Pym: A Novel

by Mat Johnson

  She came out of the subway, and she blinked and looked around for a few seconds, orienting herself. Her sense of direction was poor, her eyesight worse. Angela refused to get glasses because she was a little vain and was afraid of falling into a downward spiral of myopia, that the lightest prescription would soon lead to lenses thicker than the Hubble Telescope. She found the street sign, found the direction, and walked toward the restaurant, where I sat by the window. The look when she reached me at the table, the hug that started with the arms and pushed in with the full body behind it, it was everything I’d been waiting for. Always let them be the last to contact you when you split, even when they dump you and say they don’t love you anymore, so that you both know that you are the one who never called them back.

  “You look great. You look the same. Like you haven’t changed one bit,” Angela told me, still holding my hand as she took her seat. Another victory on my part. Seven years without increasing your body mass index is a great accomplishment. Especially for a man soon to hit forty. It was the great age, when poor lifestyle choices and bad genes started to show dramatically on the human form. For her, I’d kept myself encased in amber, mind and body. From this position, though, up close, I could see all the ways Angela Bertram had changed over the years of name hyphenation. Her once braided hair was now untwined and ironed. The darkness of her skin banished the thought of wrinkles, though. It still shone like the skin of an orca. Accented now by diamonds that covered most of her earlobes.

  “Don’t you ever wish you could go back, make different decisions?” she asked after entrées, a sadness there I planned to rub away. “The divorce has taught me, I’m creative. Even if I’m not doing art anymore, I need to be a creative person. I needed a partner who’s a creative, adventurous person. How did I think I could be content with someone whose idea of life was just raking in the cash from corporate acquisition contracts?”

  I knew she’d never be happy in that life. I knew that when we were together. What I didn’t know was how terrified she was of growing old in the same poverty she’d been raised in. This I figured out later. This I deciphered from “I love you, but I can’t live like this. I’m going with David …” And then she probably finished the sentence—maybe she was going with David to the store or on a Caribbean cruise or to the chapel to be wed that very day—but I’ve long since deleted the rest from my memory banks.

  “You always knew that. You always knew me.” Angela laughed. And I laughed back because I did and I didn’t hate her for it. She had fear. I had fear. Our demons had just been working at cross-purposes.

  “I do know you. That’s why when I heard about this, I knew I had to let you in,” I said and pushed Booker Jaynes’s folder across the table. I’d already sent her the scans, but I felt like the actual papers might serve as a talisman.

  “Well, I’m at a crossroads. The marriage, the job even—I can’t work with him anymore. Infidelity will do that,” she said, and I gave a little shrug. Not enough to show my awareness of the irony in her statement. Bitterness was the enemy.

  “Well, I’ll have to look further, but I’m intrigued, that I can say now. I know I wouldn’t have a problem getting a second lawyer to join as well.” She smiled, took a sip of the white I’d picked for the occasion. A pinot—a refined version of the rotgut I used to lug for her up to my fourth-floor walk-up. It worked. We made it all the way to dessert, talking about the lost days we once had together. She listened to my Pym ravings. She was fascinated. We kept talking in front of the bistro as the lights went off inside the place.

  “Look, Chris, I could use a capital investment like this right now. Hell, I need adventure too. But, I’ll tell you, if I do this, if I do the crazy thing of coming all the way down to Antarctica, it won’t be about me,” Angela admitted to me, walking to her subway. “There’s someone I know who this would be even more important to. Someone who this would be a dream come true for. A special guy who needs this. Someone very important to me.”

  I didn’t go for the kiss. At the gate, I shook her hand and received another hug for my restraint. Excusing myself before I burst, I floated back home. Technically I took the train, but I felt like I could have glided on the tracks and made it there just the same. No present worry, not a thought that wasn’t future or past. All my patience, my self-control, then victory. I promised myself I wouldn’t contact her again until we were below the equator. I wasn’t going to crowd her, scare her off. Give her any reason to second-guess the odyssey. I turned her over to Booker Jaynes, and I would just see her down there. See her on the ice. Wait for the opportunity to be cooped up with Angela Bertram on an utterly isolated Antarctic base. Let the inevitable take place.

  “Niggas on Ice!” Garth yelled at me when I got the door open. It was late, he was early to sleep and rise, and I was surprised to see Garth even awake. But there he was, smiling, Antarctic images on his laptop and a doppelgänger of Shackleton’s Sorrow on the page he waved, compliments of my own printer and a whole cartridge of my colored ink. “Get this, they say he’s down there, dog. That’s the rumor, this is where he lives. The ultimate in Karvel spotting,” Garth ranted. I paid attention to him, but more to the large package I’d picked up at the door. “Mathis Estate” was listed at the top of the return address, in care of a law office in Hammond, Indiana.

  I’d tried calling Mahalia Mathis, asking her to mail Poe’s letter to me, of course, but no answer till now. This wasn’t just a letter, though. It was as large as an icebox, and this made sense, because when I removed its outer paper, I saw that it was just that, a Styrofoam cooler. On top of the lid was a folder with not one copy of the Poe letter but five. All quality, professionally done. But the box, this huge box. Electric taped. Razoring the edges, I lifted slowly as Garth continued babbling about Thomas Karvel hidden away in Antarctica behind me. I was prepared for several things, a hat, tom-toms, maybe one of her performance gowns, but none of those were close to what I saw inside. A severed human head, sockets empty, staring back up at me.

  The flesh was gone, all that was left was a brown skull resting on a puzzle of aged skeleton pieces. It was enough to make me jump. It was enough to end Garth’s rant when he came up next to me. Beside this head was a note, handwritten in the elaborate cursive loops of the woman herself.

  To Be Sent to Christopher Jaynes, on the Event of My Untimely and Unfortunate Passing:

  My family has carried this burden, cast down from one generation to the next, since 1849, when they had to dig him up to hide his bones from Rufus Griswold. My plan for our last unfortunate meeting had been to ask that professor to test them next, but you saw how he made a fool of himself with his little Q-Tip nonsense. Please find me a good Jewish doctor who can run that DNA test right. Redeem him, Christopher Jaynes!!! You’re my only hope!!!*

  There was the skeleton of Dirk Peters. The man himself, in my possession. It was almost as great an honor as the book. And I made a vow to myself right then that I would redeem him. I would redeem him, beyond the petty prejudices of his family, distanced and departed as well though they were. Someday, I would find Tsalal. And I would go to Tsalal with these remains. And there, on the highest mountain, I would bury Dirk Peters in the ground, on the island of blackness that he, a black man, had discovered and, by leaving Pym behind, had preserved from the predations of white supremacy, colonialism, slavery, genocide, and the whole ugly story of our world. This was Dirk Peters’s legacy. Even if he was an Uncle Tom.

  “Damn, dog. A box of bones, ain’t that some shit? From here, nothing can surprise you. You’re not going to get a bigger shock than that in this life.”

  Garth was wrong. Very wrong. A bigger shock came three months later, when we met at the hotel in Ushuaia, Argentina, the day before the journey. To save money, Garth and I were sharing a hostel room with four other considerably unwashed German backpackers down the street, but I made sure that when I began my journey with Angela Bertram I was ironed and fresh shaved.

  She was standing in t
he lobby, the woman I used to call the Ashanti Doll, her skin a wealth of rich melanin above the white vinyl of her snowsuit. And I saw myself with her, I saw a vision of us spooning on an iceberg, within an iceberg, the blue and white and the rest of the world impossibly hard and cold but the two of us warm in an embrace. And then I literally saw myself, right there, behind her. Me but chewed up me. Me but chewed up, digested, and shit out again. This guy. Like me but bloated and stupid and going bald where I was going gray.

  Angela introduced her new husband. Nathaniel Latham told me how “fucking psyched” he was that “his babe” chose this as their “honeymoon journey.” Garth put a hand on my shoulder to make sure I wouldn’t do anything. Aside from murmuring “someone adventurous, creative,” I didn’t. I couldn’t. My brain was flushing down my spinal column. My head was empty, my eyes blank.

  “He’s an entertainment lawyer,” Angela Latham said and beamed back at me. “Being here, doing this, now I know the divorce came too late. Nathaniel reminds me so much of you too.” The rock now on her finger matched her earrings. “You guys are going to get along great.”

  * Although represented as three, there were in truth at least a dozen exclamation points at the end of the note’s final sentence. And each of those had a frowning face drawn carefully into its base dot, which I am both unable and unwilling to re-create here.

  IT was the last continent; man had overrun all the others. It hid on the bottom of the planet, below, white and silent and as still as it was cold. And it was very very cold. Our crew was black and loud, running and stuck, always freezing and yet sweating in our insulated clothes. It was boring. It was too bright. The sun never set, just went red at two in the morning and then back to yellow an hour later. And I was stuck in a double-wide aluminum box with Angela who was now Angela Latham, not even a hyphen this time that I could cling to.

  The miners sailed down from Argentina to work in fourteen-hour shifts, Monday straight through till Friday, and slept on their own boat till their week was done. We oversaw them, provided direction, counted up the ice blocks they piled into their tanker’s hull before taking them back north for bottling. During the week, the site boomed as the engines of the giant mining machines did their banging. At 3:00 P.M. on Friday, our world immediately became quiet once more. The last large sound was that of the latest tanker belching as it drifted, fully loaded, away from us. Heavy with clean water, it began its journey back up the planet again, first to Buenos Aires to drop off the workers and then all the way to exotic locations like Newark and Bayonne, its melting cargo becoming more valuable with every nautical mile.

  When the drilling was going on, we bitched about the sound.* The day after the workers sailed away from our Antarctic home, the silence was louder. The God-I-can’t-hear-anything roar, building in your ears like a snowball on a cartoon hill. The constantly rustling wind didn’t help. That was just the sound of silence moving.

  Every Saturday after the workers had gone back to the warmer continent, Booker Jaynes sent Garth and me on out to drill in the surrounding tundra. Soil samples, ice samples, we even had a standing order to grab a penguin if we got the chance. Booker Jaynes had several “clandestine business opportunities,”† had promised things to a lot of people, it became clear. I wasn’t sure how much of his intended take was outside our agreed upon communal take, but I didn’t really care. It was a chance to get out of the box, away from her. Seeing her with this man, the ring, smelling the cigars he reeked of mingling with the scent of her, it was a lot to bear. I spent my time either working for my cousin or translating Dirk Peters into English from the blurred script he wrote in. I consoled myself with the self-evident truth: Their marriage would fail. He was clearly lazy. He had “taken time off” from the agency in L.A. she worked for, and on return, he would burn through their savings. Once he was stripped bare, she would see him as the fraud I knew he must be. Her fear of being broke would kick in and she would walk away from him as she had done to me years before. By this time, I would have published my edition of The True and Interesting Narrative of Dirk Peters to major fanfare. All would be restored. This was my fantasy. In the moments when I allowed myself to see past my despair, this is what I hoped for.

  By week eight, Garth and I had fallen into a routine. Our little surveying trips were like vacations. Outside our windshield was no hint of humanity for miles and miles. Just ice and air, wind that shaped the snow on the ground into modernist curves and Victorian angles. Garth seemed almost comfortable out there. Cold climates look good on fat people. With all the layers, everybody else looks fat too. If you still managed to look skinny under all that cloth, you also looked miserable.

  “They out there, dog. On the ice. Hiding.”

  “The shrouded white figures?” I asked. I was thinking the same thing. When you were looking out there, into the emptiness, it wasn’t long before you could imagine anything you wanted there to be.

  “No. Karvel and his people. Makes sense, don’t it? You got all that money, you want to go where no bombs or nothing can get them. That’s what I’d do,” Garth told me, again. In bringing him down here, I had introduced Garth to his new favorite conspiracy theory.‡ I’d stopped countering with logic by this point, because doing this made me even more tired of him.

  When Garth became excited he talked while he ate, his Little Debbie snack cakes inevitably smearing some sort of cream or multicolored glazing across his thin outline of a mustache. Garth knew his appetites and had come prepared to fill them. He’d brought cases of the cakes, as well as videogames (most of which involved him shooting imaginary loads into fantasy people) and porn (same). The actresses in the latter clips were older, matronly looking women with large breasts and hips and guts who hugged the men assigned to act with them.§ He’d also brought his entire collection of paintings of Thomas Karvel to be signed by the artist when he found him, certain that this ultimate feat as a Karvel spotter would be rewarded by the Master of Light, who would use his pen to magically ink Garth’s investment into a fortune.

  “Shackleton’s Sorrow looks just like those mountain ridges out here. Tell me it don’t. Now how could Karvel know that?” With a sweeping movement, a coconut creme roll clutched in his glove, Garth motioned to the space beyond our frozen windshield, his thick parka and snack cake cellophane rustling in unison to accent his gesture. It did look like the painting to me. So did all the other mountain ridges Garth had made the same claim of in the weeks before. This range was about ten miles away; its pale ridges were all that gave the landscape a sense of scale. Antarctica felt to me like nothing. Frozen nothing. Nihilism in physical form. If it was to be loved, it was to be loved for its lack of content, people, possessions.

  The drill was mounted to an all-terrain vehicle (ATV) the size of a Volkswagen, and it took a good ten minutes just to get it unchained off the flatbed tow and then driven down to the ground. It was my turn, so Garth helped me set it up, then abandoned me for the warmth of the cab. It was an expensive piece of equipment. Every time we took it out, Booker Jaynes told us it was an expensive piece of equipment, but it looked mean and old. Once again it shook, it shuddered, and burrowed its way down the hole to its bottom, pumping and thrusting into the cold ground. Once it reached its target, the drill would remove an eight-inch tubular sample, and then we could drive on.

  After I got the drill going, I walked back to the cab to refill my thermos. Garth was looking through his rumpled Karvel catalog. Nearly every page was worn from overuse, its corner intentionally turned. I tapped on the window, and he rolled it down, reached his thermos to mine, and poured.

  “You hear that drill? Your mom wants one with rubber on the end,” I told him. When the cup was filled, I took it into two thickly gloved hands, where it was not so much held as laid.

  “Dog, you joke. But she had one. And your pop stole—”

  Midsentence, Garth’s expression turned from squinting speculation to wide-eyed revelation. Before I could react, one of his padded mitts reached
out to grab my shoulder but slipped and took a firm sirloin grip on my neck instead. I reflexively jumped back, but not far because the big man had a grip on me, his face twisted with an emotion I had never read there before. I grabbed Garth’s wrists just as he hit the accelerator on the truck—if I hadn’t he might have run over me. With the engine roaring, we lurched forward, me holding on to Garth’s arm with both mittened hands as fiercely as he was holding on to my neck. Under our mittens, we locked onto each other with a death grip. I looked up at Garth, his face ashy from the blistering cold, eyes facing the windshield, and saw that he was screaming. Between the roaring engine and the jackhammer of my adrenaline-pumped heart, I couldn’t make out what he was saying. It might have been “Chris, I am about to ram into a snowdrift about twelve feet high, so you should brace yourself,” but I didn’t hear it. Just felt the jolt as the truck slammed into a powdered wall.