The Arrest

by Jonathan Lethem

  11.

  Permanent Vacation

  THE FIRST TIME JOURNEYMAN VISITED Spodosol Ridge Farm he dropped in on his way back from a wedding on Mount Desert Island, a nuptial festivity that actually began with a chartered flight out of LAX into the Bar Harbor airfield. He’d at that point seen Maddy just once since the Starlet Apartments, on Fishers Island, at their father’s seventieth birthday. Journeyman and his date to the wedding—a girlfriend who hadn’t lasted long—had rented a car and meandered down the peninsula, the same road he walked today. On that day it had been smooth-paved, and made no particular impression on Journeyman apart from the length of it, and the depths of the woods that rose up intermittently like walls, the remoteness of the life his sister had chosen.

  They stayed at the Farm less than two hours, Journeyman and his date. There was little he recalled of the visit, though he could place it in time: it was the year he’d written two episodes of a television show about a family living with a talking toaster, the first and, it would turn out, the last time Journeyman would earn a single-card credit on-screen for his writing. He did recall that Maddy and her six or seven homesteading companions at that time still bunked and cooked in one central lodge while laying foundations for the first of the individual homes on the Farm. He recalled being served a pasty, chunky yellow curried-vegetable rice in wooden bowls, and that his date didn’t eat very much of hers.

  That first visit, he and Maddy managed not to have a moment to themselves.

  Three years later Journeyman visited the Farm in earnest. He was then at an early low ebb, the toaster show canceled and forgotten, his once-live pitches all gone dark, his manager not returning calls. Todbaum, on the other hand, was on the rise, through the ranks of the ordinary mortal assholes possessing a desk and a telephone, to assume what seemed his rightful place. He’d begun transforming himself into one of the town’s sacred monsters, a packager known for wrangling talent and intellectual property into fertile conjunctions, for spooking money out of dim corners of the Pacific Rim and Eastern Europe. He was becoming one of those who defied the usual precept that, despite all the power talk, nobody really could make anything happen except for the seven or twelve bankable stars. Todbaum made things happen.

  Journeyman’s lack of work freed him to wander from L.A., though his money was growing thin.

  If that second visit was a restorative one between Journeyman and his sister, it was a restoration to a cooled, firmer-edged place. She wasn’t his kid sister any longer. He had to stop and apprehend who it was she’d become instead. Spodosol Ridge Farm thrived, five or six homesteads built, though several times a week the whole community still dined together in the central lodge. The fields were now joined by an elaborate greenhouse in which the Spodosolians produced miraculous Zone Five tomatoes, ripe in May and June. They’d allocated a quadrant of land to a group of migrant Mexican berry pickers, three families, who’d years earlier begun a roadside tamale stand from the blueberry fields, a hit with those who’d come here from afar and been starved for any authentic cuisine besides pie and lobster.

  The tamale stand they’d subsidized into a real concern, a takeout business, now nestled inside Spodosol’s weekly vegetable farm-drop enterprise, which had been embraced by the peninsula. Spodosol’s produce had supplied restaurants in Tinderwick and Esther’s Landing (East Tinderwick was too small for a restaurant, Granite Head too long in decline from its quarrying glory days), and also individual homes. If you weren’t home, you’d leave a couple of twenties pinned on a counter in a kitchen left unlocked in exchange for a reusable wooden crate of what Spodosol Ridge pumped out of its fields.

  Maddy had fallen in love with a woman. The obvious turn? Not to Journeyman. Astur Guutaale was Somali, a member of what Journeyman learned, to his surprise, was a substantial community centered in Lewiston. The two had met at the Common Ground Country Fair, a yearly gathering of agrarian hippies. Astur worked as a beekeeper. She’d traveled to the fair with a demonstration hive, and samples of honey, beeswax salves, and candles. Journeyman would come to know Astur well, later, in the permanent vacation that was to become his post-Arrest life. But not yet.

  The sole mention of Todbaum came while Journeyman and his sister were swimming.

  Maddy had had to lure Journeyman out. The ocean, whether at Rehoboth or Fishers Island or the monolithic blue fist of the Pacific, had never been Journeyman’s thing. The cove here was sheltered, Maddy explained. The open surf broken by a dozen islands before it made its way to this inlet. The water warmed itself over the rocks, was nearly bathwater, or so she advertised. He went from the Farm with her that bright hot day and they immersed and floated out, two bobbing heads in salt froth. The cove wasn’t only tolerably warm, it was filthy with green fronds, with dead jellyfish, with unidentified global-warming gloop, perhaps red tide or coliform. There were times Journeyman felt, accompanying Maddy through the natural world, that she’d filled his head with too much bioknowledge, that he couldn’t quit being aware of everything teeming with rot and humidity, up to the food at the end of his fork.

  Before Todbaum’s name came up they discussed Journeyman’s woes. His career drought, his romantic drought. They talked of their parents. Journeyman’s mother’s sense had begun to fail. At Christmas Eve dinner she’d cleared a half-full bowl of chowder from the table and drained it into an open silverware drawer. Their father’s denial was absolute: he’d shut the chowder-filled drawer, and scowled Journeyman and Maddy to silence. What were they to do about it all? The Arrest would soon enough solve the conundrum for them, stranding them from news of whether their parents were even alive anymore. In this they were hardly alone.

  Journeyman recalled the light twinkling on the ripples extending from their floating heads. The fronds and filth, the cool beneath the sun-warmed layer, the chrome-green horseflies that caused the siblings to slap at their heads and submerge. Maddy had seen Journeyman living at the Farm for five or six days; perhaps she’d begun to trust that he saw her for who she’d become. Might Journeyman be forgiven, that day? He craved more even than he’d already gained of Maddy’s cool and acute compassion.

  “I’m not working with Peter Todbaum anymore,” Journeyman said. He’d weighted the emphasis in how he spoke the line, so it could be heard as a statement of policy rather than abject fact. Todbaum’s ascent was fresh, and the two men were out of touch. Journeyman’s bitterness toward Todbaum freed him to imagine he’d behaved valiantly on behalf of his sister in ways he hadn’t.

  “You really don’t need to ever mention him again,” said Maddy, not harshly, but with unmistakable firmness.

  “Well, I figured—”

  “Really not ever.” She plunged her head below the water and stayed there awhile. There was no horsefly.

  “Okay,” he said when she surfaced.

  So, it seemed to Journeyman later, Maddy had given him permission to leave unmentioned this fact: that he’d upon his return begun to work with Todbaum again. Indeed, Todbaum soon became the basis of Journeyman’s whole livelihood.

  12.

  The Blue Streak, Part 1

  THE HORSES SNORTED. A CROW vamoosed. The supercar came around the corner and up the hill at once, gleaming in the sun and seeming to ripple off waves of heat-static around its perimeters, as though near and far at once. Eke waved Journeyman off the center of the road, onto the shoulder, to make way for it. The shiny abysmal engineered carcass. This was Journeyman’s first impression: that a jet engine or hydrogen bomb had been mounted on a fantastic chassis, then been mated with an animal or insect. And then been turned at least partly inside out. The supercar was a monstrosity, a rupture to Journeyman’s stabilizing premise, his self-situation. In its humming, seething, glistening actuality it made a blight in the very air. It seemed to destroy, or at least to collapse, time itself. This didn’t strike Journeyman as a positive sensation. Following the Arrest, it had seemed that assaults on time—time’s fragmentation, or insane velocity—had also been Arrested. Time had
been allowed to recollect itself. To flow into bodies at an undistressed rate. The supercar wrenched a hole in those notions, which might now, it seemed to Journeyman, be exposed as sentimental. The supercar seemed to remember too well the pre-Arrest world, to drag fragments of smashed time in its wake.

  Later, in the library, Journeyman found two pictures:

  Journeyman X-Acto knifed these two images out of art books and added them to his file of recollections concerning the coming of Todbaum’s supercar.

  13.

  Yet Another World, Part 1

  WHEN TODBAUM BEGAN TO GENTLY orchestrate Journeyman’s career, it was by bringing him in as a kind of triage expert on broken projects. Journeyman got script-polishing work—hugely remunerative and creatively pointless. His name wouldn’t ever appear on-screen, but it did circulate in agents’ offices, as he who’d salvaged such and such, always turned work in on time, never balked at a note. As a remora adopts a shark, Journeyman took work off Todbaum’s leavings, and fed in his wake. Todbaum more and more loomed into a kind of living legend, reviled for his whims and abuses, for his savage truncations of personal visions, and yet a person whose calls one couldn’t afford not to take. Journeyman’s trace of legacy with him—you knew Todbaum at school? Sweet Jesus, what was he like then? Was he already . . . Todbaum?—became a minor point of fascination. It helped keep Journeyman’s manager’s phone ringing.

  Between gigs Todbaum paid him a retainer, to tinker with a couple of Todbaum’s slow-cooking pet projects, one or two of which Journeyman learned to care about. Journeyman found that if he sank enough hours into a given piece it gained a certain life. His fatal weakness, perhaps: he liked what he wrote. He liked draft one and he liked drafts seven and eleven too, and you could have wallpapered a multiplex with the editorial notes he received and mostly ignored. It was foolish to be offended at the suggestions the development and money people lavished on a draft. Nobody recalled what they’d said in the notes anyhow, not five minutes after they’d dictated them to their assistants.

  Just one trace remained of Journeyman’s and Todbaum’s hard days’ nights at the Starlet, that juvenile burst of activity, of treatments and pitches. That one trace was Yet Another World, the tale of alternate near-future Earths. One the cyber-dystopia, the other a wasteland of subsistence and looting, the eco-catastrophe Maddy had introduced into the conceit. For Todbaum, this was his gem, his secret unmade masterpiece. He paid Journeyman to write it, and to write it again. At one point Journeyman plopped out a 250-page version, a nearly unfilmable epic, which Todbaum personally dragged to Hertfordshire, England, there to batter down Stanley Kubrick’s door with a personal appeal. Later, the project found a temporary home at DreamWorks, then Scott Free. Each time it collapsed, Todbaum hocked it out of turnaround from his own pocket, and set Journeyman to work again.

  By the time of the Arrest, Yet Another World had evolved—stretched and sprawled—into a treatment for a wide-canvas premium cable series, the latest fashion. Its focus, more and more, on harbingers of eco-catastrophe, and collapsing borders, and the dawning of AI, and of virtual reality; the twenty-year-old story raced to keep up with the present. It would be the Game of Thrones of science fiction, Todbaum promised. First, he wanted it perfect, unassailable. He paid Journeyman to write all ten episodes of the first season, right to the unstoppable, heartbreaking cliff-hanger ending. Journeyman never thought to mention to his sister that the story to which she’d contributed such a crucial element was still alive, still nearly always open in a Final Draft window on his laptop. Or no—he thought of her participation frequently. He feared mentioning it to her, that was the truth.

  When Peter Todbaum appeared in his supercar, the Blue Streak—its studded tires and tank treads almost entirely straddling the weed-riven, frost-heave-crumbled breadth of the road’s old asphalt, its high-whirring engines and fans sounding nearly like a jet engine up close, escorted by Cordon cavalry horses and sputtering, barely functional shit-bikes—Todbaum’s wonderful horrible Chitty Chitty Bang Bang colonized Journeyman’s brain as a vision from the past’s future. Or from the future of another past entirely. It was as though Todbaum’s and Journeyman’s long-unproduced masterpiece Yet Another World had at last been realized, not in the form of a feature film or television series but instead as a fact for which Journeyman might be liable. One world had broken through to another.

  14.

  The Blue Streak, Part 2

  “YOU’LL WANT TO STAND OVER here, Mr. Duplessis.” Eke spoke precisely. Was it Journeyman’s imagination, or had the scare quotes gone off “Mr.” entirely? He’d gained in stature by being importantly connected to the supercar, even if he needed Eke’s help to know the proper place to stand. “You hear him best from this vent.”

  Journeyman followed Eke along the crumbled shoulder, around the broad, complicated flank of the supercar, to find the vent in question: a flügelhorn-mouth at the front of the massive whining vehicle, protruding from amid a bank of square headlamps, and protected by a heavy grille. To follow Eke’s lead was to stand directly before the car’s nose cone, centered low between the mammoth front wheels, each the size of the rear tire of a giant tractor. At the mercy of the vehicle, should it suddenly move. This positioning of the speaker was unlikely, it seemed to Journeyman, to be accidental. Eke shrugged, expressing his rough sympathy at Journeyman’s hesitation to place himself there.

  The supercar steamed, wreathed in a cocktail of irreconcilable scents: butane, Kahlúa, coolant, melted copper wire. Journeyman felt sunburnt by its chrome dazzle, as though the reflected sun would etch hieroglyphic scribbles across his cheeks, his blinking eyelids. Here and there the metal carapace or the exterior piping was bruised, singed, scuffed, but that fact only seemed a further expression of the thing’s fundamental indomitability.

  Peter Todbaum’s voice emanated, clear as a bell, unforgettable, and seeming to pick up at a place he’d left off some million revolutions of the galaxy ago. “Look at you, Sandy. The world’s last innocent man, waltzing unharmed between the raindrops and these motorpsycho chuckleheads. How’d you pull it off?”

  Journeyman looked up. A shadow-form bobbed, unreadable within a plexiglass globe cockpit. Could it be?

  “Struck dumb to see me? Or did these lads maybe carve out your tongue for antipasto?” Todbaum’s voice really was unchanged: fluent and abrasive, demanding love and capitulation.

  “Peter?” said Journeyman.

  “There you go. I came a long way to find you, Sandman. I drove all night for a year; I kept you in my thoughts every minute of the journey, too. You’re a sight for sore eyes.”

  “How can it still drive?”

  “A Passover miracle.”

  “I can’t see your face.”

  “Hey, I’ll get you up here for a soul kiss and look-around if you can tell the Rip Van Winkle Posse to slack off a little. These cowboys have been trying to climb up my ass for the past two days.”

  The loose-thronged Cordon people, whether mounted or dismounted from horses and bikes, didn’t appear to be verging on an assault on Todbaum’s supercar. Perhaps a residue of hostility had trailed the two parties up the coast, from early in their encounter. It might be the case that Todbaum couldn’t read them from his cockpit. To Journeyman the Cordon men looked irritated, puzzled by the situation, perhaps eager to be shed of this problem.

  “Eke?” Journeyman didn’t know the names of the others. If Eke was not precisely the leader here, he might at least speak for the collective.

  “Yeah?”

  “My friend is asking whether you’d please take a few steps away from his vehicle.”

  “Thattaboy, Sandy. You’ve still got your ear for American lingo. Basically every two-bit Libertarian free-range asshole you’ll ever meet is just waiting for someone to talk to them in Default Cop.”

  Eke grunted. He waved the horses back along the road. Journeyman couldn’t know whether he’d overheard Todbaum’s editorializing. Eke had an air of baffled deference. He m
ight simply be language-hurt, after a long day’s exposure to Todbaum’s filibuster from the supercar’s mouth hole.

  Once Todbaum was satisfied by the slackening of the noose of Cordon men that ensnared him, he instructed Journeyman to move to what would have been the passenger side of an ordinary car. Journeyman heard a pop, as if a soda can had unsealed. Todbaum’s bubble cockpit didn’t raise. Instead, a large aperture dilated open, like a camera lens, just below the line of the cockpit. From out of the supercar’s smooth-armored thorax, beneath where Journeyman stood, ladder-rung handholds slid out from beneath hidden panels. The ladder ascended to that weird open lens. Journeyman could climb, as if into a tree house. He did. He climbed into surely that most abhorrent of things, a mixed metaphor. For his name-seeking brain fell sick, the nearer it drew to the intoxicating machine. Was the supercar a camera, an insect, a jet plane, a tree house, a soda can? Since the Arrest, Journeyman tended to believe, things had only been themselves. The supercar was itself and everything else at once.

  “Come right in.” Todbaum spoke as if resplendent at the open door of his study, offering brandy or choice of cigars. Journeyman bent from the topmost rung, conscious of his own comic vulnerability to the men watching from below. He squirmed into the portal. The fit was tight, but the passage was just a foot’s thickness through the wall of the machine. He plopped onto the floor of the bright-lit capsule, at Todbaum’s feet.