The Arrest

by Jonathan Lethem

  The subject was loss. She felt he wasn’t respectful enough of the undertow of loss in the community, in the world beyond himself. Journeyman had been complaining again about his lost relationship, compromised though it was.

  “Sandy, what makes you think you’re the only person who lost someone?”

  He didn’t think this. He tried to say so. But Maddy’s words had only been the opening to a cascade. “Everyone here lost someone, we walk every day in a trench of sorrow. You imagine because you happened to be on vacation you’re, like, Mr. Phantom Limb, Sandy. We’re all half ghosts now.”

  “I didn’t say—”

  “You don’t even have to say it, but you do. Like you’re some special detector of the gone world, the sole proprietor. We all lost people. Parents, lovers, fucking Facebook caring circles, whatever. Nobody’s special. Astur lost her entire community. She did it even before the Arrest, she’s lost more than you can even imagine.” After sailing to a first refuge in Yemen, Journeyman knew, Astur and her family had found passage to the Netherlands. There her brothers had remained, while Astur and her parents went on to Boston. She’d come alone to the community in Lewiston.

  “I’d never try to compete with Astur,” Journeyman said quietly.

  “No, you compete with me.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’re Mr. Special Sad Man.” Maddy veered out of control then. Journeyman could tell she was ashamed of herself, but she’d also read his mind. “I just can’t stomach the self-drama, your hand-wringing, oh, woe is me, how can the mighty script doctor and adulterer have fallen to this, to killing ducks—”

  “Listen—” But Journeyman had nothing. It seemed odd that he and his sister could find themselves in a contest of losses. Their most elemental wound—the lopping off of their living parents into a forever-uncertainty as to whether they’d gone on living after the Arrest—was precisely identical. If they’d suffered a degradation in their closeness, that was identical too, and reciprocal. Their bond wasn’t what it had been, when they were children. It wasn’t as if they never spoke, nor even that they never laughed. Still.

  Only—reciprocal? He’d lost Maddy’s admiration, her easy delight in his progress through life. This felt inexplicable and sad. Embarrassing. But for Maddy, her brother might have toppled from an older-sibling pedestal, starting with the disenchantment at the Starlet. Was Maddy’s loss worse? Or was Journeyman’s, since he had to accept the forfeiture of a sister’s respect into his self-understanding?

  Journeyman preferred not to think about it.

  II.

  October

  26.

  October

  THE OLD GROWTH, THE MAPLES, turned first. They rusted one leaf at a time, where ocean breezes bruised them, late in August. Paulo, the tree warden, once told Journeyman that the first trees to change reveal a map of damage. The earliest turning were those once sickened or lightning-struck. So Journeyman saw the season as a theater of succumbing. The wind’s bite called each tree to solidarity with the weakest. Only the evergreens were refuseniks. Primordial trees, dinosaur trees—in their gummy hearts, they were deader than the trees that turned.

  It was a season of burning leaves, burning light. Heaps of things burning. Atop the heaps, what won’t burn, but only blacken and ooze: hooves, intestines, jack-o’-lanterns. Just one farm grew pumpkins anymore, enough for anyone concerned with ritual. They weren’t that good to eat, after a pie or two. The Tinderwick Fair had once featured contests, pie-eating contests, but also for growing the things. Blue ribbons for swollen orange freaks, pumpkins that had to be carted in, the flesh inside no good at all.

  It wasn’t only smartphones and Oscar red carpet telecasts whose vanishing you could marvel over. The fairgrounds were a dusty vacancy. Why bother to go? Someone suggested all the stilled cars be hitched to horses and dragged there, Tinderwick’s sole parking lot. But this was too much work. The cars rusted in ditches or fields, shrouded in weeds. Children played on them.

  Journeyman sometimes thought the world had been reduced to ones, to solitaries. One farm that still grew pumpkins. One tree warden, Paulo. Paulo was the only piano tuner in the three towns, too. There was just one schoolteacher, handling the grades together, as must have been true once long ago. Journeyman’s guess was fewer than forty children, fifty at most. They didn’t all attend the school. Homeschooling was popular on the peninsula before the Arrest, and had carried on uninterrupted after it.

  Nils repaired bicycles, and he was backed up. Journeyman tried not to be annoyed.

  Needra made batches of deodorant, tampons, toothpaste, also brushes and floss. Very popular woman, Needra.

  Jane and Lucius grew marijuana. The quality was incomparable, so few others troubled with personal plants. Mostly they were busy farming potatoes, tomatoes, kale.

  One butcher, one butcher’s assistant and mop-up man. Victoria made sausages.

  Andy, the one psychiatrist. He carried on as before, though he was paid now in what resembled charity or tribute: dinners from the farmers; refurbished shoes from our shoe refurbisher, Osgood, who seemed to need a lot of therapy. Andy had been known to give away the extra shoes.

  Of course this wasn’t strictly true. Frequently they had more than one of everything. Other times, none. For instance, no politician. Renate, Tinderwick’s mayor before, stepped down, returned to her work as a veterinarian. No one took her place. They had no policeman. This ought to be concerning, but wasn’t. The town’s policeman hadn’t been a Tinderwick resident anyway, but lived in Snowport. After the Arrest he’d joined the Cordon. They had no criminal, that Journeyman knew of. Not in the sense of a pickpocket or mugger anyway.

  They had no storyteller. Journeyman hadn’t had to decline the position. No one asked.

  They’d had one monster, and sent him to the Lake of Tiredness. There wasn’t room for another.

  27.

  The First Story

  PETER TODBAUM WAS OUT OF his protective capsule. Why shouldn’t he be? It was a beautiful day. Todbaum had expanded his little fiefdom at Founder’s Park to include the gazebo and picnic table by the water. He placed his back to the water, Journeyman supposed, so he could keep his eye on the Blue Streak, and track who approached the park from the road, as Journeyman did now.

  Theodore Nowlin sat with Todbaum there under the gazebo’s shade, erect and stern in his usual way, his posture claiming puritan virtue and rectitude. Yet his eyes were dazzled, rapt. Journeyman had seen that drunken look before, on other faces. It came about when Todbaum’s mouth started moving.

  Another man sat with them, one Journeyman didn’t know. Not a man, quite, Journeyman realized as he approached. A teenager. Journeyman recalled a set of teenage-boy twins, part of the off-the-grid, backroads community deep in East Tinderwick’s interior land, only occasionally sighted in town. This was one of them.

  As Journeyman got nearer, he saw that Todbaum had given his listeners espresso. A little coffee picnic, out under the gazebo’s shade, here at the end of the world. It would be the first coffee the teenager had ever tasted.

  “—whole state’s a protectorate,” Todbaum was saying. “Sure, sure, you might think your local survivalist squads have a franchise, a leg up, but let me tell you, nobody’s got anything on these Mormons; they’re like fiends of competency, been drawing up blueprints for apocalyptic eventualities since the day they handed those golden plates back to the angel Moroni. Howard Hughes put himself in Mormon hands for a reason. You know from Howard Hughes?”

  The teenager looked at him blankly.

  “Richest man in the world, inventor of the underwire brassiere, he’s like the patron saint of American paranoids. He used the Mormons like his own private CIA, only at some point it might have been that the operatives were running him as a figurehead, who knows? I wouldn’t put it past them. When I rolled through there was just one quadrant of Utah they hadn’t placed under their dominion. I mean, one quadrant worth having, resource-wise—a lot of that place
is a wasteland, salt flats, nothing arable or habitable, particularly, nothing cattle can graze, but there’s orchards at the right altitudes—ever had a Utah apple?”

  “Good apples,” said Theodore Nowlin, gravely.

  “Great apples,” said Todbaum. “I rolled out of there with a basket of Fujis, kept me alive halfway into Nebraska. I should have been hoarding the pips, if I was smarter. You people would have known what to do with them. Hey, Sandman, you need a coffee?”

  “I’m okay,” Journeyman said. He’d stopped his bicycle near enough, to place a cheesecloth-wrapped package on the table beside them. A spelt loaf. But he stayed on the bicycle.

  “You off to see Madeleine?”

  “Well, yes.”

  “Say hi to her for me. Or no, on second thought, don’t.” This was a running joke between them now, or a running joke between Todbaum and Todbaum. “I want to surprise her.”

  Todbaum had been here ten days now without yet seeing Journeyman’s sister.

  “Okay.”

  He went back to his story. “There’s a private corporation, with a whole campus dug up in the Oquirrh mountain range. There’s freshwater streams up there, totally self-sustaining, and it’s practically a mini-cult, a corporate cult, like they’ve beat the Mormons at their own game. Drives ’em crazy, too, having this secret holding just beyond their control. Place is called White Walnut. So, after I got into my dealings with the Mormons, they entreated me to use the Blue Streak to go up there, and would you believe it, the persuasiveness of these guys, and, also, I was getting a little intrigued, like what if they’ve got what I’ve got—nuclear turbines? What if they’ve got something I don’t? So, I started up the mountain. Only White Walnut’s shrouded. Complete and utter mystery to me how they did this.”

  “What do you mean by shrouded?” asked Theodore Nowlin, with excited irritation.

  “Just what you think I’d mean. They’re invisible, in a sense. There’s this opaque fog, when you approach their altitude. Just the whole place is shrouded. I don’t know if they can see through it, or how they navigated blind, but I sure couldn’t—”

  Journeyman took off. The story disturbed him in any number of ways. But before he could dwell on it, he noticed what he hadn’t before: two children, a boy and a girl, clambering on the Blue Streak’s exterior. The boy, on the ladder to the hatch. Journeyman felt a pitch of anxiety in his stomach, recalling Todbaum’s description of the dilating blades that protected the entry point. But the boy didn’t attempt to enter, just perched. Perhaps the girl had begun on the ladder too, but she’d spidered around, in her tattery dress, and clung instead to a vertical vent that resembled a set of giant shark’s gills, nearer to the bare gleaming engine rods. The children turned, noticing Journeyman noticing them. Both were barefoot. Journeyman believed they were the younger siblings of the teenage twin who sat with Todbaum beneath the gazebo. He wished he could remember the family’s name, so he could ask Maddy about them. Did their parents know they were here? But such questions might be, as they used to say with giddy frequency in Journeyman’s former life, above his pay grade.

  28.

  Journeyman’s Rounds Had Expanded

  JOURNEYMAN’S ROUNDS HAD EXPANDED. NILS, exasperatingly, had not fixed his bicycle, but he’d loaned Journeyman a spare. He needed it. After his morning duties at the butcher’s, then delivering the caul and scrap to Victoria, and gathering from her some finished product, his round of farms and recipients had grown. He brought care packages to the Lake of Tiredness, also to the woman in the library—and now, all the way back to East Tinderwick, to Todbaum. For in some unofficial way, by grudging consent, Todbaum had been approved as a ward of the towns. While what he might contribute had yet to be determined, he’d be fed.

  29.

  The Woman Who Lived in the Library

  THE START HAD BEEN INNOCUOUS. It was several weeks, perhaps a month, before Todbaum’s arrival in the supercar. The butcher, Augustus Cordell, said to Journeyman, “A woman moved into the library.”

  Journeyman felt mild surprise. “From where?”

  Augustus shrugged. “She left a rowboat at the golf course landing.” Behind the country club’s overgrown golf course lay a short beach that was nearly useless as a boat landing—useless because there were no moorings and because it was walled from the road, so nothing larger than what might be carried, a plastic kayak at most, would put in there.

  “She rowed here?”

  He shrugged again. Augustus was not one to speculate.

  “She doesn’t know anyone?”

  “The folks at Proscenium Farm asked me to bring her something to eat, but they didn’t know her name. Maybe you ought to include her in your rounds this week.”

  “Well, sure.” This was as near as the community might come to a general proclamation of welcome, but also a request to declare one’s purposes: Here’s a basket of sausage, bread, and preserves. Now, where do you see yourself in a week or a month? The butcher also knew that Journeyman cherished visiting the empty library. In this he was scarcely alone. Journeyman’s first thought was that this rowing woman shouldn’t screw up such an essential part of the post-Arrest commons.

  She’d barred the doors from within, so he had to pound on them, and call out, and wait. Yet when she opened them it was without demanding he identify himself. She seemed more irked than afraid.

  “Yes?”

  “I have food for you.”

  “Who sent you?”

  “No one. It’s just what we do.”

  “Okay, thank you.”

  “I’m Alexander Duplessis.”

  “Okay, that’s good to know.”

  “We—a lot of people like to come in here and get books.”

  “Is there a particular book you want today?”

  Are you a librarian? he almost said. “Sometimes I don’t know what I’m looking for until I find it.”

  “That’s a luxurious attitude, these days.”

  “Well, you’ve come to a place of . . . I don’t know if I’d call it luxury, exactly. But we do find time for certain pleasures.” Was he being flirtatious? Would she notice if he was? “I mean like looking at the books in the library.”

  “It’s a lucky place,” she said. “Do you even know how lucky?”

  “No, I’m sure I don’t.” Journeyman waited for her to say where she’d come from in her rowboat, or whether that had even been her rowboat.

  “You shouldn’t leave a place like this unguarded.”

  “The library, you mean?”

  “I’ll keep watch over it now.”

  In this tautological way, she’d revealed just what the butcher might have deputized Journeyman to learn: that in exchange for food, the woman in the library would provide the service of being the woman in the library.

  “Will you tell me your name?” he said.

  “Another time.”

  “Okay.”

  30.

  The Second Story

  “—WHO SHOULD I FIND BUT a couple of minor, washed-up tabloid stars holding court there, king and queen of the goddamn prom. Really, these two couldn’t get a meeting—couldn’t get arrested in my town anymore. But we’ve all got some form of luck; this turned out to be theirs. They’d been doing a road show deal, playing the we-really-love-doing-theater card, so they were in Cheyenne, Wyoming, of all the godforsaken places, when the whole thing shook down, instead of trapped with everybody else in L.A. Before, if you’d busted them out in Podunk they’d be begging you not to mention it to anybody. Now they had this whole place wrapped around their finger because of their cornpone charisma and Botox-frozen mugs imprinted on brains by endless tired reruns on AMC. Fame is a fucking currency, my friends—”

  This might not actually have been the second story. It was the second Journeyman heard. He didn’t stay to hear more. He had rounds to complete. Theodore Nowlin was with Todbaum again, and the teenager too, but this time the circle had grown: Here was Mike Raritan, listening as well. Victoria
had come. And Nils. Shouldn’t Nils be fixing bicycles? Well, he wasn’t. He was drinking Todbaum’s coffee. Todbaum doled out coffee from the Blue Streak to anyone who cared to drop by.

  31.

  By the Time Maddy Went to Founder’s Park

  ONCE IT HAD BEEN MORE than a week, Journeyman felt it, a metronome of anxiety in his chest. He felt it at each stop on his rounds, his retracing of that benign morning in September, when he’d first been surprised by the Cordon on the road, when he’d reentered the towns as captive or guest in the splendid atrocious machine. Each day bent around the question: when would his sister go to see Peter Todbaum and his car?

  At the very start, that Tuesday afternoon, after returning with Astur on her boat and walking in to find Maddy at the Farm, his sister had forbade Todbaum’s visiting Spodosol. Forbade in the most casual sense of the word. When Journeyman explained that Todbaum had called the Farm his destination, she’d waved her hand. Barely coming out of her crouch as she picked aphids from the underleaves of her staked tomato vines, she’d only said, “Well, he can’t come here.”

  Journeyman wanted witnesses. Astur stood talking with Renee and Ernesto in the far corner of the greenhouse. Renee, before the Arrest, had been a solitary housepainter and handyperson. In its wake she’d fallen in love with the younger Ernesto, one of the ex-berry-pickers and a founder of the tamale concern, and come to learn farming. The two were industrious and inseparable, seeming born for this new world. But these other Spodosolians—Astur, Renee, Ernesto—had seemingly overheard nothing. For Journeyman to be the sole hearer of his sister’s injunction was to be tasked, he felt, with enforcing it.

  At the same time, their presence meant he couldn’t plead with Maddy for forgiveness for having led Todbaum here. Not just now. Instead, Journeyman tried to match his sister’s impassive tone.