The Feral Detective

by Jonathan Lethem

  “Watch the fight for a new king, you mean?”

  She nodded again, again unblinkingly.

  “Can you take me there?”

  “It’s a long walk in the sand at night. It’s going to be beautiful, but I don’t know if you can do it.”

  “I’d like to try.”

  She seemed to be thinking. “There’s going to be a lot of light from the stars, but the ground isn’t flat.”

  “I brought comfortable shoes,” I said. I grabbed my purse, then climbed out the window, not because I thought the other Rabbits would have stopped me—they were all out by the fire—but to show Spark that I could.

  Part IV

  Night and Morning

  36

  AT FIRST I MISSED THE ARENA. I WAS SO MESMERIZED BY THE SKY. My feet had made their sanction in the crisp ground, and I’d been gazing upward, after the first few hundred yards and further reassurance from Spark about the hibernation of rattlesnakes. I’d had no particular difficulty with the walk. People from other parts of the country always underestimate how comfortable New Yorkers are with distance walking. In rhythm behind her along the soft contour, the easy way around the pilings and arroyos, I began to feel like Spark’s shadow, a function of her animal prowling, even if she was the one doing all the navigational work. We’d left the glow of the Rabbits’ bonfire, though not before I’d caught a reflected glint of the gunmetal on Spark’s rope belt.

  Now, perhaps half a mile beyond, I’d finally understood what city dwellers meant by light pollution. The dark opened my eyes. The sky flooded in, without boundary. It was sick with stars, a hundred for every one I felt ought to exist. I had to keep an eye on them all at once, in case they began to fall. I dreaded the unveiling of the moon, a prospect as unbearable as I’d once thought only the sun could be. But the moon, if it was really there, appeared snarled in low clouds as brackish as mud. I couldn’t foresee it making any progress.

  So I was like a toddler, spinning in place, making herself drunk on vertigo, when the arena, a kind of natural outdoor amphitheater, opened before and below us. I’d have been likelier to see it if they’d lit the torches, but they hadn’t. The torches waited instead, scattered amid other upright shadows on the desert floor, the Joshua trees, the tilted stones. This was it, what my altered attention had learned to tabulate: tilted stones and their shadows. There were no buildings here, no skyscrapers or sheds, no busy lanes of traffic or jets queued for takeoff to resort destinations, no crappy chain stores or alluring hipster boutiques. No person pulled another an espresso shot. I couldn’t scroll up or down or swipe left or right. Only stones and shadows of stones, Joshua trees, unlit torches, and, as my eye accustomed to the scene, a scattering of human creatures out under the bowl of night. These negligible few resided on perches above the crater floor, like fleas on a punctured soufflé of salt and waste, inferior to the star-stuff that illuminated and scorned them. These were Bears, I supposed.

  Well, I was here for human creatures. For Arabella, I kept reminding myself. Never mind Bears, or firstborn absconded Bear-kings-elect. Find Arabella, and get out.

  Spark navigated us along the upper rim, avoiding contact with the clustered spectators. The nearest few looked, predictably, like Santa Claus, their body type not even gussied up with a Harley motorbike and a Germanic helmet. Others, trickier to pick out of the landscape, more resembled ambulatory cacti, or twists of barbed wire, men like residue of the desert floor, in blackened jeans and thin wifebeaters. Here and there, cigarette or joint tips flared orange. The breeze through the arena carried faint sulfurous and meaty odors, and grim snorting laughter. Some of the smell persisted when the wind died. That was me, suffused with dog hair and woodsmoke from the Baldy cabin, growing rank in clothes two days old, in underwear I’d saturated a couple of times necking with Heist.

  I followed Spark along the periphery, not yet descending, though there looked to be plenty of room to navigate a nearer view. I unslung my purse and dug to confirm the obvious—no signal. Seeing the battery nearly dead, I powered it down. My fingers found a lipstick tube. I impulsively drew it out and applied, puckering coverage to the edges. Spark stared.

  “My lips are wrecked,” I said, not mentioning I’d been routinely abrading them against a steel wool man-mask. “Unless you’re sporting some kind of goat milk balm, this is all I’ve got.” In fact, I’d acted on a vestigial threshold-of-the-party impulse, as if stepping from an elevator in a Chinatown loft space.

  I was smarter than to think I could arrest Heist’s notice with Red Amour Crème Smooth by Laura Mercier. Wasn’t I?

  “You want some?”

  She shook her head.

  “How’s my teeth? Never mind. Take me to my friend now.”

  “She’s not here yet.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “She’s part of the ceremony. That’s what I heard.”

  “Even better, then. Let’s go kidnap her from the green room.”

  Spark turned her head three-quarters, as if perusing modern art. “You’re funny, Manhattan.”

  “How do you know to call me Manhattan? You been going through my wallet?”

  “You talk a lot, that’s all. Come on, we’re meeting up with a guy I know.” She sounded like a teenager. “You’ll like him. He talks a lot too.”

  “A Bear?”

  “They aren’t all Bears, despite what you might have heard.”

  “Heard from Anita, you mean?”

  “Yeah. Her and Donna.”

  “Oh.” I was trying to talk less, so I left it at that. We crept over the ridge, going to see a guy Spark knew. My new life was rich and full.

  37

  THE KID SPARK LIKED—I SAW THAT IMMEDIATELY, THAT HE WAS A KID, and how much she liked him—could talk, all right. He was lodged up in a little triangle of rock, perhaps something someone had once arranged at great effort, with an excellent view of the surround and the pit below.

  He was tall and beautiful with Jesus-y hair and the kind of beard that’s adolescent in its parameters—still not filled in everywhere along his jaw, or very high on the cheeks, but splendidly unkempt where it grew. His eyes were pale blue even in the dark, and there was something knowing and beatific in them. He recognized Spark and accepted my presence too, and handed us a thermos to drink from. I took it, expecting water. It wasn’t water but some kind of hard desert cider, perhaps fermented agave nectar. I knew it was silly for me to trust it and unhelpful in the best scenario even as I took a couple of hearty slugs.

  “A night like this is a test of one’s concentration,” this angelic youth said, by way of welcome. He imparted real warmth in the remark.

  “How so?” I asked.

  “We’re embedded in the dream, but it doesn’t actually care about us. It’s very harsh to consider, really. I feel a weight on my chest like the embodiment of a large animal, but it probably isn’t trying to comfort me. There’s a taste in my mouth like burnt flowers. I haven’t smoked anything, but I did eat some seeds.”

  I didn’t know how far I should try to follow him. “I’m Phoebe,” I said. “What’s your name?”

  “I’m not entertaining a name at present.”

  “Fair enough. I’m trying to keep things simple, myself. I’m trying to find my lost friend, before someone gets hurt.”

  “Simple is good! Just don’t take anything personally. When the big storm hits, they’ll be staging their drama underwater.”

  “You mean the Bear battle?” I glanced at the arena below. Shapes stirred in the gloom, preparations perhaps, though the torches remained unlit. A soundtrack had begun to float over the night. Someone, then three or four someones, beating on what sounded like plastic tubs. The tonality was too ticky-tacky and hollow to meet the old Iron John standard.

  “Yes,” the beautiful boy said. “It seems important to us because we’re human animals, so we can’t help but think the story matters. But this whole silly game could be washed out.”

  “Like a rain del
ay, you mean?”

  He didn’t blink. “I played ball in college, second base. One day at the plate, I took a line drive to the temple. Telling the coach I wasn’t coming back was one of the hardest days of my life. I dropped out of anthropology too. I’d been living as a vegan, but even that couldn’t get me close to the things I really wanted to know about.”

  “So you came to see the Bears.”

  “People worry too much about particular animal embodiments,” he said. “It’s good just to recognize we’re large mammals, and how odd that is. What I like about the desert people is that it’s the only place you can have an honest conversation about the apocalypse. That’s as true of the guy at the gas station on Twentynine Palms as any of us way out here.”

  “What seeds did you eat?” said Spark. She’d moved into the shelter of his stone triangle. She was drawn, as I couldn’t help but be myself, to his extraordinary sweet limbs, his fulsome reeling brain. His beauty made me feel differently about the desert, about the Bears. It made me feel differently about Spark too. Before, she’d had starvation. I could envy her cheekbones, but not much else. Seeing her crouched beside him, I understood she had starvation and wild youthful fucking, likely on a regular basis.

  “Dry autumn seeds,” he told her. “Datura. It’s a pretty strong trip. I vomited and urinated a chalk-white stream. The two of you, for example, are embodied as canine right now. Before you came along, I was enjoying a discussion with a being made of cornhusk and cinder. I grew up near a cornfield, but that doesn’t mean it belonged to me.”

  I didn’t recognize the drug he’d named, but I grasped the principle. I’d been around tripping persons before. “The people talking about the apocalypse aren’t always disinterested parties,” I suggested. “Some of them might be trying to bring it about.”

  “We all did it,” he said. “We ruined the earth.”

  If you were in the market for a Men of Global Warming calendar, the boy made an ideal Mr. January. But I felt a rage flare in me, that he’d rolled us into an absolving ball of confusion with the toxic villains in suits, the grabbers and falsifiers, the Machiavellian extractors and disruptors and enclosers, the Electoral College. Perhaps all of them were large mammals, sure, but not all possessing human souls.

  “Not all of us,” I said. “Some of us, a handful, stuck it to the rest.” What had the boy in the hole on the mountain been, most likely, but a rhapsodic truant like this one, before donning those furs? “You need to leave here,” I said, feeling suddenly parental. “Someone might kill you early. What a shame it would be, to miss your apocalypse.”

  “It’s impossible to miss. We’re inside it constantly.”

  Maybe I’d tasted some datura seed residue from the lip of the thermos we’d been sharing, but his words made just enough sense to me. Here in the desert we were enclosed in an unboundaried thing that apocalypse might be the word for. Somewhere, I could smell kerosene ignition, a flavor more evil, I suspected, than the kid’s apparition of cornhusk and cinder.

  It was an out-of-fashion word, evil. But I’d gotten more friendly with it in the past few months. It did some heavy lifting that I liked.

  “They’re capable of anything,” I said, to remind myself.

  “I’m free of expectations.”

  “That’s fine, but they’re not as free as you. They’re into death, only not their own. What did you think you came here to see?”

  “Hollow and circular rituals are really great. It’s a way of humbling yourself to the chimerical dream of civilization.”

  This was all very interesting, but as I girded myself for a descent, I decided I had to get free of this kid. I’d need Spark with me still, to function as my surrogate Rabbit eyes, to recognize familiar and dangerous players in this game. Perhaps also for the gun strung at her waist. But her boyfriend was excess baggage, not only because he was unmistakably incapable of stealth. So long as he was nearby, I’d be increasingly prone to contact-tripping—the infectious risk of his seed-born philosophy.

  “Just remember that a man is meant to try to kill a man,” I said. I took Spark by the hand, and she followed.

  “They’ll look tiny from up here,” the boy said.

  “Yeah, well, I’ll still be rooting for a rainout.”

  38

  THE SIZE OF THE ARENA WASN’T PLAIN UNTIL THE TORCHES WERE LIT. Their light pollution and plumes of soot blotted the interstellar vastness that crowned the desert. But in its place the breadth and depth of the pit we’d entered was illuminated, partly by their inadequacy to do more than pierce its darkness with islands of light. As Spark and I crept downward along the stadium’s face, the distance to the bottom became more evident. Pockets of dark remained, and we stuck to those. The night was growing cold, the stars clouding over, and I envied the spectators’ little fires. I missed Jessie. Spark didn’t look much like a cuddler.

  I spotted Anita and Donna, with a couple of other senior Rabbits, in their own high perch on the crater, the equivalent of a box at the opera. I shouldn’t have been surprised, I suppose. It was Friday night, if I’d kept count, and this was the only show in town. My disenchantment felt familiar, like learning that Chuck Schumer was gym buddies with Jeff Sessions, that all the top dogs gathered in tuxedos to drink martinis when partisan Kabuki was done for the day. Other women were visible in the stands as well, not looking so much like Rabbits. They were desert dwellers of another stripe, perhaps the Bear-groupies Heist had mentioned.

  I once rode a crowded 4 train, the Lexington line, in a car cowed by the presence of a newly released Rikers inmate. The status was unmistakable for the terrifying, grenade-pin paranoia seething in his eyes. He’d been too long away from anything like a packed subway car, where bodies weren’t encroaching on his in some meaningful jockeying for power but only helplessly, trying to get to work. Each time anyone came too near or made the mistake of meeting his glance, he nearly uncorked from his own skin in their direction. It was also unmistakable for the man’s obscene slab musculature, the kind otherwise seen only on top international leading men, those who’ve compensated for the lizard terror they inspire in other humans with soft, puppyish eyes and sheepish grins, to remind you that shows of force are accompanied by lives of prissy luxury, by big hearts and steroidally shrunken and harmless genitalia.

  Not Solitary Love. The king of the Bears, like the man on the train, embraced his terror, and that of his witnesses. He wore a bearskin costume that flapped around his shoulders, bound with straps across his chest, and nothing underneath. His shadowy junk swung heavily, as if he were never less than slightly aroused. Even from where I perched, when he stepped near the torches, I could see his eyes were too wide open, and inside his beard his mouth was a terrible wreck. I remembered that from the train too. There were barbells in prisons, not so much dentistry. You had to remember to floss.

  But it was a mistake to lean too heavily on my involuntary association, that of Solitary Love with the parolee on the Lex. I was consoling myself, thinking that way. I wasn’t in New York anymore. The man on the train had been probably half an hour from his next encounter with law enforcement, perhaps a day or two away from re-arrest or death by baton chokehold. We might have feared him on the train, but it was our train, not his. Solitary Love was a true distillation of this desert, and we were at his mercy. Spark’s nameless tripping boyfriend was right. Solitary Love’s look and manner were a correction to what the nameless boy had called the chimerical dream of civilization. Seeing the Bear King stride into the flickering stony rink, it wasn’t even so much that all human charity and feeling, all taste and order and sense had been dispatched, rendered null—well, it was that, but it was more, too. Seeing him, you kind of wished it to be. Bring the flood.

  It was at this moment I did the math and realized that we were some number of hours into the new world. Barack Obama was no longer president.

  Other figures scurried along the edges of the arena where Solitary Love waited, but it was easy enough, next, to spot He
ist. He was the other guy in a bearskin, head bent low, seated on a rock. Beneath the costume he wore his red leathers and dirty jeans, the usual costume that caused my heart to lurch. He was alone.

  A pulse began to beat in me to match the drums. “We have to get closer,” I said to Spark.

  39

  THE FIRST RAINDROPS BEGAN TO PELT OUR UNCOVERED ARMS AND DOT the dry rocks. The two bodies rose and moved nearer to each other in the arena, a space now described by a closing noose of bodies. Outside this ring, four women wearing beaded shawls covering bikinis or less than bikinis danced in and out of a low, flickering fire, but when they were near enough to be outlined I saw they were shorter and thicker than Arabella, who anyhow had taken a lot of African dance classes at Saint Ann’s and was unlikely to move her arms in such hackneyed ways. (Then again, the quality of drumming here was ruinously low.) The spectators were otherwise men—Bears, I had to suppose. I didn’t know how much farther into their company we were likely to be able to pass, though Spark remained intrepid. I had to salute her for that. We scrambled from shadow to shadow, the breadth of the bowl still opening before us, the rim, its stars now completely darked over with thunderhead, threateningly far.

  The two bodies collided at the same moment the sky opened like a door. Needling rain instantly ran in the dust at our feet like electric current working its way through circuitry. The water hit the kerosene lamps, which didn’t douse but threw up replying gouts of malodorous steam. The drumming didn’t quit—the signature of drumming, I guess. But it had begun to be subsumed in human voices, screams and bellowing, dark jeers. Through curtains of rain and belching steam, with intensifying cacophony bouncing off the shattered walls of the pit, it wasn’t difficult for Spark and me to descend into the spectacle. Then came a frenzied time.

  Solitary Love had broken Heist’s nose, possibly with a first blow. Heist circled with his head low, crouching beneath his opponent’s eyeline, but I still made out the purple gnarl of injury between his brows, the course of red-bright seepage on his chin and neck and jacket. From that moment I was screaming. I learned something about a fight crowd then, entering one for the first time, a place I’d never wanted or expected to be. If you cared in any way for one of the combatants, you weren’t separate from them, but inside the fight with them, and time slowed. The rain came in cascades, a metronome, but all else went still and deaf, then stuttered again into demented blurting action. Heist hatcheted at his opponent’s ribs with his hands clasped into a single fist, then slipped back, feet careening in the mud. I was side by side with others, inciting and admonishing the fighters who inflamed and disappointed us. Who knew what anyone wanted? We might all be screaming for Heist, or for Solitary Love. We might each have a separate fight and a separate fighter whose pain was our own, yet this incoherence made us one thing together. It might not be too late to go home and read Joyce Carol Oates after all, if the rains didn’t, as prophesied, fill up the bowl of stone and drown us. Heist, in the mud, clutched at one of Solitary Love’s legs, rolling to avoid the other. I screamed and screamed and screamed.