The Arrest

by Jonathan Lethem

  “A lighthouse!” Todbaum seemed delighted. “You people are ingenious. Fueled by human waste, huh?”

  “My sister’s on the committee.” Journeyman winced. He hadn’t meant to mention Maddy. “We’d have to figure out some kind of way to keep a bonfire lit, on top—”

  “We should make it look like the Statue of Liberty! Only crooked, like at the end of Planet of the Apes.”

  “Ha.” Now the Blue Streak lurched toward the water, toward the park, and Quarry Island. There, Todbaum stopped it. To their left, the small park’s scrappy play structures: an old swing set and slide, a tire swing too, and a bare basketball hoop presiding over a quadrant of concrete. Founder’s Park wasn’t mowed anymore. The grass was high and yellow. Journeyman yearned for more cover, but there wasn’t any. The supercar was a sore thumb, unless he could persuade Todbaum to keep driving and sink it into the muck of the harbor.

  “Seriously, that’s hot shit, Sandman. There’s a lot of raw potential up here.”

  “Potential? Uh, yes . . .” Potential for what? Journeyman wished to scream.

  Had Todbaum, master producer, come here to make some spectacle?

  Was he location scouting?

  18.

  Before Journeyman Left Him, Todbaum Grew Sentimental

  JOURNEYMAN EXPLAINED THAT HE HAD to go and leave Todbaum there. Would Todbaum be okay? Did he need anything in particular? Journeyman encouraged Todbaum to feel free to exit his machine and stretch his legs, to walk in Founder’s Park or even stroll through town. Todbaum laughed. “I’ve been living in this thing for nearly a year, Sandman.” Journeyman told him no one would try to hurt him here, in East Tinderwick, and he laughed again. “I won’t hurt them either.” Then, before Journeyman could try to exit the machine, Todbaum grew abruptly sentimental. He halted Journeyman by placing his hands on Journeyman’s shoulders.

  “You ever think why?”

  “Why what?”

  “Why this? Why fucking this? Let me put it another way. Where does a person go? To a book? What do you reach for, Sandman: Philosophy? Psychedelics? Dostoyevsky? I mean in the Hour of the Wolf, at the end of the day, whatever. Is there some guru you like, under a tree? By a lake?” Journeyman was briefly perplexed: could Todbaum actually be making reference to Jerome Kormentz? Todbaum stared into Journeyman’s eyes, then twisted his mouth and made a sound: “Phhaaaghhh.” The sound was familiar: Todbaum’s oral-flatulent dismissal of all received wisdom. Previously, it would have been that wisdom dictating typical action in his chosen sphere, the industry.

  “I think I did this,” he said.

  “What?”

  “I think my hatred did this. I hated it all that much, Sandy. What I’d become. Those Malibu fucks with their private islands, their secret escape hatches. Worst people in the world. I was one of them, even if I was a thousand times smarter and bigger.”

  Ah, yes. This had nothing to do with Kormentz. Todbaum had no idea Kormentz existed.

  “So, give it up, Sandy, where do you look?”

  “When I look at the Arrest?”

  “Sure.”

  “I don’t know. Maybe the natural world has a kind of imperative that we can’t know. That even if we’re part of it, we’re just one part.” Journeyman was surprised he’d located the words. They were stopgap, cobbled from beliefs he’d gathered others nearby might hold.

  “Huh, some kind of animist shit? Nice try, I’ll give you that. For me, it’s consciousness. The only puzzle they never solved. My own consciousness, specifically. I’m not afraid to root around in the sub-basement. When I say bigger than those Malibu fucks, I mean unimaginably bigger, like a tesseract—bigger on the inside than on the outside. When I delve in there I see a lot of correspondences.”

  “Correspondences . . . between?”

  “What’s the story I couldn’t quit puzzling over? Yet Another World. Now look.”

  “You think we’re living in your pitch?”

  “It all came out of my head. Except one part.”

  In this craziness, Journeyman nevertheless knew not to imagine that Todbaum meant the thousands of draft pages he, Journeyman, had elucidated from what had come out of Todbaum’s head. “What part is that?”

  “Madeleine’s. You remember.”

  Journeyman did. He said nothing.

  “That’s where we are. I mean, open your eyes, Sandman.”

  “In my sister’s head?”

  “In some combination of the two. That’s the point. Me and her. Not one or the other.”

  “You and Maddy made the world?”

  “We were living in mine, now we’re living in hers. We went through the lens. You know what I’m out here chasing, Sandman?” There were tears in Todbaum’s eyes.

  “What?”

  “Something sustainable.” From the pilot of the nuclear-fueled, espresso-making guillotine the word was obscene. “We’re going to solve this together, I can feel it. Bring the halves together again.”

  Todbaum believing he’d seen the Arrest coming; this was only typical. He’d made billions betting on a hunch about the culture’s appetite for tentpole movies about giant robots from outer space. He now claimed to have the only functioning supercar—he was the only Todbaum. Why not believe he could do better than live at the Arrest’s mercy? Journeyman felt the nightmare logic land in him, like the hook of an old song. Todbaum wanted to break the Arrest open, put his signature on it. To piss inside the tent, to use his own language.

  Todbaum pulled Journeyman into an embrace. Here at last was the thing the supercar had been designed to cradle and nourish, to usher eastward—the yolk in the eggshell. Journeyman felt Todbaum’s thin shoulders. Todbaum’s dumb unrepentant belly, pressed against his own. Todbaum had been thin and slack in college, a walking question mark. Then fat and hale in his ascendancy, years through which he retained a trainer, cook, and masseuse, when he’d entertained every appetite and habit in the book, when each night had been devoted to self-murder and each morning to reanimation of the corpse. Now, eggplant-shaped, he sagged into Journeyman’s arms like an overripe one. No beneficiary of post-Arrest physical labor—captive in his supercar, what had he done besides push buttons?—he’d nevertheless shed weight, like everyone.

  They parted on the basis by which life was lived now: Journeyman would return with something good to eat. A promise he could keep. Todbaum dilated the portal, and Journeyman was released to climb the supercar’s external ladder.

  Exiting the park, Journeyman spooked a string of wild turkeys bobbing through the reeds. Unlikely birds, Darwinian jokes, ready food. They’d thrived lately, population exploding thanks to a climate-based shift in the fates of their predators. Journeyman didn’t pause to cede them the road, as he’d ordinarily have done. They bolted into the sun-soft woods.

  Why had Journeyman allowed Eke to place Todbaum in his hands? Why couldn’t they have just murdered him?

  The Blue Streak was too strong or they’d have done it.

  He had to protect his sister, her farm, the present state of reality, all.

  He, Journeyman, the town joke, the conveyor of packages, the emissary.

  The day, the town, the road, all was as Journeyman left it—peaceable, pensive, continuous. Arrested. So long as he didn’t turn his head to see what lay behind: the Blue Streak’s occupation of the town commons. As he crossed the ruined paving where the turkeys had thronged, toward the shrouded path to Spodosol Ridge Farm, there to deliver some rendition of his crazy news of the Blue Streak’s arrival, Journeyman mourned his present world, with that deep chest ache certifying a-thing-already-lost.

  19.

  The Starlet Apartments, Part 2

  DID JOURNEYMAN CALL THE POLICE? (“Two recent college graduates slipped off in one another’s company. I’m worried the attraction may not be mutual.”) He did not. Did he call his and Maddy’s parents? (“The thing is, Dad, my friend is a—”) Well, what was Todbaum?

  Journeyman didn’t have to decide. No, he conducted hi
s own search, first on foot, then, humiliatingly, by taxicab. He hit the bars, the widest circuit, the Dresden, the Viper Room, Musso & Frank, places he and Todbaum had visited and others they’d intended to. He invaded the Chateau Marmont. Journeyman pictured his sister and his friend on a revel, in other words. As though Todbaum had simply nudged Journeyman aside and plugged Maddy into his place—maybe they were trying to pick up women together. Although it wasn’t the likeliest picture in the world, it was the best Journeyman could conjure up.

  He had to direct the last cab back to a cash machine near the Starlet just to pay off the meter. His account was below five hundred dollars. He walked to Bob’s Big Boy again, the second time this day, one which had turned to night, his first night in Los Angeles not in the company of Todbaum. Had something happened to his friend and his sister? The question was whether something had happened to Maddy. When Journeyman walked back, he checked what had become Todbaum’s usual parking spot. The BMW was returned.

  He ran up to find them. The suite was still empty, as he’d left it. Journeyman’s sense of helplessness, instilled by hours at the mercy of Los Angeles without a vehicle, was now a self-fulfilling thing. He’d been taught the name for this in college: learned helplessness. Todbaum’s BMW seemed to move of its own accord. Meanwhile the suite doors locked and unlocked themselves, the humans refusing to appear. He stared at the empty rooms in dumb wonder, as if contemplating an M. C. Escher drawing.

  When sleep began to insist itself, Journeyman stretched out on the couch, where Maddy had camped. This wasn’t in solidarity, exactly. More that a retreat to his room might invite further shenanigans at his expense. He wanted to stake out the entrance. Perhaps he should drag a pillow and blanket down to the street and sleep across the hood of the BMW so it couldn’t be started again without his knowledge, but no. That was the onset of the crazy thinking. No one interrupted his sleep, and he didn’t wake until late the next morning.

  The riddle’s answer was there in Journeyman’s mind when he woke. So simple: the Starlet Apartments had plenty of vacancies. Todbaum’s trick was perfectly in character. It fit his complacency, his stated preference for use of “available materials,” also his way of throwing money at any situation. Journeyman had slept in his clothes, and had only to tie his sneakers to rush outside. The complex was structured so that from the pool area he’d gain a view of both levels. Maybe he could judge, even in daylight, which formerly vacant suite showed signs of new occupancy.

  The day’s party was underway. Or the previous night’s had never ended. Party such as it was. A pair of women in midriff-knotted T-shirts and bikini bottoms sat on the kiddie steps, immersed to the waist, smoking American Spirits, with melting ice cubes in a tumbler for an ashtray. One of these was Journeyman’s might-have-been-couldn’t-remember.

  “Where’s your suit?”

  “Have you seen Peter or Maddy?”

  “They’re busy little rabbits.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “No time for you or me, baby. They’re in the twilight zone.” Then she noticed Journeyman casting his eyes along the balcony, reading curtains left to right. “Something wrong?”

  “I need to talk to them.”

  “Well, go talk to them, then.” Her glance was enough, just. Journeyman followed it to the right door.

  It was locked, the curtain drawn. Journeyman wasn’t going away. He made conspicuous noise with the door handle, and tapped at the window too. When the door cracked open—he heard the chain come off first—Todbaum stuck his head out.

  “Just in time,” Todbaum said. “We’re out of ice and a few other things—” Though Todbaum wore the same Indonesian silk robe in which he’d paced all day around the suite below, dictating while Journeyman worked the Typestar’s keyboard, his wallet was in his hand. He peeled out a series of twenties and began to stuff them through the gap. “I’ll find you the car keys, just a minute—”

  “I want to talk to Maddy.”

  “Not just now, Sandman.”

  “I’m serious, Peter.”

  “Awww, don’t make me spell it out in plain English, you’re breaking my heart. The reason we’re talking like this is Maddy asked me to make you go away.”

  “Let her tell me that.” A line Journeyman would have scratched from a draft. Should he reach through the door’s gap and grab Todbaum by the collar now? He didn’t.

  Todbaum lowered his voice. “We’re all consensual adults around here, Galahad. Don’t infantilize your sibling.”

  “Are you . . . working on the treatment? Yet Another World?” Journeyman heard himself. Was he really so daft?

  “Maddy hasn’t said one word about it. Not since making her sublime intervention. I don’t even think she’s interested.”

  “Well then, what are you doing?”

  “What do you think we’re doing? Took the edge off, basically. Got my ashes hauled. Which, if I’m judging right, is what you’re in need of and didn’t get. Am I correct, sir? You find yourself passed over by the poolside?”

  “Let me talk to her.”

  “No tears were shed, no coltish animals were harmed in the making of this major motion picture.”

  They haggled. Journeyman’s appeals drew only scorn from Todbaum, who’d stepped outside, now, to stand with Journeyman on the balcony. Then, just as they gained the attention of the women at the pool, below, they were both halted—by the click of the lock behind Todbaum.

  20.

  His Last Flight

  VISITING MADDY, JOURNEYMAN ALWAYS WENT LAX to Boston on the red-eye, then a morning hop to Bangor. The last time, the June before the Arrest, he did this also. Was the carrier JetBlue? How could it matter to remember? The point about his last flight was that it was that great rarity anymore, the flight not overbooked. Or maybe less a rarity, in the time just before the Arrest, when many things were changed and jumbled up in unaccountable ways. They discussed this frequently those first weeks at Spodosol: had there been warning signs? Yes. There’d been a decade’s or a century’s worth of warning signs. But had there been indicators on the close horizon, a prodrome of the Arrest? Probably that too.

  Yet to enter a plane and find even a scattering of empty seats, still a novelty.

  This red-eye was half-full. Maybe less—many had a row to themselves. Journeyman did. A throwback. The atmosphere was giddy, the attendants blithe. The passengers changed seats, slept without seat belts. A kid ran paces up and down the central aisle. Journeyman refilled his own coffee in the back of the plane and was rewarded with a mere knowing smile.

  Yet when they landed it was to be informed they weren’t approaching the ordinary gates in Boston, and that those with connecting flights might wish to seek alternate plans. The plane was moved into a special quarantine area, there to sit for a long while, all aboard growing restive, before it was even unsealed. A kind of shock came over the passengers, all defiance evaporating, when those who’d come to meet the plane wore hazmat suits.

  Journeyman never learned what they were looking for or whether they found it, or whether some panic was left in his wake when he departed the airport.

  There was no longer a connection to Bangor. Journeyman Lyfted to a bus station, there hopped a Concord Lines bus, a seven-hour journey through tedium, pulling in at every town along Route 1. He called Maddy and she drove down to pick him up in Belfast. She brought Astur, too. They were a public couple now. Had Astur had to shake off her community’s prohibition on lesbianism? Or hadn’t there been one? There certainly wasn’t in Belfast, Maine. They’d had a late lunch at a restaurant, a lovely one, called Chase’s Daily.

  Airplane, cell phone, automobile, restaurant.

  All things now gone.

  The Arrest, in full, came six weeks later.

  21.

  Astur

  IT WAS THE SPECIAL SENSATION of moving through time that had recalled Journeyman’s last flight. Todbaum’s supercar had induced it. Like the flight, the Blue Streak had crossed west to east. And
the controls themselves, inside Todbaum’s cockpit, seemed to mangle different centuries together, realms of before and after science.

  He ran into Astur first, as he moved down the Spodosol road carrying his Telluride backpack and the burden of his impossible fact. His sister’s lover startled him as she approached. She appeared from behind a concealing wall of ripening, silk-humid corn, a wall whose fingerlike leaves barely rippled in the summery air. Astur wasn’t as tall as Maddy, but she was tall. Journeyman’s height.

  “Good day, Sandy.”

  “Astur! I was just looking for you guys!”

  “We hadn’t expected you until dinner tonight. I hope you’re still coming?”

  “Oh, sure—” Tuesdays were a regular dinner for Journeyman, at the general open-table gathering at Spodosol. It returned to him, then, that today was a Tuesday. Still an ordinary Tuesday for anyone who hadn’t seen the supercar. “I was just—I’ll walk home, and come with my bicycle tonight—” Journeyman usually bicycled between the towns after dark.

  “Or we can loan you one of the Farm’s bicycles,” said Astur. “If you’d like to stay the afternoon.”

  “No, I don’t mind walking back, I just—something came up.” He’d been whisked here so easefully in the Blue Streak’s cockpit. Time and space, distance on a road, these were not what they had been before Todbaum’s arrival. Further, Journeyman had been converted instantaneously into a fumbling liar, and Todbaum’s accomplice. “Any idea where I can find Maddy?” he asked.

  “Yes, the Grange Hall,” Astur spoke as if reminding him of something he ought to have known. Journeyman often couldn’t tell when she was joking. It demolished his confidence in trying to read her. Journeyman knew he was easy to read.