The Feral Detective

by Jonathan Lethem

  Arabella was screaming too, when I spotted her at last. She’d been suddenly pushed to the front of the throng, nearly into the warfare between the Bear kings. The private-school New York kid I recalled taking to see The Grand Budapest Hotel wasn’t embodied as a Rabbit, nor as a she-Bear. Instead, she’d been granted some species of her own, a falcon or desert crow. They’d put her in a feather crown, peacock plumes now sopping, with a necklace of claws across her breasts. The ornaments were maybe nothing more than chicken feet salvaged from a barbecue picnic, but the effect was ominous as shit.

  She stood otherwise naked in the downpour, tall and stunningly pale, making no attempt to cover herself. Like all millennials, apparently, Arabella shaved her bush—all I could think was how cold she must be. She hadn’t cast herself as the abductee here, though, no matter if the whole picture screamed Stockholm syndrome. She wasn’t apart from the frenzy that wreaked us, she was within it too, barking at the fighters, convulsing herself in pornographic rage, as much a figure of chaos as anyone present, including Heist and Solitary Love. I don’t know if this qualified as a ceremony, but whatever it was, she was part of it, all right. I was too. My relief at seeing her alive stood in a kind of suspension, as though my emotions were as much prisoner of this ritual as she was.

  I believe Arabella was shouting at Heist to die, though I’d never ask her later if this was so. She hadn’t seen Heist before, after all. She probably couldn’t imagine a rescuer who’d come in such a form, if she’d imagined rescue from Solitary Love’s kingdom at all, as opposed to escape or submission or ruling it herself. Anyway, he wasn’t her rescuer, I was.

  Solitary Love’s foot found purchase in Heist’s armpit. After slipping off too many times to count, it didn’t slip, but crunched downward. I heard it, and Heist’s broken grunting exhalation, even over the drums and the rain and my own screaming. It was then that I couldn’t be held at the edge of the circle but had gone inside myself. My hand went into my purse, not to replenish the lipstick I’d surely chewed off and let be rinsed down my throat by the rain but for the klaxon, that tiny rape horn I’d tried and failed to explain to Heist back in the Airstream. I found it and moved in sheer animal frenzy. Even amid the torrents of rain and diesel steam and human noise, the hate-music I blasted in Solitary Love’s ear—I shoved the aerosol horn in as far as it could go, I sound-fucked him brutally in his side-brain—stood out like nothing else in that glistening stone arena. His murder-sized forearm detonated outward to wallop me free of him, bruising my shoulders and jaw and brain all at once and instantly. I was caught before I fell. It was Spark, behind me.

  But I’d placed the prison-built giant under arrest, in the original sense of the word: he was stopped. All else stopped too, for one shocked instant, apart from the rain and smoke. That instant was all Charles Heist needed. A torn mammal, parts of him not working, he rose without standing. Instead, Heist appeared to climb Solitary Love’s body like a ladder, hell-bent for the soft parts at the top. Heist’s head turned sideways, and his teeth went into Love’s neck. I viewed the act with admiration, even if I’d never have attempted it myself, but it was the behavior of Heist’s left hand that made something plummet to the floor of me.

  The hand had come up holding a stone, and with it smashed at Love’s eye of its own volition until the socket collapsed. The stone was tossed aside. Heist’s fingers went around what remained of Love’s eyeball, deeper than I wanted to know about, making a fist inside Love’s face. By this time the great body had toppled. Heist crouched over it, blood on his mouth and chin. His hand wrenched in and meddled. I turned away before I couldn’t.

  We’d had the same instinct, to assault the behemoth’s head. The rest of Love was too much, but stuck on top was still a human face with flesh openings, parts that couldn’t be beefed in a prison gym. Even if Heist’s approach made my little horn look pretty gentle, I felt I shouldn’t judge. Such idiot thoughts danced in my own brain, but it was really my body that judged. All the animal fear that had attached to Solitary Love now flowed to Heist instead, and I was poisoned. I’d been wrong, before. Solitary Love had nothing on his opponent, appearance aside. Heist had raged for his life like a creature not even a prison-monstered man could contend with. He should have been called the Atavistic Detective.

  The rain fell like hammers. My body went on making decisions. Exploiting the embrace of my rescuer, I’d gotten my two hands around the butt of the pistol at Spark’s hip. It shocked me to remove it, like I’d separated a part of her wiry little body, a thing made of bone. But again, my brain was only catching up, or failing to. Someone had once told me you never know who you’ll be in an emergency. I discovered that apparently my response was to try to make myself into the whole emergency. I pointed the gun at Heist, who lay groaning in the mud with Love’s head-insides in his hand, and I pointed it at Love’s twitching dying body, which sported a bowed erection, a fountain of blood and the reeking contents of evacuated bowels, all at once, a thing I wouldn’t have otherwise known was possible—Oh, the Places You’ll Go!

  I pointed it at anyone near to Arabella. She stood frozen, the entranced feather-creature, maybe beginning to recognize that I’d come for her but also that doing so had driven me insane. I pointed the gun at everyone simultaneously, a frantic wheeling action. The rain was like a medium we should breathe in, if only we could grow gills. Meanwhile my voice made words out of my screaming.

  “STOP STOP STOP YOU FUCKERS YOU GODDAMN INSANE BASTARDS! LOOK WHAT JUST HAPPENED TO THEM!” The words strung from me like banners across open sky. “WHY DO YOU THINK YOU CAN DO THIS SHIT?” No one answered my question, though I believe to this day it was a valid one. “DO YOU EVEN KNOW WHAT’S GOING ON, YOU STUPID FUCKING ASSHOLES? DID YOU FUCKERS EVEN VOTE?”

  In the awed silence, I stepped up and wrenched a shawl from one of the zaftig dancers. It was soaked, but I thrust it at Arabella. “Put it on.” I pointed with the gun, not intending to threaten harm, but because it had become my voice, my directing body. It struck me that people with guns often felt this way. Awesome epiphany! “Take her,” I said to Spark. I meant for them to climb the crater. Spark took Arabella and they began to go.

  Now, with no cessation in the rain, the tableau began to unfreeze. The magic spell of my klaxon and insanity and Spark’s pistol began to wear off, it seemed. The Bears resumed movement through the steam, like the gorillas in the Museum of Natural History, the stuffed ones in the foreground, but also those painted on the distant mountains, all coming to sluggish life. There was no pane of glass between me and them. I stepped backward, fearing them more than I did Heist’s broken form or Love’s corpse behind me.

  “Get back!” I screamed, but my voice, like my mojo, had begun to fail me. Nobody was cowed except the dancer whose shawl I’d stolen.

  Several of the Bears appeared with an old wooden door held aloft. They moved toward me. I wondered if it were meant to be used as a shield, to plant between themselves and my gun. But they ignored me. The door was a shield not for battle, but for bearing up their wounded firstborn. Rather tenderly they lowered it and knelt and edged the moaning Heist onto the surface of crackled paint, the old bronze-plate address for some house that had fallen and vanished in the desert, leaving only the door.

  I think I stood dumbfounded, my gun hand wavering, lost in seeing Heist’s beautiful strange body, the violence in it now expunged, reduced to this wrecked totem. I didn’t know how many reversals I could suffer, but I’d suffered one more—I pined for him. Then Anita and Donna took me, each at one elbow. They turned me from the scene, to start together up the near path, now coursing with mud, to follow where Spark and Arabella had gone.

  “No!” I pulled free. “Let go of him!” To Anita I said, “We have to take Charles.”

  She shook her head. “They won’t let you. He’s their king.”

  “A crippled king,” I said.

  “A crippled king is good for all concerned. It’s what we like.”

  “He needs us
.”

  “They’ll care for him. Your friend needs you. Come.”

  In my rage I pointed the gun at her. “Fuck you, I’ll do it alone.”

  Anita smiled at me. “Everybody knows Spark’s gun has no bullets.”

  Even through the blaze of my fever, this explained a few things.

  40

  OUT OF THAT CAULDRON I BEGAN TO RETURN TO MYSELF. A DUNE BUGGY had parked itself as near to the lip as possible. At the wheel, Donna. Spark had helped Arabella into the back seat, where they huddled beneath a ragged black umbrella. Anita guided me lightly, her hand on the small of my back, like a lover’s. The dune buggy’s engine idled, the headlamps beaming through the rain. It was like the stove, another one of the Rabbits’ working machines.

  I handed Spark her pistol. She took it, saying nothing but gesturing for me to join them in the vehicle’s back seat. I couldn’t imagine how to speak to Arabella, toward whom my fear and love had turned temporarily to rage. I felt for her as one might for a teenager who’d been discovered to be self-harming—cutting, say, or bulimic. Yet as with such a teenager, it was enough, for the moment, that her body was rescued, that her body was still alive. Words and emotions could wait.

  I scanned the horizon. Something drew my attention. On the far side of the arena, the Bears marched with torches alongside the stretcher-door on which Heist rested, making it unmistakable in the night. I stood a minute watching it go, and no one hurried me. Then I got into the dune buggy.

  41

  DRIVING BACK, HUDDLED UNDER SPARK’S UMBRELLA, I WAS SURE I WAS meant to be holding Arabella, speaking reassuring words as I ushered her back to civilization. In fact, we clung together. Her lips were bluish. I couldn’t speak. My body shook, and I’d peed myself at some point, though nobody but me would know in this rain. The convulsions gripping me seemed to align me to the body I’d helped kill. Solitary Love had had to die to be proven human. I had no more to offer Arabella than she did me, at that moment. Maybe less. Anyhow, who knew if anyone was ushering anyone to civilization? We could have been pointed anywhere, to the next arena.

  Yet as we came out of the realm of smoke and drumming and my own blood-rage, I reattuned to the earworm of my own thinking—the hum of self-adjusting, like a pop song never silenced in my skull, to which I only intermittently attended. One part of my brain was still busy composing the red-state tell-all op-ed, the career I’d salvage from the ruins, my triumphant return to New York with surefire viral content. Only now it had expanded, an epic including Heist and the battle in the desert pit, my own complicity, the things I had to teach you. Probably the Sunday Magazine was a better destination, or Harper’s—it could even be a Folio. Out of that, needless to say, would come a book deal. This disassociation from what I’d just seen and done wasn’t subsequent, but something that had been writing itself continuously, even while I’d clung to Love’s shoulder, even while I’d held the gun.

  There’s more. On another mental track, one completely unreconciled to my dream of fame and the reclaiming of my cosmopolitan life, was its opposite: I was a Rabbit now. I finally understood something that I believed Anita and Donna, my guides piloting the buggy, had been trying to let me know. It was the message they’d intended by showing me their downer, Shockley: that to be a Rabbit was to kill a Bear, or be willing to. To be a Rabbit was to take some of a Bear inside you, by force, and therefore to be both things—that was what made Rabbits bigger than Bears, who were actually to be pitied. These thoughts were, I’ll agree, insane. But they only furthered themselves, against my will. If I was part Rabbit and part Bear, I wasn’t unlike Heist, was I? He and I belonged together—I’d been right before, only not known in the least why. Now I knew.

  These incommensurable trains of thought would cohabit in my skull through the rest of that night and long through the morning, until Arabella and I cut loose of the Mojave, or were set free. They made little sense together—no Rabbit would dream of viral fame—yet they nested easily. The first just entailed that I pretended to myself that I was only pretending the latter. Either involved pretending I was not essentially in ruins.

  42

  THERE WAS FIRE AGAIN, OR STILL, DESPITE THE RAIN. I FELT ABSURDLY proud of the flame’s persistence, as if my little stick-gathering session was at its heart. Maybe it was. The rain had tapered. The wind that brought it had died altogether. The little accommodations, the lean-tos and parasols, the half-covered teepee structures that ringed the fire pit, these were enough for us all to shelter there. Neptune Lodge was in sight; a desk lamp even showed through an unshaded window, proving the existence of electricity, but it didn’t call us away from the fire. My bed, the room with the closing door, didn’t tempt me. I had work to do at the fire circle, though I couldn’t say what it was.

  More Rabbits were here than could have been hidden in the dark pockets of the arena, surely. Nevertheless, this gathering had the air of a vigil or witnessing council in the aftermath of that other scene, as though the fire had been built in its anticipation. Those Bearish energies needed a decanting to the desert sky, in the form of Rabbit smoke and murmuring. Someone played a soft guitar, open circular chords. I saw Lorrie there, my twig-sister. She smiled when she saw me seeing her. In another place around the circle, I saw Spark, more settled than at any time before. The nameless boy was with her there, seeming to me obviously more Rabbit than Bear now. I felt only love toward all.

  I sat with Arabella. Anita had given us dry clothes, thrift store sweatpants and T-shirts, pulled from a green plastic trash bag. We changed in the open, like women in a locker room. My pants said Juicy across the ass. Then we’d been placed under a triangular canopy and given a little space by the others. We weren’t talking yet, but communing on a New York Bear Survivor’s solidarity-group wavelength, or so I could allow myself to imagine. Her lips had returned to a normal color. The fire was all we wanted, at first anyway.

  But things traveled around the circle, blankets, bongs, substances to drink or eat. A younger Rabbit, one beaming a terrifying surplus of warmth and acceptance, put wooden bowls in our hands. There was a hot and sweet mash inside. She explained it was made of desert stuff, piñon and chia, cactus, mesquite pods. Aromatic with juniper, it seemed a thing you’d serve a child on Christmas morning, and we scooped it to our mouths with our fingers, gratefully. Before she passed, the Rabbit said, “It’s so nice to see you again, Phoebe,” but she said it directly to Arabella. Besides, I didn’t know her.

  “Were you using my name?” I said to Arabella when the Rabbit was gone. I’d forgotten.

  Arabella nodded, facing the fire. Her hands were in the muff pocket of a large shapeless hoodie, punching it down over her knees. She could have been twelve, on a beach at Truro.

  “It’s okay,” I said, not wanting her to feel censured. This desert, I now understood, was a place where things came to be unaffixed from old purposes. So my name had voyaged ahead of me, to taste lives I couldn’t imagine, perhaps to do some work in protecting Arabella. I didn’t own it.

  But I couldn’t keep from wanting to know whether I’d rescued her, and what from. Heist was gone, with parts of me along. Residual purposes were all I had. There weren’t words for the unreal loss I’d suffered, so I fell to my mission statement—my quote-unquote core values.

  “I promised Roslyn I’d find you,” I said. I called her Roslyn instead of your mother to say I knew we were all just people now.

  “Okay.” She continued to stare at the fire-impervious-to-rain. It was easy to be transfixed by it.

  “Are you sad?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Did you have a . . . Bearfriend?” I knew she’d understand this conflation.

  “I guess I had a couple, yes.”

  “You don’t want to go back, do you?”

  “No. Those people are pretty boring.”

  It wouldn’t have been my word, but I was relieved.

  “Was Solitary Love your Bearfriend?”

  She shook her head. “H
e was strange. He called me his eventual queen. It was all kind of Game of Thrones, actually.”

  “Were you scared?”

  Arabella only shrugged. I didn’t want to raise the question of whether she’d seen the bodies on Mount Baldy, of what forms of violence she’d had to absorb and make regular within herself. I couldn’t make these things regular for either of us, so I preferred that she seemed not totally disarranged. I could imagine she’d endured nothing, though I knew she’d at least had a front row seat for the duel of kings and for my own performance there. That, and been naked in feathers and a necklace of claws. But if she was fated to disintegrate, let it wait until Brooklyn and Roslyn.