The Feral Detective

by Jonathan Lethem

  74

  AT FIRST HE LAY BACK GINGERLY ON THE BED AND DRANK MORE WATER and watched me, as if there were other places for this to go, but there weren’t. I opened his robe and I opened mine. You forget, but your body doesn’t.

  For the first while I was on top. Then Heist located the strength with which he’d scaled down the spine of the wheel. Seeming to galvanize his limbs, he turned me with his arms and moved over me, climbing me horizontally with that same deliberation. Maybe I was the true Wheel of Dharma. He slowed and held his middle stiffly, protecting the damage, but it wasn’t bad that he slowed. It was time for that.

  I managed to keep from speaking until what came out wasn’t making any real sense, wasn’t mostly words. Like before, I wept. We didn’t let that stop us. Heist had a sound coming from him too, not sobbing, exactly, but a kind of subvocal baying. The sound reached into me, and I did everything I could with my hands and my hips to keep it issuing from him.

  “We have this too,” I heard myself saying over and over, an incantation in breath. “This too, this too.”

  “Phoebe?” He kissed my eyelids, sipping my tears, seeming to know what his newly smooth lips and chin were for.

  “Nothing. Don’t stop.”

  It was too simple to explain. We fit. I cried then for all the not-fits, the smalls and the bigs as well, exciting as they seemed at the threshold, and for the can’t-move-rights, and the can’t-move-once-without-comings. I was selfish enough to need this too, and Heist had it for me, all along. The world beyond, the speakable and the unspeakable, closed up shop for a time. The pain went away.

  75

  TIME SEEPED BACK INTO THE ROOM, BUT NOT TOO OBTRUSIVELY. I’D PAID for this privilege, or anyway I would, when my Discover card hit its limit. Heist and I were still touching in the can’t-quit-touching way. Something had to happen, but not yet.

  “What’s this place called?” he asked.

  “Two Bunch Palms.” It suddenly sounded very You Tarzan, me Jane. “Listen, we can go outside. We’re safe here.” I imagined he needed open space to feel safe, after being trapped in the cab on the wheel. The way to trick a captive is to give him a yard to wander in. “We don’t have to wear anything but the robes. There’s a pond.” I quoted from the brochure now; I hadn’t spotted the water features on our drive along the perimeter of this paradise. “We can sit by the water.” I heard myself beginning to chatter and tried to stem it.

  “Okay,” he said.

  “Are you hungry? I’m ravenous, actually.” At check-in, they’d told me no reservations were needed at the restaurant, just to wander in.

  “Yes. Only not right away.”

  “Let’s walk.”

  We put on the robes and also the provided slippers and went outside. We found the pond, first thing. That’s how paradise works. A pond with two smoothed grassy banks, and empty chairs waiting for us. The pond was full of ducks who weren’t afraid of you, and then when you sat awhile you saw it wasn’t only ducks. There were turtles inching from the reeds, finding places to rest in the grass a foot or so from the safety of the water. The turtles weren’t afraid of the ducks; no one was afraid of anyone. Ducks and turtles, two species on which to found a new civilization.

  It was late afternoon now. A few others in white robes browsed the scene, mostly pairs of middle-aged women, but I didn’t let it make me feel judgy. Here we all had what we needed, what anyone could need. I hoped Heist could feel the splendor of what I’d brought him to. The desert needn’t be only a scene of deprivation. There was something like a feral swankiness here, no need to choose between the flayed landscape of his origins and these enchantments, including me. All it took was a natural bottomless source of water and about ten million dollars’ worth of landscaping, plus a resident masseuse and shaman or two.

  But I had to go and open my big mouth. I should have stuck to kissing him occasionally, which he’d been tolerating nicely. Instead I began molding his smooth cheekbones and lips and chin with my thumb as if I’d carved them from marble instead of merely with a disposable razor.

  “My beautiful fugitive,” I whispered. “I should peroxide your hair too.”

  “I’m not a fugitive.”

  “Not just you. Us together.”

  Think of all the runaways we might be! I wanted to say, picturing lovers in a film slipping civilization’s snares, into their own territory, whether on horseback or in a Ford Galaxie. After where we’d been and what we’d done, I needed to swell our adventure into a whole world, to replace the one lost. Before this inchoate vision collapsed, I worked to persuade Heist on his own level, to keep it laconic: “You can’t go back there. They’re looking for you.”

  “I’m not hiding.” He said this resolutely.

  I whispered again, as if the landscape might be wired. The ducks didn’t look organized enough, but I feared the turtles. “We murdered him, Charles. I think we might have murdered them both.”

  Did saying it make it more or less real? It was real enough. Coming to this calm place might be an awful mistake. Terror and fury might still be rising to the surface of me. Possibly I belonged in the whirlwind of sweat and fire, not in a laundered robe. “Tell me you know what I’m talking about,” I said, and it came out more like hissing than I’d have preferred.

  “If I spoke of it, I wouldn’t give it the name you do.”

  “You’re just of the shit-happens-in-the-desert school, then.”

  “Some people live and die recklessly. You’re not responsible.”

  “Are you?”

  “If anyone has to answer, it should be me.”

  “I don’t want any more of your goddamn gallantry, Charles.” It was easy to say what I didn’t want.

  “The second one, Paul Apollo—” he began.

  “I’m sure he has a very cute backstory, but I don’t want to talk about Paul Apollo either.” Even dismissing the subject of the jaded Buddhist kidnapper and his Wheel of Misfortune, I observed that something lay, dire and unmentionable, behind it: Solitary Love, or whatever his real name might have been. A war vet and incarceree, and in the end a giant child of pain. He’d been no match for the Bears who had borne him up as their temporary king, nor for my siren blast and Heist’s seized-up stone. My horror flooded back, even as I sat side by side with Heist in reclining deck chairs by the groomed desert pond, in a sea of peace.

  The ducks and turtles had no answer for me. My heart pounded. The space into which Heist and I had fled seemed to be shrinking rapidly.

  “I want to help you,” I said.

  “You did that.”

  “I mean to get away. Not be part of it anymore.”

  “I wouldn’t know what that means. Your friend is safe now. You took her away. Now you can run. No one has your name. No one will know.”

  I’d asked for it. The only thing craggier than Heist’s silences were his brief, brick-like orations. This one left me stinging, as though the brick had landed on my jaw. Yet how could I dispute Heist’s prerogative to shrink into his own distance, that horizon embedded in his glance? It was what he had shown me from the start, the psychic demurral of a man with no good options. I only wanted to be along for the ride.

  “Will you send me an invoice?”

  “What?”

  “Obviously I’ve forgotten about the fee for your services,” I said bitterly.

  “We never discussed a fee.”

  “I just hadn’t understood. I’m more than glad to pay for my wilderness adventure, and all the rest.” My petulance might blossom into a storm, something roiling off the coast of me, perhaps something global. But global petulance had laid down an awfully good hand just lately, hadn’t it? “C’mon, we’ll start with dinner. Never let ’em say I didn’t wine and dine ya.”

  76

  THE SKY HAD BARELY BEGUN TO GLOW AS WE WANDERED THE MAZE OF fountains and yucca to find the restaurant. I went a little ahead; Heist followed, in the wake of my little tantrum. We threaded past the Grotto, the hot springs around whic
h the whole resort had grown up. There abundant robes lay flung over chaise lounges while the lumpy bodies they’d concealed stood stranded in waist-deep waters, or immersed lengthwise, eyes squeezed shut, deep in corners shaded by elephant palms. It occurred to me that everyone else venturing from their rooms wore swimsuits beneath the robes, while Heist and I were buck naked. Well, maybe I’d reveal myself before the dessert course.

  The resort’s restaurant was called Essence, in case you weren’t sure you’d attained yours to this point. True to the front desk’s promise, they were delighted to seat us in a prime spot along the picture window, over a view of a desert rim that promised subtle astonishments as the light changed. Only a few other tables were occupied. The atmosphere was hushed without seeming too totally precious; the patrons all being in robes undercut any posturing. Maybe the solicitous server and the proximity of actual cooked food stood a chance of reversing my funk.

  The only catch was that when my eyes focused on the attractive couple in robes two tables from us, the super-attractive, super-skinny woman revealed herself as my old Facebook friend Stephanie. She’d spotted me first and been hailing for my attention, though I’d stared right through her, thinking she’d been beckoning to the waitstaff. Stephanie sat across from a rakish lanky fellow with a trim black beard and sleeve tattoos poking from his robe cuffs. This naturally had to be Wild Edge—I’d never gotten his real name—the installation artist whose exhibition Stephanie’s gallery was readying to open, and whose ashes Stephanie had lately been hauling, to use a phrase of Shockley’s that had stuck in my head.

  “Phoebe, my god!”

  “Stephanie, holy shit.”

  We were near enough not to have to wander from our tables to be joined in conversation. No act of protest short of stalking from the restaurant, or maybe dropping the robes, was going to stop this encounter from happening. “I can’t believe you’re here,” said Stephanie. She introduced him: Kurt. I said Charles’s name, and the men shook hands. I was doubly grateful I’d shaved him, to thwart the onset of any hipster-beard solidarity. They exchanged the testosterone grunt and settled back into their seats. “This is Phoebe. I told you all about her,” Stephanie maybe-lied to Wild Edge. “I thought the Inland Empire had swallowed you whole.”

  “Like Jonah and the whale,” I agreed. “But that’s the funny thing about being swallowed whole. You can always pop back out, and nobody would ever know the difference.”

  “Hey, great to meet you finally,” said Wild Edge, with disconcerting sincerity. Had Stephanie really been selling me as her great friend? Maybe she just wanted to retrofit me to her arsenal, now that I’d turned up at the pricey resort.

  Before any chance to protest, our server stepped in to ask: Did we wish to join tables? Well, fuck it, I thought. I might score two birds with one stone. I nodded, and the server shifted our place settings and we moved to the two empty seats at their table. Let Charles Heist have to dabble in my world for a moment or two. It only required that I accept Stephanie’s proposition that we were so dear to each other as all that. The last time I’d seen her, in Culver City, she’d played a more hard-ass part. I wondered if poor Stephanie might be flailing, having let herself become the conquest of her gallery’s top dog. The art star was so much more valuable to the outfit, after all, than even the most omnicompetent assistant. It probably also didn’t hurt that I’d brought along my own tame feral man, as delicious to the eye as hers, however pitiably undertattooed. Beyond merely wanting to spectate, Stephanie might think Heist could set Wild Edge a good example.

  “What are you doing here?” she asked me, with the breathlessness that can’t wait to be asked the same question.

  “What aren’t we doing here?” I said. “We came for the waters, and unlike in Casablanca, we were correctly informed. Except we forgot our suits—go figure!” Nobody laughed but me. I couldn’t quit the sarcastic demolition work, even if it was destined to be self-demolition. Somewhere, trapped inside myself, I observed that my tantrum was the opposite of finished. It might be just beginning.

  “They must sell suits here,” said Stephanie.

  “For a pretty penny, I bet. I’d love a piece of this action.”

  This didn’t compute, so she ignored it. “Have you ever been to the Integratron?”

  “The what? Is that something they feature here?”

  “No, no, it’s way out in the desert—you tell them, Kurt. I haven’t actually been yet.”

  Wild Edge made a shape with his hands to begin. He was a sculptor, I supposed, and thought in forms. “So, basically the Integratron’s an all-wooden structure, a perfect acoustical object. It was built by this mad-genius aeronautics engineer, he was actually one of the people who worked on Howard Hughes’s Spruce Goose, the all-wooden airplane—”

  Not one single word of this made the least sense to me. Heist sat, revealing nothing, that default occupation. But his hand was on my forearm. That was nice. Our server brought the coffee we’d managed to order and placed it on the communal table before us, sealing the deal. She also clapped down drinks for Stephanie and Wild Edge: two slim vials of bright green juice, wheatgrass or something even more revitalizing and esoteric.

  “—so, you go inside with a group of people and you lie there in a circle and they ring these giant crystal gongs—”

  “It’s called a sound bath,” Stephanie interjected.

  “Ah,” I said.

  Wild Edge seemed a bit leery. He might be a man in a robe, but he wanted to insert a little daylight between himself and sound baths. “It’s basically a huge machine for inducing collective astral voyages, if you accept that kind of thing, which I maybe do. At the very least, while you’re inside the dome, time and space are temporarily destroyed. I’ve been hitting it a lot, on my way in and out of Giant Rock, which is the basis of my current project. You heard of Giant Rock?”

  “In Landers, you mean?”

  “Sure. Survivalist Central.”

  “I’ve been to Giant Rock,” I heard myself brag. “I’ve hitchhiked around those parts, in fact.”

  “Well, I want to have it moved,” said Wild Edge.

  “Sorry?”

  “To Griffith Park.”

  “Have what moved—the Integratron, or Giant Rock?”

  “Giant Rock.”

  “The whole thing? Isn’t it, like, five million tons? And broken in two pieces?”

  Wild Edge shrugged, suddenly taciturn. Stephanie leaped in. She spoke soothingly, in jargon. “Moved, or reconstructed. Kurt’s exploring the logistics. The idea is to push it to whatever extent is possible. The enterprise itself is the artwork, in the vein of Turrell or Noteless or Smithson.”

  “Have you heard of Hammertown?” I asked. Heist looked at me strangely now.

  But Wild Edge’s eyes widened. “Sure, the King of the Hammers, the off-road race, cool beans. I want to go there.” I’d earned his respect.

  I explained to Stephanie, doing my best to dredge up the nonsense Laird had filled my ears with. It couldn’t be made worse nonsense than it had been to begin with. “Apparently they have these insane desert races out there, in Alpha Force Vehicles, which are these special vehicles they’ve hand-blacksmithed for months before the race begins.”

  This embellishment puzzled but also fascinated Wild Edge. Stephanie, I saw, wasn’t wholly pleased. I kept on.

  “It’s like a ceremonial thing, of course, but the winner has to go live without any provisions on the top of a mountain until he makes his way back to civilization.” I could vomit out such stuff until Heist had to drag me from the table—it really might be simpler to unsash my robe and streak my way free. “Needless to say, they’re all insane fucking Trump supporters but they’re also really into tripping on datura seeds so that’s kind of cool.” It struck me as I said this that I’d blundered into a truth I could have offered to the Bears, could have whispered to Shockley if I hadn’t been so busy pretending to command a fleet of black helicopters. The truth was this: The Bears wer
en’t wrong to think a flood pursued them, but it wasn’t a flood you could take to a mountaintop to avoid. It took the form of conceptual artists and all-terrain-vehicle buffs and suburban preppers, whose activities posed a more urgent threat to the desert communities than the global warming for which they prepped. Gentrification, the flood before the flood.

  In her consternation, Stephanie turned to Heist. Her void-steeled nerves failing her, she reverted to the Manhattan Question: “So, what do you do?”

  “I find people,” he said. Charles Heist forever freely exhibited his dead-flat unironic koan-generating self; it wasn’t just for my benefit, if I’d ever been tempted to believe it.

  “In what sense?”

  I raised my hand. “He’s totally, like, running a shuttle for runaways, back and forth between various death cults and off-the-grid white slave organizations,” I said. “It’s kind of a cool project, I think.” My shitty elusive boyfriend is so much more bad-ass than yours, Steph, you can’t possibly imagine. “It’s dangerous work. Here, Charles, show them your scars.” I reached for Heist’s collar, to tug it loose to display his shoulder. Firm and adept, he caught my arm. “We actually had to kill the guy who did this. Can I try your green juice?”

  “Uh, sure,” said Stephanie.

  I drained it. “Mmmmmm.” Heist stood, and seeing as how he gripped my arm just below the bicep, I stood too. “Listen, this has been great, but we’ve got to get back to the room now. Did I mention that we killed a man? Maybe two men, it depends on how you count. Also, I’m totally outlandishly great in bed, though no one ever seems to mention it. Maybe I just seem to need to hear it too much, I don’t know! But Charles and I are driving back tonight, he’s got to get home to feed his dead possum, and he needs me to drive the Jeep—it’s a rental, and it’s only in my name, plus there’s a chance he’s slowly succumbing to internal injuries, so I’m sure you understand. It was nice to meet you, Mr. Edge.”