“Yes,” Kormentz said, his gaze fierce. “It is extreme. Deny it at your peril.”
“Deny what?”
“The destructive impulse. How little you grasp the worth of ritual action. It’s your principal failing, Sandy.”
Kormentz waved his hand. Shed of his book, he seemed also to want to discharge Journeyman. As Kormentz stood, to toss wood onto his bonfire, Journeyman noticed what he hadn’t before: the fuel supply included the legs and backs of two or three shattered chairs, and the remains of an antique bookstand. Kormentz hadn’t only been clearing brush. He’d begun burning the furniture.
Journeyman walked into the stiff wind, up from the lake, Kormentz’s manuscript in his bag. Was it Journeyman’s job to read it? Show it to others? He could destroy it, as Kormentz feared the Cordon might. Kormentz had threatened to do so himself; it might be his perverse wish. He’d given no instructions, anyhow, other than that Journeyman should take it to the island. It wasn’t as though there was publication anymore, or posterity. Or maybe there was only posterity? Perhaps Kormentz had outsmarted it. Perhaps he’d named names, thinking that after the Arrest, and the world’s collapse into locality, no one would ever wish to read a book in which they didn’t themselves appear.
54.
Punters
SOMETHING HAD CHANGED IN DECEMBER. The worst thing a Hollywood producer could imagine: the shrinkage of his audience. Todbaum still had Theodore Nowlin, true. Nowlin was unshakable. Teenagers still used the park, yes, but was it Journeyman’s imagination, or didn’t they seem as interested in Todbaum now? Maybe Todbaum had only ever been an occasion to them. An excuse.
The rest of his listeners had gone, shortly after the story of the woman named Pittsburgh. That tale seemed in retrospect to have marked a change in the tone of Todbaum’s narrations—a watershed, a climax or anticlimax. At first his regulars puttered through the park, possibly feeling guilty at making too abrupt a break from the storytelling evenings. They’d take a cup of coffee or leave an offering, some firewood or food, then excuse themselves. Soon enough, they forgot to come at all. This coincided with the quickening pulse of construction of the whatever-it-was. Visiting Founder’s Park, Journeyman saw boat traffic, bodies and lumber and machinery crossing to Quarry Island, no matter the wind or weather.
It had turned to winter now, even in this winter-challenged world.
The change at the park was self-fulfilling. The fewer the listeners, the less motive for Todbaum to weave long threads. That was if he was still capable. Journeyman wasn’t sure. Todbaum’s descriptions of what was “out there” now folded on themselves, became paradoxical and gnomic. It was less a serial, more a run of half-baked existentialist fugues. Todbaum had made that error of which Journeyman never thought him capable: building to a proper cliff-hanger, he’d digress, burning momentum and good faith. After journeying coast to coast, his skirmish with the Cordon ought to have been his payoff, his money shot. Any storyteller knew this. Only Todbaum didn’t seem to want to tell it.
“You know what’s funny?” Todbaum said. Journeyman had pressed him on the point. They sat alone at the fire, isolated in a morning fog, hands warming around Todbaum’s coffee. The sea’s vapor was so thick Journeyman couldn’t make out the island. “I don’t even know what it was I did to tick off your homeboys. I was asleep.”
“What do you mean?”
“I was drunk, Sandy. I’d plundered a hoard of liquor outside Worcester. These dudes were hiding it in a shed. Cheap shit, a few liters of Popov and a case of hard cider in bottles, real sweet. Tasted better mixed, and by ‘better’ I mean than camel piss. I was feeling experimental, and when I hit on this unholy mixed beverage I decided to experiment with drinking myself to death. Just about emptied the supply over a day and a night. Time got a little slippery after that.”
“Outside Worcester?”
“That’s the thing, Sandy. I was on autopilot by then, locked in on your little sanctuary. I felt heedless, sick of ducking and weaving. Route 495, skirting Boston—I never did get a look at what had become of Boston—and then 95. Straight up the chute, what’s the big deal? I figured the Streak could handle it. It was up around Portsmouth when I blacked out.”
“And?”
“Came to under the kindly ministrations of a maddened-up bunch of your shit-cyclists.”
Journeyman glanced at the supercar then, involuntarily. Todbaum had been exiting it more often, though he never ranged far. He seemed to like the gazebo’s fringe of high grass for his urinations, saving his shitting for the Streak’s built-in eco-toilet, which Todbaum had boasted of but Journeyman had never seen. These days Todbaum liked to climb down and take his coffee by the fire, as though trying to repopulate his open-air theater with his own presence. Journeyman recalled how, long ago, Todbaum used to prefer the British term “punters” for the paying customer. He liked the separation it gave him and whichever listener he flattered—to speak of punters was never to be one.
Maybe, Journeyman thought now, Todbaum wanted distance from the Blue Streak. Had the supercar’s luminosity increased? Its aura was noticeable now even in this fog-diffused daylight. Yet if Todbaum feared the Streak’s radiation, his lead-lined cockpit was the one place to be. Maybe he feared something less measurable: the supercar’s sway over him. His dependence. Maybe he emerged to test the possibility of separation. His readiness to surrender his exoskeleton, become a bare forked root again. Yet if he threw himself on the towns’ mercy, he’d be a punter forever. Todbaum had never yet been inside a single one of their homes. Had he been sheltered in a building once, since setting out from Malibu? Had he been invited to be?
The next evening they sat alone again by the fire, Journeyman and Todbaum. Two teenagers made out on the floor of the gazebo, possibly fucked, under a blanket. Journeyman wondered, not for the first time, what this world was to them. How did they remember a time before the Arrest? Journeyman sat with his back to this scene, while Todbaum unabashedly stared.
“Have you thought of simply handing the car over?” Journeyman ventured. “Just walk away?”
“Over to whom?”
“The Cordon.”
“I’d like to see those fucking yahoos try to occupy the Streak. Thing hates them like the plague. Why do you think it went berserk while I was in my stupor, Sandman? They should consider themselves lucky. I was the only thing holding it off.”
“The supercar can hate?”
“It’s an AI, which means it’s capable of learning, unlike those bozos.”
This struck Journeyman as thin. Schoolyard stuff, practically—you and what army, my car is smarter than your entire Cordon, etc. Journeyman’s skepticism rose, hearing Todbaum toss off a term like “AI.” Having collaborated on a futuristic narrative for more than a decade, Journeyman knew the limits on Todbaum’s interest in, or grasp of, technology. It had always been Journeyman’s hands on the keyboard. Todbaum was incapable of so much as installing an update to Final Draft without summoning a flunky.
“Does it talk to you?” Journeyman asked. “I mean, if it’s learning, does it know you’re there?”
“Sure, we talk.”
“I’d like to hear that sometime.” Perhaps it was finally Journeyman’s turn to needle Todbaum. “Or do you do both voices, really, like a ventriloquist?”
Todbaum obliged with his ready defensiveness. “Fuck off, Sandy.”
“So you’re protecting us from it? Who are its favorites? How does it feel about me?”
“Worse by the minute. For instance, it knows you never handed off my contract to your sister.”
Journeyman ignored this. They both knew it was true. “Is the Streak rivalrous?” he asked Todbaum. “Have you got it working on a screenplay? Does it take notes well? Has it solved the third act problems?”
Todbaum laughed insanely. He never stayed defensive for long. Still, Journeyman pressed on.
“You don’t know the first thing, do you? It’s a black box, like an iPhone. You’re just a client
of the thing. Maybe it’s the ventriloquist and you’re the dummy.”
Todbaum’s laugh shrank to a low, mean murmur. “I know more about it than anyone ever will. It’ll kill you if you try to take the wheel. God help me, Sandy, don’t let me see you try.”
“The longer you stare into the Blue Streak, the longer the Blue Streak stares into you, huh? The Blue Streak, c’est moi?”
“Something like that.”
“So, what does it see?”
“Eh?” Todbaum’s gaze was locked on the teenagers beneath their blanket, if only to keep from meeting Journeyman’s.
“If you know the car and the car knows you, who’s in there? You ran over a lot of bodies out in flyover country, stole some food and booze, handed out coffee. In your journeys, have you met yourself yet?”
“Aw, Sandman, you disappoint me.”
“How’s that?”
“‘Self’ is a shuck, my friend. Have I taught you nothing?”
“A shuck?”
“Ersatz. Fool’s gold. The self’s a howling counterfeit, an arena where no show goes on, a parenthesis with nothing inside. You used to know it, Sandy. In college, I remember you once said, ‘Everyone’s secrets are the same.’ Look at those kids.” He meant up at the gazebo. Journeyman refused to turn.
“I’m not sure that what I meant was ‘The self’s a shuck.’”
“Sure it is. It’s a vacancy. You can decorate it with distinctive stuff. Neurosis. Like a fingerprint or a snowflake, no two alike. But that’s like tattoos on an arm. What do they call it, a ‘sleeve tattoo’? You can embroider the whole damn container. Beneath the decoration, a nullity. Like outer space, mostly dark stuff.”
“Dark matter,” Journeyman corrected, mechanically. Cleaning up Todbaum’s syntactic messes and stray signifiers was Journeyman’s old avocation.
“Yeah, dark matter. That’s the majority, right? Ninety percent of everything, including you and me, and the Blue Streak too. Who knows why any of us do anything? You remember the story about the scorpion and the frog crossing the river?”
“Please don’t tell it again.” The scorpion stung the frog, Journeyman recalled, because it was in his nature. “Doesn’t that story indicate the opposite, anyway? That the self is some kind of ineradicable essence?”
“Keep it simple, stupid. The lesson is we’re all dumb destructive monkeys in the dark.”
Kormentz’s word: destructive. The destructive impulse. Maybe Todbaum and the man at the Lake of Tiredness really were two peas in a pod.
Now, using his sporadic talent for reading Journeyman’s mind, Todbaum said, “Buddhism, that’s the dumbest shit in the world, I always thought.”
“I don’t follow.”
“Getting away from the self, as if there’s anything to get away from. Same with that Keatsian whatchamacallit; you used to go on about it in college. Negative capability! Like it’s some kind of accomplishment, not knowing, always guessing, pretzeling yourself in contradiction. There isn’t anything but negative capability, Sandy. It’s pouring out of your dumb face right now, like Niagara Falls.”
Journeyman was bludgeoned to silence by Todbaum’s Rube Goldberg allusions. All were melted into worthless slag by the time he’d finished with them. Out here, by a dying fire, under winter-bright stars, on the periphery of the human story: leave it to Todbaum to hold a grudge against negative capability at this late date.
55.
Nowlin’s Plan
JUST THEN JOURNEYMAN WAS JOLTED by the apparitional figure of Theodore Nowlin, who suddenly tossed a length of pine onto the fire, causing a brief vortex of sparks. Had Nowlin been listening? He was silent for such long stretches that Journeyman could forget he was there. He’d become Todbaum’s patriarchal spirit guide.
“Can’t let ’em have it,” Nowlin said now, a stoical grunt.
“Sorry?” Journeyman said.
“Can’t let ’em have it,” Nowlin repeated. “Need it for the passage out. We’re going to Brunswick, me and your friend. You ought to come along.”
Journeyman looked to Todbaum, who gave the thumbs-up. “It’s a plan, Stan.”
“Couldn’t get anyone to build a boat, for all the pride in boatbuilding,” said Nowlin. “But Mr. Todbaum’s caught the spirit. He says it’s good to go.”
“The Streak swims?” Journeyman asked.
Todbaum shook his head. “Uh-uh. Crawls along the bottom. Remember, it’s built on the bones of a tunnel-boring machine.”
“You’ve done this?”
“I forded the Mississippi.”
A story Journeyman missed, if Todbaum had told it. “Bath Harbor’s a lot farther away than the width of the Mississippi River. Deeper too.”
“We’re planning a test run,” said Todbaum. And—did Journeyman imagine it?—Todbaum winked, across the fire. “I thought we’d go out to Quarry Island, and crawl back out for an inspection. If all’s watertight, we’ll press on to find Theodore’s community in Brunswick.”
Could Todbaum seriously care to undertake such a voyage, on Nowlin’s behalf? Or was the scheme a baroque cover for his wish to decamp to Quarry Island after all? He’d only have to get that far, then declare that the Blue Streak had sprung a leak. There he’d be, parked in the midst of Maddy and Astur’s new settlement, sticking his feeding tube deep into the island’s bedrock.
Journeyman tried to gather his wits. This was information, one way or another. He’d been so beguiled into abstraction—neurosis an embroidery covering a void! Negative capability!—that he’d missed the swerve into logistical fact. The plan must have been the source for the rumor that the Blue Streak was capable of tunneling underground. Theodore Nowlin would have spread this idea by bragging in town about the coming expedition.
Why so grudging, when it came to Nowlin’s plan? Yes, Journeyman found the man tedious. Tedious, and crazily wrong about what might be found, should he ever manage to persuade anyone to sail with him to Brunswick. Yet Nowlin only proved Maddy’s words, by his hunger to connect with distant places gone silent. Everyone here lost someone. Journeyman had more in common with Nowlin than he’d care to admit. Like Nowlin, he’d ended up in Todbaum’s park when all others were gone.
Nowlin’s craziness might be the usual, abject variety: he might simply be lonely. Journeyman was crazy with loneliness, or lonely with craziness; he ought to have sympathy. Some days, Journeyman thought the world had been crazy and tried to go sane: that was the Arrest.
Todbaum, on the other hand, wasn’t crazy, not like the rest of them, not like a person. Todbaum, with his confusions of self and surround, of author and text, was craziness itself. Perhaps that was why his car—which was also a phone and a gun and a mirror, one of those spooky devices everyone dreamed over—still worked. The question was this: Was Todbaum’s arrival, the Blue Streak’s existence, evidence that the Arrest hadn’t taken root? That it was all coming back?
56.
Journeyman’s Affiliations
THESE DAYS, THOSE BESIDES NOWLIN actively shunned the park. Likely they feared being roped into a last stand on behalf of Todbaum. The stories had tailed off, into paradox and self-loathing. Erratic, uninspiring, Todbaum made no apparent preparations, not for battle, nor for keeping his weird promise to embark with Nowlin. The supercar sat ominously inert, ever glowing, exchanging waste for moisture and nutrient from the park’s lawn, which had begun to yellow and stink. Was it Journeyman’s imagination or was the Streak’s perimeter slightly concaved, as though a sinkhole had begun to form?
Quarry Island was the active concern. The tower visible from shore now, nosing above the trees. Smoke and steam drifted up too. An onshore wind might bring a scent of cooking, something delicious being savored by the workers. Were there permanent residents apart from Eke and Walt? Journeyman didn’t believe so. But Nils, so utterly caught up with Ed Waltz in construction of the crab-armed mechanism, had pitched a tent on the island’s far shore, and spent nights there. Bicycles could rot for the time being.
&n
bsp; Journeyman rarely crossed. He still had rounds. Augustus was sympathetic to the ongoing efforts, yet still needed butchering help. Journeyman spread himself thin, racing on his bicycle to hit marks in many places at once. He had no role on the island. Instead he worked the shoreside, schlepped wheelbarrows full of stuff to the put-in, sent over packets of Victoria’s sausages. Hoping that, or his family relation, should be enough to count him among the saved, when the axe fell.
All felt this, though no one spoke of it—the axe was soon to fall.
But the problem of Journeyman’s affiliations wasn’t simply binary, island or park. He fretted: Why did Drenka so rarely leave the library? What would it mean to be in hiding, after the Arrest? And from whom?
“You’d be welcome at Quarry Island,” Journeyman told her, on his own authority. “It’s good company. And it’s beautiful out there.” They sat on the library’s back step in bright cold sunlight, sharing shrimp with black bean sauce, spicy and astringent, from a scratched and beaten Tupperware container. Lucius was as skilled at Szechuan cuisine as French. He’d cooked it at the island’s new brick woodstove. A marvel, the miniature civilization now assembled there. Lucius ferried the leftovers back that morning, on Astur’s boat, surprising Journeyman with them. This might be a watershed moment: the island feeding the mainland.
“No thanks,” Drenka said.
Journeyman waited. She didn’t elaborate. “You can go later, if you want.” Or have to. He enjoyed a dumb throb of valor, imagining securing her a spot on the last boat leaving.
Journeyman thought to tell Drenka that she’d like his sister but remembered the two had already met, and fell silent.
Drenka solved the problem of speech by taking him and kissing him, then, a bright shock of tongue and ginger-scallion breath. The kiss wasn’t repeated. They parted without mentioning it. Yet, still, Journeyman felt the whisper of a more private affiliation. Though Drenka had promised him nothing, he felt for the first time since the Arrest the chance that he, Journeyman—dialogue polisher, duck-blood rinser, emissary, older-brother-fifth-wheel-sidekick—might locate the constituency of himself.
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