***** Claire DeWitt and the Bohemian Highway (Claire DeWitt Novels) by Sara Gran (2013)
Claire DeWitt and the Bohemian Highway (Claire DeWitt Novels) by Sara Gran (2013)
Epigraph
The detective thinks he is investigating a murder or a missing girl but truly he is investigating something else all together, something he cannot grasp hold of directly. Satisfaction will be rare. Uncertainty will be your natural state. Much of your life will be spent in the dark woods, no path visible, with fear and loneliness your only companions.
But answers exist. Solutions wait for you, trembling, pulling you to them, calling your name, even if you cannot hear. And when you are sure that you have been forgotten, and that every step has been wrong, and that the woods are swallowing you whole, remember this: I too was once in those woods, and I have emerged to give you, if not a map or a path, hopefully at least a few clues. Remember that I, if no one else, know you are there, and will never give up hope for you, not in this lifetime or the next. And the day I came out of the woods I saw the sun as I had never seen it before, which is the only consolation I can offer as of now.
I believe that someday, perhaps many lifetimes from now, all will be explained, and all mysteries will be solved. All knowledge will be free for the taking, including the biggest mystery of all-who we really are. But for now, each detective, alone in the woods, must take her clues, and solve her mysteries for herself.
-JACQUES SILETTE, Détection
1
Jacques Silette, the great detective, would have said we knew. That we knew what was coming and made the choice to pursue it. “Karma,” he said once, “is not a sentence already printed. It is a series of words the author can arrange as she chooses” (2).
We all want to be someone else. And sometimes we succeed in convincing ourselves we can be.
But it doesn’t last, and our own true selves, broken and scarred, always win out in the end (3).
2
Or maybe it would be just another crime story where someone kills somebody else and nobody pays and it’s never really over. “Mysteries never end,” Constance Darling, Silette’s student, told me once. “And I always thought maybe none of them really get solved, either. We only pretend we understand when we can’t bear it anymore. We close the file and close the case, but that doesn’t mean we’ve found the truth, Claire. It only means that we’ve given up on this mystery and decided to look for the truth someplace else” (8).
3
Claude frowned.
“In 2001,” he said, and all of a sudden I knew he was telling the truth, and he had never said it out loud before. “I was doing research in the library at Stanford. And somehow I ended up in the criminology department-I think I was looking for penal codes in fifteenth-century Russia. And this book, this little paperback. It was like-I know this sounds stupid. But it was like it fell off the shelf right by my feet. And I picked it up and opened it and I read this line: ‘Above all, the inner knowing of the detective trumps every piece of evidence, every clue, every rational assumption. If we do not put it first and foremost, always, there is no point in carrying on, in detection or in life’” (14).
19
There weren’t many people who wanted to talk to me, it seemed. I thought of other people I could call who wouldn’t answer. People who were dead or people who were gone or people who hated me or just didn’t like me.
It wasn’t like anything had happened. I knew Mick wasn’t angry at me. He just had never liked me that much to begin with. I knew he kind of sort of loved me, but that isn’t the same as liking someone. If I’d been almost dead he’d probably call me and I probably wouldn’t pick up. Neither of us was doing very well or really even passing the grade with this humanity business (75).
20
If you hate yourself enough, you’ll start to hate anyone who reminds you of you. And if you stick with it, you’ll come to hate anyone who doesn’t see how just awful you are (79).
23
“There’s this book,” Tracy said, looking at her shot glass. “This guy, he says, ‘The teller has no responsibility to make the listener believe in the truth. Each must take the words and make them their own. No one can do this for another.’ That’s what he says in this book we like.”
This book we liked. Like this air we breathed, this sun that shone on us (100).
33
“It’s gettin’ tough for girls like us,” Rhonda said. We stood in the rain. Our transaction was completed but you can’t leave these things until you’re dismissed. That just isn’t how buying drugs works. “No one knows how to feel anything anymore. No one knows anymore. Ain’t no one care. People have, like, experiences. Everything just another experience. They do things, but they don’t feel it. It just all goes right through them. Like they a ghost. Like we all ghosts.”
“They sure are,” I said. “We sure are.”
“You ain’t one of those girls,” Rhonda said. “Those feel-nothing people. You feel every little thing right down your bones. You feel everything, just like me.”
“I’m working on that,” I said, cool rain on my face. “I don’t want-”
“Uh-uh,” Rhonda said. “You ain’t gonna change. Girls like us don’t change. We just keep going till they get every last drop out of us. Then they pretend they miss us when we gone” (141-2).
43
Samsāra was one name for the wheel of life and death, the stupidity we wander through, lost, until we find enlightenment and get to join with the divine. All the shit that hurts so much. The big things like death and loss and pain and also just the everyday grind of eating and sleeping and wanting and wanting and wanting-that was samsāra. You were supposed to want to get out of it. You were supposed to look for the exit, the golden ticket that could take you to the chocolate factory. Escape from New York. This way to the egress (186).
47
“People think love is, you know, this spiritual thing,” the lama said. “This feeling. But that’s not my thing. In my book, love is a physical act. Love is not ethereal. Love is sticking by someone when they’re in the nuthouse. Love is when you keep calling someone even when they don’t call you back. Love is dirty and solid. Love is, you know, earth and shit and blood and hair” (203).
59
It was always a case. But it was never a case. I left because every time we spoke we were getting closer. Because every time, something seemed to be revealed between us. Oh I always and That’s my favorite too and I know just what you mean and I can’t believe you also and the unspoken but always present How have I not known you forever? How is it I was here without you, and now you are so close to being everything? Something that seemed like it had been there all along (272).
There are no coincidences. Only doors you didn’t have the courage to walk through. Only blind spots you weren’t brave enough to see. Only tones you refused to admit you could hear (274).
Epigraph
The detective thinks he is investigating a murder or a missing girl but truly he is investigating something else all together, something he cannot grasp hold of directly. Satisfaction will be rare. Uncertainty will be your natural state. Much of your life will be spent in the dark woods, no path visible, with fear and loneliness your only companions.
But answers exist. Solutions wait for you, trembling, pulling you to them, calling your name, even if you cannot hear. And when you are sure that you have been forgotten, and that every step has been wrong, and that the woods are swallowing you whole, remember this: I too was once in those woods, and I have emerged to give you, if not a map or a path, hopefully at least a few clues. Remember that I, if no one else, know you are there, and will never give up hope for you, not in this lifetime or the next. And the day I came out of the woods I saw the sun as I had never seen it before, which is the only consolation I can offer as of now.
I believe that someday, perhaps many lifetimes from now, all will be explained, and all mysteries will be solved. All knowledge will be free for the taking, including the biggest mystery of all-who we really are. But for now, each detective, alone in the woods, must take her clues, and solve her mysteries for herself.
-JACQUES SILETTE, Détection
1
Jacques Silette, the great detective, would have said we knew. That we knew what was coming and made the choice to pursue it. “Karma,” he said once, “is not a sentence already printed. It is a series of words the author can arrange as she chooses” (2).
We all want to be someone else. And sometimes we succeed in convincing ourselves we can be.
But it doesn’t last, and our own true selves, broken and scarred, always win out in the end (3).
2
Or maybe it would be just another crime story where someone kills somebody else and nobody pays and it’s never really over. “Mysteries never end,” Constance Darling, Silette’s student, told me once. “And I always thought maybe none of them really get solved, either. We only pretend we understand when we can’t bear it anymore. We close the file and close the case, but that doesn’t mean we’ve found the truth, Claire. It only means that we’ve given up on this mystery and decided to look for the truth someplace else” (8).
3
Claude frowned.
“In 2001,” he said, and all of a sudden I knew he was telling the truth, and he had never said it out loud before. “I was doing research in the library at Stanford. And somehow I ended up in the criminology department-I think I was looking for penal codes in fifteenth-century Russia. And this book, this little paperback. It was like-I know this sounds stupid. But it was like it fell off the shelf right by my feet. And I picked it up and opened it and I read this line: ‘Above all, the inner knowing of the detective trumps every piece of evidence, every clue, every rational assumption. If we do not put it first and foremost, always, there is no point in carrying on, in detection or in life’” (14).
19
There weren’t many people who wanted to talk to me, it seemed. I thought of other people I could call who wouldn’t answer. People who were dead or people who were gone or people who hated me or just didn’t like me.
It wasn’t like anything had happened. I knew Mick wasn’t angry at me. He just had never liked me that much to begin with. I knew he kind of sort of loved me, but that isn’t the same as liking someone. If I’d been almost dead he’d probably call me and I probably wouldn’t pick up. Neither of us was doing very well or really even passing the grade with this humanity business (75).
20
If you hate yourself enough, you’ll start to hate anyone who reminds you of you. And if you stick with it, you’ll come to hate anyone who doesn’t see how just awful you are (79).
23
“There’s this book,” Tracy said, looking at her shot glass. “This guy, he says, ‘The teller has no responsibility to make the listener believe in the truth. Each must take the words and make them their own. No one can do this for another.’ That’s what he says in this book we like.”
This book we liked. Like this air we breathed, this sun that shone on us (100).
33
“It’s gettin’ tough for girls like us,” Rhonda said. We stood in the rain. Our transaction was completed but you can’t leave these things until you’re dismissed. That just isn’t how buying drugs works. “No one knows how to feel anything anymore. No one knows anymore. Ain’t no one care. People have, like, experiences. Everything just another experience. They do things, but they don’t feel it. It just all goes right through them. Like they a ghost. Like we all ghosts.”
“They sure are,” I said. “We sure are.”
“You ain’t one of those girls,” Rhonda said. “Those feel-nothing people. You feel every little thing right down your bones. You feel everything, just like me.”
“I’m working on that,” I said, cool rain on my face. “I don’t want-”
“Uh-uh,” Rhonda said. “You ain’t gonna change. Girls like us don’t change. We just keep going till they get every last drop out of us. Then they pretend they miss us when we gone” (141-2).
43
Samsāra was one name for the wheel of life and death, the stupidity we wander through, lost, until we find enlightenment and get to join with the divine. All the shit that hurts so much. The big things like death and loss and pain and also just the everyday grind of eating and sleeping and wanting and wanting and wanting-that was samsāra. You were supposed to want to get out of it. You were supposed to look for the exit, the golden ticket that could take you to the chocolate factory. Escape from New York. This way to the egress (186).
47
“People think love is, you know, this spiritual thing,” the lama said. “This feeling. But that’s not my thing. In my book, love is a physical act. Love is not ethereal. Love is sticking by someone when they’re in the nuthouse. Love is when you keep calling someone even when they don’t call you back. Love is dirty and solid. Love is, you know, earth and shit and blood and hair” (203).
59
It was always a case. But it was never a case. I left because every time we spoke we were getting closer. Because every time, something seemed to be revealed between us. Oh I always and That’s my favorite too and I know just what you mean and I can’t believe you also and the unspoken but always present How have I not known you forever? How is it I was here without you, and now you are so close to being everything? Something that seemed like it had been there all along (272).
There are no coincidences. Only doors you didn’t have the courage to walk through. Only blind spots you weren’t brave enough to see. Only tones you refused to admit you could hear (274).