Girl in Landscape Read online

  ACCLAIM FOR Jonathan Lethem

  “[Lethem’s] language has never been more poetically descriptive. He is capable of bold invention.”

  —San Francisco Chronicle

  “A fresh, frequently wacky, young voice.… Best is Girl in Landscape’s subtle undercurrent of fear—of space, the unknown and the alien other.”

  —Detroit Free Press

  “Lethem’s amazing story and spare styling shine.”

  —City Pages

  “Lethem manages to pull off something magical with every novel.… Like Italo Calvino’s Cosmicomics, [he] introduces a loopy, surreal world where murkiness and mystery run amok.”

  —St. Petersburg Times

  “This lyrical … meditation on the founding myths of the 21st century remains thoroughly rooted in an emotional world much closer to home.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “The landscape, bleak, bare and thrilling, is a character on this planet just as it is in a Western.”

  —Los Angeles Times

  “Lethem constructs [his] worlds with a minimum of prose, revealing just enough to drive the story, but leaving even more to the imagination.”

  —Bookpage

  Jonathan Lethem

  GIRL IN LANDSCAPE

  Jonathan Lethem was born in New York and attended Bennington College. He is the author of the novels Gun, with Occasional Music; Amnesia Moon; and As She Climbed Across the Table; as well as a collection of short stories, The Wall of the Sky, the Wall of the Eye. He currently lives in Brooklyn, New York.

  FIRST VINTAGE CONTEMPORARIES EDITION, FEBRUARY 1999

  Copyright © 1998 by Jonathan Lethem

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Doubleday, New York, in 1998. Published by arrangement with Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication

  Lethem, Jonathan.

  Girl in landscape / Jonathan Lethem.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-79177-1

  1. Life on other planets—Fiction. I. Title.

  [PS3562.E8544G5 1999]

  813′.54-dc21 98-41173

  Author photograph © Mara Faye Lethem

  www.randomhouse.com

  v3.1

  TO PAMELA

  The sight of the mountains far away was sometimes so comprehensible to Natalie that she forced tears into her eyes, or lay on the grass, unable, after a point, to absorb it … or to turn it into more than her own capacity for containing it; she was not able to leave the fields and the mountains alone where she found them, but required herself to take them in and use them, a carrier of something simultaneously real and unreal …

  —Shirley Jackson, Hangsaman

  Screw ambiguity. Perversion and corruption masquerade as ambiguity. I don’t trust ambiguity.

  —John Wayne

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Part 1 - Brooklyn Heights Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Part 2 - The Planet of the Archbuilders Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Part 3 - Caitlin Chapter Twenty-one

  One

  Mother and daughter worked together, dressing the two young boys, tucking them into their outfits. The boys slithered under their hands, delighted, impatient, eyes darting sideways. They nearly groaned with momentary pleasure. The four were going to the beach, so their bodies had to be sealed against the sun. The boys had never been there. The girl had, just once. She could barely remember.

  The girl’s name was Pella Marsh.

  The family was moving to a distant place, an impossible place. Distance itself haunted them, the distance they had yet to go. It had infected them, invaded the space of their family. So the trip to the beach was a blind, a small expedition to cover talk of the larger one.

  “They don’t build arches, or anything, anymore,” said Caitlin Marsh, speaking of the faraway place, the frontier. “Pella, help David find his shoes.”

  “Why are they called Archbuilders, then?” said Raymond, the older of the two boys. He sat beside his brother on the bed. He already wore his shoes.

  The boy’s question was breathless, his imagination straining to reach the place the family would go. Straining to match the velocity of the coming change.

  He scuffed his shoes together, waiting for an answer.

  “They aren’t called Archbuilders,” said Caitlin Marsh. “They call themselves Archbuilders. What’s left of them, anyway. Most of them went away.”

  As their mother spoke of the planet where the family would move, about the creatures there, she spun the place into existence before their eager eyes. Directing the talk at her sons, she made the journey sound like a game, her voice lyrical and persuasive.

  “Went away where?” said Raymond.

  “Just a minute, Ray,” said Caitlin Marsh. “David needs his shoes.”

  But the girl knew the talk was for her sake as much as for her brothers’, and she listened, intent on hearing a mistake or misunderstanding in the talk, a flat note in the song her mother was singing. Something she could point out to make it all come undone, so the family would have to stay.

  “I’ve got one,” said David, pointing to his shoe, smiling up at his mother weakly. The boys were daunted and obedient, spellbound, sensing the strangeness in their mother.

  “Where’s the other one?” said Caitlin wearily. “Pella, help him.”

  Caitlin’s long black hair fell over her face as she turned from the children’s dresser to the closet. She was distressed, almost frantic. The girl wanted to fix her mother’s hair for her, draw it back.

  Draw them all back, if she could. Back some months ago, before her father had lost his election, before the idea of leaving had ever occurred to her parents. Draw herself back before her period had come. Before blood, before loss, before Archbuilders.

  “They went away where?” said Raymond again.

  “They went into space, far away,” said Caitlin.

  “But where?” said Raymond.

  “Nobody knows. The ones we’ll meet are the ones who stayed. There’s not too many. But they’re very particular about the words they pick in English. Archbuilders is how they see themselves, even if they don’t build arches.”

  “That’s kind of stupid,” said Raymond thoughtfully.

  “Do they have families?” said David.

  “They live a long time,” said Caitlin. “So they hardly ever have kids. And there aren’t men and women Archbuilders. Just one kind. They’re called hermaphrodites.”

  She was overwhelming them, piling the facts on almost nonsensically. The only thread that connected all the nonsense was Caitlin’s insistence, her urgency. Her motheringness.

  “What’s that?” said Raymond.

  “It’s when you’re a man and a woman at the same time.”

  “Say it again.”

 
Caitlin repeated the word, and Raymond and David both rehearsed it, tittering.

  “Here,” said Pella, after digging under the bed and finding David’s shoe. It was enclosed in a sort of web of dust, as though they’d already abandoned their house and come back centuries later to search for this shoe. Pella pulled the shoe out and brushed it off.

  “Help him with it,” said Caitlin, from the closet. She organized the beach stuff: blanket, sand toys, sun cones. “Lace his pants in so there’s no skin showing. You know how.”

  Pella sighed, but lifted David’s foot and tucked it into the shoe. Pella always touched her brothers tenderly, even when she was furious. And David, the moment he was touched, was passive, like a kitten seized by the nape.

  “Thank you, Pella,” said Caitlin, as she pushed a carton of old blankets back into the chaos of the children’s closet, the outgrown clothes, the board games, forgotten things soon to be abandoned.

  “Where do they live if they don’t build anything?” said Raymond.

  Pella stopped at the window. Put her fingers to the sealed layers of glass, darkened to blunt the sun. Outside was the river, the bridge. The tunnels and towers of Manhattan. The world. Don’t take me away from the real world, she thought.

  “They live outside, anywhere,” said Caitlin.

  “There’s not too many of them around now. Just a few.”

  “Like animals?” said Raymond.

  “They changed the weather,” said Caitlin. “So it’s always pleasant outside. There was a time before when the Archbuilders were very good at science. That was when they built arches, too. Come on, I’ll tell you at the beach.”

  Caitlin herded them toward the basement. David began by carrying the flattened sun cones, but their circumference was bigger than he was tall, and he had to lift them over his head to keep them from scraping along the stairs. Caitlin and Raymond laughed at him, Caitlin openly, happily, her pensiveness suddenly lifted. Then she had Pella trade with David. Pella carried the cones, he took the blanket.

  Pella decided not to laugh today.

  Their subway car sat silent and ready in its port, its burnished shell radiant in the gloom. Raymond and David had been sneaking down to play in the brightly lit cabin of the car in the otherwise shadowy basement, and Pella could have predicted that she would find the interior littered with Raymond’s action figures, hero duck and villain ducks, plastic headquarters and helicopter, fake rocks and trees. She gave an exaggerated sigh when she saw them. But Caitlin just smiled, unflappable again. She swept the toys out and loaded in the beach stuff.

  They climbed in, knees nestled together in the middle of the car, cones upright against the opposite seat. Caitlin keyed in the request. It was five minutes before the network responded and black steel arms drew them out of their basement and fastened them to the passing train.

  “This used to be one of the old subway lines,” said Caitlin. “The F. One of the ones from before the network, when it was just a few trains, real trains that everyone rode on together. I used to take it to the beach with your grandmother and walk on the boardwalk and go to Nathan’s and eat hot dogs, and you know what else they sold?”

  “Frog legs, Caitlin, you already told us this story,” said Raymond.

  “Yick,” said David.

  “Shut up,” said Raymond.

  “It’s disgusting,” said David.

  “Frog arms, frog heads, frog ears, frog dicks,” hissed Raymond, close to David’s ear.

  “Stop!”

  Pella nudged her brothers apart and sat between them, preempting the inevitable request from her mother. Jammed between them, she thought of the night of Clement’s concession speech, the three of them seated in that ballroom, waiting, Raymond and David kicking at each other under her chair, stirring the desultory balloons that lay everywhere, decorated with Clement’s name. Pella had taken one of the balloons and twisted it until it squeaked, then tore.

  Clipped onto the side of the train, they roared through the black tunnel, their faces lit in bursts by the colored lights of the ads that strobed out of the darkness, eye-blink retinal tattoos. The antic iron rattle of the subway consoled Pella. She imagined she could smell the heated metal. She was in a place where she belonged, under New York City, her family in their private car a discrete unit in a teeming hive, buried out of sight of the sky. She let the pounding of the track drown her mother’s words.

  “The Archbuilders had a strange science. They used viruses to change things. They used viruses to build arches and a lot of other stuff, and then they changed the weather, so it was always warm and there was plenty of food around. And when they changed the weather the Archbuilders changed, too. They stopped building arches.”

  “Why?” said Raymond.

  “The weather changed their temperament,” said Caitlin. “They got different priorities. Some of them went into space. And the ones who stayed forgot a lot of stuff they knew before.”

  “Will we live outside?” said David.

  Caitlin laughed.

  Pella let her brothers ask the questions. She listened to the tone of Caitlin’s answers, urgent and beguiling. She could hear her mother making the idea of the family moving to the Planet of the Archbuilders real, inflating it to fill the space that had gaped when Clement lost the election.

  As the train slowed at the beach station their car was unclipped and slotted into the vast parking garage under the station. Caitlin led them to the elevator. SURFACE WARNING signs came to life as they passed up through the underground.

  The doors opened to a concrete bunker, lit with blinking fluorescent, floor littered with sand, sunlight leaking from around a corner. Pella lugged out the flattened cones. Caitlin leaned her bag of sandwiches and toys against a wall, took one of the cones and unfolded it over David. Pella began to do the same with Raymond, but he snatched it away.

  “I can do it myself,” he said.

  “Fine,” said Pella. She took her own and fitted the headpiece around her skull, then let the weighted outer ring fall to the ground, tenting her inside the transparent cone.

  “Mine’s too big,” said David. He kicked at it where it scraped the concrete.

  “That’s good,” said Caitlin. “You won’t get burned. Better than too small.”

  “It looks dumb.”

  “Nobody cares how it looks,” said Pella.

  “Probably there’s nobody there anyway, stupid,” said Raymond, his voice scornful and uncertain at once.

  Raymond and David had only played in sand at a nature parlor called ’Scapes.

  They walked out in their four cones toward the sunlight. Pella lifted the edge of hers and felt the concrete wall as they turned the corner. The wall was cold. It thrummed, too, with the confirming thrum that was everywhere, elevators and climate-control devices vibrant in the underground concrete and steel.

  Everywhere except where they were going: outside.

  “Pella,” said Caitlin, and Pella let her cone fall to cover her again, felt it rasp in the grit at her feet.

  They stepped out of the shade of the bunker, and the scattering of sand across concrete underfoot blended into the beach itself. Pella gaped up. The thing about the sky, the thing she always forgot, was the vaulting empty spaciousness of it. The blue or gray she’d seen framed through so many tinted windows, unbound now, explosive. Endlessly vaulting away from her eye.

  And the sun, the enemy: horrible, impossible, unseeable.

  “Look.”

  Raymond and David were pointing at the ruins behind them, the boardwalk, the blackened armatures of the abandoned amusement park. They didn’t even look at the sky, Pella thought.

  “See that tower, like a mushroom?” said Caitlin. “That was the parachute jump.”

  “Did you go on that one?” said Raymond.

  “No. It was closed when I was young. Do you know why? People didn’t open the parachutes in time, and broke their legs. But I rode the Cyclone.”

  “The what?”

 
; “The roller coaster.” Caitlin pointed it out, a cat’s cradle of ravaged iron that looked helpless and naked in the sun.

  Pella, annoyed, turned to the shore. To the right and left the beach was empty to the rock pilings that made, with the boardwalk, three walls of its frame. The fourth wall, the wrongest, was the sprawling, pitched ribbon of cyclone fence that ran between the pilings at the point of the water. Refuse and seaweed had washed up in the night and now clung, rotting, high on the wire, but at midday the waves fell far short of the base of the barrier.

  Even this distance exhausted Pella’s gaze, from the sand where she stood to the place past the fence where the darker sand met the sulfurous, glistening ocean. Even before she grappled with the edge where the water met the sky. Even before she grappled with the sky.

  And now she was supposed to be able to look past that sky, into space. Caitlin wanted her to. But even the expanse of sand was space enough, too much.

  Pella walked slowly away from her family and toward the water the fence would not allow her to reach. She kept her eyes lowered against the terrible sun, watched instead the strange track her cone made as it dragged in the sand.

  “Pella!”

  Her brothers came running up beside her, already out of breath, David almost tripping on his cone.

  “Castle or fort?”

  “What?” said Pella.

  “Build a castle or a fort? David says castle, I say fort—”

  “What’s the difference?”

  “C’mon, Pella—”

  “No, I mean it, what’s the difference between a castle and a fort?” Pella plumped down in the sand, her cone half-telescoping to accommodate her.

  David fell on his knees alongside her. “I don’t know.”

  Raymond began: “A fort is …,” but didn’t continue.

  Caitlin spread the blanket just behind them, and plopped down the bag of sandwiches and toys. “This a good spot? A fort is what, Ray?”

  “They don’t know the difference between a castle and a fort,” said Pella, carefully leaving herself out of it.