Girl in Landscape

by Jonathan Lethem

  “We have to,” said Raymond.

  “Didn’t you say we were kids?” said Pella. “Didn’t you explain what happened?” Pella heard herself, thought: How could he explain what happened? Nothing happened. Nobody knows what happened.

  David was sitting on the edge of their parents’ bed, moaning, gasping for breath.

  “Okay,” said Pella, taking a breath. “David, stop crying. Call Clement’s office.”

  “What if he isn’t there?” David whined through his sobs.

  “Then tell whoever is there. Raymond, come on.”

  Caitlin lay in exactly the same position. A rivulet of water ran down her nose. Pella took her nearest arm and pulled, drawing her shoulder up, peeling her with a pop of suction from the tub. Raymond went to the other end, and considered Caitlin’s feet. Pella, with one knee on the edge of the tub, reached over and lifted Caitlin’s other shoulder. Her mother’s insensate head lolled forward.

  Raymond was gingerly lifting Caitlin’s calves, so her feet were aloft, nothing more. “She’s just folding up,” said Pella. “You have to lift her by the butt. This isn’t funny.”

  “I’m not laughing,” said Raymond.

  He grimaced. They moved together, under Caitlin, and shifted her weight up and out of the tub, then immediately stalled and let her come to rest on the bath mat.

  “We’ll never get her down the stairs,” said Pella.

  “We have to.”

  They lifted her. Pella’s breath rasped. She realized she was crying. Caitlin’s arms flapped outward, and grazed the door frame as they passed through. But they didn’t drop her. Willing it, they kept her off the floor, and moving along the hallway. In silence; Pella had no breath left for words of encouragement. Just David’s crying in the next room, Raymond grunting as he worked to keep Caitlin’s weight from slipping, her knuckles from clapping along the banister.

  Caitlin’s head rested crookedly against Pella’s chest. Drops from her hair and crotch made a generous trail on the hallway floor, her body seemingly weeping. But Pella’s tears evaporated as her cheeks heated with effort. Refusing to even stop and consider the challenge of the staircase, she groped backward with her foot and stepped down, nodding to Raymond to keep him coming.

  One. Two. If she could manage to support Caitlin’s weight for two steps, why not the rest? She leaned against the curved angle of the stairwell there at the top, her elbow sliding along the wall. Behind her she wouldn’t be able to. But she shouldn’t think of what was behind her. She watched her mother’s stomach and breasts bunch obligingly as Raymond stepped down the first step himself, then felt the almost liquid weight of the body shifting, sliding out of her grasp again, folding toward the middle. She struggled to hold on, and to move backward, down another step. To unfold Caitlin. Caitlin’s body.

  “Pella!”

  It was Clement, at the bottom of the stairs. Pella nearly fell backward. Raymond sank to his knees, and Caitlin’s legs and buttocks settled on the second and third step.

  “Something happened,” Pella said, as Clement rushed up to meet them. The words were as specific as she felt possible.

  “She hit her head,” said Raymond. He hugged his mother’s knees.

  Clement lifted Caitlin away from them, staggering back for a moment against the banister with the weight and surprise. Pella felt a sting of satisfaction. You carry her. You be here in the first place.

  “Did you call the hospital?” Clement said.

  Pella nodded. “Raymond did.” She stepped back up onto the landing beside her brother.

  “We were putting her in the car,” said Raymond, with a kind of anger.

  Clement stood adjusting his position on the stairs, hoisting Caitlin higher in his arms, leaning back to balance the weight. He looked up from her face and nodded at Raymond. “I thought you were going to the beach,” he said blankly. “I took a cab home.”

  “We got back hours ago,” said Raymond.

  Clement started downstairs, cradling Caitlin’s head with his elbow, so it wouldn’t dangle. Her eyes were still closed. Body limp. “Raymond, get a blanket and bring it down,” Clement said. Raymond turned and darted back into the bedroom.

  Pella followed dumbly, watching Clement struggle down the stairs, knowing she couldn’t help. All the way down to the basement, where Clement loaded Caitlin into the car, her body filling the half-moon of the cabin’s seats the way it had filled the bathtub: just fine if it weren’t for arms and legs. Raymond arrived with a blanket.

  “Should I come?” said Pella.

  “You’re in your underwear,” Clement pointed out. “Stay here, watch David. I’ll be back.”

  He closed the door, and instantly the system swept the car away, into the black tunnel. The train clattered like armor. Pella and Raymond stood idiotically mute, their task abolished. Pella didn’t know how to honor this moment, the sudden emptiness where her parents had been, the emergency suspended. She couldn’t cry. She and Raymond had made themselves taut for the task on the stairs; it didn’t matter that Clement had intercepted Caitlin. They wouldn’t cry. Raymond actually seemed furious. Without speaking, they went back upstairs to see David. He was probably crying, and that would do.

  But no, he wasn’t crying. He sat watching television, rapt, as though the television could sew up the rift of what had happened. It was so fast, Pella thought. Caitlin had been felled and had vanished from the house in the space between two sets of commercials.

  Pella didn’t speak to David, didn’t risk disturbing him. She sat down on the edge of the bed beside him and lifted her knees up to make a shelf for her chin and watched. In a moment Raymond joined them, and they sat there together staring, right through the commercials, to the end of the show. When it was over Pella changed the channel. Raymond and David didn’t argue about the program, just sat watching stonily.

  Clement came home alone. When he walked into the bedroom Pella switched off the television.

  “She’s still at the hospital,” he said, answering the obvious question, but in a mumbling, turned-inward way, as though he doubted it himself.

  “Did she wake up?” said Pella.

  “A little,” Clement said. “She seemed confused. They want to examine her.”

  “You talked to her?”

  “I talked to her, yes. She couldn’t really talk to me.” He weighed this mild irony for a moment, blinking.

  “She must of really gotten knocked out,” said Raymond hopefully.

  “They don’t know what happened,” said Clement. “Her head isn’t hurt. The bruises are on her back.” He looked down at the floor, then away, but not at them. The bedful of his worried children. Pella saw her father extending the self-pitying gloom that had enclosed him since the election defeat to cover this new crisis: Caitlin’s fall was something happening to him. No matter that he hadn’t been there, and they had.

  “That’s stupid,” said Raymond. “You can’t get knocked out from hitting your back.”

  “Well maybe she wasn’t knocked out,” said Pella. “Maybe something else happened.”

  “She slipped in the tub,” said Raymond angrily.

  “David saw it,” said Pella. “Not you.”

  That got Clement’s attention. “David?” he said.

  “He heard a noise,” said Pella. “Before she fell down. That’s why he went in.”

  They all looked at David, who stared back, spooked.

  “He thought he heard something,” said Raymond.

  “Caitlin made a funny face,” said David. “Before she fell down.”

  “What do you mean, funny?” said Raymond.

  “Quiet, Ray,” said Clement. “Tell me what you saw, David. You saw her fall?”

  David nodded.

  Clement was stirred. He stared at his children, seeming to grasp for the first time their presence in this episode in his life. He moved nearer and gathered their heads and shoulders under his hands. Pella felt his hand on her skull and a thrill of animal comfort went
through her.

  “Why did you go in?” Clement said softly to David. “You heard something?”

  “Caitlin said something,” said David carefully. “Then I saw her making a face.”

  “It doesn’t mean anything,” said Raymond harshly, even as he leaned against his father’s stomach.

  “Maybe,” said Clement. “Maybe it does.”

  “David probably imagined it,” said Raymond.

  Clement stepped away, his hands slipping across the children’s shoulders, dropping to his sides. He moved awkwardly, like a stranger in his own bedroom. Pella took hold of David’s hand.

  Clement stood not speaking before them for a moment, then picked up the phone and left the room. He stopped outside the door. Pella heard him dial, ask to talk to Dr. Flinch or Finch.

  David sat still on the bed, his hand limp in Pella’s grasp. Raymond sat forward and switched the television back on.

  “She just fell and hit her head,” he said, not looking at them. It was like he was angry at the television show.

  Three

  Clement left the three of them in Caitlin’s hospital room, and went to find her doctor. Caitlin’s head was wrapped, but only because they’d shaved her for tests. They hadn’t operated, yet.

  The room was sterile and almost completely without character, but what Pella hated most savagely about it were the few details that made it particular. The moon-shaped crack in the ceiling tile, the stain on the wall that looked like urine, the torn calendar. All the things that made it Caitlin’s room instead of someone else’s, some other sick person unknown.

  Caitlin sat up, a book across her legs, her bed cranked up so it was nearly a high-backed chair.

  “Listen to this,” she said. “ ‘The remaining Archbuilders possess an extraordinary linguistic capacity; it is the last manifestation of their former complexity, the richness that has otherwise faded from their culture.’ ” Her hair gone, Caitlin’s face showed its lines. But it glowed, too, despite the flat white hospital light. Her lips were chapped, and she licked them as she spoke. “ ‘They have nearly fifteen thousand independent languages native to their planet, and the average Archbuilder speaks five to eight percent of these’—that’s hundreds of languages—”

  David clambered up on her bed and put his head on her legs just under the book.

  Caitlin put her hand in David’s hair and went on. “ ‘The fruit of their fascination with English is that it is now one of the seven or eight languages any two Archbuilders, meeting as strangers, are likeliest to have in common.’ ”

  “David isn’t interested in this,” said Raymond hopefully.

  “Why do they like English?” said Pella.

  “Here, wait, it says something good about that.” Caitlin flipped pages back. “Here. ‘Archbuilders describe English as a language of enchanting limitations. The English vocabulary is tens of thousands of words smaller than any language native to their planet. English words seem, to an Archbuilder, garishly overloaded with meaning. One Archbuilder describes speaking English as “stringing poems into sentences,” another compares it to “speaking hieroglyphs.” ’ ”

  Caitlin was unstoppable now. Pella’s family was distorting, wrenching itself into a new shape in two realms: Caitlin’s strange, rebelling body, her illness; and the impending move, the frontier that seemed to be rushing to swallow them like a horizon in motion. The point of relation between these realms, the arrow of causality, was obscured. Was Caitlin hurrying to prepare them for a life without her? She’d begun her cheerleading for the Planet of the Archbuilders before she fell and turned sick, so it couldn’t be that. If anything, the reverse. Moving to the Planet of the Archbuilders was the family project, and the family included Caitlin, didn’t it? So she was going, which meant she would recover and be fine.

  When Pella sensed herself relying on such logic, she was almost nauseous.

  One thing was certain. Caitlin’s illness was the unspoken text of their days, and the move to the Planet of the Archbuilders was the spoken. It filled so much time that Pella wondered if they even had to make the trip. They were living it here, in Caitlin’s hospital room, each time they visited.

  “Let me tell you about the household deer,” Caitlin said. She flopped the book over, began paging through it in chunks. The huge pages made her hands look tiny and feeble. “I was just reading about that.”

  “Household deer?” sighed Raymond, as though he knew he might as well express interest since he would be forced to listen either way.

  “Yes, they’re like mice, really. We’ll have them, in our new house. They’re everywhere, they live everywhere the Archbuilders do. Listen—”

  “Pella?” It was Clement, looking in. Dr. Flinch stood in the hall behind him, respectfully back, granting the family space.

  “What?”

  “Come here. Leave the boys with Caitlin.” He grinned and waved, as though he were somehow barred from entering the room. “We’ll be back.”

  Pella got up from her chair. In the hall, Clement held out his arm to her. She glanced back; Caitlin roughed David’s hair and started, “The household deer—”

  Pella followed Clement and Dr. Flinch down the hall, and Caitlin’s voice was lost in echoey hospital murmurs and clatter. Pella was sorry to leave Raymond and David alone with Caitlin. Their mother’s judgment had somehow gotten worse, and she was boring and mystifying and frightening them with her talk. Two weeks before she had been enchanting Raymond and David with Archbuilders, making them laugh and filling them with real anticipation even when they didn’t really understand. Now she was didactic, awful.

  Clement stopped Pella, a hand on her shoulder. They’d come to an empty place in the hall, near a vacant nursing station. “I want you to hear this,” said Clement, looking from Pella to the doctor.

  Then I don’t want to hear it, Pella thought instantly. It was a poor way for Clement to start.

  “Pella?” said Dr. Flinch. His nose was enormous, his chin creased. It made his entire face a huge exclamation mark. “Am I saying your name right? Your father tells me you’re a very mature thirteen years old. And very smart.”

  Very, very, quite contrary, thought Pella. But she said, “I guess.”

  “I was telling your father about what we learned from your mother’s tests in the last few days. There are two different kinds of brain tumors, Pella—I mean, of course, there are thousands, no two are alike—but for our immediate purposes there are just two.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “One is like a marble sitting in a bowl of Jell-o. It doesn’t belong there, but it keeps to itself. Doesn’t mix with the Jell-o. That kind is easy, because you can pretty much just”—he made a pinching motion with his forefinger and thumb—“pluck it out.”

  You shouldn’t talk to someone like they were a baby when the subject was brain tumors, Pella thought. If you thought they were still a baby you shouldn’t discuss brain tumors, and if you didn’t think they were still a baby, you shouldn’t talk that way. But Pella didn’t know how to tell Dr. Flinch to stop.

  Or on which grounds.

  “—other kind is like a stain of ink in the Jell-o. The ink mixes with the Jell-o everywhere it touches. There aren’t any edges. You can’t”—Dr. Flinch’s new hand motion depicted frustrated, uncertain scissors—“know where to cut.”

  “Caitlin has the second kind,” said Clement. Then he rubbed his nose as if he was embarrassed, had spoken out of turn.

  “What happens to people with that?” said Pella.

  There was a giggling in the hall. Pella turned around. Raymond and David were on their hands and knees, scuffling along the tile of the corridor. A nurse with a cart of meal trays skirted past them, humming to herself obliviously.

  “Boys,” said Clement.

  “Don’t talk to us,” said Raymond, looking up quickly. “We’re household deer.” He tittered. Grinning at the floor, the two boys crawled in a tight circle around Clement’s legs, then Pella’s.

&nbs
p; “Go back to Caitlin’s room,” said Pella.

  “We’re pretending because she told us to,” said David, voice rising in a lunatic laugh at the end, his head still ducked almost against Raymond’s buttocks as he crawled.

  “Yeah, anyway, household deer are almost invisible,” said Raymond.

  Pella saw the distance, the unreachableness in Raymond’s eyes.

  “Well, you’re hospital deer, and you’re completely visible,” said Clement. “Go back to Caitlin. Come on.” He scooted them back toward her room. He seemed grateful for the interruption, though, his own unbearable giddiness justified by the moment of child’s play. “We’ll be back in a minute.”

  The boys crawled away and through Caitlin’s doorway. Pella imagined Clement crawling off after them.

  “What great kids,” said Dr. Flinch, shaking his head, his expression tortured. Men want problems to be theirs alone, Pella thought. The doctor seemed to want pity, as though this young mother’s illness was difficult for doctors in a way the family couldn’t understand.

  The same way Clement wanted the election to be his private loss, when it belonged to all of them.

  “Yes,” said Clement.

  “What happens to people with that?” said Pella again, demanding the doctor acknowledge her. Clement was currently useless to Pella. Probably to anyone. Pella knew this version of Clement, the hopeless one who bumbled in a group of three or four people at one side of an auditorium, before stepping up to the podium to deliver a speech that four thousand found riveting and brilliant.

  Except there was no podium, no four thousand now. Just the bumbling.

  “What?” Flinch straightened his face, tried to smile at Pella.

  “Stain in Jell-o,” she insisted. She stared at Dr. Flinch’s hands. His forefinger was covered with tiny pen-marks, little hatches. He will reach into Caitlin’s head, Pella thought.

  “She is a little grown-up, isn’t she?” said Flinch, grimacing at Clement, looking for help.

  Clement didn’t reply.

  “Yes, well, I want to be perfectly truthful,” said the doctor. “Everything depends on the specifics, and the specifics are what we don’t know. Many people with your mother’s illness fight it again and again throughout their lives. No drug or radiation can ever completely eliminate the cancer. But people live years …”