Authors: Jonathan Lethem
“Well, not in one regard. You and your highhanded warnings weren’t on the map to this place.”
“I’m not the only thing. Trust me.”
Now that she’d been outside, Pella could hear the wind, a low, distinct whine that seemed to rise and fall with their voices.
“Let’s make this simple,” said Clement. “Emigration to the American sector of this planet is governed by a man named David Hardly out of an office in Washington D.C. I applied there, Efram, and I guess you did too. They didn’t mention a requirement that my children take the antiviral drug, and they didn’t say you’d be instructing me on my behavior when I arrived. Until someone explains otherwise I’ll assume we’re under Hardly’s jurisdiction here.”
She opened her eyes again. Efram was grinning around his pipe. “
Jurisdiction
,” he said. “Now you’re talking like a politician. Making sense like one, too. Dave Hardly’s never even been up here. I’ve been living here seven years, mostly alone. You decide who you want to listen to.”
Clement went to the door. “Thanks. I’ll do that.” He held out his hand for Pella. She thought, He doesn’t know the way back without me. He’ll make his dramatic exit and wander lost, have to circle back and humiliate himself asking Efram for directions. He doesn’t have any handlers here, to grab him by the elbow as he walks off the podium. He doesn’t have Caitlin.
She got up from the table in a rush, went past him and out into the night, not taking his hand.
The Archbuilder sat on a high stool in front of a window, perfectly framed by the ruins in the distant background, the pink sky above. The alien’s mouth was slightly open, a tufted gap in the fur, beneath huge black eyes and shiny black cheeks. Its arms were folded, not together, but each back on itself, wrist to shoulder, inside its rustling paper garment. Soft, double-jointed legs crossed each other twice, knee and ankle. They appeared almost braided. Fronds stirred, gently. Otherwise the alien was completely still, an ideal model.
Hugh Merrow’s face was washed-out, blond beard and eyebrows fading to sallow flesh, his eyes pale blue, and sharp. His clothing was covered with wipes, little finger-smudges of color, but the canvas he worked on now was roughed in with black and white and shades of gray. No color. He stepped away from his easel, squinting in concentration and annoyance as he crossed the room toward the Archbuilder. Brush between his teeth,
he reached out and gently rearranged the fronds on top of the Archbuilder’s head. The alien sat patient and unmoving, comfortable, apparently, with Merrow’s touch.
Lining the edges of the floor were canvases, many of them Archbuilder portraits, some finished, glossy and built-up with layers of paint, others only sketched, or rubbed out in some places and heavily worked in others. A few were overworked disasters, knobbed with encrusted brush strokes, gnarled with color. There were self-portraits, too, Hugh Merrow glaring from the canvases the way he glared now at his Archbuilder sitter. And landscapes, sketches of vine-strewn ruins, distant incomplete arches in pink haze.
Hugh Merrow moved his brush to the windowsill, then put his hands back into the mass of the Archbuilder’s fronds. The alien moved slightly, breaking the pose. Neither spoke. Hugh Merrow leaned over the Archbuilder, as though the fronds were a bouquet of flowers he wanted to sniff. The Archbuilder turned slightly, paper clothes rustling. The brush, jostled, clattered to the floor.
Pella risked a dash across the open floor for a better view. This she hadn’t seen before. She scampered out from behind the cabinet, then up under the shelter of a chair, feathery limbs scrabbling silently. A jacket covered the chair back. Pella darted up through the hanging sleeve and poked her head over the top of the collar.
Hugh Merrow’s tongue extended from his mouth, to meet the end of one of the fronds that lay across the Archbuilder’s forehead.
Pella suddenly didn’t want to be seeing it. She tucked her head down, and clung there inside the coat, trembling, angry at Hugh Merrow for what he was doing in front of her, as though her presence were known to him.
Whatever he was doing, it wasn’t painting. She knew that much.
She released her hold on the inside of the jacket, ran across the seat of the chair and onto the floor, moving to the window that was her way in and out of Hugh Merrow’s place.
Then, changing her mind, she didn’t bother escaping, just woke, allowed her perceiving self to flow back into her human body, where it lay, sleeping and hidden. The deer could find its own way out.
Back in her dark secret nook, she opened her eyes, her real eyes, and knew instantly that she wasn’t alone.
When the Archbuilder virus infiltrated her body the girl felt an urgent need to search the hills and towers west of the settlement, to look for a hiding place, a burrow, a safe house for her human body, like a bird in spring compelled by instinct to build a nest. What she found was a chunk of fallen architecture with a half-collapsed chamber, a thing that might have been a turret, a tower room for a prisoner in a fairy tale, a kidnapped woman or a man with a scarred face. The girl pictured the fragment high on the arc of some gigantic buttress, but now it lay on its side in the seam of a gully, a spot sheltered from most views, and so dark and protected that
Archbuilder potatoes grew there, just inside the entrance, exposed to the open air. The fragment was the sort of archaeological clue that the girl imagined Diana Eastling was out combing the planet to find.
The girl cleaned out the vine, sold the potatoes to Wa, then kicked dust over the muddy traces of the potato nest. Even so, she huddled at the opposite end of the chamber, away from where the potatoes had grown. She had stocked her nook with three jars of water and a blanket, stolen from a supply pallet behind the Kincaids’ house. Nothing else, no books, no paper, no games. The girl didn’t read or play there, just closed her eyes and went away, into the body of a household deer. The hiding place didn’t have to be anything more than what it was: secure, private. Though she wouldn’t mind if it were warmer. Lying still for hours, the girl would wake shivering, even wrapped in the blanket.
The girl had snuck in to watch the painter and his Archbuilder models three times before. As she saw it, she was practicing, mastering her fear and awkwardness, learning what it meant to be a household deer, a spy. She didn’t care what she saw when she practiced this new art; she was only finding out what was possible. She’d been in E. G. Wa’s shop, seen him fussing and cleaning in the back, picking his nose, staring out the window as he waited for his nonexistent customers. She’d watched him go to the bathroom, elbows on his knobby knees as he sat. And she’d climbed into the cab of Ben Barth’s truck the day before, and ridden with him out to Efram Nugent’s farm. She hadn’t gone in, though, hadn’t wanted to see Efram again, even nearly
invisible, as she was. She hadn’t forgotten the moment in Wa’s shop, when Efram had seemed to see through her deer-self, to Pella. So she’d crept out of the truck and tiptoed through the maze of planting boxes in Efram’s yard, then, suddenly spooked, had woken.
Once she’d crept around the edges of the Grants’ house, but she didn’t go in. She didn’t want to see Snider and Laney Grant, the drunk couple who never left their house, didn’t want to know what Morris Grant faced when he went home. She only waited on the porch awhile to see if Doug would come out. He didn’t. The girl saw Doug Grant when she spied at Wa’s, never anywhere near his parents’ home.
Ben Barth, Hugh Merrow, E. G. Wa—these were the bachelors, the harmless ones, as Pella saw it. She allowed herself to practice on them. She didn’t want to spy on the families, not even her own. She didn’t want to see anything that mattered. She only wanted to amuse herself and explore the boundaries, the functions of the gift.
Someone knelt over her in the dark. Someone had found her in her hole. She blinked and worked out his silhouette in the light leaking through the entrance. Bruce Kincaid.
“Pella?”
Of course
he
would find her. The digger, the clamberer, the collector. She’d hidden where potatoes grew, so what did she expect? She should have built her hideaway in a closet in her house, right under Clement’s
nose—there she would have stayed undiscovered. It was Bruce Kincaid who’d been asking where she was disappearing to. Her father hadn’t even noticed how much time she spent missing, hiding.
“Pella?”
“I’m here.” She sat up. He couldn’t see yet, she realized. The sky was bright and he was still blinded, coming into the dark turret.
“You didn’t answer.”
“I was hiding.”
“I touched you, and you didn’t say anything. I had to wake you up.”
“Touched me where?”
“Your
arm
,” he said, exasperated.
“I didn’t feel anything—”
“C’mon, Pella. You were asleep. Or out cold.”
She turned, and moved closer to him, trying to find an angle in the dim light that allowed her to read his expression.
“What’s going on?” he said.
She hesitated, then said, “Let’s get out of here.”
She nudged his arm, and he duckwalked back through the entrance. She followed, shucking off the blanket.
“You’re leaving that in there?”
“Yeah. Shut up.”
They climbed out of the gully together, silent. The sun was high, and their shadows were knotted at their feet.
“So if you weren’t sleeping, what were you doing?” he asked finally.
“I
was
sleeping,” she decided.
“This have anything to do with your not taking the pills?”
“I guess.” She’d let him supply the explanations, believe what he wanted.
“What happens?”
“Nothing. I just need to sleep a lot.”
“That’s it?”
His plain disappointment made her almost want to tell him. “That’s it,” she said.
“Morris Grant said your mom had seizures,” he said suddenly.
“What does Morris Grant know about it?”
“He said David told him.”
“Just two,” she said. “One at home, one in the hospital.”
“This doesn’t have anything to do with that, does it?”
“No.” She refused the notion so firmly that only afterward did she realize she needed the clarification herself.
They were silent again for a while, climbing the ridge. The sky was peach-hued, awesome and empty, no variation to give it more than two dimensions, or fewer than a billion. The crunch of their alternating footsteps mimicked an echo. Smoke huffed up past the rise on their left, gray-pink against the hill, but nearly impossible to make out as it rose into the sky. It came from Efram’s backyard kiln. Pella intentionally bumped against Bruce, steering them in the other direction.
“Maybe you’re just sort of warming up for something,” said Bruce as they walked along.
“What do you mean?”
“Like, your body’s changing, because of the Archbuilder viruses. So that’s why you need to sleep a lot.”
“Maybe.”
“What about Ray and Dave? Is anything like this happening to them?”
“Nope. And they don’t know about it, either. You’re going to keep quiet about this, right?”
“Sure, if that’s what you want.”
“Yes.”
If he were one of her brothers she would have had to back it up with a threat of some sort. But Bruce Kincaid smiled, and she realized he wouldn’t tell, simply because it made his life more interesting to have a secret with her.
She thought of what Morris had told her that day on the ridge over Efram’s farm. That Bruce loved her. If it was true she didn’t want to know about it, especially here, walking alone with him, indebted to him for protecting her secret, her hiding place. Let him keep both secrets, Pella thought. Mine and his own.
“And anything else,” he said.
“What?”
“Anything else I can do,” said Bruce. “To help you.” He sounded annoyed, like she wasn’t getting into the spirit of it.
“I can’t think of anything.” She wished she could
tell him that not talking about it included not talking to
her
.
“Maybe I’ll stop taking the pills too,” he said.
“Don’t.”
“Then whatever happens, happens to both of us—”
“Forget it, okay? You’ll be glad. I wish I could forget it myself.”
“So do you want me to get pills for you? I could.”
Would she want to let go of her deer-self, so soon after discovering it? Stop sleeping, stop spying? Then she thought of Hugh Merrow, of what she hadn’t wanted to see. The curtain that had parted. Maybe she did want to take the pills, after all.
“Wouldn’t they notice them missing?” she said.
“Who?”
“Your parents.”
At that moment a household deer ran skittering between them and sprang up onto a rock to the right of their path. Pella stared at the deer. It cocked its head at her questioningly.
Could someone be looking through its eyes?
“I’ll steal them from Wa’s,” said Bruce. “He’s got a shelf full of them.”
If nothing else it would keep Bruce busy, divert his attention. “Okay,” she said. “Do it.”
They came to the ridge that overlooked the lesbians’ house. Llana Richmond and Julie Concorse, and their baby, Melissa Richmond-Concorse. It was no longer remarkable. Six days before, Pella and Bruce and the other children had stood here and watched the men
prepare to fit this house together. Now it was already lived in, a part of the town.
“I could find you a better hiding place, too,” said Bruce. “I know lots.”
“Who’s going to find me where I was, except you? I bet you had to follow me, anyway.”
“Well, yesterday I watched what direction you went.”
“I knew it. I just hope Morris Grant wasn’t following
you
. He’s probably out there kicking in the sides of my thing, just to see if he can.”
“He didn’t follow me.”
Julie Concorse came out onto the porch of the house below and dumped a plastic container of dirty water over the edge, without looking up and seeing them. The water made a dark spider-shaped stain on the rock in front of the house, topped with a lump of soap bubbles.
As she watched Julie Concorse disappear through the front door, Pella imagined herself in her other form, a household deer slipping inside the house.