by Mat Johnson
The truck bounced lightly back from the resistance; I came to rest less gracefully. Maybe it was the shock of the moment, or the shock of slamming into the drift, but I felt nothing on impact. Only confusion as I looked back at the truck.
Garth got out of the cab, his jacket unzipped in the polar wind, and didn’t even glance at me, collapsed on the ground. He was looking back in the direction from where we came.
“Sweet baby Jesus.” I could just make out his mumbling. “Ain’t that something?”
In the space where we had just been standing, there was now nothing. Nothing: not the drill, not the ATV it was attached to, not the ground it sat on either. There was only air. A crater the size of a good-size Texas house. The abyss spread eighty yards from one crumbling side to the other. The twin tire lines of the truck led straight up to the lip of the hole and disappeared.
Garth was an expert on driving away from danger. On the day of the November Three Bombings, Garth Frierson was driving down Shankaw Boulevard as the third attack of that national bombing campaign went off, right there in Detroit. I’d heard the story only once before, right after it happened, but after we stood there silent, in shock, for near a minute, Garth, wired, started talking about it again as if I had just asked.
“Man, when they went off in Houston and D.C. that morning, I was driving my route thinking how safe I was, right there in Motown. Then boom. Passed the bomb site right on the left side, blew half my passenger area’s windows straight out. Couldn’t hear nothing in my ears for hours. Right then, I drove straight home, dog. I mean straight—didn’t even let the people off the bus, didn’t brake for red lights, didn’t stop till I got to my apartment. Ran upstairs, I don’t know what those people in the bus did. I got to my house and kept going, headed straight to my bedroom. I look up and I got this painting over my bed, Thomas Karvel’s Mississippi Mist, and I look at it, and I stop. First time since the explosion, ears ringing, I stop.” Garth shook his massive head. “But that was it, that was that feeling again. Like the world’s coming to an end. Now you know.”
We stood close to the edge of the crater, and after a few minutes our minds shifted to the lost drill and other suddenly uncertain ground: financial stability, job security. We came as close to the edge as we dared, which was about fifteen feet away from it. The thing just went down. How far down it was difficult to say. The opening seemed to be smaller than the cavern inside of it.
“I hate ice,” I admitted. “I don’t even like ice in my soda.” At the ends of my wrists, my hands were still shaking so bad you could see the movement through the gloves.
“Goddamn global warming.” Garth leaned forward to get a better view. “Ain’t our fault. It was all them Escalades in the ghetto.”
Inching a little farther with one of the portable spotlights from my pack, I caught a reflection inside the crater of something red and metallic—the rifler was still visible. The only reason I could still see it was that the drill was lodged into a snowy ledge about two stories down. The hole went farther below that, but the depth swallowed my flashlight in its darkness.
“They going to stick this on us.” Garth shook his head beside me. “They just going to say it’s on us, dog. They’re going to try and make us pay out our checks for this. You have any idea how much something like that drill costs?” I didn’t, but it had to be a good chunk of what we were planning on earning. The money wasn’t what bothered me. The look of disgust I knew I would see on Angela’s face when we confessed our incompetence, that’s what I was thinking about. And the sight of Nathaniel, right behind her, smirking.
“I’ll go down there, bring it back,” I told him.
“Negro what?” Garth politely asked me, turning to see if I was ridiculing him.
“I’ll go down there, attach the rigging to it, and we’ll drag it up. Hook it to the truck and just pull.”
“You crazy, dog. Out of your goddamn mind.” Garth paused, put his weight on his leg as he grabbed the spotlight and leaned forward, staring down below at the rifler on its precarious perch. He was silent for a few seconds before his reason took control of his desperation once again. “Hell no. You’re bugging.”
“It’s my life,” I insisted.
“It’s my bank account. If you die, they going to make me pay for the whole thing.”
“Or we could just take care of this and pay nothing at all.”
Garth stared at me, then stared back into the hole for a while. Finally, he unzipped his jacket further and lifted off his hood to reveal his unpicked Afro. “Fine. But if you break your neck, I’m going to tell them it was all your fault to begin with,” he said and started walking away. Pausing after a few feet to look back, Garth added, “I’ll tell a better story, though. Something heroic, make you like the man.” He walked another three strides before turning again and adding, “I’ll tell them you died fighting a polar bear. Three of them.”
There are no polar bears in Antarctica. There are certainly not three of them. This didn’t matter to me because I had no intention of turning this into yet another polar epic of man succumbing to nature. I was not thinking about personal risk at all at the moment. I was thinking about attaching the harness properly to my chest, making sure the gear was securely fastened and could hold me. I was thinking about saving the money. Having the money. Using the money. I was thinking about how I might still be in shock or overrun with adrenaline, but that this manly act felt good, like something Nathaniel would never dream of doing. Even in death I would be redeemed, in life I would be a hero. Or was I just being a fool? Again. Too late. I refocused. I tried to find precisely the right angle to drift down, one that would land me right on top of my goal: a ledge that seemed composed of a solid enough lip of pale blue glacier ice on which both my own weight and eventually the hoisted rifler could be levered. And then, once I had successfully attached my line to the machine, I dropped below the edge of the surface, slowly letting go of my line through the clasp so that I hung out into the chasm. Dangling in the air, I distracted myself by thinking about white-shrouded humanoids.
I used to do the climbing wall at the gym and be embarrassed by the pretense that I was training for anything more than other climbing walls. Who knew it would pay off in a frozen chasm at the bottom of the world? My spotlight hung by my belt’s loop, its power on and its beam circling erratically as I took care to ease into the slack and drop farther. The lamp created the feeling of movement below me, and that was all my imagination needed. Was it an illusion of dim light and shadow, or were there really tunnels and their openings just beyond me? Tunnels whose course had been interrupted by this recent avalanche? As I slowly dropped, my attention focused far below toward the crevices, hoping for something more, so I was surprised when I felt the hard and real metal of the rifler jam my toe.
“Don’t land on it! You not supposed to land on it, man. You could set off a whole other cave-in,” Garth boomed from above. He was leaning over the edge and his morbid obesity suddenly seemed like a mortal threat. I yelled him back.
I dangled in front of the drill. It looked to be in fairly good condition, considering the fall. A bit dented but functionally unharmed. Grappling hook in hand, I maneuvered myself to attach the line to the sturdiest section of the carriage it could hold. As I did this, giving it a good yank for security, the bulk of the rifler shifted from the vibration, sending a shower of loose snow farther below, into the darkness. As my eyes adjusted, I could make out more than I had before below me. Even at these depths, light managed to permeate the frozen crust, leaving the ice to illuminate the surroundings. The Antarctic gives the impression of being white, but really it’s blue. Almost entirely constructed of that pale, powder blue that at times can darken to rich, cobalt haze, as it did now around me. Through this glow, I could see the bottom of the pit, not more than another two stories below me. I could also make out the rough pattern of the fallen snow at the bottom of the cavern. In some places the debris was thick soup, in others chunks of ice the size of
coffins stood upright in the floor. It was already an impressive sight before one of the large spears of ice started to fall forward, giving movement to the static scene.
Except it wasn’t falling forward, it was walking. Walking forward, arms swinging, along the crater floor. And then it was looking up to me.
Let me say this as I said it to the others, soon thereafter. I know what I saw. And what I saw was a figure. I saw a figure of massive proportions and the palest hue, standing below me. I saw a creature with two legs and two feet, with arms that shook off clouds of snow as they sprang out beside it. I saw that what I first took to be a slab of ice was in fact a shawled figure, one whose cloth now rippled with movement as the beast hustled forward.
And what did I do? I looked up, I looked to see if Garth also saw it, catching the quickest glimpse of my greatest revelation. But Brother Garth was gone. Above was just the taut rope that held me.
When I turned back to look down, it was gone. So that’s when I did the only thing I could do, the only thing that came to my mind.
“Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!” I yelled into that now empty crater, the words echoing lightly against the walls of the abyss. “Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!” I kept screaming louder and louder, till Garth started pulling me up once more. I fell silent now, waiting for a response.
* Or rather, as the cliché goes, bitched and moaned, but you couldn’t hear the bass of moaning over the machinery hum.
† These are sometimes also called “scams.”
‡ I should say here that, in America, every black man has a conspiracy theory. (That statement in itself reveals a conspiracy, omitting as it does the conspiracy theories of black women [copious though they may be].) Some theories are quite creative, fascinating. But most are quite mundane, because they’re true. This obsession with conspiracies is most likely due to the fact that our ethnic group is the product of one.
§ This I found out after searching through Garth’s laptop while he was in the shower (bored). Confronted, Garth responded, “I like to look at women who would actually sleep with my fat ass.”
WHEN we got to the base camp we found the crew in the communal room at full attendance. The TV news channel was on, and on the screen was chaos.
It was the familiar trauma. There were the jumpy camera angles of smoke in the streets and people coughing into cloths ripped from their shirts. There were flashes of blood with no clear points of origin. There were people leaning quietly on other people who screamed loud enough for both of them. There was dust piling onto running crowds, as if they were being buried not just alive but in motion. There were legs that lay still in the streets, feet flopped out and hanging lifeless. But this time there wasn’t just one place identified in the chyron, one nation, one landmark in flames. This time there was Tokyo, and Paris, and Berlin. And then there was London, and New York, and L.A., and Sydney, and Seoul, and at one point even Stuttgart, and then there was bouncy footage from locales that were defined by solemn commentators as being “________ miles outside of” other places.
“The drill fell in a little crater. It’s down about two stories, we’re going to need help getting it up. Wasn’t our fault.” I saw the bad news on the TV, but the only good thing about really bad news is that it provided good timing for a less bad news dump.
“Man, it’s blowing up, up there. Blow. Ing. Up,” Jeffree responded, not listening. I’d accepted Jeffree’s theatrical nature over the weeks, but that made it no less annoying. But he was right. On the set, the trusted news anchor relaying the latest events started choking up. The television blared but we were quiet. Nobody talked or moved much. Nobody had to because the television was relaying all the words and action a mind could comprehend. An image of smoke coming out of the subway entrance flashed by. I saw the green balls of the 4-5-6 train lines logo.
“Your condo,” Nathaniel said, pulling Angela closer on the couch.
“My cousin Antoine works two blocks from Seventy-second Street Station,” she returned, pushing into him. I remembered Antoine. I said, “Antoine’s probably fine, just fine,” but I don’t think she noticed.
“We should be out there,” Jeffree offered, no small bit of heroic longing in his voice. Carlton Damon Carter, Jeffree’s lanky partner in engineering and love, was always silent, but at that moment, his silence felt profound. We in the room were all listening.
When the satellite suddenly lost its reception and went to static, we didn’t even look away from the screen. Our satellite was always going down, and the signal was never very strong. I remember thinking that the white noise was a bit of a relief, a chance to brace ourselves before the next wave of chaos blinked into view.
“Turn it off. Turn it,” Captain Jaynes said, pointing. His voice was deep and bellowing and full of enough drama that it demanded authority or confrontation if he could get it. “There’s nothing you can do, nothing any of us can do down here. We’re not just going to sit and watch all day going crazy. That don’t make no kind of sense. Best thing to do: turn the news off for a bit, get our work done, get our minds off of what we can’t change for the moment. When the satellite feed comes back through, we’ll deal with it.”
“Boss man, I likes the way you think,” Jeffree agreed. “But it’s Saturday. The day off. The Shabbat, baby. We got nothing to do but wait for the TV to come back on, then watch it.”
“No,” Captain Jaynes disagreed, his voice rising so that the whole room could take in his declaration. “What we have is a very expensive piece of mining equipment that has to be retrieved from a hole in the ground.”
The only white folks Captain Jaynes, Race Man, invited onto our crew’s Antarctic mining mission was White Folks, his dog. And even that dog was a thickly spotted Dalmatian. My cousin loved calling his name in anger, and the poor mutt gleefully suffered it. I was nice to him, though,* and as we drove Captain Jaynes to the site White Folks leaned into my hands to be scratched.
“I saw something. I saw someone down there. A creature. Just walking by,” I confessed to my cousin. Past him, Garth gave me the funky eye. Jaynes looked over like he knew there were two kinds of Jaynes minds too, and he was pretty sure how I should be categorized.
“This ain’t going to be some great excuse for you to start going off about your book again, is it? People don’t want to hear it, man; that shit on the TV just makes it more so. So promise me, no more stories about super ice honkies. Understood?” he asked.
I nodded. Because I did understand. I was obsessed, I knew it even though I couldn’t stop being that way. I bored myself, truly. But I saw what I saw, and I said so.
“To think that a work of fiction, no matter how old or what you think you’ve discovered about it, has any reality. It ain’t normal, son,” Captain Jaynes offered. “I’ll tell you something else, life is too short to be reading more books by white people. Especially dead ones. We got our own books. We got our own culture. We don’t got to borrow theirs.”
Garth followed the tire tracks we’d made on our last visit, deeply concentrating on the road, lining up his wheels with their initial journey to save the trouble of replowing. The others behind us did the same. Nobody talked. Besides the last comment, the only sound in the cab was White Folks panting between his master’s legs, his enormous pink tongue hanging out past his muzzle. Around the dog’s neck was his uncomfortable looking collar: an old iron chain, weathered and with links nearly two inches long. I’d seen it before, but staring longer I realized what it was: old slave bonds.
“Are they real?” I motioned to White Folks’s neck. I even repeated it as the captain stared mutely back at me.
“Real enough for White Folks,” he told me. My cousin was a collector of black memorabilia, this was one of the things we had in common. Most of Captain Jaynes’s acquisitions were of the remnants of slavery: chains like this one, bills of sale, sale adverts, runaway notices, cages, neck spikes, face masks, the like. Jaynes even had a vintage hogshead barrel that he’d filled with various cat-o’-nine-tails.† I
would imagine that the links would pull at the Dalmatian’s short hair or pinch his skin, but White Folks didn’t seem to mind as he pushed back eagerly into his owner’s hand.
“Why do you do it, then? Why exactly do you collect all the slavery stuff?” It was an obvious question, but we still had ten minutes to the accident site to kill. Captain Jaynes was quiet for a good two minutes before he answered, visibly turning the question over in his mind.
“I’m collecting evidence” was what my cousin told me, and the great trial that Booker Jaynes was preparing for unfolded before me. In the captain’s living quarters, office, and many storage lockers, crowded with artifacts as they were, the case was perpetually made, stuck in closing arguments with judgment ever forthcoming.
My cousin was not the only one with an idiosyncratic collection on base. Booker Jaynes understood people needed their passions to keep sane on the ice. Everyone was provided a storage space. Angela and her usurper had fitness equipment in their hold. At six most mornings she dragged their machines into the cargo space, where she moved her limbs until breathing heavily as the blubbery Nathaniel sat on a foldout lawn chair, reading the The Wall Street Journal on his tablet. Garth brought his sizable collection of Little Debbie snack cakes by the case. When he worked the late shift, Garth could be seen passing the sweating blur of Angela en route to his stash of calories, and the difference in physicality between the bus driver and the lawyer was like a display in the natural history museum. The remaining space of Garth’s hold held his prized Thomas Karvels. His own sleeping quarters had so little wall space that, like the finest museums, he circulated his collection regularly. In their hold, Jeffree and Carlton Damon Carter stored the extra servers for their website, their video equipment, sets, and lighting. At times, their small area became a miniature television studio, recording clips that quickly found their way around the world via their site. “If we wanted to do porn, we could be rich overnight,” Jeffree joked, repeatedly. Painfully (personally). “Not sharing you” was Carlton Damon Carter’s constant response, his statement no less adamant for the fact that it always came in a near whisper.
