The Feral Detective

by Jonathan Lethem

  “Now you’re crying.” He spoke softly. He always did.

  “So?”

  “I—”

  “Shut up now.”

  He knew how to do that. So the five of us breathed there, in that space capsule to nowhere. The Airstream hadn’t even had to launch and crash-land to find a ruined planet. It had only needed to be parked at the rim of a pit in the unincorporated zone between Upland and Claremont. What was I doing with my life, that I’d come to come here?

  “Are you okay?” Heist whispered after a while.

  “Yes.”

  “You were beautiful.”

  “I don’t know about that. But that’s my first since the election.” Did I exaggerate? Sure, I might have managed a few desultory one A.M. or morning-shower wanks in the zombie weeks of the Obama administration, without taking much notice of it. But my orgasms weren’t small occasions. The journey to being a person who entertained them in the company of others had been a private epic. It hadn’t been obvious that such pleasures would be available to me on the far side of the Neoliberal Dream.

  “Okay,” he said, rather stupidly. The flood of tears unleashed in me was, in fact, a flood of rage. Heist could hold me, but I could hate him while he did. Vacuum licked my cheeks clean. I let him. Men had trashed the world that women and dogs had to live in, and at that moment I counted Heist among them—the men, I mean, not the dogs. I thought of Arabella again, out there somewhere in the company of her possible abductor, the so-called Buddhist with his Chinese friends. Was she in a trailer at this moment? Were there dogs to warm her?

  “Do you have cigarettes?” I said. “Or is this a vape-only zone?”

  “I’m sorry. I don’t have either one.”

  “You clean-liver, you.” I went groping for the wine bottle, drank from it directly this time, a deep gulp. He said nothing.

  “I’ve figured out why there’s no music. It’s a holding action. Because you’re only a turntable and a collection of vinyl and maybe a personal brand of artisanal foie gras away from being just another fucking Bernie Bro, aren’t you?”

  I was pretty pleased with myself, but Heist had no idea what I was talking about. My bile had nowhere to land. It was as misplaced from its context as I was, here in the Inland Empire, in this zone between, where I could no longer glimpse the world that was anyhow irretrievable. Inauguration was in two days, if I counted right.

  “I can go get cigarettes, or music, if you need it,” he said pathetically.

  “No.”

  “Okay,” he said again, to soothe me or himself.

  “No, it’s not okay. Don’t forget what brought me to you, Mr. Heist.” My thickened tongue had to struggle not to call him Heisht, but my brain was suddenly acute, wide open and enraged. For a moment, anyhow. I could feel it wishing to snap shut into blackness. “There’s a missing girl.”

  “Yes.”

  “And tomorrow we’re going up the mountain like we should have done today, and we’re going to find her, and I’m going to take her back to New York City, and I’ll never see this fucking place again.”

  “I understand.”

  Heist had to show me how to flush the tiny built-in toilet with the pedal on the floor, and he had to keep me from tumbling over as he took me there and back to the bed. And then I in my disheveled clothes and he in his, minus the red leather jacket, swam into the bedclothes, and were covered by the three dogs, so that I couldn’t tell one from the other when I groped in the furry dark. And there we slept, the five of us.

  Part II

  The Mountain

  13

  THE BUDDHIST STUMBLEBUM KEPT APOLOGIZING FOR THE WIND WHILE HE showed me around the premises of the Zendo. I ought to have been grateful to him, since I’d given no advance notice of my arrival, but then again it didn’t seem he’d had much to do before I’d appeared. Maybe he should’ve thanked me. Maybe he had, in his way, with his exhibition of enthusiasm, the little hop in his step, and his apologies for the wind.

  The skies were clear up here on Baldy, the wind incessant. I shuddered, feeling it cut through my coat and pants. My legs felt naked to it. What had fallen as rain down below had apparently landed as snow here in the mountain village. Melt, or freezing rain, had made a crust atop the snow and black sheets on the paved walkways, on which a last dusting had fallen in a flurry overnight, perfect for slipping and cracking your skull. When I’d walked through the gate onto the grounds of the compound, the man in robes had been sweeping the grainy stuff off the walks and watching it blow just as quickly back across.

  He’d parked his broom and welcomed me warmly, assuming I was some kind of pilgrim, and I hadn’t corrected him. A pearish man, no taller than I was, with black alert eyes and such a heavy salt-and-pepper goatee that I couldn’t see his lips. I might have taken him for a waiter at a Barney Greengrass brunch, an impression only deepened when I made out a Queens or Long Island accent beneath the tone of plodding sincerity he’d obviously cultivated to go with the robes, and with the pointless sweeping. It was then that he’d told me his name was Nolan.

  The road to Baldy Village had even less to do with any image I’d maintained of Los Angeles than did the valley below. The wind had begun to impress me during the winding drive up from the flatlands, my rental hugging the curves behind Heist’s pickup. It moved my car sideways a couple of times. I tailgated Heist, as if tethered to his car and therefore to the road. I drove near enough to his bumper that I could watch the dogs’ heads rustling beneath the tarp, now that I knew to look for them.

  There wasn’t that far you’d want to go sideways on that winding two-lane, which on the sharper turns allowed views of valleys like chasms behind the low rock barrier at the passenger side. The landscape had altered completely in a matter of minutes, once past the high reservoir. The signs promising lodges and warning of bear and fire danger gave off a whiff of Aspen, where I’d spent a weekend skiing once—or rather, a weekend of falling on my ass and struggling free of snowbanks.

  At the Zendo, I’d parked my rental beside a weird vehicle, a Ford Econoline van with a cracked windshield, like Heist’s, and wooden two-by-fours replacing the bumpers, jacked up on too-big wheels. It was painted a drab matte green, like something military, or paramilitary. There wasn’t sign of another soul besides Nolan in the compound. The atmosphere evoked a mountain resort after the neutron bomb. I couldn’t see the white top of Baldy anymore. I was too near to see it, here at the Zendo. I only sensed it, up where the wind was screaming.

  “You don’t hear it after a while.”

  I looked at Nolan, startled to have my thoughts read.

  “Much like the noise inside,” he added, tapping his skull to make certain I understood. His stance was ostentatiously wide, weight distributed evenly on the white old-man running shoes poking from beneath his robes. Or maybe it wasn’t ostentation, merely a good idea on this ice.

  “I don’t have noise inside,” I said. “Only modern jazz. Saxophone solos, mostly, sometimes Muzak when I get lazy.”

  He didn’t reply, only radiated a smug amused delight to have me land in his world. Maybe they didn’t get so many lady pilgrims since the sex scandals broke up here, and after Leonard Cohen took a powder for the flatlands. Worse, the big Zen Poobah himself, who’d founded the place, had departed this world for the next. Possibly they didn’t get many pilgrims of any kind now, only gawkers.

  I’d been reading about it on Wikipedia, and it seemed impossible to me that Arabella hadn’t done the same. I was barking up the wrong tree. Well, barking might be too strong a word for it. More like letting some of the noise out of my head in the direction of another person, that same noise I’d just claimed didn’t exist.

  Possibly this wind could blow it all away, and that was why they’d put the Zendo up here.

  “I’m looking for a girl. A young woman. She might have called herself Arabella, or Phoebe.”

  “Recently?”

  “The past month.”

  “Those are nice na
mes. I think I’d recall.”

  “I think so too. She could have used some other name.” I thought of suggesting her mother’s, or some female variant of Leonard, or the names of the women in Sleater-Kinney, but I couldn’t remember those.

  “Yes,” he said. “People often get renamed up here. Me, for instance. Roshi told me I couldn’t be Nolan anymore.”

  “I’m sure he had his reasons.”

  “Oh yes.”

  “Is there anyone else I could talk to? Someone in charge?”

  “In charge of what?”

  In charge of Nolan, I wanted to say and didn’t. “Do visitors sign in somewhere?” In my head I tried on some rock and roll song I’d heard in the car, hoping it could drown out the wind and how I wanted to strangle the stumblebum.

  “If you sign up for a sesshin, a retreat, you fill out a form. Also it costs money. But sometimes people just stop by, like you.”

  I thanked him and asked if I could walk the grounds.

  “I’m not supposed to let you go alone.”

  “I won’t bother anyone.”

  “It’s very snowy.” The former Nolan’s brain seemed to work sideways. I almost envied it. He resumed sweeping while I puttered along the paths he’d never clear if he swept a thousand years, but there was nothing to see. I returned to the warmth of my rental car and drove back down into the center of Baldy Village, to wait for Heist at the Mount Baldy Lodge bar, where he’d said he’d find me.

  14

  MY BAGGAGE WAS IN THE TRUNK. I WAS READY TO GO. WHEN I’D AWOKEN, bathed in sweat and straitjacketed in dogs, in Heist’s Airstream, I’d first turned my face back to the pillow in shame, my mouth swollen and chalky with alcohol and semen. Heist was up and brewing coffee and I’d taken some from him without speaking. When the coffee spiked my brain and opened my lips, what rushed out was more fury. I told him to return me to the Doubletree and that I wanted to go up the mountain to retrieve Arabella in my own car. Heist was quietish. He did as I asked. He’d said he had to take care of Jean the opossum and see to a few other things. Whether this meant his office or the stray girl Melinda or more of the People of the Wash, I didn’t care. He said he’d come back to the hotel and lead me up Baldy in a couple of hours.

  By the time I’d showered and had about a gallon of water and more black coffee to wash down a hotel sticky bun, I looked over my little dungeon there and began packing my Dopp kit and suitcase without another thought. Whatever else, I was done with this room. Arabella was up the mountain, which Google Earth and human logic told me was as good as having her treed like a housecat. There was one road up to Baldy Village and the Zendo, and it topped out at various wilderness trails and finally the ski lift. Unless she’d helicoptered or astral-planed her way off the mountaintop, I’d find her. Should my search require staying overnight, there were the lodges, but I preferred to believe I’d pull her off the mountain this afternoon and load her onto a red-eye at LAX. Virgin Atlantic, ideally, with lots of lovably hateful Manhattanites in first class. I’d get home with a California story or two in my back pocket. No, sorry, I didn’t ever set eyes on the ocean or the Hollywood sign, but did I tell you the one about the porta-potty levee? The trailer park blowjob? Oh, What a Manic Pixie Am I! I pictured telling this over late lunch at Elephant & Castle. So I’d thrown my stuff into the trunk of the rental and checked out.

  Now I ordered a coffee at the lodge, untempted by the balloon glasses of merlot certain mountain-dwelling creatures were already crouched around at barely noon. The Zendo had been too utterly a contemplation of the void at the center of my scheme and self, my rescuer’s vanity. My phone showed no signal—Heist had already shunted me off the grid, without my even noticing. I was at his mercy again, as much treed up this mountain as Arabella. My suitcase in the trunk of the rental could be destined for an LAX baggage carousel, sure. Then again, by removing my traces from the suburban Doubletree, I’d made myself convenient for abduction, to wherever Arabella had gone, or wherever Heist wished to lead me.

  15

  I WAITED TWO HOURS, EVENTUALLY RESORTING TO A GLASS OF THE MERLOT. Then a second. When Heist came in, around three thirty, he didn’t join me straightaway but stopped to talk to a grizzled prospector type who’d been sitting at a table near the door nearly as long as I’d been at the bar, guarding a tall glass of beer and squinting at the roadway as if expecting someone. I considered joining them, to catch a hint of what was exchanged, but before I could, they’d shaken hands and parted. Whatever words had passed between them were yet more that was beyond my ken, possibly strands of the trap into which I’d fallen. Too, I felt sulky, left out of the fun.

  “Phoebe.”

  I punched his leather-clad shoulder. “Hey, old buddy,” I said. I felt the onset of my own preemptive daftness. I’d been in his bed the night before. Behaving idiotically, I might disguise how idiotic I felt. “You crack the case?”

  “Not exactly.” I saw him glance at my wineglass.

  “Care to join me?” I said.

  “Not right now.”

  “You want to ask me how was the Zendo?”

  “How was the Zendo?”

  “I met the cutest little sweeper.”

  “I’m sorry?” Heist looked strained, which reassured me, actually. If it disappointed my faith in his prowess, at least my paranoia was assuaged. The so-called Feral Detective was nothing much, not avenger nor conspirer, not boyfriend material, and likely only a pair of weird weepy orgasms away from being forgotten by me completely. Most likely when I got back within range of an Internet signal, I’d find an e-mail from Roslyn waiting, explaining that Arabella had returned to New York or the Reed campus under her own steam.

  “There was nothing to find,” I said. “Not even one of Leonard Cohen’s lost sandals. I’ve been sitting here for hours.”

  “Did you talk to anyone?”

  “Nope. Why?”

  “Nothing in particular. Just—”

  “You can’t imagine me not talking for two hours, can you?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “What’s the matter? You look nervous. I thought you said this was a dead end.” He’d begun side-eyeing the lodge bar’s population, one of the more detectively moves I’d seen from Heist, actually. Yet a more innocuous assortment of alcoholic mountain coots could scarcely be imagined. I was even beginning to like them, two hours and two glasses of wine into my vigil. I’d fallen into a world of facial hair having nothing to do with Williamsburg, Brooklyn. It put Heist in an attractive light. Here he represented a clean-cut young man of the West. And I’d felt only the passingest of urges to collar these gents and demand they tell me who they’d voted for. I had a feeling they’d tell me they’d written in one another’s names, if they’d voted at all.

  “I didn’t say it was a dead end either.” His voice was low. “I think we ought to drive further up. You want to pay and we’ll talk in my truck?”

  “Sure.”

  I reached for my purse, but he said, “Here, let me.”

  “Really? How gallant!” I pronounced it the French way.

  “I just don’t want you to use your credit card,” he said tightly. He threw down a twenty and took me by the arm. His grip I kind of liked, but I pulled free of it once we were through the door. We walked past my car to where his truck was perched on the shoulder, a bit up the hill.

  We climbed into the cab, but he didn’t put the key in the ignition. I said, “What gives? You yourself were glad-handing around that place when you came in.”

  “My face is familiar, your name isn’t. It might be better not to leave such an easy trail.”

  “I don’t care if they know my name.” I pushed back, by instinct, at what seemed to me off-the-grid bullshit. “Hey, come to think of it, maybe I should scatter a few breadcrumbs around.”

  “Better not to.”

  “Explain yourself, detective.” I still worked to keep it playful, but there was no one batting the balls back across the net. Though the pick
up’s engine was dead, Heist spoke with his hands on the wheel, staring straight ahead, presumably in the direction of whatever concerned him, farther up the mountain. After so long in the lodge bar, my eyes had some difficulty adjusting to the late-afternoon glare off the snow, so I turned my head down too and waited through one of his deliberative intervals. In profile, his absurd sideburns looked like some Russian count’s high collar.

  “If we understood Sage right, Arabella’s been using your name some places. Possibly including this mountain.”

  “And?”

  “Have you considered that she might have gotten into something illegal?”

  This stopped me cold. I considered, not for the first time, that I might be the one lost, cast as the dupe. Only now it was Arabella who’d ensnared me. She’d sent my name journeying into the world ahead of me, to what purpose I couldn’t guess. My name might have learned things I didn’t yet know.

  “Illegal like what?” I heard myself croak.

  Heist didn’t speak at first. When he finally did, it wasn’t to acknowledge my question. His gaze remained stuck on the road, the lengthening mountain light.

  “You good to drive?”

  “Sure,” I said, a little insulted.

  “Because I’d rather not leave your car here in the middle of town. Follow me a ways into Goat Ridge Canyon, to where there’s a place we can stash your ride.” His use of the corny slang was too evidently native to mock. I readied to mock it anyhow, but I found myself struck dumb by all the grim implications. “Then you can jump back in with me and we’ll go further up.”

  “Okay.”

  Now he glanced at my feet, which were clad in green suede loafers, already lightly stained from the lodge’s parking-area rock salt. “You ought to be prepared to hike a bit.”

  I’d wrapped my still-soggy boots in a plastic dry-cleaner’s bag from the Doubletree closet and buried them in my luggage while dreaming of check-in at LAX, what now seemed a thousand years ago.