Girl in Landscape

by Jonathan Lethem

  Or they don’t, Pella understood.

  It would forever be linked for Pella to the collapse of the subway. The tunneling devices that had hollowed out too much of the city’s bedrock, the failed surgical incursion that had destroyed Caitlin, taken too much of her with the tumor, left her half-paralyzed and inarticulate and dying anyway. Hollowed. Why couldn’t she go on reading to them about the Planet of the Archbuilders forever? That would have been a reasonable compromise. They could have moved into the hospital, moved into the dayroom with the crossword puzzles, barricaded Caitlin’s room against the doctors. Instead, when she was returned to the ward everything had mysteriously changed in the unseen operating room, a corner had been turned without any explanation, and now they were supposed to say goodbye and it was to a Caitlin who wasn’t herself, wasn’t even whole. Her smile drooped. Her words were thick, frustrated. Clement took them out of school, and every day for ten days they came in the morning for Caitlin’s dwindling minutes of clarity, to hold her hand and hear her try to say she loved them. The Planet of the Archbuilders was never mentioned, though Pella saw that Clement was still quietly making the preparations. The four of them were hypnotized by Caitlin’s fall in slow-motion. Every day she had a little less time. Every day there was less said, less to say. Every day for ten days they watched her fall asleep and afterward went to the hospital cafeteria, where Clement bought sandwiches and ice cream that the four of them, the incomplete family, ate in stunned and grateful silence.

  Time heals, give it some time, what these poor kids need is time: At the funeral everyone spoke of sorrow and time, and then Clement led his motherless children and their sorrow aboard a tiny ship where they were frozen alive for a trip that lasted twenty months, but seemed to them an eye blink, a dream. So had they been given time? Or was their sorrow frozen with them? Raymond and David and Pella, short a mother, and Clement, short a constituency, and a wife. It was as though Clement had replaced Caitlin with the ship. As though they had tunneled inside her departing body for comfort and escape. Then hurtled with it into the void.

  Four

  “Who’s that kid?” said Raymond, pointing out the figure trailing behind, the clumsy shadow they’d all noticed.

  A group had formed this morning, children wandering out into the valley together, away from the homes, beneath the empty sky. Pella, Raymond, and David Marsh, Bruce and Martha Kincaid.

  Bruce Kincaid was the same age as Pella. Martha was eight, a year older than David. The Kincaids had lived here months already. They picked their way blithely over the crumbled ground, distorted shadows dancing, through the tendrils of dried dead vines. The new children, the Marshes, walked cowed, stealing apprehensive glances at the blazing sky.

  “That’s just Morris,” said Martha Kincaid lightly, not even turning to look at the boy who was tracking them.

  “Morris Grant,” said Bruce. “He’s a real pain. He’s the only other kid besides us. That’s why it’s good you’re here.”

  “He has an older brother,” said Martha.

  “Yeah, but Doug doesn’t hang around with us,” said Bruce to Pella and Raymond, ignoring his sister. “He’s fifteen.”

  The real pain tailed them out into the valley, staying on the path but keeping a safe distance behind. Whenever Pella looked at him, Morris Grant would turn and start throwing rocks off to one side, as if that were all he was there for, as if he weren’t following.

  Morris Grant’s missiles kicked up little plumes of dust where they landed, ineffectually near no matter how hard he threw. Pella was transfixed, her neck already sore from turning her head, her eyes bedazzled by distance, by trying to measure the valley. Was it all stones and ruin? Where did the Archbuilders sleep? Where were the Archbuilders?

  Pella hadn’t seen one yet.

  “Look,” said Bruce Kincaid. He kicked at a green vine that sprang from the scabbed, rocky ground. “You want to see where the potatoes come from?”

  “Potatoes?” said Pella.

  David knelt and tugged on the vine.

  “Careful,” said Bruce. He nudged David away with his foot. “Yeah, you know, Archbuilder food. Everybody’s food. You guys ate it at our house last night.”

  “That wasn’t potatoes,” said Raymond.

  “Yes it was. Archbuilder potatoes. That stewy stuff was sour potatoes mixed with meat potatoes, and the vegetable, like broccoli tops? Green potatoes.”

  “Show them about fish potatoes,” said Martha Kincaid, gasping with pleasure at this prospect.

  “Gotta find one first,” said Bruce. He knelt and began smoothing pebbles and dirt away from the crevice, holding the vine gently to one side. David put his hands out to help, but Bruce said, “Look out,” and unfolded a large pocketknife.

  “Dad said you’re gonna ruin your pocketknife keep chopping at rocks,” said Martha.

  “I like to sharpen it,” said Bruce absently, prizing the knife into the gap. His tongue arched out onto his left cheek as he worked.

  The night before, the night of their arrival, Clement and Pella and Raymond and David had been invited to eat at the Kincaids’ house. The new world outside was boundless and dark, impossible to see or think about. The Marshes rushed from their strange empty new house to the Kincaid’s like escaping slaves, huddled against the universe, hurrying from one puny light to another, eyes lowered, mouths shocked dumb. Pella held David’s hand. Raymond walked a little ahead across the shadowed crust of ground, daring himself, pushing away from the family.

  Be brave like an arm, Pella thought.

  Bruce and Martha’s parents, Joe and Ellen Kincaid, cooked a big meal of Archbuilder food. They hadn’t called it potatoes. The two families sat and ate together in the small house, and Pella felt an irrational fury at the adult Kincaids, for presuming they were meeting the Marsh family when Caitlin wasn’t there. Pella knew Caitlin would have talked more than anyone, would have dominated this table and the talk at it, as she always had. Listening to Clement’s clumsy overtures was painful. Couldn’t the Kincaids hear how incapable he was? Apparently not. This was what passed for adult conversation on the Planet of the Archbuilders.

  At that dinner Bruce Kincaid had right away latched onto Pella, appointed himself her guide, distracting her from Clement. Sitting beside her at the table, he pointed out the household deer that hid in the shadows at the edges of the room, watching the families eat. “There—there. Do you see them?”

  It took her a while to make out the tiny figures, more miniature quicksilver giraffe than deer. But climbing giraffe, able to cling, like the one on the side of Joe Kincaid’s desk or the one that scurried up the edge of the curtain. Bruce showed her how they hid in darkness and reflections. He switched the lights in the room on and off so the household deer were surprised, and briefly more visible, before they adjusted to the new lighting. After a few minutes Ellen Kincaid said, “Bruce, stop that flashing, please. It’s giving me a headache,” and when he stopped the creatures were again almost invisible. But Pella’s eyes had begun learning to find them.

  Before dessert, Ellen Kincaid brought out a large plastic bottle and put a capsule of blue powder at each child’s place at the table. Clement quickly palmed up those lying before Pella and David and Raymond and handed them back to her, comically swift and elegant, before she’d even screwed the top back on the bottle.

  It was the drug to stop the Archbuilder viruses from living in their bloodstreams.

  “I know, it’s better to do it with the food,” Ellen Kincaid said, misunderstanding. “But keep these. You can give us some of yours later. We all share around here, anyway—”

  Clement held up his hand. “We’re not …”

  Ellen Kincaid waited, but Clement didn’t finish.

  “Excuse me,” said Ellen Kincaid.

  Pella felt a disconcerting pride in Clement, his plans, his notions, his courteous stubbornness. It was the pride Caitlin would have felt if she were here, so Pella felt it on Caitlin’s behalf. Clement’s notions made th
eir family somehow matter. Even damaged. Even here.

  There was a clumsy silence, then Joe Kincaid brought out the dessert, a mashed thing, like a hat with powdered sugar. He set it down, and Ellen Kincaid passed him one of the rejected capsules. The Kincaids all swallowed theirs, Martha Kincaid with her wondering eyes locked on Pella.

  Clement then changed the unspoken subject, began to speak of gardening, his admiration for the Kincaids’ garden, his hope that he could start one himself. Bruce caught Pella’s attention at the same time, and the table split again into two conversations, adults and children. The pills were forgotten. Or at least not spoken of again.

  After dinner the exhausted family trudged across flat stones behind Joe Kincaid and his flashlight, back to their own house, to fall into hard new beds and instantly asleep. Pella dreamed of the subway, as if to bring the darkness of the empty sky close around her, to make a tunnel of it. A hiding place.

  The next morning Bruce Kincaid arrived early, to carry on his job of stewardship by leading Pella and her brothers out into the valley.

  The settlement was at the farthest edge of a basin ringed by crumbled arches. Eroded spires that rose a thousand feet into the air. Fallen bridges, incomplete towers, demolished pillars. The valley was a monumental roofless cathedral with only the buttresses intact, and the calm purple-pink sky of the Planet of the Archbuilders glowed like stained-glass windows between these vast ruined frames.

  Caitlin had explained it all, narrating from her hospital bed. Her voice hung over this landscape. So Pella knew that the towers were unnecessary, ornamental, that they had only ever been partly habitable. And that no one, human or Archbuilder, lived in them now. What rooms existed were mostly filled with rubbish, the dead-end flotsam of the Archbuilders’ abandoned civilization. The towers and arches were built into the rocky floor of the valley, where landscaping viruses had sewn ground and architecture together.

  Here in sight of the ruins, Pella understood why the creatures still called themselves Archbuilders. Even if that part of them had gone to sleep—if anything, it would make it more urgent that they advertise their connection to the spires, to the network of ruins. In remembrance. They were like ghosts haunting the abandoned mansion of their own civilization.

  So what were the human families? Ghosts haunting someone else’s mansion?

  The children wandered out among the pitted hills in the middle of the valley, as far from the shadows of the arches as possible. Pella had to work not to feel doomed out under the open sky, had to struggle not to cringe under the sun. Caitlin is here, she told herself. Their mother had died and brought them here, insisted on their coming, weaving her tale of this place into her dying. So she must be here. They must have come to find her in this landscape, somewhere in these rocks and ruins, somewhere between the flat valley and the bowed sky. Like the Archbuilders, Caitlin had left but was still here, in this landscape of remembrance. Pella squinted, lifted her head defiantly, ignored the sun.

  It was their first day.

  Bruce scooped out around a wide flat stone with his knife until it was loose enough to pry up. To Pella’s surprise, there was a sucking sound, like a shoe pulled out of mud. Bruce grunted, and flipped the rock over. The little vine led down into a moist crevice, where it turned into a yellow-green lace of veins covering a rubbery, translucent sac. Bruce took his knife and carefully slit the outer hide of the sac, then reached in and began separating the pods that nestled inside.

  They crowded around, even Morris Grant, who’d crept up on the edge of the group once they’d stopped. Nobody seemed to object that he’d joined them. They just ignored him. He looked harmless enough to Pella.

  “Here. C’mon, Martha,” said Bruce Kincaid. He lifted out the first subsection and handed it to his sister. “That’s a green potato.” Martha held it out with two hands and everyone took a turn poking at it. “Split it open and cook it and you get that stuff we ate with the sauce on it. See, but this one’s a cake potato.” He gave the next one to Raymond. “They all grow together. It’s called a cake potato, but it isn’t sweet. The Archbuilders mostly eat those ones. I don’t like them unless they’re all covered with butter and sugar, like the one we had for dessert. Even then I don’t like them much.”

  “Me neither,” said Martha.

  Pella felt the cake potato. It was heavy, and it dented, like an avocado. Nothing like potato, or cake, as she knew them. For what that was worth.

  Morris Grant said, “That’s no big deal. That stuff is everywhere.”

  Bruce Kincaid barely glanced at the smaller boy. “Yeah, but they haven’t seen it, so shut up, Morris.”

  “Can I have one?” said David.

  Bruce, still squatting, pulled another pod from the crevice in the rocks. “Sour potato.”

  “How many different kinds?” said David.

  Bruce said: “Sour, meat, green, cake—”

  “And fish!” said Martha.

  “I’m getting to that,” said Bruce. “Sour, meat, green, cake, tea, uh, ice, and fish. Fish and ice are the hardest to find. Fish is the weirdest one.”

  “How do they grow in there?” said David.

  “Long time ago the Archbuilders took all their favorite foods and made them grow like this, under the ground, so they wouldn’t ever have to do any work. Efram says that’s what made them all lazy and stupid.”

  “Who’s Efram?” said Pella.

  “Efram won’t eat the potatoes,” continued Bruce, not quite answering the question. “Everybody else eats them, even if they’re trying to grow something else. But not Efram. He’s got Ben Barth working on his farm like a slave to get out enough food that isn’t Archbuilder potatoes.”

  Pella heard adult words echoed unreflectingly in Bruce Kincaid’s speech.

  “Efram who?” she said.

  Raymond and David were prying at the cake potato, trying to break the skin, reducing the thing to a bag of pulp in the process.

  “Efram Nugent,” said Bruce. “He’s not around now, or you’d of met him. He’s always out roaming around. That’s why Ben Barth’s got to run his farm.”

  “Efram discovered the Planet of the Archbuilders,” said Morris Grant, a little defiantly.

  “Did not, Morris,” said Bruce. “Don’t be stupid.”

  Morris Grant turned and sidearmed a rock into the cracked valley.

  “Show them fish potatoes, Bruce,” said Martha.

  “Okay, okay. I’ve got to find one first.” Bruce went back to gouging in the crevice. He rejected a series of potatoes, piling them gently to one side, then said, “Here.” He held it out. Raymond reached out with extended hands, but Bruce said, “No, cradle it. Like a water balloon.” He plumped it against Raymond’s chest.

  “Take the others,” he said, and distributed the pile among Pella, David, Martha, and Morris. “E. G. Wa gives us a nickel for every potato we bring in. He bottles them and makes soup and stuff. Except tea potatoes—he’s always got too many of those. A nickel credit, that is. Forget that one.” He indicated the cake potato that Raymond and David had been struggling with. “You ruined it. It’s crap.”

  “I’m keeping the credit for the ones I carry,” said Morris.

  “Jeezus,” said Bruce. “Whatever.”

  “Credit where?” said Raymond.

  “E. G. Wa has kind of a shop,” said Bruce. “Much as you can have a shop with thirteen people in the entire valley. Seventeen now that you’re here.”

  “I thought there wasn’t any money here,” said Raymond.

  “Well, E. G. Wa and some other folks still use dollars and cents, just out of habit, I guess,” said Bruce Kincaid. “But mostly everybody just trades.”

  “Also the Archbuilders sometimes buy stuff,” said Martha. “Wa gives them money for bringing potatoes.”

  “Yeah, it’s kind of stupid,” said Bruce. “He gives them money, then takes it back. But it gives them something to do.”

  Archbuilders sounded less than impressive. Pella decided s
he would be as casual about them as Bruce and Martha Kincaid.

  The six children trudged back across the valley, arms loaded with various potatoes, Raymond cradling just the one sloshy fish potato. Morris trailed, taking care to indicate his apartness from the group even as he joined them in the errand. They turned away from the path back to both the Kincaids’ house and to Pella and Raymond and David’s new home, and headed down a series of crumbled steps until those houses were out of sight.

  E. G. Wa’s shop was just the front part of his house, which was itself just another of the prefabricated cabins they all seemed to have for homes. Where the Kincaids had their dinner table, Wa had a counter loaded with jars. Against the wall was a small table with an optimistically full pot of coffee heating on a burner, and arrayed for the nonexistent coffee drinkers were three rocking chairs.

  As the six of them came clumping in from the porch, Pella caught sight of a pair of household deer skittering out of sight behind the counter.

  “Look,” said Bruce, pointing to a shelf loaded with packages, foil- and plastic-wrapped goods imprinted with advertising logos. “My mother bakes this bread, see?” Now Pella saw the dusty loaves, more plainly wrapped in transparent plastic. “She trades it to Wa, and he sells it out of the shop.”

  “But we get it free at home,” added Martha.

  Pella had a sudden pang of hunger. For bread, for mother.

  E. G. Wa came out of the back. He was tall, and his smile had a permanent, mummified look. He angled his spindly body over the counter and surveyed the group of children. After a moment he took the toothpick out of his mouth and said, “These the new kids, Brucey?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Got stuff for me already?”

  “Yeah.” Bruce lumped his armload of potatoes onto the counter, then helped the others do the same, except for Raymond, and Morris, who managed alone.