Girl in Landscape

by Jonathan Lethem

  “We do? I hadn’t noticed.” Clement grinned, meaning it to be funny.

  “Pella didn’t tell you I came around?” Efram pointed at her, as if she were off somewhere in the distance.

  “No, actually,” said Clement. “Maybe she forgot.”

  “Maybe,” said Efram, raising his eyebrows at Pella significantly.

  Pella turned and looked out the window, back across the porch at the jagged black landscape they’d crossed coming here. The sky was dark now, too, the sun finished.

  The lit house had been a trap for them, a trap she led Clement into.

  “Here.” Efram pulled out chairs for them, as though they all belonged there in Diana Eastling’s house. Clement sat, but Pella took the long way around the table, pausing to examine Diana’s desk, which was loaded with disordered papers, stopping to peek into the unlit kitchen. She imagined briefly that Efram was lying to them, and Diana was in the house somewhere, hiding, listening. She wished it were true.

  There were no household deer visible, anywhere. Pella went and sat down at the table, as far from both Efram and Clement as possible.

  Efram exhibited his uneven smile. “People have been trying to get it through my thick skull that your coming here means something, that it’s some kind of defining moment around here.” He tipped back in his chair and swung his legs up onto the table, then took a pipe and a lighter out of his pocket. Pella stared. Efram not only put his feet on Diana Eastling’s table, he smoked in her house. She wished he would burn it down, so she and Clement could flee. “I’ve been laughing it off,” Efram continued, “but now it occurs to me they may be right.”

  Clement shook his head. “I’m just one man and his family, here to start over, Mr. Nugent. We may be part of a trend, but we’re only part of it.” Clement’s voice was testy, brittle.

  “Call me Efram. And let me finish. I was going to say maybe we need a defining moment. This is going to be a town, maybe a big town. That’s okay with me.” He lit his pipe and puffed out white, aromatic smoke. “And you’re a politician,” he added. “You want to be involved. That’s okay too.”

  “I’ve worked as a politician. Now I’m working as a homesteader. I’m beginning to wonder what it is that’s not okay with you.”

  “You don’t want to be seen as a carpetbagger.”

  Pella wanted to cover her ears. The world seemed to have closed in around them there at the table, and the two voices flew at Pella from different directions: Efram’s a low ambient insinuation that wanted to surround her, take over the world, and Clement’s a tinny broadcast from too far away to matter, but too nagging to ignore.

  “I don’t want to be a carpetbagger. I want to be a part of the community here. A growing place, that’s something entirely new to me. I want to learn.”

  “Learning is good,” said Efram. He took his legs off the table, his pipe out of his mouth, and leaned forward to peer into the bowl of the pipe. When he spoke it was as if he were reading something from inside the bowl. “What if I told you I thought we needed some organization, a few rules around this place?”

  “You’re headed somewhere, Efram. I don’t imagine you’re a person who ordinarily beats around the bush, but you’re doing it now.”

  “Pella’s a lovely girl.”

  “You’ll embarrass her.”

  Clement’s words seemed to Pella the very definition of inadequate. She was past embarrassment.

  Humming with obscure shame and dread was more like it.

  “Then I’ll switch the subject,” said Efram. He turned the pipe around and pointed it at Clement. “I think we ought to draw a line around this town we’re starting here, Marsh. Make it a human settlement, a place where kids are safe.”

  “You want to exclude the Archbuilders, is that it—”

  “And I want Pella and her brothers to take those pills.” The words were so lazily formed it was almost possible to ignore how he’d interrupted Clement to say them.

  “This planet belongs to the Archbuilders, Efram,” said Clement, as though he couldn’t begin to address Efram’s suggestions directly.

  “I’m just talking about moving them out of our settlement. They don’t care. They’ve got plenty of other places to wander around. A whole ruined planet for them to gawk at and wonder what the hell happened to their civilization.”

  “If we become a little embattled preserve—”

  “Maybe you’d rather we become Archbuilders.”

  “That’s ridiculous.”

  Efram put his pipe in his mouth and pointed his thumb at Pella. “That’s what you’re doing to Pella if you don’t give her the medicine.”

  “I don’t think medicine is the right word for it.”

  “Do you think it’s right to put a political experiment ahead of your children’s welfare?”

  “Politics you believe in should be reflected in the choices you make for your family,” said Clement, angry now. “There isn’t any difference between the two. If there is, you’re a hypocrite.”

  “You were a Democrat, right?” Efram pronounced it so it nearly rhymed with hypocrite, as if he thought that might have been what Clement really meant. “I thought your party was against screwing with human biology.”

  “Please. We’re a long way from our own scientific fiascoes here. These viruses have been stable for centuries. The Archbuilders remade their world from the ground up. It’s pointless to regard some of it as suspect, unnatural. If we’re going to live here, breathe the air, we’ve certainly got to find out what the viruses do to us.”

  Pella heard her father as Caitlin must have heard him. His authentic principles, his rightness. Only his rightness seemed lost here. Hopeless. She’d made it hopeless, with the thing she was hiding from him.

  “Do to her, you mean,” said Efram.

  “Nothing’s happened to her,” said Clement confidently.

  “Is that right?” Efram turned to Pella and raised his eyebrows, smiled.

  Pella stared back, her mouth opening to speak. But nothing emerged.

  It was her lie to defend.

  The thing had only happened once. Twice if she counted the dream. Maybe never again. But what if she wanted the pills? She felt a swell of panic. She could sneak the pills, take them without anyone knowing—

  As harshly as she felt toward Clement, she didn’t want him to be wrong and Efram right.

  But Efram nodded at her as she sat and stared, as though he already had his answer, or was getting it now.

  Then she blinked her eyes, and was out in the night, squatting low on the summit of a pillar, staring out at the valley, her tiny body twitching, humming with awareness. Below her spread a tangle of ruins, threaded with vines whose leaves shimmered in the gentle, invisible wind. Beyond the ruins lay a homestead, one light shining through the windows, and through the porch window Pella could see three people seated at a table, two men and a girl—

  “No,” she said.

  She was back at the table.

  “No what?” said Efram, squinting at her.

  Pella touched her own arms, her legs, trying to believe in herself, in the presence of her body. She felt the small throb of pain in her ankle, smelled Efram’s pipe. She was here. Not outside. Not watching herself through deer eyes.

  “Nothing’s happened to her,” said Clement furiously. “We discussed it.”

  “You discussed it?” said Efram, completely unruffled. “What prompted that?”

  “No,” said Pella, finding her voice. “Nothing happened.” She said it to push Efram away, if only for a moment, and to assert to herself that she was here, in her human body. That she wouldn’t drift out into the night.

  Was this how Caitlin felt after her operation? Half-present, half-gone?

  If she let herself drift and wander would she find her mother, somewhere out in the moonless valley?

  “Fair enough,” said Efram. “We’re all agreed that nothing should happen.” He took his eyes off Pella at last, and turned back to Cleme
nt. “So why not take the step to ensure that it doesn’t?”

  Clement stood suddenly. “Why don’t you leave that for me and Pella to decide,” he said.

  It occurred to her that she should rise now, follow Clement, show her belief in him, as if this were one of his podiums, or convention halls. But she didn’t stand. She was unsure her legs would hold her. So she stayed at the table with Efram, trembling, paralyzed by her fear that Efram was holding back something terrible that she needed to know.

  She’d lied to protect herself. But it had become a lie to protect her father.

  She closed her tired eyes, but their two voices babbled on maniacally. The room was filling with words, with shattered inflexible sentences. Pella wanted to howl, or to disappear. Instead she huddled, listening. Efram said, “I don’t know if you and your kids ought to decide something that matters to everyone here, the whole town.”

  “I can’t imagine why you think it’s so important,” said Clement.

  “What you can’t imagine,” Efram shot back, “is exactly the problem. Things you can’t or haven’t bothered to imagine about the Archbuilders, things I know.”

  “You like to deal in vague warnings,” said Clement. “If you know something, let’s have it. I don’t think you do. If the result of the viruses were known, I’d have read about it.”

  “You really think it’s that simple, don’t you, Marsh? Read about a place, then go blundering in. The map and the territory are the same.”

  “Well, not in one regard. You and your highhanded warnings weren’t on the map to this place.”

  “I’m not the only thing. Trust me.”

  Now that she’d been outside, Pella could hear the wind, a low, distinct whine that seemed to rise and fall with their voices.

  “Let’s make this simple,” said Clement. “Emigration to the American sector of this planet is governed by a man named David Hardly out of an office in Washington D.C. I applied there, Efram, and I guess you did too. They didn’t mention a requirement that my children take the antiviral drug, and they didn’t say you’d be instructing me on my behavior when I arrived. Until someone explains otherwise I’ll assume we’re under Hardly’s jurisdiction here.”

  She opened her eyes again. Efram was grinning around his pipe. “Jurisdiction,” he said. “Now you’re talking like a politician. Making sense like one, too. Dave Hardly’s never even been up here. I’ve been living here seven years, mostly alone. You decide who you want to listen to.”

  Clement went to the door. “Thanks. I’ll do that.” He held out his hand for Pella. She thought, He doesn’t know the way back without me. He’ll make his dramatic exit and wander lost, have to circle back and humiliate himself asking Efram for directions. He doesn’t have any handlers here, to grab him by the elbow as he walks off the podium. He doesn’t have Caitlin.

  She got up from the table in a rush, went past him and out into the night, not taking his hand.

  Nine

  The Archbuilder sat on a high stool in front of a window, perfectly framed by the ruins in the distant background, the pink sky above. The alien’s mouth was slightly open, a tufted gap in the fur, beneath huge black eyes and shiny black cheeks. Its arms were folded, not together, but each back on itself, wrist to shoulder, inside its rustling paper garment. Soft, double-jointed legs crossed each other twice, knee and ankle. They appeared almost braided. Fronds stirred, gently. Otherwise the alien was completely still, an ideal model.

  Hugh Merrow’s face was washed-out, blond beard and eyebrows fading to sallow flesh, his eyes pale blue, and sharp. His clothing was covered with wipes, little finger-smudges of color, but the canvas he worked on now was roughed in with black and white and shades of gray. No color. He stepped away from his easel, squinting in concentration and annoyance as he crossed the room toward the Archbuilder. Brush between his teeth, he reached out and gently rearranged the fronds on top of the Archbuilder’s head. The alien sat patient and unmoving, comfortable, apparently, with Merrow’s touch.

  Lining the edges of the floor were canvases, many of them Archbuilder portraits, some finished, glossy and built-up with layers of paint, others only sketched, or rubbed out in some places and heavily worked in others. A few were overworked disasters, knobbed with encrusted brush strokes, gnarled with color. There were self-portraits, too, Hugh Merrow glaring from the canvases the way he glared now at his Archbuilder sitter. And landscapes, sketches of vine-strewn ruins, distant incomplete arches in pink haze.

  Hugh Merrow moved his brush to the windowsill, then put his hands back into the mass of the Archbuilder’s fronds. The alien moved slightly, breaking the pose. Neither spoke. Hugh Merrow leaned over the Archbuilder, as though the fronds were a bouquet of flowers he wanted to sniff. The Archbuilder turned slightly, paper clothes rustling. The brush, jostled, clattered to the floor.

  Pella risked a dash across the open floor for a better view. This she hadn’t seen before. She scampered out from behind the cabinet, then up under the shelter of a chair, feathery limbs scrabbling silently. A jacket covered the chair back. Pella darted up through the hanging sleeve and poked her head over the top of the collar.

  Hugh Merrow’s tongue extended from his mouth, to meet the end of one of the fronds that lay across the Archbuilder’s forehead.

  Pella suddenly didn’t want to be seeing it. She tucked her head down, and clung there inside the coat, trembling, angry at Hugh Merrow for what he was doing in front of her, as though her presence were known to him.

  Whatever he was doing, it wasn’t painting. She knew that much.

  She released her hold on the inside of the jacket, ran across the seat of the chair and onto the floor, moving to the window that was her way in and out of Hugh Merrow’s place.

  Then, changing her mind, she didn’t bother escaping, just woke, allowed her perceiving self to flow back into her human body, where it lay, sleeping and hidden. The deer could find its own way out.

  Back in her dark secret nook, she opened her eyes, her real eyes, and knew instantly that she wasn’t alone.

  When the Archbuilder virus infiltrated her body the girl felt an urgent need to search the hills and towers west of the settlement, to look for a hiding place, a burrow, a safe house for her human body, like a bird in spring compelled by instinct to build a nest. What she found was a chunk of fallen architecture with a half-collapsed chamber, a thing that might have been a turret, a tower room for a prisoner in a fairy tale, a kidnapped woman or a man with a scarred face. The girl pictured the fragment high on the arc of some gigantic buttress, but now it lay on its side in the seam of a gully, a spot sheltered from most views, and so dark and protected that Archbuilder potatoes grew there, just inside the entrance, exposed to the open air. The fragment was the sort of archaeological clue that the girl imagined Diana Eastling was out combing the planet to find.

  The girl cleaned out the vine, sold the potatoes to Wa, then kicked dust over the muddy traces of the potato nest. Even so, she huddled at the opposite end of the chamber, away from where the potatoes had grown. She had stocked her nook with three jars of water and a blanket, stolen from a supply pallet behind the Kincaids’ house. Nothing else, no books, no paper, no games. The girl didn’t read or play there, just closed her eyes and went away, into the body of a household deer. The hiding place didn’t have to be anything more than what it was: secure, private. Though she wouldn’t mind if it were warmer. Lying still for hours, the girl would wake shivering, even wrapped in the blanket.

  The girl had snuck in to watch the painter and his Archbuilder models three times before. As she saw it, she was practicing, mastering her fear and awkwardness, learning what it meant to be a household deer, a spy. She didn’t care what she saw when she practiced this new art; she was only finding out what was possible. She’d been in E. G. Wa’s shop, seen him fussing and cleaning in the back, picking his nose, staring out the window as he waited for his nonexistent customers. She’d watched him go to the bathroom, elbows on his knobby k
nees as he sat. And she’d climbed into the cab of Ben Barth’s truck the day before, and ridden with him out to Efram Nugent’s farm. She hadn’t gone in, though, hadn’t wanted to see Efram again, even nearly invisible, as she was. She hadn’t forgotten the moment in Wa’s shop, when Efram had seemed to see through her deer-self, to Pella. So she’d crept out of the truck and tiptoed through the maze of planting boxes in Efram’s yard, then, suddenly spooked, had woken.

  Once she’d crept around the edges of the Grants’ house, but she didn’t go in. She didn’t want to see Snider and Laney Grant, the drunk couple who never left their house, didn’t want to know what Morris Grant faced when he went home. She only waited on the porch awhile to see if Doug would come out. He didn’t. The girl saw Doug Grant when she spied at Wa’s, never anywhere near his parents’ home.

  Ben Barth, Hugh Merrow, E. G. Wa—these were the bachelors, the harmless ones, as Pella saw it. She allowed herself to practice on them. She didn’t want to spy on the families, not even her own. She didn’t want to see anything that mattered. She only wanted to amuse herself and explore the boundaries, the functions of the gift.

  Someone knelt over her in the dark. Someone had found her in her hole. She blinked and worked out his silhouette in the light leaking through the entrance. Bruce Kincaid.

  “Pella?”

  Of course he would find her. The digger, the clamberer, the collector. She’d hidden where potatoes grew, so what did she expect? She should have built her hideaway in a closet in her house, right under Clement’s nose—there she would have stayed undiscovered. It was Bruce Kincaid who’d been asking where she was disappearing to. Her father hadn’t even noticed how much time she spent missing, hiding.

  “Pella?”

  “I’m here.” She sat up. He couldn’t see yet, she realized. The sky was bright and he was still blinded, coming into the dark turret.

  “You didn’t answer.”

  “I was hiding.”

  “I touched you, and you didn’t say anything. I had to wake you up.”