The Feral Detective

by Jonathan Lethem

  I called to Heist, giving full benefit of my wishful thinking. “You think it’s leveling off?”

  He let me catch up. “Should get a whole lot worse, which is in our favor.”

  “How so?”

  “We want to evacuate them. The rain makes our case.”

  “They won’t believe in water they can’t see on a moment-by-moment basis?”

  “No Californian does.” Here Heist offered me a short smile, an admission that he saw I lived to banter, and that he thought he’d bantered back. Maybe he had. The suggestion was that Heist not only knew I wasn’t Californian but maybe wasn’t himself. But if he wasn’t, what was he?

  The dogs had woven together to nose at a heap of wreckage, a house-of-cards pile of ragged slabs of white concrete, its edges scored with rusted stubs of rebar. Though it would have taken a bulldozer to shove it together, the assemblage suggested a lean-to or tent, a temporary shelter. Now I saw it was a shelter. A gray hand emerged from its entrance to chafe at the snouts of the dogs that had been pointed together there.

  I observed the sawed-off plastic gallon containers set out to collect rainwater and the bed of an extinguished fire, also the refuse of fragmented materials—twisted-off lengths of car-radio antenna, stray shopping cart wheels—that lay fanned on the ground before the entrance in an order implying use value, like hand tools mounted in a suburban garage. Heist had slowed not to allow me to catch up, but because we’d entered the Wash’s first encampment.

  The hand scumbling at the noses and skulls of the wet dogs featured white skin coated with grime and tipped with black half-moon fingernails. Now the dogs retreated, spines buckling with an excitement that mimicked fear, as the hand grew an arm and then an entire body, which unfolded itself improbably from within the concrete slabs to stand nearly bare in the rain. The body was smooth, everywhere neatly muscled and utterly filthy, in dirty white sweatpants cut off raggedly at mid-thigh. Considered as a diaper, the covering needed a change. It took a quick soaking instead.

  The man didn’t seem to notice or care. His head was smooth too, or not quite, when I looked harder—it had been recently shaved, and featured perhaps a week’s shadow. Heist was tallish, but not beside the nearly nude giant who’d slid from the hole. We stood on uneven ground, sure, but gazing up at him, I felt like one of the dogs, or as though I’d stepped into a sinkhole. I guessed at six six or six seven. Everywhere, it seemed, Heist reenacted his trick of conjuring mammals from floorboards or heaps of rubble. Or again, I might be dreaming, and here was my White Rabbit.

  “Laird.”

  “Hola, Charles.”

  “You still got that shortwave radio?”

  “I keep fiddling but it’s out of juice.” The giant knelt to sweep the three dogs into one embrace, permitting them to lap rain from his knees, his bowed thighs.

  “You know what I’m going to tell you. They’re broadcasting alerts.”

  Laird tapped his head. “Alerts I hear plenty with no radio. That’s what got me down here.”

  “You might need a raft.”

  “Who’s this one? She brought me an umbrella? I could turn it upside down.”

  “Phoebe’s searching for a lost girl.”

  “I don’t have any to spare.”

  “We’re going to talk to Kate. The folks in the pipe need higher ground, at least.”

  “Kate had everybody building a levee yesterday. She calls me Tractor.”

  “Kate likes to make up nicknames.”

  “Tell her I’m not her fucking tractor.”

  “I’ll put in a word.”

  “Spirit if not the letter of my remarks.”

  I’d been struck dumb, I saw now, by the fact of Laird’s immensity, and the fact of any kind of voice coming out of that body. I imagined him standing again, taking with him all the dogs clutched to his chest like a bouquet. Yet it was Heist’s ease with the giant that stirred me more. His adeptness with the animals and the people-animals of the world. I was beginning to yearn to be counted among them, to be under his care as well.

  Now Laird stood but left the dogs on the ground and they darted off, seeming to know we were proceeding past this lurid sentry, farther into the Wash.

  “Bye,” I said.

  “I’ll catch you on the rebound, Mary Poppins,” said Laird.

  10

  WE FOLLOWED OR WERE LED BY THE DEEPENING STREAM—HEIST AND I navigating higher ground, the dogs splashing through the depths—before descending into the midst of a tiny settlement, a town, perhaps, made of tents and sheet-metal lean-tos, all of them shiny with rain. The lanes between the twelve or fifteen shelters were strewn with packrat evidence: pyramids of irregular firewood, disassembled bicycles, a stack of computer keyboards, and more rainwater-collecting containers, some full. No sign of life at first except for a pair of childish feet sticking, Diogenes-style, from a tall segment of concrete pipe, and a puppy sniffing at an empty can. The three huskies surrounded the puppy, which squirmed onto its back in submission, then batted at their noses. Heist waved me into the midst of this largely abandoned village only to move through it, and beyond.

  At the next rise it appeared below us, the tunnel. The rough mud had given way, abruptly, to an angled concrete aqueduct, a channel directing the runoff in an accelerating course toward a dark-overhung aperture in the stony bank beyond. As we neared, I could see into the flat-bottomed tunnel formed by the sheltering roof. The wings of the aqueduct were dotted with pup tents and sleeping bags, deep into the dark alcove, maybe thirty or so visible from the rise where we stood. The population had clambered up onto these tilted planes, dragging what they could of their shelters and belongings. These were the tunnel people. The structure that housed and hid them, that roofed them from the demolishing steady sunshine and surveillance helicopters that made their ordinary enemies, had betrayed them in the storm.

  At the mouth, visible once Heist and I descended, a woman directed the effort the giant Laird had given the name of levee. It was a work in progress, to put it generously. A rotted couch had been placed in the center of the flow, to make a bulwark the water had to work under and around. Despite the sizable stones and chunks of shattered pavement that had been added at every breach, and the soaked clothes and rotting blankets, the tarps and tenting employed to cement between the stony stuff, the water did. There was nowhere for it to go but into the tunnel—the engineers had had the essential geological fact of the planet on their side when they placed it there.

  The woman—Kate, I supposed—waded in the streaming, jeans rolled to her knees. The jeans, and her down ski jacket, were wet through. Kate’s two helpers, both shirtless black men, one with nubby dreadlocks, took on the unwitting air of players in an avant-garde political-theatrical tableau—they’d only need an actor in a plantation hat with a bullwhip to complete the picture. One of the two hoisted a cinder block but had nowhere to go with it, stood bewildered. I had already begun to see the cinder block as he might, an asset not to be spent in error. These fighters of the sun had despoiled their village fighting water, and gained nothing.

  “They ought to leave the tunnel,” said Heist.

  “We live in a free country, Charles.” Kate spoke without turning from her effort, in a weary bark that cut above the whirr of torrent and low whistling wind. It was a voice I could have put to a middle school principal or the bailiff in a courtroom drama.

  “Let me talk to them.”

  “That’s included in free.” Now she turned to look. The voice emerged from a face like the top of a caved-in pie, more ancient than her sturdy body. “A gentleman, however, would get into the trenches and help.” She noticed me and made a swift assessment. “Ladies are counted as gentlemen in this case.”

  “Phoebe needs to talk to that girl Sage, if she’s still around.” Heist’s dogs had waded in to sniff more hands, and now one stood atop the couch.

  “Well, there’s your task, then. Sage and Martin are on the hill with a hand truck.” She gestured off to her right,
the vast crumbled slope. “They could use some help. Laird quit on me.”

  That’s because he’s no tractor, I wanted to say, but didn’t.

  We found the pair called Martin and Sage halted in frustration nearly at the top of the grade. They looked near weeping, maybe were, the rain made it hard to tell. The two of them resembled all-American teenagers, it seemed to me, only weeks removed from Glee Club when their careers as homeless persons began. At Kate’s instigation they’d broken a porta-potty out of the construction site across Monte Vista Avenue and worked it through a torn section of fencing. Now, with the hand truck, they’d mired it in a gulley, the wheels sunk where gravel turned to mud. Heist and I threw ourselves at the problem, abandoning my umbrella and all pride, making our own avant-garde theater now, something more Beckettian, I think: Figures Shifting a Toilet into a Crevasse. Kate received the offering of the porta-potty grudgingly. She and her helpers, including Martin now, turned the blue plastic shed on its side and began to work it into place in the levee, while Sage and I followed Heist into the tunnel at last, having earned our waiver from Kate.

  “You two go warm up,” said Heist. Deeper inside, a poured-concrete stair led to a dry platform. There, smoke furled from a metal drum. “I’m going to talk to some people.”

  Sage and I joined three others at the fire. I’d managed to keep my handbag wedged in my armpit, and now I foraged in it for some tissues to dab at my dripping hair. My coat kept me dry underneath, but one of my feet had immersed completely, my toes squishy within my boot. Sage was worse off, her dirty green army jacket a thing you could have wrung like a sponge. She huddled, looking at me expectantly. Heist had told her I came with questions.

  “Charles thought you recognized a picture.”

  She nodded fearfully.

  “Her name’s Arabella.” Vowels echoed in the grotto of the aqueduct.

  She shook her head, mousily firm. “She never said that.”

  “You remember what she said instead?”

  “You’re her friend?” Now I saw Sage turn, as if willfully, to the part of her that was inward and strange, that which had driven her so far and so irreversibly from Glee Club. The task of shifting the porta-potty had glued her to the real, but the glue wasn’t meant to hold. “Do you have a cigarette?”

  “Sorry.”

  “I don’t want one anyway.”

  “Oh.”

  “I’m just really sorry you lost your friend. I wish I could help you.” It was tra-la-la time.

  “Maybe you are helping me. Did you see her—here? In the Wash?”

  “We came down together. With a guy.”

  “With Martin?”

  “No, a different guy, older.”

  A shudder went through me. “You mean—Charles? My friend who helped us just now?” A wary part of me still thought of that furry girl in Heist’s office. If I was in search of a villain or abductor, the Feral Detective remained the only suspect before me.

  She shook her head again. “The man isn’t here now. A Buddhist.”

  I grew excited. “You mean from the place on the mountain, on Baldy? The retreat?” I wondered why Heist hadn’t wanted simply to drive up with me and check it out, if he’d heard this. Maybe he hadn’t. “Is he a monk?”

  She tittered. “He’s friends with the monkeys. He’s friends with the rabbits and bears. He knows everybody.”

  “Is he a monk? Do you think she’s with him now?”

  “Uh-uh. Where’d Martin go?”

  “He’s helping with the levee.”

  “This rain isn’t helping with anything.”

  “No,” I agreed.

  “Not even the drought.”

  I wanted to fiddle her radio dial, get her on the right station. “What about the man with my friend?” I said. “Where did he go?”

  “He has Chinese friends.” She laughed. “I don’t mean Phoebe. She isn’t Chinese at all.”

  “That’s me,” I said. “I’m Phoebe.”

  “Not you. That’s her other name, your friend. I just remembered.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Phoebe. You’re both Phoebe.”

  11

  HEIST HAD WORKED ON THE COMMUNITY PROJECT FOR A WHILE, SHOEHORNING the porta-potty into the levee, earning his brownie points. By the time I emerged from the depths, back to the tunnel’s mouth, having concluded there was no further purpose in conversation with Sage, he’d sweet-talked Kate and borrowed the hand truck. Now he was busy with a supply of bungee cords, lashing aboard several refugee properties, their bindles and pup tents. A few of the tunnel’s tenants had seen the light and would make an exodus, be following us back to the truck. I think they were all Mexicans, several making up a family, it wasn’t clear. Grime and desolation and my own discomfort made their faces difficult to read.

  This was Heist’s way, I’d begun to know it. He worked in and through contradiction, rarely pitting himself, nothing done by wholes, little ever given a firm name. A partial evacuation, an inadequate levee, a smidge of investigation, an airing for the dogs. Soon enough I’d feel handled the same way, which was infuriating and enthralling both. For now I put my Manhattanite ass to the wheel and got drenched again dragging a shopping cart of plastic bags full of who-knew-what out against the muddy current, up to the lip of the Wash, where we loaded it all under the tarp. Three rode underneath too, with the dogs. Two more in the cab between me and Heist, humans soaked through with disarrangement, chagrin, remorse, exhaustion. I was one of them. Maybe Heist too.

  I had no idea where Heist meant to take these people. They surely couldn’t all live in the armoire in his office. Yet as we began to drive, I felt thrilled at what we’d accomplished, whatever it was. Freeing humans from the Wash. Though there were now two bodies intervening on the long seat, I thought I felt Heist, pulsating with his brand of implacable, mellow intention, the two of us making a bracket of what I believed was called caritas around our rescuees. Call me naïve or selfish, but I’d never contemplated the erotic potential in altruism until now. It had always seemed like Mother Teresa stuff to me.

  So it came as a shock when Heist unceremoniously dropped me off first, swinging into the Doubletree’s loading zone, beneath the protective awning, and waited for me to dash inside.

  “Talk later?” I said. My voice squeaked. Our passengers looked at me.

  “Talk later,” said Heist.

  “All righty, then.”

  I got out of his truck, feeling dumped. I treated myself to another one of the greasy, hot, fresh-baked chocolate chip cookies from the lobby, and also to a spanking new umbrella, daring the clerk to notice it was my second of the morning.

  12

  THEN CAME A STRANGE TIME. IN THE HOURS BEFORE CHARLES HEIST REAPPEARED and took me away in his truck again, I entered a kind of spell or pall, as if the small hotel room were a kind of tunnel too, and I’d been left behind instead of rescued. I stripped off my soaked clothes and took a hot shower, and while one part of my mind urgently wished to scrub off the mud of the Wash, the rank smell of the tunnel and of my homeless companions in the cab of Heist’s pickup, another part mourned some loss I couldn’t specify. I felt I’d been allowed to taste Heist’s world, teamed with him in pursuit of abjectly hopeless tasks in a pit in the rain. And then I’d been expelled.

  I sat in the Doubletree robe, picked up and read a magazine called Inland Empire cover to cover. I flipped channels. Sweating, brow-knit, lips-pursed Bruce Willis negotiated on a very large mobile phone for the lives of terrified hostages. On another station a baby-faced senator smirked and stonewalled around the implications of his lifetime’s jolly bigotry. The television glow didn’t warm me the way the barrel fire had done, and I turned it off.

  The faces at that fire, where I’d stood and talked with daft Sage—I couldn’t shake them. Why hadn’t Heist persisted, I thought now, and commanded everyone from that tunnel? They could have come here and piled into this room and used the supply of fluffy towels. We could
have stolen all the cookies from the lobby. Meanwhile, Heist and I could have gone off up the mountain, so that I could play Bruce Willis, achieve my rescue, deliver Arabella and myself from this absurd landscape, though not before he and I had spent a certain amount of time in some rustic cabin on a fireside pelt rug. My thinking ran along such stupid and self-mocking lines as these, but I couldn’t switch it off like the television.

  Thanks to a room service tray bearing a “pole-caught American tuna melt,” I had the privilege of wallowing in my dissolved state in that robe and on that bedspread for a nice long interval. It was only by dumb luck, therefore, that I was dressed and even wearing some makeup when Heist returned to my door. Or not luck so much as a depraved turn within my fugue: I’d made a decision, at the most crass and dismal level, to find the Inland Empire’s nearest singles bar and get laid. If Heist wasn’t interested, someone else would be.

  The carnal impulse I’d conceived, the first since the election, wasn’t a bright and happy one. It was morose, a product of the sensory deprivation chamber of the hotel room and the whole field of disturbance that lay outside the room. I thought for a minute of calling Roslyn. Despite time zones, it still wasn’t too late. She’d be up, I was pretty certain, drowning her fear in white wine and binge-watching The Crown or Pretty Little Liars. She’d have gladly talked me out of my destination, as she’d talked me off any number of Tinder cliffs over the past year. But then I’d have had to explain where I’d gotten, and hadn’t, in my search for Arabella. I would have had to explain Heist. I didn’t call her.