Yet Another World, Part 1
WHEN TODBAUM BEGAN TO GENTLY orchestrate Journeyman’s career, it was by bringing him in as a kind of triage expert on broken projects. Journeyman got script-polishing work—hugely remunerative and creatively pointless. His name wouldn’t ever appear on-screen, but it did circulate in agents’ offices, as he who’d salvaged such and such, always turned work in on time, never balked at a note. As a remora adopts a shark, Journeyman took work off Todbaum’s leavings, and fed in his wake. Todbaum more and more loomed into a kind of living legend, reviled for his whims and abuses, for his savage truncations of personal visions, and yet a person whose calls one couldn’t afford not to take. Journeyman’s trace of legacy with him—you knew Todbaum at school? Sweet Jesus, what was he like then? Was he already . . . Todbaum?—became a minor point of fascination. It helped keep Journeyman’s manager’s phone ringing.
Between gigs Todbaum paid him a retainer, to tinker with a couple of Todbaum’s slow-cooking pet projects, one or two of which Journeyman learned to care about. Journeyman found that if he sank enough hours into a given piece it gained a certain life. His fatal weakness, perhaps: he liked what he wrote. He liked draft one and he liked drafts seven and eleven too, and you could have wallpapered a multiplex with the editorial notes he received and mostly ignored. It was foolish to be offended at the suggestions the development and money people lavished on a draft. Nobody recalled what they’d said in the notes anyhow, not five minutes after they’d dictated them to their assistants.
Just one trace remained of Journeyman’s and Todbaum’s hard days’ nights at the Starlet, that juvenile burst of activity, of treatments and pitches. That one trace was Yet Another World, the tale of alternate near-future Earths. One the cyber-dystopia, the other a wasteland of subsistence and looting, the eco-catastrophe Maddy had introduced into the conceit. For Todbaum, this was his gem, his secret unmade masterpiece. He paid Journeyman to write it, and to write it again. At one point Journeyman plopped out a 250-page version, a nearly unfilmable epic, which Todbaum personally dragged to Hertfordshire, England, there to batter down Stanley Kubrick’s door with a personal appeal. Later, the project found a temporary home at DreamWorks, then Scott Free. Each time it collapsed, Todbaum hocked it out of turnaround from his own pocket, and set Journeyman to work again.
By the time of the Arrest, Yet Another World had evolved—stretched and sprawled—into a treatment for a wide-canvas premium cable series, the latest fashion. Its focus, more and more, on harbingers of eco-catastrophe, and collapsing borders, and the dawning of AI, and of virtual reality; the twenty-year-old story raced to keep up with the present. It would be the Game of Thrones of science fiction, Todbaum promised. First, he wanted it perfect, unassailable. He paid Journeyman to write all ten episodes of the first season, right to the unstoppable, heartbreaking cliff-hanger ending. Journeyman never thought to mention to his sister that the story to which she’d contributed such a crucial element was still alive, still nearly always open in a Final Draft window on his laptop. Or no—he thought of her participation frequently. He feared mentioning it to her, that was the truth.
When Peter Todbaum appeared in his supercar, the Blue Streak—its studded tires and tank treads almost entirely straddling the weed-riven, frost-heave-crumbled breadth of the road’s old asphalt, its high-whirring engines and fans sounding nearly like a jet engine up close, escorted by Cordon cavalry horses and sputtering, barely functional shit-bikes—Todbaum’s wonderful horrible Chitty Chitty Bang Bang colonized Journeyman’s brain as a vision from the past’s future. Or from the future of another past entirely. It was as though Todbaum’s and Journeyman’s long-unproduced masterpiece Yet Another World had at last been realized, not in the form of a feature film or television series but instead as a fact for which Journeyman might be liable. One world had broken through to another.
14.
The Blue Streak, Part 2
“YOU’LL WANT TO STAND OVER here, Mr. Duplessis.” Eke spoke precisely. Was it Journeyman’s imagination, or had the scare quotes gone off “Mr.” entirely? He’d gained in stature by being importantly connected to the supercar, even if he needed Eke’s help to know the proper place to stand. “You hear him best from this vent.”
Journeyman followed Eke along the crumbled shoulder, around the broad, complicated flank of the supercar, to find the vent in question: a flügelhorn-mouth at the front of the massive whining vehicle, protruding from amid a bank of square headlamps, and protected by a heavy grille. To follow Eke’s lead was to stand directly before the car’s nose cone, centered low between the mammoth front wheels, each the size of the rear tire of a giant tractor. At the mercy of the vehicle, should it suddenly move. This positioning of the speaker was unlikely, it seemed to Journeyman, to be accidental. Eke shrugged, expressing his rough sympathy at Journeyman’s hesitation to place himself there.
The supercar steamed, wreathed in a cocktail of irreconcilable scents: butane, Kahlúa, coolant, melted copper wire. Journeyman felt sunburnt by its chrome dazzle, as though the reflected sun would etch hieroglyphic scribbles across his cheeks, his blinking eyelids. Here and there the metal carapace or the exterior piping was bruised, singed, scuffed, but that fact only seemed a further expression of the thing’s fundamental indomitability.
Peter Todbaum’s voice emanated, clear as a bell, unforgettable, and seeming to pick up at a place he’d left off some million revolutions of the galaxy ago. “Look at you, Sandy. The world’s last innocent man, waltzing unharmed between the raindrops and these motorpsycho chuckleheads. How’d you pull it off?”
Journeyman looked up. A shadow-form bobbed, unreadable within a plexiglass globe cockpit. Could it be?
“Struck dumb to see me? Or did these lads maybe carve out your tongue for antipasto?” Todbaum’s voice really was unchanged: fluent and abrasive, demanding love and capitulation.
“Peter?” said Journeyman.
“There you go. I came a long way to find you, Sandman. I drove all night for a year; I kept you in my thoughts every minute of the journey, too. You’re a sight for sore eyes.”
“How can it still drive?”
“A Passover miracle.”
“I can’t see your face.”
“Hey, I’ll get you up here for a soul kiss and look-around if you can tell the Rip Van Winkle Posse to slack off a little. These cowboys have been trying to climb up my ass for the past two days.”
The loose-thronged Cordon people, whether mounted or dismounted from horses and bikes, didn’t appear to be verging on an assault on Todbaum’s supercar. Perhaps a residue of hostility had trailed the two parties up the coast, from early in their encounter. It might be the case that Todbaum couldn’t read them from his cockpit. To Journeyman the Cordon men looked irritated, puzzled by the situation, perhaps eager to be shed of this problem.
“Eke?” Journeyman didn’t know the names of the others. If Eke was not precisely the leader here, he might at least speak for the collective.
“Yeah?”
“My friend is asking whether you’d please take a few steps away from his vehicle.”