The Arrest

by Jonathan Lethem

  WITHOUT WARNING EXCEPT EVERY WARNING possible it had come: the Arrest. The collapse and partition and relocalization of everything, the familiar world, the world Journeyman had known his whole life.

  The future, that is to say, announced itself. The future always already present but distributed unequally, like everything else—like bread, talent, sex, like peepal, neem, aloe, and those other plants that give off oxygen at night, like the rare spodosol-rich ground for which Journeyman’s sister’s farming collective was named. The Arrest produced itself as a now already past. Like a time capsule unearthed.

  This was confusing. It should be confusing. Did Journeyman understand the world into which he’d been born—its premise, its parameters, its plot? No. So, why should he grasp how it had changed?

  How even to say when the Arrest began? The question was when had it gained your attention. Plenty flew under the radar. Biodiversity halved? That made an impression, barely. Polar ice and Miami drowned? Terrible, yet also too big to take personally. One day Journeyman noticed reports of a new tick-borne disease. Once you’d been bitten, cow meat made your throat close up. No more American Wagyu tomahawk steak for two, black on the outside, red within. People joked uneasily. Were the new ticks an eco-terrorist hack? On television, someone said that the turning point had been when in 1986 the president had removed the solar panels from the White House. Then again, someone else said the turning point had been when St. Paul’s epistle had been delivered to the Romans and ignored. You could debate this shit forever.

  But not on television, not any longer. Here the Arrest at last commanded Journeyman’s attention. He sat up and noticed the death of screens. They died not all at once, the screens, but in droves, like creatures of the warmed ocean, like those hundreds of manatees washing ashore the same day in Boca Grande who, just weeks before, Journeyman had found uncompelling, and deleted from his feed. He’d unfollowed the manatees. No hard feelings.

  Television died first. Television contracted a hemorrhagic ailment, Ebola or some other flesh-melting thing. The channels bled, signals fused, across time as well as virtual space, a live Rod Serling Playhouse 90 teleplay broadcast from 1956 sputtering into last agonized life and expiring in the middle of episodes of season two of Big Little Lies. The Vietnam War came back, and Family Ties too. Until these boiled and melted along with the rest.

  The Gmail, the texts and swipes and FaceTimes, the tweets and likes, these suffered colony collapse disorder. Each messenger could no longer chart its route to the hive, or returned only to languish in the hive, there to lose interest in its labors, whether worker or drone. All at once, the email quit producing honey.

  So many other ecologies depended on the pollinations, the goings-between of the now-fatigued drones and workers. Without them, nothing worked. Air-conditioning units stalled, planes fell from the sky. The honey of emails and texts had been the glue holding the world together, it appeared. Now the smart devices all evidenced wasting disease. They had to be put out to a level pasture to let them graze out the last part of their lives. There they crumpled to their knees, starved, incapable of grazing.

  People kept on swiping at the phones and mashing at the keyboards. Some tried giving the voice-activated devices mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. Some proposed fixes or work-arounds. Those more mystically minded placed phones or remotes beneath their pillows at night or built shrines in which to surround their devices with crystals, hoping to spark them from their silence. Others, like Journeyman, merely kept glancing at the screens that had gone dark, and also sat periodically weeping. Some, like Journeyman, needed eventually to be given a mug of herbal tea while someone else hid their inert former electronic playthings.

  A solar flare?

  Eco-terror? Terror-terror? Species revenge? The Revolution?

  Had Journeyman’s world jumped the shark?

  The stars didn’t go out, one by one.

  The U.S. wasn’t replaced with a next thing. It was replaced by wherever one happened to be. The place one happened to reside at the moment of the Arrest, which after a fitful start had come overnight. Did they even call it the Arrest elsewhere? Journeyman counseled himself to be done with such speculation. BE HERE NOW; WHEREVER YOU GO, THERE YOU ARE; ALL POLITICS ARE LOCAL: every bumper sticker had come true at once, even as the cars slumped sidelong from the roads to make way for other means of transit. Every tank seemed sugared by the same prankster, the gasoline turned to a thing that inched from the pump nozzles like molten flourless cake.

  Guns worked for months, for nearly a year after the initial Arrest. Then died too, souring like milk. The bullets no longer even blew up if you shattered them with a hammer—Journeyman had seen it tried.

  Goodbye to gasoline and bullets and to molten flourless cake. Goodbye to coffee. To bananas and Rihanna, to Father John Misty, to the Cloud, to news feeds full of distant core meltdowns, to manatees and flooded cities and other tragedies Journeyman had guiltily failed to mourn. Hello instead to solar dehydrators, rooftop rain collectors, to beans, kale, and winter squash. To composting toilets and humanure, to a killing cone, feather plucker, and evisceration knife. Say hello to chasing a screaming duck into a pond to drag back to the killing cone. To being the butcher’s sluice boy.

  Had Journeyman known that barns were traditionally painted red to disguise the bloodstains? He hadn’t. Journeyman had been playing catch-up since the Arrest, cribbing from field guides, farmer’s almanacs, seed catalogs, old Michael Pollan paperbacks. Could he become a man of the soil in mid-life? No, he was too old a dog for that trick. The peninsula was choked with expert organic farmers, lured here by the locavore movement. His sister was one of them.

  That’s why Journeyman worked with the butcher, Augustus Cordell, sluicing bloody steel tables, retrieving offal and caul for Victoria’s sausage-making. Victoria’s creations—her summer sausage, her hard salami, her black pudding—were prized by the whole peninsula, but also used as barter with the people of the Cordon. As it turns out, therefore, Journeyman could wish he’d been carrying a packet of them in his Telluride Film Festival backpack five minutes later that same morning, after climbing the lake’s overgrown driveway, back to the main road.

  6.

  An Old Friend

  AT FIRST JOURNEYMAN THOUGHT IT was bees or deerflies, a kind of humming, as he pushed out of the canopy, onto the sun-mottled asphalt. He mistook the humming for the bee-loud glade. This day was still weirdly perfect. Journeyman, freed of Kormentz’s monologue, was interested to search for the book the prisoner had requested. It had caught his imagination. Journeyman had a little crush, too, on the woman who’d moved into the library—it made an excuse to visit there.

  It wasn’t bees. A contingent from the Cordon was on the roadway. Their humming resolved into something more irregular, the guttering of their night-soil engines, as they approached. Journeyman distinguished the sound a minute before the riders appeared, hovering into view over the roadway’s contour. Two shit-Harleys. Behind them, two other men, on horseback. The four were an advance team for something else. Some stormhead rumbling farther back on the road.

  Journeyman stood blinking as they dismounted. He knew one of the riders, who called himself Eke. Was this short for Ezekiel, or Ekediah, or some other longer name? Journeyman didn’t know. Eke might have been in his late twenties. His hair was slicked back and cut stylishly high on both sides, though he wore the stalactite beard of a Cordon elder.

  “Mr. Duplessis.” It was the way of the Cordon to address members of Journeyman’s community formally, or mock-formally. Eke, for one, spoke with impunity to men decades older than himself, or at least to Journeyman. He picked his nose in front of Journeyman too—evidence, if needed, that the formality in his address was more mock than otherwise.

  “Hello, Eke.”

  “Just the man I wanted to see. Good piece of luck finding you on the road.”

  “It’s good to see you too, Eke, but I wasn’t expecting you. I haven’t got anything.” Journeyman s
till, at this point, imagined this might concern sausage, or other supplies.

  “This isn’t about nothing like that.”

  “No?”

  “You’re good with us, Mr. Duplessis. We wouldn’t ask for more than’s our fair share.”

  “What can I do you for?”

  “We got a strange one for you. Comes with you and your sister’s name attached. If your names hadn’t got mentioned, I doubt we’d be here.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Fellow came up our way in a kind of car.” He waved behind him, at the road. The other men on the stopped motorcycles, and the two horses, including Eke’s own, seemed to flicker their attention back the way they’d come as well, as if Eke had their sight lines tethered to his hand by invisible threads.

  “A working car?”

  Eke paused to shake his head, signifying something outside the box. “Not like one any of us ever seen. It’s big. Kind of an armored car. A supercar, I guess you’d say.” Later, Journeyman would reflect on how Eke’s nomenclature stuck: supercar. Perhaps the inevitable term. “He won’t come down from it, says he’ll talk to Sandy Duplessis or Madeleine Duplessis only. He also knew the name of your sister’s farm out there.”

  “You couldn’t . . . get him out of his car?”

  “Well, not if we didn’t dynamite him out of it. Which, I can tell you, we were prepared to do, until he began shouting your name down. Like I said, it’s been a puzzler. We’re not afraid of him, mind you. Some proposed turning him back the way he came, but others felt we wouldn’t mind taking a look at the operation of the thing, if we could get him down from it without dynamite. We thought you and your sister might want to at least give him a hearing before we made the call.”

  “Down?” Journeyman couldn’t visualize this. Also, he was distracted by something he’d noticed: that two of the Cordon’s men bore bandages on their limbs. One, a thick hump of gauze at the juncture of his shoulder and neck. Had they been in some kind of battle? Were these wounds acquired in wrangling this supercar? Or should Journeyman take their tales of periodically invading hordes more seriously than he had?

  “He’s seated up pretty high,” said Eke. “You’ll see.” He glanced over his shoulder. Now Journeyman heard it and saw it. Not the car itself, which remained around a few bends and below a few rises. Just the rumbling cloud it raised, on a still and sunny afternoon. Eke appeared a bit rattled by the thing he’d been trying to describe, that thing coming.

  What were Journeyman’s feelings, at that immanence, that Tuesday when it first came, before it rounded into view? Was he rattled too?

  Certainly. But something more. Journeyman felt an abject throb of who-he-used-to-be. Someone in a quote, unquote “supercar” had come bearing his name as his bona fides? Journeyman might be more than the town’s emissary to the Lake of Tiredness and the butcher’s sluice boy. He might be an important person on this peninsula.

  “This man—he really knew my name?” Surely, there was a trick in this. The dust cloud grew nearer. Otherwise, time had stopped. A crow moved from branch to branch, a blob of shadow on the sun-daubed road. Journeyman could so easily have stayed longer bantering with Jerome Kormentz, and missed this strange caravan rolling through. Perhaps then Eke would have implicated whomever he’d come across, instead of Journeyman.

  “Your name, Mr. Duplessis. No mistaking that.”

  “Did he give his?”

  Eke scratched deep into his beard with strong fingers. “Yes, he did. Said Peter Todbaum. Said you’d know him.”

  7.

  The Starlet Apartments, Part 1

  WHEN HE AND PETER TODBAUM were twenty-four, and two years clear of Yale, he’d lost track of Todbaum for a short while.

  This was in the time before Journeyman had been awarded his private nickname, let alone accepted its verdict.

  Journeyman had been living in New York City, working as an assistant at FSG, writing short stories that no one wanted to publish, when Todbaum got back in touch. Todbaum had acquired an agent and was going to Hollywood. He wanted Journeyman with him, as co-writer on a stack of ideas he promised Journeyman he’d already developed and vetted with his representation, and which only needed Journeyman’s hand. Journeyman, not William Goldman or Nora Ephron. Todbaum had a place picked out for them in Burbank, where they’d shack up and bash out treatments and it would be a great adventure, like Yale without all the pointless Yale stuff, and with a good deal more cocaine. Hearing it, Journeyman was sold. He was there in a heartbeat.

  The place was the Starlet Apartments, a classic ’30s two-story complex curled around a pool. Monthly rentals, with a motley assortment of long- and short-term occupants, plenty of empty apartments too. This was in Burbank, right under the shadow of the high-walled Warner Bros. lot. Todbaum joked that the place was named for its traditional use as a lunchtime casting couch liaison site, and his joke was likely right.

  The two holed up there at the Starlet to bat out projects poolside and in the paltry second-floor suite they shared, with the AC cranked. At night, they drove to West Hollywood bars in Todbaum’s father’s cast-off BMW, where they drank shots of Jägermeister and tried to pick up women, many of whom were considerably older than they were. At this, they never once succeeded, nor did they mind. The young men were too full of themselves and their projects to mind. Todbaum’s agent called every few days to ask how their work was coming along; he champed at the bit to get them into “good offices” as soon as the material was ready. And so, half the time, even at the bars, even blitzed on German digestif, they ignored their surroundings and continued to work, to brainstorm their notions for screenplays and television shows. They worked side by side in deck chairs while the complex’s other young tenants tried to entice them into the pool.

  Blitzed or hungover, Journeyman fastened himself to the task. In his mind, he and Todbaum were Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett, perhaps; Todbaum the bullshitter, Journeyman the hands on the keyboard. Todbaum would circle Journeyman where he sat, reeling out great fugues of self-infatuated improv, doing voices, abruptly changing lines or names of characters, forcing Journeyman to hurriedly xxxxxxx out endless lines on their Canon Typestar. Then Todbaum would jerk the pages from Journeyman’s hands to scribble further emendations, or ball them up to toss into the suite’s corners. They hammered out one whole script, a horror movie based on one of Journeyman’s unpublished stories, and four or five long treatments, several of them broad, idiotic comedies pegged for stars of the day, Carrey or Martin or Murphy.

  Their pet project, one of Todbaum’s supply of “killer pitches,” was a science fiction movie he called Yet Another World. This was a tale of alternate nightmare Earths. One was their own version of reality, the other an Orwellian techno-dystopia, a kind of cyberpunk extrapolation from the Cold War ’50s, when the two worlds had bifurcated. The story began when the two worlds discover a portal that allows them to communicate, one with the other (the exact means of communication was unclear, a thing Todbaum relied on Journeyman to think up). Yet Another World was also a love story, with an impossible obstacle: a man from the dystopian cyberpunk world (Harrison Ford, probably, or Bruce Willis) would fall in love with a scientist from their world (Michelle Pfeiffer was Todbaum’s pick; he thought she’d be hot in glasses).

  Along with scripts and treatments, the two young men also hammered out what would be for two decades, with only minor interruptions, Journeyman’s life situation. That was to say, Peter Todbaum talking and Journeyman typing, and eventually collecting a fair amount of money for it. For Jerome Kormentz hadn’t been totally groundless to call Journeyman “storyteller.” In that previous life, in the world before the Arrest, storytelling was the way Journeyman buttered his bread.

  Todbaum and Journeyman sold none of what they made in the Starlet, though they did run those notions in and out of a great number of meetings. They excelled in near misses that may not have been near at all, involving follow-up conference calls and weeks of waiting, or requ
ests for further work on spec that were rarely rewarded with more than a free coffee. Nonetheless, by the time their run was concluded, and Todbaum’s agent’s Rolodex exhausted, two things were apparent. The first was that Journeyman, the silent partner, the keyboard man, could bat out reams of more or less what was needed in this town, the fuel it all ran on, and that sooner or later he might be remunerated for it. Second, that Peter Todbaum had a different gift, for spinning rooms into a kind of visionary frenzy of promise on the pinwheel of his tongue, even if the rooms, in this early phase, quit spinning when he exited. More than one of the development executives the two met with joked to Todbaum, in so many words, “You should have my job!” Soon, he did. And Journeyman would spend the next decades working principally for him.

  In the last of the five months the two men spent living at the Starlet, Journeyman’s sister graduated college. Madeleine Duplessis had attended Baginstock College, on the coast of Maine, a boutique liberal arts college she’d chosen, perhaps, in order to avoid Journeyman’s family’s legacy school. She was just two years younger than her brother, a difference in age that had evaporated in the subsequent decades’ atmosphere: her serious life and Journeyman’s unserious one. Yet his role as the older sibling might have mattered still, back when she took up the invitation to visit Los Angeles, and to stay with her brother and Peter Todbaum at the Starlet.

  Maddy had accepted, Journeyman understood, in order to avoid landing back at “home,” on Fishers Island, the place where their parents had elegantly retired after shoving the kids off to college. Maddy had had enough of the Atlantic coast for a spell, perhaps. She’d majored in environmental science and oceanography, and had in her last year moved into a collective off-campus house dedicated to organic farming. She had no special purpose in Los Angeles, let alone in the entertainment industry, but what purpose was needed beyond curiosity, at twenty-two? And why shouldn’t the two young writers want a tall attractive sister to accompany them into the West Hollywood nightlife, to make them appear less like losers?