“I think I did this,” he said.
“What?”
“I think my hatred did this. I hated it all that much, Sandy. What I’d become. Those Malibu fucks with their private islands, their secret escape hatches. Worst people in the world. I was one of them, even if I was a thousand times smarter and bigger.”
Ah, yes. This had nothing to do with Kormentz. Todbaum had no idea Kormentz existed.
“So, give it up, Sandy, where do you look?”
“When I look at the Arrest?”
“Sure.”
“I don’t know. Maybe the natural world has a kind of imperative that we can’t know. That even if we’re part of it, we’re just one part.” Journeyman was surprised he’d located the words. They were stopgap, cobbled from beliefs he’d gathered others nearby might hold.
“Huh, some kind of animist shit? Nice try, I’ll give you that. For me, it’s consciousness. The only puzzle they never solved. My own consciousness, specifically. I’m not afraid to root around in the sub-basement. When I say bigger than those Malibu fucks, I mean unimaginably bigger, like a tesseract—bigger on the inside than on the outside. When I delve in there I see a lot of correspondences.”
“Correspondences . . . between?”
“What’s the story I couldn’t quit puzzling over? Yet Another World. Now look.”
“You think we’re living in your pitch?”
“It all came out of my head. Except one part.”
In this craziness, Journeyman nevertheless knew not to imagine that Todbaum meant the thousands of draft pages he, Journeyman, had elucidated from what had come out of Todbaum’s head. “What part is that?”
“Madeleine’s. You remember.”
Journeyman did. He said nothing.
“That’s where we are. I mean, open your eyes, Sandman.”
“In my sister’s head?”
“In some combination of the two. That’s the point. Me and her. Not one or the other.”
“You and Maddy made the world?”
“We were living in mine, now we’re living in hers. We went through the lens. You know what I’m out here chasing, Sandman?” There were tears in Todbaum’s eyes.
“What?”
“Something sustainable.” From the pilot of the nuclear-fueled, espresso-making guillotine the word was obscene. “We’re going to solve this together, I can feel it. Bring the halves together again.”
Todbaum believing he’d seen the Arrest coming; this was only typical. He’d made billions betting on a hunch about the culture’s appetite for tentpole movies about giant robots from outer space. He now claimed to have the only functioning supercar—he was the only Todbaum. Why not believe he could do better than live at the Arrest’s mercy? Journeyman felt the nightmare logic land in him, like the hook of an old song. Todbaum wanted to break the Arrest open, put his signature on it. To piss inside the tent, to use his own language.
Todbaum pulled Journeyman into an embrace. Here at last was the thing the supercar had been designed to cradle and nourish, to usher eastward—the yolk in the eggshell. Journeyman felt Todbaum’s thin shoulders. Todbaum’s dumb unrepentant belly, pressed against his own. Todbaum had been thin and slack in college, a walking question mark. Then fat and hale in his ascendancy, years through which he retained a trainer, cook, and masseuse, when he’d entertained every appetite and habit in the book, when each night had been devoted to self-murder and each morning to reanimation of the corpse. Now, eggplant-shaped, he sagged into Journeyman’s arms like an overripe one. No beneficiary of post-Arrest physical labor—captive in his supercar, what had he done besides push buttons?—he’d nevertheless shed weight, like everyone.
They parted on the basis by which life was lived now: Journeyman would return with something good to eat. A promise he could keep. Todbaum dilated the portal, and Journeyman was released to climb the supercar’s external ladder.
Exiting the park, Journeyman spooked a string of wild turkeys bobbing through the reeds. Unlikely birds, Darwinian jokes, ready food. They’d thrived lately, population exploding thanks to a climate-based shift in the fates of their predators. Journeyman didn’t pause to cede them the road, as he’d ordinarily have done. They bolted into the sun-soft woods.
Why had Journeyman allowed Eke to place Todbaum in his hands? Why couldn’t they have just murdered him?
The Blue Streak was too strong or they’d have done it.
He had to protect his sister, her farm, the present state of reality, all.
He, Journeyman, the town joke, the conveyor of packages, the emissary.
The day, the town, the road, all was as Journeyman left it—peaceable, pensive, continuous. Arrested. So long as he didn’t turn his head to see what lay behind: the Blue Streak’s occupation of the town commons. As he crossed the ruined paving where the turkeys had thronged, toward the shrouded path to Spodosol Ridge Farm, there to deliver some rendition of his crazy news of the Blue Streak’s arrival, Journeyman mourned his present world, with that deep chest ache certifying a-thing-already-lost.
19.
The Starlet Apartments, Part 2
DID JOURNEYMAN CALL THE POLICE? (“Two recent college graduates slipped off in one another’s company. I’m worried the attraction may not be mutual.”) He did not. Did he call his and Maddy’s parents? (“The thing is, Dad, my friend is a—”) Well, what was Todbaum?
Journeyman didn’t have to decide. No, he conducted his own search, first on foot, then, humiliatingly, by taxicab. He hit the bars, the widest circuit, the Dresden, the Viper Room, Musso & Frank, places he and Todbaum had visited and others they’d intended to. He invaded the Chateau Marmont. Journeyman pictured his sister and his friend on a revel, in other words. As though Todbaum had simply nudged Journeyman aside and plugged Maddy into his place—maybe they were trying to pick up women together. Although it wasn’t the likeliest picture in the world, it was the best Journeyman could conjure up.
He had to direct the last cab back to a cash machine near the Starlet just to pay off the meter. His account was below five hundred dollars. He walked to Bob’s Big Boy again, the second time this day, one which had turned to night, his first night in Los Angeles not in the company of Todbaum. Had something happened to his friend and his sister? The question was whether something had happened to Maddy. When Journeyman walked back, he checked what had become Todbaum’s usual parking spot. The BMW was returned.
He ran up to find them. The suite was still empty, as he’d left it. Journeyman’s sense of helplessness, instilled by hours at the mercy of Los Angeles without a vehicle, was now a self-fulfilling thing. He’d been taught the name for this in college: learned helplessness. Todbaum’s BMW seemed to move of its own accord. Meanwhile the suite doors locked and unlocked themselves, the humans refusing to appear. He stared at the empty rooms in dumb wonder, as if contemplating an M. C. Escher drawing.
When sleep began to insist itself, Journeyman stretched out on the couch, where Maddy had camped. This wasn’t in solidarity, exactly. More that a retreat to his room might invite further shenanigans at his expense. He wanted to stake out the entrance. Perhaps he should drag a pillow and blanket down to the street and sleep across the hood of the BMW so it couldn’t be started again without his knowledge, but no. That was the onset of the crazy thinking. No one interrupted his sleep, and he didn’t wake until late the next morning.