The Arrest

by Jonathan Lethem

  Again, the dome didn’t give. She holstered the blowtorch. Now Journeyman saw her respond to something. Was Todbaum yelling at her? Maddy showed only passing irritation, not granting him her full attention, and descended the ladder. She folded it again and started back across the moonlit grass.

  This was the whole of Maddy’s inquiries at Founder’s Park. With no apparent result. Except now Todbaum pulled a scrap of paper napkin from his pocket.

  “She’s good, I’ll give her that.”

  “Good at what?”

  Todbaum shoved the napkin into Journeyman’s hands. Journeyman saw it was covered with Todbaum’s scrawl. His wretched handwriting. In the years they’d worked together Todbaum had used it only to make indecipherable jottings in the margins of scripts, and to sign checks.

  “What is this?”

  “A proposal—a contract, really. All she has to do is sign. You’ll be the witness. Me and her are working together again, if we ever really stopped.”

  “Working on what?”

  “On this.” Todbaum spread his hands, indicating—everything. “Yet Another World. We can name it with some literary allusion, if you like—The Figure in the Carpet . . . The Serpent . . . O Rose, Thou Art Sick, whatever. I always figured our title was just a placeholder anyway.”

  “You think you’re making a movie?”

  “Way bigger than a movie, Sandy. Me and Maddy, we’re jump-starting history, the whole tentpole franchise. Dystopia and postapocalypse, two great tastes that taste great together. The rupture, me and her, that’s the problem, right? So, it’s also the solution. Last night she let me know she knows.”

  Journeyman examined the napkin. Only stray phrases were legible at a glance. Fractured FRACTAL reality breakdowns = partitions: fractal daze days/STASIS v. DYNAMISM—with that, Journeyman quit trying to parse them. Another quadrant of the napkin was crosshatched with columns of numbers. Todbaum had been breaking down the budget, perhaps. Or proposing the splits.

  “She’s meant to . . . sign this napkin?”

  “Why not? I signed. C’mon, Sandman, where’s your sense of destiny? All the immortal deals go down on cocktail napkins. The Gettysburg Address was written on a candy wrapper five minutes before Abe got onstage. I exaggerate.”

  Todbaum exaggerated.

  Journeyman put the napkin in his pocket.

  34.

  Journeyman Took a Disco Nap

  JOURNEYMAN DIDN’T PRESENT TODBAUM’S NAPKIN to his sister. It remained captive in his pocket through the following day, a flaming tendril of Todbaum’s madness.

  Why should Journeyman be the go-between? He knew the answer: he’d fated himself for this role the day he steered the supercar to Founder’s Park, if not decades before. He’d asked to be the middle person. He shouldn’t want it any other way.

  Journeyman had never made it to the end of one of Todbaum’s stories. The doings in Founder’s Park ground on past his ordinary bedtime. There was usually a kind of question and answer period. Or Todbaum would restart, elaborate, keeping his listeners enspelled. Journeyman saw them in town the mornings after, wandering as if hungover.

  Journeyman needed to know more. If he’d accepted his appointment as intermediary—he saw no way to refuse it—he should grasp the goings-on at the park. Who left last? Was the fire extinguished or did it die? Would Maddy return? Journeyman took what in his former life was called a disco nap. He’d bedded down at dusk for a few hours, then rode back in the dark—Nils had finally completed repairs on his bicycle.

  Was this the fourteenth story? The twentieth? Journeyman arrived for the finish. He hid his bicycle in the woods and clung in the gloom at the edge of the park. Another moonless night. He counted just three heads at the fire, the last faithful. Theodore Nowlin’s craggy figure, unmistakable. Journeyman couldn’t identify the others. Todbaum talked with his hands, outlined in the campfire’s flame. The Blue Streak flickered in the firelight. The wind knocked down Todbaum’s voice before it reached his hiding place, but Journeyman felt he could follow the tale by his gesticulations. Perhaps this was Journeyman’s training rising to the surface, after years taking Todbaum’s dictation and notes. He shivered, wishing he could move to the fire.

  Finally the last three were gone. Todbaum sat alone. Journeyman’s urge to reveal himself and discover what Todbaum would choose to say struggled against the urge to remain hidden and learn what Todbaum might not want him to know, or didn’t know. Journeyman waited.

  Two men came out of the woods nearer the shore, startling Journeyman. Eke and his friend. They’d had no fire themselves this night. Perhaps they hadn’t even been in their camp before appearing here. Todbaum greeted them familiarly, it looked to Journeyman. He seemed at least unthreatened. The two stood by the fire. Todbaum ascended the ladder of the Blue Streak, returning with something, and handed a part of the something to each of them, which they accepted. Cups. Then poured from another part of the something, a tall pour from a bottle or thermos. Had Todbaum lied about his exhausted supply of scotch? Or was it coffee?

  Night coffee.

  Journeyman wanted some himself but kept to his hiding place.

  Todbaum climbed back into his cockpit. Eke and his friend stood a moment, close at the fire, drinking what he’d given them. Then they began to shed their clothing. Journeyman watched, trying to believe. He didn’t need to believe for it to occur: it did. The two bearded young men stripped bare, leaving their clothes in a single pile, and moved nearer to the fire. One tossed on additional fuel, from the wood gathered there, the wood Todbaum’s constituency had brought with them as tribute, from their own hard-won supplies. The two naked men began to dance.

  They were not skilled dancers, Journeyman thought. But inspired. They capered near the flames to warm themselves. They also danced fully around the Blue Streak’s circumference, danced in mad fascination, it seemed to Journeyman, paying the vehicle homage with their bodies, daring themselves to touch it, as if it were hot. The glow in the impermeable cockpit faded, leaving only the supercar’s general luminosity. If Todbaum was watching, he sat in the dark. The dance went on.

  When it ended, it ended with two bodies on the trampled grass and softened ground nearest the dying fire. One—he couldn’t tell them apart—sucked the other’s penis. Journeyman shrank deeper into his cold nest of leaves. He couldn’t move, frozen by the chill and by his embarrassment. He didn’t budge until they’d reclothed and departed for their own camp beyond the tree line. By the time he’d gone, the fire was cold, embers dimmed to black. The last illumination, this moonless night, was the supercar’s own gentle and persistent incandescence. It drew a thick fog of moths, mosquitoes, hairy fliers of all types.

  Night coffee.

  Gay Cordon sex.

  Oh, the doings in Founder’s Park.

  35.

  Journeyman Sometimes Tried to Think About the Cordon

  THE TOWNS HAD NEVER HAD exiles from the Cordon before. Had the two men come to live in the woods near the park because their mutual desire made them unwelcome? Or was that unfair to the Cordon? Journeyman had no idea.

  If it was the case, if they’d come for solidarity, they could have sought out Nils. Or others—even Maddy and Astur. Not made their strange encampment near Todbaum. Could the entire Cordon offer them no example?

  Journeyman sometimes tried to think about the Cordon and found it difficult. The audience for Todbaum’s stories attested to the insatiability, among Journeyman’s neighbors, for pictures of what lay outside their sphere. Even those who’d lost little in the Arrest craved wider news. Then there was the Cordon: a close example of people other than themselves. A group, a region, organized otherwise. The Cordon people hid in plain sight, irritants to be endured, appetites to be fed.

  You could say a few things with confidence: That they were content with the bargain they’d struck, uninterested in acquiring the skills they lacked.

  That they advertised their willingness to do violence and wore disdain on their sleeves,
but weren’t gratuitous.

  That they allowed some traffic, yet were unwilling to transmit news or description. That those from the towns who’d crossed into the Cordon region—many, in the early days—never returned, but few feared the Cordon had chosen to do them harm.

  That they believed in the standard of necessity—their own, above all.

  Otherwise, there was something mute or inchoate about the Cordon. In their stubbornness they seemed even to refuse Journeyman’s curiosity. He suspected he wasn’t alone in this.

  36.

  We Lose Ourselves

  KORMENTZ HAD BEGUN TO INSIST on reading to Journeyman from his Pillow Book in progress, fresh wearisome pages concerning things like the play of late October light on the surface of the lake. Today he unveiled a passage that made a kind of litany out of the phrase we lose ourselves. He insisted Journeyman sit with him by the water while he read it, crinkling his pages of neat tiny cursive, bugging his fish-eyes at Journeyman for approval between each line. As he piled up renditions of how we were losing ourselves, Journeyman nearly lost it.

  “We lose ourselves lately, in these unnumbered days / We lose ourselves in our tasks and our friends / And in making amends / We lose ourselves in ourselves / And in the art of losing / And in the setting down in lines of what we’ve lost / In these unnumbered days—”

  “Jerome, hey, sorry.”

  “Yes?”

  Journeyman fantasized he drove a bulldozer, to plow Kormentz and his sententious poem into the lake, there never to be heard from again. “I have to go, I’ve got deliveries to make. And there’s a big meeting today.”

  “It’s just a little longer. I’ve got tasks as well.”

  “I really can’t stay.” Journeyman wanted to scream. What tasks? Kormentz had none. But something else bothered Journeyman: these days no longer seemed to him unnumbered. The arrival of Todbaum and his machine had, precisely, renumbered them.

  Journeyman thrust his hands into his pocket, found Todbaum’s napkin. He could draw it out and read it to baffle Kormentz. Claim it was a poem or koan. But no. On the whole peninsula just one person remained unquestionably innocent of Todbaum’s arrival: Kormentz. Better it stay that way. Journeyman extricated himself. If he wanted a confidant, he should visit the library again, to try and call on the woman who’d installed herself there. In fact, he resolved to do it today, after the meeting.

  Yet like a bad song Kormentz’s lyric invested itself in Journeyman’s head. Through the rest of the day, right into the specially convened meeting with the contingent from the Cordon, he found himself cobbling variations upon it: We lose ourselves in our stories / And in washing the blood from our hands / We lose ourselves in guessing / Who’s lying to us or themselves / And in lying to them / And to ourselves—

  37.

  A Big Meeting, Part 1

  THE TOWNS ASSEMBLED GOODS FOR the Cordon—ripe vegetables, sacks of grain, cloth-wrapped cheese, sausage and jerky, jars of what had been pickled or preserved or fermented or distilled, a steam-sealed wax-paper pack of tamales—in a weekly Friday afternoon drop at the North Grange Hall. It was more than Journeyman could carry alone. Others helped, by horse and bicycle. Still, he was the designated go-between. Though others dropped off goods, Journeyman often was the only one present for the exchange, apart from Quentin Maslow, who lived alone in the upstairs of the Grange.

  Quentin, like Journeyman, had been a houseguest on the peninsula at the time of the Arrest. An odd, shy bird, likely also a malingering depressive, he clearly couldn’t stay with his hosts permanently after. Quentin lacked even the thread of familial connection Journeyman benefited from, in Maddy and her farm; he hardly appeared to like his former friends in Tinderwick. Quentin conveyed an air of not-caring that his own life had become such a marginal thing. He smoked a great deal of Jane and Lucius’s excellent marijuana, and often got Journeyman high when he arrived for the Cordon’s pickup. He’d managed the Grange Hall, such as it required managing. Quentin served, Journeyman supposed, as an informal perimeter sentry for the three towns, the first to see what came down the central road—not that he would likely be able to do anything about it. He certainly hadn’t raced down to inform anyone of the arrival of the Blue Streak, on that consequential Tuesday. Quentin frequently sat in on the exchanges with the Cordon folk as they loaded the towns’ offerings, though he rarely spoke a word.

  Others stayed away. In Journeyman’s estimate, his neighbors preferred not to confront the fact that their safety was mortgaged by regular installments of precious food. The fact that their farms were in a sense plantations. No love was lost on either side. The Cordon people who arrived to receive the goods compensated for their dependence on the towns with grudging disdain. The North Grange on Friday afternoons was a raw edge, a badly carpentered joint, where the bargain of existence was too plain. Here as usual Journeyman was the hinge man, the middle worker.

  Today would be different.

  Since wrangling Peter Todbaum down the peninsula and into his care, the Cordon people had looked at Journeyman with renewed curiosity. They waited for some revelation. Journeyman told them only that Todbaum’s car was parked. That the visitor had asked nothing untoward, that he was presently welcome. If skeptical, the Cordon people didn’t press. That Eke and his unnamed friend had absconded into the region of the towns went unmentioned. It was possible that the Cordon had no idea where the two men had taken themselves.

  But, one week earlier, Journeyman had been helping a Cordon woman named Carol Leeds load her horse, when she said, “The elders are hoping for a parley this time next week.”

  Carol Leeds was a forceful, sixtysomething Mainer with tattoos that ran beyond her shirt-cuffs and across her knuckles, also up her throat right to her jawline. A woman whose presence Journeyman found both intimidating and impressive, one who only rarely made the expedition to the North Grange.

  Journeyman had only widened his eyes.

  “Can you make it happen?” Carol Leeds had asked him.

  “I think so.”

  She nodded. Journeyman was left to alert the towns. Of course, in their anarchistic fashion, there was no appointed authority to notify. The makeup of whatever diplomatic party might join Journeyman in meeting with the Cordon elders was sheerly a matter of whom he chose to alert. And whomever they chose to share it with.

  Journeyman supposed he could even have decided to alert Todbaum. His storytelling and coffee had made Founder’s Park as much a public commons as anything the towns had seen since the early days of the Arrest.

  Journeyman did not alert Todbaum.

  The day of the meeting the company consisted of Journeyman and Quentin as usual. Also Mike Raritan, who cooked out of the old roadside lobster shack and whose mackerel-and-potato fritters were something the towns had used from the start to beguile the Cordon. Dog treats, Journeyman had often thought, for the peninsula’s guard dogs. Mike carried a basket of them to the parley. Versatile Paulo had come, their tree warden and piano tuner.

  Spodosol had sent a representative: Cynthia Pitchings, a protégée of Seldon and Margot, a carrier of the old wisdom. Cynthia was bridge to the generation that had, under spell of the Stevedores’ bestselling back-to-the-land manifesto, Living the Real Life, inaugurated the organic movement here, living in an atmosphere almost of voluntary Arrest. Astur had come along too, as Cynthia’s second. Two men Journeyman barely knew, named Eugene and Paul, were here from Granite Head.

  A pair of surprise attendees, too, from East Tinderwick. One of the mothers from the rarely glimpsed deep-woods families, Delia Limetree. She’d come with her son. He was the teenager, the strapping solitary twin who’d been in the park with Todbaum at the first story. Today Journeyman learned his name: Sterling. He seemed keyed up, his mother mournful. What had compelled them here? Sterling carried a knapsack.

  On the Cordon’s side, Carol Leeds, with two others of their elders, Cyrus and Deloit. The two wore long beards and biker leathers, and gear like fingerless gloves a
nd flip-up shades to sing out their Road Warrior dreams for anyone who’d listen, but the eyes beneath the flip-ups were careworn, watery like poached eggs, as though they’d been weeping. Younger members had come too, a group of five men and women who didn’t linger inside. They helped themselves to a fritter, or took some packets from the table to load, then stood out on the road talking in low tones.

  One of the younger men was short a hand and forearm. The man moved the thick-wrapped elbow stump tentatively, gazing at it with an air of wonder, unlike the carelessness Journeyman associated with Vietnam and Gulf War veterans, street-corner presences gesticulating with decades-missing limbs. The last time Journeyman had seen this man he’d been whole, he was certain of it.

  The three elders, Leeds, Cyrus, and Deloit, sat stiffly arranged at one of the Grange’s family-style tables. Not reaching into the basket of fritters, though the younger folks had broken the seal. Those from the towns stood, or perched on chairs at the fringe. Journeyman gathered, reluctantly, that he was seen as the liaison. He flipped away the cloth covering the basket and handed the fritters around. The smell was good. The elders fell on them wolfishly. Paulo and Astur accepted them as well, in the cause of conviviality. They took Journeyman’s hint, moving their chairs nearer to the long table. Paulo poured rose hip tea from a thermos into mugs from the Grange’s ancient kitchen.

  Sterling Limetree and his mother hung on the periphery for now.

  “Guess I’ll get straight to it,” said Deloit. “You won’t be surprised, concerns your man and his nuclear-engine car.”

  He’s no one’s man, Journeyman wanted to say. He moved around the table to place hot mugs in Eugene’s and Paul’s hands, drawing them into the circle. Journeyman said nothing, however. Let him be a fixture, an apparatus; let him not be taken for a spokesperson. “Your man had some friends,” Deloit continued, “only I guess I don’t mean friends. Came looking for him in numbers, about a month ago now, along the same road I came in on.”