“The other man,” I said. “The one who killed him—”
“I know who he is, Phoebe. Charlie-boy. Baby. The Firstborn.”
“Charles Heist, yes.”
“Was he your Bearfriend?” Now it was her turn to look at me, and mine to look into the fire.
“I think maybe.”
“They told me all about your man,” she said.
“Oh, did they?”
She actually had a glint in her eye, one I liked to see. Mocking the wretchedness of my dating life had been one of her teenage sports. “Yup,” she said. “He’s the super-boring Bear who doesn’t want to be one, who keeps rescuing the Bear and Rabbit kids, even when they don’t want to be rescued.” That she was capable of goosing me this way was hopeful, the sort of signal I wished I could beam directly to Roslyn. The precocious girl was in there.
“Yes, well, you know that’s how I like them—ambivalent. Crazy and mixed up.” Plus, Arabella, I am the super-boring Rabbit who is rescuing you whether you like it or not. But I didn’t say this.
“He sounds like your typical lame Phoebe boyfriend. I’m lucky I didn’t catch your taste in men. He’s going to make a lame king too.”
“If he lives.”
“He’s got a better chance than Solitary Love.” She actually sounded bitter, but I tried not to take it personally. Around this time, as my adrenaline surge receded, the Nancy Drew instinct returned, and I considered how, for all I’d witnessed tonight, Solitary Love didn’t remotely fit the description Sage had given, of the older man, friend of monks, who’d led her and Arabella down from the mountain. Was I pursuing a phantom? I’d need to ask Arabella if such a person existed. But first I had to get her fully back on my side. As it stood, the war in the pit still raged inside us.
“Even if we have different favorite Bears, we can still be friends, can’t we?” I tried to locate the proper joshing tone.
It might have worked.
“It’s okay,” she said wistfully. “I don’t really have any favorite Bears.” This sounded like permission to do what I’d done—come and find her, I mean, not help murder a man. I wasn’t seeking permission for that.
The fire and the aimless strumming guitar, plus the bellyful of hot piñon and chia, was having an effect, not only on us but on others in the circle. It was almost as though the bowls held some dose of soporific enchantment. By the time we’d finished licking our fingers, Arabella and I were settling ourselves on the ground, curling together like Heist’s dogs for a snooze. My purse was dry enough to put beneath my head for a pillow. Anita came to put a blanket over us, and we left the party for a while. In this, we had company.
43
A BIT LATER WE WERE AWAKE AGAIN. THE TEMPERATURE HAD DROPPED. Someone had built up the fire. It still rained lightly but the clouds now showed gaps where the stars raged through. Spark and her nameless Jesus crawled within our shelter. We four shared a joint and listened for a while as he talked about the coming flood, the places in the desert that would soon be beachfront, the drowned cemeteries and malls. The boy had a lot of facts about water. He also told us nuclear war was a metaphor.
I broke into his monologue. “It’s not a metaphor.”
“I know why you would say that!” His tone was very understanding. “But think about this for a minute. The things we’re taking out of the ground and roasting into the atmosphere, they’re made of atoms, right? The word ‘nuclear’ comes from ‘nuclei.’”
“I know that.”
“The stratum of particulate matter that’s shrouding the sun and boiling the dolphins in the sea, it’s basically nuclear winter in slow motion. Did you ever see that movie where Inspector Clouseau is a German scientist in a wheelchair who wants to take all the beautiful women down into an underground fallout shelter?”
“Sure,” volunteered Arabella. “My dad made me watch that movie, like, a dozen times before I was twelve.”
“That’s not surprising. It means a lot to people of a certain age. They talk about the Cold War like it’s something that they survived, or averted. Actually, it’s a record of something that’s still happening, and we’re trapped inside it. The bombs already fell. But they’re also still falling. The bombs are named Ford and CIA and Google. When I was at Davos, I realized these people are basically just Inspector Clouseau, rich people planning a really sexy bomb shelter for when the dark falls on the rest of us.”
“Wait, you were at Davos?” I said.
“Once, yeah. My parents go every year. It only took me one visit to understand, though. Sometimes it’s easiest to hide the truth in plain sight.”
“What truth is that?” I said.
“They’re not going underground. That would be stupid! The water flows downward, remember? They’re going to the mountaintops. That’s what Davos is!”
“Okay, well first of all, I think you mean Dr. Strangelove, not Inspector Clouseau. Second, I don’t think the two things are the same.” In truth, I wasn’t even sure what two things I meant weren’t the same, only that elements had drifted together that would have to be put apart in order to think about them straight. It was possible that what I meant was my life. I was in the desert, drinking something from a communal bowl that I’d been told was called Mormon tea. The sun was coming up and Donald Trump had been president for a whole day. Not only was I not writing an op-ed or Harper’s Folio, I was debating Peter Sellers and Davos with a trust fund Jesus tripping on datura seeds. I might even lose the debate.
Then Arabella looked at me and said, “Too much Bearsplaining,” and we both began shrieking.
“What?” said the nameless boy, alarmed.
“Bearsplaining,” said Arabella, through laughter. “The world is ending, okay, we get it.”
“I’m not a Bear.” He came off a little sulky.
“Whatever. Just splaining, then.”
“Sing,” I commanded, or maybe pleaded. “Show him.”
Splain/rain was a joke Arabella and I had originated months before, in Roslyn’s backyard on Cheever Place. The canopy of trees, the narrow, high-fenced yard, Roslyn’s tulips and plate of tea sandwiches. Even before we could go there in an airplane, the joke brought us back there. It was something I needed, as badly as I’d ever needed anything.
“I can’t stand the splain, against my window . . .” Arabella had a beautiful voice, a trained voice. She’d fronted a band a few times, at Saint Ann’s parties, three punk boys not worthy of backing her.
“Do ‘Splainy Night in Georgia.’”
“I don’t know that one.”
“I played it for you! I’m disappointed. What about ‘It’s Splainin’ Men’?”
“No, remember this one? Splaindrops keep falling on my head—”
I joined her, though I wasn’t any kind of singer. Miraculously, across the fire, the Rabbit guitar was picked up and strummed in accompaniment, the right chords so far as my limited ear could tell.
Now Arabella and I were up at the fire, dancing as she sang. The sky blazed with dawn shards, the storm bearing the night off with it. We swayed at the rim of cinders, she in her blue camouflage hoodie, me in my Juicy Couture. I heard a waking Rabbit groan, “What’s going on?”
“The two Phoebes are dancing,” another told her. “It’s a happy thing.”
The guitarist, a droll, gap-toothed woman with a head the shape of a pomegranate, rose and danced with us, still rollicking on her instrument. Arabella improvised from the melody and lyrics, loading it up with copious American Idol melisma: “Splainy splaindrops, splainy sidewalks, because we’re freaks, nothing’s worrying meeeeee—” She could have been a queen of anything she wished, certainly something more than Rabbits or Rabbit-Bears; in her youth’s splendor, she could have conquered cities. This thought revealed my lingering bias against the desert people, even though I’d arguably become one. Perhaps in my inevitable new postelection lesbian phase I’d fall in love not with my friend but with her daughter, if that wasn’t a monstrous thought—it probably was
. But I was free and dancing alongside my monstrous thoughts now.
I screamed, “It WON’T be long till HAPPiness steps UP to GREET me,” and it sounded fine, it sounded terrific.
The sun came up. The rain stopped. We still danced. Arabella switched the song. “I can see clearly now, the SPLAIN is gone,” she sang, and we dancing Rabbits, five or six now, screamed it with her, while the others watched and clapped. The guitarist knew this song too. Donna came up the hill then and took me by the sleeve. She wanted to lead me back to Neptune Lodge, where she and Anita had disappeared for a while without my paying attention, and why should I have? The reason she’d sought me out wasn’t clear. Was it something about Heist, some news? No.
“There’s something you’ll want to see, I think.”
The downer, Shockley—was he dying now? Had we sung him to his finish line?
They led me inside to a small television on the kitchen counter. The satellite dish worked. The station was CNN. The images, of the cities in the East, Boston, New York, Washington, streets flooding with bodies and signs, with jubilant pink. The march. I’d been tracking the burgeoning scheme in my feed for weeks, but like everything in the desert except for the desert, it had become unreal to me. Now it was a grainy feed that was also like a pure injection of who I’d been into whatever it was I’d become. My people were there, revealed in their secret mighty number. Tears belched from me to see them in exultant riot, in knit uterine hats, blaring their raw oceanic refusal into the face of the monster—he who you couldn’t help guessing looked on, raging like a pitiable infant. But my people were also on this side of the screen. That they’d wanted to lure me in to see, that it mattered to them at all, caused me to see the march as a Rabbit event, a fulfillment and reply to what we’d endured in the night. Later that day, arrived with Arabella at the Ontario, California, airport, I’d find an outlet for my charger and my reawakened phone would flood with the images, the texts and selfies, but for now there was only this, the satellite’s feed, enough. We watched awhile and then I went back to the daylight fire and beautiful singing Arabella. “I can see all obstacles in my way—” It was a much better song than the earlier one, really. The word splain had fallen away, done its work. “Here is that rainbow I’ve been praying for—” The morning sky, short of the rainbow, lived up to the song.
I took the lipstick from my purse a second time. This time Spark allowed me to apply it to her. She leaned in, closed her eyes. Arabella shared it too, and others as it was passed like a joint around the circle. “I think I can make it now, the pain is gone—” While we danced and Arabella sang, the Rabbits pointed to the far hill—again they wanted my attention. I turned to see a nonhuman living thing, a line segment streaming in our direction, a sidewinder? My trite brain still drew imaginary snakes. But no. It was Jessie, wagging his tail. He coursed into the Rabbit circle and into my arms. I had all I needed.
Part V
Cobble Hill
44
WE REENTERED THE BROKEN WORLD. TO RETRIEVE ARABELLA TO ROSLYN’S doorstep, to the brownstone peace of Cheever Place, the old refuge—these past eight days, out in the Great Nowhere, in Upland and on the mountain and in the wastes, this had been my compass, my beacon. But Arabella had clammed up on the plane, when she wasn’t sleeping. By the time we stepped through the dystopian construction-zone labyrinth of LaGuardia, I felt it all going south. Overhead, suspended from the asbestos ceilings, each television was tuned to images of the deal-whore as he romanced Congress, informing them that his opponent’s popular vote victory had been robbed from him. Then we stepped out to hail a farty cab from a frigid, wind-blasted curb. My return’s triumph had already curdled.
Worse, Roslyn couldn’t help us. Nine hours earlier I’d texted her from the airport to say I had Arabella safe, that I was bringing her home. I wanted to see Roslyn gather Arabella up and make her right, and I wanted her to do the same for me. Yet, arrived here on Cheever Place, I found I had three cracked women on my hands. Three included myself and two who wouldn’t embrace, or meet each other’s eyes.
Oh, Roslyn went through the motions, fed us tea and hustled us to hot showers, offering fresh fluffy towels and robes from her vast supply. But she couldn’t help because my ordinarily indomitable friend was in trouble, was down for the count. She was distractible and squirrelly, couldn’t quit telling us how a new buyer was gutting the upper duplex, destroying her sleep in the process. I have any amount of sympathy for lost sleep, but this wasn’t the most relevant stuff. When Arabella trudged downstairs, appearing more like she’d been whipped than welcomed home, Roslyn said, “I can’t get on the subway anymore.”
“You can’t get on the subway?” I obliged her by asking, though as I sat and listened my head was full of the desert.
Despite being needed at NPR’s Midtown bureau, Roslyn explained, she couldn’t go, couldn’t bear the F train tunneling deep to within a mile of Sauron’s tower. Everyone was an enemy now and Manhattan was under occupation, by the protesters as much as the Secret Service. When a packed car shuddered to a halt between stations, Roslyn sweated out tremors, a thousand miniature panic attacks. A terror event was a certainty—it was only a question of when.
It got worse when Arabella returned upstairs, her hair in a towel, her presence as shrouded as it had been under that feather headdress. MSNBC wasn’t helping. Rachel Maddow didn’t seem to have a handle either. I kept snapping the television off and Roslyn kept snapping it back on. She couldn’t even organize an order of delivery Thai, and when I did, she ate less than Arabella. Me, I stuffed myself to the brink of nausea.
I had my own interlude under the hot water, in Roslyn’s elegantly renovated bathroom. It felt amazing to wash the layers of airport and desert off my body, but when I closed my eyes the falling water made me remember the storm in the pit, so I opened them again. Then I put on my own robe and went upstairs and got the two of them into their separate bedrooms and myself onto the couch.
In truth, if my apartment hadn’t been sublet, I might not have stayed in Roslyn’s. Though the subway hardly beckoned to me either. But I had an app for that, and for anything else. I could Uber again. My phone and my brain were each flooded with activity, each lit like a pinball machine. I’d returned to what Stephanie, in Culver City, had called the caffeinated neurotic atmosphere. The city still buzzed with the devious crush of possibility, of millions of young bodies just on the other side of the wall. In a flush of avidity I spent a few minutes in the dark on Roslyn’s couch browsing Tinder, then passed out.
45
I WOKE IN DAYLIGHT TO FIND ARABELLA IN THE KITCHEN, CLEANING. She didn’t see me at first. Roslyn had been upstairs at the hour of the wolf, drinking white wine—I’d just registered it through my slumber on the couch. Now Arabella rinsed the glass and set it upside down on a cloth, as she’d been taught. She rinsed the bottle too, and placed it in the recycling bin, gently, not wanting to wake either of us.
She was dressed in her old clothes, her high school uniform, which was to say a shirt filched from Roslyn’s collection of threadbare concert tees—Zappa at the Fillmore East, in this instance—and a skirt, over leggings and a halter top, with laced-up boots. Like the early rising and the kitchen cleanup, it seemed chosen as a mild rebuke, as if to say to Roslyn, Which of us is really the bad girl here? Arabella might have reverted to a Saint Ann’s senior, headed up to smoke clove cigarettes on the Promenade.
Instead of that, I enacted a ritual of ours together, mine and Roslyn’s, but also mine and Arabella’s, from the days before, when I used to spend the night on this couch with regularity. I dressed in the clothes Roslyn had laid out for me, another New York costume, and though it was drizzling it wasn’t cold, and we walked all the way up across Atlantic Avenue together, to Iris Café. Our favorite fussy breakfast joint, one where we didn’t have to glance at the menu to know we wanted the paprika-salted poached eggs and avocado toast, and where we had once had all our best talks—mine and Roslyn’s, but also mine and Arab
ella’s, though never, never the three of us together.
Of course, the atmosphere was gutted. This was the new world, still just two days old. Nevertheless, for me it was like traveling back in time, into the city I’d quit and lost and been fired from, no telling which anymore. It was still here, at least in its basic lineaments and rites, but I wasn’t, even if at the moment I happened to be.
Arabella waited until after the lattes appeared. “Last night while you were downstairs in the shower, she told me she’d made an appointment for me with her doctor and her shrink.”
“What did you say to that?”
“I said I’d see her shrink if she came to the session with me. She wants him to ask me questions but she’s afraid of hearing the answers.”
“I’m a little afraid of hearing them too.”
“No, you’re not. You know the same things I know.”
“What things are those?”
“You know she went to the Poconos to canvass for Hillary? That’s where she went every summer, the same place, to make out with her cousins and pity the locals on their porches and feel superior about being a New Yorker. And it’s where she got raped, which she never talks about. Well, I don’t feel superior because I’m a New Yorker.”
Though I had some knowledge of the facts she cited, Arabella wasn’t making full sense. Yet the language she spoke reached into me, it rhymed with my own incoherence.
“Are you capable of being kind to her?”
“Sure. I’m just talking this way to you, blowing off steam.”
I looked around the café. A middle-aged Heights couple studied Section A together, as if somewhere in its columns lay a description of the hour and manner of their death. They should have bought two copies. No one was going to have time for The Arts or Science Tuesday again anytime soon.
“Did anyone rape you?” I asked her.
Arabella shook her head.
The Feral Detective Page 15
