The Feral Detective

by Jonathan Lethem

  Renee wowed us with her astounding indifference to her studies right off the bat, and with her feats of insomniac partying, punctuated by equally awesome bouts of daysleeping. We’d find her in the common area, still up, clinging upright on a couch, when we woke for breakfast—she’d need to be told to go to bed, like she’d forgotten how it worked. In contrast to Arabella at Reed, Renee had lasted through her first semester—somehow. When we both returned to New York for winter break I found myself invited to a New Year’s party with Renee’s Dalton friends, but I lost track of her at the party until I went into the back bedroom for my coat at two or three in the morning. There, I’d found Renee sitting amid the coats and handbags. She stared, with a cross-eyed cosmic expression I couldn’t parse, until I focused on her hands, which held a hypodermic needle. It had waited, like Spark’s gun, right below my line of sight.

  It was just this echo, the startling rupture of my unworldliness, that had brought Renee to mind. Yet actually, oddly, once I’d made the connection, Spark so strongly recalled Renee Lambert that I wondered for a minute—and aloud to Heist—whether they might be the same person. Maybe after dropping out, she’d come west? But no, that wasn’t right, Renee would be older by now. My age, and I was old.

  Heist humored me. In this fashion, in a tizzy of my own chatter, I was able to carry on, to progress beyond the sight of the gun and, perhaps even more objectionable, beyond the fact that we strode into the desert with no supplies, and farther from the Jeep. Well, if we needed we could drink the sky, and nibble my unleavened naiveté for a cracker. I seemed to have held on to a stash of it.

  I felt closer than ever to Heist. As my manic comparison trailed off, he didn’t speak, but then he’d given me so much in the Jeep. We had different styles. I made myself candid in fickle bursts, he reciprocated with marathon ruminations or silence. He’d led me into his desert. I took his arm. He let me.

  28

  THE LARGER COMPOUND SNUCK UP ON ME COMPLETELY. I SHOULD HAVE noticed Jessie take off ahead of us. One instant we trudged pathless sands. The next, around a rise, we’d entered a maze of human signs. Small habitations littered a span of landscape: huts like the two we’d passed, a few teepees, yes, and also half-submerged, tin-roofed pit dwellings.

  Heist steered through the smaller huts, and I followed. He found his way to a muddy well, a broad, unsheltered excavation with scraped-rock steps leading down to a place where mud and water pooled in tepid shade. The well looked as though it had been in use a long time. I supposed the gathering of structures had grown up around it.

  Two people stood at the lowest step, submerged in shade. A woman and a scrawny, Christ-bearded man, both dressed in soft, dun-colored clothes. Heist went halfway down and spoke with them. This wasn’t a nervy encounter like that with Spark. Heist was known to them, or spoke the Rabbit language in a way that took them off their guard, or they weren’t on guard to begin with. Spark might be the exception. Waiting at the top step, I caught a first glimpse of one of the children, a barefoot longhair, gender impossible to verify. It crouched like a cave dweller in the mouth of a hut, then made a face at me and rolled into a ball and tumbled comically backward, out of sight.

  Afterward, Heist took me to the largest building, a small cabin. There we met Anita. She wore the white robe I’d soon learn was for approaching her hives. Heist introduced me, and Anita gave us water and set out a bowl for Jessie, who lapped appreciatively. Then Heist went right to the point, asking about a girl who might be called Arabella or Phoebe, apparently trusting Anita not to be confused by the overlapping names. Anita gave me a bright, skeptical look-see, but smiled too. I was relieved to like her when she opened her mouth, even if she seemed ready, even eager, to squash our hopes.

  “Sorry, Charles. Your girl was never with us.”

  “But you know who I’m talking about?”

  “Not by either of those names. Or any name. We’ve had rumors and sightings. The Bears’ priorities are changing again. There was talk of a girl, among other things. But then there always is.”

  While she spoke, Anita knelt disinterestedly at what appeared to be a small heap of stones in the center of the floor. When she nudged one with a forked stick I saw a spray of sparks, and a glow from beneath. Jessie leaped backward, then nosed back. It was some kind of banked fire, not that we were particularly cold at mid-morning, even in out of the sun. We took seats beside her. My eyes adjusted to the cabin’s gloom.

  “What about the mountain?” Heist’s question was noncommittal, it seemed to me. It didn’t reveal what we’d seen on Baldy. Yet his tone cast Anita as his willing partner in broad speculation. She seemed to take the bait.

  “Oh god, the mountain. I’ve heard the usual Bear stuff, about a coming flood, but with a stupid new emphasis on some crafty deal they’d struck up on Baldy. I got the feeling they’d been fleeced by someone or something.”

  “I thought they were going to stick to their carnival and stay out of trouble,” said Heist.

  “Since when have you known the Bears to stay out of trouble?”

  “Aren’t they getting too old for this?”

  “Like all of us, Charles. But they have a young new king. The worst yet, which is saying something.”

  “Do I know him?”

  Anita nudged the stones again, and then I saw they weren’t all stones. Some were stone-like shapes in blackened foil. Using her prong, she teased these onto the floor, then vented the foil to release trapped steam, some savory essence out of nowhere. I was struck dumb with hunger.

  “I don’t think anybody knows him, really. The only name he goes by is, get ready for this, Solitary Love.”

  “Ex-con?”

  The references in their talk whizzed over my head. Heist and Anita seemed to speak in some ancient code. But I didn’t feel jealous. Instead, I felt party to the investigation at last. Enveloped in the conspiracy, whether I understood every detail or not.

  “Love claims to be an Enduring Storm vet,” she said. “But I doubt he got the tattoos or that nickname in Iraq. If you squint, he looks almost human. Our plan is to set him on fire next time he comes near enough.”

  Heist raised his palms in a gesture of surrender. “I saw that movie. One time was enough for me.”

  Anita had clocked my interest in what she’d plucked from the coals. Now she used the forked stick to shove one of whatever it was my way across the floor. I juggled it up for a look. The food within was some kind of cornmeal pouch around a chunk of green. “Go ahead,” she said, and when I paused, she added, “Cactus tamale.” She shoved another steaming packet in front of Heist, and one for Jessie too.

  “Thank you.” I slurped in a bite too hot to swallow.

  I was more than Heist’s sidekick now, I was the new girlfriend being shown off, and welcomed by—what? His ex? His mom? Distinctions didn’t so much matter; I was under her wing, in the family. The tamale was delicious, stingingly spicy and hot. Looking back, it was obvious I was coming down off a jag, a combination of hunger and pistol derangement. At the speed I decelerated now, if I wasn’t careful I’d curl up and pass out on the floor.

  “Looks like I need to go and see this new young king,” said Heist. He spoke as if to no one, as if to the ragged horizon that bound this hut on all sides.

  “Never forget,” said Anita.

  “Never forget what?” he asked.

  “All this could have been yours.”

  29

  WHAT HAPPENED NEXT HAPPENED FAST. HEIST STALKED FROM ANITA’S cabin, leaving his tamale half-eaten on the floor. Jessie went too. Anita smiled at me again, as if it were natural I should be left flat-footed on her sandy floor. The way of the world. I gobbled the last of my food and grabbed my purse and bolted outside, to follow.

  I had to run to catch up. When I did, my reward was to have him turn and say, “Better you stay.”

  “You’re kidding me.”

  “I’ll be back in a few hours.” He never broke stride, gaze locked to destination as firmly
as if he drove. It was the Jeep he moved toward, of course. We went past the two huts where Spark had stood and confronted us with the gun, though I saw no sign of her there now.

  “No fucking way,” I said. “I’m coming with you.”

  “I should do this alone.”

  The language between us grew rudimentary, then, and circular. I kept telling him the search belonged to me, that he didn’t even know Arabella, and that I’d followed him this far for a reason, not to be sloughed off at the threshold—deposited like a spare Rabbit at the hutch. He kept, well, sloughing me off. Soon Heist was silent while I railed at him, amid empty hills born to swallow human language, carved by time to make my protests small. I’m sure I was screaming by the time we reached the steep crag that had kept us from driving right into the Rabbit town. The Jeep was visible up above. I recall the phrase fucking macho bullshit with no particular pride.

  Heist opened the driver-side door, and Jessie leaped inside. I entered the passenger side. There, I found myself temporarily quieted. Sitting in the Jeep again, I remembered our long drive, the tenderness with which Heist had allowed me to sleep off my fear, his hand on the crown of my head. Besides, maybe simply by following him to the vehicle I’d won, and he’d take off to confront the Bear King with me aboard. At least he hadn’t physically booted me from the passenger seat.

  But Heist wasn’t going anywhere. Typically passive, he sat, the key in his hand resting ready on his knee, and let his insistence saturate me wordlessly. When I spoke again my tone was seething but quiet, and I heard my own defeat in it.

  “Are you and I even on the same planet?” I said.

  “There’s only one planet.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Spock. You know, I figured you out now. You may look like a wolverine, but you’re the opposite. You’re one of those Leonard Nimoy types, a total Asperger’s robot. Human beings are just puzzling animals to you, worth saving for the sport of it, no better than stray dogs. There’s only one planet, sure—but you’re studying it from the wrong end of the telescope.” I knew this was nonsense, really, yet I wanted to claw at the door behind which Heist had sealed his infinite sadness. The vanity with which he concealed it from me was suddenly repulsive.

  Heist didn’t reply, but Jessie did, by thrusting up to lick my face, making me aware of the tears I’d uncorked. Heist only closed his eyes and stretched back, making a physical sigh without accompanying sounds.

  “It’s like I’m watching you reel back into these ancient tribal grievances,” I told him. “It makes me furious, because I dragged you into this to find a real lost living girl, a young woman.” I didn’t mean myself. But I left Arabella unnamed, to permit the implication. “It makes me sad too, in like a hundred different ways. If you say it’s a sad planet you’re going to make me puke.” I wanted to unentrench Heist from the past, into the present life—that one in which he and I were at least tenuously lovers.

  “It’s not about any of what you say. It’s about not showing up with another ready-made hostage.”

  “You’re as much a ready-made hostage as me.”

  “That isn’t how they’d look at it.”

  “Great. Excellent. Let’s examine everything from the Bear perspective. It trumps anything I could possibly say. I hate how that word is ruined, among so many other ruined things.”

  “What word?”

  “Never mind. I know current events aren’t your bag. When you’ve got a minute go ask the Owl, or the wise old Badger, they’ll explain.” Jessie licked my gluey nostrils. I smooched with him a bit, my booby prize, just to show Heist what he was missing. “Fine, go do your man shit. Jessie and I will be waiting in the menstrual lounge area.”

  “I need Jessie with me,” said Heist. “I need a tracker.”

  “Oh, that’s right, Jessie’s got a penis. My bad.”

  “You know how to get back?” Heist only had to tip his chin. The Jeep looked out toward the way we’d come, the rise behind which the Rabbits did their Rabbit things.

  I told him I knew the way back. Then I said, “Did I break through to you in any way? Because you broke through to me. I saw you howl, Charles.”

  All day I’d been wanting to remind him how we’d been in the Airstream, that we’d unpeeled one another there, that we’d each come. But that was common, really. I’d had that with plenty of fools from whom I’d parted—easily, absently, gratefully. It was what had happened on the mountain that bound us, or I believed it did. Trauma makes you a family, I thought absurdly. I’d believed Heist and I had been wrecked together, but maybe we’d only been wrecked at the same time, in two different ways. I didn’t know what the mountain meant to him, after all.

  “I remember.” That was all he said, but he turned toward me then, and his eyes softened inside the worn mask of his features.

  I wasn’t letting him off so easy, not this time. “You remember what? That you got to come in my mouth?” I needed Heist not to turn out to be some top-level Western-style pickup artist, one so strung out on his internal event horizon that he couldn’t even be bothered to properly neg me.

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  “Feel free to elaborate.”

  “I . . . I see you, Phoebe Siegler.”

  My whole name: I was in his mouth now. It moved me, but I pretended it didn’t. “You see a lot of things,” I pressed. “I don’t come from nowhere, you realize. I’ve seen some things of my own, some things that would freak you out as bad as that mountain, maybe worse.” I couldn’t think of what these exactly were, at the moment. But never mind.

  “I don’t doubt it.”

  “I’m not some stray in a drawer. I’m not a Rabbit either.”

  “No,” he agreed. “You’re a woman, a different kind.”

  “What kind?”

  “I don’t know yet.”

  The yet I liked. Heist might have been bargaining, to be rid of me. I didn’t care.

  Then we were kissing, for a while. Jessie tried to join us, confused by my encouragement a moment earlier, but we shoved him off into the back seat, where he quieted down. Good dog. The way Heist and I kissed didn’t translate into more than it was—neither of us persuaded the other of anything, and we weren’t about to strip off our clothes right there either. I had the distinct impression that I was kissing a sculpture, an odd and interesting statue, the interior of which was solid to the core, and inaccessible. I felt us as two topographies, abutting, yet lonely inside. But for all that, hey, it wasn’t bad.

  I remained terrified, at how Heist had instilled in me a fear of abandonment I’d never previously tasted. If my illusions were like exes, I felt I’d been dumped eight or ten times in the past week. Yet at least I could feel, just for an instant, how my fears were themselves rooted in a stark appetite for something unnameable but real. Under everything that had been taken from me, I did observe myself rustling around. Maybe Heist was the same as a desert: a void encounter, one putting me in a heightened relation to a certain Phoebe Siegler.

  He was more than that. He was a figure about to go howling again, off into his own wild. He might also be Arabella Swados’s best hope. I didn’t ask him again to take me along.

  “Be careful, Charles.”

  I hated his guts, and feared for them too.

  30

  WHEN I PASSED IT AGAIN, I LINGERED FOR A MOMENT AT SPARK’S HUT, the dark entrance she’d popped from. She wasn’t there, but I felt her presence. I was being watched. I moved off to the ridge behind which lay the well and Anita’s cabin, the small Rabbit civilization. Then I looked up and found Spark there, silently keeping pace with me on a rise to the right. The pistol was hung on a rope around her waist; I had no difficulty spotting it this time. That was one way I was changing.

  31

  NOW, TWO HOURS LATER, RETURNING FROM FETCHING STICKS WITH LORRIE, as I walked with Anita toward Neptune Lodge in the flattening golden light and chafing wind, I sensed her again. Spark. A special nerve in me was attuned to the girl with the pistol, an
d now it reawoke. I turned and searched the hills and sure enough, there she was, scrambling along a distance from us.

  “Anita?”

  “Yes?”

  “We’re being followed by that young woman from the outpost. Spark, I think she’s called.”

  “Yes, I noticed that too.”

  “I think she’s following me specifically.”

  “I’m sure you’re right. Apparently, you interest her.”

  “Am I that interesting?”

  “To Spark you are.”

  “Bada bing, bada boom.”

  But Anita charged on ahead, Red Queen to my Alice, forcing me to follow, oblivious to my wit. Her dickishness made me want to take her at her word and be grateful I had at least Spark for an admirer. My charms seemed lost on Rabbits on the whole. I wondered whether it was optional or mandatory: my visit to their sick captive Bear, this deepening involvement in Anita’s skewed, dusty kingdom. During my interlude gathering sticks, I’d begun looking forward to the fire. I could feel the allure of a bite of charred food and the cover of night—a place beneath the stars and a certain distance from the madness of these women. It might be the next best thing to a hot shower and a Wi-Fi signal.

  In this mood, Neptune Lodge came as a little bit of a shock. I’d been in the Mojave less than twenty-four hours, but the large satellite dish, which loomed up as we came around a rocky outcropping, appeared like some clarion of modernity, an Eiffel or Empire State. The building’s wide, low roof sported solar panels too. The structure nestled in a cradle of rock, sheltered from wind. We approached it from above, on steps notched in the stones. Here were glass windows as well. Maybe a hot shower wasn’t out of the question. I recalled that tantalizing prospect Anita had held out: a room with a door that closed.