The Arrest

by Jonathan Lethem

  “Oh?”

  “The village association’s afternoon meeting. Theodore Nowlin’s proposal.” She offered a brief eye roll, inviting Journeyman’s enjoyment.

  “Of course.” Nowlin, a great bearded slab of a man, a widower in his seventies, had returned to the peninsula to retire to his family’s East Tinderwick farmstead, on which he cultivated a large flower bed along with his vegetables. This, after several decades’ employment as an arc welder at the Bath Iron Works, constructing navy destroyers. Nowlin’s five-generations-in-Maine claim, his salty street cred, was a thing Journeyman found irksome.

  Nowlin’s proposal was for an ocean expedition. His stated belief, that the Cordon was made of inlanders and lacked in oceangoing expertise. They showed no capacity for patrolling the coastline. Nowlin argued that a vessel of good size could ride out far enough to circumnavigate the Cordon’s vigilance, to make contact with the fine folk he imagined still ran the show in Bath and Brunswick. Nowlin had been trying for months to divert East Tinderwick’s engineering resources away from the lighthouse tower on Quarry Island, in favor of his big boat plan. No one quite had the heart to point out the swarm of unknowns upon which his dream depended.

  “Is something the matter, Sandy?”

  “No, I’ll just wait up at the Farm, I guess.” Journeyman lacked a clear intention. But rushing to the Grange Hall to find Maddy in the company of so many responsible East Tinderwickians wasn’t appealing. He’d either have to divulge his insane news to them collectively, or actively seek to deceive them. He wanted to whisper it to Maddy. As if it were merely a whisper.

  “Your work is done?”

  “Yes,” Journeyman said. “All I did was visit the Lake of Tiredness.” A lie of omission. But Astur had asked about work. Not whether he’d bummed any rides.

  Astur raised an eyebrow. “Ah.” Journeyman’s visits to Kormentz were a surefire conversation killer. “Well, then, why don’t you come out with me on the water? The wind is perfect today.”

  “Oh! That’s where you’re going?”

  “I’d love your company.”

  “In a boat, you mean?” Astur had left Somalia at nineteen, with her family, by boat. Despite that terrifying passage—or because of it?—she liked sailboats, and the sea, and frequently went out solo in a shellback. She’d ferried Journeyman and other nonsailors to Quarry Island the week of the cleanup of the bodies and wreckage from the French boat. Astur was able to row a peapod from the shore to a moored sailboat like a champion, better than Journeyman could imagine ever being able.

  “Why not, Sandy?” Astur’s smile was incredibly warm. “Everyone else is at the meeting. My own work was completed this morning. Are you needed elsewhere?”

  “Um—”

  “You seem heavy.”

  “I do?” Journeyman felt not heavy, but weightless, detached, invisible. Or wished he were invisible. He saw the problem with his plan to merely dawdle at the Farm, waiting for Maddy to return: if Astur wasn’t diverted from her course, she’d spot the Blue Streak from the water herself. He felt increasing panic: there wasn’t any way he could prohibit or prevent this. Who knew what Todbaum might be doing now, and to whom?

  “Why aren’t you at the meeting?” Journeyman asked her. “The lighthouse project is as much yours as anyone’s.”

  “Exactly. My presence isn’t required, since my views are well represented. Theodore Nowlin doesn’t see me as a person separate from Madeleine, really.” Journeyman understood her to mean Nowlin didn’t see her as a person, period. He wouldn’t presume to articulate this.

  “You’re a vote,” Journeyman said. “C’mon, I’ll go with you, we’ve got him surrounded.”

  “Our votes aren’t needed, Sandy. It’s decided by consensus, as you’d know if you ever attended one of our meetings.”

  “Well, I live in Tinderwick.” He felt accused of something, everything.

  “So, why concern yourself? Come with me instead.”

  “On the boat?”

  “Yes, Sandy, on the boat! Why should that be so ridiculous to you? This day won’t come again. Whatever’s worrying you, it can wait.”

  He was tempted. Though perhaps because he felt tempted to abstraction, dissociation, to absenting. Why not enter a small boat with his sister’s girlfriend, to consider the whole thing from the beneficent waters? There it would be, the coastline, with its little traces of their town poking through the dense tree line: the boat put-in, the playground equipment, Todbaum’s silly car—all to be beheld, all to be . . . well, what? Beheld. That might be enough.

  But one thing wasn’t possible—to sail from the coastline of himself. Journeyman didn’t, for instance, like boats. He couldn’t experience any pleasure aboard them. Did Astur know this already, and was therefore needling him, or was her consideration sincere, in which case he’d have to disappoint her? But this was idiotic—of course it was sincere. Todbaum had only reentered Journeyman’s life an hour earlier, and already Journeyman projected the other man’s interpersonal Machiavellianism in every direction.

  “I’ll walk with you as far as the put-in,” Journeyman said. “There’s something there I have to show you.”

  “Okay, I’ll enjoy your company on the walk. Maybe at the put-in you’ll change your mind.”

  “Maybe I will.”

  “I have two life jackets.”

  Sure, he thought but didn’t say, but have you got a built-in espresso machine?

  22.

  The Starlet Apartments, Part 3

  IT WAS LIKE COMEDY, ONLY not funny. Todbaum stood in his robe, locked out. He appealed, in turn, to the closed door, to Journeyman, to the onlookers, to the nowhere-to-be-found apartment manager. The pool women involved themselves, displaying a remarkable capacity to seem drunker in a crisis, despite not drinking, as if drawing on unseen reserves. Their semi-boyfriends appeared before long, too. They hustled Todbaum away to be placated or reasoned with. The women wanted to speak to Maddy through the door, to tell her that Todbaum wasn’t near, that it was safe to open up. Todbaum reappeared and demanded his car keys. The process of placation had to begin anew. Journeyman was given the car keys instead. Maddy would be smuggled downstairs—she’d refused to speak with her brother while on the premises, but he’d be allowed to drive her to LAX. Journeyman should wait in the car. He supposed he was being managed too, though he didn’t recall any unreasonable behavior on his part, or any reasonable behavior, either—he felt he’d stood dumbly to one side, a helpless observer. Were the absurd strictures Maddy’s own, or conjured by these loopy intermediaries? Soon enough Maddy appeared at the car, fully dressed, bearing the overstuffed hiker’s pack, which she shoved into the back seat. She wore a turtleneck, far too hot for the occasion. Was it this that made her cheeks look so red? It reminded Journeyman of how she’d dressed as a teenager, to conceal the flaky skin of her neck.

  “Go.”

  Journeyman protested. Maddy made it clear that he should drive, if he wanted even a syllable back. He drove.

  “Where to?”

  “The airport.”

  “Wow,” he said. “You have a ticket?”

  “They sell tickets.”

  “So, I’m your cabdriver? After you vanish for two days?”

  “Did I? Vanish? Is that what I did?”

  “I don’t know, Maddy. Maybe that’s not the word for it. Are you going to tell me what happened in there?”

  Journeyman felt her emphatically not-looking at him as he slid Todbaum’s car onto the 101. “I am not going to tell you what happened in there.” These words stacked like bricks between him and his sister.

  “Okay, fine, whatever. So, you’re just going to let Peter completely ruin this whole thing for you? I was going to show you L.A.” The car was hot. He cranked the AC. For once there was no traffic.

  “Well, you didn’t show me L.A. You showed me, what is this? Burbank? Toluca Lake? You showed me the Starlet Apartments. But maybe you don’t know the difference.”

 
“You sound—” Journeyman started this despite himself, and finished it that way too. “You sound like Peter.” A part of him wanted to wreck Todbaum’s car, to wreck the squalid progress of this event. He and his sister would walk back, as he’d walked between destinations, searching for her.

  “That would be natural, since I’ve been listening to nothing else for days.”

  The heat in the car was the heat of Maddy’s face, the bottling of unwept tears while she razed the hillside with her eyes.

  “You didn’t have to listen for days,” he said. “I didn’t ask you to do that.”

  “No, Sandy, you didn’t ask me.”

  Journeyman couldn’t compute her sarcasm. “Why didn’t you just walk out of the room? He didn’t restrain you in some way?” Journeyman suspected Todbaum’s predilections.

  “Not in any way you wouldn’t recognize.”

  Journeyman reached over and tugged at her turtleneck’s collar. The imprints of Todbaum’s teeth were just below, red dents, already purplish-edged. Her skin was otherwise smooth, no sign of psoriasis. She slapped away his hand.

  “Before you say anything, Sandy—”

  “What?” He should have been enraged. He felt baffled.

  “That isn’t the matter; it isn’t anything.”

  “You like that?”

  “I like that.” She was angry now. Journeyman would always stand, he saw, at the doorway of those with predilections, those like Todbaum and his sister shared, and feel a fool for wondering. For not belonging even at the doorway.

  “So, what’s the matter?” he said sulkily, unwilling yet to be contrite.

  “Maybe you can have a thing you like, but have it in the wrong way.”

  “You weren’t his captive? He didn’t stop you from leaving?”

  “He did stop me, but not how you think.”

  “How?”

  “With words.”

  “What kind of words?”

  “Pull over.”

  “What?”

  “I’ll find a real cab. Or I’ll hitchhike, that ought to go well. I don’t want to be in this car anymore, Sandy.”

  “Let me drive you where you want to go. To the airport. Do you even know what airline?”

  “Domestic whatever.”

  “Domestic whatever, right.”

  They sat in silence, until, soon enough, they sat in silence at the white zone, exposed to the riotous sunshine. LAX was the only airport Journeyman could imagine felt like this, a six-lane freeway up on top, the second story of the Tower of Babel. Abruptly Maddy leapt free of Todbaum’s BMW, then opened the rear door and swung her titanic backpack onto the curb, before he could help. He dashed out anyhow, and said he was sorry. What if he found somewhere else for them to go? Would she stay, a day or two at least? They could go to Disneyland, he offered. Find their cousins in San Diego. Rent a convertible and drive the Pacific Coast Highway. She shook her head.

  “It’s okay, Sandy. I just—I just want to go.”

  “Is this something to do with the pitch?”

  “What pitch?”

  Journeyman was unable to keep from asking, as he’d been unable with Todbaum, at the door. “The movie, Yet Another World. Peter thinks it’s half yours now, apparently.”

  “Whatever.”

  “Did you talk about it?” Journeyman’s bitterness crept in, an early flare of the lifelong sickness. Maddy wouldn’t miss it.

  “Maybe. I don’t know. He can have it, I don’t care. This isn’t about that.”

  “If it isn’t about this, and it isn’t about that—”

  “Sandy, listen now. I want you to listen.”

  “Tell me. Anything. I’m listening.” They were inspected by a curbside checking attendant, dispassionately. The word “skycap” drifted into mind. That was what they were called. Maybe he could offer one of them the keys to the Beemer, and join Maddy in flight. It was then that she said the last thing she’d ever say to Journeyman about what had transpired between her and Peter Todbaum in the Starlet Apartments. The last thing, anyway, for some thirty years.

  “He didn’t do anything to me that he doesn’t do to you.”

  “What’s that? What does he do to me?”

  “Sandy, don’t you see?”

  “What?”

  “Practicing.”

  “Practicing? For what?” For eating the world, Journeyman heard himself think.

  Maddy left it to Journeyman’s imagination. Before turning inside she allowed him to embrace her, though without unslinging the backpack. A heartbreaking rigid embrace, such brittleness in Maddy’s trapped arms, Journeyman’s hands not meeting around the fullness of the pack, fingers locating instead the bulky contour of her hiking boots inside. Journeyman’s eyes briefly found those of the skycap, who offered Journeyman nothing, not even a sneer; he’d witnessed too many similar scenes. Then Maddy was gone.

  23.

  Journeyman Was a Middle Person

  JOURNEYMAN WAS A MIDDLE PERSON, a middleman. Always locatable between things, and therefore special witness in both directions, to extremes remote to each other, an empathic broker between irreconcilable poles—or so he flattered himself. He might only be a muddle. Mixed-up, pallid, compromised, a person ineffective and unpersuasive in all senses. He might seem an impressive writer, for instance, to civilians: he was one of those few who made his living by his pen. Yet to actual writers, when they learned that all he did was rewrite others, accept and incorporate producers’ notes, and that nothing of his efforts ever got greenlit, he wasn’t one. The proverbial writer’s not-writer. Another instance: he’d loved a married person but hadn’t ever been married. Now he swabbed the blood of murdered animals he’d never have been able to murder with his own hands, then delivered the resultant goods, the bacon and sausage and jerky that he’d never have been able to fashion. Nothing anchored Journeyman to any given cause or philosophy; his strategies were inconsequential, even to himself. He’d survived the Arrest by dumb luck. Even his everyday name, Sandy, placed him ambivalently: neither firmly of the land nor willing to embark offshore. Yet here he was. Offshore. In Astur’s sailboat.

  24.

  Every Vessel Finds Ground

  JOURNEYMAN ALWAYS FORGOT. THE SEA was less a floor than an inverted sky, the vast swallowing indifference of which he didn’t care to contemplate. Was there a name for his fear? Voluminophobia? Journeyman focused instead on the network of sun-glints that interlaced the swells, forming the illusion of a surface. Astur’s boat swept rapidly from sight of East Tinderwick, toward Quarry Island. Nevertheless, as they turned west, the tree-break revealed the cultivated shore of Founder’s Park. There, the stone wall, the gazebo, the swing set and basketball hoop. Among these, Todbaum’s car. The Blue Streak. It too twinkled in the sun, as if made of water.

  “Do you see it?” Journeyman asked her. He’d described Todbaum and the Blue Streak to her as they’d approached the dock where she’d tethered her rowboat.

  “Sure, Sandy. I see it. Did you believe you’d invented it?”

  “I had some hopes.”

  “I’m sorry, then. Are you frightened of your friend and his machine?”

  Had she read Journeyman’s mind? “Shouldn’t I be?” he asked her. “Aren’t you?”

  Astur cocked her head. Indicating, Journeyman supposed, that she hadn’t seen the reason yet to be afraid. She hadn’t crossed the waters from the land of her birth and become a beekeeper and fallen in love with his sister and shrugged off the Arrest to be spooked so easily by Todbaum’s nuclear coffeepot.

  “We have to go back. I have to tell Maddy.”

  “I’ll turn sail at the island, in the cove. The offshore wind is very strong.”

  “What if we blow out into the open sea?” This was a sort of fantasy. They could be the French boat in reverse, the odd couple, pointed toward the old world. A chance to suspend the judgment Journeyman felt hanging over him.

  “Every vessel finds ground eventually,” Astur said.

 
“Does the bottom of the ocean count?” Journeyman fumbled with a length of brine-smelly rope, the purpose of which eluded him, and which he couldn’t have begun to be able to knot. On the water his general nonutility was made comically specific.

  Astur laughed. “No, Sandy, that isn’t what I meant. That isn’t what I mean.”

  “Well, what do you mean?”

  “Maybe your friend has something important to tell us about where he’s been.”

  Had she intended “vessel” to include the supercar? In either case, it now felt to Journeyman that her aphorism encompassed it. So, their community was the ground that bizarre vessel had found. East Tinderwick. Founder’s Park.

  “There’s renewed fighting elsewhere,” Journeyman thought to tell her. He felt relieved to share some new information that didn’t extend directly from his sojourn in Todbaum’s cockpit. “Some of the Cordon guys, they’re all dinged up. You know Eke? He looks rattled for a change.”

  “We were never going to live here forever untouched by the outside. Others have come, Sandy, don’t forget. The woman in the library.”

  “Yes. But I like her.”

  “This is why we have to build the lighthouse.”

  This struck Journeyman at the time as a non sequitur. Or, at least, a merely incidental remark.

  25.

  Loss

  A FEW MONTHS AFTER THE Arrest’s onset, Maddy got very angry with Journeyman. She’d been trying to teach him to forage for mushrooms. She’d had him briefly pegged for this role, but he was miscast. Journeyman wasn’t any good at it, and shirked the opportunity. He stumbled after her on the overgrown wood paths, paused to inspect himself for imaginary ticks, was shy of snakes in the vernal pools. He forgot his training, hesitated over any identification. Perhaps it was this behavior that laid the ground for her outburst, though his behavior wasn’t the subject.