The Arrest

by Jonathan Lethem

  Just one fire was lit, in the center of the camp, far from the tower. Jane and Lucius placed bowls of some savory mash in the hands of any who approached. There, Journeyman’s sister and her lover sat talking to a couple of the newest arrivals, Augustus among them. Augustus still wept. He’d come into the circle and told what he’d seen, the scorched remains. Was Journeyman numbed? Yes. Numbed and in wonder and wondering. Jane put a bowl into his hands. It held beans and spinach and tomato. Journeyman felt starved after the terrors and disappointments of town. The peninsula now under a cloud of occupation. Journeyman in a vision beheld the Arrest entire. Or anyway felt he did. The Arrest obliterated assumptions. It shrank the world, the circle of the known. This place, the island to which they’d fallen back, was the consoling world yet further shrunken. Augustus still wept. The butcher hadn’t been a butcher, before. He’d been a manager and teller in Tinderwick’s branch of one of Maine’s regional banks.

  The talk changed again. Maddy spoke as though offering a tour of the island. “It’s bedrock, there’s no tunneling through,” she said. “And the fir stand is too dense. No way that thing can crawl up the leeside beach.”

  “So?” This was Lucius.

  “So he’ll circle the island and feel his way up the quarry path. There’s no back door. He does that or keeps on.”

  “Him and Theodore Nowlin,” Journeyman pointed out, eager to be included. It was the only thing he knew. “I saw them last night, before they embarked.”

  “Is someone watching the beach?” Lucius asked, ignoring Journeyman.

  “We’ll hear it coming,” said Astur.

  “So, what’s the plan here?” Journeyman asked. “And does everyone know it except me?”

  Was it Journeyman’s imagination? Did all at the fire turn to him? Did some smile? Was Journeyman merely the comic relief in this story? He sat with his bowl on an upright section of tree trunk. His sister sat beside him. Ed Waltz came nearer, and put his hands on Journeyman’s shoulders from behind. Ed had been crying too.

  “Eat,” Maddy said.

  “Yes.”

  “You’ll need your strength for later.”

  Journeyman felt the pressure of their averted gazes. “I get it now,” he said to his sister. “The whole deal with this island.”

  “What is the whole deal with this island?”

  “You’re throwing me that surprise party I always said I never wanted.”

  “I knew you’d guess, Sandy.”

  67.

  Another Arrest, Part 1

  IT BEGAN FOR JOURNEYMAN WITH a sunset walk, led by Astur. The island, clotted with scraped bluffs, stands of pine, and bunkerlike mounds of quarry slag, couldn’t be circumnavigated. But it was riddled with trails. The oldest, boot-engraved in granite dust a century ago. The newest, grass or bramble flattened in recent weeks. Astur seemed intent on walking them all in the magic-hour evening.

  They strolled down to the old landing for the quarry barges. The predicted spot for Todbaum’s arrival. The wide beach lay ringed with unlit bonfires, as if prepared for some ceremony. This was the clearing where the assemblage Journeyman thought of as the crab claw had been welded together, yet now the thing wasn’t in evidence. How did it vanish? Journeyman asked Astur. She guided him to the surf’s edge. The tidemark was at two-thirds on the rocks, still coming in. Astur pointed. Amid the disguising rockweed fronds the claw tips were just discernible, protruding from the muck in which the vast apparatus had been sunk, presumably at low tide.

  Journeyman didn’t ask more.

  They climbed to the tower that rose through the trees. Dodie Metzger stood nearly at its top, disassembling the flat platform on which she stood, lowering planks by rope and pulley. At the foot Paulo untied the planks and shoved them aside in a heap. Journeyman realized he’d never distinguished tower from scaffolding. That husk now mostly stripped away, twin tensile cables, thick as arms, lay exposed. They ran on brackets down the tower’s ocean face, then fed through winches low to the ground, south through the impassable woods. The winches and cable were boatyard stuff. Ed Waltz’s work before the Arrest had been to winter the large summer boats, dragging them in and out of the water. Ed was the winchman, then. Now again.

  Another old path snaked to the cliffs. Astur led. The moon was risen, two-thirds, like the tide. The cables led to this spot. They’d been bolted through the vast weatherworn, birdshit-splattered granite block that had been so long abandoned, staring off to sea. Then secured on the block’s far side by a new steel plate. The cliff where the block sat had been worked too, strategically undermined, the ground beneath it broken. The granite hunk now jutted over the precipice, threatening to tumble into the sea, or at least to the thin pebble beach that lay below.

  Journeyman smelled steel shavings, rotting mussel shells seabirds had smashed on the granite block’s roof, thyme wafting from underfoot.

  The moon large enough to hold his thoughts.

  Journeyman stepped to the edge. Nothing below apart from an overturned rowboat, dragged up just above the tide line.

  The same rowboat?

  68.

  A Picture

  WEEKS LATER JOURNEYMAN TRIMMED TWO more pictures out of library books. This reminded him of the tower.

  69.

  Another Arrest, Part 2

  THE MOON CLIMBED AND SHRANK. Lucius brewed morning tea on the remains of the central campfire—he wouldn’t let anyone else make it; he was fed up with their bad cooking, here at the end of the world. No fires were lit, on this darkening island. They waited. Someone produced a guitar. There was always a guitar. The coffee went around, and cake too. There was always cake, in foil that had been painstakingly rinsed and dried a hundred times. Some stood on the beach watching the sea glitter. Ed futzed at the winches. As the dark fell their eyes adjusted. Soon it was evident they had watchers on that other shore. New occupants of Founder’s Park, Cordon people. They’d lit fires of their own. Presumably stood watching, looking out as those on Quarry Island looked out. They’d have read the signs, the tread marks grinding into the water. The Blue Streak was strung between them, on its way. But nearer to the island now. Quite near the island.

  In the park, two fires, one bigger than the other. One grew and grew and then the roof lit, revealing the shape. The whole frame erupted. They’d torched the gazebo.

  Down by the water Augustus went on quietly talking with others about Edwin Gorse, about what he and Journeyman had seen in the charred kitchen.

  They spotted the disturbance in the water. The churning in the field of moonglint. As if a pot of spaghetti had come to boil beneath the waves. A seething, tracked by wheeling black birds. Shouldn’t it be seagulls, not crows? Crows were perhaps Todbaum’s special envoy. They flapped off overhead into the trees. The water’s dancing reflections gave way to the lifting glow. The bald pale lamp seeping up from the floor of the harbor, a kind of reply to the moon.

  Haloed within, two figures riding. Mr. Toad in his motorcar, and, bent over his shoulder, the idiot-Gandalf, Nowlin. Sit down, Journeyman begged Nowlin silently, in the instant before the trap was sprung. He was an old man, after all.

  The Blue Streak sought purchase on the dry shore, treads shrieking from beneath the sucking sand. At that instant, the halves of the trap emerged. The claws, sprung by the supercar’s weight. Robotic pincers festooned with seaweed and black clay, stinking of salt rot; these rose along either side of Todbaum’s vehicle, surrounding it. Less a crab claw than a kind of Venus flytrap. Not particularly swift, but neither was the Blue Streak, not at this vulnerable moment, its Darwinian crawl from sea to land. The halves clamped around the Streak’s sides, scraping and grinding as they secured themselves around its treads and chassis. The four topmost fingers of the trap rose as far as the glass dome, met there, and intertwined. The clutching fingers eerily underlit. Here is the church, here is the steeple. Open the doors, and see all the people.

  Journeyman readied himself for the dome to be crushed like an eggshell. For
Todbaum and Nowlin to ooze forth like yolks. No. It held without shattering. Journeyman lost sight of the men inside. Did they cower on the floor? Or had they moved into the hidden parts of the supercar: engine room, bunk, toilet?

  The Streak’s treads seized up in the trap’s grip. Though innumerable small valves and tubes and doodads that ran along the outside surface of the supercar were crushed by the bite of the trap, the integrity of the thing was uncompromised. The cockpit unshattered. Yet the thing calmed. Its engines faded to a whine, barely audible over the surf and the roaring of blood in Journeyman’s ears. The two machines—slick doomsday craft, grimy artisanal nemesis—had married into one impossible object.

  The quiet lasted barely a minute before it was drowned in the grinding and screeching, from high on the hill, of Ed Waltz’s machine. The winches turned and the twin cables revealed themselves from beneath the sand as they leapt to tautness. They not only reached from the tower to the titanic block on the far cliff. They also extended under the beach and into the sea, anchored to the trap. The whole island was a machine, Journeyman saw now. Cantilevered from claw to tower to perching ballast of granite. Tick by tick, the ancient winches that had hauled boats from the sea now heaved the knuckled welter of claw-and-car past the high-surf mark, onto the high beach where they’d arrayed themselves. Hauled it into their midst, where it was licked with reflected flame.

  Maddy had been igniting the bonfires. Renee and Ernesto and Dodie and Nils and Andy the shrink and Jane and Lucius were with her, bearing shovels and rakes. Journeyman began to feel he understood, if only in part. The dry wood sprang rapidly to blazing. With shovels and rakes, those on the beach tipped and shoved the fresh orange coals to situate beneath the arms of the apparatus, the claw trap, the vise in which the supercar remained held, tipped slightly upward, immobilized entirely. What better conductor of the woodfire’s heat than that bare rusted iron? Journeyman thought of the worth of ritual action and wondered at the words. As though for a time words had been banished even from rising into mind. No one had spoken, it seemed to Journeyman, since the gazebo had burned, so many fires ago. At a glance that site lay dark. Even then, had words been uttered? Or just murmurs?

  But there was one talker here on the island among them. He recommenced his barbaric yawp now, over the Blue Streak’s trumpetlike speaker.

  “I’ll hand it to you, Maddy, I really did get my dick entangled in your IUD here. Only I’ve seen the specs on the Streak, and I’m here to tell you: the melting point of this hafnium-carbon alloy is something like three-K Celsius. Nothing you’re liable to approach with your driftwood and shit, though it’s a real pretty fireworks show.”

  The winches were halted, for now. The Streak’s treads unflailing against their captivity. Had they been stilled by the claw’s hold? Or had Todbaum chosen to conserve his energies for some next struggle or stratagem? His voice went silent too. The only sound, the crackle and hiss of the flames massed around the caged supercar. That and the waves lapping. Then Maddy stepped up and spoke in a voice loud enough to be heard where Journeyman stood. He knew the Blue Streak had microphones to convey it into Todbaum’s cockpit too.

  “Let Nowlin come down.”

  “Nice try!” barked Todbaum through the speaker. “Ted’s my wingman. Me and him have places to be and people to go. You lost your chance to team up, Madeleine. We’ll write you a postcard.”

  “Send him down, we’ll scatter the fire.”

  “I don’t give a crap about the fire, that’s what I’m trying to say. I’ll send him down when you disengage the Jaws of Life here.”

  Journeyman saw Maddy gesture then to those who fed dry wood to the fires. The supercar nearly engulfed in showering sparks as the fuel ignited. Within shroud of smoke and flame the machine glowed, unholy with radiation, though Journeyman couldn’t make out the human forms within the cockpit. How could Nowlin entrust himself to the ladder, if Todbaum were to open the hatch? The Streak’s exterior would be white-hot.

  “I get it now,” said Todbaum. “This is your idea of a collaboration. You’re putting on this Kabuki episode for the gang on the mainland. They need to see you gave it a try. It’s a good show, Maddy, maybe a great show. If you do their dirty work for them, maybe everything goes back the way it was, hunky-dory, weekly delivery of duck eggs and kale puttanesca in mason jars. Maybe it doesn’t matter whether I croak or not, huh?”

  Maddy didn’t answer. The fires rose. Those on the beach stood back, a semicircle of shining faces. A few tended the fires. Eke and Walt had appeared and were among those working with great zeal with rakes to push the coals nearer, beneath the armature and treads.

  “This thing was built to withstand worse than your paleo-guerrilla moves. I’ll be sipping martinis while you torch this fucking island to the bedrock.”

  Across the water, the park lay silent. Todbaum might be right about that much: they’d be watching them now.

  “Actually, I take it back. I’m looking at the dashboard indicator, congrats, you’re on the brink of inducing a core meltdown in my reactor. I’m about to go all Chernobyl on your ass. What a way to go out, for a bunch of granola-heads. I dunno if the blast’ll be enough to actually take out the Cordon too, or just poison the topsoil for a hundred-mile radius. Guess it amounts to the same thing.”

  Could Todbaum induce a catastrophe out of sheer petulance? Did the supercar’s controls include autodestruct? Should the Spodosolians bet their island refuge on the Last American’s nonsuicidality? Journeyman’s thoughts drifted then, from the arrangement in steel and sand and fire that lay before him, to that life now vanished outside of the time-smashing, irrelevancy-besotted machine that was his head.

  He and Todbaum had once invaded a party at one of the great despised fraternities, Delta Kappa Epsilon. After liberating an unguarded foil packet of cocaine from a desktop, they’d locked themselves in the fraternity’s attic, to snort it. The frat brothers came in numbers to the attic’s door, bellowing for them to come out. Todbaum drew a Bic lighter from his pocket and flicked it against an overhead smoke detector and the building erupted in sirens. Campus security and the fire department came and freed Journeyman and Todbaum from the attic, frog-marching them past the outraged frat boys. A week later the two were tried by a student counsel grievance committee, given academic probation.

  “Which hill do you want to die on?”—another of Todbaum’s favorite sayings. By crawling underwater from the park he’d opted for arrest by Maddy, instead of the Cordon. Why not? Todbaum had crossed the Arrestlands to keep alive a story in his head. Now, on an island at the end of land and time, the hunter had been captured by the game. What did it mean to Todbaum, to deliver the crisis of himself into Maddy’s hands? For Todbaum the higher cause might be to keep from dying on the hill of yourself.

  Journeyman’s thoughts seemed as ill-fitted as those oceangoing crows. Like the crows, they hovered over Todbaum.

  He was startled back to the proceedings on the beach. Todbaum had dilated the porthole and freed Theodore Nowlin. Eke and Walt kicked and raked away the chunks of fire nearest to the Blue Streak and stepped up to help him down from the ladder. Was it banishment, or had Nowlin changed his mind, bargained for escape? With Eke and Walt’s guidance, the tall man vaulted free, then staggered a ways from the flame-licked supercar, to end on his knees in the sand. He’d survived both the ocean tunneling and being roasted in the cockpit, not the gentlest ticket to the island. He’d rejoined them now, woken from his dream of returning. Quarry Island had been far enough to go, after all. Todbaum was going no farther.

  Maddy and Astur and others rushed to damp the flames, to smother the coals with garlands of wet seaweed. Hiss and steam covered the beach as the fires quickly sputtered, became wreckage, beach crap. The moon’s light again prevailed. That, and the cockpit’s glow. The Streak lay like an egg cradled in a fox’s mouth. No one inside but Todbaum. Journeyman thought he saw him, shrouded in steam and light. The winches groaned again to life, then began a steady clankin
g as they ratcheted the trap and its contents inch by inch up the beach. Toward the quarry path. Toward the tower.

  70.

  Drenka Was There

  JOURNEYMAN SPOTTED DRENKA THEN, AS they trudged silently up the dark path behind the shrieking, grinding mass. When she’d joined their company he couldn’t know. But it was her rowboat parked below the cliff. She saw him see her and she almost smiled, Journeyman could have sworn it.

  71.

  Last Stories

  TODBAUM RAILED THROUGH HIS PROGRESS uphill, toward the tower. Difficult to make him out over the effort of the device, the scrape of metal and stone. His amplified voice became part of that roar. By the time the winches quit, having dragged the claw-bound supercar to a point of rest at the tower’s foot, Todbaum had gone into a bargaining phase. Now he entreated not to Maddy, but to anyone who’d listen.

  “Who wants coffee? How long’s it been for you poor sonsabitches?”

  No one spoke.

  “Pity. We could get a nice thing going on this island if you’d just crown me King Turd. Speaking of which, you got working shitholes here? ’Cause I feature immaculate facilities; you can ask Nowlin if you want. Anyone requiring an ‘interlude,’ as my mom used to call it, is welcome aboard.”

  Theodore Nowlin had staggered up the incline, still supported by Eke and Walt. Todbaum’s old company in the park, Journeyman noted.

  “The more the merrier, as you know, it’s the shit that keeps the show running.”

  Ed Waltz and Dodie Metzger and Nils and Renee and Ernesto busily engaged the undercarriage of the crab to the armature of the tower. It was a kind of train track, Journeyman saw. A railroad pointed to the sky.

  “I see what you’re getting at here. It’s in a spirit I endorse, believe me—every dollar is on the screen! But if you think I’m going to engage thruster rockets or some such shit to complete the picture, you got another thing coming. I can’t for the life of me see how you’re closing this deal.”