How even to say when the Arrest began? The question was when had it gained your attention. Plenty flew under the radar. Biodiversity halved? That made an impression, barely. Polar ice and Miami drowned? Terrible, yet also too big to take personally. One day Journeyman noticed reports of a new tick-borne disease. Once you’d been bitten, cow meat made your throat close up. No more American Wagyu tomahawk steak for two, black on the outside, red within. People joked uneasily. Were the new ticks an eco-terrorist hack? On television, someone said that the turning point had been when in 1986 the president had removed the solar panels from the White House. Then again, someone else said the turning point had been when St. Paul’s epistle had been delivered to the Romans and ignored. You could debate this shit forever.
But not on television, not any longer. Here the Arrest at last commanded Journeyman’s attention. He sat up and noticed the death of screens. They died not all at once, the screens, but in droves, like creatures of the warmed ocean, like those hundreds of manatees washing ashore the same day in Boca Grande who, just weeks before, Journeyman had found uncompelling, and deleted from his feed. He’d unfollowed the manatees. No hard feelings.
Television died first. Television contracted a hemorrhagic ailment, Ebola or some other flesh-melting thing. The channels bled, signals fused, across time as well as virtual space, a live Rod Serling Playhouse 90 teleplay broadcast from 1956 sputtering into last agonized life and expiring in the middle of episodes of season two of Big Little Lies. The Vietnam War came back, and Family Ties too. Until these boiled and melted along with the rest.
The Gmail, the texts and swipes and FaceTimes, the tweets and likes, these suffered colony collapse disorder. Each messenger could no longer chart its route to the hive, or returned only to languish in the hive, there to lose interest in its labors, whether worker or drone. All at once, the email quit producing honey.
So many other ecologies depended on the pollinations, the goings-between of the now-fatigued drones and workers. Without them, nothing worked. Air-conditioning units stalled, planes fell from the sky. The honey of emails and texts had been the glue holding the world together, it appeared. Now the smart devices all evidenced wasting disease. They had to be put out to a level pasture to let them graze out the last part of their lives. There they crumpled to their knees, starved, incapable of grazing.
People kept on swiping at the phones and mashing at the keyboards. Some tried giving the voice-activated devices mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. Some proposed fixes or work-arounds. Those more mystically minded placed phones or remotes beneath their pillows at night or built shrines in which to surround their devices with crystals, hoping to spark them from their silence. Others, like Journeyman, merely kept glancing at the screens that had gone dark, and also sat periodically weeping. Some, like Journeyman, needed eventually to be given a mug of herbal tea while someone else hid their inert former electronic playthings.
A solar flare?
Eco-terror? Terror-terror? Species revenge? The Revolution?
Had Journeyman’s world jumped the shark?
The stars didn’t go out, one by one.
The U.S. wasn’t replaced with a next thing. It was replaced by wherever one happened to be. The place one happened to reside at the moment of the Arrest, which after a fitful start had come overnight. Did they even call it the Arrest elsewhere? Journeyman counseled himself to be done with such speculation. BE HERE NOW; WHEREVER YOU GO, THERE YOU ARE; ALL POLITICS ARE LOCAL: every bumper sticker had come true at once, even as the cars slumped sidelong from the roads to make way for other means of transit. Every tank seemed sugared by the same prankster, the gasoline turned to a thing that inched from the pump nozzles like molten flourless cake.
Guns worked for months, for nearly a year after the initial Arrest. Then died too, souring like milk. The bullets no longer even blew up if you shattered them with a hammer—Journeyman had seen it tried.
Goodbye to gasoline and bullets and to molten flourless cake. Goodbye to coffee. To bananas and Rihanna, to Father John Misty, to the Cloud, to news feeds full of distant core meltdowns, to manatees and flooded cities and other tragedies Journeyman had guiltily failed to mourn. Hello instead to solar dehydrators, rooftop rain collectors, to beans, kale, and winter squash. To composting toilets and humanure, to a killing cone, feather plucker, and evisceration knife. Say hello to chasing a screaming duck into a pond to drag back to the killing cone. To being the butcher’s sluice boy.
Had Journeyman known that barns were traditionally painted red to disguise the bloodstains? He hadn’t. Journeyman had been playing catch-up since the Arrest, cribbing from field guides, farmer’s almanacs, seed catalogs, old Michael Pollan paperbacks. Could he become a man of the soil in mid-life? No, he was too old a dog for that trick. The peninsula was choked with expert organic farmers, lured here by the locavore movement. His sister was one of them.
That’s why Journeyman worked with the butcher, Augustus Cordell, sluicing bloody steel tables, retrieving offal and caul for Victoria’s sausage-making. Victoria’s creations—her summer sausage, her hard salami, her black pudding—were prized by the whole peninsula, but also used as barter with the people of the Cordon. As it turns out, therefore, Journeyman could wish he’d been carrying a packet of them in his Telluride Film Festival backpack five minutes later that same morning, after climbing the lake’s overgrown driveway, back to the main road.
6.
An Old Friend
AT FIRST JOURNEYMAN THOUGHT IT was bees or deerflies, a kind of humming, as he pushed out of the canopy, onto the sun-mottled asphalt. He mistook the humming for the bee-loud glade. This day was still weirdly perfect. Journeyman, freed of Kormentz’s monologue, was interested to search for the book the prisoner had requested. It had caught his imagination. Journeyman had a little crush, too, on the woman who’d moved into the library—it made an excuse to visit there.
It wasn’t bees. A contingent from the Cordon was on the roadway. Their humming resolved into something more irregular, the guttering of their night-soil engines, as they approached. Journeyman distinguished the sound a minute before the riders appeared, hovering into view over the roadway’s contour. Two shit-Harleys. Behind them, two other men, on horseback. The four were an advance team for something else. Some stormhead rumbling farther back on the road.
Journeyman stood blinking as they dismounted. He knew one of the riders, who called himself Eke. Was this short for Ezekiel, or Ekediah, or some other longer name? Journeyman didn’t know. Eke might have been in his late twenties. His hair was slicked back and cut stylishly high on both sides, though he wore the stalactite beard of a Cordon elder.
“Mr. Duplessis.” It was the way of the Cordon to address members of Journeyman’s community formally, or mock-formally. Eke, for one, spoke with impunity to men decades older than himself, or at least to Journeyman. He picked his nose in front of Journeyman too—evidence, if needed, that the formality in his address was more mock than otherwise.
“Hello, Eke.”
“Just the man I wanted to see. Good piece of luck finding you on the road.”
“It’s good to see you too, Eke, but I wasn’t expecting you. I haven’t got anything.” Journeyman still, at this point, imagined this might concern sausage, or other supplies.