“Will you tell me your name now?”
“Drenka.”
“I’m Alexander,” he said. “I think I told you before.” Then admitted, “Mostly called Sandy.”
“It fits you,” she said, crushingly.
All Journeyman’s possible questions seemed inane. The one he selected—“What brings you?”—Drenka preempted, raising her hand.
“I don’t want to be interrogated.”
“I’m not here representing anyone but myself.”
“Then I don’t want to be interrogated by you.”
“What should we talk about?”
“Tell me about your day, Alexander Duplessis. Who did you see?”
“You don’t know them, I think—”
“Explain it to me. Tell me a story.”
A story? That was what Journeyman was meant for. Or had been, once. “You know how there’s this perimeter around us here? Those people call themselves the Cordon—” Journeyman hesitated: Was this even true? Or had the people in the towns arrived at that name? “We had a meeting with them today.”
Drenka waved as if brushing this off. “I avoided all that. I came by water.”
“I didn’t ask.”
“What do you mean?”
“You’re self-interrogating now, I just want to point out.”
“You were saying.”
“So the Cordon, they’re a little stirred up. Normally no one comes or goes. They, uh, let this guy through—” Where to start with Todbaum? Journeyman didn’t want to, actually.
“The car guy?”
“You heard?”
“People come around,” she said. “You know, the ones you mentioned. Those who like to browse.”
“Well, yes. The car guy. He set some stuff in motion.”
“He wasn’t as discreet as me.”
“Not so discreet.” Journeyman couldn’t be more ambivalent about the topic. Though he felt cheered by the jostling, elbowy shape his and Drenka’s talk had begun to take. “Some of their people are living with us, and today a couple of our people crossed over . . .”
“You seem unnerved.”
“I do?” How to explain what it meant to have Sterling Limetree and Quentin Maslow go? Minor characters, he couldn’t think how to make them matter to Drenka. Had Todbaum been giving Journeyman notes on a script, he’d have instructed Journeyman to cut the two out entirely. Yet a part of Journeyman had gone with them. He and Drenka walked in silence, to the water.
“Sandy.”
“Yes?” Journeyman didn’t, just then, like the sound of his nickname in her mouth. Better her mocking him with the full string of syllables.
“Thanks for the company. I’m going to walk on alone now.”
He blinked at her dumbly.
“If you want to browse in the library, you can do that now.”
“It’s okay.”
“I’ll see you again soon.” She shook his hand. He watched her pick her way along the rock beach, into the chill wind.
How did one human undesolate another? If you’d never seen it done, you wouldn’t believe it possible.
As for stories, they might be among the kind of machines that no longer worked.
43.
Dinner With Jane and Lucius
JANE AND LUCIUS, THE MARIJUANA cultivators, were occasional guests at the Farm. Journeyman couldn’t tell what triggered the invitations. Once or twice a season they trotted in with a basket containing bottles of wine from their apparently inexhaustible cellar and something interesting from Lucius’s kitchen. Spodosol was changed on those nights, in unquantifiable ways. It wasn’t as though pot, or alcohol, weren’t present at other times. But Jane and Lucius seemed a cue to drop the usual atmosphere of conscientious industry in favor of something more unbuttoned. When they came, evenings ended late.
The two lived outside East Tinderwick, in a compound of summer houses that had been occupied for just three or four weeks a summer by wealthy Boston families and a famous painter, though they were not summer people. They carried a certain cosmopolitan air. Lucius had been, once, the chef at the Tinderwick Inn. That was before the Arrest made such things as inns and restaurants irrelevant, and the inn a permanent home for the resident staff and a couple of guests who’d happened to be checked in.
Journeyman was envious of them. With Journeyman, Maddy was all work and no play. When Jane and Lucius appeared, she’d abandon a row of kohlrabi half-tended and drink wine in daylight. This night Lucius placed a superb cassoulet at Maddy and Astur’s table, made from a duck Journeyman had dressed himself. The room was ringed with candles, a circle of light pushing against the darkening October. They’d shared an early smoke and were through the salad course before the subject arose.
“I could go for one of those espressos of his right now,” said Lucius. He’d unbuttoned his vest and leaned back in his chair. Journeyman had no idea when Lucius and Jane might have visited the new Founder’s Park. He wasn’t surprised they had.
“Go and have one if you like,” said Astur.
“The price is too high,” Lucius quipped.
“That guy’s a major douche,” said Jane, which brought a sharp snort of laughter from Journeyman. “His whole Catastrophe Svengali routine is a fucking drag. It’s like he thinks he invented the end of the world.”
Lucius made a wry face. “Still, Jane. You can’t say the guy didn’t do his homework.” Jane and Lucius made a specialty of this affectionate push-pull banter, while others were usually too ripped on their weed to be able to form sentences. It was a style of sociality Journeyman missed more than he realized.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“While we were huddled up here in Podunk, the man drove the length of the goddamn country, babe. No wonder he’s pulling a crowd. Inquiring minds want to know.”
“I call horseshit,” said Jane. “Who knows where he came from?”
“Well, Sandy does. Don’t you, Sandy?”
“I knew him in L.A.,” Journeyman admitted. “Actually before that, in college.”
“What do you mean knew him?” said Jane. “You know him now.”
“Or is he not the same guy?” said Lucius, holding up a finger, playing Sherlock Holmes. “Maybe we’ve got some doubts?”
“I wish I could claim he was an impersonator,” Journeyman said. “Or that he’s changed.” He avoided Maddy’s eye, now. No reason to imagine anyone knew about the Starlet Apartments, unless it was Astur. He avoided her eye too. They made it easy for him, rising together to clear the plates, into the kitchen. But they were hardly out of earshot.
“Okay, so he’s a producer, right?” Lucius spoke as a prosecuting attorney, nailing down established facts. “The thing about producers is that they’re producing something, usually several things at once.”
“He’s a liar,” said Jane.
“Same thing,” said Lucius. “So, what’s he producing? He’s gonna make a little Cordon of his own, right?”
“Out of what? Or I mean who? Ted Nowlin? They already stole his teenager.”
“That was a trade,” Journeyman pointed out. “He swapped the teenager for the men in the woods. Eke and his friend. Walt.” Journeyman had told no one what he’d seen.
“Out of us, babe. We’re all gonna be in it, just you wait.”
“You’re making no fucking sense,” said Jane.
“He won’t have use of Eke and Walt,” said Astur, who’d returned from the kitchen with a serving bowl of preserved berries and goat cheese. “I’ve enlisted them in my project. They’re going to live on Quarry Island.”
“That so?” asked Lucius, with amusement. “Have Rosencrantz and Guildenstern been informed of their place in your plans?”
Astur’s smile was placid. “They’re making themselves ready for their departure from the mainland. Camping in the park is excellent practice.”
But Jane wasn’t going to be put off. “Say what you mean, Luce. How are we going to be in his Cordon?”
Lucius shut his eyes, as if explaining might be beneath his dignity. “Listen, when they come for him, and they are going to come for him, what are we going to end up doing?” No one answered. “That’s right, we’ll fight to protect him and his fucking artisanal panzer. We gave that jackass asylum, didn’t we? We more or less offered him amnesty too, for whatever atrocities he committed on their turf. He’s one of us now. If we let them pull him out, what’s next?” Lucius widened his arms dramatically, and bugged his eyes. “This. All this shit. They take it all.”
“He’s not one of us,” said Jane.
“He is, Jane. He’s us all the way. He’s our spirit animal. He bought us for an espresso.”
“Oh, that’s utter horseshit, Luce. You’re drunk.”
“Sure. I’m blitzed and it’s working on me like a truth serum.”
“Maybe you’ll be fighting for him,” said Jane. Her contempt was royal. “I’ll be sitting in the peanut gallery, watching through opera glasses, laughing my big fat lily-white ass off.”
All laughed. Maddy laughed loudest. They’d all turned to her, aware she’d spoken the least through the dinner—spoken barely at all. Yet she presided. They were here at her pleasure, weren’t they? Journeyman considered it, his ritual puzzle. The survival of the peninsula was at her pleasure—or hers and Astur’s and that of five or six of the other most expert farmers. The farmers and Victoria—the Cordon loved Victoria’s sausage.
But Journeyman had fallen silent too. Pretending he was invisible, undeputized. “Will you go and see him, Maddy?” he blurted now.
“I’m not as curious as the rest of you.”
“I don’t mean because you’re curious. Todbaum thinks this is between you and him.”
“He’s wrong.” Through the revels Maddy had never unholstered her hammer. It hung from her belt casually, a piece of her. The same hammer she’d used to stress-test Peter Todbaum’s cockpit.
“Wrong because he’s crazy—” Journeyman began this as a question, but it hung as an assertion.
“We’re all fucking officially crazy,” said Lucius, who was, it seemed to Journeyman, fucking officially drunk.
“Wrong because he’s got the wrong sibling,” said Maddy, as she got up to clear the dishes.
44.
Postapocalyptic and Dystopian Stories
IF JOURNEYMAN WAS AN EXPERT in one thing, it was postapocalyptic and dystopian stories. Reading them, to pillage riffs and motifs for Yet Another World, had been his paid homework for decades, in the time before the Arrest. Paid by Todbaum, that’s to say. Todbaum hadn’t only been outsourcing his research, however. He read the books too.
“You know what’s great about this shit, don’t you?” he’d once asked Journeyman.
They sat in his Venice Boulevard office, headquarters of his production company, Kill Tree, control room for the vehicle he piloted before the Blue Streak. With the question, he’d gestured at the books strewn everywhere, pages stuffed with Post-its and striped by hot-pink and canary highlighters, many laid open on their faces. More than once Journeyman had witnessed Todbaum physically hacking a chapter from the bindings, to place in the hands of Journeyman or some other alphabet-monkey he’d hired to adapt the stolen material into a scene. The strange thing, the very most Todbaumest thing, was that he always insisted his assistant buy first editions for his raw material. The best copies, dust jackets intact. Then he’d slough off the jackets to be trampled. He’d say he liked the smell and feel of the original editions. Yet once acquired they were doomed. (Journeyman had once reached to shift Cat’s Cradle from an oozing pool of spilled cola. Todbaum laughed sharply. “Look at you, Sandman. You feel sorry for the books, don’t you?”)
That day Journeyman had come to report on Walter Tevis’s Mockingbird. Journeyman said he didn’t think it was a movie. Todbaum only grunted. Very likely this hadn’t been his hope. More, he wanted to load Journeyman’s mind with examples to pillage for Yet Another World. Tevis’s book, Earth Abides, Dr. Bloodmoney, Station Eleven, A Canticle for Leibowitz, Riddley Walker, Vonnegut, Atwood, King—these, sprawled around them, were the shit he had in mind.
“What’s so great about this shit?” Journeyman parroted.
“It’s always better, not worse.”
“What do you mean?”
“You people are supposed to, you know, write it to keep it from happening, right? Cautionary tales?” In Todbaum’s mind Journeyman might be answerable for all writers, his tribe. “But they just can’t help it, they like it there. They love it there.”
“Where?”
“Where? Whatever fucked-up allegorical hellscape or dire prison block for the human soul they’re working through, the particulars don’t matter. They want to live there, you can feel it. The characters in the book, they’re always justified, set on a road. Speaking of which, The Road, that one bugs the fuck out of me. It’s supposed to be this existential Beckett deal, right? Grown-up apocalypse. But what’s the worst old Cormac can think of? The basement scene, right? They keep those people alive so they can strip the flesh off them to eat. But the thing no one ever mentions? You’d have to feed those people to keep ’em alive. There’s no point to it. If McCarthy were honest, he’d admit he wrote a campfire story, Sandman. Instead he inserts all this Old Testament horseshit. The world’s reduced and cleansed, the ambiguity scrubbed out.”
“Because—it’s easier?”
“Sure. Postapocalyptic comfort food. I’m not talking about dime-store fiction. Even Kafka wanted to go live in The Castle, I bet you good money.”
“We tell ourselves stories in order to live.”
“Sure. Who doesn’t like comfort? And who doesn’t like food?”
“Not me.”
“There you go, Sandman. There you go. Now write my show just like that. A postapocalyptic, dystopian-pastoral meet-cute. The old song we all long to hear.”
45.
What Did the Blue Streak Want?
JOURNEYMAN WOKE ON THE COUCH downstairs. Not because Maddy and Astur’s guest room, his usual crash pad at Spodosol, wasn’t available, but because he’d passed out on the couch after bullshitting with Jane and Lucius long into the night. They’d broken into a supply of hard cider after exhausting Jane and Lucius’s red wine, and the conversation turned foul and foolish. By the time it was just the three of them, there was less and less Journeyman remembered.
Journeyman discovered Maddy and Astur already gone, presumably to their morning labors. The kitchen woodstove was lit. He found a still-warm pot of tea waiting, with a mug set out. They’d tiptoed around him. He sat and sipped and blinked in the slanted morning light and waited for his head to clear. He’d dreamed of Todbaum, of the old days, of the talk concerning dystopian and postapocalyptic stories. Maybe it was all dreamed, maybe there had never been a Todbaum, or a Hollywood, no life before. No. It had happened, then been muddled into dream. Journeyman missed it.
Once he felt steady enough to balance on his bicycle, Journeyman started out, not searching the greenhouses to find his sister, not wanting to face her in his morning-after incarnation. He should have returned to Tinderwick, to his duties. Instead he veered into Founder’s Park. If he ever wanted Todbaum to himself, it should be early. By midafternoon Todbaum usually had some audience of visitors or acolytes around him.
Journeyman could ask for a coffee. He needed one.
The park was quiet, the fire dark, the Blue Streak silent. Far across the water he saw a sail, off the east of Quarry Island. No signs of life beyond the tree line, where Eke and Walt kept their tent. Journeyman leaned his bicycle against the playground slide and approached the machine. The ladder was retracted. Nothing indicated life or activity within. Perhaps Todbaum was still asleep. At the moment of this thought, Journeyman heard a summoning whistle from the water’s edge, past the gazebo.
“Sandy, hey. Hang on a sec.”
Todbaum stood just below sight line on the embankment, peeing into the bushes. He shook off and zipped, then jogged in h
is slovenly way up to join Journeyman. His jeans were almost black with filth, his sneakers soaked in dew. The smile that played on his face was sickly. This was the farthest Journeyman had ever caught him from his machine. Journeyman stood between them. He could tackle Todbaum into the grass, then seize—but no.
The harsh light of morning, the harsh light of Journeyman’s hangover, these flooded the scene, seeming to strip it of illusion. Todbaum looked terribly old. Journeyman had been Time Averaging him relentlessly since his return. It was as though Todbaum’s charismatic sway over the visitors to his storyteller’s circle formed a kind of gauze, a liquid aura, which enclosed and recuperated Todbaum himself. Now, bare of it, he only appeared anemic, insalubrious, deranged by time. Journeyman might have looked the same to Todbaum.
“You only love me for my coffee.”
“I wouldn’t say no,” Journeyman admitted.
“That’s the spirit.” As Todbaum passed him, Journeyman heard the Blue Streak stir, an almost subterranean sound of coolant rumbling, the silenced engines purring into life. Looking up, Journeyman saw the cockpit now glowed in readiness. The ladder rungs appeared. Had it sensed Todbaum’s approach? Did Todbaum carry what used to be called a “key-chain fob”? If Journeyman intended either to help overthrow or to defend Todbaum, this might be important to know.
“C’mon up.” Journeyman watched Todbaum’s ass wriggle through the aperture, followed by his wet sneakers. Journeyman followed.
Inside, Todbaum pointed through the dome, to the lawn between the supercar’s left side and the tree line. At first Journeyman imagined Todbaum had meant to indicate something in the woods—Eke and Walt’s campsite, most likely. No. Todbaum pointed down, at the grass.
“You see the deer?”
Journeyman hadn’t, until now. A younger buck, with a six- or eight-point rack, lay below, dead. The creature’s carcass straddled a margin where the green lawn met singed-brown grass ringing the Blue Streak. Had the vehicle, to supply itself, drained the moisture and vitality from the nearest growth? Several pipes and tubes now extended from the underside of its chassis, into the ground. Or was this dead zone a result of the steady leakage of its radiation, as Journeyman had feared? And what about the deer? Journeyman asked this, and Todbaum smirked.
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