The Feral Detective

by Jonathan Lethem

  The couple was locked in an embrace. For warmth, I supposed, given how little they wore beneath their fur costumes. This was how I understood it at first. They clutched each other and couldn’t be bothered to notice us, they were so chilly and helpless in the pit there, she in her silly rabbit costume, the oversize hood with furry ears, him in his corresponding bear outfit. Their hands and feet were outfitted with oversize paws and their chests and crotches were covered with fur, but their entwined limbs were fully exposed, only smeared here and there with patches of mud, weirdly bright-dark against their pale moonlit arms.

  I’d gone so far as to consider with exasperation what it would take to rouse these callow teenagers from the hole and explain to them they’d been rescued and help them down the hill before I saw that what I’d taken for mud was dark red, a kind of congealed, frosty cherry Jell-O that bunched inside the animal-head hoods. Their throats were slit. Heist had slumped down, his back against the pit’s wall, sobbing, his breath torn in wretched gasps. Miller leaped into the pit, Vacuum too. Miller licked at Heist’s face, Vacuum at the dead faces within the hoods, the bear-boy and the rabbit-girl, and then Vacuum began helping himself to some of the Jell-O, smearing it along his muzzle. I managed to reflect that this might be taking primal sorrow a bit far before I tumbled back from the pit and twisted around to retch bile and merlot into the snow.

  I was startled back into myself by the howling. I think it was Heist who began it, first a kind of ragged keening, but joined in a chorus that rose through doggish baying to a kind of barbershop-werewolf presentation. They didn’t keep it up long, but astonishment drew me up to my knees. I wiped my mouth on my coat sleeve and rubbed the ice and gravel from my palms, then unzipped my coat enough to stick my hands into my armpits for warmth. The rest of me was warm enough or too numb to understand it wasn’t, but my hands felt bitten through.

  “Phoebe,” said Heist from within the hole.

  “What?”

  “You have to look.”

  “I looked already.”

  “Is it her?”

  I groaned protest. It wasn’t her, or if it was I wouldn’t look.

  “You have to be sure.”

  I crawled. Jessie crouched beside me. Heist was at the rabbit’s head, pulling back the hood to show her face to the moon, while blocking the murdered throat from my view.

  “No.”

  “You’re certain?”

  She was a blonde, with thin lips and empty eyes, somebody else’s. Somebody else’s missing girl, somebody else’s demolished child in a hole, decked as a ceremonial rabbit.

  “That’s not Arabella.”

  “Okay.”

  The moon was pitiless, sun-like. “Take me away from here.”

  19

  HERE, AT THE NEW SUMMIT OF MY ABJECTION AND PASSIVITY, AT LEAST in my adult lifetime, I began to disassociate. My disassociation took a particular form that was hardly useful, but may be interesting to report. In a reverie so rapidly designed by my subconscious that it was as if it had been preformatted for convenience, I had in fact not quit my job at the Great Gray Lady but instead taken a remarkable assignment. An op-ed, a special full-page intended for the first Sunday after inauguration. You, Phoebe Siegler, are uniquely suited to infiltrate and explicate to us the Great Out There, which we at the editorial board are at last ready to admit we don’t understand in the faintest.

  I should underline what horseshit this was. I’d never been asked to write a thing. As at the literary journal, I’d been a decorative editorial flunky, a limit I’d never fought my way free of. (That was partly my fault, hey—it wasn’t as if I’d gone around pitching brilliant ideas for op-eds, and the witticisms that turned the heads of the men around me were more in the cause of charming self-deprecation than of carving my way out of the category of the highly dateable.) But in this fantasy, I was on a brilliant assignment into the underground that the election had in fact revealed as our nation’s dominant paradigm. Sew a Pepe the Frog medallion onto your backpack, young lady, and go seduce the unspeakable and hairy, then report back. Tell us where the hell we are. The total incoherence of this fantasy didn’t blunt its consoling sweetness. Nancy Drew was defunct, replaced by Joan Didion—a female Reporter from the Outer Limit, whose meekness in the given moment would be revenged in sublime verbal retrospect.

  20

  I HARDLY RECALL THE JOURNEY BY FOOT BACK TO HEIST’S TRUCK, EXCEPT that he now employed the flashlight and an arm around my waist as we hustled, sometimes sliding on our heels, back the way we came. He stashed me in the cab while he rounded the dogs into the back, under the tarp. I think I passed out and missed the start of the journey, but before we reached the village again I was shocked awake by a dream of someone pelting his windshield with gravel. Actually, someone was pelting his windshield with gravel, and as I came awake I pointed it out.

  “It’s hail,” Heist corrected.

  “Hail? This is fucking Los Angeles.”

  “No, this is a mountain.”

  The arrows of ice beat intermittently against the truck as we drove the switchbacks now covered in fog. Heist pulled us into the dirt driveway to the abandoned cabin where we’d hidden my car. I never could have spotted it myself.

  “I’ll build a fire,” he said.

  “Wait, we’re staying here?” It was so like my naughty fantasies but so useless now, and I was bewildered.

  “Just you.”

  “While you go get the police?”

  “While I go get a Jeep.”

  “You are so fucking deluded if you think I’m staying alone in this fucking cabin while you—what’s the Jeep for?” I couldn’t stop saying fucking, and I couldn’t displace the rabbit and the bear with their skinned-white limbs and ragged bloody throats from my visual field, not if I looked at Heist’s Easter Island head, not if I looked at the cabin illuminated in his truck’s headlamps, beaming through hail that was just now converting to drifting flakes. If I squinted it was almost Christmassy. Or fucking Christmassy, let’s call it.

  “Phoebe, those kids are warm up there. Hours old.”

  “Stop talking about that.” I’d fished out my cell phone and was compulsively asking it to find a signal. No signal, no method, no teacher. We were out here alone, reinventing the universe.

  “If we call the Feds, we’ll lose hours, if not days. We might go to jail for a while. That’s doing Arabella no good at all.”

  “How do you know Arabella’s involved in—that?”

  “I can’t know she is,” he admitted.

  “Somebody’s looking for those kids,” I said. “They belong to somebody.” Even as I said the words I knew these were the kinds of things that were far from assured in the world of the Feral Detective.

  “We’ll call it in anonymously once we’re on the road.”

  “What’s the Jeep for?”

  “The rabbits and the bears live in the desert.”

  “Please, no more puzzles.”

  “There’s two groups. The Rabbits and the Bears. They’re . . . communities.”

  He’s friends with the rabbits and bears. Sage had been trying to tell me what she knew. I’d taken it for a children’s chant.

  “Off-the-gridders,” I suggested, proud that I could speak-a da lingo.

  “Way off. They live in the Mojave, in a place nobody else goes to, a place you need a Jeep even to get to the edge of. The Bears come here to use the mountain, I told you some of it already.”

  “The ceremonies.”

  “Yes. Though they don’t ordinarily leave dead bodies.”

  “They knew we were coming so they baked a cake.”

  “Sorry?”

  “Nothing. You’re right. We have to go to the desert, Charles. Before it’s too late.”

  Heist moved me inside the cabin, which was unlocked, and left me there with the flashlight, to study the corners for real or demonic creatures, to examine the broken window and the corroded linoleum tile, while he got firewood out of the truck. Then he bu
ilt a fire in the ancient black woodstove, faster than I’d seen a thing like that done before. He brought in a bedroll and unzipped it and put me inside, and I let him do all these absurd things to me because I couldn’t imagine what else to do, and because I was immobilized by the problem of who I was, now that I’d seen what I’d seen. A lot of me was still on the hill, at that moon-blazed clearing, crawling on my knees to the edge of the pit.

  “Why can’t I come with you?” I whined.

  “You’re packed already. I need to grab clothes and get the Jeep and arrange some things.”

  “Feed the opossum.”

  “The opossum is dead.”

  “Oh, great. Did someone kill her too?”

  “They don’t thrive in captivity.”

  I do, I wanted to say. “Don’t leave me.”

  “I’ll be back in a few hours. We’ll drive and talk, or you can sleep.”

  “What if the Bears come back?”

  He shook his head. “They left the mountain.”

  “I want you, Charles.” I tried to make this seductive, rather than desperate. But seduction was desperate. I’d fallen so far.

  “I want you too,” he said, and through the swirl of my horror and apprehension, of bears and rabbits and whatever had befallen or might befall Arabella in Heist’s desert, I was still thrilled to see how it surprised him to say it.

  “Then don’t go.”

  “I’ll be back,” he said again.

  I reached out of the coverings and pulled him to me, and made him hold and press and kiss me until he’d made me feel that the fire and the cabin around the fire were an extension of his embrace. At that, I relented. Snow whistled in through the broken window but the room had grown warm. The flames flickered through the black stove’s grill and I didn’t need the flashlight anymore, so I turned it off. I saw Heist as if through a hot mist. I reminded myself that I’d been the one to force him up the mountain, where he didn’t wish to go. I’d been the one to walk into his office. I’d run from the great glass building in New York, and from its evil counterpart, the Golden Finger of Sauron; I’d run from the shitty old world to the bright utopian edge, the western void, to beg this abduction by a man I’d never imagined existed. He was friends with the rabbits and bears. I should change my name to Arabella. She’d adopted mine to show me who I was, to tip the script.

  “Do you want me to leave you a dog?”

  “Jessie,” I said. “Just Jessie.” I might have been dozing, I realized now.

  “Okay.”

  And then he built up the fire and went to get a Jeep.

  Part III

  The Desert

  21

  I’D BEEN IN LORRIE’S COMPANY FOR MOST OF AN HOUR, COLLECTING sagebrush for the evening’s fire. The stuff wasn’t just lying there, it had to be crackled free of the dry underside of the living plants, twisted gray skeletal things that revealed their vitality only in the difference between the dry limbs and those which resisted, which bent and sprang back. There was an art to it, and I was improving.

  Lorrie had insisted, rightly, that I wear her spare hat, a floppy sunhat, mesh dripping around my ears. Still, around the hat’s edge, the sky assaulted me. The sun had tilted from its brutal perch overhead, making for the low ridge of distant bare bluffs, and the wind had picked up again. I checked my phone, which wasn’t a phone anymore, but a clock, and some kind of glinty talisman too, vestige of a former life or world. The third or fourth time I did it Lorrie said, “That’s not how they reach you out here.”

  I’d learned something about the two tribes, the Bears and the Rabbits, from Heist. I had yet to meet the Bears. Lorrie was a Rabbit. By this time, I’d met eight or nine of her kind, women and a couple of men, all sun-blazed, wiry, industrious, and what I suppose I’d call opaque. Gnomic.

  I’d also been abandoned again by Heist, a humiliation that burned in me, but Lorrie hadn’t been witness to it. She’d been friendly without giving me the least hint whether or not she might also be totally insane. I took this chance to draw her out.

  “No? How do they reach you out here?”

  “Out here they use contrails.”

  “Con-whats?”

  She lifted the front of her hat and pointed at the sky. Conveniently—or had she clocked it in advance?—a jet’s white exhaust tilted across the cloud-scudded blue canvas. The plane, long gone. If someone, let’s say a JFK-to-LAX traveler like that I’d so recently been myself, had glanced down, they’d have seen only inhuman ridges, scraped sculptural vacancies. Mars. No chance they’d have imagined the two sun-beaten women fetching sticks like Bruegel peasants, let alone spotted our dire stretched shadows, speckles amid the outcroppings and sage—the plants and birds and rocks and things littering this raw distance.

  “Contrails,” Lorrie said again.

  “Who’s ‘they’?”

  “You know, anyone wanting to penetrate your body with radiation or advertising.” She nodded again at the phone in my hand.

  “I was actually thinking of calling my mom.” Well, someone else’s mom was in fact my intention. I wanted to call Roslyn Swados and tell her where I was and that I was still trying, that I was out here searching. Either that, or snap a photograph of Lorrie and her bundle of kindling and text it to Roslyn. So far as moms went, there was no reason not to keep Arabella and myself mixed up in my own head for the time being. It was better than equating myself with Lorrie, the option Heist had left me with when he ditched me.

  “We’re mostly our own moms out here. But I can be yours if you want.”

  So, we can pretty well settle on insane, I thought. But I wanted to keep her talking, because even the voice of an insane person may serve as a tether to the human, and I was pretty far out on the edge of things here.

  “When’s the last time you talked to her?” I asked. “Your own mom, I mean.”

  Lorrie shrugged. This was a nonstarter. Instead I pointed up, at the contrail.

  “Is that one telling you anything?”

  “Just that it all goes on and they’re not done pretending and the bombs haven’t fallen and they’re not even trying to answer the question of what comes next and they’re not sorry and it’s our job just to be witnesses to it all, to abide with the dying planet. I don’t think I can explain all of what it says, but that’s a start.”

  Now we’d squatted in the sand to rest and study the sky, and Lorrie surprised me by tugging aside her shorts and releasing a stream of urine. It trickled its way through the ridged sand floor into a tiny ravine to begin evaporating visibly, like steam in a drying cast-iron pan.

  “But there’s no personal message.” I knew I was being an asshole. “Nothing like ‘Lorrie, phone home’?”

  She looked at me with pity. “I’m sorry for your hurt.”

  “I am too.”

  “You’ll let go of the people in the machine. It’s a grieving process.”

  “I’m less into process, more into sudden procedures. Like a Botox injection, or liposuction.” I felt I could say anything to Lorrie, but not in a good way. “For instance, just a few weeks ago I was working right in the brain of the machine, helping the machine to think about itself. I was practically the machine’s girlfriend.”

  “Wow.”

  I couldn’t squat as long as Lorrie, so I fell back on my ass and hands. I had no puddle of fresh pee to avoid, and was anyhow already coated in the sand and desert grime that flew in the wind. The two of us continued to stare at the sky. Come to think of it, maybe a New York Times op-ed was pretty much like a contrail, as likely to be heeded from its great lofty perch.

  “Yeah, it’s pretty weird,” I said. “One minute I’m Ms. Machine, then, kablooie, I met some dogs and a possum, and next thing I knew I was here with you guys. The Rabbit people. You don’t mind if I say that?”

  “No, that’s our right name.”

  “So, like I said, here I am.”

  “Instant karma, that’s what they call it.”

  “Well, someone did.
”

  At that instant, I was startled by the presence of someone approaching from behind where I sat. The insulating barrenness of the Mojave had struck me as absolute, and to find that Lorrie and I weren’t alone in our contrail fugue made me feel like a dreamer, as though space had folded to make a doorway.

  “Ladies.”

  It was Anita. Big Chief Rabbit, the one Heist had been seeking when, hours before, we’d first stumbled into the Rabbit village. It was after Heist and Anita talked that Heist had run away, deeper into the desert, and left me here. I held it against her. She was an older woman, keen and scrawny as the rest of them, but with superbly full white hair and the carriage and demeanor of a studio-bred actress, one who’d quit lying about her age.

  Anita now wore a Meat Puppets T-shirt and running shorts, her feet in large muddy boots. She’d earlier appeared in a white priestly outfit I learned was designed for walking up to desert hives—Anita was a beekeeper. It was she who’d directed Lorrie to lead me out fetching sticks, so I shouldn’t have been so surprised she’d found us. It was only that I felt we’d walked miles from that earlier point, and would need to walk miles back—yet why shouldn’t our walk have been in circles, for all I could trust my internal compass in this place? I didn’t trust it coming out of a Midtown F train stop.