Pym: A Novel

by Mat Johnson

  Angela flashed her eyes to mine just long enough to make contact, and even then the creature made a bellowing sound, removing his hand from within his shroud and making me wonder uncomfortably about where his paw had been resting moments before. “You have to get me out of here, Chris. I’m not going to make it. I’m not made for this life, you know that. I went to Spelman, Christopher. I am a soror of Delta Sigma Theta,” Angela emphasized, her whispers otherwise barely audible over her snow-cone scraping.

  “You’re even more than that. I love you, and I don’t want to see you like this,” I told her. She didn’t even flinch at the L-word. She just got a little tear in her eye, which she wiped on her glove, where it froze. It had been almost a decade since I had told her that I loved her, and last time she didn’t cry at all. I did. “And I will get you out of here. I promise,” I told her. And we both believed me.

  Back in Augustus’s hovel, I lay on the pungent skins by the hearth, staring into the blue gloom of it all. Augustus’s sty was increasingly cluttered. I began to realize that when I had first entered the hole it had been at its cleanest; maybe he’d straightened up in anticipation of the trip that never happened. Now it was horrendous, with pieces of everything that had frozen to both our shoes cluttered around us. Augustus, true to form, was eating, and I could hear the krakt swooshing around his jowls. I actually considered cleaning the place up a bit. Most of the mess was not mine, of course, but for the moment I did live here. After witnessing Angela suffering, however, I couldn’t motivate myself to do any work. Augustus for his part chomped away, staring back at me with curiosity.

  The more the image of the other Tekelians became normalized for me, the odder Augustus appeared in my eyes. My captor’s peculiarities extended beyond his wretched smile: his back was bent forward, stuck in a perpetual bow; his shoulders collapsed on either side of him so that his head was the only thing that kept his shroud from sliding down to the floor. I also noticed that while the rest of the Tekelians seemed to travel in groups, or at least congregate in groups in the city center, Augustus seemed to be perpetually alone. In my entire time with the creature, I never once saw him socializing with another of his species. Staring across at him, watching his pale, watery eyes looking at me, I actually felt a moment of pity. Perhaps in response to this empathy, Augustus did the most human of things: he rolled his marble eyes at me. Shaking his hands free from the krakt (and thereby making even more of a mess of himself) he reached into his cloak with a sigh. In my mind, the casual amusement of the situation immediately dissipated and thoughts of Jeffree’s maiming emerged once more. As pathetic as he was, Augustus was still one of them, and so I had reason to be on guard. The next dagger could come for me. Immediately, I got on the floor picking things up, frantically attempting to bring order to the place, smiling all the way. That is, until Augustus put his cold and pudgy claw on my shoulder. It was a bracing grip, belying a strength that was not immediately apparent, and I almost expected a blow to follow. Instead, I heard crinkling.

  “Aaaggaakkaarraagagh,” he said. Looking at Augustus’s greedy paw, I saw something startling: the empty wrapper of a Little Debbie snack. No, not just one but several, balled into his palm and now falling to the floor, each with the last traces of their caloric goodness sticking to the cellophane. Augustus had eaten every one, clearly, and just as clearly, his appetite was in no way satiated. In his primitive, albino snow monkey way, Augustus had just discovered what every food-stamp foodie had before: the more you ate of the things, the greater your desire to eat more. Poor Augustus was already addicted. And there was only one man left on the continent who could offer him more.

  While the Tekelians were by far the most notable of our discoveries, there were less sensational revelations to be had in Tekeli-li, ones no less substantial. Chief among these were the white beetles that infested the frozen city and were in particular abundance in the cramped hovel of the insulin-fueled ice monkey I called Augustus. Going for a more scientific angle, I named this insect Scarabaeidae colonialis, although admittedly this appellation soon degenerated in my mind to colons for short. At first I mistook these pale bugs for pieces of snow, as which evolution had camouflaged them, but after I felt the evil little things climbing on me, I soon discovered their true nature. It was an age of discovery, even when you didn’t want it to be, even when you just wanted to sleep for a few hours and hope that the world hadn’t been destroyed. But in my waking hours, with nothing else to amuse me (upon reflection I found that, as a modern man, I had spent most of my day amusing myself), I had taken to watching the creatures go about their day.

  All these bugs seemed to do was eat, their meals being the scatterings of krakt and whatever pieces of dried leather they got near; they even ate bits of rubber off the bases of my shoes. They didn’t seem to be too particular about what they ate, they just consumed and consumed, and when they got food they almost instantly seemed to breed so that they could eat it faster. A few would arrive on a previously “undiscovered” property, and after immediately claiming it for their own they would eat and multiply, and only hours later they would be swarming in disgusting multitude and their object devoured. It seemed like such a short-term survival strategy, one based on the premise of abundance. When, however, they were placed within a finite space (such as four blocks of ice around them high enough so that the bastards couldn’t get out), they mindlessly continued with the same strategy of overconsumption and overbreeding. After a few hours of my experiment, the last of them had turned as cold and hard as the little snowballs they resembled. In the back of my mind, with my last sliver of optimism, I was hoping that I might write some sort of academic paper on the subject, something I would dedicate to the memory of Jeffree’s left eyeball.

  Before I managed to wipe out the most recent wave of the colon bugs in Augustus’s hovel, the little bastards were able to enact a bit of revenge in the form of the holes that now perforated my nylon snowsuit. These holes caused a draft that, after a few miles of trekking through the tunnels with Augustus as my lead dog, threatened to freeze my sweat right onto my long johns. The only thing to do was to keep walking, which I did, and try to avoid slowing down enough that I lost the crucial body heat that was the key to my survival.

  I had no fear that I would lose sight of Augustus as he walked on in front of me, because as he stomped forward he sucked the last remnants of Little Debbie goodness from his collection of wrappers, leaving a trail behind him when he discarded each bit of cellophane. Augustus, I now noticed, had a bit of a limp, whether from an accident or from abuse it was impossible to say, but based on how the others of his tribe derided him as we passed them in the halls, I guessed the latter. It wasn’t just a limp but a sway, an oscillating motion I found almost soulful.† The trip was much longer than I remembered it, much more vertical, and I was petrified that after we finally got to the surface there would still be the miles of trudging in the open air before we arrived at the Creole’s base camp. With time the ice around us became brighter, more solid as the mild signs of perplexing melting that plagued Tekeli-li moved farther behind us and my eyes adjusted from the subterranean dim. The wind that whistled through the frozen channel became stronger, more direct, and soon there was literally the light at the end of the tunnel. To my surprise, when I stood aboveground, I discovered that the tunnel, all but the final opening of which looked as if it had been carved centuries before, came out not a hundred yards from our Creole Mining Company camp. Ours were not the first footprints here either: the Tekelians had possessed a direct underground route to our front door all along. Putting a hand on Augustus’s hulking shoulder, I tried to ask him about this, motioning to the cave opening and then to the Creole barracks, where I could already see Garth had the lights on. Augustus looked back at me with his ghostly eyes to see what I was gesturing about, then held me in a stare for a moment before nodding slowly and deliberately, as frustrated by our language barrier as I was at that moment.

  In the living room of my forme
r Antarctic home, I hoped to find the signs of a living society. I hoped to find the TV on, CNN blaring, maybe Garth eating a serving of spaghetti in a salad bowl, waiting excitedly for me so he could share the good news of the return of satellite communication with the rest of the planet and our impending freedom, wealth, and world renown. What I found was that while the TV was on, it showed nothing but static, a gray and blue electric blizzard on the screen. The computers were on as well, but each gave a “Failure to Connect” error message that flashed on, then off again. With the feeling that my organs were plummeting to my bowels in an attempt to escape my fate, I remained focused and kept walking past these screens to the lounge area. There I saw an even more bizarre sight: the communal room was covered with paintings. They sat across the couches and chairs, they lined the walls like tiles so that only glimpses of the surface behind were visible. Everywhere, in watercolors and oils and the reproductions of both, the worlds of Thomas Karvel competed against each other. The sun was setting. Oh, God, was the sun setting, but in parts of the room it was rising as well, and it was hidden by clouds, and it was at midday also. In some places, remarkably, it was actually dark, which was particularly impressive given the solar display that was going on around here. It was the entirety of Garth’s art collection, and within it, in the middle of the floor, collapsed in the remaining stacks of his master’s work, was my man Garth Frierson, snuggled next to White Folks, who barked a few times at Augustus after yawning a hello to me. Garth himself woke up but after an immediate head spinning didn’t actually seem that excited to see me.

  “I’m sorry, dog,” he offered meekly as he rose. It had been only a week, but it was clear that the man had lost weight in that time. Maybe it was just water weight, but it was a whole fish tank’s worth. “Can’t eat, dog. Feeling all guilty and shit. You know you’re thinking it: if I’d just had more Little Debbies, I could have bought your freedom too.”

  I assured him that I wasn’t thinking about that, and once he saw that I had not returned to enact some sort of revenge fantasy, the big man’s demeanor improved immediately. I was happy to see my boy, a human connection to the past and reality. I was also happy to hear that there was half a pound of powdered sugar in the cupboard over the stove, because this would take care of Augustus’s “sugar fang.” After I had guided his pale and now sweating paw into the bag, Augustus held up his powder-covered fingers to marvel at the warmth of this snowlike substance. The pupils of his gray eyes bulged in ecstasy when his tongue touched the smallest bit of pure cane sugar on his marble nail. I left my new roommate sitting down on the kitchen floor, his stained shroud balled on the linoleum, plunging his face into the bag like a dog.

  Garth was as unhappy to hear about the fate of Jeffree’s left eye as I was to hear that the rest of humanity was still missing. For the moment, there was nothing we seemed to be able to do about either one of those things, and in our conversational pause to digest that fact, the room’s odd decoration seemed a safer topic.

  “What’s with all the paintings? You airing them out or something?”

  “Just makes me feel at home.”

  I grew up with Garth, in the same neighborhood for ten years. This stuff didn’t look like our home. There were no black people in any of Karvel’s paintings, not one in all the ones that engulfed the room. Actually, that is not a fair assessment, there are no blacks in the paintings of Vermeer either, but I didn’t get the same feeling from his work—and Vermeer was Dutch, the old, scary Dutch West Indian kind of Dutch too, not the modern, happy-go-liberal version. It wasn’t just that there were no black people present, it was also that Karvel’s world seemed a place where black people couldn’t even exist, so thorough was its European romanticization. With its overwhelming quaintness, its thatched roofs and oversaturated flowerings, this was a world that had more to do with the fevered Caucasian dreams of Tolkien and Disney than with any European reality. During my African sojourn, I remember having seen my Afrocentric countrymen land at the airport in Accra and wander around a city that wasn’t there. They were so firmly entrenched in their ideologies, so tightly wrapped in their kente cloth, helmeted from truth by leather kufis, that they failed to see the real Africa before them. They wanted only the Africa where everyone was either a king, a queen, or a descendant of both. Where a Wakandian fantasy civilization hid just beyond the palms.‡ Where black diasporans would be greeted at the airport as long-lost offspring, like the Hawaiians do with the leis. Determined, they walked on the continent seeing only what they wanted and blamed all they didn’t like or understand on the white man. All the while ignoring that at the same moment the locals called them “white man” to their backs and faces. But on the other end of the spectrum, how much better than real Europe was this fantasy of Whiteness which Garth took for granted? The romance of castles and armor removed from the context of constant war, serfdom, and feudal lunacy. Conan barbarianism, Dungeons & Dragons alternates to plague-ridden reality. That delusion was everywhere, but it was a dreamworld that was no less absurd for its ubiquity.

  “It’s not art,” I blurted out. It was a cruel thing to do, but at the moment I wasn’t responding to Garth Frierson’s taste in art, just fighting for intellectual space in this oversaturated room.

  “Dog, you silly. Course it’s art. It’s the best art. Thomas Karvel, he’s the bestselling painter in America, probably in the world. See this one right here, this one?” Garth grabbed a sunset over a sandy beach with seagulls flying by. “This is Dawn at Surfside. When Thomas Karvel was creating this, they did a limited release of like twelve hundred hand-painted, signed copies. I ordered mine three months in advance, and by the next day, it was sold out. By the time the FedEx man dropped it at my door, it was already worth damn near double what I paid for it. The majority of people love it. It’s art.”

  “But what if now the majority of people are dead out there, Garth? Then what good would it be?” I asked, motioning to the paintings around us.

  “Shit. If that was true, what good would anything be?” It was a question we both responded to with silence, just sitting there.

  I was hoping that Augustus would want to spend the night at the Creole base camp, and that maybe I could even convince him this would be a much better living arrangement for both of us—given the state of his hovel, I had high hopes for this plan. Unfortunately, I wasn’t back in my room for more than fifteen minutes before I heard an explosion of liquid violence coming from the kitchen area. There, sprawled out on the linoleum, was Augustus, heaving and clammy. A long stream of white vomit strung from his pale lips to the hard floor around him. I would have thought this reaction was due to his caloric overindulgence had we not experienced a fairly significant breakthrough at that moment.

  “Cold,” Augustus said.

  The creature had spoken! Making sure that Augustus hadn’t simply caught something in his overused throat, I repeated the word I thought I had heard, and he, in progressively fainter tones, said it back to me. Cold, he kept saying. It made sense that he would have knowledge of the word’s existence, having heard me use it repeatedly as I chattered my teeth. His comprehension of the word was obviously limited, though, because it was specifically not cold inside the Creole base. In fact, for the first time in days the frozen ache I’d felt all over my body had left me and I was even working up a light sweat, dressed as I was. Augustus was clearly not cold either because he was dripping with sweat as if he had a great fever and his pale pores were trying to flush it away.

  “Goddamn. I think that boy is melting,” Garth offered as he leaned over me. While not literally losing his solid form, Augustus did look like a Popsicle in a microwave. “Cold,” he’d said, but “hot” was what he meant. Still, even this small breakthrough in comprehension was staggering. So was Augustus’s weight: they say that muscle weighs more than fat, but I can’t imagine any of the Tekelian warriors possibly weighing as much as the doughy creature Garth and I lifted up off the floor and out onto the tundra so that it could recove
r itself.

  While Augustus moaned back into good health, I managed to shovel down a quick can of a premade pasta, filling my gut with just enough calories to see me back to Tekeli-li, the constant threat of falling and polar air staving off the ’itis. Garth’s last words to me, Just wait, when I know anything I’ll come get you, haunted my every step, but I distracted myself by teaching the words hot, walk, ice, good, and bad to the eager Augustus, who aped them back to me as we trudged along. While it was impossible to say whether he got the full concepts behind the sounds, listening to his effort was worth more effort, if for nothing more than the comedy of it all.

  By the time we arrived back at Augustus’s cave, I was hungrier than I had been in my life, but more tired than ever before also. Augustus predictably went straight back to his stash of krakt, but I didn’t have the fortitude to stomach it at the moment. Neither, apparently, did he, because it was mere minutes before I heard the labored breathing of his sleeping, his sticky paw still in his glazed mouth. It was very late at night, I’d forgotten. But my body remembered.

  “Sleep,” I said to Augustus.

  “I can’t,” Angela Latham said from behind me, her voice skipping lightly off the white walls and kissing on my spine.

  She stood at the doorway, and she was lovely. Akan cheekbones that hinted at a smile even when her eyes had been crying, lips so full they seemed perpetually puckered for a kiss: she was as lovely as she had ever been, even in my dreams. And there was this pause, when she just looked at me, actually looked at my eyes for a moment for the first time in so long. And there was a second of veiled recognition when we both acknowledged that it was late, too late for her to be showing up at my door even if the impetus was insomnia.