Pym: A Novel

by Mat Johnson

  The chasm didn’t seem nearly as deep upon return to the site, or nearly as wide. But then I started thinking about having to hang down on a cable into the abyss again and it seemed as scary as it always had. I was already sore from the first attempt, but that was fine because Jeffree‡ eagerly volunteered for the task of trying to rescue the drill this time.

  “Ever since we got to Antarctica, the traffic to the blog has started building again. We’re getting more unique hits every day. They love it. Polar adventure. I’m like a super-nigger on ice! The people, they need someone to live through. Trust me, I used to be in roller derby back in the day. People need a hero.”

  Even as Jeffree prepared to go down and secure the drill, he managed to create a dramatic air about himself. It was in the beat to his jaunt, the elaborate kufi that covered his bald head, the fact that he let his parka crack open just low enough at the top that his cowrie-shell necklace still affirmed his blackness into the frozen air as his breath turned white before him. Carlton Damon Carter, as always, hung behind. Like Garth, Carlton Damon Carter would not even remove himself from his truck’s driver’s seat. I found Carlton Damon Carter much more intriguing than his louder accomplice, because Carlton Damon Carter seemed to have no need for attention at all. Sure, he kept himself looking dapper, his lightly processed hair sculpted neatly with Dax pomade, but while Carlton Damon Carter clearly took pride in looking attractive, he seemed to feel no need to attract attention from anyone but the protagonist of his own life story, which of course was not Carlton Damon Carter. Even there, staring across the distance through his truck’s frosted window, I could see that Carlton Damon Carter sat preparing his camera equipment to focus on what really mattered to him.

  “Looks like you didn’t fuck it up too bad” was Captain Booker Jaynes’s estimation on seeing the drill below. With that blunt assessment I felt better; the fact that it was Jeffree who was attaching the climbing harness through his legs and not me added to my mood. In that moment the earlier vision of the white shrouded figure, the stress of the initial accident, it all began to dissipate. Melt away, just like we hoped none of the snow that surrounded us ever would. My obsession was starting to scare me. It was leaping off the pages of the old manuscript and into my real world. That thing I saw was either real or a sign of just how advanced my mania had become. Back now, though, was the ever present mundane. We would get the drill, we would fix the damn thing, we would keep going. Back on TV and in reality, the world would not end, and just like all the other unrest, this spike would gain a vague name and be sectioned off into the land of anecdote. I would address my obsessions, and no longer let delusions of massive pale monsters get the better of me.

  When Carlton Damon Carter finally arrived on the scene with his video camera and lights ready, Jeffree prepared to begin the rescue. He made a big deal about going down the hole too; despite the wind blowing as it did, ruffling the fabric in our hoods, further muffling our hearing, it was possible to hear his generous sighs and huffs. Even at the time of his complaints, I knew enough about Jeffree to know that he would be bragging about this later, replaying the clips of it on the computer for us even though we’d been here to see it happen. The man was physically built for this. Even through his parka the thickness of his arms was visible. I had never seen Jeffree lift weight one, and yet there the muscles were.§

  “Rock and roll, baby. Time to get all action star out here.” Jeffree was smiles before this jump. Captain Booker Jaynes, his hood and hat removed, his dreads so many silver snakes dancing in the wind, tested the suspension line for him, giving it a tug for attention. “No cowboy bullshit. Go down slow, hook the pulley to the frame. Gentle, clean, easy.”

  “Don’t worry, it’s going to be easy,” Jeffree responded, looking down at his target. Then to the camera.

  “You hit the ledge with your full weight and you’re going to knock the rifler off the shelf and send it in an avalanche another twenty feet down,” I warned.

  “I’m like a cat. Let me show you how a real man gets it done,” Jeffree responded, pointing at me with the last sentence. Then with a smile and a salute, not even looking down or over into the crater, he quickly jumped up and flew down. Standing on the opposite lip beside Jaynes, I watched Jeffree slide in a quick, smooth, and effortless glide. Then I watched him hit the drill so damn hard when he landed that he set the whole thing in a secondary avalanche, falling another twenty feet down. Angela screamed.‖ Carlton Damon Carter kept the camera on and focused.

  “I’m okay, didn’t break anything,” Jeffree yelled, but the weak cracking of his voice betrayed him. “Least I don’t think,” he retracted.

  Captain Jaynes had two gloves over two calloused hands over his one face. He was breathing heavily; I could see the mist shoot clouds between his fingers. “Ig’nant ass fools,” he said, which I felt was a bit rude, but Jeffree was so far down he wasn’t hearing anything.

  “Yo, Chris, you got some big-ass feet,” Jeffree quickly followed. I could still see him from where I stood, brushing himself off, trying hurriedly to regain his jovial persona. I had small feet. I wasn’t going to yell that down on account of the myth, but I didn’t know what the hell he was talking about. Before I could respond, Jeffree offered, “I thought you said you didn’t come down here? You got your big-ass boot tracks all over the snow.”

  “I didn’t go down there,” I yelled immediately, looking to Captain Jaynes, largely to make sure he knew that Garth and I hadn’t been just goofing off this time. But I hadn’t gone down there. Leaning forward to peer over the edge for a moment, besides Jeffree’s dark form, now covered in powder as he stood by the rifler, I saw footprints as well. They were like little craters, oblong, in a pattern that suggested the gait of a biped.

  “Hey, this is wild. You got to come see this. You got to take a look at this, Chris Jaynes. Carlton, you got to get a shot of this.” Jeffree was getting really excited now. You could tell, because for once he didn’t sound as if he was reading lines off of a teleprompter.

  I turned to Captain Jaynes, showing too much excitement before the first word, because he knew where I was going.

  “Look,” my older cousin interrupted me. “I don’t want to hear none of that snow honky bullshit, you hear? We got reality to worry about. Real issues, real money. I don’t want to hear any of your dead ofay book theories, conspiracies, or anything else.” Captain Jaynes raised his head to address Carlton Damon Carter and the Lathams, who were only now deeming the event worth coming out of their own truck’s heated cab. “And I don’t want anyone else hearing your nonsense either. We’re going to suspend down there, get our drill out of the snowball it’s stuck in, and then we’re done here. Not another word.”

  So I didn’t offer one. Not as we attached our own harness gear around our waists and between our thighs. Not as we dangled slowly in the air into the hole and carefully controlled the slack as we drifted down. I didn’t offer to say anything, not even after our feet touched firmly on packed ice, and I looked over at Jeffree, who was standing on top of the drill’s snow-encased carcass where it rested against the wall, staring into the space around us. As I looked around, they did seem to be real footprints—an observation I made quickly and while Captain Jaynes was busy disengaging himself from his line. The spacing of the holes was a bit wide for footprints, but it was consistent.

  “Help me get this goddamn drill out of here,” Jaynes ordered, and I went over and pulled on it with the others. It had to be flipped, but the impact had packed the snow into its every groove, and the only reachable part was the bumper. If we tried to lift it up from that, chances were the bumper would just rip off it. Forcing myself to focus on the task at hand, I joined my muscle with Jeffree’s, pulling as Jaynes offered direction from off to the side. There was the difficult first lifting, then the teetering, then it fell over with the slightest of bounces on the giving surface. I turned to Jeffree when it was done, but he wasn’t even looking at the thing. Staring back from where the drill ha
d just come, Jeffree was instead focused on the hole of maybe four feet that the machine’s removal had revealed.

  “You see that too, don’t you?” he asked. I just saw a hole. Behind me, Captain Jaynes just saw something that was not worth his attention, and he was already fastening the harnesses to the rifler’s frame.

  Jeffree pushed past us, went to the little opening in the side of the hollow. I followed. The hole seemed to lead to another chasm. Or rather something more, its depth becoming more apparent as I got closer. It was a room that someone had recently entered; when I approached I saw those massive footprint-looking indentations, obscured as they were by the falling snow and the rifler’s landing, heading directly toward this space.

  “What is it, some kind of crevice?” In spite of my belief, or maybe because of it, I felt the first pangs of fear at what might be beyond. Jeffree shook his head at me. Or maybe not at me—his eyes were wide and distant, his thick jaw slackened in a rare moment of self-reflection. I could see Carlton Damon Carter adjusting his zoom to catch the expression as well.

  With the sounds of Jaynes’s diligent working still behind me, I crouched to look into the space. No, it was not simply an ordinary crevice. It was long, it was expansive, the footprints going far off into the distance and fading into the rest of the snow. It was tall too, this ceiling; the opening was just a space in the collapse. There are many natural ice caves under the surface of Antarctica. But it was hard to believe that this was one of them. The walls looked chipped away, the space too straight, and if there had been any debris it had been cleared away.

  “It’s a cave,” Jeffree managed, beside himself at the sight of it. Even at this depth, the sun shone through the surface, offering illumination. Everywhere glowed a haunting blue that seemed electric from the throb.

  “No, it’s not a cave,” said a voice that surprised me before I realized that Captain Booker Jaynes had stopped what he was doing and crept up behind us. Jaynes, to my surprise, now wore an expression much like Jeffree’s, and I realized that I also wore the same foolish, overwhelmed look. Jaynes’s eyes were focused on the things that I dared to think were the tracks of a creature that had walked upright through here only hours before.

  “It’s a tunnel,” Captain Jaynes finally managed.

  We kneeled silently in the cold, taking in the sight and its repercussions. Far above us, Carlton Damon Carter filmed, and unseen beyond him, Garth and the Lathams sat warm in the trucks that hummed and roared. Finally, as my knees began to numb and my excitement threatened to overpower me, I broke the meditation.

  “Captain, what do you want us to do now?” I asked. Booker Jaynes was a man who lived life by either being in control or pretending he was long enough to gain control again. Here was a situation that no one besides myself had ever thought they’d face. Captain Jaynes met it with belligerent, folded arms, but then his attitude just fell away. My cousin turned to me, slapping me several times on the shoulders as if discharging any responsibility for this new discovery.

  “Me? Hell, looks like we got a snow honky problem. You’re the expert.”

  * I really, really liked that dog.

  † This he displayed in his office in a way that others took, rightly, as a veiled threat.

  ‡ Or Jeff-Free, as it said on the website, although I don’t think that was the legal spelling.

  § I’d heard grunting in the area of his and Carlton Damon Carter’s storage unit but didn’t pry.

  ‖ Or perhaps it was Carlton Damon Carter, who was also a high alto when speaking above a whisper.

  OF course, I was the expert on the phenomena we seemed to be encountering. Unfortunately, my sole primary source was those few lonely paragraphs in The True and Interesting Narrative of Dirk Peters. Coloured Man. As Written by Himself:

  As we go south, the sky darks in a polar dusk and the fog gets thick. The birds, white gulls (or albatross or some such) were not stopping, gray ugly things that kept croaking “Tekeli-li” like we supposed to understand them. Infernal! The Tsalalian had been dying for days, then in a few minutes he dead. I says that we should dump the corpse immediately, for the sake of decency if not good health and stink, but Arthur Pym was looking by the body. Dripping more spit than I thought he still had in his self, he says, “That wouldn’t be prudent.” Alas, the flesh that had been Nu-Nu got saved for then as we were soon up on a strong current that shot us past the broken ice at fast speed. What can I say of what was seen next? Not nothing. So let me just say that we approached an ice shelf too long to be another iceberg, going into the distance of east and west. As we were move forward, a slice of this thing fell into the ocean before us, showing both a crack in the ice and a shrouded figure in white standing within it.*

  Floating forward, we moved into a cave within the ice itself. There we come to a landing, and they surrounded us. Arthur Pym stepped out of the boat despite me yelling to stay put, so transfixed was he. The group surrounded him. And then I kicked off and made a quick exit out of there.

  After that, Dirk mostly talks about how the current pulls him back, and how he’s really fortunate that he listened to Arthur Pym and didn’t get rid of the body of the late Mr. Nu-Nu, coasting as he did in the monthly return tide back to Tsalal. “You never know what you’ll eat if you [sic] hungry enough. I cut up Nu-Nu’s corpse into bite-size pieces, then I used them as bait for the Bich de Mere. Those things taste like horse shite,” was the entirety of Dirk’s recorded reflection on the experience.

  So from my research I knew that we should avoid eating bêche-de-mer. Beyond that I had no idea what we were supposed to do next.

  We lifted ourselves back up to the trucks. Now that I had their complete attention, I replayed in detail what I had seen the first time.

  “Come on, Professor, what the hell is it?” Booker Jaynes demanded. “Some kind of monkey? Some kind of Neanderthal? Or just men, the CIA or something?”

  “It’s the twelfth tribe of Judah,” Jeffree asserted as he stroked his goatee, nodding to Carlton Damon Carter, who stood behind him in our circle, reviewing his video footage. It was not clear that Jeffree actually believed this, but it was obvious that he liked the sound of it, its biblical and Diasporan overtones. We huddled in a makeshift tent, a tarp pulled between the roofs of two trucks and hung over the sides to keep the wind out.

  “It’s definitely government shit,” Garth added, sounding like a weary big man preparing for a fall. “It’s the feds that built that, dog. If not ours, then someone else’s. Believe me, I know: I used to work for the government.”

  “You worked as a bus driver, Garth. As a bus driver for the city of Detroit. That hardly qualifies you as an expert witness on the government,” Angela said with a roll of her almond eyes, and it was almost possible to see the air deflate out of the big man, sending him drifting into the corner. He gave me a look of sympathy from over there, but all I could do was marvel at her power.

  “No,” I boomed, trying to assert my own. “This is nothing like that. Whoever it was that I first saw, whoever it was that built that tunnel, it’s not something modern, not something that’s been seen recently. No mechanical equipment we know of built that tunnel. It looked almost natural. It looked old.” I leaned on the last word, let it hang in the air for a minute. When I saw I had them, I dug in and declaimed.

  “Look, folks, as you know, I am not here by complete accident. I am with you, on the crust of the Cape of Good Hope, because that is where I believe the events cited in Pym from two centuries past took place. Historical precedent. Whatever it is out there, it has been noted before. We are simply the first to experience this phenomenon since the chasm—”

  “Excuse me.” Jeffree, who had been whispering with Carlton Damon Carter, turned around to interrupt. “Before we get any further with this, this cave—since I was the one to discover it, I believe it should be referred to as, um, the Jeffree Tube. Yes. So if you could refer to it as the Jeffree Tube from this moment forward, I would appreciate that.”

>   “So are you meaning to imply some form of ownership here?” Angela stopped him, pointing her finger in a way that threatened permanent ocular trauma to its target. “You must be, if you’re already invoking naming rights. You don’t even know what this thing is besides a big crack in an ice block and already you’re claiming it as your own property?” There she was. This petite woman, small but centered. Her beauty alone would have made some men† cower, but along with the way she paced the tent, the way she shook her arms violently as she spoke, she erased any questions of stature. The woman at dinner had been less assured and a bit reeling, but already Angela had grown stronger. With Nathaniel. Like a beautiful blossom growing in horse manure.

  “Hey, sister! Sister, please!” Jeffree jumped forward, his hand stretched out in suppressing motions, his face giving off his best impression of an individual hurt and affronted by false accusation. “I’m not saying I own it outright. You the one said our contract with ______ Cola says that the Creole collectively owns what we scrounge on our off days. I’m just saying, since I found it, I should be able to name it. That’s all.”

  That’s all. That’s all you need to start a fight among a bunch of people sacrificing everything to get rich, to build a legacy. The largely deflated Garth Frierson still had enough air in him to float out the tarp as the conversation grew steadily more heated.‡ In the mix of things, amid the accusations and retractions, Captain Jaynes left the space. When he returned, my cousin had his full gear laid out before him: the steel spikes for his hiking boots, his face mask, pick, climbing rope, goggles, all in addition to his normal polar walkabout gear. As he prepared, the room became quieter. Even I, who had just been in the process of mounting a fierce defense of my more elaborate conclusions, joined the growing silence.