Journeyman, as was his responsibility, delivered food for the three of them. Drenka still wouldn’t let Journeyman through the door, but after a week or so he managed a question.
“Can we . . . visit sometime?”
“I don’t know. Maybe, later.”
“Later tonight?”
“Uh-uh. The girls need me.”
He returned with fresh bread and sausages, the first sausages since the night on Quarry Island. Drenka accepted the package. When Journeyman suggested he come inside, she shook her head. “They’re reading,” she said. “I’ll walk with you instead. Down by the water.”
“That’s good.”
“I saw you on the island,” Drenka said, once they stood in the overgrown lawn sloping behind the hospital.
“I saw you too.”
“You knew the man in the car.”
“Yes. Peter Todbaum.”
“He was your friend.”
“Once, I guess.”
“But your sister hates him.”
“Yes,” Journeyman admitted. “I guess she does.”
“I want you to tell me why he came here. And why he had to go—up there.”
“It’s a long story.”
“You’re a writer, I heard.”
“I was.”
“Take some notes. You have plenty of time.”
“And then we can hang out?”
“We’ll see. First, I’m going to help these girls get their heads screwed on right.”
She told him why she lived as she did, among them and not. In the library. When she’d first appeared, Augustus and Maddy had each come calling, to ascertain her purposes. To offer welcome, and perhaps a job. A role. Drenka held them at arm’s length. “I’d lived in a place a lot like Spodosol, in Lincolnville,” she said. “A good organic farm, at first. Seemed like a place I could stay. It went bad in a hurry.”
“Bad how?”
“Just bullshit power games. Little tin dictator types, but the passive-aggressive variety. Nothing I could work with, so I came here.”
“By rowboat?”
“Once I got to the coast, yeah. I had to get around the Cordon people.”
Journeyman thought of Todbaum. This might be all they wanted from him, apart from espresso: persuasive testimony from outside. Drenka had lurked, through those long weeks they’d listened and despaired over Todbaum’s lies. What if she could answer the simple questions: Was their peninsula a prison or a citadel? Did the Cordon exaggerate the dangers outside? Were the towns under protection from nightmares, from raiders seeking their food and shelter? Or were they the Cordon’s captives, held for their farming and sausage-making, their pickles and preserves?
Yet Drenka demurred. “Lincolnville was sort of like here,” she said. “Only more fucked-up.”
“But what was outside Lincolnville?”
She shrugged. “Other stuff. I came here when I got sick of it there. I only know what I know.”
Journeyman confessed how in the days before the island he’d entertained an elaborate theory. When Todbaum described his traveling companion, the woman he’d nicknamed Pittsburgh, Journeyman imagined, with fascinated horror, that Drenka was Pittsburgh.
Who even knew if Pittsburgh even existed? In Todbaum’s account he’d expelled the woman from the supercar at the outskirts of New York. In Journeyman’s fantasy, during the trip together she’d learned of Todbaum’s plans and come to warn them. Even to take revenge. At the peak of paranoia, Journeyman imagined that Drenka had met secretly with Maddy and Astur, to plan the ceremony. The trap, the lighthouse.
Drenka only laughed.
“I never met your friend. I certainly never would have gotten into his car.”
“I see that now.”
“You thought I rowed up the coast from New York City?”
Journeyman was embarrassed. “I didn’t think about that part of it.”
“I rowed from Lincolnville Beach. Even that nearly killed me.”
“Of course.”
“Tell the truth in what you write,” she said then.
“I’m afraid,” said Journeyman.
“Afraid of what?”
“That I’ll arouse your contempt.”
“I can’t afford contempt. Contempt is too expensive nowadays. I’m just careful.”
“Careful?”
“Of places like this. All the fucking drama. You and your crazy sister, her and her organic army. You scare me. But I don’t have contempt for you, or anyone.”
“Afraid you won’t like me, then.”
“Liking you might be even more expensive. I’ll see you later, Mr. Duplessis.”
78.
Journeyman Time Averaged Himself
THE ARREST HADN’T ABOLISHED THE regime of mirrors, the way it had those of gasoline and pixels. Mirrored surfaces were everywhere, even for those like Journeyman who’d excluded them from the walls of their homes. The windows of the library and other buildings, caught at the right angle of sunlight. Or of a firelit interior, at night. The rearviews of junked cars. A group of local kids had snapped a number of these off and mounted them high on the rocky beach above Founder’s Park, to form a glinting array. Like the old fields of signal-seeking SETI satellite dishes, these beckoned to who-knew-who, to imaginary aircraft.
Journeyman indulged in deliberate Time Averaging. An inquiry into the lurking matter of the self. He did it from Astur’s boat. Gliding into a mooring, moments before reaching out with a docking line. The water wasn’t always smooth, but often enough. Journeyman puzzled on his own face. Like Narcissus, though with results less flattering. Gazing into those depths, Journeyman thought also of the Arthurian Lady of the Lake. No one, he was certain, would hand him a sword.
79.
Those Birds and That Tower
HIS JOB WAS UNCHANGED. DELIVERIES. From and to. Here and there. Jarred and jellied stuff, pickles and pesto from Spodosol, eggs from Proscenium Farm, greens from Brenda’s Folly. Meat scraps to Victoria and Victoria’s sausages to everyone including the emissaries from the Cordon, whom Journeyman met at the North Grange once a week. They sent new faces these days. Younger, mostly. The elders had declined to appear since the days of the occupation. Were they embarrassed? Or bored? Journeyman assisted Augustus, helped him murder the ducks. His rounds were familiar. He skipped the Lake of Tiredness. As with the Grange, no one new had come to live there. The path was overgrown. In time Kormentz’s exile cabin would be forgotten.
Journeyman had one new client. Twice a week he crossed to the island on Astur’s boat. Astur went to check on Eke and Walt; she evidently felt responsible for them. While they visited, Journeyman climbed the tower, his new backpack loaded with rations for Todbaum.
The tower’s struts made a ladder. It wasn’t difficult to climb except in driving rain or sharp wind. Journeyman waved his arms to scatter the crows. Having followed it from the mainland, they kept a permanent vigil atop the supercar. Never fewer than seven or eight of them there. The same ones or not, Journeyman couldn’t know. Their shit streaked the chrome detailing and cockpit dome. Someday might cover it entirely. More than one had died, perhaps from the radiation, like the deer. Journeyman found the bodies at the base of the tower. One carcass had wedged into the seam where the crab claw gripped the Blue Streak’s chassis. It slowly dried and dissolved until nothing remained but a few blue-black feathers. Did Todbaum encourage them with tidbits when Journeyman was gone from sight? They did seem to creep closer each time Journeyman rose to his own perch.
Journeyman had come to take for granted the mingled stink: butane, Kahlúa, melted copper, fart. How lon
g the Blue Streak could function in its declining state—partly crushed, tipped at an angle, never sheltered from sun or wind or the depredations of the crows—Journeyman couldn’t guess. It did seem to have an inexhaustible supply of power. At night one could see its glow from the top of Tinderwick Hill. Word was it was visible as far off as Granite Head.
Todbaum never spoke, but listened. He left his door open so long as Journeyman was willing to perch on the arm of the crab-claw trap, the threshold of Todbaum’s cell. Journeyman read aloud from the pages that lived in his backpack. Together they worked their way through The Pillow Book of Jerome Kormentz. What would they read once they’d finished? Maybe Journeyman would bring the file he’d been preparing for Drenka. Or extemporize a serial, a shaggy-dog story. Further Adventures of the Blue Streak. Some people liked stories in which they themselves appeared.
Having read a page of Kormentz’s book, Journeyman freed it to the breeze. From the tower he could track the pages, sometimes all the way into the water. Other times they fluttered into the treetops or out of sight beyond the cliffs. Sometimes the crows, vigilant for a handout, took the bait, dive-bombed. Journeyman had more than once seen one wing off to a selfish branch to gobble a page, certain they’d gained a prize. In that sense, Journeyman felt, the white shit glazing the Blue Streak’s dome could be taken as a recirculated papier-mâché art piece, a late contribution to Astur’s tower. Or an encaustic form of literary criticism.
They were tired of the old stories, those birds. They wished to hear new ones.
Acknowledgments
Thanks: Daniel Halpern, Zachary Wagman, Eric Simonoff, Miriam Parker, Gabriella Doob, Michael O’Connor, Kim Stanley Robinson, Chandler Klang Smith, Julie Orringer, Elvia Wilk, Steve Benson, Phil Norris, Marge Kernan, Mara Faye Lethem, Anna Moschovakis, and Dr. Neil Martinson.
And Steve Erickson, for The Intervention.
About the Author
JONATHAN LETHEM is the bestselling author of eleven novels, including The Feral Detective, The Fortress of Solitude, and Motherless Brooklyn, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award. He currently teaches creative writing at Pomona College in California.
WWW.JONATHANLETHEM.COM
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Also by Jonathan Lethem
NOVELS
The Feral Detective
Gun, with Occasional Music
Amnesia Moon
As She Climbed Across the Table
Girl in Landscape
Motherless Brooklyn
The Fortress of Solitude
You Don’t Love Me Yet
Chronic City
Dissident Gardens
A Gambler’s Anatomy
NOVELLAS
This Shape We’re In
SHORT STORY COLLECTIONS
The Wall of the Sky, the Wall of the Eye
Kafka Americana (with Carter Scholz)
Men and Cartoons
How We Got Insipid
Lucky Alan and Other Stories
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
THE ARREST. Copyright © 2020 by Jonathan Lethem. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
“Atopia” from Atopia © 2019 by Sandra Simonds. Published by Wesleyan University Press and reprinted with permission.
Cover design by Allison Saltzman
Cover illustration © Dexter Maurer
Illustration here © DC Comics, from Superman’s Pal, Jimmy Olsen ISSUE: 133. Cover date: October, 1970, by Jack Kirby.
Illustration here courtesy of STUDIOCANAL Films Ltd. Photograph by John Brown.
Ecco® and HarperCollins® are trademarks of HarperCollins Publishers.
FIRST EDITION
Digital Edition NOVEMBER 2020 ISBN: 978-0-06-293879-4
Version 09182020
Print ISBN: 978-0-06-293878-7
About the Publisher
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Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
I. Tuesday 1. Frost Heaves
2. The Lake of Tiredness
3. Time Averaging
4. The Pillow Book of Jerome Kormentz
5. The Arrest, Such as Journeyman Understood It
6. An Old Friend
7. The Starlet Apartments, Part 1
8. The Chaos Inside the Quiet
9. Three Towns
10. Madeleine
11. Permanent Vacation
12. The Blue Streak, Part 1
13. Yet Another World, Part 1
14. The Blue Streak, Part 2
15. Things Todbaum Told Journeyman About the Blue Streak
16. Founder’s Park
17. Island and Lighthouse
18. Before Journeyman Left Him, Todbaum Grew Sentimental
19. The Starlet Apartments, Part 2
20. His Last Flight
21. Astur
22. The Starlet Apartments, Part 3
23. Journeyman Was a Middle Person
24. Every Vessel Finds Ground
25. Loss
II. October 26. October
27. The First Story
28. Journeyman’s Rounds Had Expanded
29. The Woman Who Lived in the Library
30. The Second Story
31. By the Time Maddy Went to Founder’s Park
32. The Eighth or Tenth Story
33. Footage, Napkin
34. Journeyman Took a Disco Nap
35. Journeyman Sometimes Tried to Think About the Cordon
36. We Lose Ourselves
37. A Big Meeting, Part 1
38. What Did Journeyman Want?
39. A Big Meeting, Part 2
40. Aftermath of a Big Meeting
41. His Lonely Rooms
42. Drenka
43. Dinner With Jane and Lucius
44. Postapocalyptic and Dystopian Stories
45. What Did the Blue Streak Want?
46. Special Rider
47. Gorse
48. On Astur’s Boat Again
49. Half the Tow
n, and His Sister Too
50. What Were They Building Up There?
III. Winter 51. Custody
52. News and Rumors
53. The Worth of Ritual Action
54. Punters
55. Nowlin’s Plan
56. Journeyman’s Affiliations
57. No Trumpets
58. The Last American
59. Yet Another World, Part 2
60. The Sinking-Under
61. The Fairy Village
62. Recrossing, Rescue, Recon
63. The Fire
64. Gone
65. Bubble
IV. Yet Another Arrest 66. The Circle of the Known
67. Another Arrest, Part 1
68. A Picture
69. Another Arrest, Part 2
70. Drenka Was There
71. Last Stories
72. Another Arrest, Part 3
73. One More Picture for the Files
V. Aftermath 74. Breakfast
75. Cynthia Pitchings’s Account
76. The Note
77. Citadel or Prison?
78. Journeyman Time Averaged Himself
79. Those Birds and That Tower
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also by Jonathan Lethem
Copyright
About the Publisher