by Mat Johnson
Nathaniel, seeing this process, let go of me, limping heavily until he reached the pile Pym had dropped, and scooped his own brown fingers in search of leftovers as well.
“This tastes like fermented whale piss” was his critique of the now frozen beverage, as he scooped a bit from an ice glass with his pinkie.
“Close” was Pym’s response, and as soon as he had licked the last remnants of the stuff off his fingers, Pym dropped the glass in hand straight to the floor, turning to look for another one. I don’t know if Nathaniel didn’t hear Pym’s confirmation of the drink’s ingredients or if Nathaniel’s own hunger was simply too great for him to object, but he kept eating from the discarded receptacle regardless. I too was tempted: if this was all there was left of the world, what else would there be for me to dine on?
“I say to you that good liquor is not light on the tongue,” Pym continued, lips smacking. “And this is the drink of the Gods. It is the elixir of life, keeping me alive longer than I’m sure I have a right to live.” Swallowing down another bite of his frozen spirit, the clearly inebriated man took a good look at me.
“This is how you survived two hundred years, huh?” Nathaniel perked up. It was clear that he didn’t believe the Caucasian but just as clear that he knew he didn’t need to believe him in order to sell this dreck by the barrel back on the mainland. The optimism intrinsic in this speculation, that there might still be a mainland to return to, put a little pep in Nathaniel’s limp as he searched through the pile for other samples.
As Pym chewed, his mustache bounced up and down over his top lip like a caterpillar in a circus. He was taking me in now, really looking at me for the first time since he’d realized I was not a fellow white man. “You look awful. Or like offal. One or the other; I care not,” he told me.
“Of course I look awful, these creatures have me living like a fucking slave. What the hell am I supposed to look like?” To this, Pym raised his eyebrows in disapproval before continuing with his binge. His manner seemed to imply that he found my reply not only boorish but pathetic.
“That is not what I have heard. Your master Krakeer was just over there—”
“Who, Augustus?” I asked in disbelief. The idea that Augustus, even with his considerable strength, could ever be the master of me was ridiculous.
“Do not interrupt me. As I was saying, I heard from the very source that in fact you were being put up for sale. I suspect in mere weeks your indolent character has revealed itself.”
“He’s not feeding me, Pym, he doesn’t have any food. I’m starving. I’m not working around the house because I’m so starved I can barely move.”
“Well, you managed to walk all the way into town, didn’t you?” Pym replied smugly, very impressed with his own impish wit. “I suspect your master will have food enough shortly, for that is him addressing the great warrior Barro. In fact, I imagine your price is being paid as we speak. You know, when the Gods found you, they believed your people would make fine additions to their lives. Tis sad; you are shaming their generosity.”
I followed Pym’s pointing hand in the direction of the interior of the public house, and there, in the shadows, was Augustus, talking to another, taller figure I couldn’t see from where I was standing.
“He wouldn’t do that. He wouldn’t sell me,” I told Pym or myself. For the most part I thought all the Tekelians were the same, but I realized then that I had grown soft on my Augustus, as damaged as he clearly was. And in comparison, he was good to me. When he noticed my presence, Augustus pointed me out to the other man, and I could tell he was speaking of me in high regard from his expression and his hand motions. This began to make me nervous until, to my relief, Augustus’s conversation came to a seemingly uneventful end, and soon my Tekelian roommate was joining me. In Augustus’s hands were two great frozen cups of the pub’s fermented liquid. One of those he held out to me. I drank that mess down too.
“Katow Knee Cracto Khee!” Augustus declared joyously.
“He says he sold you to Barro for two full glasses of khrud. Says it will be better for you—Barro has a fur-padded bed and can feed you,” Pym instantly translated for me, not even giving me a chance to take my drink from my lips.
“You eat!” a grinning Augustus offered, tapping his frozen mug against my own, clearly proud of himself.
“Who the hell is Barro?” I got out after my first swallow. Khrud did taste like fermented whale piss, along with less pleasant fluids of the whale as well. Or Ballantine malt liquor. Either one. “Barro.” Augustus shrugged sheepishly, acknowledging the minor drawback of his victory. Before more words could answer me, actions did, and behind Augustus his trading partner emerged from the bar. They all looked the same, but this one looked a lot like the one that had poked Jeffree’s eye out. I was now in the possession of Mr. Sausage Nose, I shuddered to realize. When he passed me and smacked me upside my head without breaking his stride, I was sure my identification was correct.
“He said, ‘Come to me tonight.’ ” Pym translated. “If I were you, octoroon, I would heed that beckon.”
The thought of having my own eyes poked out of my head in a Tekelian game of William Tell gave me enough energy to make a break for the surface. That and the odd Tekelian liquor I had swilled, which took the bite off my pain for the majority of my journey. Even slightly drunk, I knew better than to try to make it all the way back to the Creole base and risk being seen by Barro or his associates. Instead, I was attempting to get up to the trucks, which were still parked directly above us at the site of our original contact. And, as the alcohol quickly wore off, I decided not only that I would make it there but that if I could not get one of the vehicles to start, or find one of the extra sets of keys I knew to be hidden on them, I would instead die there. That I would simply lie down to sleep in a front-seat cab and not have to wake up again. This was actually a comfort in the final stretches of my journey, when I could no longer imagine ever gathering the energy to walk back again. Even for Angela.
After finding the crater we’d entered on our first descent, using the last of my energy and will to climb the rope that still hung down as we had left it, I located the vehicles. My eyes adjusting to the amount of unfiltered sunlight that shone from above, I saw something else: that the wheels of all three trucks had been slashed. Long, deliberate cuts that were identical on each wheel and machine, sinking all of them a good two feet closer to the ground than they ever should have been. And I saw that their gas tanks had been opened, that petrol had spilled and dispersed into the ground around them. Except on the last massive truck, which despite its equally flattened tires, had its engines running.
The windows were fogged, and I saw movement inside. I thought: Little Debbie, you have come to have a final feast with me, and imagined a cornucopia overflowing with every snack cake there ever was, every snack cake currently on the market and every snack cake yet to exist. Instead, after I opened the door, I found a black man, chomping on protein bars.
“I know where it is, dog!” Garth said to me, completely unsurprised by my arrival. “Thomas Karvel’s base camp. I figured it out, found the mountain peak in the painting, found it in one of the photo books Jaynes has. It’s right there!” he gushed, holding his snapshot of the painting up to the horizon and the mountains of ice that stood there. The resemblance between the two images was nonexistent to me.
“No, man. Look at the ridges, look at the outline. The top’s basically the same, right? Just flipped. That’s why it looked so familiar but I couldn’t place it. This image was painted from the other side. That’s where Karvel’s base is, man. Over that ridge. Has to be. It takes him weeks to create a masterpiece; he would need somewhere to stay.”
Looking at the outer shape of the formation, wanting to believe it so much because I had no other vision to invest in, I began to think that for a moment I’d seen what Garth was talking about. There were similarities. I ignored the fact that all the mountains basically looked the same to me.
“So, you down? You want to run away to the promised land?” Still staring at the photo and then back at the horizon, still wanting to see what Garth saw that gave him this level of conviction, I nodded my cold head in the affirmative. However mad the big man’s suggestion, it was the closest thing to a logical course of action available.
* This sound was yet another trait I had seen exhibited only by Augustus and not by his race in general. The others either didn’t laugh or did so in a way that seemed less like they were clearing their sinuses of a decade of congealed mucus.
† Shirley Temple was America’s biggest star during the twentieth century’s Depression, but she was a national obsession that from a distance of time now seems quite disturbing. Just a little girl, Temple was the ultimate symbol of purity: the sacred virgin, worshiped by all. There is an innocence to the virgin icon, but at its center it is still a sexual role. Little Debbie, I must say, was beyond such considerations, her purity unassailable. You don’t talk about Little Debbie.
‡ I had wondered about these creatures’ religious inclinations, whether they believed in a soul or felt they had one, and what I saw I took to be a sign of their primitive faith. Of course they worshiped an ice cube. Without natural predators—which were often the favorite subjects of worship of primitives—what would they bow down to? In the absence of bears or big cats to run from, the ice itself seemed a natural (though abstract) choice.
GARTH explained to me that the cutting of the truck’s tires didn’t matter to us, that our journey wouldn’t require them. The ice ahead was uncharted, and any seemingly harmless stretch of untouched snow might conceal a deadly chasm, or paper-thin surfaces unable to carry the weight of the vehicles. It was better to take the snowmobiles and hope that even they weren’t too heavy. Garth had managed to bring one bike by himself to the site and used it to drag another. There were two more waiting back at the Creole’s base camp; the captain could get one and Angela could double up on another. Now that he knew I was game, Garth would make a quick trip back for supplies and meet me here again. That was our escape plan.
After this course of action was agreed on and I had blissfully filled my belly on forgotten glove compartment energy bars, my first order of business was to find my cousin and put Booker Jaynes back in charge, because now more than ever we needed his leadership. Captain Jaynes was a member of the baby boomers, the last generation of African Americans to fight the race war directly—I can admit without embarrassment that I have always been impressed by that. Leaving Garth on the surface so that I could bring the good news to Angela and the others, I headed immediately for the hold Jaynes served in, which fortunately for me was on the way to town in the tunnel I was traveling. When I got there I found Angela as well. Seeing her at the door of Jaynes’s cave, leaning against the wall, I was almost immediately hit with a wave of euphoria that seemed to imply that everything was going to be okay. What a divine coincidence. That there was, contrary to my suspicions, an order to the universe, and that it was a benevolent one. The beauty of this woman only contributed to this feeling: even now, after she’d spent weeks in the same dirty clothes, her grip over me was not lessened. The scarf that wrapped up Angela’s unwashed hair only increased her hold on me, made my mind think back to our grad school days, before any misstep had been taken. Hugging her, I told Angela how lucky it was that I’d found her here at this moment.
“No, it’s not lucky. I’ve been waiting here in front of your cousin’s door for half an hour. My thighs are frozen, my feet are almost numb, but here I still am waiting, all this time waiting just to ask the old man a question. This is so not covered in my job description.”
“Babe. What do you need to know that could be so important?” I pulled out one of Garth’s protein bars as I talked, taking the time to remove my gloves and unwrap it for her. To my surprise, Angela didn’t grab the offering from me, instead with her gloved hands she cupped my bare ones, guiding them to her mouth. There was no risk of the chocolate melting on her gloves, as cold as it was. Looking at her, her lips drained to gray, I found it hard to believe there would be enough warmth in her gut to melt the food either. Seeing her lips part and then collapse as they chewed, I was overwhelmed by the desire to touch them. To touch any of her, and not just acrylic thermal padding.
“I want to know if he’ll switch jobs with me.”
“You want him to come all the way across Tekeli-li to scrub down that kitchen floor?” I asked.
“No, I want to trade households with him. Even if it’s only for a day or two. You’ve seen Booker: he’s the only one of us who looks well fed and not beaten down.” I had noticed this in my quick passing in Tekeli-li’s main square. I put it down to the legendary Jaynes endurance in the face of opposition, but a generous employer was the more likely factor. “He’s your cousin, Christopher,” Angela continued, squeezing my hand, which she still cupped in hers. “You talk to him. I need this. I called his name into the cave a few times; I heard something in there, the moans those Neanderthals make sometimes. But I don’t feel safe going in uninvited.”
“You don’t have to worry about that anymore. I have an escape plan for us,” I told her. There was intimacy in the way I said “us,” and no small amount of expectation on my part. I admit I wanted desperately in that moment to play the hero, for Angela to see me in that light. This might be the final break she would need to mentally annul her second marriage. Not reacting to any of this, Angela instead became excited about the main point of my statement and jumped to the conclusion that the modern world had reappeared in the form of radio contact or the workers’ ship arriving, and that we would be soon traveling back to it. This assumption contrasted painfully with the reality that I was really discussing Garth’s belief that if we marched out onto the uncharted ice we might find the hidden lair of his artistic crush.
“Chris, that’s just insane. That’s not even stupid, it’s past stupid and straight into suicidal madness,” Angela nearly whispered, pulling away from me and tugging absently on her snowsuit’s zipper as if a half inch of flesh had been exposed.
“Staying here is suicidal madness,” I rebutted, trying not to sound hurt.
“Maybe. But at least it requires a hell of a lot less effort. And anyway, Nathaniel isn’t going to make it on the ice: he can barely limp out of the village square.” Angela paused for a moment, dragging the image of her ailing second husband into both our minds. “Even if I wanted to go, if I wanted to risk it all for freedom and just run: how can I just leave him?” she asked. For a moment I entertained the hope that it was a question of logistics. “Go. If you find a way to rescue us, come back for me,” she said.
After arranging for me to make the request to my cousin on her behalf, Angela departed, leaving me alone in the corridor just as she had been. Immediately I missed her, but I comforted myself with the thought that Captain Jaynes most certainly would join the escape, and that, with his vote secured, Angela (and Nathaniel too, of course) could be convinced to join us. Given the urgency of the situation, I was much less timid about finding Captain Jaynes than Angela was, so instead of passively sitting it out in the hall, I crept into the opening of his captor’s dwelling.
As I moved slowly through the entrance, past the curves of the first walls that hid the interior, I heard that moaning sound that Angela had mentioned. There was no question something was home, and in deference to the Tekelian inhabitant (and the breed’s considerable strength), I attempted to move with all the stealth I could manage. Staring down at my boots, trying to limit their crunch, I became aware that there wasn’t simply one voice moaning: this was a duet. And one of them was not the canine roar of the Tekelian, but instead the intermittent wailing of a human. Forgetting care and caution, I ran forward, turning the corner to enter the great room.
What I saw there I have no words for. Except these: Captain Jaynes lay prone on an elevated slab of ice with his Tekelian mistress, Hunka, on top of him. Together they were performing an act that I did not fin
d entertaining. That’s all that I’m prepared to offer on the subject, because to this day I haven’t fully recovered from the trauma the vision inflicted. And to be real, it was a blur, the flash of an image rather than a clear one, because the moment my presence was known, the snow monkey was gone, having run off in embarrassment to more secluded quarters. So fast was Hunka that one second I was seeing a blur of white and the next moment, in the very same spot, a solitary brown member stood its ground, saluting me.
“What were you thinking? Don’t you knock?” Captain Jaynes demanded of me as he struggled to cover himself and stand. There was, of course, no place to knock, as the melting ice tended to swallow the vibration of most percussion. As to what I was thinking, it would take me much longer than the time provided to decipher that. Once my cousin had repackaged himself, pulling up his snow pants and zipping up his zipper, he began to act as if I had seen nothing at all. In appreciation of this mercy, I went along with the act, telling him the details of our impending flight to freedom, and this time I made a real effort to sell the feasibility of the quest. I was so successful in arguing my case that as the words came out of my mouth my own ambivalence about Garth’s plan slowly cemented into certainty. By the time I was summing up my pitch, there was no doubt in me. Our journey would be successful. Our destination was a real one.
From the look on my cousin’s face as he leaned against the far wall, hugging himself with one arm and stroking his beard with the other hand, I could see he was taking it all in. Better yet, from the seriousness with which he was studying the situation, the moments of silence that followed, there could be no doubt that Captain Jaynes actually believed me enough that he felt the merits of the whole crazy plan should be weighed like gold. This was the man I had worked for, the one I was proud to call my family. This was the representative of that generation of leader caste that would take us to tomorrow.