was holding her breath, trying not to make a sound. But she couldn’t have made a sound if she’d wanted to, not in this body.

  “I think it was very fair,” said Diana Eastling. “You were full of stupid questions, bad guesses. You hadn’t even met Efram yet. I wasn’t going to walk you through that. I’m not fond of that sort of thing.”

  “You wanted me to meet Efram first? Why was that important?”

  “He was worked up about your coming. The two of you were obviously headed toward some tedious male thing. And God, if you haven’t worked it out yet, please don’t tell me about it.”

  “So I seem different now.”

  “You learned to lead with something other than your stupid questions, with me, anyway. That’s different enough.”

  “Just because I’m not leading with my questions doesn’t mean I’ve gotten answers for them,” said Clement carefully.

  “I shouldn’t have mentioned Efram. Now you sound like you think you’re talking to him.”

  “Efram’s tedious male thing is hounding Hugh Merrow out of this town, Diana.”

  “I credit both of you with the tedious male thing. Not just Efram. That’s the first thing.” She swung her leg away, then abruptly rose from the couch and went to the table. As she loomed up Pella shrank back into the tumbleweeds of dust along the floor, and the upper half of Diana Eastling’s body disappeared above the table’s edge. Clement remained on the couch, in the same position. Pella watched him through Diana Eastling’s knees.

  Then Diana Eastling turned and walked back to him, lighting a cigarette while she spoke. “The second is that what’s happened, what’s happening, between us here—it has nothing to do with Efram, or Hugh Merrow, or anything else outside this room. It isn’t an alliance.”

  “What is it?”

  “A liaison.” She blew out smoke. Pella couldn’t see her face.

  Clement smiled.

&n
bsp; A blackened match-head bounced to the floor under the table, still issuing a thread of smoke.

  “Hugh Merrow made things difficult for himself around here from the moment he arrived,” said Diana Eastling wearily. “That’s not Efram’s fault. But I’m getting drawn into justifying Efram’s behavior, and I don’t want to do that. Maybe whatever’s being done to Hugh Merrow is blatantly unfair, Clement. But don’t bring it into this.”

  “That’s clear enough.”

  “Is it? Good.” She paused. “I came here to make my own space, Clement. Most of us did.”

  “I’m learning.”

  “Yes, you are.”

  Diana Eastling still had the edge in her voice that Pella had admired, but it was too late for it to mean anything anymore. Her leg across Clement’s had ruined everything.

  Diana Eastling reached out, cigarette between her fingers, and touched Clement’s hair.

  Set him on fire, Pella thought.

  “Kiss me now,” said Diana Eastling. “You’re letting me talk too much. I don’t like that any better than your questions.”

  He got up from the couch and pulled her to him. She held the cigarette away as they kissed, then drew on it when they finished.

  “Mmmm.”

  “What’s going to happen?”

  “Shhh.”

  Through her anger at them both, Pella felt pity for Clement. He was alone, and being in Diana Eastling’s arms only made it less noble, more pathetic. Didn’t he hear her cynicism? Couldn’t he see how little use she had for him? They didn’t understand each other, had nothing in common. Pella was certain she knew them both better than they knew each other, Clement better than he knew himself. Clement on Diana Eastling’s couch was like Raymond at his shrine. Pitiful.

  Then Pella’s anger overtook her pity. Clement and Diana had betrayed her. It was Pella who was most alone in the end, knowing all she knew. She was in charge of Clement’s aloneness, but he’d abandoned Pella to hers.