The Feral Detective

by Jonathan Lethem

  I sent out a Hail Mary e-mail to my only actual Los Angeles acquaintance, a high school friend who’d Liked my quitting on Facebook and invited me to get in touch. Now, hearing my location, she broke the news that Culver City, where she worked in a gallery, was a nearly two-hour drive on a weekday, even without the rain. Still, I had nowhere else to be, unless I set out up the mountain to poke around the Zen Center on my own—the location was plain enough on Google Maps. But no, I’d give Heist at least one more day. So I told her I’d treat her to dinner at the best restaurant she could show me in Culver City. I needed the hell out of the Doubletree and the whole Inland Empire.

  6

  THE GPS INSTRUCTED ME TO “MERGE ONTO INTERSTATE TEN WEST, TOWARD Los Angeles,” but in the robot’s voice it sounded like lost and jealous. The sea change from the suburban desert interior, of which there’d been stunning miles to traverse before I’d seen downtown passing on the right, was unaccountable. As the miles peeled beneath the tires I thought of Arabella, the western distances she’d had to go to make her disappearance—how many, exactly, I had yet to know.

  Last I’d seen Arabella in person she’d been musing on what I then thought was her little joke, about finding Leonard Cohen. “Don’t you go hitchhiking now,” I’d said to her. “It isn’t 1972 anymore, except in your heart.”

  “Don’t worry, I won’t,” she’d said, with a teenager’s glum exasperation. I hadn’t forced her to promise. Now, each mile ticked in me, a metronome of self-reproach. If I could have Arabella back now, I’d have tried to insert a tracking microchip under the skin at the nape of her neck, like they do with cats and dogs at the adoption shelter.

  7

  I MAY HAVE BEEN TO BLAME, BUT BY THE TIME OF OUR MEAL’S SECOND course, I figured I’d never call Stephanie again and might even block her if I didn’t have the brass to unfriend. Of course that’s when the conversation got interesting, at least a little.

  “Everyone’s trying to get out of New York,” she informed me, in what I suppose she intended as a kind of congratulation. “You’re not even ahead of the curve. Out here it’s like, what took you so long?”

  “I don’t need to be ahead of the curve,” I said. In fact, I was a little stunned to find myself in an outrageously expensive restaurant, one with a low glow of orange light at each table and an actual fourth-tier—but identifiable—movie actor at the bar. The sheer urbanity, in the decor and clientele, had actually thrown me for a loop. Nothing in Upland or Claremont had challenged my New Yorker’s sense of superiority. But Stephanie had me meet her at the gallery first, where glam-bohemian staff and collectors, women in leather jackets and heels, men in beards and T-shirts, browsed what seemed an entire city block of white walls and unfathomable objects, making me feel by their blasé fabulousness very much the poor little match girl by comparison.

  “You become yourself out here,” said Stephanie now.

  “How so?”

  “In New York, that caffeinated neurotic atmosphere guarantees you think something important is happening every single second of your life. In fact, you’re just eating shit. I mean literally so unhealthy you can’t even look at yourself in the mirror. And you ride the subway to some job that barely pays your rent and the only reason you don’t know it sucks is that a thousand other people are telling you how lucky you are.”

  Stephanie could look at herself in the mirror, I’d wager that. She wore a sleeveless black dress showing gym-sculpted arms so teenage-boyish they made me a little hot. I braced myself for an infomercial on the benefits of a diet of sheer avocado.

  Instead she said, “With the space around you here, you can’t kid yourself. You have to wake up every day and you have to decide who you are in a total void.”

  She might have been talking about me in my room at the Doubletree after all. I put down my fork, which had been continuously employed in the cause of departure. “Funny you should say that,” I told her. “I think I’ve been undergoing a sort of void encounter myself these past couple of days.”

  Stephanie shrugged. “It’s impossible not to.”

  “I felt like the mountains were too close and too far away at the same time.”

  “Wild edge,” she said enigmatically.

  “What’s that?”

  “L.A. has more of it than any other city in the world. Wild edge, city right up against whatever, the sea, the mountains.”

  “That’s crazy.” I couldn’t gratify her with anything less equivocal than that.

  “You can feel the civilization as this kind of thin layer that’s just been troweled onto the landscape. It’s, like, everything’s provisional.”

  Well, on the one hand there’s mansplaining, and on the other, there’s the sound of a woman quoting the mansplaining to another woman. She confirmed my guess. “This artist we’re working with, that’s actually the title of his upcoming show, Wild Edge.”

  And whom you’ve fucked or are about to be fucking. Stephanie turned red enough that she didn’t need to say it.

  And I suddenly wanted everything she had, practically including the portobello and groats on her barely fussed-with plate. Her head start in fleeing to Los Angeles, her Culver City version of the void encounter, so much less tawdry than my own. I’d been calculating how soon I could get my rental car from the valet and drive east to the Doubletree. Now I wanted to leverage a night on her couch.

  “There’s plenty of wild edge,” I said. “But there’s a surplus of everything else too. A boggling amount of San and Los, with a side order of Rancho.” I was getting defensively goofy. I felt we’d come to that juncture where you allude to the man in your life, in order to claim you’ve got one. A life, that is. I thought, absurdly, of mentioning Charles Heist, or asking if she’d heard of the Feral Detective. Knowing Heist had something in common with having a man in my life—he never called.

  “Where are you again?”

  “Montclair—I mean, Claremont.” I was too embarrassed to say Upland, for some reason. “It’s, uh, a really different scene.” I waved my hand in the approximate direction of the movie star.

  “I’ve never had any reason to go.” I felt it as a sudden withdrawal of her sympathies.

  “If there’s a Midwest of Los Angeles, I think I’ve found it.” Earlier I’d mentioned I was looking for a lost friend, nothing more. Now it occurred to me she might think the “friend” was myself, and not be entirely wrong. I tried another joke. “There’s nothing but there there.” Stephanie wasn’t buying.

  After this glance into each other’s voids there was little left for me and Stephanie to do but to deplore the orange monster for a while and say no to dessert. We crossed these items off the list, and I kept my promise and picked up the check.

  8

  THE RETURN DRIVE ON INTERSTATE 10 IN THE DARK, AND STILL IN GUSTS of rain, was baldly terrifying. It was hardly less crowded than at rush hour. If the six lanes of red taillights were a video game, it would have been called Chute of Death. In fact, at the crest of an ear-popping hill I came to a famous cemetery, one with its own freeway exit, on the other side of which the Inland Empire spread before me, looking like the proverbial blanket of tinsel.

  As it happened, not much later, crouching around a fire in the desert, I’d hear it explained that the hill crowned by the cemetery marked the point at which, in a future of rising sea levels, the Pacific would be exhausted in its encroaching from the west. These immaculate gravestones littered a chunk of future beachfront.

  Suck on that, Wild Edge.

  9

  I WAS AWOKEN IN THE DARK. NOT BY MY PHONE, WHICH I’D ALREADY learned to switch off, having discovered how rarely my New York friends seemed capable of conjugating western time zones. It was by a rap at the door. I rolled from bed to pull the window’s heavy curtains and discovered only more pounding rain streaking the glass. But technically there was daylight behind it somewhere, not night.

  I croaked out some stalling sounds while I wiggled into clothing I’d discarded in a tra
il from the bathroom to the bed. Lacking eyes on me, I’d descended to dormitory squalor pretty rapidly.

  Charles Heist stood in the hotel’s corridor, his black plastic poncho glistening with rain. His hair was swept back under a soaked Dodgers cap.

  “You ready to make some rounds? I could use you now.”

  Rounds? Was he a feral doctor now? “Sure, sure. Just let me—” I indicated the room behind me. I was barefoot, still blinking in the corridor’s light.

  “You have rain boots?”

  “I went to the airport in my winter stuff.”

  “You’ll want it.”

  I didn’t know whether to invite him and his dripping work boots in or shut the door in his face. So I split the difference, left it ajar to the corridor while I went into the bathroom to brush my teeth, found my boots and coat, then corralled my phone and handbag—Pepper spray! Klaxon!—and joined him.

  “Should I follow you in my car?”

  Heist shook his head. We passed through the lobby, where I helped myself to an umbrella from their supply. I also shot the young woman at the counter a dark look for having succumbed to whatever gambit Heist had employed to cause her to surrender my room number. She didn’t blink. I tucked myself into the wind and gale of the front lot, where Heist steered me to his pickup truck but left me to open the passenger door myself. So much for cowboy courtliness—Heist was as unmannerly, as dour and self-enclosed, as an emo guitarist packing in after a poorly attended gig at a bar in Greenpoint. That being my sole point of personal reference for riding shotgun in the garbage-strewn cab of a pickup.

  Heist had started the engine before I tucked my knees and umbrella inside and slammed the door. The vinyl of the seat and the plastic of the dashboard were cracked, yellow foam insulation bulging in both cases. The windshield too had a hairline network extending from where a stone or bullet had impacted it on the passenger side. The wiper blades glided unimpeded, though, carving and recarving windows through the rain.

  I eyed the glove compartment, wondering if it would fit an opossum. Maybe some smaller creature.

  “Are we going up the mountain?” Those white crowns were purely theoretical now, battened somewhere high behind the gray ceiling of the storm.

  “Not just yet. I want to take you to the Wash.”

  I tried not to find that ominous. “Who or what is the Wash?”

  “The San Antonio Wash. It’s the alluvial fan for Mount Baldy, or what’s left of it.” In the grip of the phrase from his own mouth, alluvial fan, I heard Heist begin dreaming of some incommensurable distance, not really addressing me at all. It was a sound I would grow used to from him, this ready unaffixing from the time and space we were meant to be inhabiting, like the cab of his truck. In fact I’d grow needy for it, even if in a given moment it seemed to erase not only me, but him too.

  In this instance, he tore himself free without my help. “You probably drove past without noticing. Everyone does. It’s hidden in plain sight.” We were headed east on Foothill, out of Claremont’s trees. “That’s one of the reasons this zone between Upland and Claremont is what’s called unincorporated.”

  “Unincorporated?”

  “It’s neither town. It’s between.”

  I suffered a lurch of intuition. “The gravel pit, you mean.”

  “There’s a gravel pit at the north end, yes.”

  “It’s called the Wash?”

  “Most people don’t know it has a name.”

  “Listen, I’m a slow starter. I’m better after my coffee.”

  He turned toward me and drove with one hand, like people do in the movies. All you can think is how they’re about to crash and it drives me crazy, even in the movies. “If you don’t want to go into the Wash, I’ll take you back to your hotel.”

  Now Heist wasn’t distant at all, though I might have preferred it if he was. We were nearer than when seated across from each other at his desk, and I felt pitched into the fractal-like whorls of his nostrils and lips, the leonine sideburns and eyebrows. He resembled a breathing woodcut. His eyes were soft, though, and his voice unthreatening.

  “On the contrary, I was wondering when you’d ask.” My yammering wasn’t entirely under my control. Again, I had to see that within my fear was fascination, and more. I wanted to confirm my ability to anchor this man’s drifting attention. Before he found Arabella, I thought, he ought to find me.

  Unless I stunned him with my pepper spray, the only method available was my nervous riffing. “Only what’s the frequency, Kenneth? Seems like a rainy day for a hike.”

  “It’s not so much a hike I had in mind. The Wash people need help. Word is three more days of rain.”

  “What kind of help?”

  “If they sleep in the pipe they might drown. They don’t know they need to be rescued.”

  “I might be your first customer. I wasn’t sure I could keep dry for much longer in the Doubletree.”

  Heist was already qualified to be at least my temporary boyfriend, inasmuch as he’d learned the art of ignoring a percentage of what came out of my mouth. But the next thing he said silenced my joking for a while.

  “Plus, there’s someone in the Wash who might know your friend.”

  “Someone’s seen Arabella?”

  “A young woman. I could be wrong. She’s pretty spaced out. If I’m right, Arabella’s going under another name. Maybe you’d want to talk to her and see what you think.”

  “Yes.” The possibility that he’d actually advanced Arabella’s case reduced me, if not to tears, to syllables. “Just let me in on the plan here.”

  “Try not to come on like the police, that’s the main thing.”

  “I can do that, sure.”

  “Great.” With his free hand he rolled something closer on the long seat between us. I felt it as electric when he closed that distance so casually, then disappointed when he reapplied his eyes to the road. I took up what he’d nudged against my leg—a battered aluminum thermos.

  “Go ahead.”

  It was black and hot. I wasn’t discreet in my slurping. The bracing effect helped me shake off the aura of dream that clung to my waking the way the raindrops clung to the pickup’s windshield. That coffee was a wiper blade, cutting a window for my brain to peer through. I wanted to ask him who was looking after the marsupial in the desk drawer and the tween in the armoire, but the answer was obvious: they were looking after each other.

  Heist parked us on the south side of Foothill, just behind the sign marking the edge of San Bernardino. He took the truck off the boulevard’s shoulder, into the muddy gravel seam at the top of the cavernous margin of earth and gravel, now gushing with wide rivulets of runoff, this thing he’d called the Wash. Tearing past this nullity the first few times in my rental, I’d thought it impressively huge, if also uninviting, not an entry point into anything. Stepping from Heist’s truck, onto the layer of desert mud, I took the true scale into my body. The faraway buildings and trees seemed to recede as I surrendered myself to the earth’s surface. I unfurled my nerdy umbrella.

  Heist went to the side of the pickup’s bed, covered with what I now saw wasn’t a hard cap but a fitted tarp, snapped tightly onto the bed’s walls. He unfastened it from the corner nearest the driver’s door and repeated his disconcerting magician’s stunt, that of disclosing animal life where I hadn’t thought to look: a trio of dogs’ snouts nosed through the gap he’d widened.

  He tore free another few snaps and the dogs scrabbled over the bed’s wall and leaped clear of the truck, one after the next, flowing like train cars on an invisible rail. Brownish husky-type dogs, with raccoon eyes and ridged backs and curled, banner-like tails. Laughable that I’d spent my vigilance on the glove compartment when Heist had The Call of the Freaking Wild conveyed behind us the entire time. If it hadn’t been for the rain I liked to think I would have heard their whining or smelled their fur. Maybe, though, these weren’t whining or fur-stinky dogs, were instead only ghost clean and silent, on point. They circ
led the truck, skirting the roadway, and went down into the ditch, seeming to know we were to enter the Wash.

  The rain had eased just enough that I couldn’t cite it as an excuse to balk. It had been a day since I’d witnessed a lightning strike. Heist, the dogs coursing around his boots, beckoned me down toward a gulley where the fencing had been peeled up to form an easy entrance into the pit, which continued to seem to expand in my sight, as if it wished to swallow me. I had to half collapse my umbrella before I limboed under the fence. Heist waited just long enough to be certain I was clear. In his poncho, with his arms outthrust for balance on the grade, he resembled a black kite that had touched down and grown work boots.

  The palm of the storm-laden sky pressed down to meet us as we descended the bank on the far side of the fence. Within a few steps, I couldn’t see back over the ridge to Heist’s truck. I had to keep my eyes at my feet anyhow, to navigate the muddy gutters rushing underfoot. The dogs surged in and out of my peripheral vision. One curved to me and I held out my hand for him to sniff in greeting and he endeared himself with a hasty sandpaper lick, then resumed scouting. Either the dogs had already been muddy beneath the pickup’s tarp, or they’d instantly found puddles nearly up to their shoulders to plunge through. At either side of the bulge along which Heist had led me, I saw now, runoff gushed as if from a ruptured main.

  “Holy hell,” I said. “This thing is like a bathtub filling up.”

  “It might get there.”

  “Is this the runoff for the entire mountain?”

  “There’s a reservoir between us and the mountain, or we’d be underwater already.”

  I picked my way after him and the dogs, teetered as if on a high wire with my umbrella. My city boots slid on the slick gravel. Soon enough I learned to do as Heist was doing, seeking footings on the clumps of tall reedy grass, jamming my heels into their exposed roots. God knew what figure I’d cut with the inhabitants of the Wash, but I felt the opposite of any manner of police, unless it was a meter maid. The dogs surged ahead, braiding like a strand of DNA. The cavernous embankments of mud, ice plant, and wet shale rose higher with every step, the high thin perimeter of fencing now barely in view. I wondered if I ought to be scattering breadcrumbs or pomegranate seeds or Advil to chart a retreat. Was the rain beating harder against my little bumbershoot, or was it that the wind had died as we descended, so I noticed the sound?