Pym: A Novel

by Mat Johnson

  “Well, we don’t have the bounty now, do we? Would he take something else in its place? Some matches, perhaps? Blankets?” More snow beast discussion followed. I noticed that the more the old beast Khun Knee talked, the more the room smelled of herring.

  “He says the debt must be repaid,” Pym translated. “If you lack the bounty, you can work it off.”

  “Work? Well shit, how long will that take?” the captain shot back at him. His voice had risen an octave. There was something about a white man saying you had to work for him that I knew repulsed Booker Jaynes to his core.

  “A few hundred cycles.”

  “What’s a cycle?”

  “The time from darkness to light,” Pym responded, and although his voice still seemed a bit distant, numb, I detected a bit of nervousness on his part as he kept glancing at the beings around him as if to avoid ownership of those words.

  “A hundred days? You’re trying to tell us we owe you a hundred days’ labor for a deal that didn’t even go through?” The captain was getting exceedingly agitated at this point. The strain of the past hours, of this improbable discovery and the fate of all that we had left behind had finally overtaken him.

  On orders from Khun Knee, the warriors under his control suddenly stood at attention. In response to the elder’s barked command, the soldiers bore arms. Literally bore arms, rolling up their sleeves to reveal horrifically muscled and veined biceps and triceps that seemed as hard and heavy and white as marble.

  “Not days.” Angela stared at the approaching soldiers, her voice shaking slightly with each of their steps. “The nights here last all winter, right? And the days the entire summer too. He’s not saying we owe a hundred days of work. He’s saying we owe a hundred years.” The uncertainty in her lovely voice had nothing to do with her lack of faith in her own interpretation of this contract. It came from a deeper anxiety, one that in that moment fluttered through every black heart in that room.

  And thus our slavery began.

  * To the horror of both of us, I’m sure.

  † Imagine the farthest cloud, on the brightest day, in the bluest sky. Imagine that just past the very top of that cloud was a hard, constructed ceiling. Then imagine how small you would feel under it.

  ‡ Americans love that last question, “Where are you from?” They see it as an excuse to go on about their peculiar local identity and tell you everything about themselves as people without really offering anything personal at all.

  § My cousin felt that a white liberal was a Caucasian who said to himself or herself every day, “Don’t hate niggers. Don’t hate niggers.” And that the rest of white America’s racial perspective was “Don’t let the niggers hear you say ‘nigger’ out loud.”

  ‖ Still talking.

  a Let me assure all who inquire that I did spend time considering this image later. At the moment it didn’t seem possible. None of it did.

  I am bored with the topic of Atlantic slavery. I have come to be bored because so many boring people have talked about it. So many artists and writers and thinkers, mediocre and genius, have used it because it’s a big, easy target. They appropriate it, adding no new insight or profound understanding, instead degrading it with their nothingness. They take the stink of the slave hold and make it a pungent cliché, take the blood-soaked chains of bondage and pervert them into Afrocentric bling. Parroting a vague “400 Year” slogan that underestimates for the sake of religious formality. What’s even more infuriating is that, despite this stupidity, this repetitious sophistry, the topic of chattel slavery is still unavoidable for its American descendants. It is the great story, the big one, the connector that gives the reason for our nation’s prosperity and for our very existence within it. But still, aren’t there any other stories to tell? So many have come to the topic of slavery because they think the subject matter will give them gravitas, or prizes, or because they find comfort in its familiarity. To be fair, something so big (nearly 20 million slaves kidnapped), for so long (from A.D. 1441 until the end of the nineteenth century) is nearly impossible to dance gracefully with. But still. That is the source of my love for the slave narratives: they are by their nature original, even when they draw on the forms of earlier literary sources. They are never duplicitous, because they all have one motivation: to document the atrocity of chattel slavery and thereby assist in ending it. Their artistry is surprising, considerable, devoid of pretension and with passion in its place.

  Turns out though that my thorough and exhaustive scholarship into the slave narratives of the African Diaspora in no way prepared me to actually become a fucking slave. In fact, it did quite the opposite. The amount of real manual labor these prehistoric snow honkies expected me to do was insane.* The day after it was revealed that we had no connection to the outside world, and worse still of course that the outside world might not exist anymore, the Tekelians came for us. We had spent the night discussing our situation as Jeffree and Carlton Damon Carter kept trying to contact the mainland, trying to get someone on the radio, thinking as much of our own situation as of that of the rest of humanity. Nothing. They found nothing—no email, no text, no call. No signal, no satellite. At first it seemed like it was just a delay. After a while, the dread grew. There was nothing out there. And then, after hours of desperation, came the banging on the outer door. Slow but hard. Steady. Unavoidable.

  Gathering our warmest garments, we were forced to leave behind all but what we could carry, as the hulking Tekelians insisted that we follow them on foot. Even my most prized possession, Dirk Peters’s antique skeleton, which I kept in an oily green canvas sack, had to be left behind in my room for now. Given minutes to reduce our belongings, unsure of how long our stay was to be, excess baggage and clothing were thrown across our break room floor.

  “Don’t let fear take hold of you. We go into the unknown but not the unconquerable,” Booker Jaynes addressed the now downturned heads of his crew. I tried to take my cousin’s advice, but I wasn’t sure if I could carry the load with his flinty determination. Each of us had been withdrawn all night, whispering our private concerns and suspicions, I with my cousin, Angela with Nathaniel, the engineers in their coupling. Gone was Garth Frierson, who after the situation of our being forced into servitude by our creditors was revealed, quietly removed himself from the ensuing discussion. I saw Garth whispering for a few moments with Pym, but thought little of it at the time, or truly of Garth in general for the rest of the stressful night. At half past three in the morning, giving up on the hope of intercepting a radio signal from the world to the north, I passed Garth’s door on the way to my own. Stopping in the hall, I was struck at that moment not by what I heard from his room but by what I didn’t: no snoring. Garth suffered from the worst sleep apnea I had ever heard, his bass snores started loud and then built toward industrial levels before waking him for a few seconds of lip-smacking incoherence before repeating the chorus. But there was no such solo; instead I heard movement, and the crinkling of more wrappers than I was willing to imagine. Despite my suspicions, morning revealed that the sound was not the product of an epic preslavery pig-out, but was the sound of strategy. As the rest of us did the last of our zipping and the massive Tekelian warriors crouched in our low-ceilinged break room as they waited to take us away, Garth appeared before us comparatively unclothed. Dressed in just his bathrobe and long johns, the big man held before him a large box, a box I immediately recognized as one of the bulk containers of Little Debbies from his storage unit. Not looking at us, and particularly not looking at me, Garth lumbered over to the closest and the largest of the shrouded guards and handed the freight to him. The guard, for his part, took the gift without bark, concealing it within his robes as if it had never been there.

  Garth Frierson sheepishly turned around and was quickly walking off toward the hall when I grabbed him by the fatback of his shoulder.

  “What the hell was that?” I demanded.

  “Um. A couple things. Some Cosmic brownies, some Swiss cake rol
ls, a few Devil Squares, and some Banana Twins. Actually, mostly it was Banana Twins: I ordered those by accident” was all Garth said back to me, trying unsuccessfully to build up enough momentum to break my grip. Accepting the futility of this action, he continued. “Look, dog. I’m sorry. I paid off my portion of our debt with a box of snack cakes, okay? What can I say? I’m so sorry.”

  Nathaniel Latham, having also witnessed the transaction, interrupted excitedly. “Sorry? Don’t be sorry. If they’re willing to barter for the remaining debt, you can pay it off for all of us! You must have two dozen boxes of that candy crap in there, I saw them the day you loaded them. That’s enough to pay off everyone. Hell, that’s probably enough to get ourselves a few servants.”

  “I’m sorry ’cause I ate the rest” was Garth’s reply, and it made me sad to hear the big man’s voice crack like that. Nathaniel tried to strangle him, and it took both Jeffree and me to pull the lawyer off of the big man.

  Garth had bought his freedom, but I figured the rest of us would be in servitude together. I found out soon that this was not to be the case. When we reached Tekeli-li’s cavern once more, the Creole crew was dispersed. Before much discussion on our part could begin, we were being divided, urged through pale hand motions and the Tekelian guttural barking to follow others among the small crowd of the creatures that awaited us at Tekeli-li’s cavernous center. Angela protested when she realized that she and Husband II would not be taken together, but even those complaints were relatively muted considering the amount of anxiety present in those moments. They were less pulled apart than physically urged into opposite directions, massive, freezing hands put firmly on shoulders and arms until resisting would be a noticeable act of violence. For the most part, we didn’t fight the monsters. We didn’t complain or try to assert our own agenda because we didn’t truly understand what was going on or have a clue as to the penalties for noncompliance.

  At least I recognized the creature in whose care I was now placed: none other than Krakeer, one of the two Tekelians we had claimed ownership of only a day before, the specimens we had intended to present to our world. The entirety of my debt, Pym explained, was owned by him. Despite my lack of familiarity with the species, Krakeer was easy to spot in a crowd. He was exceptional. Most of the Tekelians had long, nearly luminescent teeth that were so narrow they looked as if the creatures might ritually pull them down from their gums as some sort of beautification exercise. But Augustus—as I chose to rename him in honor of Pym’s fallen shipmate and my own morbid passive aggression—had teeth that seemed to go down at odd, unrelated angles, each bit of fang with its own dental agenda. The only two of his teeth that seemed to coordinate were a pair that turned in as if they were talking to each other. Augustus’s hair, or at least his lack of it, was distinctive as well. He wore the same shroud as the rest of his group, but he lowered his hood for a stretch to itch his scalp as we walked back in silence through the long frozen corridors. The hair there appeared in barren patches, the skin it failed to cover was the gray of dog bellies. And those chewed fingernails, devoured to the point that even the flesh around the nails had been eaten. Augustus’s wretched fingernails were utterly unique to him among his breed; all of the others I saw had long talons that they clearly took pride in. It was also clear that Augustus took little pride in anything. My only consolation in this whole affair was that, by the time we reached his dwelling, a half hour later, the creature was breathing so heavily from the effort of the journey that I knew, if the situation warranted it, Augustus was also probably the only Tekelian I could whup. Even the small, ghoulish children of this race that taunted both of us as we marched seemed more of a threat, wiry little things as feral and gray as squirrels. One, no higher than four feet in his little shroud, threw a snowball directly at Augustus’s head and offered only wheezing giggles when my captor turned to feebly bark a complaint before slinking away.

  Augustus’s lair was what I expected for a large hominoid, similar in my mind to the descriptions of the much speculated upon North American Sasquatch (who I suspect might be a relative of this southern breed). The room was a dark cave with almost womblike overtones, the floor scattered with debris that had become embedded in the ice in sedimentary layers where the floor was bare and in clumps in the furs that provided partial cover. Despite the low temperature, the space had an overpowering musk and an unmistakable odor of flatulence, which I took to be the stank of Tekeli-li. Later, however, I came to understand that this hygiene issue was particular to Augustus, and that most of the other Tekelians lived under the ice hygienically.

  Soon after we arrived, after catching his breath and informing me with hasty hand gestures of a task I was to do, Augustus went to the far side of the room, lay down in his robes, and went to sleep. I started to theorize that the Tekelian metabolism must necessitate extended multiple rest periods throughout the day to conserve body heat, but the nap thing also turned out to be another quirk unique to Augustus.†

  The task which Augustus had signaled for me to do was simple, and with nothing else to distract me, I gave it my full focus. The Tekelian’s pantomimed instructions were easily understandable. There was a frozen tub of loose fat, presumably taken from seals above. My job was simply to smash it with a pestle. The tool was the height of a small man and made from what I assume was whale bone. Although the actual manipulating of this fat cauldron was different, it reminded me instantly of the preparations of fufu I’d seen during my vacation travels through Ghana.‡ Similarly krakt, which is the closest I can come to capturing the Tekelian name for it, served as a staple diet. While fufu is a firm, doughy paste served along with stew, krakt was more like porridge in consistency, or a mushy rice pudding, composed entirely of squashed animal fat. Prepared properly (and this I never actually managed to do, not that Augustus seemed to mind), smashed utterly and chilled by the natural climate, the paste achieved a taste similar to that of unsweetened ice cream, or a mayonnaise without the vinegar. The fatty, unsweetened custard was packed with energy, fitting a normal human’s daily protein requirement in only a few swallows. Krakt was a meal that satisfied your hunger, or at least extinguished it: every time I ate that paste I never wanted to eat again.

  My first night in the compound, while Augustus snored, I explored my surroundings. The dwelling was in a tunnel like the ones we had been in when we first came down here, only a hole had been burrowed into the side and beyond that a room carved. Along the way, we had passed several other residential holes, giving the hallway the appearance of the interior of a flute, and in these I saw others of these creatures going about their lives. Despite my novelty here, I was ignored by all but the children, who would stop what they were doing in order to taunt me. Surrounded by the little monsters, I was struck mostly by how utterly alone I was in this world. No sooner had this thought appeared in my mind than I saw a flash of brown, similarly engulfed by a gaggle of toddlers.§ It was her. Angela. Despite the distance we’d traveled, fate had placed us on adjacent properties, and when she saw me approach her, the look on her face said that she seemed to rejoice at this.

  “Have you seen Nathaniel? Is he with you?” was the first thing Angela said when she saw me. The last time I saw her second husband, he was being pushed into the exact opposite direction. Whether Nathaniel reached his destination shortly after or had kept moving far off into the reaches of the outer tunnels I had no idea, and I didn’t care. It seemed to me that we were on the extreme outskirts of this village. If we weren’t in the rural area, then certainly we had landed in the Tekelian suburbs. Or maybe, off in this well-worn frozen backwater, inconveniently remote from the main area, we had landed in its ghetto.

  “Chris, this is crazy. These things expect me to clean up after them. They’re disgusting. I tried kicking loose what I could, putting it into a pile, and this bitch in there—I mean I think it’s a female, it looks like it has tits—just keeps pointing at the frozen-in bits going ‘Ung!’ Pointing at stuff stuck to the ice for god knows how many y
ears, how many inches down. I’d need an ice pick to get it out.”

  “Wait.” I calmed my excitement over the fact I could do something to the benefit of her. Retreating to Augustus’s quarters, I reached through my backpack for one of the only possessions I had deemed worthy of taking with me. Pressed in my reading edition of The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, stuck right by the page where Richard Parker was being served up for dinner, was a nineteenth-century bronze letter opener that had served as my favorite page holder since I had bought it off Benjamin. Without a statement about its history, either sentimental or antiquarian, I made a gift of it to the lady. The gift Angela Latham gave in return, a relieved smile, was greater.

  “You’re always there for me, Chris. I always knew that, always loved that about you.” Angela poked the Tekelian air with her little saber as she winked at me. “Look at this thing. I bet Nathaniel could stab a couple of these bastards with this in his hand.”

  I didn’t expect to stay the whole night in this Augustus’s hole, huddled for warmth inches away from the site of my labor. I expected Garth to appear in a matter of hours, declare that our communications with the world had resumed, and that we were all shortly going to be getting out of here. I didn’t know how Garth would get this information to me, but I was certain our situation was just temporary. Unfortunately, it didn’t go down like that. The first night was one of suffering. The diet of krakt, as rich as it was, proved quite a shock to my system, the result of which was that I discovered the Tekelian form of plumbing: a visual nightmare that consisted of a hole in the ice (one can only guess how it was excavated) and a Lovecraftian horror within it. It was the following morning, after retreating from this communal commode, which in a bit of olfactory fortune was far down the hall from where Augustus had us staying, that I saw Angela being led by her family of Tekelians.