Pym: A Novel

by Mat Johnson

  “No, we shouldn’t leave this place,” Booker Jaynes interrupted my rush to euphoria. “Nope. No.”

  “What? What the hell do you mean ‘no’? You believe me, don’t you? This place is out there. It could be complete luxury.”

  “Could be, could be. There’s probably something out there, I trust you on that. That’s not what I’m saying at all. Sure, that all may be out there. But the problem, our problem with these people, is right here. They don’t respect us. They treat us like animals. What we need to do is stay here and fight that.”

  “What are you talking about? You’re the one always talking about getting away from normal white folks. Why the hell aren’t you down to run away from these monster ones?” I demanded.

  “Separatism; look where it got me. I come all the way across the damn ocean to the South Pole, and they still here. I was wrong. You can’t run from Whiteness. You have to stand and engage it. They got courts: we can litigate our freedom. They like ice sculpture: we can learn the medium and then outshine them with our own artistry. We will teach them to respect us. We will show them how beautiful we are. And then, then they will be forced to love us, and that is our only salvation.”

  In movies, when someone is talking crazy, you are allowed to smack him.* Unfortunately, I lacked the speed to pop the lunatic in question, and the thickness of my snowsuit would have cushioned the blow anyway.

  “Booker. They’re enslaving us. They’re not even humans. And they’re assholes! You’ve changed, man. You’ve sold out. This is because you’re screwing that ice ape, isn’t it? You got Stockholm syndrome or something.”

  “Don’t talk about Hunka like that,” Captain Jaynes snapped back at me, his corded dreadlocks bouncing around behind his wagging head to add punctuation. “Shut your mouth. That is a special creature there. Don’t add insult by pretending like you don’t think she’s fine.”

  Already, Booker Jaynes was brushing himself off, preparing to pretend that this discussion and my visit had never happened and the new road he was choosing was a sane one. He had lost it, it was clear. His Jaynes eccentricities had misguided him, and his Jaynes stubbornness now ensured he would go all the way. “No point in running anymore, can’t you see that. We stay, and we struggle. Because the struggle is who we are,” he told me with finality.

  Burdened by a profound sense of disappointment, I climbed once more from the bowels of the underground whiteness to meet the yellow sun above. I had intended to return from my trip with my three comrades, each high with the hope of freedom. What I returned with instead was a week’s supply of krakt, a gift from Captain Jaynes which I held on my shoulder in an oily sealskin sack. “She makes it from her own recipe. Take it or I’ll eat it all myself,” my cousin said proudly as he gave me the parting offering, along with a promise to get Hunka to buy Angela from her captors.

  Beyond those emotions related to my failure, I began to realize that there were other feelings boiling up within me as well. With every step out of Tekeli-li, I began to wonder if this would be my last moment in this improbable community, an idea I considered with absolutely no sense of nostalgia. So regret-free were my actions that when I came closer to the surface I began to experience a wave of paranoia as well: surely it could not be this easy. Surely, if I had realized that I was leaving, others must have realized it as well, noticed my absence already, and were at the moment making preparations to stop me. Not Augustus, of course, but others more invested in my servitude. Maybe even Sausage Nose himself. In the light of this fear, I stopped several times along that final stretch of the path just to listen for footsteps behind me, ones I was sure I almost heard before I acknowledged that it was probably nothing more than an echo.

  I found Garth in the truck’s cab, asleep and prone, feet up on the steering wheel, his socks reeking like deep-fried corn chips. Instead of taking a seat and warming myself by the truck’s running heater, I chose instead to leave the stash of krakt on the floor in front of Garth, then inspect the snowmobiles that would provide our escape. I wanted to be gone from Tekeli-li now. I wanted to have this place farther behind me with every second, lost in a cloud of snow and memory. I didn’t know much about mechanics, but I did know enough to understand that the internal wires and tubes of the vehicles should not be strewn loosely around the snow, packed into the ice by an orgy of footprints. I knew enough to know the vehicles shouldn’t have their front visors smashed, or be lying on their sides, hoods open and guts ripped out, metal corpses even more still because of their ruin. I brushed the snow from the snowbikes as if I could comfort them, tears starting to build in my freezing eyes. It was during the process of doing this that I saw him, caught a glance of him in a cracked rearview mirror sneaking up behind me to observe my mourning.

  “Arthur. Arthur Gordon Pym!” I yelled to my tormentor. The culprit still held a piece of bone in his hand, preparing to do more damage. If it really was him, if he really was that old, I suddenly felt as if it would be my duty to nature itself to kill him. In that moment, eyes blurry, it was clear to me. If Pym was the destroyer of my dreams, then I would be the destroyer of the dreamer.

  “You did this,” I yelled at him, with as much venom as those three words could carry. Pym paused just out of lunging distance, kept his arms open at his sides in case he needed to spring into some form of action.

  “You would speak to me about what I have done, you dark character? I know what it is that you are doing,” the Caucasian said to me, and when he did the full fear of our discovery and possible punishment hit me, and I felt a cold chill well beyond the one in the air.

  “What the hell are you talking about?” I yelled back at Pym. Looking at all the tubes and wires at my feet, I thought nothing appeared so damaged by his human hands as not to be salvageable. If I knew how to stick them back into the machines properly, which I didn’t.

  “You have a secret treasure trove of the prized sweetmeats, I have no doubt. But you, sir, have been discovered!” Food. That was what he thought this was about in its entirety. There was a tone to his voice that was as self-righteous as it was wrong, and it warbled and bounced just like his finger did as it pointed at me.

  “Why would I be hiding the snack cakes if I knew they could buy my freedom, Pym? That’s not even logical.”

  “So you say, so you say, but logic is exactly what it is that I apply to your chaos. For if that is not what you are doing, why else did I see your mate attempting to harness your carriages, except to …” There was a pause here, a moment when the two of us were just standing out there in the snow, and I could almost see the cold synapses fire in his brain as Arthur Gordon Pym came to the realization of what Garth’s and my true intentions were. “You scoundrel! You foolish beast! Do you really mean to steal your person from your rightful owner? Not only have you been a lazy slave but now you indulge in this madness as well? Are you such a fool that you intend to run away from Heaven itself? Has the taint of your blood made you so black and stupid that you can’t—” Pym stopped abruptly, taking the time to recover from the blow that Garth landed on the back of his neck. Garth’s big hands were like leather gloves filled with pudding, and the sound of the impact reverberated well beyond the site of impact. Spinning around to look at his assailant, Pym jumped forward so that now he was trapped between Garth and me. As he took in the massive figure of the bus driver, augmented even further by the layers of thermal padding to keep Garth’s flesh warm, Arthur Pym suddenly remembered that he should be afraid of us.

  “On further consideration and reflection, I must say I am sorry for the insults. You and your brethren make excellent slaves. You are truly born for it. Much more so than those poor specimens from Tsalal, I assure you.”

  It was that ‘excellent slaves’ part that made Garth walk toward Pym, landing another slap to the back of his nearly perfectly round skull, his balding raven mop bouncing in response. It was the line about Tsalal that startled me, though. I held a hand up to Garth, beckoning him to pause his thrashing. Tsalal.
Oh, the sound of it. Even from Pym’s dismissive lips it struck a fire in part of my soul that I worried had gone frozen. Tsalal. The dream was out there. And it was with Pym’s pronunciation of the word, with all its slithering and disdain, that I knew it was within reach. That the greatest revelation was still in front of us.

  “Tsalal? What do you know about Tsalal?” Even if there was no world left above us anymore, did that make this goal of discovering Eden any less lofty? Maybe now it was even more so. Tsalal was the world my crewmates and I were destined for.

  “I have known of the island, for I discovered it, and the Tekelians did so before me. They sought to use its natives as a source of labor. But the human crop, it was useless. Unfit for proper bondage. Now they grow wild, I presume.”

  Trying to calm myself, to avoid betraying how much I wanted this information and letting Pym know he could extort it from me, I continued. “And what else do you know about these Tsalalians?”

  “They are black,” Pym said as if this said it all, pausing after each of these three words so that I could perceive the weight of them.†

  “Do you know how to get there?” was the most important question I had to ask. Garth paused behind, and his threat definitely affected the speed of Pym’s answer, but I hoped not the content.

  “Yes, of course. It’s a simple matter of tides. I could show you. Although, I must tell you: there is no point trying to set up trade with those niggers.”

  Spurred by the last word of his statement, Garth gave the white man another smack, this time with the full force of annoyance. The blow left Pym on the ground, very, very unconscious.

  “What the hell are you doing, man? He was going to tell us how to get to Tsalal!”

  “I don’t like that word.” Garth shrugged. “And I ain’t the kind of nigga that’s gonna let some cracker say that to my face and get away with it.”

  Garth showed some bit of regret by grabbing Pym by the collar and smacking him further, more lightly this time, in an attempt to wake him up. But it was clear that Pym would not be regaining consciousness for a while, and the longer we waited the more our immediate plans were at risk.

  “Did you bring Dirk Peters’s bones from the base camp like I specifically asked you? I don’t want to lose them.”

  “You’re a weird dude, Chris. Really, you’re not right sometimes. Yeah, I got it.”

  “Good. We’re taking Pym with us too. That’s the only solution. We’re taking him with us, we can’t … I can’t let this chance slip away.”

  “Man, do you not see what that fool did to the other two snowmobiles? We not carrying nobody. Besides, why do we need Tsalal? We already got somewhere to run to. We already got a plan, and I think it’s a pretty good one.”

  “I’ll carry him. He’ll be my burden.”

  With that, I rolled Pym’s limp body over and tied him up. Then I took the rest of the rope we could find in the truck’s cab and laid it out on the snow in the form of a Philadelphia soft pretzel. Once it was arranged, I poured water onto the line from the bottle that Garth kept in his coat, despite his complaining. And in seconds, when the water had frozen the rope and the snow around it into a hard shape and the makeshift sled was ready, I placed the knocked-out Pym on it and put our food supplies and my bag of bones beside him, securing all of them tightly so that they wouldn’t fall off during the quest ahead of us.

  * In African American vernacular, it’s called “going upside the head,” and because of that I have always imagined an open-hand assault in a literal upswing, gliding past the ear and making contact with most of the temple.

  † Pym said “black” the way really white people do: not like they are simply naming the pigment, which those people do in one quick syllable, but in the way that made the word specific to Negroes. This black had at least two syllables, b&-’lAk, and there was always enough emphasis on the second syllable to convey all of the anxiety the speaker had about my ethnic group as a whole. Ba-laaaaaaaak.

  I have always loved quitting jobs. Whether because the job itself was repugnant or the people working at it with me, I have always held my right to quit my job as one of my most sacred privileges. An entire ritual surrounds this shedding of employment. First, there is the glorious moment when, after the unpleasantness of my position and my general unhappiness become overwhelmingly apparent to me, I say to myself (and I quote), “Fuck this. I don’t have to take this shit anymore. They think they can make me do what they want, but I’m out of here.” Ah, there it is, the almost orgasmic release I feel when I first make the profane declaration to myself, the feeling of reclaimed power coursing invisibly through me. But not just that: this singular moment, this coveted private knowledge is formed into a golden kernel and popped into existence again in my mind as a reaction to every unfortunate work-related moment I’m forced to endure before I make my destined departure. It’s such a glorious thing, the harboring of this secret knowledge, that in itself it has kept me at many a job even longer than I had originally intended, because just knowing that I would soon be free was the most effective of panaceas. So much so that there were times when even though it was impossible for me to quit I would say the same words to myself and mercifully delude my conscious mind that I could get the hell out of there if I wanted to.

  As I marched through the snow with nothing but more snow in front and behind for hours, I began to wonder if all of my quitting dramatics might have some larger meaning. That they might in fact be evidence of some form of race memory from my genetic past. How many of my slave ancestors used such gimmicks to preserve their own sanity? Spending years obsessing over the intended escape that only they knew of. The intricate planning that they shared with no one. I have thought of their escapes before, and was usually impressed by the bravery and fear that must have accompanied those breakouts. But I forgot to think about the glory of all the acts of flight that never happened. And how powerful their inaction probably was to the slaves who did not perform them.

  But me, I quit. I have quit very good jobs, and horrible ones. I have co-workers that I still miss, and co-workers that I regret never assaulting on the way out the door. And overall, I have enjoyed my resignations, enjoyed that last moment of walking away from each of the places that housed my misery, knowing that I would never have to return. I have walked down the street each time and bounced away, literally bounced in a skipping motion, knowing once more the effervescence of freedom.

  And always, immediately after my departure, then comes the next feeling, the next sentence, which is just as inevitable as the first. It goes, “What the hell are you going to do now?” And thus begins my terror. The hell I was doing now was slogging forward through the wind, rope over my shoulder as I pulled, trying to ignore the pain in my right hand as I kept my grip on my makeshift sled. What I was going to do was ignore the sounds of the screaming Arthur Gordon Pym, who was surprisingly awake and still tied to the luggage pile behind me. What I was going to do was keep following Garth Frierson, staring at the back of his head like so many of his bus passengers must have, and trust as they did that the man knew where he was going.

  “What is this shit?” Garth asked, staring at the sealskin container. It was Pym who responded.

  “That, heathen, is krakt. It is the chosen meal of the Gods, the most perfect economy of taste and sustenance.” There was a snort that ended this description. I had untied Pym for the moment and replaced his many folded robes with one of the spare snowsuits just so that I could keep a better eye on what his limbs were up to. We sat out on the compacted snow taking a break, our footprints lost in the trail behind us, the mountain in front of us still infuriatingly distant. There was nowhere for Pym to run to, and this knowledge calmed him a bit. The fact that he seemed to be sobering up as our trip progressed contributed to his change in demeanor too.

  “But does it taste good?” Garth retorted.

  “No,” I said over my shoulder, and then continued relieving myself into a growing yellow hole a dozen yards past t
hem.

  “It is a staple of the very heavens,” Pym shot back, offended. “Everyone eats it there. Everyone eats it there for every meal, and for every occasion. It is the food of love. Everyone who consumes it has love for it.”

  “Everyone?” Garth asked, and emboldened, he took a sample, dipping a bare finger into the gook and putting it on his tongue. “Dog, this is delicious” was Garth’s judgment.

  “Great. Eat as much as you want, my man,” I told him. “You sure you know where you’re going, right?” I asked, but Garth was too engrossed in his culinary discovery to answer.

  “Where the hell are we going, Garth?”

  I didn’t want to seem like the child on a long trip calling out Are we there yet? but yet and still, were we? We were stopped for yet another “bathroom” break, as it was clear that the krakt was proving too rich for the mortal stomach of Garth Frierson, who at least did me the honor of going downwind to shit himself this time.

  I’d given up tying Arthur Pym’s hands an hour before, since there was no point to it. For the most part, as I trudged along behind the tracks that Garth laid down just before me, Pym was the least of my fears. Mostly, I worried about Garth. I watched through the small cloud of snow in his wake as he stomped along, the fat of his hips swiveling to get him there. I watched as he Karvel-spotted, removing the picture of the mountain peak from his jacket and raising it to whatever new vista we approached. And I waited. Impatiently. Trying to calculate the point at which our bodies would be sufficiently depleted so that even the life of servitude behind me was literally beyond my reach. And only after that horror became too much to contemplate did I think of Pym instead. And I thought of something. I turned my body and mind to Pym, who was trying to scrape the last of the krakt out of the empty seal bladder onto his fingers.