77
I REMEMBER WISHING MY MOTHER WOULD DIE SO I COULD BE ALONE WITH my father. This was when I was eleven or twelve, but it wasn’t a sudden feeling. It was a recognition, one that didn’t evaporate upon recognition, nor did it vanish in guilt. I knew enough to audition it as oedipal, but it didn’t feel oedipal to me. It felt like my dad was gentle and fun, and my mother was harsh and a drag. It wasn’t as if my wishing killed her—she was still alive.
Then there came the moment when my mother’s harshness was what I needed more than anything. I’d gotten into colleges easily, a lot of them. I was about to go to Columbia and refuse the others so that I could live at home. My mother forbade my doing so. She’d looked at me and seen a coming misery, but she hadn’t troubled to appeal to my self-sympathies. She said just one thing, speaking levelly, without her usual caustic grain, and asking no sympathy for herself: “Don’t worry, when you’re gone he’ll find another movie friend.” The words released me from an insufficient home in the world.
Heist’s retrieval of me from the restaurant called Essence—at that moment he became, temporarily, my mother.
78
THERE WASN’T MUCH TO PACK. WE JUST CHANGED OUT OF THE ROBES into the same crapped-out clothes that stank of the yellow dust. Before we left the room I glanced at the bed where no one had slept. I tossed the key card onto the pillow, not wanting to deal with explaining at checkout. I suppose that even without an invoice for his person-finding services, I’d paid for the sex with Heist, if I chose to think of it that way. I’d try not to.
I was pretty sure I hadn’t lied to Stephanie and Wild Edge in the middle of my nervous breakdown—Heist really did need me to drive him home. He couldn’t have done it himself. Making love, then frog-marching me through the door of Essence, he’d willed himself to uncommon strength, as in his climb on the Ferris wheel. But now, like some opportunistic predator, a lion napping between hunts, he was asleep again in the passenger seat before I’d even gotten on the freeway heading west. He was too weary to notice when I drove through a McDonald’s for a couple of Filet-O-Fish and a shitty coffee to replace the surely terrific one I’d never touched at the restaurant. Heist was a sick man healing. He was also needed in the place to which I’d be returning him, home. He had a project. I hadn’t lied at all about that.
Looking at him now, asleep crushed against the passenger door while I gobbled mayonnaise sandwiches and drove with one hand, keeping us at seventy in the slow lane of the fiendish interstate, Heist looked a little bare. He was denuded of his protective cloak of dogs, that’s what it was. Well, he’d have them back soon enough. Maybe I’d shaved him a little much too, a tad aspirationally, but his sideburns would grow back. The question was whether I’d be around to see him redogged and reburned. It was a question that didn’t need answering until we reached Upland.
Heist might have to navigate some police and social workers, he might have to run a few feints, but he still had his project, a living family of rescuees installed here and there, like Laird and Melinda. I was the one in trouble. As when I’d been on the verge of living at home during my college years, I’d without fully noticing become bare like a stone. Unworlded. A glimpse of it at the table with Stephanie and Wild Edge was all Heist had needed to make his intervention. He’d been quick on the draw, seen me better than I’d seen myself. So he’d roused himself, just long enough to rescue me from my rescue of him.
Maybe we could go forward on that precarious basis, what the hell. I might return with Heist, into his game of tiny rescues, of not asking questions larger than who needed pulling out of which family or cult on any given morning, or I might not. But I wasn’t going back to op-eds and conceptual art installations and Paris Review parties and scrolling outraged updates interspersed with pastry photography, any more than I was going back onto that couch with my dad to watch The Philadelphia Story for the umpteenth time. Better no world than that one, sweet as it all had been. It was gone.
79
AROUND REDLANDS I SAW HER AGAIN, MY GOLDEN GIRL, THE BLOND MOTORCYCLIST on the chrome-gold Harley with the golden helmet and goggles. She pulled up in the fast lane, and I kept pace with her for a while, though it made me jealous to imagine Heist waking and seeing her there, emblem of a freedom I’d never known and could never pretend even to understand. Plus, she looked really hot. Heist didn’t wake. The biker girl guided me westward a certain distance, then peeled off ahead and took an exit ramp, to whatever fabulous nowhere she called her own. I had a ways to go.
Acknowledgments
THIS BOOK OWES A LOT TO SAM SOUSA, BRIAN KRAATZ, JOHN AND SCARLETT Ellis, Alix Lambert, Sean Howe, Daniel Lanza Rivers, Charles Long, Mimi “Splain” Lipson, Anne Boyer, Dorna Khazeni, Anna Moschovakis, Dana Spiotta, Julie Orringer, Mandy Keifetz, Jeena Trexler-Sousa, and Cobra Becerra. Thanks as well to the ensembles that propped me up: Dan, Zack, Miriam, Sonya, Laura, and Emma at Ecco; Eric and Raffaella at WME; Pomona College; Kate’s Lazy Desert; the below-zero faithful of the East Blue Hill Library, particularly Steve Benson, Lee Lehto, and Jen Traub; above all, Everett, Desmond, and Amy.
About the Author
JONATHAN LETHEM is the New York Times bestselling author of eleven novels, including The Fortress of Solitude and Motherless Brooklyn, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award. He currently teaches creative writing at Pomona College in California.
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Also by Jonathan Lethem
NOVELS
Gun, with Occasional Music
Amnesia Moon
As She Climbed Across the Table
Motherless Brooklyn
The Fortress of Solitude
You Don’t Love Me Yet
Chronic City
Dissident Gardens
A Gambler’s Anatomy
NOVELLAS
This Shape We’re In
SHORT STORY COLLECTIONS
The Wall of the Sky, the Wall of the Eye
Kafka Americana (with Carter Scholz)
Men and Cartoons
How We Got Insipid
Lucky Alan and Other Stories
Copyright
THE FERAL DETECTIVE. Copyright © 2018 by Jonathan Lethem. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Ecco® and HarperCollins® are trademarks of HarperCollins Publishers.
FIRST EDITION
Cover design by Allison Saltzman
Cover photograph © Kate Bellm
Title Page Photo by Liz Stepanoff / Shutterstock
Version 09272018
Print ISBN: 978-0-06-285906-8
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