Pym: A Novel

by Mat Johnson

  I called my cousin Booker Jaynes at the number he left for me. Garth’s handwriting wasn’t much better than Dirk Peters’s, but I got through anyway.

  “Booker Jaynes?”

  “Captain Booker Jaynes.” The voice was abrupt, graveled. I apologized and started in with family small talk but only got a few seconds before he interrupted me.

  “Mr. Chris Jaynes, I have three questions to ask you before we say anything else,” he told me. I stuttered a bit, then went silent. After a few seconds of this, satisfied, he put them to me.

  “One. You want to go to Antarctica, to the Ross Ice Shelf, take a group down there and do some research. Is that correct?”

  It was. I’d told him in my original message. Clearly this was why he bothered to call me back. He sure didn’t want to talk about Great-Uncle Oley.

  “Two. Do you have the kind of money it would take to get down there, rent equipment, hire a professional crew, and make it through any weather delays necessary to get the intel you need?”

  It looked like I did. The first settlement offer from the college was a little more than I had invested in the books themselves. Not as much as I knew the books’ worth had probably appreciated to, but getting in the ballpark. Added with the year’s severance I’d received for not suing them for firing their only black professor, I could do this.

  “Three. Are you willing, are you willing to swear on your God, swear on your heart, swear on the very Jaynes bloodline, that you will not tell a soul about our meeting, or reveal any information therein—not one goddamn word—without my approval? Can you handle that?”

  I could, did. I wrote the address of the bar he wanted to meet at the following night. Then I hung up and started calling some cousins on his side of the family to see if Booker Jaynes was actually as crazy as he sounded.

  * Dirk Peters, The True and Interesting Narrative of Dirk Peters, p. 277.

  † Dirk Peters used the phrase “remembering thing,” actually.

  ‡ Peters’s repeated phrase for this was “Help me make good on the thing.”

  § Peters, Narrative, p. 184.

  ‖ Ibid., p. 185.

  a That is to say, it advocated lifelong human bondage for those of African descent, as well as their children and grandchildren, great-grandchildren, et cetera, for eternity.

  b Peters, Narrative, p. 278.

  c Peters, Narrative, p. 185.

  d Peters, Narrative, p. 186.

  MOST of the people on the Jaynes side of the family fell into two categories, brilliant or lunatic. My mother, who raised me alone, gave me both her surname and its problematic lineage. The Jaynes family was stricken with overactive intellectualism, which is why so many were clinically or functionally insane. But my other cousins insisted that Booker Jaynes was in the brilliant category. Mostly.

  From calling around, the story I got was this: Booker Jaynes hadn’t started out paranoid, he’d just worked his way there through life experience and due diligence. Booker Jaynes was probably the world’s only civil rights activist turned deep-sea diver. The successes of the struggle in the South left him feeling distraught and betrayed—he was just getting started when those Negroes down there decided to call it quits—and he went as far away from it as he could. While his other disaffected radical brothers went underground, he went undersea, diving commercially mostly and wreck-diving when he could. The man had made his career before technology increased the range and duration of dives, back when you made it on oxygen and a prayer. It was a world where you owned no treasure unless you dragged it onto the boat yourself, where the rights to a fortune were often protected only by the sea that hid it, where claim jumping was called “fair game.” Booker Jaynes was as much a product of this world as of the northern Bronx he grew up in. For Booker, going from diving to polar exploration was as natural as making the transition from H2O in its liquid to its solid form. When he was a kid growing up with my great-uncle Frazel, Booker had his interest in polar exploration sparked by an article about the explorer Matthew Henson in the Brooklyn Sun. After saving Green Stamps from the local Shop N’ Go for a year, Booker used the coupons to buy ice shoes and ski poles. By the time he could actually afford the things, it was June, so his pop arranged for Booker to have time climbing the discarded shavings from an ice-skating rink in Rosendale. The most important thing my calls to cousins and aunties told me, though, was that Booker was a man who made things happen. Or at least tried to.

  Booker looked like a Jaynes, forehead like a block of caramel toffee, neck stolen from a giraffe, unfortunate attributes he’d tried to cover with a snake orgy of gray dreadlocks. As we’d planned the night before, we met at a bar in lower Manhattan, past City Hall by the docks. I didn’t like going near Wall Street. More specifically, I didn’t like going near high-risk bombing targets, it just wasn’t my thing. He sat in the back of the room staring intently at the front door, Malcolm X style, which considering we were in an organic juice bar was a little heavy for the scene.

  “I used to come here before. Used to serve you underage, if you worked the docks,” he told me. “Wasn’t all bright with these damn lights in here. It was called Hughson’s. It was a place you could get stabbed with a knife. It changed on me,” my cousin told me, in a way that sounded like he was adding it to a long list of things in this world that had betrayed him.

  He asked about my motive for the expedition and I launched into the story of Pym. As his eyes drooped, I suddenly appreciated Garth for his ability to feign the slightest interest in literary history. Next, he asked me about the family. It was clear he wasn’t interested. He was just checking to see if I was really me. Once that was confirmed, Booker Jaynes cut short my family update.

  “This bar holds a lot of memories for me. I was here, taking a break from working a dock in Brooklyn, the morning the truck bomb went off in the shipping entrance of the Twin Towers. I heard the bomb go off, went outside. Smelled the smoke and saw the soot-covered people, and it all kicked in. I knew exactly what I had to do. It was time to march,” he told me, hit the last word slow and hard so that I could feel the impact, then took a swig of his carrot juice. Immediately locating a Kinko’s, my cousin had a flyer typed, printed out, and copied by the hundred before the smoke had even cleared. Setting the rally for four hours in the future, Booker Jaynes barked the news and handed out the flyers as he took his long walk north, from City Hall to Fourteenth Street. Hours later, flyers dispensed and throat parched from calling others to the cause, Booker Jaynes arrived at his rally point at Union Square, the historic site of American civil disobedience, and received the shock of his life.

  “Not one goddamn person came to the Twin Towers Bombing Rally. Not one, not even the Negroes bothered. Not even one news crew either, and I called them all. What type of shit is that? Not a one; people just walking by. What the hell has this country come to, that people won’t rally against injustice? What the hell is wrong with a society that won’t even bother marching anymore?”

  “But, you were going to march about what?” I asked my cousin, somewhat confused.

  “What? What was I going to march about?” Captain Jaynes spun in my direction, shoulders, chest, and all. When Booker Jaynes looked at you, he really looked at you with his whole body: an errant billy club in Little Rock in ’64 had resulted in a loss of rotation in his neck. “Negro, we were going to march! Don’t ask me about marching; what kind of ignorant ass question is that? Let me tell you, I marched at Selma, I marched in Mississippi, I marched in Montgomery. I know how to march.” The last sentence was delivered in a loud staccato, each word nearly a sentence in itself.

  “I’m sorry, Captain, I’m a bit lost,” I continued carefully, truly unsure as to whether I had missed some form of information. “March against whom? Why? I don’t understand, how would that help anything to do with the bombing?” Maybe I did lack some insight, but my cousin didn’t bother sharing his with me. Instead, he just stared me down, the gray snakes around his neck now still as if steadying t
hemselves for a lunging attack. He paused to take me in. For a second, I thought he was going to stand up and walk out, leave me there sipping my wheatgrass. I could see he wanted to. But he didn’t. Instead he leaned forward, and in little more than a whisper, he let me in.

  “There are people out there, people who have made fortunes just following me around, finding out where I’m taking my boat next, so they can come right behind me and steal something. White folks who wake up every morning and say, ‘Hmm, I’m getting kind of low, I wonder what Captain Jaynes is finding that I can take from him.’ So this doesn’t go beyond this table, do you understand me?” he demanded. I didn’t really, but assured him I did. After making me swear a few more oaths, he continued.

  “This is the deal. Drinking. Water bottling. In Antarctica. All above sea level. Go down, cut and drill blocks of glacial ice, then ship it on tankers back up Stateside. Big corporate thing, but I got an in. Government is giving huge tax breaks for using minority-owned businesses. We get some black people, front a bit of our own money, incorporate with a few others who can do the same, and it’s a guaranteed fortune. Here’s the number to get in on it. Can you do this?” Checking around the room first for prying eyes, Booker Jaynes pulled out a folder from his satchel, let me see the numbers. The number to get in and a much larger number, the number I would leave with after the money started flowing. I could pay it. It would be all of my money, but the projected earnings would set me up for five years. Enough time to construct a detailed analysis of Peters, even if we didn’t find anything. And the plan made sense too. No one drank tap water since the Dayton Dirty Water Disaster; the clean stuff was worth as much as petroleum. The ice down there was centuries old, formed long before the modern world began collapsing.

  “Looks good, but can we go to this location?” I said, pushing the coordinates across the table with equal paranoia, giving the room my own once-over.

  “We can go and do whatever we want, that’s the thing. Long as we get the water, put up the funds, we’ll be on our own. We can drill for whatever’s down there, the petroleum treaty is over, and what we find we can keep. Get it? Nothing but upside to this. Just need a skeleton crew. That’s it. All black, so we qualify. And also because I don’t trust white people.”

  “Who do you have in mind?” I asked, thinking of Garth. Thinking this could be employment for both of us.

  “I start asking around for people, and it’s out the bag. Any of my contacts could turn around and take the whole thing before we can seize this opportunity. But you, no one knows you. So you have to find the people. We’ll need another general helper like yourself, two water treatment engineers, and two lawyers. Got to have the lawyers, I want protection. The laborers we’ll ferry-boat in for week shifts from Tierra del Fuego. Find the crew, and I’ll take you right down to your chasm and you can have the coldest damn book club on the planet.”

  I’d reserved a hotel room in Queens for the night; it was cheaper and safer than Manhattan and I’d thought my family reunion would be longer and more social than it was. On the way there, I got off the train to stop in at a Thomas Karvel Emporium of Artistry on Fifty-second. The painter didn’t just sell his work in galleries, he owned his own, and the store was awash in sunsets and saccharine. I was planning to see if the “Master of Light” had done any South American vistas, maybe even set in Argentina or Chile, that could be used to tempt Garth to come Karvel spotting below the equator. The closest I could find was a red sunset shining past the Jesus looming over Rio de Janeiro, a vision which had magically erased the actual city below in favor of green hills, sea, and sand. Waiting in line to purchase the overpriced print, I looked into the glass room at the back of the store. To get in there, you had to see one of the clerks, and then they walked in with you and hovered while you checked out the premium Karvelia on the walls. From the line I could see one of the paintings in the back. The top of the frame was yellow laced with orange and red and pink, and capturing the same end of day as the rest of the visions that crowded the place, but beneath the sky it was blue. I saw snow. I ditched the line and got closer. The guard was answering questions from a jewel-encrusted woman perusing some English cottages on the other wall, and in his moment of distraction, I took a shot of the snowy scene with my phone. Outside, my excitement barely let me control my thumbs. I texted it to Garth, along with its title. Shackleton’s Sorrow.

  I had an assignment from my cousin, to fill out a crew, but I knew absolutely nothing about aquatic engineering. An Internet search that night led me to several large companies that I was sure Booker Jaynes would hate if I notified, and not much else. The best I could find was two water treatment guys from Queens who ran what they called an “Afro-Adventure Blog” on the side. Sewage management wasn’t exactly the same thing as aquatic engineering, but I figured if they could handle all the shit in Queens, they could handle anything.

  Their website was a strange hybrid, half devoted to their sewage treatment services, half to video clips of their adventure exploits. I clicked on the first clip. One of the two men, Jeffree, was on-screen, the other, apparently, behind the shaky handheld camera. They were running west on the Brooklyn Bridge, fighting through the traffic of a terrified mob. The camera shifted away from Jeffree and to the Twin Towers in the distance, their tops flaming. The footage was bouncy and jumbled. But it was sincere. They were running against a panicked tide to get to the disaster. There is Jeffree, this dark-skinned man past forty with a shaved head and theatrical goatee, and he just wants, as he says again and again when he looks back at the camera, to “do something.” It’s black superhero shit. But then the fantasy ends. They reach the site of the World Trade Center and in moments it’s in rubble. More chaos and running and horror. Tidal waves of dust and then sirens and rogue herds of insanely frightened office workers. But they can do nothing.

  Jeffree and Carlton Damon Carter are just two guys who make dirty water clean again, guys who share the same little Lefferts Garden apartment, where they sleep in the same marriage bed. Poetically, the last image that the ever silent Carlton Damon Carter films of Jeffree on that day is of the water engineer handing water out on the street to those last survivors straggling from the World Trade Center.

  “See, I’m the performer, right? I’m like, to these people watching, the hero they want to be. But my man Carlton Damon Carter, he’s the one that filmed it and made it art. He’s the one that designed the website, the one that brings all I’ve done to the world,” Jeffree declared in another clip, one in a series of video journal entries. He had a hand firmly on Carlton Damon Carter’s neck and was roughly pulling on him as the other, lighter man blushed in response. It would have been a very masculine gesture if Jeffree hadn’t kissed Carlton Damon Carter lightly on the side of his forehead in the end.

  “He’s my muse,” Carlton Damon Carter nearly whispered into the microphone. “I’m his lens.”

  It was clear from the number of comments beneath each clip that they had a huge national and international audience for their exploits. But as I kept watching, I started to wonder if the national and international attention for their little site may have distorted their original intentions. The duo’s attempt to drive to Ohio during the Dayton Dirty Water Disaster was a disaster in itself, and the reams of tape basically just covered them stuck on I-95 in a U-Haul filled with barrels of New York tap sludge, only to be turned away by the National Guard. Here the same agonized futility on display in the 9/11 footage just comes off as plain stupidity. Clearly I was not the first person to perceive it this way; Jeffree admitted as much to me on the phone the next morning, calling me back a few hours after my fishing email.

  “Something like this, that could really increase traffic. Negroes on Ice. That could be a whole documentary,” he told me, his live voice filled with even more bravado than the video editing had captured. Already I found him a bit annoying, but I was looking to discover literary history not make buddies, so I pawned him off to Booker Jaynes anyway. I was already pre
occupied with the next stage of the recruitment.

  I knew where she lived. I knew where she worked. I hadn’t talked to her in seven years, but that was because I held on to the hope that she would come back to me first. When I went into the city I made a habit of passing through those blocks that housed her residence and her job, walking from one end to the other in the hope I’d see her from a distance, but that was all I did. I didn’t call her. I clung to my hope instead, hope built on a shaky foundation of science.

  With love, the scientific literature on the subject reveals that the human brain works according to a series of dependable cycles, ebbs and flows as natural as the current. We were seven months into our first love phase, and Angela Bertram’s endorphins ran out before mine did. I clung, she pulled away. I clung harder, and she walked out on my ass. I wasn’t bitter, this was actually my preferred understanding of events. Another way to look at it is that she grew up poor, and staying in a grad student’s little stinking hovel invoked a future life of pretty much the same. The fact that she left me for a lawyer fits into this theory too well—evolution had hardwired women to be attracted by ambitious, successful providers, as it had predisposed men to physically fit women capable of bearing healthy young. So I gave her this. It was not Angela Bertram’s fault, it was evolutionary reality. She already had my heart, I didn’t have much choice. I didn’t fight her abandonment, because you can’t fight science. Fighting science just makes you pathetic, like spitting in the wind or breathing underwater. The best thing to do is let the wind abate, float to the top. And then breathe.

  Science is a glorious thing. Angela divorced after seven years, a number predicted by her endorphin cycle. Even though I heard for years that the marriage was in trouble I stayed away because research shows that the vast majority of relationships that begin as extramarital affairs end within a year after the partner has left her or his spouse, and my love for her was undying. Angela Bertram had been separated completely from the bastard for almost two months. I’d heard something about infidelity, but made sure not to torture myself with specifics. I’d stayed away because rebound relationships initiated in the first three months after the conclusion of a long-term relationship had a dismal success rate. I had been planning on contacting her in three weeks, on the exact date of the third month of her final separation, before fate had changed the calendar. If I was a religious man, I would have seen the hand of God. Instead, I saw the wonders of the scientific method and the fruits of self-discipline. There had been other women in my life, there was sex and sometimes romance and much flirtation. But no love. No one had gotten to my heart because my chest was hollow. Whatever was once there, Angela Bertram now possessed it.