The Feral Detective

by Jonathan Lethem

  “Where can I find you?” he asked.

  “I’m staying at the Doubletree, just down Foothill—”

  “Under your own name?”

  “Yes, but what I was going to say is could I come with you? Maybe I’d be able to help describe her—”

  I’d stopped at a sound of clunking and rustling, directly behind me. I almost shit my pants. Another rescue animal? The front panel of the armoire slid open, and two filthy bare feet protruded sideways into the room, their ankles covered in gray leggings. The feet twisted to find the floor, and the rest of the person attached came writhing out, to crouch like the animal I’d mistaken her for.

  A girl, maybe thirteen or fourteen, I guessed. Her black hair was lank to her shoulders and looked as though it had been cut with the nail clippers no one had taught her to use on her raw-bitten fingers. She wrapped her elbows around her knees and watched me sidelong, not turning her almond-shaped head completely in my direction. She wore a tubelike black sundress over the leggings. Her bare arms were deeply tanned, and lightly furred with sun-bleached hair contrasting with the black sprigs at both armpits.

  “It’s okay,” said Heist. He talked past me, to the girl. “She isn’t looking for you.”

  She sat that way, quivering slightly, pursing one corner of her mouth.

  “She thought you might be an emissary of the courts,” he explained. It was nice he felt compelled to account to me at all, I suppose. I’d half risen from my chair. I sat again.

  “Go ahead,” said Heist.

  The girl scurried up and into the mound of blankets on the low bed. She took the same position beneath them, huddled around her knees, her eyes poking from the top as if from an anthill.

  Was it a message to me, that I should remember some lost don’t wish to be found?

  Heist lowered Jean gently back into her drawer and slid it shut. “This is Phoebe,” he said to the girl. “She’s looking for someone else, someone who ran away. We’re going to help her.”

  We? I might cry now. Did the girl ride on Jean when they searched together? No, she’d need a bigger animal, a wolf or goat. Or maybe the detective carried her under his free arm, the one that wasn’t holding the opossum.

  “I’ll find you at the Doubletree,” he said to me now. It wasn’t curt or rude, but I was being dismissed. I felt as though a trap door had opened under the chair.

  “You sure I can’t go along?” I heard myself nearly pleading. “I’d like to get the lay of the land, actually. I’m only here for one reason.”

  “Maybe after I make a few inquiries.”

  “Great,” I said, then added lamely, “I’ll work things from my end in the meantime.” The words we exchanged seemed credible enough, if they’d been spoken in a credible atmosphere. Here, they seemed a tinny rehearsal, something having no bearing on what was actually being enacted in this room, a thing I couldn’t have named and in which I was an unwilling player.

  Could I ask him for the passport back? I didn’t. The girl watched me as I went for the door, opened it to the blinding glare. For the first time, I noticed the water dish and food bowl in the corner—Jean’s meal station. Or maybe the furry girl’s. It occurred to me that Heist had introduced the opossum by name, but not the girl. I felt demented with despair, having come here. My radical gesture, to quit my privileged cage and go intrepid. Take the role of rescuer. Yet it was as though I’d been willingly reduced, exposed as nothing more than that opossum, or the girl in the blanket. My mission had defaulted to another surrender to male authority, the same wheezy script that ran the whole world I’d fled. All the lost girls, waiting for their detectives. Me, I’d be waiting at the Doubletree, to contemplate all the comforts I’d forsaken. And yet I felt also the utter inadequacy of the authority to whom I’d defaulted, he with not even a gun or a bottle of Scotch or a broken heart in his drawer, only a marsupial with a urinary tract infection. I was confused, to say the least. I got out of there.

  4

  BLAME THE ELECTION. I’D BEEN WORKING FOR THE GREAT GRAY NEWS organization, in a hard-won, lowly position meant to guarantee me a life spent rising securely through the ranks. This was the way it was supposed to go, before I’d bugged out. I’d done everything right, like a certain first female nominee we’d all relied upon, even my male friends who hated her, as a cap on the barking madness of the world. Now she took walks in the hills around Chappaqua, and I’d checked into the Doubletree a mile west of Upland, California.

  I’d grown up a pure product of Manhattan, secretly middle-class in Yorkville. My parents were both shrinks, and their marriage was a device for the caretaking of my mother’s jittery, wrecked romanticism. An only child, I might have been one too many. I spent a lot of my childhood farming myself out to the houses of families with siblings, houses with a raucous atmosphere in which I could be semi-mistaken for just one more. It wasn’t so much that my parents discouraged my bringing friends home. When I did, my parents were always delighted, and, putting out tea and cookies, sat us down for what I imagined—still imagine—couples therapy might be like.

  I saved my parents a calamitous sum by getting into Hunter College High School, then forced them to produce the calamitous sum by getting into college in Boston. The summer before my junior year I interned at a literary magazine, and when I returned to New York after graduation I worked there. It was a place that encouraged the nonsurrender of certain radical feminist-theoretical attitudes I’d cultivated at college, even as I prospered in an atmosphere of lightly ironized harassing “mentorship” in an office full of men ten years older than myself. From there to NPR, where I did research, prepping the one-sheets that made interviewers sound like they’d read books they hadn’t read. And then Op Ed, my foot in the door of the citadel.

  The notorious day in November when my boss and all the rest of them sat deferentially with the Beast-Elect at a long table behind closed doors, to soak in his castigation and flattery, I conceived my quitting. At the start of the following week, I actually opened my yawp and did it, made a perverse stand on principle, stunning myself and those in range of hearing. The hate in my heart was amazing. I blamed my city for producing and being unable to defeat the monster in the tower. I already had my escape charted out, and I gave exactly zero of my accumulated mentors, or my parents, any say in the matter. For my thirty-three-year-old tantrum, I was patronizingly dubbed The Girl Who Quit. I think I won Facebook that day, for what it’s worth. I mean, of course, inside the so-called bubble.

  Roslyn Swados had been my supervisor at NPR. Twenty years older than me, a public radio lifer, she was recently divorced when our friendship began. I was fresh off a juvenile breakup myself. She had me to her perfect Cobble Hill duplex for a dinner consisting of a bottle of white wine and a baguette and a giant hunk of Humboldt Fog, a cheese I’d somehow never tasted until that night. We polished them all off in an orgy of commiseration, then moved on to a bar of Toblerone.

  Roslyn’s life ran along the lines of the New York I’d idealized growing up, one increasingly unavailable to those of us coming along after—the one implicit in a thousand short stories from the ’80s and ’90s issues of the New Yorker still stacked in my parents’ bathroom, some of which I’d memorized. It was only likely that her address was Cheever Place, a landmarked, tree-lined block that formed my sanctuary and ideal.

  Neither of us were lesbians, so I couldn’t be in love with Roslyn. It didn’t make sense for me to want to be her, since there was no one for me to divorce yet. I wasn’t Roslyn’s daughter, either, since I still had a mother, and she had Arabella, who was a high school sophomore when I entered their lives, still living at home, though she had in some ways already grown elusive to Roslyn. It was more like I’d farmed myself out again, as I’d done before college. In this case, to a family where I could be a younger sister to the mother and an elder to the daughter. I’m sure Roslyn hoped I’d glue the two of them together at least a while longer. I never blamed her for making this calculation. Our friendship was
real, and the calculation was wrong, as it happened. I couldn’t glue mother and daughter together, not even briefly.

  But I did get close to Arabella. She trusted me. Soon I enjoyed two uncanny familial friendships, upstairs and downstairs in the same duplex. This was a kid who’d become a vegetarian at twelve, after reading Jonathan Safran Foer’s book, and who had three posters in her room: Sleater-Kinney, Pussy Riot, and Leonard Cohen. Her sexuality was unclear, but I got the feeling the sexuality of the entire high school at Saint Ann’s was unclear, so she had company. She no longer spoke to her father. She played guitar, badly. I worried when she told me Cohen’s “Chelsea Hotel #2” was her favorite song (giving me head on the unmade bed), but took heart when it became apparent she identified not with the female subject but with the male singer.

  Arabella and her friends were those who couldn’t recall a time before 9/11, or only barely, an evil channel glimpsed before their parents dug the remote from the cushions to switch it off. Though they made me feel old, I rooted for her and her compatriots with the dumb devotion others reserved for sports teams. I frankly envied Arabella when she declared her disinterest in eastern colleges and applied to Reed. I thought she’d thrive there.

  One night in September, I went to dinner with Roslyn. We met at Prune, on First Street. We sat on either side of a stew of mussels and leeks, our favorite, only nothing was right that night, and it was more than the nothing-is-right of foreshadowed electoral doom. Arabella hadn’t been calling home. Her texts were minimal, their tone hostile and defensive. Roslyn didn’t know what to do.

  “Did you call your mother from college?” Roslyn asked bluntly.

  “My mother wasn’t one you called,” I began. I said it with a glibness I regretted immediately.

  “Arabella thinks of me the same way.”

  Of course. Something obscure came clear, the reason I’d inserted myself so deeply in this family. I’d been free to behold and adore a mother and a daughter equally, even if they couldn’t themselves. In the system of my own family, I could only choose one side.

  “I’ll reach out,” I said. The thing I knew she hoped I’d say.

  I got Arabella on the phone, once. She didn’t like her classes, or Portland. She repeated a promise from before, that she would drop out and head down to Mount Baldy, to find Leonard Cohen. I treated this with skeptical amusement—a big mistake. And Arabella probably sniffed me out; she was too smart to fool. For the first time ever, I’d agreed to act as a go-between or mole for her mother.

  Then came the week in November when, accompanying the national calamity, Leonard Cohen dropped dead. When Roslyn rang Arabella’s cell, she got only a text in return: I’m fine. Somehow, I thought, I’m fine never means what it says.

  I urged Roslyn to contact the dean of students. She’d already been contenting herself, it seemed to me, with too little word from her daughter. Arabella was a New York kid, I reminded her. It meant she was equipped, sure, but also that the rest of the country, even funky Portland, would be an alien wonderland to her—never more than after November 8.

  But Roslyn was a New Yorker too. Distracted, stoical, and now, like all of us, a little or a lot wrecked. She’d been hitting the white wine hard, without enough Humboldt Fog and baguette to soften the impact. I didn’t blame her. She satisfied herself with a few more flat-affect texts from Arabella until the day in mid-December when even those quit coming, and when calls to Arabella’s number resulted in a “Mailbox full” message.

  Roslyn woke from her trance and bought a plane ticket to Portland. She was distraught enough that I offered to join her. We flew out on a Friday night, and we were together when Reed’s security let us into Arabella's dorm room, the single she’d fought for. The mess there included unopened mail dated as far back as September, masses of untouched schoolwork, and her abandoned passport, the one I’d now handed over to Heist. Like most New York eighteen-year-olds, Arabella wasn’t a driver, so she’d fled without an ID, which set off alarms. We talked with the dean of students on Monday before flying back east, but Arabella hadn’t made herself visible to their system of counselors and advisors. She’d been discreetly failing out from the start, and no one knew her.

  Back in New York, I tried to help a nearly insensate Roslyn with some rote sleuthing. A credit-card record put Arabella on an Amtrak to Union Station in Los Angeles. Leonard Cohen, it didn’t take much to learn, had been recently living not on Mount Baldy, but in Los Angeles proper, among the Jews and pop stars, as would anyone with a brain. Well, not Arabella. The last thing the credit card’s trail revealed was a purchase—a bunch of groceries—from a supermarket called Stater Bros. in the Mountain Plaza Shopping Mall in Upland, California, fifty miles from the Pacific Ocean. It pointed to a pilgrimage to the Zen mountaintop, just like she’d promised. So, having sworn to Roslyn I’d find her daughter, I arrived in Upland for a look around.

  Harvard, Hillary, Trump, the New York Times. Names I hated to say, as if they pinned me to a life that had curdled in its premises. Those might be summarized as feeling superior to what I hated, like the Reactionary White Voter, or the men who’d refused me the chance to refuse to marry them by refusing to ask.

  Well, unlike the helicopter-raised people around me, I could look in a mirror without someone else holding it—or so I liked to think. If there was an outside to my fate, I’d locate it, or be damned inside the self-referential system of familiarities. Maybe I could bring back Arabella, and with her, a report from the exterior.

  5

  MY HOTEL WAS ONLY A MILE FROM THE DUSTY YELLOW MYSTERIES OF Upland, but it might have been a million. Claremont was a town that presented itself as an implacable fortress of non-native shade trees and well-kept craftsman houses, fitted around a college campus as empty and perfect as a stage set. In this cheery simulacrum I discovered nothing I could get a purchase on, apart from a lively record store, but I didn’t have any way of playing a record. So I took my phone to a bakery and coffee shop called Some Crust and read Elena Ferrante at an outdoor table and hoped for some amusing college student to hit on me. I got hit on by amusing senior citizens instead. Perhaps they, like the Klan, had been lately emboldened. I retreated to my hotel.

  My room reminded me of a gun moll’s wisecrack, in some old film I’d seen, on entering an apartment: “Early Nothing.” I was left with Facebook, where my friends had responded to the election by reducing themselves to shrill squabbling cartoons. Or I could opt for CNN, where various so-called surrogates enacted their shrill hectoring cartoons without needing to be reduced, since it was their life’s only accomplishment to have been preformatted for this brave new world. Television had elected itself, I figured. It could watch itself too, for all I cared. I read my book.

  On the second day without a call from Heist, it began to rain. There was dramatic promise in the storm’s beginnings, with a three A.M. lightning strike that might have been right over the Doubletree. It shook my room with a sound like a sonic boom just an instant after the flashbulb flare that had woken me. Could the world be saying no thanks to 2017, to the latest outlandish shithead cabinet appointment, after all? Maybe I’d come to California to join it in sliding into the sea.

  But the lightning was mere overture to a dull steady rain that fell unceasingly through the day and night that followed, unimpressive except if I stepped outside the door of my room. The hard-baked desert ground, which exposed the lie of all those shade trees, didn’t soak the water up but refused it. The rain gathered in torrents coursing downhill, away from the mountaintops, which were no longer visible through the roof of gray mist. These gouts made every sidewalk crossing a whitewater rafting opportunity, only I didn’t have a raft. Southern California wasn’t made for pedestrians, needless to say, but today it wanted amphibious vehicles.

  I retreated to my room to write e-mails, except the one that mattered, the one I owed Roslyn. I knew my friend was in tatters, waiting for me to deliver a miracle. Instead, I’d reduced myself to her West Coast equal, f
or the moment: a woman in a room, alone. I might be nearer to Arabella; likely I was. But I couldn’t prove it.

  So my thoughts turned to my appointed savior. I Googled a few combinations of feral, detective, and Heist, but, surprise surprise, he didn’t have a website or Wikipedia page. Nor did it help that his last name doubled as an improper noun. Most of the results not involving crime movies were links to heartbreaking and lurid newspaper accounts of children abused by their caretakers in Florida and elsewhere, which pushed me off the search in disgust. I played some Leonard Cohen on YouTube through my computer’s lousy speakers. A fairly weak gesture in Arabella’s direction, but maybe it would somehow summon her up.

  The third morning, I couldn’t take it anymore, and I tried Heist’s phone. I got his voicemail. “I can’t answer the phone. Please leave a message.” I called twice but left no message. Unlike the first time I’d heard it, I now had a face to go with that strange calm, flat tone: a strange calm, flat leathery face, bordered in extraordinary hairs. I couldn’t purge it from my thoughts, nor could I quit picturing his office. Was the furry girl wrapped in her blanket on that cot, jumping at the ringing of the phone? Or was he? Whose bed was that, anyhow? Were the girl and the opossum lapping together from the water bowl in the corner? I felt I might be obligated to bust in there and free that child, but I was paralyzed with uncertainty, and the absurd hope that Charles Heist was suddenly about to deliver Arabella and make sense of my dereliction of my own life, my own trajectory. I longed for my cubicle, for another Tinder date at the Bourgeois Pig.