The Arrest

by Jonathan Lethem

  “Of course he won’t.”

  “He can stay in the park for now.”

  Her imperturbability amazed Journeyman. It was almost as though she’d been expecting Todbaum.

  “Sure,” he hedged. What would keep the Blue Streak anywhere if it didn’t want to be kept? Had Todbaum even really been a captive of the Cordon men who’d escorted him down the road? Or had he been using them as a presidential motorcade uses the Secret Service? “And then what?”

  She shrugged. “Well, it depends, Sandy, doesn’t it? On what he wants.”

  “He said he wants to live here.”

  She turned to him, then, and smiled. “Who wouldn’t?”

  That was all for that day. They moved to other topics.

  Journeyman had expected that it might be a day or two before she condescended to visit Todbaum. In his projections they’d go together, he and his sister, perhaps with Astur too, or others from the Farm. A contingent, not a posse. He was mistaken. A week went by, then another.

  He imagined, then, that she might be organizing some kind of quasi-official response, an ad hoc committee for welcome or unwelcome. Though Journeyman spent more time there since Todbaum’s arrival, he certainly didn’t know everything that went on in East Tinderwick. He ate dinner two or three nights a week at Spodosol, yet hardly heard every scheme hashed out in a commons room or fireside, late at night, after he’d left.

  He was wrong in this too. Maddy let everyone guess just as she let Journeyman guess—and Todbaum as well. Power accrued to her by this act of omission, her air of nonconcern. The longer she didn’t visit Todbaum, the more certain that others besides Journeyman would see her response to his arrival as the crucial, the defining one. A chess game. The longer East Tinderwick’s queen refused to budge, the more helpless the other pieces were revealed to be.

  Yet it seemed to Journeyman that Todbaum accrued a kind of power too, in his own nonbudging way. People were weirdly drawn to him, as they had always been. Children and teenagers, and Theodore Nowlin. Those who longed for the lost world of machines. Todbaum had this thing they wanted to touch and see, the Blue Streak. It worked like a magnet. The absence of any consensus about Todbaum and his machine, the post-Arrest unmediating and unbundling of human opinion, was also a clarion: one had to go see for oneself.

  After nightfall, the thing was radiant too. It was as though a television set had been switched on in a valley of the moon.

  By the time Maddy went to Founder’s Park she was the last to go. No, that wasn’t strictly true. There were those no more interested than they’d be if the East Tinderwick Village Improvement Society had erected a new methane-powered stoplight in front of the old post office. Some, the back-roaders, shunned the center of town. These were those who’d anticipated and preempted the Arrest, who tried to go the Arrest one better. They prided themselves not only on their self-reliance but on their self-circumscription to a cultural time and space that barely acknowledged an “elsewhere” or “before.” Like the clambering kids, they were often barefoot, in as few clothes as weather allowed. Knowledge of Todbaum’s arrival, if it reached them, was foreclosed to their curiosity. Another dumb blip of the civilization of the always-mistaken.

  Others in Tinderwick, and especially in Granite Head, might have regarded it as too far to travel. Not being bicyclists or horse riders, they’d make do with gossip for now. Perhaps they’d inspect the supercar the next time they had a cause to be out that way. Still, among East Tinderwick’s wider population, those who could be seen at a meeting or a barn dance, all had made their way down to Founder’s Park before Maddy. All had gone for at least a middle-distance gawk at the machine. Many had gone closer. Many of those who’d gone closer had stayed awhile. They’d stayed to sample Todbaum’s espresso and balderdash, or to hear one of his stories of what lay outside their benign perimeter, the things he’d encountered in his crossing.

  When Journeyman couldn’t bear it any longer, he tried to explain this to Maddy. “He’s making friends out of your friends,” Journeyman said. “You know how he can be.”

  “I think I remember,” Maddy said. They were in her kitchen. Her hands were busy as usual, feeding cobs through a hand-cranked sheller to grind off the hardened kernels. Her latest project, popcorn. “Something like flavor of the month, every month. Whether anyone actually likes the flavor or not.”

  “The thing is, I think some people might like the flavor,” said Journeyman. “Any novelty in a vacuum.”

  “Good,” said Maddy, indecipherably. “Good for him, and good for them.”

  “He’s begun scheduling these things now. It’s threatening to become a ritual. Mike Raritan has been building fires in the pit, and making those weird fake s’mores of his.” These were actually delicious, accompanied by a fresh Blue Streak espresso and the scent of smoke wafting into the stars above the island.

  “Scheduling what things?”

  “His narrational sessions, his rallies. It’s like a political campaign.” Journeyman realized he himself was campaigning, to arouse his sister’s concern.

  “People need ritual,” Maddy agreed. One of her conversational judo moves. Journeyman felt chagrined, as if he’d gone to the office hours of his anthropology professor and tried to interest him in the games of beer pong back at his dorm.

  “It’s more than ritual, maybe,” he proposed. “Some of us have been waiting for word from . . . outside . . . for a while.”

  Now Maddy grinned. “Others of us go outside every single day. Like me, now. Dodie Metzger said she found some matsutake in the woods just off the Drunkard’s Path the other day.”

  “What’s—?” He didn’t pretend to try to pronounce it.

  “A mushroom, the best mushroom. It’s that season again. Want to come with me?”

  Journeyman begged off. He had deliveries still to make. He was ashamed of his failure to become the town’s mushroom forager.

  Journeyman’s final attempt to interest Maddy in the situation at the park was halfway successful. “There’s more kids climbing on that thing every day it seems. You should see them, Maddy.”

  “I’ve heard. He’s a regular pied piper.” He’d found his sister in her hammock with a book, one he’d recommended to her, actually. Earth Abides, by George R. Stewart. The book was open, facedown, nestled between elbow and ribs. A few orange maple leaves had fallen and stuck to her sweater. Journeyman gave the hammock a soft push.

  “He’s not encouraging them, that I can see. But he doesn’t do anything to discourage them, either.”

  “What are you trying to say, Sandy?” she asked sharply. “That he’s going to hurt the kids?”

  “I didn’t say that. But the machine is powered by some kind of fuel rods. He sleeps in a lead-lined vault up in there. It could be dangerous.”

  “It’s probably safer than swimming in the quarries,” she said, crossly. A child had died in one of the granite quarries two years earlier.

  “Sure.”

  “A lot of things are dangerous.”

  “Sure, Maddy. I know.”

  “I’m not in charge of anyone’s kids.”

  “Of course. So, did you hear about the tent?”

  “What tent?”

  At last Journeyman’s news seemed to surprise her. “Just into the tree line, east of the park, there’s a tent. A camp, really. It looks like a hunter’s camp, like with a deer blind.” Journeyman didn’t know exactly what he was talking about.

  “Whose camp?”

  “You remember Eke? He was part of the team that brought Todbaum in that day. Him and some other Cordon guy I don’t recognize.” In fact, Journeyman had barely glimpsed either person. He knew it was Eke only because Paulo had told him so.

  “Are they doing anything?”

  “Not that anyone can see. Just sort of staking Todbaum out. I guess they’ve been at the water a few times, fishing. They’re not really trying to stay hidden, but they don’t come hang out, either, at least not while I was around. Not durin
g the stories.”

  “Someone needs to go talk to them.”

  “Maybe so.”

  “I’ll go down there,” she said, at last.

  “You want me to—”

  “No. I’ll go alone.”

  32.

  The Eighth or Tenth Story

  JOURNEYMAN COULDN’T KNOW WHETHER IT was the eighth or the tenth or some other number. There’d been plenty. He’d caught parts of at least three others, and knew he’d missed more. He’d never learned the finish of the tale of Utah, of the Mormons and the strange opaque fog cloaking the corporate redoubt in the mountains—it had gone on and on. When he’d asked some of its hearers to retell it, he found it changing in their retelling. Attenuating, growing strange and hopeless, as though only Todbaum could tell it right. The tale itself was enclosed in an opaque fog, perhaps.

  Journeyman had pulled over on his way home from Spodosol, late that same day when he’d finally triggered Maddy’s alarm, finally gained her attention. He’d been riding his loaner bicycle when he saw the campfire’s sparks rising past the silhouetted treetops, to the pale-clouded moon. A good crowd was gathered, more than Journeyman had seen there before. He hoped to hang at the periphery, in the dark, and listen without being singled out as he sometimes was by Todbaum. He felt the chance his sister might not be far behind him, that she was reckoning an approach to the new world of Founder’s Park. If Maddy came, he’d watch and learn what went on between them. It seemed his responsibility, now that he’d finally instigated it.

  Todbaum was just underway. “If I learned one thing coming across, it was watch the fuck out for the sole town in the middle of absolute zippo nowhere. Worse than the inner-city blues, worse than suburban sprawl, the strips where nothing was the same more than two or three miles at a time even though it all looked the same. The tiny towns were worse, even, than the big-perimeter formats, the gated zones. Because within the castle walls, the folks with the guns and underground storage tanks, however many corny fascist scripts they’re working through, however much they’re still jerking off to Reddit memes about George Soros—once they’ve carved off their piece of turf they’re also sort of playing Minecraft, or maybe it’s The Sims. You know, feed the people, enforce the rules, balance the little ecosystem. Every man a wife or two, nobody goes hungry on my watch, that kind of crap. Like—” Here, Todbaum lowered his voice to a theatrical hush and glanced at the tree line. There the two men in the tent, Eke and his friend, harbored near to their own fire, which glowed a faint orange. “Like your neighbors to the south.”

  Journeyman crept nearer. He scanned the faces lit not only by the firelight but by its intricate reflection off the Blue Streak’s chromework. So many he recognized, so many he didn’t. Among them, Sophie Thurber and Edwin Gorse were new apparitions, unexpected to see, perhaps to be interpreted as signs. Sophie Thurber was the spinster matriarch of the Thurber’s Corner houses. Her surname featured on dozens of stones in the Tinderwick cemetery, provenance on the peninsula. Yet, unlike Theodore Nowlin, Sophie Thurber was no meeting attender, not a rallier to causes, spoke to barely anyone. She reputedly had a miser’s fortune tucked into her home’s walls, a thing now only theoretical, or virtual. A fortune in dry strike-anywhere matches would be better. Who, Journeyman wondered, had managed to interest Sophie in the doings at Founder’s Park? And how? A mystery.

  Edwin Gorse was another thing entirely. An inventor of some cash-cow pharmaceutical, he’d two years before the Arrest taken early retirement and bought one of the old money-sucking mansions crumbling on Tinderwick’s High Street. He cleaned it up, then moved in his family, wife and two young girls, while apparently knowing no one on the peninsula. Not that they wouldn’t have found a welcome place here, or shouldn’t have. The towns embraced what used to be called “transplants”—as opposed to summer people. Yet when he was Arrest-widowed—his wife away on a business trip—Gorse and his daughters turned inward, shunning the new all-ages school, living behind a hedge. To pull his weight he tilled the old house’s grand lawn and made himself into an expert potato farmer. Journeyman found him a bit of a cold fish. Yet now he’d found his way to Todbaum’s campfire. Journeyman found himself thinking of the two girls, a town away, alone in the tall gingerbready house. Perhaps Gorse had hired a babysitter. Perhaps the oldest girl was old enough now to look after the younger. What did Journeyman know about children?

  “So, Paper Moon, Kansas, was dead in the prairie wastes, a pin in the map of nowhere. If you think Kansas was dull driving when it was all corn and ‘only two hundred miles to Kickapoo moccasin and fudge emporium,’ you should catch it now. I saw signs of life and pulled over—my bad. I think I might have glimpsed the worst brainwash nightmare cult I ever saw in that fucking town, and I saw a few. It was an egg cult. Yeah, you heard me right.”

  Journeyman glanced again in the direction of the tent in the woods, the cigarette-tip flare of their campfire. He imagined he could detect the scent, a good one, of fish the camping men had caught and grilled over their coals. Todbaum had lowered his voice unnecessarily, to match the scant wind in the trees, the crackle and murmur and faint surf. All Journeyman could make out from within this circle of light was the Cordon men’s fire—who was to say they’d stayed beside it, not slipped nearer, as Journeyman had done himself?

  “They had a giant egg, rigged up by the side of the railroad tracks. Three or four stories tall, painted like an Easter egg, old-world style. ‘World’s Largest Czech Egg, Paper Moon, Kansas’ it read on the side. And there was more fucking barbwire around that thing, and guard towers, like the Berlin Wall—picture a town split at the railroad tracks, and the Czech egg was Checkpoint Charlie. And it had been a chicken town, and still was. Those monstrous industrial chicken factory buildings, you know the kind of thing. Ten thousand chickens, each in a ten-inch cell, no light, no contact, just machines tending them, eggs rolling down a trap chute. If this town was Berlin, the chickens were the ones in the concentration camps, I guess. Only the whole thing breaks down without an industrial-level power source, ventilation, all the automated feed machines, what have you. You can’t exactly run a ten-thousand-chicken barracks off of bicycle power or solar panels, not that they had any of those anyhow. Strictly gas or diesel operation, dead in the water. So they’d freed all the chickens on the side of the tracks where the men and the guns were. They let ’em roost in the vacant downtown, variety store, boarded-up movie palace, all the businesses that had died probably fifty years before the Arrest, the old American story. Chickens everywhere, pecking at rocks, eating each other’s dead bodies. Before you ask, I never once saw cannibalism, coming across, not once. I’m not saying there isn’t any, I’m just not stupid enough to pilot myself into precincts dire enough for a close-up. Never saw cannibalism, apart from the chicken cannibalism in Paper Moon, Kansas. What the people ate was eggs, day and night. And the ones with the guns and the wire on the north side of the tracks, the men of the Czech egg, they took petitions at the fence. Starving, sorry-ass people from miles around were at that fence, trading anything—canned cat food, sexual favors—for those free-range ghost-town cannibal-chicken eggs. It wasn’t my favorite locale, let’s just say.”

  Todbaum still held it, Journeyman had to admit. The conch shell, the horn of story. Still, Journeyman had to find his way home to the other town, in the dark. As he mounted his bicycle, he felt the irksome echo of Todbaum’s voice in his ear, in his brain. Was it only Journeyman’s imagination, or had Todbaum drifted into doing his impression of Journeyman’s voice?

  Maybe Todbaum had no instrument of his own. Maybe he’d conjured up the only voice he had by melding his father’s browbeating tone and Journeyman’s dorky plaint, shored up by scraps of Jack Nicholson, Christopher Walken, whomever else. Journeyman shook off this thought, bicycled away.

  Madeleine hadn’t come.

  33.

  Footage, Napkin

  THE NEXT AFTERNOON TODBAUM HAD Journeyman up to his cockpit to learn of his sister’s vis
it. Rather than explain, Todbaum showed him the footage captured by the Blue Streak’s security camera. He cued to the start of the action easily, as if he’d been watching it repeatedly that morning before Journeyman appeared.

  The lens was fish-eyed, panoramic. Maddy loomed into the center abruptly, after seeming at first to peel around the image’s perimeter. She carried a ladder. This was in darkness, by moonlight, though the camera’s superior capacity rendered everything clear, as if shot with some day-for-night lens. The scene was free of other actors, the gathering dissolved, the fire now just embers, Maddy alone. It was a painter’s folding ladder she employed, perhaps eighteen or twenty feet long. Tools hung at her belt. She moved nearer the camera, unfolded the ladder, tested its placement alongside the Blue Streak. Though she’d chosen not to climb the outside of the vehicle itself, which suggested caution—or distaste?—she appeared unconcerned that she’d triggered any alarms, or, indeed, that the camera eye recorded her actions. She moved with steady purpose.

  When Maddy was an arm’s length from the cockpit dome, she reached for what dangled from her tool belt. A simple claw hammer. With no hesitation, no gentle test strike, she reared the hammer back over her shoulder, then slammed its head against the transparent dome. A second time, even harder. Then again. She rained steady blows, with no obvious result. It was at this moment, however, that Todbaum, presumably startled from sleep by the hammer’s assault, must have come from his lead-lined sleeping vault, into the dome. Maddy waved. She smiled, tight-lipped. And went on hammering.

  Was Todbaum now trying to get her attention? Screaming at her? There was no audio. She raised her eyebrows slightly, smiling again. She holstered the hammer, but only to reach for the other tool at her waist. A blowtorch, a small one. From it she sparked a white-blue flame, a tiny blade of light, and applied it to the curve of the dome. Her brow was furrowed with intent, yet amusement played on her lips.