57.
No Trumpets
IT BEGAN WITH A PICNIC. The ruins of a picnic, a fire circle in the first snow. Perhaps they’d crossed in, a day or two earlier, and camped, Eke-and-Walt-style, in the woods. Who could say? The towns kept no perimeter watch. The line was somewhere high beyond the North Grange, and the line belonged to the Cordon. The towns had no spies or sentries who’d report when it was crossed.
The butcher, Augustus Cordell, told Journeyman. He’d learned from someone at Proscenium Farm. The remains of a fire in the snow had been found in one of Proscenium’s back fields, behind the creek’s tree line, past the farm’s wallows. The scorched skull and carcass of one of their hogs, scattered bones, a smashed jug or two. Scanning for traces, they’d also found the scene of the hog’s slaughter. Gore and entrails at the creek’s edge. The butcher shook his head. It appeared to have been done with a timber axe, one found missing from the Proscenium barns. Calling up this image seemed to trouble Augustus most, the clumsy murder of the hog. It wasn’t right.
There was no need for them to come in waves, nor come noisily, with trumpets. No need to inspire shock and awe. They’d filtered in. Housed who-knew-where, at encampments, stealthily seized houses. Perhaps they had sympathizers? Those who gladly offered lodging? Who’d have any way of knowing? Yet at some point they did set up a block on the road. Journeyman was met with it, two days later, trying to bring provisions to Jerome Kormentz.
Snow lay in patches between the shading pines. It melted on the roadbed. The frost was incomplete, no new heaves. The asphalt’s fissures were the old ones, the geological record. The crows that tailed Journeyman might have been the old ones too: What would be the point of new crows? What if, despite the seasons’ turning, they’d all been Arrested, too, heaves and crows and persons, never aging, trapped in some purgatorial recursion? Journeyman would bring Kormentz packages forever, perhaps. Like his Pillow Book, a world that could never be finished, only abandoned.
But no. Here was the new thing on the road. A shed plopped onto the center of it, at the bend before Brenda’s Folly Farm. A prefab aluminum toolshed, barely larger than a porta potty. In the days of pickup trucks such things were purchased at Lowe’s and plopped onto one’s lawn in an hour or two. Journeyman imagined them sledging it all the way up from their territories south of here. He marveled at the effort. But no, a foolish thought. Likely the shed was from nearby, repurposed off some Tinderwickian’s property, dragged behind the Cordon’s horses a mile at most. A drift of smoke tooted from its rooftop vent. No sign of horses or bikes or shit-bikes anywhere near, though Journeyman had hardly inspected the surroundings.
Two men, one he knew by sight from the meeting at the North Grange and, before, from encounters on the road. Not that it mattered. Names went unexchanged, let alone pleasantries. The two warmed their hands at a fire in a small ceramic barrel. Despite the vent, smoke would have made the air unbreathable if the door hadn’t been propped open—it was bad even so.
“Stand right there,” said the one Journeyman had never seen before.
“Sure.” There wasn’t room for Journeyman inside anyhow. There were no weapons, such as he could judge, inside the shed.
The man looked him up and down. “You ought to hand that off and make your way back south.” This man chewed something that made a brownish juiciness glisten between his teeth, a wad of bound leaves—could it really be tobacco? Journeyman wondered if he was some official of significance within their ranks.
“There’s a man at the lake—” he started.
“We know.”
“This food’s for him. He’ll be expecting it.”
“He’s good,” said the same one. The one Journeyman had seen before looked down at his boots. “We got your man taken care of.”
“He’s expecting me,” he said. “He’ll be surprised—”
“Then let him be surprised.” The man reached out.
Journeyman began reluctantly to remove Kormentz’s provisions from the pack.
“Whole thing’ll do.”
“Sorry?”
“Your satchel, just leave it.”
Journeyman’s Telluride Film Festival backpack. It had journeyed with him across the divide of the Arrest. Part of the cornucopia of swag waiting in his hotel room in that mountain town. He’d fanned the treasure on his bedspread just to marvel: hand lotions, sleep masks, thumb drives, cranberry-pistachio clusters, chargers for charging other chargers, all branded by Dolby or Rotten Tomatoes or Variety or some other festival sponsor. All those monikers and devices now gone, gone, gone. Journeyman handed it over. Choose your battles, he thought. Had he ever chosen even one?
“That’s a good man,” the Cordon man said, as to a dog. Then added, obscurely, “Much obliged to your service.”
Journeyman set out back down the road, relieved of his burden. A delivery boy, he’d delivered. Or had he been mugged in broad daylight on the frost-heaved boulevard?
The crow shadowing him tree to tree might know.
58.
The Last American
UNMOORED, EMBARRASSED TO RETURN TO the butcher’s, Journeyman staggered through the empty streets downtown, past the library. No sign of life there. He didn’t linger, didn’t test for an unlatched door. He walked to the docks behind the firehouse. Heaps of lobster traps waited there for no appointment. The local lobstermen had once peddled their catch for airlift by the thousands to Paris, for the Christmas table. The urchin fishermen, similarly, packed the chewy tasteless things off to Japan, where urchin was known as a cure for erectile dysfunction. Journeyman’s mind wandered to such lost worlds as if he could reverse engineer the Arrest. As if it made sense to want to. A spit of woodland concealed the beach where Drenka had abandoned her rowboat. Perhaps it was no longer there, perhaps she’d rowed off. Multiple disasters tickled the edges of Journeyman’s awareness. When the sun set and he grew cold, he remembered Todbaum. He was Journeyman’s to feed. Todbaum had an appetite.
Journeyman fetched his bicycle. After his encounter on the main road he wanted to be able to outpace anyone on foot. He’d find dinner at Spodosol for himself, and a share to deliver to Todbaum. The peninsula felt vacant, haunted at sunset. If not a hot meal, then something from Spodosol’s stores. Whatever he fetched could be heated at Todbaum’s fire. If he had a fire.
Journeyman stopped at the top of Founder’s Park before reaching the Spodosol road. Todbaum had a fire. He also had something to eat. He sat on a lawn chair scooping food from a bowl held near to his chin. Sentinel Nowlin by his side. Likely Nowlin provided the food. A third, Edwin Gorse, stood on the far side of the fire, his anxious gesticulations casting shadows reaching into the bare trees. Almost unconsciously Journeyman dismounted and slow-walked his bicycle in. Should he have felt it his duty to inform Maddy and Astur, others, what he’d encountered on the road—to sound a general alarm, like Paul Revere? Maybe he’d tell Todbaum. Let that satisfy his obligation. It was Todbaum and the Streak they’d presumably come for, those men on the road.
Journeyman’s actions weren’t sensible, perhaps. He moved benumbed. Things changed, he thought. Then they didn’t. And we forgot they could again.
Todbaum and Gorse seemed to be in an argument. “No, no, no, no, no.” Todbaum shoveled in chunky soup while grumbling at Gorse across the fire. Beans and potatoes and string beans in tomato broth, a meal that looked Spodosolian to Journeyman. The broth dribbled on Todbaum’s unshaven chin. “I don’t have to draw the line anywhere, Ed. I never met one single line worth drawing, my man, only crossing.”
Lines not worth drawing, only crossing. Hadn’t Todbaum said the exact same thing to Journeyman that first night, in a dorm room at Durfee Hall? The feeling was less of déjà vu than of an accordion of years, collapsing. Was Journeyman nothing, through four decades, except Todbaum’s dupe, his ratifying witness?
“So, that’s your endgame?” Edwin Gorse’s tone was sardonic, needling. “That’s why you came all this way? To burrow under the oce
an floor like a—” His words seemed to fail him.
“Like a pair of ragged claws, exactly.”
“And leave us to fight your battles.”
“Who’s ‘us’?” snorted Todbaum. He waved his spoon at the empty park. Theodore Nowlin stood by impassively, watching Todbaum talk and eat. Waiting for his glorious voyage. Did Nowlin eat anymore, or did he give every scrap to Todbaum? Perhaps he lived off the bark of trees.
“Eh?” said Gorse.
“Who’s ‘us’? Because I don’t see anyone much to speak of.” Todbaum nodded at Journeyman. “Hey ho, Sandman.” Journeyman nodded back. To the others he might have been invisible.
“To have followers, you have to lead,” Gorse whined. “Show people what the Streak can do. That’s how you got this far.”
“What do you know about how I got anywhere?” Sucking down the last of the stew, Todbaum tossed the bowl onto the snow-patched grass, then blotted his mouth in the crook of his sleeve.
“You told us, night after night.”
“Did I? I could have been shitting you, Ed.”
“What do you mean?”
“They’re all dead. I just couldn’t think of any way to break it to you sensitive types.”
“All dead what? How all dead where?” Gorse’s syntax seemed to break down, to be broken down, in Todbaum’s forge of nonsense. Possibly this had happened to Journeyman, irreversibly, a long while ago.
“It’s a wasteland. I mean, not like you imagine, not like I told you. I offered up the consoling fiction, just because I hate to let people down. I love you stupid freaks for keeping on keeping on. It’s a human thing, and I like human things. Homely things. What’s that German word for it, heimlich? Homelike?”
That doesn’t mean what you think it means, Journeyman almost said, but didn’t.
“So I tried to give you the Heimlich maneuver, har har. I made up all that total claptrap. There’s nothing out there but an irradiated landscape. I never got out of the Streak, for safety’s sake, and I never once drove over anything fresher than a maggot-filled braincase with a few scraps of hair, maybe some blackened lips, though the nose and ears were long eaten off. More often, bleached skulls. Loads of people died in their cars, and believe me, it is a pain in the goddamn ass. I twisted through more damn traffic, I steered over the veritable bones of the moon.”
“All dead?”
“Sorry.”
“But that doesn’t make any sense. The Cordon—”
“Hard to know if they’re in on the gag, huh?”
“The gag?”
“People believe what they need to believe. Like you, thinking your wife’s out there somewhere. Am I right, Gorse? That’s what keeps you going, isn’t it? The sweet nothing you whisper to those girls at night when you tuck ’em in?”
“You traveled all the way here to tell us that?”
Todbaum shrugged. “Sure. And for the grub.” His gaze flickered to the emptied bowl in the slushy grass.
“You’re saying there is no more America?”
“I’m it, sweetheart. The Last American.”
If you meet the Last American on the road, kill him. Another thought Journeyman didn’t utter. The trees that ringed them, they seemed to beat like quiet hearts.
“You’re a liar.” Gorse’s syntax, if he troubled to notice, was back on track. “The sky, the fallout—we’d know. And the sea.”
“Ha, you got me.” Todbaum raised his hands like a Western villain, but only for an instant. Journeyman suspected he pined for a better adversary. Gorse was too easy to torture. “That was just the cover story, but you’ve proven yourself worthy, Comrade Gorse. You deserve the truth.”
“Go ahead.”
“It’s all good. Blue skies, shiny happy people. They’re laughing their asses off at you dumb hick-topians.”
“Who?”
“Everybody, including probably your wife and her new boy toy. They fixed it, everyone’s back online, back on the grid. You’re living in an experimental preserve, Biosphere Twelve, I think that’s what they call it. They pumped the carbon out of the clouds and the sea, everything’s hunky-dory now, all nuke-powered VR tech and genetically modified caviar. Sure, the developing world’s still fucked, but hey, that’s why they call it developing. Meanwhile, someone decided to let you guys tough it out just for shits and giggles. Take you at your word, see if you could reinvent the wheel. Like a game of The Sims. You chose this backwater nirvana, Gorse—don’t ask me why. So, you get to live in it. With armed guards at the perimeter. Except you don’t even seem to need them. You’re obedient, like dogs, stuck behind the invisible fence of your self-regard. This place is a reality show. Only your clicks were down, so they sent me in to goose ratings. Like the way Spider-Man always somehow happens to appear on the cover of every failing comic book.”
“That’s the truth?”
The penultimate truth, Journeyman thought. Another always lay around the corner.
“We lost people. Every one of us lost someone we loved.” Maddy’s refrain. Journeyman was struck by Gorse’s unlikely sense of solidarity, conjured from behind that high hedge.
“They’re right where you left ’em,” said Todbaum. “Sipping on margaritas and watching Pornhub. And for a punch line, your screwball Erewhon is about to get shrunk down to the size of a single island, and you still don’t get it. You idiot-ass hippie.”
Nowlin stood by, silent as the trees. Why didn’t he protest? Was this what he’d been promised, once they burrowed off from Founder’s Park? Margaritas and Pornhub?
“So, that’s it?” said Gorse. His bitterness was a toxin poisoning only himself. “You crawl off to that island for safety, with the hippies you despise?”
No, Journeyman thought. To renew his proposal to Maddy. Their collaborative venture: to be Adam and Eve of the Unarrest.
“No fucking way. I told you, me and Ted, we’re lighting out back to civilization. We’ll just drop in on the islanders for a farewell picnic. When the wind’s right, I can smell them baking scones from here. Ought to give them one last thrill.” Todbaum’s mad voice was a fountain to fill the vacuum of night, and the vacuum of himself.
“This entire vehicle’s a state-of-the-art recording device, you know. The digital capture of my gallivant through the land of the yahoos ought to keep the punters entertained for weeks, if not months. Time to cash in.”
Punters and yahoos, the only two categories of human Todbaum recognized. The yahoos, Journeyman supposed, were those who couldn’t even afford to buy a ticket, or a monthly payment to keep their channels lit.
Journeyman had to speak, so at last he did.
“They’re here now,” he said. “They’re out on the road.”
“Where?” said Gorse.
“Past Brenda’s Folly Farm,” he said. “They set up a checkpoint on the road. Though they might be farther south through the woods, on the Drunkard’s Path.”
“Shit,” said Gorse. He stared into the dark, looking panicked. Journeyman supposed he was thinking of his girls. “Can I take your bicycle?”
“Go ahead.”
“Run, little man!” shouted Todbaum. “It’s time for your close-up!”
Gorse said nothing, just put his back to Todbaum, the Streak, the park. He wobbled on Journeyman’s wheels, straightened, was gone.
The Cordon’s arrival had stripped Journeyman. Nothing to deliver. Not even a backpack to deliver that nothing with. The night walk to Tinderwick hardly enticed him now. He shared in the fear he’d roused in Gorse: that Tinderwick would be overrun, if it wasn’t already. He said his good night and walked the dark path to Spodosol.
59.
Yet Another World, Part 2
IN YET ANOTHER WORLD, THE dystopian Earth—the alternate world from which the woman scientist reached out to her boyfriend on the counterpart postapocalyptic Earth—was in sway of a dark global corporation named UnSurAnce. The woman scientist worked at a start-up, helping develop a virtual reality experience called A Roo
m of One’s Own, which was proposed as the ultimate in seductive, all-senses-enveloping VR—a product intended, she believed, as a high-end toy. What she didn’t know was that her start-up was actually secretly funded—entirely owned, in fact—by UnSurAnce. A Room of One’s Own was intended not as a plaything for the wealthy but as a tool for manipulating the dispossessed masses—those unrooted by climate change, the workers made redundant by the onset of robots. The technology was meant to trick them into downloading out of their inconvenient human bodies, to live the remainder of their spans entirely inside a virtual reality mainframe. It was a toy engineered to beguile the user—the punter—into paying for the privilege of suicide.
Journeyman crept in. Spodosol was eerily dark. No fires, no lamps, the compound seemingly abandoned. Frightened, tired, he didn’t explore. He had no idea where matches and candles were kept. Maddy and Astur were gone. Journeyman curled beneath a woolen blanket on their couch. When he slept, he dreamed of the television show that had never existed. He slept swallowed in his and Todbaum’s grim vision. Maddy’s too, however little she wished to claim it. Journeyman dreamed he’d entered A Room of One’s Own and succumbed, mistaking it for reality. And that now all realms outside its boundary were unavailable to him. Lost.
60.
The Sinking-Under
HE WAS WOKEN IN THE first faint hour of dawn by a body standing over him where he slept, examining him by lamplight.
“I was just sleeping.” Journeyman bolted upright in stupid guilt, as though apprehended in the sick indulgence of his dream of virtuality.
“There were signs someone came in at night,” Cynthia Pitchings said. “I had to check.”
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