The Arrest

by Jonathan Lethem

  “Where’s everyone else?”

  “You should get on the boat, Sandy.”

  “The boat?”

  “Astur’s rounding up stragglers in an hour or so. You should be down by the water.”

  “Are you going?”

  Cynthia shook her head. “Someone has to stay.”

  “The captain going down with the farm, eh?”

  She grunted. “I’m not going down.”

  Journeyman found his shoes and coat and followed Cynthia outside. The day was cold, and sparkling. She fed him tea and bread in her own kitchen, then sent him to the boat landing. “Stragglers,” it turned out, meant Jane and Lucius. With their love of home comforts, they’d squeezed a last night in their own beds before decamping to the island. Jane carried a tote full of Lucius’s kitchen ingredients and some of the heavy French silverware they preferred. Another full of paperback books and a Ziploc bulging with dank buds. With them Journeyman stood and watched Astur first moor, then climb into the rowboat to fetch them from the shore.

  “Good morning, friends!” said Astur, when she was near enough to be heard. Despite numberless crossings, her cheer was inexhaustible. Journeyman and Lucius grabbed for the front of her scow, to bring it near and clamber aboard. Jane lifted the canvas bags and conveyed them to Astur for a dry perch on one of the rowboat’s seats. Journeyman had nothing, just the clothes he’d slept in. Others, it occurred to him, had been feathering their nests on Quarry Island for weeks now.

  “Look,” said Jane, when Astur had rowed them nearly to her boat. Jane sat rear-facing. Journeyman and Lucius turned. Across the twinkling water, past the spit of trees separating the launch from Founder’s Park, an action was visible at the sand and scrub edge near the gazebo. The supercar, in motion.

  “What the fuck,” said Lucius.

  The Blue Streak had tipped. Waves lightly slapped against its cowcatcher fender. The vehicle dug at the loose grit of the embankment. The juncture where its treads engaged was a blur of dislodged sand. As the wind died, Journeyman made out the whine and whir of its tunneling action, punctuated by hacking and sputtering as its rotors and blades struck fixed stone and entangled with kelp and spiral wrack. Water flooded into the depression where the Blue Streak sank itself deliberately into the beachfront.

  “Well would you look at that?” said Jane. “We’re in a race to the goddamn island.”

  Astur clunked the rowboat against her sailboat’s stern, then tied on. Only then did she stop to gaze with them at the ferment of sand where the supercar deepened its entrenchment, into the mouth of the bay. She shook her head. “I do not think it will be fast. We should easily win this race.”

  “Well, that’s a relief,” said Lucius. His sarcasm died in the open air. It had nothing to stick itself to but their fear. The supercar cratered into the surf and sludge like a monster’s cranium. A tumor that had reared from the mire of the world, to which it now returned. They watched it submerge within its own boil, reducing the beachfront to sewage. Journeyman thought of the French boat, the food and shit that had swirled where it sank.

  A cry echoed across the water. In the excavation’s wake the gushing tide undermined the embankment supporting the put-in ramp. The old beams shrieked a second time, then groaned and split, posts tearing free of the mud, submerged barnacle-white logs bared like a skeleton. Seawater swarmed. The supercar punched this hole in their world, then vanished beneath the froth.

  61.

  The Fairy Village

  WHEN JOURNEYMAN AND HIS SISTER were young, they’d been sent to a summer camp in Maine—William Tell Acres. For two summers Journeyman had gone alone. Then Maddy had joined him, two summers more. The camp formed his only knowledge of Maine, before Maddy drew him back.

  When Astur landed them on the island, Journeyman thought of William Tell Acres for the first time since the Arrest. Wending along the close path toward the settlement, he spotted Delia and Danny Limetree, in a company of other East Tinderwick back-woodsers. They’d assembled huts and a teepee, smoke gently issuing from its flapped vent. Farther off, the lean-tos and sheds the Spodosolians had established. Journeyman remembered the “fairy houses” they’d built at the camp. Tiny stone-and-stick palaces, roofed with clumps of moss. If the reluctant forest hippies of East Tinderwick’s secret forests had been miniaturized, they’d have been precisely the fairies the children had waited to see come occupy the little villages they’d made ready.

  Meanwhile, at the cleared site on the island’s promontory, where old quarry slag had been rearranged for Astur’s lighthouse project, the industrious Spodosolians had produced a year’s worth of infrastructure, a new town square.

  Impressive, yet looking close, provisional, too. These were lean-tos, shacks, a campsite. “Glamping”—that was the old name. Renee and Ernesto stood at the fire with a wide square skillet, grilling egg-and-cheese-and-spinach sandwiches on chunky biscuits and handing them to all takers. The chickens who’d supplied the eggs ran loose, among the five or six dogs. Lucius and Jane put themselves in line for a breakfast, and Journeyman did as well. Ed Waltz and Dodie Metzger and Nils had just been served and now transported their egg biscuits back over the rise, where the lighthouse’s ragged upper reaches loomed above the tree line.

  Journeyman took his biscuit in hand and went to find his sister. Maddy knelt inside the communal sleeping shed, ordering rows of mason-jarred beets and kimchi and brined string beans onto shelves formed of the lintels and jambs of the unfinished interior walls. Had Spodosol’s winter stores been cleared out? How long would they harbor on this island?

  “Hey,” he said.

  “Hey,” returned Maddy. “Glad you made it.” He saw she wore the claw hammer on her tool belt. She was never without it anymore.

  “What needs doing?” he asked.

  Maddy turned from the work and gave Journeyman a short, tight smile. “You might help Dodie and Paulo stack the bonfires. On the ridge.”

  “Bonfires? On the ridge?”

  “For later.” There was nothing unfriendly in how she left him guessing.

  “Ah.”

  Others had landed, from precincts beyond East Tinderwick. Mike Raritan’s boat had sailed direct from Tinderwick proper, landing twenty minutes or so after Astur’s. His passengers included Sophie Thurber, and Edwin Gorse’s daughters. The two girls stepped wide-eyed into the midst of the refugee collective, were fed and given a show of the facilities: the slapdash outhouse, the potable water supply. After eating breakfast they were enlisted scrubbing dishes with Andy the shrink.

  Was Drenka still at the library?

  One residence had been carpentered to winter through: Eke and Walt’s cabin. Astur and Maddy had cast the two for a permanent fate here. The former Cordon men queued for egg biscuits behind the Gorse girls, who stared at the bearded men and were rewarded with kindly smiles. They seemed becalmed. Or was it resigned to their fates? Were Eke and Walt prisoners of this island, or defectors taking asylum?

  No, the tower, at the summit of the old cleared quarry path: that too had been built to last. An uncanny sink of labor and resources, of village time, expended in a visionary cause that still eluded Journeyman. Would another French boat appear, to gratify the effort? It seemed as likely as fairies appearing to occupy the William Tell village.

  They might themselves be the fairies they’d been waiting for.

  62.

  Recrossing, Rescue, Recon

  ASTUR TAPPED JOURNEYMAN ON THE elbow. “Come,” she said.

  “Where?”

  “We need to go back, you and I. We’re going to rescue your friend Augustus.”

  “Maddy said I should help with the firewood.”

  Astur shook her head. “The fires are prepared. Better you come with me.”

  Paulo saw them heading down to the rowboat, and offered to join them. He seemed to know Astur’s mission—everyone seemed to know more than Journeyman did.

  Astur waved him off. “You stay. Sandy can help. We may need the s
pace in the boat.”

  She rowed them toward the mooring. A wind had risen since their journey out, Astur’s oars gently battling the steady rippling waves. Her tacking brought them a view of the tower’s height.

  “It’s almost finished,” said Journeyman, fishing.

  Astur smiled, but shook her head. “It won’t be completed until you add to the effort.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “We need you, Sandy. You need only add a single straw.”

  “Is that an old Somalian aphorism?”

  “No, Sandy, it isn’t a Somalian aphorism.”

  Journeyman felt obscurely humiliated. He stared back at the tower. Did it shake and clatter in this rising wind? Or was that only the scaffolding? Perhaps it waited for the stabilizing contribution of his single straw.

  They tacked long, away from East Tinderwick, hugging the windward shore. Where did Astur mean to land? Center harbor was too visible, it seemed to Journeyman, if they were to sneak into town in daylight. Another plan he’d wait to have revealed.

  “Look,” Astur said.

  She pointed at the surface. They crossed a sinuous watery field, as if through the wake of an invisible boat. Something churned in the depths. Journeyman spotted a train of bubbles rising from below. They passed above the inching progress of the supercar, along the bay’s floor. A wandering abyss, it matched Journeyman’s mood. He recalled a cartoon he’d seen, depicting a “Nixon Monument”: citizens ringed around a gigantic sinkhole, gazing down. And the sculptor Laird Noteless’s catastrophic urban earthwork, the notorious “fjord” he’d excavated into a Harlem hillside, into which New Yorkers had pitched their garbage and sometimes their suicidal bodies.

  Suicide: was the Blue Streak even watertight? Todbaum and Theodore Nowlin might be entombed in the mud-depths. Yet the skim was etched with weird waveform. If the supercar was stilled, Journeyman reasoned, it would have been instantly. Not a quarter mile out. Astur tacked them through the water palimpsest, and beyond.

  She skirted center harbor. Passing, he strained to make out any sign of activity on Bay Street. Nothing. Was that a figure on horseback, watching through the trees that ringed the playground? Journeyman might be fooling himself. A column of gray smoke rose from the center of town. Impossible to know which street from the distance of the water. A bonfire? Odd in midmorning. The light was perfect, like the day Todbaum had been escorted down their road.

  Astur drew them close past the spit concealing them from the harbor’s view. She tied up at the country club marina, amid the abandoned sloops that bobbed in wet slip, waiting for summer people who’d never retrieve them. Fair camouflage, though her main sail stood out among the bare masts. They rowed into the club’s boathouse.

  “This feels like a plan,” Journeyman said to Astur.

  “That’s because it is one.”

  The butcher waited there. Augustus Cordell. He sat, plainly waiting, huddled beneath a tarp for disguise. Journeyman felt dismayed at the orchestration of so many occurrences outside his grasp. Augustus seemed glad to see him, though. He greeted Journeyman in a stage whisper likely unnecessary against the sound of surf lapping into the boathouse walls. Astur brought the boat near. Augustus handed over heavy bundles of product for Journeyman to heave into the rowboat—lard, bacon, whole fowls, raw cuts in waxcloth. The butcher had been pushing, these last weeks, Journeyman suddenly understood, in advance of this moment. Pigs had died for the retreat to Quarry Island.

  He Suddenly Understood. It might be Journeyman’s epitaph.

  The goods half-submerged the rowboat. Augustus didn’t follow them in. “I need to check on Mr. Gorse,” he said. “There’s fire up at his place.”

  “I can wait half an hour,” said Astur. “No more. I don’t want to sail without you, but I will.”

  “I get the picture,” said Augustus.

  “I’ll go too,” Journeyman said.

  “Please stay, Sandy. This is my last crossing.”

  “I’ll be okay if I’m left in town. Those people know me.” Journeyman meant the Cordon men with whom he’d been transacting on behalf of the peninsula for years now. Whether those would be the same he’d meet in town wasn’t certain.

  “Perhaps so,” said Astur. “But you’re needed on the island.”

  “I’ll be back within half an hour,” he said. The path to High Street, where Gorse lived, curved up past the library. He’d look for Drenka. Even if Augustus retrieved Gorse and Journeyman could convince Drenka to join them on the island and they were therefore too many for Astur’s scull, they weren’t too many for her sailboat. Journeyman knew its capacity. He’d row from shore to sailboat a second time himself, if he had to. He could rescue her.

  63.

  The Fire

  HIGH STREET WAS EMPTY, BUT it reeked. The telltale fumes of shit-cycles. Did the butcher know this scent? Not likely as well as Journeyman did, from his meetings out on the road.

  Yet there was more to the smell. Fire. Smoke still trickled up from the smoldering roof, past the concealing hedge, to the sky. The laurel hadn’t kept out anything that mattered. That barricade-like hedge that had been Edwin Gorse’s way of setting himself apart from them.

  Had this alone been enough to draw the Cordon’s attack? The sense of barricade? More likely the Cordon people knew Gorse was often down at the park with Todbaum. Guilt by association. Or they had questions. They’d cornered Gorse and he’d made a stand, Journeyman supposed. That was what Gorse had been looking to do.

  The house was one of the oldest in town, built for some ship’s captain or quarry owner. Its bones were strong enough to resist collapse, but the flames had licked the paint black where they hadn’t eaten the cladding to the bare frame, and they’d eaten most of it. Journeyman tried to remember the true colors and failed.

  Augustus found the body. The third scent in the air. Gorse had gotten himself backed into the kitchen, at the rear. He’d died shoved down between the island counter and the sink. A modern kitchen. Dishwasher and microwave, dead relics unremoved. Journeyman’s noticing these was surely a symptom of numb dissociation.

  Had Gorse no remaining avenue of escape? Or only believed he hadn’t? Had they beaten him senseless, before the blaze? Broken his legs? No way to know at a glance, and there wouldn’t be an autopsy. Had Gorse refused to cede the house until it was too late? Possibly it was ablaze on several sides. Perhaps the Cordon also felt the worth of ritual action. Their way of saying, simply, we were here. We did come. A definite statement in an indefinite time. Would it be their only statement? Or merely their first?

  Journeyman touched the butcher’s shoulder. “Let’s go.”

  “We should bury him,” Augustus said.

  “It’ll wait. We need to get to the island.”

  “She won’t leave without us.”

  “She might,” Journeyman said. “I want to make another stop, at the library.”

  Augustus nodded. They left.

  64.

  Gone

  RISKING THEMSELVES IN PLAIN SIGHT, Journeyman and Augustus rattled the library’s front doors. Locked. Embarrassed, Journeyman drew the line at shouting Drenka’s name. Approaching noon, the town lay vacant around them. Had the Cordon already withdrawn? This didn’t seem a bet worth making. The fire on High Street, Journeyman’s running shoes encrusted with ash, made silence a portent. Augustus glanced at the tree line, behind it the playground, the town beach, the cloaking woods they’d traveled through, into town. There, Astur waited to salvage them. If they hurried.

  “I’ll check the back,” Journeyman said.

  The rear entrance was unlocked. Journeyman stepped inside. Nothing. No sign, no evidence of intrusion. Just the bookish vault she’d made her home.

  Augustus had to make Journeyman accept what he’d found, much as Journeyman had needed to rattle the butcher loose at Gorse’s. “She’s not here.”

  “Yes.”

  “So, let’s go.”

  Journeyman mumbled consent. />
  Drenka’s boat, gone too. For months it lay inverted beneath a tarp on the golf course beach. Now, rowing with Astur and the butcher out to Astur’s sailboat, that one solitary banner amid the bare masts, Journeyman spotted the tarp. Discarded, flapping in the day’s breeze. Was she safe, where she’d gone? Would he ever know? Drenka, her craft, now among the missing things that might never have been there in the first place.

  65.

  Bubble

  THEY PASSED OVER IT AGAIN, returning. The roil, the susurrus denoting the action of the Streak as it burrowed through murky bottom-stuff, toward Quarry Island. Had Astur steered them to find it? Had she sought to measure its progress in the time they’d been gone? It had certainly made progress. Yet Astur and Journeyman said nothing. It was their guilty secret, somehow. Augustus sat weeping in the back of the sailboat. Butchery hadn’t prepared him. One never knew.

  As they tacked past the zone of disgruntled water, a single large bubble rose, to burst with an audible plop on the surface. As though the deep-hidden supercar had farted. This, too, they politely left unremarked.

  IV.

  Yet Another Arrest

  66.

  The Circle of the Known

  THE THING MOVING UNSEEN THROUGH torrents of mud was also a kind of clock, ticking. The sun had gone behind the clouds now. It marked the afternoon’s swift passage whether one looked up to see, or not. Beneath it the island had an anthill’s intensity, seething yet methodical. Unfrantic. Each person tracked to a purpose, some obscurer than others. Food stacked to the rafters of the sleeping shed. A repurposed stone well, into which the meat and cider had been lowered, on oiled ropes, to reside in the deep cool.

  Bonfires built yet unlit, strategically arranged. Waiting.

  The machine wouldn’t arrive until dark. This time of year, four thirty in the afternoon. No matter how mild the air.