by Mat Johnson
“Come with me,” she urged, grabbing my hand. Her own temporarily gloveless palm was a skinny thing, I could feel her bones through skin as light as oiled papyrus, yet nearly as cold now as the ice that surrounded us. She was too good for this—I would have felt more guilt in inviting her down here if I wasn’t so relieved to have her near me. With Augustus napping for the second time this morning (Was it morning? I don’t know. There certainly had been a slight ebbing and receding of the glow), I chose to join Mrs. Latham as she walked down the tunnel toward town with her captors. Her hosts apparently accepted the addition of my presence to their party, because after a few hundred yards the monsters were poking and prodding me in their desired direction, just as they were doing to Angela.
At the market, strutting amid the stares of so many of these robed creatures, we quickly noticed the presence of both Jeffree and Carlton Damon Carter in the distance. They had been fortunate, it appeared: they were the only two who had been selected for labor together, their bond so visible that perhaps even these alien creatures could recognize it instantly. Despite this, the men’s demeanor did not indicate that their hosts had given them much consideration at all.
“We got to get the fuck out of here” is what Jeffree said to me when we approached him. Jeffree was one of the darkest-skinned among the Creole crew, but his melanin count did nothing to hide the bruise that had welted along the side of his face, punishment for what offense I couldn’t imagine.
“I’ll admit it, I thought we could just hang here for a few days, wait for the next shift of workers to sail in from Argentina, get some footage for the site, some anecdotes for the talk-show circuit. But this is bullshit, man. We got to break out. If they think, they think Brother Jeffree is going to put up with this treatment for another night, then they got another thing coming.”
“Have you seen Nathaniel? Or Captain Jaynes? Has anyone heard anything from the mainland?” Angela tried to press him, but whatever affront Jeffree was reacting to was still spinning behind his glazed brown eyes.
“Man, we ain’t seen nobody, I ain’t heard nothing, and we ain’t about to hear nothing down here either. They even took my man’s camera. Tell them what they did to your camera, Carlton.”
“They took my camera,” Carlton Damon Carter explained.
“Can you believe that? What’s the point of being here if we don’t get it on tape? Forget news of the outside world, we got to make our own news, sister. And the news is freedom. Fuck this!” Jeffree declared, nearly yelling.
“Word!” Carlton Damon Carter echoed behind him, and it was this one loud declaration from the quiet man that made all three of us turn to note the anomaly.
“It doesn’t have to be that bad,” I tried to calm them. “Garth’s still at camp, at the radios: when he hears something, when the satellite malfunction or whatever is resolved, I’m sure he’ll come get us. Think about the story here, think about the experience you’re having, this priceless material falling into your lap, Jeffree. When the world comes back, and it’s got to, think of how many hits you’re going to get on the blog. You’ll have to increase your bandwidth. Think of the movie rights.” This last bit was for Angela, and it seemed to work, because she paused from darting her head around in search of a sign of Nathaniel to look at me. “Right, you’re right.” She nodded the affirmative before her attention drifted off again.
“Yeah, okay. Okay, man. You right. I guess, I guess I can—” It was just in that first moment of Jeffree’s pacification that his host, a creature whose draped figure I’d previously assumed to be a curtained wall, turned around. What fierce, dead-eyed monsters these were, I thought, staring at it. This one was the most horrific beast I’d seen among them, a full head taller than the rest of his colossal kin and that damn sausage nose, like it had been chewed by a bear before being judged inedible and abandoned. While the overgrown homunculus I called Augustus seemed soft and harmless, like a rotting marshmallow, looking at Jeffree’s sausage-nosed specimen, I was reminded of the ferocity of these barbarians. Without warning and without letting Jeffree finish his sentence, the creature shot out a hand toward Jeffree’s bald head, the impact causing the cowrie-shell necklace that Jeffree always sported to clack like a rim shot.
“Motherfucking kielbasa-nosed prick!” Jeffree responded, and immediately I knew where his welts were from. Jeffree pulled his hand back as if to use it for punching but, taking in the size of his target and the hopelessness of his task, dropped it again in frustration. For his part, Mr. Sausage Nose paid him no mind, merely walking farther along the village path as he had just urged Jeffree to. Carlton Damon Carter, giving his partner a tortured glance, smartly started following the beast, but this had no effect on Jeffree, who after wagging his head several times, turned to me instead.
“You stay here. You put up with this, I’m going. I’m going back to join that fat bus-riding bastard, and I’m going to get somebody up on that radio, and then we are all getting the hell out of here.”
“Don’t you think—” I started, but having made his decision, Jeffree began walking off. Back toward the tunnel we had first come through on discovering this place, in the opposite direction of his personal monster.
“RKARKKARKIV,” Sausage Nose roared with such a violent collection of consonants that my own body froze up. First the sound hit, then the air that made the sound. Angela’s petite hand flew to her equally diminutive nose to shield her from what came out of the screaming creature: the breath of a lifetime diet of lard processed through the body of an ape. Jeffree may have smelled the aroma too, but by now he’d walked pretty far away and made no motion to stop. Clearly infuriated, the beast repeated his roar, leaving poor Carlton Damon Carter to curl his arms over his ears and head in response. It was then I noticed that the other Tekelian breed, those that had been casually walking past us and stopping only to give us curious stares through their albino eyes, now had come to a complete and expectant halt as they waited to see how this situation was resolved. It was Jeffree himself who gave them an answer, although I doubt that the creatures had any understanding of what the raised middle finger signified, or of Jeffree’s verbal instruction to “sit on it and rotate.” What the crowd did understand, what it was impossible to misunderstand, was the meaning of Jeffree’s creature’s response. When Mr. Sausage Nose shot his hand out from his robe, I assumed it to be another violent hand gesture in response, but it was violence itself. The dagger, which is the only word I can think to describe it, was clearly made of bone that had been sharpened on one end. Thrown from fifty feet away in a blur barely visible, that point went directly into the socket that held Jeffree’s left eye. When Jeffree collapsed on the ice, red pooling into the ground around him in an unexpected burst of color, the crowd decided it had seen enough and moved on.
Close up, the wound was even more grizzly, even more so for Jeffree, still being unmercifully alive. It was only the angle that saved him from death—the dagger exiting at his temple instead of depositing in his brain. Judging from the blow, he should have been dead, but we knew he was alive because of how loud he was screaming.
After a few minutes, Angela and I had to pull Carlton Damon Carter off his lover, because Sausage Nose still demanded his attention. It took all of us to get Jeffree off the ground: he was stuck to it. In just minutes his own blood had frozen his soaking clothes to the floor.
“My eye,” Jeffree kept saying as he staggered to standing. “We’re sorry,” we kept saying back to him. And then in a sudden movement Carlton Damon Carter grabbed the knife poking out of Jeffree’s head as if the weapon might fly away, just as quickly yanking it free. I thought Jeffree would pass out from this, but he didn’t. To his credit, he stayed conscious and was still screaming a good ten minutes later, stopping only when his captor returned. That’s when Sausage Nose shoved some fabric in Jeffree’s mouth, then threw him over his massive shoulder like Jeffree was a bag of brown rice. Carlton Damon Carter trailed them as the monster stomped off again.
/> I found my captain, my cousin, not an hour later, having pantomimed his beard to a horrific assortment of beasts until enough pointing fingers added up to his location. Booker Jaynes was crushing a collection of glacial ice by stomping in a basin of ice shards.‖ Just past him, noting his progress, was a Tekelian form at rest, reclined on a slope carved into the wall behind. Leaning as it was, with its robes hanging back across its body, I realized that this beast was the one they called Hunka, the first creature I’d noticed to be clearly female: the collapsed gown held the shape of what appeared to be engorged breasts.a After seeing me, Captain Jaynes paused in his march, but when he heard his host’s guttural exclamation from behind, Jaynes resumed his motion, crushing the ice cubes beneath him with his boots as if he was stomping on grapes south of Napoli.
“That is the way of it. That is the way of our bondage. He’s lucky he just lost an eye” was his reaction to the news of Jeffree’s maiming, and this came after a long pause that seemed to offer even less than that paltry response.
“Booker, what if the ships never come back for us? What will we do if it takes a week for telecommunications to be restored? What if it takes a month? What if we can’t reach the world for years?”
“Then we will do what our people have always done: we will wait for our chance. And we will endure,” Booker Jaynes shot back, the words filled with disdain and disbelief that I would need this answer found. Returning to his crushing, he seemed more at peace in it than I had seen him in any of his Creole desk duties. Crunch, crunch, crunch. Stomp, stomp, stomp. That was his only answer. There was another overtone to his statement as well, one that I digested in the long, cold walk back to my own tunnel, my own servitude. There was relief in his voice. As if the man’s worst fears in life had been realized and justified all in the same moment.
* I realize honkies is a racial slur and the Tekelians might not even technically count as human, but this was the word that Booker Jaynes kept using and as such was stuck in my subconscious as well. In addition, the noises that the creatures made to communicate did have some literal honking sounds, which made the slur that much more difficult for me to shed.
† There are two types of lazy bosses. One is so lazy that they make you do not only your own work but theirs too. Worse, they lie to you about it, unloading all responsibility for their actions. The other is so lazy that not only do they not do their own work but they can’t even be bothered to provide you work to do. These bosses lie as well, but only to themselves, passively. The first is the hardest boss to work for, the second the easiest. In Augustus I sensed immediately which one I had.
‡ Fufu is a starchy paste made of boiled yams or cassava that comprises the staple of the Akan peoples. It is also used as glue for minor automobile repairs by tro-tro drivers in parts of Accra, Tema, and Kumasi.
§ Unlike the young of most mammals, the Tekelian children managed to be diminutive and large eyed and yet still utterly unendearing by my human standards. Their little white piranha teeth helped.
‖ This process I would soon be acquainted with as a method of preparing drinking water.
a The way she was sitting, leg up and leaning on her arm, disgusted me. Later I realized it was a mockery of the Farah Fawcett poster many of my white friends had when I was a child.
NATHANIEL Latham was a Morehouse Man, and to me this said everything about him. This is a distinctive breed, one possible to identify without the sight of a college ring or knowledge of its academic history. There is the entrepreneurial optimism, visible in his buoyant steps, there is the near-religious belief in the self and a refusal to acknowledge that any obstacle could thwart him. The Morehouse Man is a uniquely American creation and shares the young nation’s traditional certainty that the days ahead will be greater than the days behind. His clothes are crisp, conservative but energetic, ever waiting for that magazine cover that will one day reflect on his success. The Morehouse Man, at his finest, is America at its finest. Once, while sitting at a dusty café in Accra, I looked past my dog-eared copy of The Garies and Their Friends to see the red polo shirt, perfectly trimmed dreads, and platinum watch of a Morehouse Man sitting at the table next to me. What struck me about the scene was not seeing such a familiar sight thousands of miles away at a little burger stand in West Africa. No, what I found most impressive was that even so far out of context I could recognize the Morehouse Man, which a conversation with this brother soon confirmed.
Unfortunately, while Morehouse had trained Nathaniel Latham for many things, none of those things had to do with physical survival in Antarctica. His college had forged Nathaniel’s will, filled him with enough optimism to convince him that his will was sufficient to overcome even the most absurd situations, but as for practical polar matters, such as choosing proper metal studs for ice spelunking, it was woefully inadequate. I say this because after only a week of walking back and forth between his captors’ lodging and his wife’s, Nathaniel’s top-of-the-line, custom-order boots’ lack of proper studding had resulted in a sprained ankle. Sure, Nathaniel’s soft feet were kept warm, but on the iced-over floors on the path that separated our two neighborhoods he would have been better off with spiked golf shoes. I heard Nathaniel moving outside my door five nights after Jeffree lost his eye, calling my name, calling out a bunch of cusses as well, although those weren’t directed at me.
“Yo, Chris. You watch out for Angela, okay? That’s your job,” Nathaniel told me, not even bothering to look at me directly. I felt a shameful rush at this request, like he was acknowledging that had always been my job, no matter what role he served for her at the moment. As Nathaniel talked to me, he limped forward a bit, and his injury became apparent. “This ankle is killing me; it’s puffed up like a … Forget it. But I’m not going to be able to walk back here for a couple of days. Maybe a week. I should really take the week because I need to recuperate. I’m going to start getting migraines, at this rate.”
“Did you tighten your shoestrings at the tops? That will brace the ankle,” I generously offered.
“Yeah, I tightened the goddamn shoestrings, Chris. Jesus Christ. What do you think is keeping me upright? I’m barely going to make it back to those bastards where I am tonight, and you would not believe what they’re capable of. So your job is to watch out for Angela. I don’t like what’s mine fucked with, and I don’t want them fucking with her.”
She wasn’t his, but I did watch out for Angela Latham. Minutes after the usurper limped off, I found my way down the hall, using for illumination one of the fatty candles that were ubiquitous down there, made from a substance that seemed to be stale krakt or, if not, something almost identical in composition.* The neighboring residence, the one of Angela’s enslavers, was only a hundred yards away, and yet I had never visited, waiting instead in my off moments in the halls for Angela to pass through so that I might stalk her without seeming to. Now that I was actually taking time to investigate her residence for the first time, I immediately felt a moment of disorientation. Expecting to find another small hovel, I instead discovered something much grander. What I had taken before to be the front entrance to a simple hollowed-out cave like Augustus’s (not a home but home to a few smelly sealskin rugs) was merely the back end, the alley exit, of a palatial fortress. Instead of rough markings made into the ice, these walls were perfectly smooth, except where moldings and primitive candelabra had been expertly carved into the surface. And there was furniture as well, not just heaps of animal carcasses but elegant pieces carved out of the very ice into chairs and tables and even baskets for storage. I saw this and was amazed, and also shamed: if you have to suffer the indignity of being a possession, it’s an even worse insult to be the possession of a pauper. Angela certainly seemed to have landed a prince, or some other branch of royalty, although to look at him you couldn’t tell. Or at least I took the beast I now saw to be her principal captor, but that was just because I found the thing standing behind her, staring intently at the woman as she worked. Angela was in what appe
ared to be the dining hall, a cavernous room immaculate aside for the smell that hung in it. There was a soft-shell crab place in South Philadelphia on Passyunk I used to go to, open for decades nearly twenty-four hours a day: this cave smelled like that joint’s sidewalk. But the place was spotless, clearly owing to the labors of the brown woman making it so. Still, there was a haughtiness to the creature sitting behind her on a raised surface, as if he himself was responsible for the efficiency of her work. He was no more responsible for his clean home than I was for Augustus’s messy one (I wasn’t touching that place, it was disgusting), yet there the creature was, as arrogant as a Shar-Pei.
At the moment, Angela was down on her knees, digging at the debris in the pale floor with a bone tool, pouring wet slush over the crater to smooth the surface in her wake. Despite the thick Gore-Tex and fleece which padded the majority of her body and limited her movement, Angela had the task down to industrial-level efficiency. She was so consumed by her efforts that she didn’t notice me for a long moment and, when she did see my boot, barely looked up.
“Is he still there?” Angela asked finally, not pausing from her digging. The debris she threw onto a skin which lay beside her, one that kept freezing to the floor, so that as she progressed she kept giving it firm tugs. I looked over at the creature directly and, thinking of Jeffree’s now missing eye, smiled the best I could at him, bowed my shoulders a bit, and tried to look stupid and harmless.