Girl in Landscape

by Jonathan Lethem

  Leading two other deer, she doubled back, to look in at Hugh Merrow’s. Bruce and Raymond were painting now. Pella guessed they’d both been shy to paint in front of her. Lonely Dumptruck was posing for Bruce, Gelatinous Stand for Raymond. Hiding Kneel was seated at the table, reading one of Hugh Merrow’s books. Martha was dancing around the edge of the room, still singing to herself. Morris and David were painting on the wall.

  She darted off. One of the other deer stayed, slipping through Merrow’s door. The other followed her.

  She hurried away from the houses now, out into the empty valley, where deer bounded together and apart, like runners in some goalless relay. Like dancing skeletons in the sun. Pella lost herself in the frivolous, hectic chase.

  One deer was rounding up the others, running tight circles. It was a spying call. The deer had found something to look at. The deer that was Pella did its best to ignore it, circling out of the gathered groups, hiding in dusty collapsed towers.

  The rounding-up deer took a group of four others out in the direction of the lesbians’ house, then returned and rounded up some more. The Pella-deer watched from a patch of shade, twitching, attentive. She was spying despite herself, spying on the other household deer.

  The rounding-up deer was goofy, unsteady on its feet. It bumped into the others, tripped, then dizzily bounded back to its feet. But it knew what it wanted. It kept gathering others, leading them over the ridge. Soon the valley was empty.

  Pella-deer’s curiosity won out.

  The yard of the lesbians’ house was empty. Pella-deer was confused. There had been so many deer headed that way. Wherever they were being led, some number should have split off from the group to spy here. Could they be inside? She went inside to look.

  The front room and kitchen were also empty of deer. Llana Richmond stood at the table, chopping vegetables. Julie Concorse lay on the couch, reading. Their baby wasn’t in the room. Pella-deer scouted the four corners of the front room, found one deer dozing under the couch. She gave it a thump with her twiggy hind leg and darted away, irritated by the mystery.

  Her answer lay in the baby’s room. Melissa Richmond-Concorse stood in her tiny bed, leaning over the rail, murmuring, clutching at the deer that stood nearest. The room was packed with deer. It rippled and shone like a sea with tiny liquid bodies. The deer overlapped in rows, craning their giraffe-necks to see, dashing up in alternating sprints, almost within range of the giggling, gasping child’s curled fingers.

  Pella-deer squeezed into the room. She understood now. The rounding-up deer had been Melissa Richmond-Concorse. The baby herself, incarnated. She wasn’t taking the pills either. So when the baby napped she became a deer, one as giddy and impulsive as a two-year-old. Today the baby had stumbled out into the valley and rounded up some playmates, then returned to her baby-self to admire them.

  The room whirled with tiny figures, but the only sound was Melissa’s gurgling. Pella could hear the clank of dishes and the murmur of conversation from the kitchen. Llana Richmond and Julie Concorse were oblivious. The deer didn’t even rustle, just flowed silently, like underwater creatures. One deer, two deer, red deer, blue deer, thought Pella. She wanted to get near the baby too. It was like a chance to step into a picture-book world, where hide-and-seek had only to do with a delight in faces hidden and uncovered, where it had no moral dimension, no measure of guilt. The opposite of the adult spying she detested.

  Sixteen

  “Do you want to go for a walk?” said Diana Eastling.

  “I guess,” said Pella.

  Clement was in the kitchen. When Pella came home he’d announced preemptively that Diana Eastling was coming for dinner. “Just like you wanted,” he told Pella. She’d made a face at him. His secret wants were more the point, surely. Pella didn’t have any interest in Diana Eastling now.

  But that didn’t matter, since here she was.

  They went out onto the porch. The sun was going down. “Where?” said Pella.

  “Doesn’t matter,” said Diana Eastling. “Just a walk.”

  Pella and Diana Eastling strolled out into the wastes behind the homestead. The household deer seemed to be running in slow motion, their elongated shadows vibrating like plucked strings across the dust.

  “What’s happening to you?” said Diana Eastling.

  “To me?”

  “To your body.”

  Did she mean Pella’s small asymmetrical breasts? No. “Nothing,” said Pella.

  “Nothing Archbuilderish?” said Diana Eastling. “Nothing at all?”

  The jocular and generous tone Pella chose to ignore. “Nope.” She kept a half step ahead as they walked.

  “Clement says otherwise.”

  “What does Clement know?”

  Diana Eastling didn’t answer that, meaning nothing, as far as Pella was concerned.

  And guess what I do know, she wanted to add in the silence.

  “Your brother said you sleep all day,” said Diana Eastling.

  “Who?”

  “David.”

  “Not all day.” Pella kicked at stones in her path. She felt peevish, only half-willing to have this conversation. She wanted access to Diana Eastling’s knowledge of the Planet of the Archbuilders. But any pleasure in talking was spoiled by what Pella knew about Diana Eastling and Clement.

  “Do you ever dream that you’re running? Out here?” Diana Eastling waved her hand to indicate the valley floor. The gesture reminded Pella of Efram.

  Do I ever, thought Pella. She caught herself smiling. Then she caught Diana Eastling noticing her smile.

  “Why?” said Pella. “Do you?”

  She turned, and saw that Diana Eastling was smiling too.

  In that moment Pella became completely unafraid of what the Archbuilder viruses might do to her. She saw that Diana Eastling believed they were harmless. So Pella could let them live in her, could follow where they led.

  That was all she could possibly want from this conversation. It had come so easily. And now Pella didn’t care to indulge Diana Eastling for a second more.

  “Dinnertime,” she said, and ran toward the house.

  As soon as she’d wolfed down her dinner, a bland stew of various potatoes, Pella pulled away from the table. The others were still eating. Clement had barely begun—he was fussing around Diana Eastling, playing host. Raymond and David were arguing about Morris Grant, eating slowly to keep Clement from heaping more on their plates.

  “Pella—” said Clement.

  “I’m going out,” she said, and went, though it was night.

  In her hiding place she crouched down and pulled the blanket over herself.

  She had her purpose now. To find Efram. The conversation with Diana Eastling had freed her. Now a purpose coursed in her, a fever, a song.

  That viruses were so she could learn the secrets of the one who knew everyone else’s secrets. So that only she would know him. So that only she would understand him.

  She felt his contempt for Clement, for Hugh Merrow, Diana Eastling, and the left-behind Archbuilders, felt it as a thrilling vibration that ran through her, an animating current. She hated everyone he hated. She and Efram had an understanding. They alone felt the meaning in the chunks of Archbuilder architecture, they alone knew the ugly truth about Hugh Merrow. For she’d seen it too, seen something terribly wrong, even if she couldn’t say what it was. She’d been wrong in keeping the secret, foolish mistaking Efram for an enemy. Pella wanted to be absorbed into Efram now, wanted to live in his compound and laugh at the families, wanted to stride with exquisite bitterness inside his footsteps.

  She needed to see him alone in his house. She had to spy on him once, then never again.

  Her self flitted into a deer and ran across the darkened valley, exhilarated.

  His windows glowed a little, like a flame through candle wax. Their small light glinted off the windows of the greenhouse, so it almost seemed the source of the light. Pella-deer dashed on tiptoe amidst the planting pots a
nd scraps of metal, over Efram’s mosaic of stones, to his door.

  She listened. Nothing. Just Ben Barth’s chickens in the coop behind her. She zipped over to the nearest window and nosed at the edges. No point of entry. Nor sound. The same at the next window. Pella recalled her visit inside. Had there been any household deer there? Was Efram’s house sealed? She worked her way around the perimeter, edging her deer feet into window corners, testing for gaps. And listening for a sound from inside. She thought of his Archbuilder interior, the house within his house. Was he in it now, dreaming of space?

  She found her way into the greenhouse, through the lacy shadows his plants made in the dark, but the way to his house though the greenhouse was sealed too. She was alone there, beating like a heart in the dark, among the cool leaves. If he was inside he was perfectly silent. She couldn’t get inside to know, to see him. She ran back out through his yard, and up and over the ridge until his farm was out of sight.

  He must be drinking at Wa’s, she decided. So she went there, like an arrow shot silently across the valley. She darted inside easily, crowding aside two other deer at the window entrance. What she found there was Ben Barth slumped so deep in a rocking chair that he threatened to slide onto the floor. No other customers. E. G. Wa was cleaning up a spilled drink at Ben Barth’s feet, humming to himself. Pella climbed up onto a shelf to watch.

  “Where you goin’ with that?” Ben Barth said suddenly, rolling his head.

  “You’re done,” said Wa.

  “Where—”

  “You’re alone,” said Wa. “Sleep it off.”

  “Fuck.”

  “Go home,” said Wa, suddenly fierce.

  “I don’t have a home,” said Ben Barth.

  “Well, who’s fault is that?” said Wa. “You oughtta take over Hugh Merrow’s homestead.”

  “Hah!”

  “What’s so funny?” said Wa.

  “Place is overrun with Archbuilders,” mumbled Ben Barth.

  “They’ll go if you clear ’em out,” said Wa.

  “Huh,” said Ben Barth, and he seemed to lapse into himself again.

  “Come on,” said Wa. “I’m closing early tonight.”

  Pella slipped outside. She didn’t want to see more. The scene disturbed her. What was Ben Barth doing drunk so early in the night? Where was Efram?

  Something was wrong tonight.

  A trio of household deer ran past her, toward Hugh Merrow’s place.

  A high column of flame climbed up through the top of the house like an Archbuilder tower, visible across the valley before she was close enough to see the house itself, though when she joined the ring of household deer that stood watching Hugh Merrow’s home burn Pella saw that parts of it were only just catching fire. The door was open. Pella crept as near as she could. The fire smelled like garbage, like rotting food. The far wall, still unburned, was covered with roasting canvases. They smoked black and brown before bursting like bloated stomachs with fire. Merrow’s palette table was sitting in the middle of the floor. Martha and Bruce and Raymond and David had squeezed out tube after tube of paint onto the table, and now the wet gobs of pigment were hissing and popping, boiling in garish purple and turquoise flame.

  Then Pella saw it, underneath the table. The Archbuilder, lying still, its fur dull from the fire.

  She thought for a moment that its tendrils were moving. They were moving, not alive, but curling in the heat. The floorboards underneath it were smoldering. Then flames consumed the head of the Archbuilder entirely.

  Nothing was alive in the fire except the fire itself.

  The heat floated out in waves, making its own wind in the still, cool night. Pella staggered backward on her tiny legs, almost blown over. She was stunned by the fury of the fire. It roared like a being, roared for an answer. There was no one there to give it one. Only household deer. Which was the same as nobody. Pella herself felt insufficient to the fire, and the other deer were less, were nothing. They were air, smoke, virus. Nobody was seeing this, nobody could.

  Pella couldn’t see the Archbuilder anymore. She thought, Terrible things happen when nobody is looking. When I am looking. She fled.

  Dear Miss Marsh,

  I believe you left these at my house.

  Efram Nugent

  The note was attached to the bag of pills, which was set inside the entrance of her hiding place. Pella saw it when she woke. Her real body felt huge to her, thick and numb compared to the sliver of being that witnessed the fire. But she trembled just as fiercely as she had as a deer.

  Efram knew where she hid. Like Bruce before, he’d been here while she was asleep. He’d seen her dreaming body.

  And he was out tonight, in the time since she’d come to her burrow. He’d been out in the valley, roaming around.

  Seventeen

  “Pella, wake up.”

  She opened her eyes. It was David.

  “Clement said you would get me breakfast,” he said.

  “Where’s Clement?”

  “There’s a meeting.”

  “What kind of meeting?”

  “Because of the fire.”

  The night came back, the burning house. She sat up. “Where’s Raymond?”

  David shrugged. “You know Diana Eastling stayed in Clement’s room all night?”

  “Get out of here,” Pella said. “I have to get dressed.”

  When David left the room Pella took the bag of pills out from under the bed. Without pausing to think she put two of them in her mouth and swallowed. They stuck. She reached for the glass of water by her bed and washed down the pills, gulping away the lump in her throat, then took a third and swallowed it, too.

  No more spying. No more fire.

  Let Clement be right and Efram be wrong. Or let them both be wrong now. Let them both be her enemy.

  She dressed and went outside. The day was windy and hot, as if the Archbuilder weather had shaped itself after the fire.

  The ones she would have expected were there, the Kincaids, E. G. Wa, Ben Barth, and Doug Grant. But the lesbians were there too, Llana Richmond holding their baby. And Snider and Laney Grant. People she never saw away from their homes, people she never saw unless she slipped through their windows, invisible. They stood or sat awkwardly in the Kincaids’ living room, listening to Clement, in postures of defeat or barely suppressed panic, betraying their reluctance at being gathered. Only Diana Eastling was missing. And Efram, of course.

  Pella moved inside and closed the door, leaving David on the porch with the other children. Clement glanced at her and went on. Pella saw the shine in his eyes, saw the outlines of his imaginary podium. Spend the night with Diana Eastling, Pella thought, then wake to a crisis. Lucky Clement.

  Pella found a spot and slumped down against the wall, tucking her knees up, making herself small. Doug Grant glared at her. He was there on Efram’s behalf, Pella knew, not as part of Clement’s meeting. He stood near the door, eyes wild, jaw pulsing under his cheek, looking on the verge of twisting in half out of sheer fury.

  “I suggest you walk out and get a good look,” Clement was saying. “A few hours before it burned all our kids were in that house playing,” said Clement. “Not just Archbuilders. Though why Archbuilders should be any less a part—”

  “That’s why it’s good it burned,” said Doug Grant jaggedly. “Let them come out into the open, not hide in Hugh Merrow’s old place—”

  “Shut up, Dougie,” said Snider Grant. He looked at the floor while he spoke, and ran the back of his hand across his mouth. “What do you have to say about it?”

  Snider Grant talks just like Morris, Pella thought. A drunk is the same as an unpopular boy.

  Snider’s wife Laney Grant stood immobile beside her husband, arms wrapped around herself.

  “You want these people to think you did this thing?” Snider Grant said, still not looking at his son.

  “Nobody thinks you did it,” said Clement.

  “Sure,” said Doug Grant. “You think
Efram did.” He went to the door. “Screw you all,” he said, looking at his father. He went out.

  Clement didn’t even glance after him. “There’s a decision to make,” he went on. “We need to get some answers. We can be intimidated and disorganized or we can begin to act like a community.”

  He was talking past them, Pella saw. Over their heads, to a distant back row that didn’t exist. He was talking to history.

  “What does that mean?” said Julie Concorse. She was oblivious to history. “What do you want to do?”

  “I think we ought to go out and talk to Efram Nugent, as a group,” said Clement.

  “Great,” said Ellen Kincaid bitterly. “Go and form a posse, just like Efram did with Hugh Merrow. That’s great. You have about as much evidence as he did, too.”

  “Ellen—” said Joe Kincaid.

  “Let me talk, Joe. I don’t see why you can’t—where’s Diana Eastling? Why don’t you get her? She can talk to Efram. She knows him.”

  Pella was sick of hearing about Efram and Diana Eastling. She hated Diana Eastling.

  The wind outside was rattling the windows.

  “She wouldn’t come,” said Clement. He wound down, suddenly out of energy. “I agree, she should be here. She doesn’t want anything to do with it.”

  The door opened. It was Bruce, Martha, David, Morris Grant. “Can we come in?” said Bruce. “It’s kind of dusty out.” As he spoke the wind tipped over a bucket on the porch, which rolled, clanging, until it came to rest against the house.

  The lesbians’ baby began crying.

  “Get inside,” said Ellen Kincaid, weary now. “Close the door.” She placed her palms on Bruce’s and Martha’s heads. David and Morris sat together by the door. Looking at Clement, Ellen Kincaid said, “For God’s sake, send one person, someone who knows Efram. Don’t act like a mob.”

  The room turned its whole attention spontaneously to Ben Barth. He sat propped against a windowsill, as slumped and beaten-looking as the night before, at Wa’s. He didn’t move to acknowledge their attention.