Journeyman suspected we also did this to the world. It must be the case.
4.
The Pillow Book of Jerome Kormentz
JOURNEYMAN WAS OF AVERAGE HEIGHT, but Kormentz made him feel tall. Kormentz had always reminded Journeyman of a fish-person, his eyes goggled, his perpetually smiling lips pursed, lower lip a valentine, his thin hair streamed almost invisibly back to cover his scalp. As Kormentz aged, this impression deepened, despite the effect of the Time Averaging. Maybe someday the resemblance would climax and he’d leap into the Lake of Tiredness, shiver into goldfish form, and vanish. Kormentz’s mystical bent made it seem possible.
“Good morning, Sandy!” Journeyman’s given name was Alexander Duplessis. Mostly these days he was called Sandy. His family nickname, it had been propagated locally by his sister, before he could intervene.
“Hello, Jerome.”
“Storyteller, tell me a story.” A standard provocation from Kormentz.
“I’m not your storyteller or anyone’s, Jerome.”
“No, you’re the butcher, now. Did you bring me a lean chop? A portion of somebody’s beloved lamb, named Freckle or Daisy?” He scurried alongside Journeyman as they moved toward his deck.
“I brought you some pig. Good enough for soup.”
“But what’s the pig’s name? A he- or a she-pig? Did you slaughter her yourself? Have you grown more accustomed to it? You know how I’m starved for names, Sandy. Something for my brain-soup. I can live without the people if you’ll just give me the names. Then I’ll invent the people for myself.”
“Here’s a story,” Journeyman said. “Ed Waltz got a tractor to move a few dozen yards across his field, using human waste mixed with the used oil from Mike Raritan’s deep fryer. He thinks that might be the recipe.” The people of the Cordon had functional motorcycles. Nobody knew the secret of their fuel, except that their rides smelled like shithouses.
“Ed and Mike, that’s a start. How about Sarah and Jennifer and Penny? How about Susan? What can you tell me about Susan? Has anyone new moved into the yurt?”
“I’m not sure what you’re talking about. If it’s the Susan I’m thinking of, she’s one of those who left.”
“Pity.”
“Here’s what I have for you.” Journeyman unslung his backpack, a relic of the before. It read TELLURIDE FILM FESTIVAL 2020 on the straps, though faded almost to illegibility. He’d gotten it as a freebie. There’d been a backpack like it, each full of Criterion Blu-rays and other swag, waiting in each guest’s hotel room. Had others been subsequently stained, as this one had, by rinsings in the blood of fresh-slaughtered ducks and sheep, or by lard-smeared mason jars of new-rendered pig parts, such as Journeyman unloaded now? He also fished out a rubber-banded bundle of carrots—he retrieved the rubber band for future use—and some loose spring onions and garlic scapes. “There’s a good soup to be had here,” he said. “Especially if you’ve been gathering mushrooms.”
“There’s a book I need you to find for me, Sandy.”
“What book?”
“The Pillow Book of Sei Shōnagon. Ancient Japanese text, tenth or eleventh century, I think.”
“Pillow Book?” Journeyman didn’t like the sound of it. “Like that Doris Day movie, what’s it called? Oh, Pillow Talk.”
“Sandy, you’re a philistine. It’s one of the classic early literary texts. The author was a lady at the emperor’s court. She recorded her impressions toward the end of her life, with no expectation of publication. Or perhaps she had one sly eye on posterity. Years ago I memorized great swaths of it—alas, all gone now. I do recall it was broken into these marvelous categorical lists, like ‘Things that should be large,’ or ‘Things that give a pathetic impression,’ or ‘Things that make one nervous.’”
Jerome Kormentz aloft on one of his jags: this was a thing that made Journeyman nervous. It made him feel answerable, even if there was no one else around. He was bothered by Kormentz’s constant invocation of “Eastern” stuff. It was with Eastern stuff that Kormentz had beguiled the two teenage girls at Spodosol Ridge Farm. The actions that had led, eventually, to this cozy exile. Journeyman himself had a kind of tone deafness when it came to Eastern stuff, or at least to the Eastern stuff spouted by Westerners who fancied themselves enlightened. He did pine for sushi restaurants, and for Wong Kar-wai movies, and older Japanese samurai movies, by Kurosawa and Kobayashi. Some of these remained shelved, tantalizingly, at the town library, where he supposed he’d go soon, to try to find Kormentz his Pillow Book. Not that any of the local tinkerers had time or inclination to spare for rigging up a prototype bicycle-powered or human-waste-fueled DVD or Blu-ray player.
“I’m writing my own version,” he added into Journeyman’s silence. “The Pillow Book of Jerome Kormentz. It has the same odds of lasting as Sei Shōnagon’s, but you never know.”
“Does it rhyme?”
“No,” Kormentz said. “Why do you ask that?”
“Aren’t most things that last really some kind of song? Like The Odyssey? And they shot that Chuck Berry number out into space.” Talk with Kormentz often plumbed regions of bizarre fact Journeyman had no idea remained relocatable within him. “Never mind. What’s your Pillow Book about?”
“Read Sei Shōnagon’s before you bring it to me and you’ll understand. Just the purest impressions of life as it is lived, without apology.”
It was clear where this led. “I’ll take a look,” Journeyman said, sourly. He’d unpacked the last of the vegetables now, and the mason jar of goat milk yogurt his sister always set aside for Kormentz. Nothing kept him. Other days he might linger to talk, but not today.
“I was always a loving person,” Kormentz blithered. “Everyone knew that. I believed it was sweet and kind, a light I was spreading at the Farm. I love women, Sandy. I made them feel irresistible. Everyone knew I did a little touching, a hand at the small of the back—”
Journeyman had heard it before: the small of the back. Kormentz still luxuriated in his moment of disaster. This had been the cause, as much as his crime, of his removal to the Lake of Tiredness—the fact that he couldn’t quit talking about it.
5.
The Arrest, Such as Journeyman Understood It
WITHOUT WARNING EXCEPT EVERY WARNING possible it had come: the Arrest. The collapse and partition and relocalization of everything, the familiar world, the world Journeyman had known his whole life.
The future, that is to say, announced itself. The future always already present but distributed unequally, like everything else—like bread, talent, sex, like peepal, neem, aloe, and those other plants that give off oxygen at night, like the rare spodosol-rich ground for which Journeyman’s sister’s farming collective was named. The Arrest produced itself as a now already past. Like a time capsule unearthed.
This was confusing. It should be confusing. Did Journeyman understand the world into which he’d been born—its premise, its parameters, its plot? No. So, why should he grasp how it had changed?