The Arrest

by Jonathan Lethem

  Eke and Walt nuzzled, whispered into each other’s beards. Was it Todbaum and his coffee that had uncorked them? Journeyman knew that made no sense. He felt himself pining for a chance with Drenka. He could wish this one thing in the world unarrested, if nothing else.

  Astur moored near the island. The four of them transferred the sailboat’s contents and themselves to a scow, then oared their way through the field of rockweed surrounding the island until their feet found purchase on the slimy rock.

  Eke and Walt dragged their tent and provisions up along the beach. The rest they left for others to convey up from the cove. For others were here, Journeyman saw now.

  49.

  Half the Town, and His Sister Too

  JOURNEYMAN MOVED UP FROM THE beach. Renee and Ernesto and other Spodosolians greeted him with casual cheer. Mike Raritan too. Raritan never missed a many-hands-make-light-work chance, a Grange repainting or greenhouse raising. All had come on an earlier boat, to help shift lumber up into the island’s growth, toward its rocky summit. It lay scattered just above the high-tide mark on the rocks, repurposed hand-chiseled beams and joists from the peninsula’s collapsed barns, those nineteenth-century specimens sagging to rest on their stone foundations. The old lumber had been loaded onto a scow for use in Astur’s lighthouse project, on the island’s highest bluff.

  The rock teemed with activity. Journeyman shouldn’t have been surprised at finding Maddy here as well. She’d let Astur be the public face of the project, kept herself oblique. But Journeyman shouldn’t be fooled.

  Maddy seemed exalted out in the daylight. “Sandy!” When his sister called his name like that, Journeyman was thrown back to Rehoboth Beach. Ankles-deep in the sucking surf, watching his sister tilt into the waves, feeling terror for her that she didn’t feel herself. Parents high on the dunes in aluminum chaise lounges, their father with a book across his face. Journeyman might have been ten or eleven when he realized his younger sister was a better and braver swimmer than he was, and always would be.

  “Lift with your knees.” Maddy positioned herself at one end of a barn beam, indicating Journeyman should take the other. The Spodosolians were shifting the titanic beams onto wheelbarrows, to thread up along the narrow path into the trees. Journeyman took her commands, including lifting from his knees.

  “Who’s tending your garden?” he shouted to her from the other end of the beam.

  “Maybe one of my interns,” she said. She’d used this word to taunt Journeyman since the day he’d once made the mistake of using it in her presence. He’d been referring to the aspiring writers pressed into service around a writer’s room in which he’d been a senior member. A standard term. When none of her farming collective was in hearing, she used it to needle him.

  “Your interns all seem to be here today,” Journeyman said. So far as he could tell, this was true.

  “Why don’t you let me worry about that. Who’s killing your ducks?”

  “Augustus is done for the week,” he said. “Anyway, I don’t kill ducks, I just clean up the blood.”

  “I can’t believe you said that.”

  “What?”

  “It’s just so perfectly you, Sandy. That distinction. ‘I just clean up the blood.’”

  “You can come help me one of these days and it won’t seem so allegorical or whatever it is you’re suggesting with that tone. It’s food, for people to eat.”

  “If I ate them, I’d kill them myself.”

  “You eat the eggs,” he said, lamely.

  They made their way uphill with the barn beam, Maddy guiding the wheelbarrow backward, Journeyman shepherding the overhanging weight from behind. The island’s paths were no wider than the span of the wheelbarrow’s handles; they grazed branches at every bend. Yet the century-old paths, though laced with roots, were tamped smooth, never more than they could bump over. Ahead, Eke and Walt sprang like goats into the pathless trees. They’d arrived at their new home. Astur and Maddy’s design, Journeyman thought. Their script.

  At the top the scene opened. That which Journeyman hadn’t had the vision to conceive. Half of East Tinderwick had been enlisted. Specifically the half not magnetized to the goings-on in Founder’s Park, to Todbaum’s stories. Here was Paulo, Dodie Metzger. Delia Limetree, with Danny, the remaining twin. Mike Raritan, who’d preceded them up the hill. They arrayed like hive insects on the sun-scrubbed granite bluff, studying the foundation that had begun to be assembled out of those sheared blocks abandoned as imperfect by the quarrymen so long ago.

  Here was Ed Waltz, so rarely far from his barn full of contraptions. Today he’d exported his steam-powered welding torch to the island, and labored at the assembly of a giant hinged clamshell vise. Like the mouth of a Venus flytrap, one large enough to gulp down an elephant. Here, too, was Nils, never ordinarily far from his bicycles. He worked on a thing like an enormous derailleur, a pulley-and-chain system, a black-greased ruin Journeyman recognized as salvaged from the container bridge at the old dock. Even Jane and Lucius had come. Rare to see them in bright daylight. Both had their sleeves rolled and, with Astur, worked slapping nails into tar shingles on the roof of a new-assembled shack. A storage shed? Living quarters for Eke and Walt?

  Journeyman felt included-out. This was a conspiracy he’d missed. It stung at an old wound he’d forgotten he bore. Would he forever be defined as “from away,” an accidental member of the community? His lasting presence here merely a symptom of the Arrest?

  “I went on a date,” he heard himself brag to his sister.

  “Really? That’s terrific, Sandy. You meet online?”

  “Funny.”

  “I don’t know, I thought maybe your old friend has Tinder in his wondermobile.”

  “Supercar,” he corrected.

  “Tinder in his supercar, then.”

  “If he does, he’s hoarding it.”

  “Okay, so spill the beans. A date with who? Person, place, or vegetable?”

  “You don’t know her. The woman who moved into the library. She’s odd, a little intense. But, you know, I make my rounds. She’s warmed up to me. Even the odd and intense need human contact, I guess.”

  “Drenka, you mean?”

  “You know her?”

  “We’ve met,” said Maddy simply.

  Journeyman hid his disappointment. He’d wanted this one thing to himself.

  It wasn’t difficult to hide. Maddy had turned from him again. Not merely flinched from his gaze, though she had done that. This was the deep interior barricade, a thing for which Journeyman felt an ancestral recognition. A thing to which he’d learned to defer. On the beaches at Rehoboth, so long ago, his sister only sometimes beckoned to him to join her in deeper waters. Other times she’d dive beneath, not beckoning at all, and swim where Journeyman couldn’t imagine following.

  50.

  What Were They Building Up There?

  JOURNEYMAN DIDN’T KNOW, BUT IT worked on him in his dreams. These recurred night after night. In them he approached the island by boat, but not Astur’s sailboat. He was on the prow of some larger thing. A ferry? In the dreams the boat was to his back, a wedge riding high and steady in the surf, but he sensed it beneath him, rather than seeing it. It approached the island with no apparent method of slowing, or plan to divert from the inevitable collision, but Journeyman never experienced fear, only fascination. His attention remained locked on the thing under construction high on the bluff.

  The tower or pylon or ziggurat.

  Other times it seemed some kind of titanic effigy or golem.

  Perhaps a rocket on its pad, an Apollo finger pointing through clouds, to the exosphere.

  Yet the monument underway was a lighthouse—yes? Why not believe Astur’s declarations? Well, for one thing, what Journeyman had witnessed in progress that day, the day of Eke and Walt’s release to their captivity, didn’t resemble any lighthouse he knew. For another thing, what powered a lighthouse now? What beacon or battery could generate the signal, in the long night
of the Arrest?

  And, though Journeyman sailed to the island occasionally, he spent more time by far with the thing in his dreams.

  It was night as he approached, and yet, according to the laws of dream, the tower project was always blindingly backlit by the sun. High noon at midnight, on this inner-island. He’d struggle to make out the form within the nimbus of light. Like a phosphene, a blot on his vision, he seemed never to be quite facing it directly. When he turned, it turned too, following him like a moon.

  Was that a face he saw?

  Was it on fire, this tower? Wreathed in smoke? Were birds above it, wheeling?

  Did it fall toward Journeyman, or he toward it?

  III.

  Winter

  51.

  Custody

  JEROME KORMENTZ HAD PREPARED THE tableau, Journeyman could see, well in advance of his arrival. He’d built a large fire in his stone pit by the shore of the Lake of Tiredness. Journeyman had to admire Kormentz’s beaverishness, not only in gathering the wood and tinder necessary to warm himself out-of-doors but in constructing at the water’s edge a lean-to, an entirely new structure, albeit modest. Perhaps Kormentz had caught the bug of industry running wild on Quarry Island. It had grown more intense with the onset of winter.

  Kormentz welcomed Journeyman into his sitting hut, and poured some floral concoction from a teapot into mugs without handles. A stack of manuscript pages lay pinned beneath a rounded heavy stone. The topmost page displayed Kormentz’s precise cursive hand.

  “Your book,” Journeyman said. The Pillow Book, of course.

  “Yes.”

  Journeyman sat, sheltering from the chill that had found him as he’d emerged from the tree-tight path. Doing so placed him with Kormentz in a kind of love seat. Later, this too seemed a feature of his scrupulous attentions in making this scene. The lean-to captured the heat coming out of the ring of stones admirably well. The pages lay between them, rippling in the breeze.

  “Is it finished?”

  “Such a book is never finished, only abandoned.”

  Journeyman shut his eyes, deeply irritated, though he knew he’d walked into that one.

  “Well, it looks . . . sizable.”

  “I’m placing it in your custody,” Kormentz said.

  “Oh?”

  “To take with you, to your island. That makes you my literary executor, should I perish.” Journeyman stared. “Are you surprised?”

  “I came today expecting we’d talk about the island,” he said, with caution. “You’re a little ahead of me.”

  “Sandy, please. In this time of illusion, shouldn’t we dispense with any prevarication between us, my dear confessor?”

  “Okay.” Dispense likely meant, with Kormentz, its opposite. Journeyman hadn’t seen Kormentz so high on his own theatrical solemnities since the time of his expulsion from East Tinderwick.

  “You don’t imagine you’re the only one who comes here to talk, do you?”

  “I knew it was possible we weren’t exclusive,” Journeyman deadpanned. “Do you want to tell me who it is?”

  “I’m bound not to.”

  One of Kormentz’s allies, from the period of deliberation over his fate? A traumatized former acolyte? Even after their guru’s exile, Journeyman knew how bound some had remained. Perhaps Kormentz even had a lover. Journeyman refused to be interested.

  “Is this person inside your house right now? Is that why we’re out here in the cold?”

  “No, they’re not inside my house. Please, don’t patronize me. I know the news.”

  “Rumors, you mean.”

  “Call it what you like. I’m aware of the planned retreat. And that I’ve been sacrificed.”

  “For god’s sake, Jerome, you haven’t been sacrificed.”

  52.

  News and Rumors

  THAT THE CORDON FROM THE south had scheduled an assault. That it would occur in these light-dwindled days before the solstice.

  That the first objective of the assault was the seizure of Todbaum’s vehicle.

  That the objective had expanded. That the Cordon had determined to seize one or several of the essential farms supplying them with rations.

  That Spodosol Ridge Farm was the Cordon’s principal target. This, because the Cordon’s nemesis Todbaum had named it as his destination. That Spodosol was seen as complicit with Todbaum. That now the farmers had a weapon, and might use it against the Cordon.

  That the Cordon planned what was called a “surgical strike.”

  That there were factions among the Cordon people. That some preferred a more “scorched-earth” approach.

  That secret negotiations were being conducted on a “back channel.” That the Cordon had planted “moles” amid the towns.

  That Quarry Island was being prepared as a defensible redoubt, for a last stand. That the new structures were meant as refugee shelters for Spodosolians and East Tinderwickians during the coming assault (the “retreat” to which Kormentz had referred). That, despite obvious materials limits (on roofs, beds, provisions), safe harbor had been offered to anyone in East Tinderwick, or even Tinderwick proper, who cared to ask.

  That, conversely, harbor had been offered only to those on a select list, in a process undemocratic and nontransparent. That Jerome Kormentz had been singled out for exclusion.

  That the retreat to the island had been conceived on the principles of nonviolent resistance.

  That such principles were laughably misapplied here, in an overreaction by newcomers unaccustomed to local ways of resolving conflict. That the struggle over Todbaum and his supercar should be recast as a dispute between neighbors to be settled in the “old manner” (which remained unspecified).

  That the retreat to the island amounted to nothing so much as a mass suicide (both “lemmings” and “Masada” were invoked here).

  That the retreat to the island was a daring last-chance military stratagem.

  That what was under construction on the island was not a lighthouse but in fact a gigantic slingshot or trebuchet. That the fantastical crab claws Ed Waltz had been welding were intended for the gripping of giant chunks of granite, to be hurled over the water at attackers daring to set sail from the shore.

  That Peter Todbaum was about to make the entire thing moot by pulling up his watering tube and nuclear-powering his way out of their lives.

  That he’d start for Canada or set out across the ocean. That he was about to instruct the supercar to burrow into the earth, to tunnel and conceal itself, to lurk like unexploded ordnance.

  That Todbaum was in league with the Cordon. That together they’d scripted the entire episode as a kind of pantomime to outflank the towns.

  That Todbaum was terrified and had gratefully accepted the promise of the towns’ defense of him on the island.

  That Todbaum had gone crazy.

  That Todbaum was crazy to start with.

  These things could not all simultaneously be the case. Journeyman could if he chose confirm a few pieces. That some number of people were prepared to fall back to the island, yes. That Kormentz had been, like the unicorn stranded by Noah’s ark, denied passage—though Journeyman didn’t admit this to Kormentz, it was true.

  Some ignored or denied such talk. Others, on the margins, deep-woodsers, might have been blissfully ignorant. If you hadn’t seen the boats going out, or the tower rising, it might have been hard to believe. Threat of the Cordon’s seizure of the farms wasn’t new. It floated in the air, an ambient thing.

  As for Todbaum, that wrongness had rooted in their midst. A glitch or tumor, a television tuned to a dead channel in a world where there were no televisions tuned to any channels. The peninsula’s reality had grown around Todbaum, absorbed him.

  53.

  The Worth of Ritual Action

  NOW KORMENTZ GOGGLED HIS EYES. The whites wholly visible around the pupils, the rims red, the bonfire reflected in their centers. Journeyman saw rage and terror, all that Kormentz labored never to reveal. />
  “Take the book, Sandy. It’s what remains of me. It mustn’t fall into their hands.” He gripped the pages with his bony claws, causing Journeyman to think of the giant steel pincers under construction out at Quarry Island. As he thrust the manuscript at Journeyman’s chest, he dislodged the stone which had pinned the pages. It fell to the ground between them. Journeyman accepted the unbound book into his care, reluctantly.

  “Take it,” Kormentz said again. “Or I’ll put it into the fire myself.”

  “They’ll march right past the turnoff to the lake,” Journeyman said. “They have no interest in you.”

  Kormentz managed a bitter smile. “How certain you are.”

  “What could they want from you? Or your book?”

  “They’ll want this place for a northern outpost.”

  “They’ll take the Grange.” Was it possible they’d already done so? With Quentin Maslow gone, no one lived at the North Grange to report otherwise. At the last drop-off the Cordon people had stayed after, while Journeyman returned to Tinderwick.

  “An outpost out of sight of the road,” Kormentz said.

  Outpost? Journeyman suddenly wondered at the martial terminology. Could Kormentz’s secret visitor be from the Cordon?

  In these paranoid days, Journeyman tried not to take the bait. “Fair enough. Maybe they’ll put you in charge of it. As the northern sentry you can write to your heart’s content.”

  “Take it now and go,” Kormentz said. “I only hope my faith in you isn’t misplaced. They’re coming here to pillage and destroy.”

  “Destroy what?” said Journeyman. “They need the farms.”

  “What they don’t need they’ll sacrifice. They’ll surely kill me and cast my book into the lake or the fire.”

  “Seems a little extreme.” Journeyman reconsidered his worry, that Kormentz had formed some tricky alliance. The disgraced guru could never join up with the Cordon. All of Kormentz’s pretenses and allusions, his arch piety, needed the context of the community that had banished him to lend them any meaning at all.