by Mat Johnson
“The exhaust fan,” Nathaniel interjected. “You’ve got to turn off that exhaust fan; it’s blowing hot air right into the village. That’s what’s melting everything. Just take care of that and everybody will be fine. Nobody gets hurt. Everything can go back to normal.” His voice cracked, and the last word was perhaps an unconscious notification that there simply was no more normal to retreat to.
“The heat of your device is destroying the great city, vanishing paradise itself. We know not how you do it, nor do we care, but the assault must cease and for the solid foundation of our world to continue,” Pym explained.
“That’s all they want, Chris. Just go take care of this … whatever you have to shut off, and let’s end this thing.”
“And of course we will also need the return of the human chattel which owes its labor to the citizens of Tekeli-li, such as you yourself are surely aware. But nothing more, I assure you, honorable lady,” Pym said past me again to Mrs. Karvel. “This theft cannot be tolerated.” This last statement was directed at all of us, even Nathaniel standing beside him. When Mrs. Karvel, who I wasn’t sure even understood that she was being addressed directly, made no response to him, the aged Caucasoid followed up his statement. “The latter might be negotiated if the former is abided by.”
“Then you would be willing to talk this out, then?” Mrs. Karvel unexpectedly stepped forward, burning the side of my hand with her cigarette as she pushed past. “To handle this thing like decent, civil Americans?” Mrs. Karvel asked him. I don’t know what she made of the odd man in his cultlike white robes making demands of us, out here in the epicenter of nowhere, but Mrs. Karvel was clearly a smart woman, and a smart woman made the best of whatever situation she was presented with. “Y’all will be my guests then, mine and my husband’s. We’ll do this nice and friendly like. You tell your people, or whatever them things are out there, you tell them we’ll serve it up right here, bring tables right out onto the roof. Good home cooking and all that. Talk things out real civil. Invite as many as you want. How you like that?”
Pym looked over his shoulder, back behind him at the creatures he represented. How did he like that? There was a nervousness to Pym, a nervousness that he bore every moment I encountered him. His love of the Gods was based on his fear of them, and it was clear which of the two emotions was most overwhelming.
“What kind of food might you have?” Pym asked, preparing as he was to make the offer as attractive as possible to his masters.
“A feast?” I asked aloud as we closed the door behind us. It seemed a brilliant idea to me, truly inspired. The breaking of bread, the universal action of communal friendship. What more agreeable act could we offer? I was surprised at the rationalism displayed by Mrs. Karvel.
“A supper,” Mrs. Karvel said in response to me, lighting another cigarette and nodding. “We’ll give them a good, strong supper, and that will take care of all our troubles.” She went to the back of her little storage room and started unpacking the boxes, lifting them out of their furniture shapes and lining them up on the floor before us.
“Well, I don’t know if that’ll take care of all our troubles, but at least that’ll begin to—” I stopped when I realized what she was doing. Inside the boxes labeled with the images of rats were more little boxes with more little rats imprinted upon them. And as I watched Mrs. Karvel, I saw that inside those little boxes were little poisonous blue pellets, the kind you would feed to rats if you wanted them to cease being nuisances and start being dead.
“All our troubles. You said they have a village under the ice, right? A place big enough for a homestead, if we need to?” Mrs. Karvel asked, holding a box of poison and shaking it like a maraca before us. “Now help me look. I know there’s some packets of Kool-Aid back here.”
“You can’t just poison them, dog,” Garth kept complaining, simultaneously dipping his fingers into untainted cooking bowls to scoop up leftover food. Garth addressed me, but he was loud, offering criticism for the entire room. And, apart from my cousin, the room ignored him. Garth was different from us: we might have shared an ancient slave past, but we did not share our immediate one. Garth hadn’t been caught with us below. Garth hadn’t had his own brief taste of bondage to give him something invisible and bitter to suck on. No, Garth was an outsider in this regard, and we ignored him.
“I mean, what you guys are talking about is like some germ warfare shit, you know what I’m saying? It’s like some anti–Geneva conventions shit. It ain’t right.”
“Right. It ain’t tactical.” Captain Jaynes took over the discussion. “See, when you fight against your oppressors, it’s got to be tactical. There’s no point in poisoning them, there’s too many for that. And if you do that, you can’t never win the argument. You can’t never see that look on their faces when they know that you were right and they are so wrong.” We ignored Captain Jaynes for entirely different reasons. For one, he was clearly in shock, shivering there in his blanket despite the heat, and he was now so pale from his discomfort that he had gone from brown to gray. But really, the captain never sounded much more sane than this, so there was no confusing his current physical condition with his mental one. No, the real reason we didn’t listen to my cousin would’ve hurt the man if it’d been said aloud: even though I was the only one who had witnessed the actual intimacy between him and his personal captor, the truth was suspected by all. So we ignored him and kept quietly at our diabolic work. Garth filled the new silence.
“But dogs, you can’t just kill people. It’s not right, it’s not how you’re supposed to do things. I mean, these creatures freaked me out just as much as they freak you out, but there are some things that are right and some things that are wrong and poisoning a bunch of folks is just wrong. That’s like torturing them to death.”
“Young man,” Thomas Karvel began, and his voice alone was enough to quiet his biggest fan. The painter was still hoarse since rising back to consciousness, and he held the site of the painful blow on his head as if he was keeping his brain from falling out of a hole there. “Young man,” he repeated, emphasizing the words in such a way that through his southern accent “man” sounded belittling. “This isn’t some uniformed army, this is something totally different. There are no rules here.”
“But sir, it doesn’t have to be this way,” Garth asserted, jutting his gut forward in the center of the assembly, as if to use his girth to stop the momentum of the room. “Why not—I don’t know—just listen to what the snow monkeys are saying. I mean, they have actual demands here, right? I’m saying, can’t we just turn down the heat? That’s what they’re asking, right? We can just turn down the heat and figure out some other way to keep warm. We could save energy, you know? I bet if you turned off that waterfall for one, that alone would make the boiler chill a little. Dim the lights. I don’t know. And then we could just turn the heat down to fifty degrees or something—”
“Fifty degrees! You’re talking to me about fifty degrees? You lost your mind? If I wasn’t worried the boiler wouldn’t blow to high hell, I’d have it running at eighty. Fifty?! Forget fifty, why not thirty-two degrees? You drop it to fifty, then they’re going to want it below that. You show them weakness now, and where does it stop? Where?” Karvel’s face was flushed with indignation. Motioning with his arms to provide an invisible canvas, Karvel painted this horrific vision for the room. “Hell, we could even have snow in here.” He spun around on his heels after that declaration, joining his wife in her culinary preparations.
“Well, all right then. That sounds settled to me.” Angela was the first to break the silence. It was no small thing that her legal husband was out there, serving the savages of the cold as we spoke. If she could move forward, if she could move on, what could the rest of us say?
Although Garth’s complaints were ignored almost as quickly as they were registered, it should be said that the final decision to poison the Tekelian Army wasn’t made quickly. There were logistics to consider. For one, we had no real
knowledge of their physiognomy: would this even work? What if it offered the beasts no more than a case of heartburn or just left them groggy?
“We’ll feed them up on the roof. We got some foldout chairs, some pullout tables. It’s too hot in here anyway. And if they get a little drunk, hopefully it will be enough to just push them off the side.”
“ ‘The side’?” Angela asked, confused.
“Yeah. The side of the roof. That ought to take care of them.” Mr. Karvel took up the direction. “Sure thing it’ll work. When times get tough, you got to go back to the simple things to get them done. You do what you have to. And we have to survive. Even if we lose the dome, we have to survive.”
It was simplistic and brute, and nobody argued with it because nobody had a better idea. Each of us on our own mumbled about the improbability of it all, but the simple fact was that there were no other legitimate options. Even my Plan B of getting that little boat and sailing to the Tsalalian refuge of blackness depended on us getting out of this dome alive, and that seemed impossible now. The Tekelians knew of the exhaust tunnel, and they had seen Jeffree here as well, so it was safe to assume that that exit would soon be obstructed.
In our absence, Augustus managed fairly well in the freezer. I went to visit him as Carlton Damon Carter and Angela helped Mrs. Karvel prepare her feast, to at least alert him of the invasion and take some of the prepoisoned Betty Crocker golden food cake out to where the creature lay in his robe on a sack of frozen burritos as if it was furniture. There was a moment there as I watched him that I empathized not only with this individual, who had been so kind to me, but with the race that he was connected to. These were living creatures, regardless of how abhorrent I found their social values to be. It was so easy to let that xenophobic element within me, that part inclined to dehumanize those different from myself, have its way. But it was my duty to fight this mentality. Watching my creature gorge upon his yellow cake, shoving his head into the plate much like a spaniel does, crumbs erupting around his jowls, I reminded myself that, though his mannerisms were bestial, he was still a living, caring being.
The food that covered the dining room table ready to be transported upstairs, it looked like it could kill you, but kill you by clogging your arteries or sending the kind of fat that sits in your gut and waits to stop your heart when you’re not looking. Now the poison, it did have a smell. But that smell was as sweet and inviting as the marshmallows that melted over the tops of those salad bowls of candied yams. All the food that was in the white porcelain and Tupperware containers had enough rat poison in it to kill the kind of vermin that stalked the streets of Tokyo, knocking over buildings in black-and-white movies. All the food in the Fiestaware serving bowls was good enough to eat—good enough to eat and still live to the next day to talk about what a great meal was. We were betting that the monsters didn’t know what poison smells like. We were betting that none of them collected Fiestaware either.
Once the food was properly prepared, Mrs. Karvel, triumphant, came forth upon the roof plateau to announce its impending arrival. All seemed as civil as the circumstance could allow for. Arthur Gordon Pym even volunteered to help us bring the serving trays out onto the landing, and for a while I saw him sitting in Mrs. Karvel’s storage room, holding the exit door open. Presumably Pym was there to oversee any foul play, but the gift of a bottle of Kentucky bourbon quickly stilled his own apprehensions, a distraction we’d counted on. What we weren’t counting on was that our party would be such a success. After we brought all the food upstairs, all the little paper plates and plastic silverware, after we located the foldout tables and chairs and removed them from their storage, passing them up along a bucket line to the roof exit, after it was all ready and we knew there was no turning back, again we opened the roof exit door. It was windy outside, and we hadn’t even started when a whole pile of napkins blew past us and off the edge, but the napkins were white, and when they hit the snow you couldn’t see the litter.
And there they were. All of the warriors, which we expected, but more. Beyond them, all of the women of Tekeli-li. And then among the females, I saw them. All the little Tekelian children had been brought as well. Screaming gleefully at the feast they were about to indulge in. Little, hairy albino kids of no more than six and seven, four and five, one, two, and three. Mrs. Karvel looked up at the spectacle of youth as she carried in her deadly Sara Lee easy cook and bake rolls, and I believe I saw her almost collapse for a second. It might have been the wind whipping across there or the slippery, slight curve of the plateau, but I know her shoulders did buckle for a moment and I thought she might fall down at the sight of them. They were hideous, but they were young in the way that’s familiar across species: clumsy, endearing, trusting, innocent. But Mrs. Karvel recovered. Without anyone other than me noticing. And she kept walking to the serving table, looking down at her wares without breaking her smile.
“Oh, you brought quite a crowd. I hope y’all also brought your appetites!”
THE Tekelians sat on folding chairs on the roof, their asses stretching the fabric halfway to the ground, their minds conscious only of their own fingers and the food that they grasped and that stuck to every crevice and nail. The creatures ate without utensils, ate in the most natural way, but also in a style that was completely alien to me. There was a time when I lived in West Africa that I had to train myself to eat solely with my right hand.* Despite this simple task, I couldn’t do it. Food fell from my fingers and back into the communal bowl, and I longed for the ease and dignity of a simple fork. But there is grace in hand-to-mouth eating for those who are used to it. These creatures were experts at their task. They were so focused on their meals that not a crumb was spilled, leaving only the smallest of visible evidence of their feast on the plates. They ate it up. And what they ate was poison. And they didn’t seem to mind that either.
In fact, they didn’t seem to mind the poison at all. Didn’t seem to have the slightest bellyache from their specially prepared destruction. Not even the children; I have to confess it was painful for me to see the little ones devour this tainted bait, their little mouths eager to experience the novelty of it all. I was witnessing an act of genocide, I was sure. I have no delusions about myself in this: I was no less morally responsible than those that sat by while European traders sold infected blankets to Indians, or the first guns were traded for slaves on the West African coast. I was relieved to see that, much like with children everywhere, the novelty of a new food was outweighed by the inevitable repulsion to novelty itself. Leaning in toward their fathers’ and mothers’ food-laden fingertips, all of the children I could see took only the smallest of bites before shaking their heads in the familiar refrain of the picky toddler. I confess, I didn’t see all of the children, and I don’t offer this report as an excuse. I was participating in something horrible, and my only defense is that I was motivated by my own fear, which of course is no defense at all.
At that moment, though, I was engulfed more in practical matters than in ethical quandaries. The food had to be served; although we had planned for fifty Tekelian monsters, there were at least a hundred in attendance, and we weren’t prepared to get the plates to each of the unfolded tables while they were still warm. This, however, turned out to be to our benefit: the beasts really liked the food cold. In fact, even when we managed to bring it to their tables quickly, the creatures let the warm plates sit there for a few minutes in the wind, refusing to touch them before the dinner became nearly as frigid as the air. We decided to play a zone defense with our serving duties to make up for the fact that there weren’t enough of us to fully meet the challenge. This strategy soon met a snag when it was discovered that Jeffree’s monster had been placed in my quadrant. Old Sausage Nose sat closest to the exit door with a table all to himself, an arrangement clearly referencing his importance. As soon as we got on the roof, I could see Jeffree staring at him with his one working eye. The beast saw him too. He saw what he thought was his and he demanded it. As th
e rest of the troops dug into their food, this monster just stared across at his injured chattel, one arm extended, pointing his long alabaster digit directly at Jeffree’s moving body. There could be no confusing the gesture, so I was left to ignore it. I had no intention of bringing Jeffree near Sausage Nose’s table; I could tell by the way Jeffree was looking that he was already imagining the finale in his personal movie, already imagining his climactic conquering of the big boss. As I struggled to figure out how to avoid the impending conflict, Carlton Damon Carter pushed by me with such force that I expected him to attempt to maul the molester of his man. Instead, Carlton Damon Carter immediately went to serve the food that sat before the creature, picking up a piece of the poisonous Hamburger Helper stroganoff delight in his bare brown hands and holding it out to the beast’s mouth with all the tenderness of a man feeding a baby goat in a petting zoo.
“Eat up, big boy. You eat as much as you deserve, honey,” he cooed, his free hand still holding the camera, which he’d somehow recovered before fleeing, to record the revenge for posterity.
And it was not just the Tekelians who were taken with the Karvels’ supper. Since being awarded a bottle of the painter’s private stock, Arthur Pym had made himself scarce and was nowhere near the tainted food in question. Nathaniel, for his part, was all over it. I watched as Nathaniel kept staring at the food while it was served to his masters, his eyes watering as much as his mouth when Angela paused from her serving duties to slap the dinner from his thieving hands. The Tekelians, thinking the servile wench was affirming Tekelian dominance by not allowing the human to eat, just laughed at this display, a congested snorting sound I was sure would make Nathaniel lose his appetite further.
