Girl in Landscape

by Jonathan Lethem

  “We won’t act like a mob,” said E. G. Wa. “We won’t because we don’t agree what needs doing.”

  “Gathering doesn’t make a mob,” said Clement feebly. “A community has a right to hold a meeting.”

  Ben Barth curled further into himself and emitted a little moan of displeasure. Pella thought of the day she’d first met Ben Barth. He’d been so excited by the new family’s arrival on the Planet that he couldn’t shut up. Now he was like a guilty shred of himself, suffering the weight of the accusations that Efram never even seemed to notice.

  The wind shook the house. Pella looked up with a start at a thump outside. The bucket, or something else, blown off the porch. Melissa Richmond-Concorse cried louder.

  “March us across to Efram’s farm and see if he thinks it’s a meeting,” said Ellen Kincaid. “I’m sorry, Clement. It doesn’t make sense to me.”

  “Not without proof,” said Julie Concorse. “I agree.”

  “Nobody saw anything?” said Joe Kincaid. “Nobody knows what happened?”

  Why hadn’t she taken the pills sooner? Just a day would have been enough. To be asleep, truly asleep in her bed. Not to have known the fire. Not to be the witness.

  Or could the urge to spy be stopped by the pills that quickly, in just a day? Pella felt a thread of fear inside her. What if nothing stopped it once it started, no matter how many pills you took? She wanted to run home and swallow another one.

  When she looked up again Efram had come in.

  He held the door open for a moment and pointed outside. “Feel that wind?” he said.

  Nobody spoke. The sky was yellow, the wind shrill.

  He closed the door. “There’s a pollen storm coming,” he said. “You people ought to make sure your homes are sealed up.”

  Pella stared from her spot on the floor. Had he seen her? She looked away, not wanting to feel his stony presence looming.

  “Pollen storm?” said Llana Richmond.

  Wa spoke eagerly. He seemed grateful to have the meeting broken. “Stuff blows around all of a sudden. When the potato vines are full of seeds. So the potatoes get in all kinds of nooks and crannies. Get in your house if you aren’t careful. Find them growing in the toilet.”

  “We need to talk to you, Efram,” said Clement.

  “So I heard,” said Efram. “I’m here. Talk.”

  “It’s about the thing that happened out there, Efram,” said Joe Kincaid. “At Hugh Merrow’s place.”

  “Let’s go,” said Laney Grant in a panicky, whining voice. She grabbed at her husband’s arm. He shrugged her away childishly, then followed her to the door. Morris Grant glared at his parents’ backs. The wind kicked pebbles across the porch, past the open door. One rattled in across the floorboards before Snider Grant closed the door.

  Pella noticed there weren’t any household deer around.

  “The thing that happened,” repeated Efram. “You mean the fool Archbuilder that started a fire and got itself killed?”

  He made it sound like the title of a fable, Pella thought. Another little play he was going to put on for them, a lesson.

  “There always were a lot of volatile ingredients sitting around Hugh Merrow’s place,” said Efram, with a hint of satisfaction. “Somebody should have gone in there and cleaned up, maybe this wouldn’t have happened.”

  “Come on, Efram,” said Joe Kincaid. “Archbuilders don’t burn down buildings.”

  Efram raised his eyebrows. “Too bad we don’t have a chance to ask Truth Renowned why it made an exception to your rule, Joe.”

  “That was Truth Renowned?” said Clement nervously.

  “I talked to Gelatinous Stand and Lonely Dumptruck just now,” said Efram. He jerked his thumb over his shoulder, indicating the valley. The places Clement knew nothing about. “All three of them spent the last couple of nights at Merrow’s, but they were out when Truth Renowned started the fire.”

  So Efram had already spoken to the Archbuilders about the fire. Clement’s questions were all anticipated. The energy in the room drained toward Efram. Clement was lost. Pella thought irrationally that it was too early in the morning for such a total defeat. The rest of the day spread before them, crushed. The rest of their lives on the planet. Where could Clement go from here?

  When he lost his election he should have died, not Caitlin. Died and spared them this.

  The wind outside was shaking the windows.

  “Efram,” said Clement softly.

  “What?” said Efram. His eyes were searching the room restlessly, but they still hadn’t lit on Pella. She might as well have been a household deer as her real self, for all Efram cared.

  And he might as well be a killer and liar, a fire starter, for all she cared.

  “Some of us want to learn to live with Archbuilders,” Clement said. He picked the words one by one, as though he knew his thread was very thin. “Work together with them, make a town.”

  Efram scowled. “Don’t let me stand in your way,” he said. “Only if you don’t get home soon and close your windows you’ll be in charge of a potato factory, not a town.”

  “Efram’s got a point about the pollen storm—” began Joe Kincaid.

  “Things are changing,” Clement went on, in some speechifying trance now, back for a moment on his podium, though it might be invisible to anyone but Pella. “Some of us want to come to a real understanding of their culture and biology instead of resisting it, being suspicious and superstitious about it—”

  “Be more specific, Mr. Marsh,” said Efram. “Some of us have a good understanding of the Archbuilders.”

  “There are families here who aren’t taking the antiviral drugs,” said Clement. “We’d like to see what happens if we open ourselves to the Archbuilder viruses—”

  “We?” said Efram, raising his eyebrows, interested at last.

  Clement nodded at Llana Richmond and Julie Concorse. The baby Melissa was sitting at Llana Richmond’s feet now, playing with her shoelaces. “More than just one family,” he said.

  “How do you know what we’re doing?” said Julie Concorse fiercely.

  “Mr. Wa mentioned it,” said Clement. “I don’t know of any other source for the pills, outside of Southport—”

  “I didn’t mean to poke into your business,” said Wa pleadingly.

  “It’s not your fault,” said Llana Richmond. She looked at Clement. “Don’t drag us into your battles, Marsh.”

  Efram stood by silently, radiating impatience, letting Clement’s gesture crumble in dissension.

  Meanwhile, the wind was rising.

  Clement looked half-asleep now, even standing on his feet. There was a dumb hint of a smile on his face. He’d collapsed into himself. One by one the others had left, stepping out into the howling wind, first Efram, taking Ben Barth with him back to his farm, then E. G. Wa, then Julie Concorse and Llana Richmond, with their baby. Morris had asked if he could stay there, at the Kincaids’, to wait out the storm, and he and Bruce and Martha had followed Ellen Kincaid into the back room, stranding Pella and David with Joe Kincaid and Clement.

  “Clement,” said Joe Kincaid gently. “You really do want to be indoors when it hits.”

  Clement still hadn’t moved. Pella got up from the floor and took his hand, took David’s, led them to the door. They ducked their heads into the wind and headed for home.

  Poor Clement, she thought. Always right, and always wrong.

  David sat at the table. Pella brought out a loaf of Ellen Kincaid’s bread from the cupboard and set David to slicing it and spreading mustard on the slices. Then Pella got out the cheese and turkey and she and David assembled sandwiches, a pile of them, cut into triangles. Clement and Raymond didn’t come out of their rooms. Pella and David sat in silence at the window, eating and watching the potato-vine pollen swirl in the air and batter gently against the house.

  Bruce and Martha and Morris were waiting for them after the storm, when Pella and Raymond and David went out wonderingly into th
e valley. They fell into step together, headed out past Wa’s, away from their homes. They all were quiet, even Bruce, even Morris. It was only the middle of the day, and too much had happened. The meeting at the Kincaids’ seemed remote, a thing that had happened to other people, not them. Everything was in disarray. The planet had humbled them.

  The pollen, which seemed to fill the sky during the peak of the storm, was invisible now, all drifted or blown into corners, under ledges. The potato vines had curled back to the ground. Their leaves were still now in the dead air. The household deer had come out of hiding, and were running insanely everywhere. Pella ignored them. She didn’t feel any urge to be among them, didn’t feel the sleepy curiosity calling her, didn’t miss feeling it. That part of her was gone.

  Without speaking Pella steered the group in the direction of her hiding place, the half-buried Archbuilder turret. The group was sheepish and easily led. They came over the ridge behind the shell that hid Pella’s secret bed, and stood nearly on top of it.

  “Careful,” said Pella.

  Martha was standing ahead of the others. Bruce took her shoulder and pulled her back. He knelt down and thumped the crust with the flat of his hand. “Yeah, it’s hollow.”

  “What is it?” said David.

  “Just some old Archbuilder building,” said Morris.

  “Let’s knock it down,” said Pella.

  Bruce looked at her questioningly. Pella turned away from him. She renounced her secret life, including Bruce’s conspiring glances.

  Let Raymond’s cache of mourning photographs be the only reverent secret hidden out in the valley.

  “It’s not safe,” she said. “Somebody might fall in.”

  Morris Grant picked out the largest rock he could find and pulled it up to the level of his chest, then staggered forward and let go. The rock sank into the wall of the structure but didn’t collapse it. It sat like a scab or a tumor, half-buried. Pella thought of her blanket and bottle of water that were underneath and would be entombed. Like a cradle for a baby who would never be born.

  “C’mon,” said Morris, “help me.” Teetering out incautiously over the sunken stone, Morris began tapping at it with his toe.

  “Careful,” said Raymond, “you’ll fall.”

  “Let’s use rocks,” said David.

  Bruce looked at Pella again. She met his eyes, and shrugged.

  David and Martha carried smaller stones over and dropped them on top of Morris’s. Pella felt a flush of pleasure at the easy manipulation. The other children were like her arms and legs, doing what she willed them to do. Bruce joined in now, raising a flat stone over his head and plunging it into the depression that had formed in the top.

  “Here,” said Raymond. “Quit throwing.” He sat on the edge of the hollow and brought his heels down in unison. David and Martha and Morris immediately joined him. Kicking together, they brought the shell down. It crumpled with a dusty exhalation, entombing Pella’s little bed. The heap of rocks slid over the top, a tiny avalanche sealing the place that had been her entrance.

  “There,” said Morris with enormous satisfaction, as though he’d both conceived the project and been the one to carry it through.

  “There,” said David too, pretending to huff with effort.

  “Let’s go look at Hugh Merrow’s place,” said Bruce. Now he avoided Pella’s eyes. “See what’s left standing.”

  “Maybe that’s unsafe too,” said Morris. “Maybe we’ll have to knock it down.”

  “Okay,” said David.

  “Knock it down,” said Martha dreamily.

  Raymond didn’t speak, but like the others he seemed brightened by their destruction of Pella’s hiding place.

  Moving intently now, they went across the ridge at the top of the valley, to Merrow’s.

  What remained of Hugh Merrow’s house was another crust on the verge of collapse. The blackened walls still stood, but the interior partitions and everything within them had vanished. The roof was gone. There were no traces of the canvases that Martha and Raymond and Bruce and the Archbuilders had decorated just a day before. The palette table and the easels and the chairs were all reduced to indistinguishable char, in heaps on the floor. The blackened sink stood sprouting from the well like a gnarled mushroom, the countertop burned away around it.

  The body of the Archbuilder was gone. Pella wondered if Raymond or David or Martha or Morris even understood that it had been there.

  She knew Bruce understood, from the way he avoided her gaze.

  It was Bruce who led the attack on the skeleton of the house. He kicked in the door frame, so the wall around it began to buckle. Then he found the place where the wall sections met and began kicking. Scuffs of black soot covered his sneakers instantly. The others joined him. This time even Pella. Without fear for their safety they swarmed the ruins, tearing the walls apart with their hands and feet. The house was flimsy, like a set for a play. The front fell to Bruce’s attack almost instantly. The families might as well have been sleeping outside like Archbuilders as in this joke, this wisp of a house. It deserved wrecking. Pushing together like a team of dray horses, the children brought down the whole rear wall, splaying the back of the house open, revealing the spread of broken spires on the horizon. Then they wrenched down the last of the side walls, too. The wall groaned a minor protest, then fell. Puffs of newly fallen pollen drifted out of corners where it had lodged. The floor was strewn with shards of blackened wood and the rubble of ruined items, paintbrushes, kitchenware, a few books. Ashes. The children stopped and regarded their work. The house was done. It was garbage. It belonged to the Planet now. It begged to be covered with vines. That would be mercy. The only thing standing was the sink, a feeble echo of a ruined tower.

  Now they stood gathered at what had been the front door, gazing at the valley through the space of the wrecked house.

  “Look,” said Martha.

  “What?” said Bruce.

  Martha pointed out to the left. “There.”

  “What?” said Bruce. “There’s nothing there.”

  “No, look,” said Raymond. “She’s right. Some people or something.”

  They all strained to see.

  They wended around the flattened ruins of the burned house and down a short slope, where for a moment the distant figures were out of sight. Pella thought for a moment they’d imagined them. Then up the other side, and the figures reappeared, nearer, but still not near enough. The children walked forward, magnetized.

  “Up here,” said Bruce. He pointed to a rise on their left. “They won’t see us.”

  The group scrambled after him. Pella too. She said to herself, Spying, lying, spying, lying. Spiers and liars.

  It was three Archbuilders and Efram Nugent. They were building a sculpture in the sun. Pella recognized Hiding Kneel, Gelatinous Stand, and Lonely Dumptruck. Hiding Kneel was using a shovel to load buckets of black mud from deep under the hard floor of the valley, and the other three were packing it onto the form under construction, a figure about the size of an Archbuilder, a rough statue. Efram was working as diligently as the others, not leading them, not following. As the mud figure dried it turned the color of the rock and dust.

  Then Pella saw the shoulder of the statue, where fur had been slicked down with moisture from the mud, but not covered. It was a real Archbuilder they were packing in mud. The shapes at the top were its collapsed tendrils.

  “What are they doing?” said David.

  “Archbuilder funeral,” whispered Bruce. “Ben Barth told me about this once.”

  “How’s it a funeral?” said Raymond.

  “Like burying someone aboveground,” said Bruce, not taking his eyes away. “They build the dead Archbuilder into a monument, with sticks and wire so it stands up. Sort of like, be your own tombstone.”

  “But what’s Efram doing there?” said Morris.

  No one had an answer for this. They stood behind Bruce on the bluff and watched as the burial party patiently slathere
d mud onto the still body.

  Ash, fire, mud, fur, thought Pella.

  “Be your own, be your own, tomb-stone,” chanted Martha under her breath, bringing out the rhyme.

  They returned to the house. Clement was gone. They were all three numbed and hungry. Pella made more sandwiches and they ate without waiting for Clement, as darkness fell.

  Afterward they cleaned up the table in silence. The long day was supposed to be over now.

  “Where is he?” said David at last.

  “Be quiet,” said Pella.

  “But where is he?”

  “I’ll go find him. Get ready for bed.”

  Pella was halfway to Diana Eastling’s house when she met Clement. He’d mastered this one route, at least. He could walk one path through the valley in the dark with his head down.

  “Hey,” said Pella, stopping him before he practically walked over her.

  “Pella,” said Clement, his eyes brightening momentarily, then falling.

  “Where have you been?”

  “Saying goodbye,” he said.

  “Goodbye to who?”

  “Diana’s leaving,” said Clement. His voice was flat and dead. He trudged ahead, letting Pella fall into place beside him.

  “Leaving for where?” said Pella. “Southport? Earth?”

  He waved his hand carelessly behind him. The night was all around them now, the distance pressing in. “Out there. Exploring, visiting her sites. Her Archbuilder friends.”

  “She does that all the time.”

  “This is different,” he said. “A long trip. She asked Raymond to watch her place for her.”

  “So?”

  “She’s getting away from me. From the town.”

  Pella looked over her shoulder, as though Diana Eastling might at that moment be seen skulking across the landscape. Pella had wished her away, but now she felt doomed by the loss. Diana Eastling was a thread of sanity, of control.

  “Why?” said Pella.

  “I tried to make her understand what Efram did, but she doesn’t believe me. She says it’s a grudge …” He broke off.

  Pella decided then she’d never even seen the burning. Perhaps some household deer might have. It was likely, since household deer were everywhere. Too bad they had no voice. Too bad they had nothing to do with Pella.