The Arrest

by Jonathan Lethem

  Maddy had attained her full height. Or perhaps she’d been encouraged by her communal friends to straighten and not be ashamed of her full height. She was taller than their parents (who’d begun shrinking), and taller, too, than Journeyman, and Peter Todbaum, when he rose to greet her. She and Peter hadn’t met during Journeyman’s Yale years, and when she came through the door of the suite, her only luggage a hiker’s backpack, dressed in a tank top and high-trimmed jean shorts, Journeyman felt Todbaum’s instant excitement at her presence.

  “Well, fuck me in the heart,” he said. “Who’s this long drink of water?” Todbaum used his Cary Grant voice for this. Todbaum was a capable vocal mimic, though he typically dialed up hoary movie stars that sounded, by now, like impressions of impressions: Peter Lorre, John Wayne, and so forth. Other times he used a chesty, bullying voice Journeyman didn’t recognize, and which Todbaum explained was actually his father’s. Once or twice, he’d japed in an uncanny impersonation of Journeyman’s own voice, until Journeyman begged him to stop.

  “Peter, Madeleine,” Journeyman said now, as if at a freshman mixer.

  “Well, how do you do?” said Todbaum. “From what the Sandman here told me, I was picturing a little mud-hippie. Some kind of hairy-ankled garden gnome.” Todbaum was free with nicknames, and one of his for Journeyman was Sandman—a reworking of Journeyman’s given name and a joke about how Journeyman would often conk out in the middle of parties, or during one of Todbaum’s ceaseless sentences.

  “A mud-hippie?” Maddy glanced at her brother. Journeyman recalled that he’d mentioned to Todbaum how Madeleine had cured herself of childhood ailments, including that of preppiness, through devotion to farming and the outdoors, to a macrobiotic diet and other alternative practices.

  “Maybe there’s a secret Dutch gene lurking in the frog family lineage, eh?” He also liked to riff on Journeyman’s last name, Duplessis, and the suggestion that all of what he considered his pretensions—jazz, wire-rim eyeglasses, and red wine—were traces of French ancestry. “Someone must’ve took a walk on the Walloon side.”

  “Sorry?” said Madeleine, even as she came out of a brief embrace with Journeyman to offer her hand to Todbaum. He lifted it to his lips and, weirdly, sniffed it. Maddy pulled it free.

  “You look fresh off the Prinsengracht Canal,” he said. “Where’s your bicycle?”

  Maddy jostled back at him, a little. “Oh, it folds up small. I’ve got it right here in my pack.”

  Todbaum’s manner of acknowledging this was to turn to Journeyman. “She walks, she talks, she—whaddayou frogs call it?—she ripostes.”

  “Did my brother tell you I was mute?”

  “He didn’t prepare me in any way,” said Todbaum.

  “That’s good, I wouldn’t want him to. You’ll just have to roll with the punches.”

  “Oh, I’ll roll!” said Todbaum delightedly.

  “Good,” said Maddy, turning to Journeyman. “Can we get something to eat?”

  What had Journeyman expected, introducing them? Not this—Todbaum’s open drooling, his sister’s “ripostes.” His kid sister—hand-holding toddler, mutual confidante and whisperer, agonizing nightly violin-practicer, and stricken sufferer of childhood psoriasis and psoriatic arthritis. The hours she’d spent smoothing lotion onto her arms and legs, sunning in hopes of a solar cure, that teenage prisoner of sore flaking knees. Though they’d drifted somewhat, in high school, Maddy was lodged in Journeyman’s somatic sense of himself. He felt as though the center of his chest might once have been fused to hers, as though they’d been separated conjoined twins with one multifarious heart.

  Had Todbaum been aggressive with women at college? Todbaum, so far as Journeyman recalled, hadn’t been any way in particular. He’d been a reveler, a sophomoric provocateur—not a lover at all. Or maybe he kept that part of his life hidden. Perhaps his provocations of Maddy, now, were a display for Journeyman’s sake.

  The rest of the night suggested so. The three went out to the Dresden and, after that initial flare of response, Todbaum back-burnered Maddy. The writers were caught up entirely in infatuation with their new toy, the science fiction movie. They drank and spun their pitch, and Maddy drank and watched. Three time zones behind, she tired early. The next morning, Todbaum appeared impatient to find her on the couch when he came out for morning coffee (the suite lacked a third bedroom), and seemed only grudgingly amused at their sibling familiarities.

  The second night—out, again, at Todbaum’s insistence, at the Dresden—she leaned across her drink and interrupted their talk. “You gave her the dull half.”

  Todbaum raised his eyebrows.

  “Dull half of what?” said Journeyman.

  “Your movie. Yet Another World. What, you thought I wasn’t listening?”

  “It doesn’t have a dull half,” her brother told her.

  “Sure it does. The regular stuff—our world, I mean. All you guys talk about is the cyberpunk part, the dystopian part, where the guy comes from. But the part about our world, you’re not even interested in it. It’s like the whole thing just exists so he can have a girlfriend.”

  “Hey, look at our little story doctor,” said Todbaum, suddenly alert to her. Or unconcealing an alertness he’d been veiling—Journeyman would need to wonder, later on.

  “She’s not just his girlfriend,” Journeyman complained. “She’s a scientist. They’re, uh, equals.”

  “Right, okay,” said Maddy. “A scientist of what?”

  Neither had the answer to this.

  “And her world sucks.”

  “It’s our world.”

  “It’s nobody’s world. It’s like movie world. A flat backdrop. Nobody’s lived there since the 1950s, if they ever did.”

  “What would you suggest?” said Todbaum.

  “I need another drink,” said Maddy. She was through her second Blood and Sand, a dangerously dessert-like cocktail. Journeyman thought to protest, but said nothing. After Todbaum had provided a third round, she repeated, “It’s flat.”

  “You said that.”

  “The actual world doesn’t flatten for your convenience. It’s a boring lie. That’s why the other half of your movie is better. Put her world in motion too. Maybe an ecological catastrophe.”

  “Keep talking.” This might have been Todbaum’s motto for himself.

  “Make her an environmental scientist. She’s trying to save her reality, he’s trying to save his. They’re both under pressure. What did you call it? A ticking clock?”

  Todbaum pointed his glass at Journeyman. “Maybe I bet on the wrong Duplessis. Because that’s good.”

  Journeyman was silenced.

  “You got your dystopia in my postapocalypse,” Todbaum said. “You got your postapocalypse in my dystopia. Hey, these taste pretty good together! It’s a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup meet-cute for two fucked-up worlds.”

  “Now you owe me a percentage,” said Maddy.

  “I owe you another drink, that’s for sure.”

  “You can’t buy me for the price of a Blood and Sand.”

  “Let’s see how many it takes.”

  Journeyman didn’t actually mind. He liked them to like one another, was happy to think he’d provided two-way ratification of a general okayness—it made him feel better about his own choices, and the chance his sister would provide his parents an encouraging report. What’s more, the movie was better for her idea. The movie was suddenly great, as great as they’d thought it was before.

  It was the third night Journeyman would spend a lifetime wondering whether he’d been meant to foresee and prevent. It happened before he knew it. The third night was a Friday. When the Starlet broke out in its usual half-assed pool revels, which Todbaum usually disdained, he surprised Journeyman by suggesting that they stay in. There were some new faces, he said. A cutie or two. They wouldn’t have to drink and drive for a change, only fall back into their rooms. Only later did Journeyman see how every part of this was congruent with Todbaum’
s scheme, assuming he’d formed it in advance.

  Journeyman woke at four or five on a deck chair, his throat raw. Todbaum had poured liquor and pot not into Maddy—well, he’d likely done that too—but into Journeyman. And, from Journeyman, conspicuously withheld the cocaine. Journeyman’s hair was stiff and rank with chlorine, though at some point he’d gotten back into his tee and jeans. He’d either made out with one of the not-terribly-cuties, or tried to and only kissed and fumbled. Todbaum’s power of suggestion over him was awful. Alone now, he went upstairs. The suite was locked, Journeyman’s key inside. He rattled at the door, imagining his sister would hear him from the couch, but no. He didn’t ponder this, but instead staggered up North Pass to the Bob’s Big Boy on Riverside, to feed his still-drunk hangover with hash and eggs.

  When Journeyman circled back an hour or so later, he found the suite door unlocked, but Todbaum’s bedroom door shut, and no sign of Maddy. Instead, on the kitchen counter, he discovered a note in Todbaum’s hand—Go catch a flick, we could use a few hours—atop two twenties. This was before cell phones. The desolate spaciousness between humans, between human moments, not yet filled in with chattering ghosts of reassurance. You could hear yourself not think. Journeyman saw a 10:50 matinee of Raising Cain, then ate a bulb-tanned hot dog and snuck down the corridor into Unforgiven. He wasn’t woken until the credits rolled.

  When he returned to the Starlet, the door was again unlocked. This time, Todbaum’s door was open. Journeyman saw no signs, one way or another, of what activities might have taken place there. But Maddy’s backpack was gone, all traces of her evaporated. And neither she nor Todbaum were to be found, the rest of that day, or into the night. Todbaum’s car was gone too.

  8.

  The Chaos Inside the Quiet

  THE SHIVER AND CACKLE OF crows on an overhanging branch. The slick grinning madness within the man exiled to the Lake of Tiredness. The fever of life in an animal about to be slaughtered, only calmed for death. The sun, so placid through the trees, a fucking inferno exploding for eternity or until it fizzles. The stunned serenity of a vacated suite of rooms at the Starlet Apartments. The dystopia inside every utopia, the brain in every skull. The buzz and clatter of whatever it was that approached on the road today. The problem of me, thought Journeyman.

  9.

  Three Towns

  JOURNEYMAN LIVED IN TINDERWICK, THE peninsula’s hub. The town functioned, before the Arrest, as the nerve center, where the ancient local families, the organic farmers, the off-the-grid types, the blue-blood summer people, the sailing folk, etc., all had been forced to mingle in détente before retiring to their mutual antipathies. Tinderwick housed the peninsula’s library, along with other old institutions so dependent on fuel that they now comprised the local ruins: the gas station and car wash, the supermarket and post office, the firehouse (there had been an attempt to revive the firehouse on a horse-drawn basis, which flopped). The country club, its golf course now turned to cropland; a community radio station with a tall tower, much mourned; the restaurants and bars that had depended on tourism. Among such ruins, the bakery and the fish shack persisted on a barter basis, evoking a continuity with the town’s more recent history. In other ways Tinderwick had reverted to a nineteenth-century form, when the town had been a wintry outpost stranded much of the year from the rest of civilization.

  Yet even nineteenth-century Tinderwick would have featured a post office, regular newspapers from afar, and visitors landing by boat, things to inscribe the residents of Tinderwick as citizens of something wider. As Americans. New Englanders. Post-Arrest, any wider civilization remained unknown. There were just the two microcultures hemming them: the Cordon, which made their boundary from the larger mainland, and Esther’s Landing, the isolated town at the peninsula’s tip. The people of Esther’s Landing could, by definition, only bring outside news if it reached them by water. No such approach had been recorded, apart from the French boat. Since that had wrecked on Quarry Island, any news it might have conveyed perished with its crew.

  The Cordon faced outward. Their folk did sometimes bring nerve-racking tales of organized assaults from precincts to the south and west, from New Hampshire. The Cordon’s people were stoical, flinty types; Eke was typical. Hardly storytellers. Shouldn’t that make them trustworthy? Maybe, maybe not. The Cordon’s accounts all underscored the need for their defensive measures, the hardening of a perimeter, the justifiability of their paranoiac vigilance. Motive made all their tales suspect. Journeyman had wondered: how many hungry beggars equated to a berserker horde? Maybe just a half dozen.

  The peninsula’s second town, Granite Head, was where the old quarries were centered—those mysterious engines of the region’s prospering for more than a century, before the appetite for granite bank and skyscraper lobbies and bridge foundations in Boston and New York had been exhausted. The overgrown deep-bottomed quarry pits now not only functioned as natural freshwater fish hatcheries and swimming holes. Those of them with the right proportion and smoother walls made ice hockey rinks when the freeze was hard enough. Quarry hockey was a free entertainment relying on sturdy paraphernalia: metal skates, sticks, hard rubber pucks, and winter clothes.

  Maddy lived in East Tinderwick, where the locavore and natural-growing community had centered itself, mid–twentieth century. The community blossomed in the 1940s, before hippies or foodies, though it paved the way for both. That was when the back-to-the-land gurus Seldon and Margot Stevedore bought several hundred acres of woods and overgrown farmland, to the wonder and consternation of the locals, and began parceling it out to young acolytes, so long as they were willing to bend their backs to the labor of growing food in a hostile terrain.

  East Tinderwick was, therefore, the secret battery of the present survival of the community. The preservation and reinvention of the oldest methods, the mushrooming and berrying, the jarring and canning, the smoking of mackerel, the cellaring of root vegetables, had placed the community in a position to barter for their survival with the Cordon.

  The Cordon had guns, when guns still worked. Once guns quit they had the authority of their willingness to do violence. They also had can openers, and Bush’s maple-and-cured-bacon baked beans, only they were running out of the Bush’s. The peninsula had farms that ran by horsepower even before the Arrest, simply because the trust-fund idealists and peak oil preppers and golden hippie grandchildren of the Stevedore sharecroppers thought it was a better and a nicer idea than lubing up and repairing a grimy old tractor. The peninsula had farmers who knew how to raise and murder a duck—as Journeyman had learned, ducks were hard—and a sausage maker who never wasted a drop of blood from a single murdered duck, if Journeyman could catch it and bring it to her. The peninsula had rose-hip-and-yellow-dock chutney, and smoked mackerel, and the best marijuana.

  The Cordon liked these things, as well they should.

  East Tinderwick was where Journeyman’s sister had landed, after she fled Los Angeles, after the Starlet. East Tinderwick was where Maddy bought her own acreage, with a couple of partners from her senior-year off-campus house at Baginstock College, and, with them, founded the intentional community called Spodosol Ridge Farm. It was Spodosol where Journeyman had begun, after some time, visiting his sister during the summers, and it was where, over three decades later, he’d unintentionally found himself in residence at the Farm at the moment the Arrest occurred.

  10.

  Madeleine

  LONG BEFORE THE STARLET, JOURNEYMAN’S sister had struck him as dark. Not depressed, or gothy, more what’s called saturnine. She seemed to occupy, helplessly, a square of Earth plagued by an excess of gravity, or shaded by a tiny storm cloud. Or both, gravity and cloud. It wasn’t a thing she had the power to decorate or disguise, but a current that flew tangibly through her despite the adoption of any number of stances, attitudes, or enthusiasms—all the usual self-making of an adolescent person. Journeyman got to be the one who encouraged her by making fun of her. Or perhaps it was the reverse
: that he made fun of her by his encouragement. Madeleine only stuck with things—field hockey, vegetarianism, certain tattooed and heavily pierced friends—that Journeyman had declared ridiculous, and unlikely to persist. She disappointed their parents freely, without giving them the satisfaction of seeing her fail. She only quit the violin on the day she’d finally achieved near sublimity, a celebrated recital after which she never lifted the bow again.

  He’d never heard her volunteer an interest in music of any kind, let alone play it in her room.

  On summer vacations at Rehoboth she steeled herself to swim in the cold ocean, out a terrifying distance from the beach. She refused to be recruited for basketball but destroyed Journeyman in their backyard.

  She possessed an uncanniness for problem-solving procedures, of a sort that caused her always to ace her math and science classes. Yet she eschewed abstractions and figuration both. She once explained to her brother how she visualized math problems: as a series of broken objects needing rearrangement into a more pleasing whole. Her hands moved while she solved them. She liked stuff.

  One year she read all of Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey and Maturin novels, and shifted them from their father’s shelves into her room. Yet she disliked the sailing cultures, the boaty folk, of coastal Delaware, of Fishers Island, and, later, of the peninsula to which she’d removed herself.

  Journeyman never saw her take one drink at a high school party, but she’d accept a glass of wine from their father at dinner, the year before college. Journeyman didn’t know if she’d been a drinker at college.

  When Madeleine got her mathy hands into the soil, in college, and began to come home Christmases and Thanksgivings talking of loam and silt and hydrostasis, of cryptopores and mollisols, alfisols and spodosols, how could Journeyman have known she was describing her whole future concern, right down to the source of the name of the farm she and her fellow righteous oddballs would make their permanent home? Let alone that it would flourish and survive and become instrumental, a pin stuck through a tattered portion of reality when all the rest of it flew away?