Pym

by Mat Johnson

  His hand continued to move in the air before him, whether reaching to me or pointing at me I couldn’t tell. I could, however, testify to what the creature said. In a slow, deliberate imitation of my own nervous chatter, the creature spread his colorless lips, revealing an alabaster tongue as devoid of blood as his skin was, his slick gums as pale and shiny as porcelain.

  “Tekeli-li” is what he told me.

  * The last paragraph in Peters, Narrative, chapter XVII, the following paragraph being the lead paragraph in chapter XVIII (pp. 146–148).

  † Me.

  ‡ One of the unfortunate side effects of the imposed artifice that is “race” is that it forces its way into every categorization. For instance, as the crew of the Creole began to become increasingly argumentative and confrontational, instead of thinking A: “This group is plagued by overblown personalities and is socially dysfunctional” or B: “The issue at hand, with its extraordinary circumstances and implications, is one that sparks immediate difficulties,” what one infected with the American racial mythologies might have come up with was, instead, C: “Why can’t Negroes get their shit together long enough to get anything done?” This, of course, is a fallacious and offensive implied accusation. There are countless successful organizations in a variety of professional arenas founded and run by people of African descent to prove the implication wrong. At that moment, though, in this tent with these specific individuals tearing at each other before the event had even begun, I must confess that, when summarizing the scene in my own warped mind, I succumbed. In my mind, I had skipped over reactions A and B, even managing to degrade past response C to come another down, to D. This response consisted solely of the word N*ggers, which I confess I uttered, wagging my head in frustration.

  THE others came running quickly down the snow-packed path. This was because I was shrieking. It seems that Garth, the white creatures, and I were not far from that opening hall through which we had first descended, and that the rest of Creole’s crew were waiting just beyond the bend. Considering this fact, it was probable that these other beings, standing so close and so still, were very conscious of our group’s presence. That they’d been monitoring our presence. Assured that our group was contained and about to head back up to the surface, the beings had swooped in for further observation. Not counting on two slower members to get lost, not counting on us swooping in on them instead. Regardless of the alien nature of these figures, their expressions of shock were clear. The cringing, the cautious backstepping. They were enormous, and even their frightened movements of retreat were terrifying. If it had not been for the arrival of the rest of my co-workers at the opposite entryway, they would have quickly escaped me, returning into fantasy and rumor, the story ending on this very page.

  We looked on the six of them as they looked at us, but we were the more awed of the two camps. Their size alone, their towering presence, would have been enough to provide a spectacle. Given my own height of six four, I would have to say that their median height was at least seven four or higher. Their bodies were mountainous and hidden, covered in hooded capes that hung broadly from the shoulders and concealed their bulk in folds. What we could see of their very thick legs and feet were bound as well, but by how much material it was impossible to tell. All the cloth was off-white, composed of what appeared to be the rawhide of skinned animals. In the dim light it was difficult to make out depth and distance. The only things that were clearly visible were their heads, and those were what froze us. What I at first glance had assumed to be horrific masks proved instead to be their actual faces. The color, or lack of it, was striking. Albino, it seemed clear, but their eyes contradicted that. Looking into them as they stared intently back at my own, I realized that I had never truly seen pale blue eyes before. I had seen blue but never in this shade, the lightest possible variant, which had more in common with the snow around us than with any accepted form of ocular pigment. These darting, acute, haunting orbs bobbed over noses that were so long and pointy I assume they served some sort of evolutionary purpose that was at the moment unclear. The nostrils were cavernous stretches of ovals, from which gusts of steam—the sole visual evidence that these were actually hot-blooded creatures—pulsed. Also from the holes in their noses came hair, straight and brittle, that fed into their beards, thick corn silk completely devoid of coloring, pouring out of their ponchos. The only pigment attached to them was a yellowing around the mouths and noses, presumably from feeding or bodily fluids.

  “Chris? Say something. Do something,” Angela, poking me from behind, put to me, as I was standing the farthest forward. I don’t know if attempting communication was the consensus plan of the others, but to me it seemed profane to break the silence of this moment. And for a second I couldn’t be sure the creatures before us wouldn’t kill us for the sacrilege.

  “Your hands,” I whispered to the others. It was thought said aloud. “Drop whatever’s in your hands, and hold them out to show that they’re empty.” Simple deduction. That’s what waving and shaking hands are all about: showing we have no weapons to attack with. Since they were tool users, it made sense that the beasts would get this logic, and they did, looking at each other before cautiously holding their own hands out as well.* The only one not making a gesture was poor Garth, whose hands wagged as loosely by his sides as his chin did on his neck. From behind him, Angela gave the big man a forceful jab to his hefty underside. Perhaps a bit more nervous than most, Garth awoke from his frozen stupor, saw what the rest of us were trying to communicate, and flung his hands forward in a sudden motion. It was a spastic display that sent a forgotten snack cake once in his glove out into the snow between our two parties. When it landed in its crinkly covering, the monstrous beings seemed to view it as a gauntlet, nervously reaching back for their weapons once more, causing our side, en masse, to take a few stutter steps back in response.

  “We come in peace,” Jeffree managed to get out. He had one hand on Jaynes’s old shoulder and the other on Carlton Damon Carter’s, seemingly prepared to push the former into harm’s way as he pulled the latter away from it. As Booker Jaynes yanked himself free, one of the creatures, the shortest of the bunch, shot down to grab Garth’s pastry off the ground, causing another wave of backstepping by us. He huddled off to the side of his group with the Little Debbie, seeming truly agitated by his find, holding it at arm’s length for quite a while before bringing the open packaging closer.

  “Yum yum,” I told him. I think it was something I’d seen in a Bob Hope movie once, where the sophisticated American tries to communicate with a bestial savage. Our animalism connects us, I struggled to remind myself. “Mmmm, mmmm,” I said, making feeding motions with my hands. His eyes were firmly affixed on me. He raised the now crushed cake to his lengthy nose for a series of quick snorts, then pulled a loose piece into one of his massive, hairy hands. With a slow, dramatically deliberate underhand swing, he threw a piece of pastry lightly across the expanse at me. His companions stared dumbly at this interaction. I caught the missile and—before I could think of what unknown contaminant these creatures might share, what hidden virus they might be infected with—I swallowed the cake down, humming “mmmm” all the way and rubbing my belly. It was cake with the texture of a sponge soaked in oil since 1952. Pausing for a few seconds after my last swallow, seeing I didn’t fall to the ground and meet a quick death, the creature ate what was left of the portable sweetness.

  “AAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH”

  The sounds it made, the groans, were loud, vulgar. They were appreciative too, and the now excited snowman gathered over his buddies. The international sugarcane trade that fueled the colonial world—these beings had obviously missed that. I watched, struggling to be culturally relative and hide my revulsion, as they moved the crumbs around in their mouths, their alabaster tongues glistening.

  “They like the food,” I turned to tell the others. They were all nodding, uniform looks of frozen shock on their faces.

  “Them shits
is good,” Garth mumbled, eyes glued to the display of ecstasy before him. “Let me see if I got more,” he said and began patting himself down, pulling through all the pockets. The others soon joined in, frantically groping him like those sweets were the only things holding off a rabid dog. Garth looked like a sculpture they were putting together.

  “Uh, guys? They’re leaving,” I interrupted. It was true. A quick word from the main yeti had sent the others, one by one, back out into the tunnel beyond. Except one. He was moving toward us. Moving toward me.

  I didn’t appreciate how massive he was until I was swallowed in his shadow. The smell, the horrible fishy smell, like the penguin cage at the zoo. The hand, a mitt of calloused, pale, dead skin, raised slowly up to me. Up toward my chest, open, flat. Still. Like he wanted me to take it.

  “You going to leave him hanging?” Jeffree asked, incredulous, to which the others agreed in a united chorus of “Don’t leave him hanging.”

  I grabbed the hand. I was touching it. Not as cold as ice, but as cold and hard as leather laid on it. The massive fingers slowly circled mine, and the creature gave me a gentle pull, motioning with his head beyond.

  “He wants me to go with him,” I translated. “Shit” slipped out next.

  “I’ll go.” Jeffree stepped beside me, hand forward. “Carlton Damon Carter and me. Will film it. We’ll bring the footage back.”

  The creature, seemingly sensing the meaning of the discussion, let me loose. He looked at me with those eyes. I met them, barely. Long enough to motion over to Mister Adventure Man.

  “But let’s get this straight now: it’s called Jeffree’s Tube.”

  “Fine,” Captain Jaynes offered. He was already backing up out of there, the others following.

  “And we’ll call them Carlton’s Carrions. That has a real ring to it.” Carlton Damon Carter looked up from his lens at this, smiling.

  “They’re not birds, Jeffree. And you can’t name everything,” I told him.

  “Look, if we go down, we take the risk, then we make the decisions. That’s supposed to be how this deal works, right? Finders keepers. That’s the deal. Whoever goes down there owns this. Movie rights, book rights, TV rights. Action figures. Because I don’t see anybody else stepping up.”

  And with that, everybody stopped stepping away. And slowly, one by one, stepped forward.

  We all went. Everybody but Garth, who was out of breath and exhausted from the task of carrying his own weight, but he was my boy, so I argued successfully that he should stay above to serve as our lifeline in case we disappeared below. As for the rest of us, down we trudged behind the snowmen, deeper into the subterranean blue, not knowing what awaited us. Down into the ground at the end of the world.†

  The beings were fast, the lengths of their gaits alone put us at a disadvantage. Jogging lightly for a bit as the labyrinth of tunnels moved farther down, we struggled for purchase when the surface became steeper. As the angle increased, so did the time these creatures kept their feet to the ground, using the rough ice of the floor to add a skating motion to their stride. The farther down we went, the wetter the ice that surrounded us seemed, glistening in a slow but undeniable melt. This, of course, was the opposite of what I’d expected; it should have been colder the deeper we went away from the sun. But the caves that widened to cathedral heights dripped above us. We were silent, focused on not busting our tails, until we arrived maybe a half hour later at an opening that brought our path to an end, dumping us out into a hollow so fast it took a moment to realize that the blue sky we now saw far above us in the cavernous space was a distant frozen ceiling.

  Americans use the description “as big as a football field” as if that is a legitimate form of measurement. But really, what other single unit of measurement is there that’s comparable? The space here seemed to be at least the size of one large sports arena, possibly two, seats and concession stands included. And there were enough creatures present to fill that field’s audience as well. Thousands, tens of thousands, of the humanoids could be seen moving about below us as we stood at the tunnel’s mouth. In an instant, creatures that seemed the greatest rarity in the universe now outnumbered our own group by a legion.

  “We are going to be very famous,” Jeffree said, looking around. The sweat on his brow steamed. Carlton Damon Carter, his eyes nearly as wide as his lens, nodded in agreement as his camcorder took in the wonder.

  “We are going to be very famous. We are going to be very famous, and very, very rich,” Nathaniel declared as he pulled Angela by her gloved hand over to him. She looked at me, though.

  “You said it was true,” she said, dumbfounded. I was struck by the privilege of witnessing this spectacle and the dizzying possibility that my strange obsession might come to fruition. But the way Angela looked at me was the greatest treasure and maybe the whole point.

  All around us, the creatures climbed along the walls, drifting upward in lines to the ceiling in hivelike precision. In fact, the hollow itself was just like the inside of a beehive: I could see rows of identical portals covering the walls around us for hundreds of yards in the air, each the entrance to one of many hundreds of rooms, and each room delineated by pockmarked indentations in the ice that served as ladders. The creatures secured a hand or foothold, effortlessly gliding their oversize bodies both down and up the cave’s high walls. Above us, the distant ceiling dripped across the expanse, giving the appearance of soft rain. And as more of the beasts saw us, more of them climbed out of their high-rise caves and slid down the walls to crowd around us.

  “This is not good. This is not good at all,” Captain Jaynes said as we were surrounded. It was already too late for complaints, whatever was going to happen had already started. So many faces, so many pale eyes, now staring at us. So much familiarity within the alien. They pointed just like we did. They whispered. I had no idea how genetically connected we all were, but I felt some link must be there—if not as fellow humans, then as fellow primates, or at least as mammals.

  As I was guessing at their taxonomy, a male stepped forward, a shriveled specimen in comparison to the stoutness of the rest. This was clearly an elder, his silver beard was fuller, longer than those of the other males.‡ He came directly forward, past the imaginary boundary around us that his tribe had respected, and stopped in front of me. This was odd: the gesture seemed intended to initiate a meeting of leaders, and Captain Jaynes was obviously the elder of our group.

  “Tekeli-li,” their chief said to me. The pronunciation was so different from what I had imagined, containing warbles hidden within the word that no tongue groomed on Romance languages could duplicate.

  “Tekeli-li,” I responded back to him. This was greeted by a polite nod—I doubt he imagined that I was trying to respond to his greeting—and then a motion to one of the other creatures who stood behind him. The second humanoid looked similar to the one who had taken a bite of Garth’s cake upstairs.§ Big and pale, pale and big. But this one was clearly a leader—his paunch of overindulgence poking out like a massive phallus beneath his robe, his face bloated in comparison to those that peeked from behind him. And the nose. In comparison to those of the other monsters who came to gawk at us, this guy’s nose was freakishly massive; gray, long, and lumpy, like poorly packed boudin. The sausage-nosed beast spun off at the old beast’s orders, and then the elder tried to continue.

  “Ergg Eyy Ossen Aublatt?” is what the odd old thing said to me. This is as near as I can manage to catch how it sounded to my ears, and the only thing I understood was that it came in the form of a question. I looked over at my captain for guidance. He looked back at me and slowly shook his head. He’d had enough.

  “I don’t know who these folks are, I don’t even know what the hell these folks are, but I do know that now we got to get the hell out of this place. We seen enough. Jeffree can stay if he wants,” he barked. I could hear in his voice that it was clearly too much for the old man.

  “Agreed,” offered Nathaniel. “We’ve
established first contact, and established our respective stakes in intellectual property and other rights of exploitation. Let’s go while we still got the good health that makes money worthwhile.”

  “We come in peace,” Jeffree, stepping forward and past me, declared suddenly, Carlton Damon Carter zooming his lens in on the intensity in his partner’s eyes. The elder paid Jeffree no mind, quickly sidestepping him while keeping his glare on me. He looked at me expectantly, as if I was about to give an answer to his burbled question. I felt obliged to comply. Pointing to myself, I said, “Chris Jaynes.” The long beard simply stared at me with an expression of confusion.

  “EEEEErrrrrgggggggggg—” was what the elder was winding into when another call came from behind the crowd and beyond the cluster of igloo-type buildings in the distance, from a large cave opening much like the one our own crew and guides had descended through minutes before. Hearing the sound, the speaker cut short his wailing with visible relief and joined with the rest of the crowd in looking back toward the newcomers. Jaynes nodded his head to the side, as if we should just turn and run for it right then. But there was nowhere to go. We couldn’t possibly hope to climb back up those caverns, or even to navigate the route back to the surface, fast enough to distance ourselves from these creatures so clearly bred for the environment.

  Besides, I was caught up. Hypnotized. For now, coming to our gathering, Sausage Nose and another of the larger creatures seemed to be carrying a child, each with one hand holding a shoulder. A diminished, dangerously thin boy, with a slight pinkish color that contrasted with the bluish tones of the other creatures. He appeared to be unconscious, flopping like a stringless marionette. The three figures came through as the crowd opened a path for them. When they dumped the smaller creature between the elder and myself, I saw that it wasn’t a child at all but the body of a man.