Pym: A Novel

by Mat Johnson

  “Nathaniel has been out to see me just once in three days. Three days, can you believe that shit?” she asked me. Of course I could believe that, the man could barely walk. How the hell was he supposed to get all the way over to this side of the city? Crawl?

  “That’s not right, Angela,” I told her. “A man should be there for those who depend on him.” When she sighed and nodded, relieved that someone could mirror her anxiety, my moral fiber was mushed into so much krakt. “That’s what makes a man a man,” I added, and with that, she was next to me.

  I pulled her close, or rather I pulled her thickly insulated Gore-Tex Arc’teryx coat close. Angela laid her head on my heart, and through a good two inches of insulation and laminate I imagined she could hear my pulse accelerating.

  “When this is over, I’m going to buy a mansion in Oak Bluffs, with a maid for every floor,” Angela managed to say to me before drifting off finally. The absurdity, I thought, but knew that Garth and I were no better. Our goals, what had brought us down here, were out there on the ice like shining oases, luminescent to us individually. Now, frozen, trapped, I couldn’t help thinking that maybe they didn’t matter. That what really mattered is what our ambitions had led us to. That we were in this moment because of the futures we imagined for ourselves. That even without the snow beasts, we were enslaved. By our greed, our lusts, our dreams.

  On my pile of tattered furs and leathers, we lay spooned. Intimate and clothed and with our boots on. No words were said, and for the first hour I could hear that Angela Latham was awake and swiftly breathing. And then, after that hour, her breathing slowed to nearly match that of the nearby Augustus. I, on the other hand, grew more awake and energized with every heave of her chest, pushing as it did into my own back. It was such a beautiful sound, this exhalation sweetly gusting, that I could almost convince myself that I really was the man she was pining for. I could push away the thought that ever since we’d come down to Antarctica, we’d all of us—I, Garth, and now Angela—fallen short somehow, revealed how enslaved we were to our own comforts, lusts, and delusions, even without the snow beasts.

  Lying with her, I thought of Tsalal. I didn’t think of finding anyone there, of excavating evidence of whoever had once inhabited it, or academic fame that might come from its discovery. I just thought of us, like this, alone on its beach. I thought of escape, but escape to an Eden. The two of us, spooned together, the heat of the sun above and the warm sand beneath us. Lying there, drunk on purple water.

  * Blubber.

  † For a good portion of our walk, I passed the time imagining that Augustus was moving to the rhythm of Stevie Wonder’s “Superstition.”

  ‡ Wakanda is the African utopia of the Black Panther comic books. Although initially I struggle with the fact that it is an Afrocentric romanticization funneled through the imagination of its white creators, the first issues produced by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby are the sole memorabilia that Captain Booker Jaynes and I share in our respective collections.

  THE issue of starvation in American slavery was a central one, for the slaves. For the slavers, not so much. But for the slaves starvation was extremely important. In modern America, most of us have never had to endure the constant hunger that was once commonplace among our people, but the legacy of centuries of starvation is still present in our culture. Before the stereotype of the black man running down the street with a TV under his arm existed, the same racist archetype was carrying a stolen chicken, or a watermelon. Similarly, the stereotypical embodiment of black masculine superiority, with his rippling muscles and flat abs, owes much to a slave history of endless toil fueled by little food, lifestyles no modern diet and exercise plan could compete with. All this is to say of the crew of the Creole that, after three weeks under the ice, at least we looked good. In the modern era, Americans starve with full bellies, starve on high-fructose corn syrup and hydrogenated oils, carbohydrates too complex for our bodies to bother deciphering. We starve and yet are fat as shit at the same time, morbidly obese and vitamin deficient, hands shaking if we take too much time in between pies. That was a much more desirable form of starvation than our current situation, if you had to pick, but an anemic existence nonetheless. Ironically, both forms of starvation can cause diarrhea, which shows you how limited the human body is in its range of defenses. There are those who say that it is important to “listen to your body,” that “your body knows what it needs.” If your body knew what it needed, it would listen to the brain, the only part of it worth a damn when it comes to thinking. Diarrhea is the worst possible reaction to not having enough food to digest. It’s mutiny. It’s everything inside you trying to get out while it still can.

  I wasn’t sure why I was afflicted with this symptom, whether it was from barely eating the krakt or from eating any of it. Either way, I wanted to eat more. I wanted more of the vile stuff because I wanted desperately to eat, and I no longer cared what the cost of that desire was. Yet ironically, there was food equally desperate to get out of me, forcing me to undress and bundle back up in a torturous cycle. But there was not enough food coming in, not enough to sustain me. When I finally managed to gather the energy to rise, Augustus sat across from me, staring at me like a retriever eager to be walked.

  “Smell,” he offered, pointing a cold, pale digit in my direction. “You. Smell,” he followed with, conjoining the words awkwardly and, in my opinion, just showing off. Overwhelmed and undernourished, I lay back down again and drifted into unconsciousness to the sound of Augustus’s wet, snorting giggles.*

  When I next opened my eyes I saw that Augustus had drifted off, presumably in search of food, and I spent the day alone lying there, increasingly delirious, feeling the acid bubble inside my gut attack my stomach’s walls. It was a few hours into this pain when I saw it scurry through the room, just out of the corner of my eye, just beyond visual recognition. Scurry, though, is wrong: that implies a sense of urgency this creature didn’t convey. Skip would be the best way to describe the action of the thing, a casual hopping motion that bounced buoyantly across the far end of the room. At first I took this to be one of the Tekelian pickaninnies, maybe lost or just being devilish by invading the local eccentric’s eyesore flat. But as it continued to dart around, I began to realize that this creature in the room with me was something entirely different. First, there was the sharp percussion sound of its walking, crisp and metallic on the ice as if it was wearing tap shoes. And there was a whistling sound as well. I thought it was the wind, but it was more solid, stronger. It was a happy sound, although I confess in my state I wasn’t paying attention to the tune of it. At that moment, I was too focused on the little head I saw poking out from some of the cluttered debris of animal refuse Augustus had accumulated. It was a human head. It was a child’s head. A white girl, no older than four years by my estimate, whistling and skipping with curly chestnut hair billowing out of her blue summer bonnet. All that protected her from the freezing air was a blue and white, checkered sundress, but she seemed fine. There were no signs of hypothermia at all, in fact her cheeks were quite rosy (and not from frostbite). She just whistled along, pausing only to take a bite out of the Swiss roll snack treat in her lovely little hand, the pastry’s delicate chocolate covering falling like ebony snow to the ground.

  “Little Debbie,” I called to her, but my delusion just giggled and kept skipping around. Skipping and chewing, swallowing then whistling. This was a girl whose feet didn’t touch the ground. Literally, they didn’t touch the ground, floating a good two inches above it yet still managing to make those lovely tapping sounds. Little Debbie’s shoes may have missed the floor, but her crumbs didn’t, and the more she skipped around, the more her crumbs fell where I could come eat them later. Skip, Little Debbie. Dance! If it would help, I would be her beige Bojangles. For that pastry good stuff, I would bug out my eyes and hop up and down the stairs with her in blackface just like Louis Armstrong had done for Shirley Temple.† I didn’t care about principles, and I didn’t even care
that this was surely all a hallucination. I wanted some of that sweet stuff too. Bite off her head and scoop the cream filling out of her neck with my hands.

  I made it down to the market area because I didn’t want to die of starvation alone. It was not so much the “die” part, rather the “alone” aspect that most scared me. Before leaving, I managed a quick check for Angela, hoping to find both comfort and food, but she was gone. I saw a lot of Angela by this time, usually at night, and in my bed. Fully clothed and no kissing, but there she was. In fact, aside from those evenings when her captors didn’t allow it, Angela was there with me every night she could be. I never attempted to push it further. It was enough that there she was in my heavily bundled arms, and there she would stay until the next waking. I hadn’t yet transitioned past the role of placeholder, I understood this. But what a place to be.

  While our growing interaction was unknown to Angela’s second husband, it was keenly noticed by Angela’s captors, who shooed me away from their kitchen vigorously on every occasion I made to go find her. Now that I was starved to the point of losing my mind, looking for whatever scraps she may have been able to give me, she was nowhere. Instead of the sustenance I needed, I received a blow when one of the more matronly examples of the beasts hurled a block of ice the size of a softball at my nose. I managed to avoid the brunt of the assault but took enough of it to leave my jaw swollen and my head throbbing with even more pain than my starvation had already inflicted. In this haze of nauseated famine, I made it into the village, guided by will alone. It was my guess that Augustus had relocated himself to the center of town, because often when he disappeared from our flat, he came home reeking of the grog I had seen him drink there. It was a good guess, because it was the only choice I had. It was possible that Augustus was coiled up in the smelly hovel of some other hermit, but the idea that he might have a friend besides me seemed improbable.

  I was on my way toward that area of the village in which the bar had been carved when I came upon a crowd of fifty or so of the Tekelians standing around in a circle, muttering their harsh consonants as they stared into their grouping’s epicenter. It is in man’s nature to be drawn by the crowd, if only to see what everybody else is up to. Even when that crowd was composed entirely of albino snow monkeys, I wasn’t any better (perhaps there was more krakt!). Weakly, I began to insert myself into the middle of the assembly, but thinking better of it, I decided to gain a more remote access point from which to watch the spectacle. Kicking a notch in the ice of a nearby building, I hoisted myself just high enough to see past all of those cloaked hoods that were getting in my way. What I saw at first I took to be an icon: appropriately, they were worshiping a block of ice.‡ It was about ten feet tall, roughly hewn, powdered white by snow on its sides, upright and phallic in presentation. This was not the only phallic presentation in this spectacle. In response to some fierce barking call, the assembled crowd returned a roar of its own and from within their cloaks removed long, pointed bones, what appeared to me at first to be the tusks of a mammoth but were more likely the ribs of a small whale. To my great and growing horror, I saw that the ends of these were sharpened to fierce points like calcium swords, with grooves cut into their bases for handles.

  “KARARUM!” one of the beasts yelled from his perch by their frozen idol, and above the tall crowd the bone sabers rattled, banging horribly off each other in deliberate percussion.

  “They’re going to war,” I muttered in disbelief.

  “No shit. You really are a genius.” The sarcastic words came with a hand on my startled ankle, and when I looked down from my perch I saw that they belonged to Nathaniel. It was unnerving to see him in the state he was, in some ways more so than to see the monsters get more monstrous. The Morehouse Man was now unshaven, and a scraggly beard had gotten the best of him, clinging to the sides of his face like a mold. Strong cheekbones that had once protruded now seemed to just poke out, the cheeks below nothing more than sunken caverns. Stains of krakt were apparent on the front of his coat and gloves. The Morehouse Man is a well-groomed man. I didn’t know who this Nathaniel was. This is not to say that at the moment I cut a stunning figure myself, but even in the real world I was known to let myself go for the sake of a good book with more than three hundred pages.

  “You okay?” I asked, climbing back down. It was a rhetorical question, but the man Nathaniel had become was in no mood for rhetoric.

  “Am I okay? Nigger, do I look okay? I can barely walk. It’s going on three weeks and my ankle still looks like a cantaloupe. And once they saw I still couldn’t walk, my snowmen kicked me out. Carried me down here and left me. Can you believe that shit?” he asked. I could. Behind us the creatures yelled the mindless syllables of nationalism followed by more waving of swords in the wind.

  “ ‘The Melt.’ That’s what they’re saying. That’s what they say they’re going to fight.”

  “The Melt? How the hell do you know they’re saying ‘The Melt’?”

  “The melt, or the heat, or something like that. It’s the word they use to describe when things start dripping around here. And the next word is the one they use right before they hit you.” With this, Nathaniel said the sound, doing a decent job of reproducing the barbaric Tekelian tongue. Although Augustus had never even attempted to strike me, I still recognized the word instantly.

  “That’s what the beast that keeps Jeffree said right before it poked his eye out for trying to escape.” When I said this out loud, I realized how I had rationalized Jeffree’s maiming: I had decided to believe that he had been disfigured because he was obnoxious. Because he was prone to clichés, garish behavior, and meaningless grand gestures. Not because he had tried to run for his freedom but because he could be a dick. But trying to break free had not been simply a grand gesture, or even a heroic one, although it was both of those things. It had also been a rational response. They were going to kill us one by one, I became certain. That had been their plan all along. That was what the rally was for: our genocide.

  “They’re not trying to kill us. Look at them, they look like an army.” Nathaniel gestured with the ski pole he was using as a cane. “Do you really think they’d need an army to kill us off?”

  “I think they’re going to kill me next, Nathaniel. They’re starving me,” I explained. Suddenly, my hunger made complete sense: they were experimenting, trying out different ways to kill each of us. Just for sport. By the time they came for Garth they’d be ready to attempt burning him on the stove like a luau pig.

  “Don’t you get it?” Nathaniel was shaking me now. His pole fell to the floor, but with a firm grip on each of my shoulders he was at no risk of tumbling. “They’re not trying to kill us, because we are commodities. I’m a businessman, Christopher. I know what I am seeing here. They don’t hate us, or at least they didn’t when this started. They just want us to do their work for them, to get a return on their investment. That’s why they didn’t just kill Jeffree; they didn’t want the capital loss. They’re not starving you, they’re just keeping their expenditures low. My captors didn’t hate me, they just declared me a loss and had me liquidated. It’s not personal.”

  “It’s personal to me: I’m starving. I take that very personally.”

  “And my ankle feels like an elephant’s standing on it. But if you asked them, they’d probably tell you that my ankle’s hurting them more than it’s hurting me. And if they had a balance sheet, they could prove it. That’s why I’m learning the language, get it? Life is all about improving your assets,” Nathaniel told me, then added a series of growling syllables I took to be a Tekelian translation of the same sentiment.

  Regardless of his plans for the future, it seemed that, in addition to suffering his sprain, Nathaniel was not doing much better on food than I was. I had little hope that I would be able to remedy the situation, but out of pity I asked him to travel with me on my quest to find something to eat. When I pulled Nathaniel’s arm around my neck, through the frigid air I received a good
whiff of him. His musk was pretty bad, but it couldn’t have been much worse than mine, it having been weeks since either of us had had the supreme pleasure of a hot shower. As he limped and I dragged, we made our way through the midday village traffic, past pale stares, their hostility obvious regardless of their alien, simian nature.

  Fortunately, the location I had in mind was not far along the path. This was good because I don’t believe that I could have carried Nathaniel much farther, and it was only the guilt of sleeping with his wife (albeit only literally) that let me heave his burden as far as I did. The spot was an ice cave like most in the main center, carved into a wall away from the village’s primary action. What set this one ice cave apart was that a long window had been cut out of the wall separating the room from the outside, and the open rectangle was a bar for those Tekelians inclined to consume its liquids, served in thick goblets of opaque ice whose blue tint turned dark yellow when filled up. I didn’t see Augustus with the crowd of patrons. (Tekelians, I believe, were genetically predisposed to the drink, and seemed to make its consumption a part of their daily rituals.) Who I did see, however, surrounded as he was by his frozen cups, was the only other human in this subterranean community. The one whose ancestors came not from the Tekelian caves but from the caves so far away in the Caucacus Mountains.

  “Arthur Gordon Pym,” I said to him. At the moment, the white man was pulled into the far corner of the bar’s wall, surrounded by cast-off cups of past customers. Bent over, walking among them, Pym was gathering up the mugs that lay discarded, picking up a fresh one as a particularly tall Tekelian lobbed one in Pym’s basic direction. From his custodial actions, it appeared that I had interrupted Pym at his job, that he was perhaps the pub’s owner, or at least one of its stewards. However, I then saw Pym find a cup with a little drink still frozen solid to its inside. He immediately dropped all the other cups again and began scraping out the prized remainders of the one with his pink hand, shoving the garbage into his mouth.