The Feral Detective

by Jonathan Lethem

  The so-called lodge wasn’t larger than a suburban ranch house, really, but I’d had my expectations shrunk to the local scale. Did Heist know about this place? I couldn’t imagine, but then again my confidence at any guesswork concerning Heist’s hopes, dreams, motives, turn-ons, or any other of the contents of his skull was in an all-time ditch, along with my wish to continue giving a shit.

  “Is this a Rabbit place?” I asked Anita.

  “It belongs to an ally.”

  “Why wouldn’t you just all live like this?”

  “A question smothered in money.”

  “You’re squatters,” I blurted. “The owners aren’t here.”

  “The only squatters are your norms. They’re squatting in your mind. I don’t have time right now to chase them out.”

  “Yes, I’ve been hearing how busy you are. I’ll wait.”

  The lodge was laid out like a split-level family home, with an open-plan kitchen featuring a refrigerator and stove, though the spaces were mostly bare and the rooms dark, no evidence of electric light despite the solar panels. There I met a black woman Anita’s age, in the ordinary Rabbit-Bedouin gear, named Donna, and another white girl approximately my age, who wore a plastic windbreaker and sunglasses indoors. She struck me as a slumming debutante, perhaps the Edie Sedgwick of the group. Maybe the lodge belonged to her parents, even. When we were introduced, she mumbled her name, which sounded like Glinda or Glimmer, and made a special effort to buffalo me with shrugs and eye rolling. I wondered if all the norms squatting in her mind had been chased out, or if that effort was still pending. I’d lost sight of Spark as Anita and I had come down the hill, and now I wondered if she ever came indoors, to a place like this—I didn’t think so. My study of Rabbits was a fledgling thing, but I was beginning to make out a few different subspecies.

  32

  DONNA LED ME IN, WITH ANITA, WHILE GLINDA OR GLIMMER HUNG BACK. The large high-ceilinged room was at the end of a corridor at the back of Neptune Lodge—the master bedroom, I’d have said, but I didn’t think they’d care for that name, under the circumstances. The windows there were shadowed by overhanging stone, and as the sun dimmed I felt ushered into an underground cavern. At first I thought the room was empty, and that I was being shown my quarters, which were ample but spooky—but no. The downer Bear lay across the bed, his body a still lonely mountain beneath a light sheet, his Mennonite beard and heavily inked arms tucked out over the top of it. Then I saw that a shackle and chain ran from his arm to an exposed pipe in the far corner of the room. It didn’t look uncomfortable—he had worse problems—but it didn’t look friendly.

  The Bear’s mouth hung wide, the sound of his breathing so ragged I felt certain he was asleep. Then we moved nearer and I saw his eyes not only were open, but charted our presence in his sickroom. They appeared to be the only living thing in the vast choleric pudding of his face. His lips never rippled to produce the sound, the wake-snoring or undeath rattle that filled the room—instead it seemed piped in, as if a speaker had been secreted in his beard. His earlobes showed signs of lapsed tribal-style piercings, but only loose flesh remained. The metal had all been removed from his body, perhaps by the Rabbits, as if to free him of his chosen toxins.

  The room’s scent was earthy and saline, like fresh deep sand dug from a hole at the beach.

  “Shockley, I brought a visitor.” Donna spoke in a low murmur and nodded at me.

  “I told you I want my sister.” The Bear talked around the guttural, corroded breaths, but they didn’t abate just because he spoke.

  “Your sister can’t come. This is Phoebe. She’s from New York City.” Donna turned to me. “Shockley used to ride a motorcycle, and he likes to talk about places he’s been. Don’t you, Shockley?”

  “I been to New York City, shit,” said Shockley. His eyes found me. It took a surprising effort for me to choose to step up nearer to his bed.

  “What did you do there, in New York City?” asked Donna.

  “Shiiiiiiiiit.” Beyond this, Shockley only breathed, and we all listened. Goya could have painted the scene. I tried not to be ashamed for either of them: the ancient whalelike body, scarred by fantasies of criminal glory, now imprisoned in patronizing solicitude, or Donna, the only black person in the entire Mojave Desert (so far as I’d seen) behaving like his nurse. This wasn’t for me to point out.

  Donna spoke again. “Shockley had a good day today, but he gets tired around evening time.”

  “No, I want to talk to Phoebe, man. I like Phoebe.”

  I was having trouble finding my voice. “I like you too, Shockley.” Why did he make me want to cry? Because he reminded me of Heist, goddamn it.

  “You know who Andy War-hole is?”

  “Sure.”

  “Well, I don’t look like much now, but when I got to New York City in 1967 goddamn if Andy War-hole didn’t want to take my picture.” His rasping groan seemed to warm to the tale, growing more expressive, even when he had to pause for breath.

  “Did he give you a copy?”

  “Sweetheart, I never thought to ask.” He managed a hoarse cackle.

  “Would have been a valuable keepsake.”

  “Awwwww, I’d have lost it by now anyway, or rolled some drugs up in it and smoked the thing. Best speed I ever tasted, up in that Factory joint.”

  “That must have been nice for you.”

  “Got my ashes hauled by a lady who wasn’t a lady too.”

  “I hope that was also nice.”

  “Gotta try everything at least once. Well, let’s say twice.” He attempted a smile, just legible in the gasping mouth and the heavy beard. “Now you tell me one.”

  “My stories aren’t very interesting.”

  “Hell, everybody’s got a story. It’s what makes us human. I just want to hear you talk, Phoebe from New York. Tell these Bunnies I need some goddamn privacy here.” He startled me by lifting his hand, the one without the chain, to flick a finger at the door. The effort seemed to cost him, and when the hand fell again the fat hairy fingers twitched slightly, as if palsied.

  Donna looked at me, and Anita.

  “It’s okay,” I said. “Leave me alone with him.”

  “I’m going to make some coffee,” said Donna. “You want some?”

  “Yes, please,” I told her, and she and Anita left the room. Against a few of my better instincts, I got up and shut the door behind them.

  33

  “LISTEN, MR. SHOCKLEY. WE PROBABLY DON’T HAVE LONG.”

  “Sweetheart, that’s real touching, but I don’t know if I’m capable at the moment.”

  “No, just listen.” I’d had my big idea. The effect of being so far off the grid wasn’t so different, I’d now understood, from the result of being too much on it. Self-invention prevailed. If these people had crept out of the cities, out of late capitalism, to become Rabbits and Bears—if Renee Lambert might as well be Spark—then what kept me from being the Feral Detective? In the Mojave, no one knows you’re not a dog. “Mr. Shockley, I’m not who you think I am.”

  “Who do I think you are?” The Bear’s eyeballs moved in a not-quite-panicked way, or so it seemed to me. It might actually be the case that you couldn’t read eyeballs in an absence of other body language. Well, I’d see if I could panic him a little.

  “I’m not a Rabbit.”

  “No Rabbit,” he echoed, as if it wasn’t real unless he chewed it in his beard a little.

  “Nor am I Rabbit-affiliated, despite any impression I may have given just now. Those women have no idea, but I’m working undercover here in advance of an all-out paramilitary raid. My people sent me in to get a certain young woman out before the shooting starts.”

  “Shooting? Shooting who?”

  “The agency I work for, Mr. Shockley, necessarily nameless at this point, is a pretty blunt instrument. They’re not too interested in distinctions between different species. I wouldn’t want to be out here on the dunes when the helicopters show up.”

 
“Helicopters?”

  “Black ones.”

  “Fuuuuuuuuuuck.”

  “That’s about the size of it. But I’ve been authorized to offer you amnesty in return for a modicum of cooperation.” Yes, folks, she could do the police in different voices. I was the apotheosis of a latchkey child addicted to Law & Order.

  “You’re going to get me out of this room?”

  “Maybe not instantly, but yes. I could also try to contact your sister or get you into some other kind of safe house.” I felt this was when I crossed into the territory of what could fairly be called malicious: Shockley was going to die in this room, in my estimation.

  “Shit, let’s get to cooperating.”

  “It feels like we’re off to a good start.”

  “To me too, honeybunch.”

  “So, lead me to my missing person. She calls herself Arabella, or Phoebe. I assumed her name, in order to confuse the Rabbits.”

  “I got nothing. Who’s the target of this big raid, anyhow? Don’t tell me they’re sending black ops after some lost girl.”

  “My agency is pursuing a number of targets, including a certain Mr. Love, Solitary Love. I believe you know him?”

  “Crazy-ass Love’ll never be brought down alive, and to kill him outright might require a bazooka.”

  “I’ll take that as confirmation. Do you also know Charles Heist?”

  “That’s the great white hope you’re talking about.” Shockley’s breathing deepened, and quickened. “Flesh of my flesh, blood of my blood, fur of my fur.” His free hand flickered to life again, beckoning to his distant tribe. I thought of old ladies I’d seen on Madison Avenue, in mink, barely able to hail a cab. “The boy broke my heart but I could never do anything but forgive him.”

  “He’s been sighted in the vicinity and he’s wanted for questioning as well.”

  “He’s back because they called him back, man.” His voice grew introspective, and his eyes rolled back. “It fucking worked, I knew it would. They laid a trail and he came in from the cold.”

  “You’re saying what? That the Bears called Heist back here?” I leaned in close enough now that I smelled him, the must of his body under the sheet, the tang that wafted from his mouth.

  “Sure enough. His destiny’s calling, really. We’re just the telephone.” The Bear reached for his spooky voice. He had a knack for whispering in capital letters.

  “How’d you place the call? With contrails?”

  “A sign was left on the mountain.”

  “I was afraid you’d say that.” Now I was free to hate the man in the bed. It didn’t conclude my fascination with him but gave it a new flavor. I wasn’t through with my questions either, if only the Rabbits would stay put on the far side of the door. I had to hope it took a good long time and lots of collective manual labor to crank out a cup of coffee around here.

  “So, what’s his destiny?”

  “If anyone can make it right, it’s old Charlie-boy. Wish I could be there to see it.”

  “How make it right?”

  “They’re going to have a Bear fight. By the end of it we’ll have a true king.”

  “Who’ll fight? Solitary Love and Charles Heist?”

  He cackled, in the affirmative. “Somebody’s going to die.” This came as barely a whisper. The Bear was fading again, the thrill of our private encounter no longer enough to kindle him through the evening hours.

  “Why is that necessary, that someone should die?”

  “Freedom, girl. Death’s its bedfellow.”

  “Maybe. Maybe I’m a little less impressed with freedom than you are.”

  “Spoiled bitch.”

  “God, I wish. I remember what it felt like. I hope somebody spoils me again at some point.”

  “Liar.”

  “How about you talk about Arabella now?”

  “In hell.”

  “Oh, are we playing the word association game? I’m good at that one. I played it on long car trips with my parents. And here I was, thinking you wanted to get out of here.”

  “Pussy.”

  “There you go. The word of the year. It’s number one with a bullet.” I doubted my gambit had any further juice in it. The man was dying, but he was dying to me even faster. He wasn’t a man anymore, but an oracle trapped in diseased flesh. Now the oracle was out of answers.

  I turned to discover the door open behind me, Donna and Anita standing there. For how long I didn’t know.

  34

  THE COFFEE CAME OFF THE STOVETOP IN AN OPEN POT. THERE WERE eggshells in it, to leach the acids, and the coffee was very good. The shells were from some bird smaller than a chicken—or from a very small chicken. I just hoped they weren’t rattlesnake eggs. But the electric coil on the stove had worked, by some measure or another. While we sat in the kitchen, Anita and myself on hard wooden chairs, Donna perched on the sill of a window opened wide to the gathering dusk, I watched the coil cooling from orange to black again. Whether it was generated by the solar panels or not, Neptune Lodge featured electricity.

  If the satellite dish was also in order, there might be some kind of signal. I doubted I could keep my promise to the prisoner Bear to call in a flotilla of black helicopters, but I might be able to let some authority know where I was, or to bask in the latest Twitter outrage. I filed the thought away. I didn’t want to take my phone out in front of Donna and Anita because I didn’t want them to confiscate it. Our klatch seemed friendly enough, but I wasn’t sure of my standing with the High Rabbits after whatever they might have heard. I preferred not to end up shackled by my wrist to their other guest in some sort of cute Hitchcockian nightmare.

  “I’ll show you your room, when you’re ready,” said Anita.

  “Is there a continental breakfast?” I joked. “Does my door lock from the inside or the outside?” They ignored me, Heist-style.

  “I smell rain,” said Donna.

  “Does that mean tonight’s fire ceremony is canceled? I was looking forward to that. I brought a lot of sticks.”

  “We’ll start a fire,” said Anita.

  “I could sleep in the Jeep,” I said. “If you show me how to get back there.”

  They ignored this too.

  “Why did you bring me here?” I felt feisty enough to lay my cards on the table, if it meant I got to see a few of theirs.

  “We thought you should see what the Bears consisted of,” said Anita. “Conrad Shockley got you up to speed. He’s the short course.”

  “Yeah, so what’s the deal with all the bikers and ex-cons? I was expecting brocaded vests and drum circles.” I didn’t want to say how disappointing I found the Rabbits as well. I’d been waiting to see womb-based architecture, wax-dripping ceremonies, harmonium-flavored incantation. Instead everything was flayed and stark, life barely clinging to an exhausted surface. They were survivors of the catastrophe that hadn’t happened yet, which was maybe the point. They were readier than I was.

  “Listen in the night,” said Anita. “You’ll hear the drums.”

  “I thought the colony was founded by a lot of idealistic hippies.” I found I couldn’t quit needling them. “Or was that just the women? You couldn’t find better boyfriends?”

  “The Bears all started as hippies,” said Anita. “But then, everyone does. Humans are born polymorphous and free.”

  “Not me. I was born in a short black skirt. But go on.”

  “The challenge is to stay what you call a hippie, isn’t it?” said Donna. “They failed.” She spoke while gazing off, into the rain she smelled and I couldn’t yet see. I didn’t doubt her. We’d come to Neptune Lodge for coffee and philosophy and a roof.

  “The desert wore them down,” I said. “Not like you guys.”

  “Not in the same way.”

  “Maybe they just got old. Though that doesn’t explain the young ones.”

  “Men are stuck in the past,” said Donna. “Really, you could say men are the past of the human species. They need a lot of help from us
with that.”

  “What kind of help would you say you’re giving Shockley in there?”

  “Shockley’s beyond any help besides listening,” she admitted. “But the listening’s worthwhile on both sides, I think. A lot comes out of them at the end, when their souls are separating from their bodies. I wouldn’t call it wisdom exactly, but meaning. I like to try to take the meaning in with my highest loving attention.”

  “I think you’re flattering yourselves, but never mind. What are you going to do about Heist? They’ve got more than drums in mind for tonight. Heist came in right on schedule.”

  “We can’t do anything about that.”

  “You like it,” I said, realizing it with the words.

  “Let me show you your room,” said Anita. It was an Igor line, if you could imagine Jane Fonda getting cast in the Igor role.

  35

  BUT THERE WERE NO BARS ON THE WINDOWS, NO LOCK ON THE DOOR. They didn’t care about me. Or, just one of them did. She came after nightfall, while Anita and some others were out building the fire on the ridge. They were preparing something special, a bonfire, whether for me or as their counterpart to the drums, a signal to beam across the dark in the direction of the Bears.

  Spark came to the open window. I got the distinct impression that this one entered right-angled buildings only through windows, when she entered right-angled buildings at all. I didn’t see her gun, which was fine with me.

  “Hello,” I said.

  Spark blinked at me, once. She didn’t blink often.

  “Is there something you want to tell me?”

  “I’ve seen your friend.” She said it as though Arabella had come to her in a dream, but I didn’t doubt it. Everything might be like a dream to her. Anyway, I couldn’t afford to doubt.

  “Is she okay?”

  Spark nodded.

  “That’s the best thing you could have told me, then. Thank you.”

  “I’ll see her tonight.”

  “How?”

  “I’m going to watch the Bears. She’ll be there.”