by Mat Johnson
“Arthur Pym, why’d you say ‘the Gods found you’?” The Caucasian turned up from his feeding to look at me inquisitively but said nothing. Although centuries old, he didn’t look more than thirty-eight. A drunkard’s watery thirty-eight but a lot better than most two-hundred-year-olds nonetheless. Down here, white didn’t crack either.
“You know,” I continued, “when we were talking back at that pub before, why did you say ‘the Gods found you’ about the Tekelians, when I found them? I discovered the Tekelian at the base of the chasm. That was me.”
“You are not half so clever as you imagine, Christopher Jaynes. Did you really believe yourself to be so lucky as to trip upon their perfection? Did you really think it was you that had the element of surprise?”
The tunnels that led to our base camp—immediately I made the connection. My mind lurched forward, fueled by explosive possibilities. The Tekelians had been watching us all along. They had planned for all of it to go down.
In a rush of euphoria, I began to believe that the entirety of humanity was probably still alive and carrying on in the rest of the world without bother. But then I remembered the emails and the missing workers’ boat, and my mind came crashing down once more. There was no way the ice monsters could have made their own computers from bones and snow, or made phones to cancel work orders.
“Do you intend to starve me? For if murder was your dark intent, it would have been better to kill me back in Tekeli-li rather than drag me this far.” It was two hours later, and Pym had a good point on that one; even though it had been only a few hours, I was hungry too.
“Garth, two protein bars, please. No, maybe you should make that four.” It was a hard thing to ask for; I’d eaten so many before we left that the mere thought of those faux chocolate fiber bricks threatened my gut. Still, it was better than the pangs of hunger which I was already starting to feel again.
“Ain’t no more, dog,” Garth said, not even bothering to put his binoculars down and face me.
“What? Of course there are more. There was a whole unopened box; just take one out of that pile.”
“Ate ’em,” the big man said while looking back through the binocular lenses. He kept scouring the horizon as if his magical mountain would just jump up and reveal itself if he stared at the distant ridges long enough.
“ ‘Ate ’em’? That is a sentence fragment, Garth, among other things. What you’re missing primarily is a defining noun. Your subject. If you are going to eat all of the food, you could at least say ‘I ate them.’ If only because now you’re going to have to watch us starve.”
Garth didn’t respond. As he walked on toward the ridge, he just kept looking around.
By our next stop, the tip of my nose had gone numb: there was barely any of it showing past my hood. Mine was a wide, Negroid nose, and yet and still its tip had gone numb. For a good half hour, I lost Garth in front of me, his massive figure growing smaller on the horizon until the dot that he had become simply vanished. Pym trudged not far behind me, just one wrist now bound and attached by rope to the sled. The white man complained bitterly the entire way, but luckily the wind blew loudly enough that the specifics of his discontent were lost. It started to seem like maybe Garth had gone on to die alone and without accusations, because the idea that we were actually moving forward toward something seemed absurd. Not even looking up anymore, I just stared at the ground. Following the tracks of Garth’s boots print for print, at some point I just stopped thinking, became hypnotized by watching the powder as I trudged by. Given my state, if it wasn’t for Garth’s screaming, I would have slammed into him when I eventually found him standing there.
Garth Frierson was yelling, but as I took his presence in, pulling back my hood to better hear him, I saw that he was doing something else even more spectacular: Garth was jumping. Jumping up and down, pumping his plump, gloved fist as he did so. Despite my exhaustion, it was a moving sight: given the general rotund shape of his outline, his actions gave Garth the appearance of a blubbery ball, bouncing up and down at improbable intervals.
“We’re here!” he finally managed to communicate to me.
“The camp? You see the camp? Where is it?” I called back to him.
“The mountain ridge! That’s it, dog. That’s the one we’re looking for, over there.”
Following Garth’s pointed finger, I did see the mountain ridge. It was true, it was the same one that I saw in the painting. Then, looking past and around that landmark, I saw something else. I saw that there was nothing out here. No sign of an eco-habitat, no sign of life, nothing. If not for the printed image that Garth had of this very spot, I would have assumed there had never been any form of human contact with this place at all. But I was sure it was this spot, just as Garth was as he held up the image and compared it to the landmarks around us.
“This is it!” he kept declaring.
“Yeah, this is it. Fine. But what are we going to do now, Garth?” I asked, searching around for salvation and seeing nothing but snowdrifts.
“So is this to be the site of our grave?” asked Pym, sitting on the sled as he massaged the blood back into his feet.
We pitched a tent. As we did, the wind picked up and carried a storm cloud directly over our heads, then kept it there, dumping its snow down on us as if we had asked for more. By the time I began to drag my gear inside the thin nylon walls, the top of our shelter was already lined with an inch of powder. I thought, Good, that will keep some of the wind out, because I had decided to lie to myself for a while until there was some truth worth hearing.
We dragged whatever we had inside the tent before it was lost in the storm. With the last of my strength, I took the gloves off my nearly numb hands and zipped down the front tent flaps as if this act would magically turned the fabric into the sturdiest of doors. Hunched over, turning around, I saw Pym at my canvas bag, my treasure. He’d opened the strap at its mouth. In an act completely lacking in respect, he’d pulled out a blackened and aged femur and was holding it as if it was a drumstick he might want to take a bite of.
“Enough!” I managed the energy to snatch it back from him, replacing the contents and hugging my collection as if the remains were still living.
“Why do you have a dead man among your luggage?” Arthur Gordon Pym asked me, the judgment and disdain as palpable as the wind that blew against our refuge’s walls. “What is this, one of your victims?”
“No,” I replied, pointing. “It’s one of yours. It’s Dirk Peters.”
Pym dropped what was in his hands, pulled away from it for a second before looking into the rest of the sack. And then he looked back at me, smiled broadly, and gave a laugh of madness. Picking up the skull, he held it out to me.
“Alas, poor Dirk! I knew him, Christopher: a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy: he hath borne me on his back a thousand times; and now, how abhorred in my imagination it is!” The sight of this white guy holding the sacred remains of my black brother pissed me off more than any of the events before. I grabbed the skull back out of Pym’s hands with the one-word curse, “Blasphemy!”
“Well, if this is who you say, which I believe not, then who are you to throw such a stone?”
“The weirdo’s right, dog. What you’re doing with it?” the former bus driver asked me.
“I’m taking it to Tsalal. For a proper burial,” I said, holding the bag to me.
“I’m saying, if you ever do find Tsalal, this big black island, why the hell would you bury his bones there? Isn’t that, like, the last thing this dude and this Mathis lady would have wanted?”
“It’s not about what they would have wanted. It’s about what’s right,” I told him. Consumed by cold and overwhelming hunger, I barely bothered to offer that explanation. Why struggle to fight such silliness?
We sat in silence for hours awaiting death, the three of us. Then, after a while, Arthur Pym said:
“Do either of you count straw or twigs among your many wondrous possessions?
For I believe that to find sustenance we may have to look amongst our own circle.” Despite myself I looked and saw a pool of spittle spill out the side of the Caucasian’s mouth in anticipation. Although Garth was the one currently being stared at, the big man paid Pym no mind. Instead, as Arthur Pym argued to no one the merits of his culinary suggestions, Garth put back on his gloves, goggles, and hat, and left the tent.
“I am just going outside and may be some time” was his sole remark, and like Lawrence Oates before him he was gone. I was too far gone to try to stop his sacrifice.
“So, are you going to try to eat me now,” I asked Pym, but he shrugged this off.
“Let us acknowledge this: yours is a rather odorous breed, and you, sir, are a particular pungent example of this. I fear even my starving appetite could not overcome that truth.”
“My people don’t stink. And I wouldn’t stink if those Tekelians you love so much had let me take a bath.” At the mention of criticism of his beloved snow monkeys, Pym’s head shook side to side as if he’d bitten something nasty.
“This end is a judgment, I fear. For your theft of yourself,” Pym returned, looking toward the tent door Garth had just walked out of, perhaps considering if he should go and chase after his meal.
“What are you talking about? Steal myself? You basically admitted that they scammed us into that deal, that they were watching us all along.”
Again, the head shake. Pym wouldn’t hear anything negative about the race from the caves. That is it, that’s the trick, I realized as my brain began to go numb. Drifting off, staring across at the two-hundred-year-old man just to make sure that the needs of his stomach didn’t overpower the needs of his nose, I saw it all become clear to me. That is how they stay so white: by refusing to accept blemish or history. Whiteness isn’t about being something, it is about being no thing, nothing, an erasure. Covering over the truth with layers of blank reality just as the snowstorm was now covering our tent, whipping away all traces of our existence from this pristine landscape.
And now we rushed into the embraces of the cataract, where a chasm threw itself open to receive us. But there arose in our pathway a shrouded human figure, very far larger in its proportions than any dweller among men. And the hue of the skin of the figure was of the perfect whiteness of the snow.
—The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket
IT can be argued then that the greatness of The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket lies more in the ongoing reaction to its cliffhanger ending, this flaunting and confounding literary challenge, than to the work itself. The backflips of those who seek to prove that the book is actually a finished work in itself are matched perfectly by the somersaults of others who say the work is an unfinished equation to be answered. Jules Verne, eager to solve the riddle laid out by his American hero, wrote a sequel called An Antarctic Mystery, or The Sphinx of the Ice Fields.* Verne sought to place Pym firmly within the world of the rational, regardless of Poe’s own lack of concern for this regard. The mystery referenced in Verne’s title is solved when his protagonist’s exhaustive research into Pym’s final scene comes up with an answer to explain everything: magnets. Ever fond of science (or even pseudoscience) over mysticism, Verne came up with this rational explanation, that the white figure was a big Sphinx-shaped magnet that had pulled Pym to his death. H. P. Lovecraft took up the challenge in At the Mountains of Madness. In Lovecraft’s version, Poe’s white figure was revealed to be a penguin. A massive, albino penguin, of a breed that was left there by the alien Old Ones, who had also left behind an incomprehensibly hideous tentacled monster. This creature was slimy and, true to Poe’s symbology if not to the setting, completely black.
Pym’s literary critics, the ones stuck with working over the existing text rather than imagining their way out of it, have struggled valiantly, but with disappointing results. As examples of the many schools of thought on that infamous final paragraph, I offer the following:
A. The ending of Pym is simply a taunt for a possible sequel, a crass attempt to turn this novel into one of several, thereby solving Poe’s considerable financial burdens during this period. This technique also harkens to Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, from which Poe borrowed liberally throughout. People forget that, after Crusoe escaped from the island, he and Friday went on to further adventure for another chapter in the wild hills of Italy, chased by ferocious wolves and the like. People forget that part because they want to—it’s anticlimactic, pointless, and silly. Arguing against this theory is the fact that Poe says in the afterword to Pym that there are only two or three chapters missing. Why merely three if an additional volume was the aim?
B. If it is separated from the expectations that a novel has an arc, a direction, and that even the picaresque variety must undergo some final statement, then the ending of Pym fits quite well within the rest of the work. It starts with action, explores the scene, and then ends unresolved, with the reader wanting only to read on. The final chapter feels like every other chapter in the book, and Poe himself once declared that he was first a “magazinist,” an assertion that fits his refusal, or inability, to end this story. Instead of an apposite and structurally determined ending, his finale seems merely to mark the moment when he surrendered to exhaustion and wrote no more. While this may be an attractive explanation, it should be remembered that Poe was a master storyteller, albeit of short-form fiction. Surely, though, a master of the micro could not blunder so largely on the macro level as to have a novel that simply doesn’t end. Right?
C. The ending, the moving into the white chasm with the inhuman, shrouded figure, is an allegory for death. The ending is merely the poeticized destruction of both Pym and Dirk Peters. While it is attractive in its simplicity and for the way it compliments Pym’s author, I object to this rather common read because it’s just plain stupid. First, why, in a book that has taken pleasure in so many gory details, would Poe escape into metaphor for the clincher? Also, how could Arthur Pym then write the preface, which he does, telling us that he is back on the East Coast? No, this is just a stupid interpretation. I usually refrain from name-calling, but it’s true.
D. Just as Poe’s vision of the blackness of Tsalal is perfectly horrific, his vision of this complete whiteness of his Antarctica is perfection itself. How then, as a writer of stories based on conflict (as all tales are), can Poe go forward with the narrative? “And then we got there and everything was just absolutely without flaw in every way” does not make for a gripping story. Or even a feasible story. So, this theory states, the narrative reaches a dead end. It can go nowhere. Conflict, the basis of all storytelling, itself has been negated by an overwhelming worship of whiteness.
* Le Sphinx des Glaces, in the original French.
I woke up dead. I woke up naked, lying on a bed of soft green moss, my body warmed from the golden glow above me. There were voices. Men mostly, some women. Not a conversation, not listening, just talking, over each other and united only by their passionate tone. Angry voices, words and meaning lost in their muddle. I was in Hell. As my eyes adjusted, I found hope for Heaven instead. Looking around, I could see that it had to be one or the other, because Purgatory could not be this decisive, this stunning. Gone was the snow with its frozen white death, and now in its place were fauna and lavender and color. Bushes of every hue, more vivid than I could have imagined, stretched out around and past me, along the small hill to a waterfall that fed the Pierian spring that babbled a few feet beyond, large orange carp swimming visibly beneath the surface. Gone was the vast frozen whiteness that was the taker of life, because now I was lying on the green bank of a river, naked, smelling lavender in the air and hearing the faint sound of harps present under the chatter.
Yes, there was the noise of the voices, but it was so beautiful. The more I looked, the clearer that was. As a matter of fact, with the white doves flying by and the clouds which hung above perfectly billowing their fluff, it was so overwhelming that it was almost too much for my mind to nego
tiate. No, not almost, definitely, it was definitely too beautiful, too perfect, for my mind to wrap around, my ears all that grounded me. In fact, the air was so sweet it was saccharine. Really, it was like pouring perfume under your nose. I started to feel sick in my stomach at it, but there was something so familiar about this place and the voices in my head. That’s when I noticed that, despite their appearance of flowing, the clouds above weren’t actually moving. Tracing their path off into the horizon, I saw that right before the farthest clouds disappeared past a blooming cherry tree, there were black letters written right onto the blue sky. It was a signature, the autograph of this land’s creator.
In my terror I realized that this was not my heaven, this was Garth’s. This was my hell. I was trapped inside a Thomas Karvel painting.
“Dog, you up?”
I rolled over onto my side and saw my friend. Garth stood buck naked. Eating a bag of Cheetos.
“Where the hell are we?” I managed, taking him in. Orange cheese dust powdered Garth’s various bodily hairs from his goatee down, his overhanging belly covering his genitalia, fortunately.
“We’re here, dog. I found it—don’t sleep on the big man. I told you I knew what I was doing. I found it and came back and got you.”
“Where the hell is here?” I asked, raising myself up as well, a hand covering my groin in an act of modesty.
“This is Eden, dog. As in ‘the garden of.’ You standing in the Dome of Light.”
Dome was an apt description. And not just in the sense of the shape of the structure I now found myself in but also in the “sports arena” usage of the word. This was no modest little science station. The interior really was the length of a football field, and the waterfall that coursed on the far end of the room poured down from at least three stories high. As I looked at the falling water, I could see that there was actually a fenced deck just above the falls with a table and chairs, past that the reflection of windows. Above, the clouds were painted right onto the ceiling.