The second night—out, again, at Todbaum’s insistence, at the Dresden—she leaned across her drink and interrupted their talk. “You gave her the dull half.”
Todbaum raised his eyebrows.
“Dull half of what?” said Journeyman.
“Your movie. Yet Another World. What, you thought I wasn’t listening?”
“It doesn’t have a dull half,” her brother told her.
“Sure it does. The regular stuff—our world, I mean. All you guys talk about is the cyberpunk part, the dystopian part, where the guy comes from. But the part about our world, you’re not even interested in it. It’s like the whole thing just exists so he can have a girlfriend.”
“Hey, look at our little story doctor,” said Todbaum, suddenly alert to her. Or unconcealing an alertness he’d been veiling—Journeyman would need to wonder, later on.
“She’s not just his girlfriend,” Journeyman complained. “She’s a scientist. They’re, uh, equals.”
“Right, okay,” said Maddy. “A scientist of what?”
Neither had the answer to this.
“And her world sucks.”
“It’s our world.”
“It’s nobody’s world. It’s like movie world. A flat backdrop. Nobody’s lived there since the 1950s, if they ever did.”
“What would you suggest?” said Todbaum.
“I need another drink,” said Maddy. She was through her second Blood and Sand, a dangerously dessert-like cocktail. Journeyman thought to protest, but said nothing. After Todbaum had provided a third round, she repeated, “It’s flat.”
“You said that.”
“The actual world doesn’t flatten for your convenience. It’s a boring lie. That’s why the other half of your movie is better. Put her world in motion too. Maybe an ecological catastrophe.”
“Keep talking.” This might have been Todbaum’s motto for himself.
“Make her an environmental scientist. She’s trying to save her reality, he’s trying to save his. They’re both under pressure. What did you call it? A ticking clock?”
Todbaum pointed his glass at Journeyman. “Maybe I bet on the wrong Duplessis. Because that’s good.”
Journeyman was silenced.
“You got your dystopia in my postapocalypse,” Todbaum said. “You got your postapocalypse in my dystopia. Hey, these taste pretty good together! It’s a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup meet-cute for two fucked-up worlds.”
“Now you owe me a percentage,” said Maddy.
“I owe you another drink, that’s for sure.”
“You can’t buy me for the price of a Blood and Sand.”
“Let’s see how many it takes.”
Journeyman didn’t actually mind. He liked them to like one another, was happy to think he’d provided two-way ratification of a general okayness—it made him feel better about his own choices, and the chance his sister would provide his parents an encouraging report. What’s more, the movie was better for her idea. The movie was suddenly great, as great as they’d thought it was before.
It was the third night Journeyman would spend a lifetime wondering whether he’d been meant to foresee and prevent. It happened before he knew it. The third night was a Friday. When the Starlet broke out in its usual half-assed pool revels, which Todbaum usually disdained, he surprised Journeyman by suggesting that they stay in. There were some new faces, he said. A cutie or two. They wouldn’t have to drink and drive for a change, only fall back into their rooms. Only later did Journeyman see how every part of this was congruent with Todbaum’s scheme, assuming he’d formed it in advance.
Journeyman woke at four or five on a deck chair, his throat raw. Todbaum had poured liquor and pot not into Maddy—well, he’d likely done that too—but into Journeyman. And, from Journeyman, conspicuously withheld the cocaine. Journeyman’s hair was stiff and rank with chlorine, though at some point he’d gotten back into his tee and jeans. He’d either made out with one of the not-terribly-cuties, or tried to and only kissed and fumbled. Todbaum’s power of suggestion over him was awful. Alone now, he went upstairs. The suite was locked, Journeyman’s key inside. He rattled at the door, imagining his sister would hear him from the couch, but no. He didn’t ponder this, but instead staggered up North Pass to the Bob’s Big Boy on Riverside, to feed his still-drunk hangover with hash and eggs.
When Journeyman circled back an hour or so later, he found the suite door unlocked, but Todbaum’s bedroom door shut, and no sign of Maddy. Instead, on the kitchen counter, he discovered a note in Todbaum’s hand—Go catch a flick, we could use a few hours—atop two twenties. This was before cell phones. The desolate spaciousness between humans, between human moments, not yet filled in with chattering ghosts of reassurance. You could hear yourself not think. Journeyman saw a 10:50 matinee of Raising Cain, then ate a bulb-tanned hot dog and snuck down the corridor into Unforgiven. He wasn’t woken until the credits rolled.
When he returned to the Starlet, the door was again unlocked. This time, Todbaum’s door was open. Journeyman saw no signs, one way or another, of what activities might have taken place there. But Maddy’s backpack was gone, all traces of her evaporated. And neither she nor Todbaum were to be found, the rest of that day, or into the night. Todbaum’s car was gone too.
8.
The Chaos Inside the Quiet
THE SHIVER AND CACKLE OF crows on an overhanging branch. The slick grinning madness within the man exiled to the Lake of Tiredness. The fever of life in an animal about to be slaughtered, only calmed for death. The sun, so placid through the trees, a fucking inferno exploding for eternity or until it fizzles. The stunned serenity of a vacated suite of rooms at the Starlet Apartments. The dystopia inside every utopia, the brain in every skull. The buzz and clatter of whatever it was that approached on the road today. The problem of me, thought Journeyman.
9.
Three Towns
JOURNEYMAN LIVED IN TINDERWICK, THE peninsula’s hub. The town functioned, before the Arrest, as the nerve center, where the ancient local families, the organic farmers, the off-the-grid types, the blue-blood summer people, the sailing folk, etc., all had been forced to mingle in détente before retiring to their mutual antipathies. Tinderwick housed the peninsula’s library, along with other old institutions so dependent on fuel that they now comprised the local ruins: the gas station and car wash, the supermarket and post office, the firehouse (there had been an attempt to revive the firehouse on a horse-drawn basis, which flopped). The country club, its golf course now turned to cropland; a community radio station with a tall tower, much mourned; the restaurants and bars that had depended on tourism. Among such ruins, the bakery and the fish shack persisted on a barter basis, evoking a continuity with the town’s more recent history. In other ways Tinderwick had reverted to a nineteenth-century form, when the town had been a wintry outpost stranded much of the year from the rest of civilization.
Yet even nineteenth-century Tinderwick would have featured a post office, regular newspapers from afar, and visitors landing by boat, things to inscribe the residents of Tinderwick as citizens of something wider. As Americans. New Englanders. Post-Arrest, any wider civilization remained unknown. There were just the two microcultures hemming them: the Cordon, which made their boundary from the larger mainland, and Esther’s Landing, the isolated town at the peninsula’s tip. The people of Esther’s Landing could, by definition, only bring outside news if it reached them by water. No such approach had been recorded, apart from the French boat. Since that had wrecked on Quarry Island, any news it might have conveyed perished with its crew.