Pym: A Novel

by Mat Johnson

  Garth leaned down and whispered firmly into my ear, “I told him we’re Republicans. Black. Republicans. Got it?”

  “What? What are you talking about? Why are we naked?” I had many questions, but this seemed the most pertinent.

  “Contamination, dog,” was Garth’s answer.

  “Contamination from what?” I must have yelled on that last word, because just then out of the turquoise bush beside me hopped an Easter bunny, clearly startled. Albino and obese, it darted its nervous red eyes in confusion at the scene.

  “I was hoping you could tell me ‘what,’ ” a male voice answered. And there, on an outgrowth of granite rock, stood a Caucasian with a thin black mustache, his arms outstretched like the Rio de Janeiro Jesus, white terry-cloth robes in each hand.

  “You fellows hungry for some Welsh rabbit?” asked the Master of Light himself, whom I recognized immediately from Garth’s catalogs. In response to Thomas Karvel’s query, the Easter bunny to my side scampered back into the bushes, presumably for cover.

  When I heard “Welsh Rabbit,” I expected cheese on toast. So it was with surprise that I received my plate.* Instead of being populated by a metaphorical rabbit, it was instead occupied by a real one, dead and skinned and glazed. A cherry tomato stuck into its little bunny mouth.

  “Is this one of those?” I motioned with my fork at the scattered white bunnies it was possible to see jumping around below. From the deck atop the waterfall, one could see the entire length of the life-size terrarium we were inside of.

  “Those cute little white ones? Oh no, I would never do that. Those are for the missus. I shot most of these back in Ohio,” Karvel assured me. I could barely hear him, though, over the sounds of all the voices, pumped through speakers attached to the wall.

  “Nothing’s come through the satellite in weeks, but luckily I had hours taped. I got Rush over here by the kitchen, because he’s the granddaddy. I got Beck going in the southwest corner. Northwest is O’Reilly, southeast is Hannity, I think. Honey, is southeast Hannity?”

  “How the hell would I know?” came from the kitchen.

  “She’s sick of it. Keeps me grounded, though. Makes this hallowed ground, the way I see it. Makes it America. America without taxes, and big government, and terrorist bullshit. I knew this was coming, end of the world, been saying it since the sixties. I got out because I love it too much, really. But I’ll never leave the U.S. of A. God bless America.” Karvel lifted his glass, and we toasted with him.

  “Where’s Pym?” I asked Garth when Karvel went to lower the volume of the speaker over our table. Given the current circumstance, the idea of a kidnapped Caucasian seemed like it might prove problematic.

  “I don’t know. Frozen on the ice? Maybe all the way back at our departure site? Last time I saw him, he was running off away from me, following the tracks back in that direction.” I could tell by the way Garth said “departure site” that he had avoided telling our hosts of our Tekelian adventure.

  “Don’t worry about him, dog. He sure wasn’t worried about you. You know that fool tried to eat you last night?” I told him that, yes, I did remember the cannibal conversation. “Conversation? Dog, when I got back, I had to pull that lunatic off you. Look at your leg.” I did. There was the perfect oval of human teeth marks traced in red on my pale calf.

  “Yeah, I saw that when I was stripping you down; I put a little peroxide on it. That’ll heal,” Karvel told me, returning. “It’s a shame about your crew member. Some people, they can’t handle being alone down here. All that PC nonsense, it made men soft. Hell, the lesbos are stronger than most of the men nowadays. Me, I love it down here. You make your own reality in this place. The ultimate luxury. But I always lived in my own world, least that’s what my wife says.”

  “I do say that,” Mrs. Karvel called from the kitchen. “Because it’s the damn truth, even before you dragged me down here.”

  “So … what was with the strip-us-naked thing?” I used this opportunity to ask my host. I felt a big foot kick my knee at the end of this sentence and looked across the table to see Garth was staring me down. We were both currently clad solely in Karvel’s bathrobes. It didn’t seem like an inappropriate question.

  “Hey, don’t worry, I ain’t one of those,” he said, laughing. “Just didn’t want to throw your clothes in the incinerator with you in them. Who knows what they’re contaminated with? We don’t know what happened out there in the world, do we? I was hoping you all would know, but it’s pretty clear not one of us does. One minute I’m sitting here watching Fox & Friends, then they start talking about some riot. I go get some nachos, next thing you know I come back and it’s all dark. It’s dark everywhere: TV, phone, Internet. Nothing.” Shaking his head, taking a swig of his beer, Karvel drops his voice both in volume and in pitch before continuing. “First thought: nukes. Iran, North Korea, Pakistan, they’ve been begging for it for years. But a nuclear attack couldn’t have taken out everything at once, not even a big one. So I’m thinking, something biological. Then you got a bigger list: add in Syria, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, Cuba, Somalia, Chechnya, China, and I sure as hell don’t trust Russia. Probably engineered or something, sitting dormant in everybody’s system while it spreads across the world. Silently spreading all across the world, see? The smart people, they been talking about this for years. Then on a set time, on a set date, boom, it goes off. Just like that, everyone’s dead. Blood in the street, blood pouring from eyes, babies screaming, dogs dying. Everything. We been talking about stuff like that for years, but still, when it happens …”

  I looked at the painter for a moment, petrified. As he talked, Karvel became increasingly morose, his voice dropping with his shoulders, joining in with the chorus above. It was almost as if you could see the fear radiating off of him, that if you reached out your hand you could feel it blowing out his pores.

  “Well, let’s hope that’s also highly unlikely, right? Could just be a satellite problem, or an international computer virus.”

  “Yeah, that’s what I thought at first. Then the repair and supply plane stopped showing up. We were supposed to get that boiler fixed, damn thing probably won’t go over seventy-two degrees without exploding like the Fourth of July—it’s a menace. Course, they use computers for everything now, so who knows? Right? Let’s just hope it wasn’t the Rapture, ’cause if my wife finds out that Jesus came and didn’t take us with the righteous, she’s going to make my life a hell,” he said. “I’m kidding,” he followed with. I didn’t know about which part.

  After the meal of brown bunnies with Kraft mac and cheese, “Jiffy” mix muffins, and heaping portions of Betty Crocker roasted garlic and cheddar mashed potatoes, Mrs. Karvel cleared our plates and even complimented us on our appetites. Mrs. Karvel was a plain woman who was also plainly a bit intrigued by Garth and me: her smile was a little too wide, her laugh a little too quick, her retreat to the kitchen a little too nervous. I thought this might be a reaction to our race, but that was probably more about me than about her.† I did know that the food was a welcome change from our moment of starvation and weeks of krakt, and after I was done I felt more like a man again. Garth, though, seemed like less of one, having regressed in the presence of his hero. For one thing, he couldn’t stop staring at the painter, darting his eyes in Karvel’s direction every time the man looked away. When not staring, Garth just rotated his head, slack jawed at this life-size terrarium Karvel had created.

  “It’s a state-of-the-art 3.2 Ultra BioDome,” Karvel told us as he gave his tour. We had each been given a pair of his pajamas at supper’s conclusion. Unfortunately, like many men of big accomplishment, Karvel was a short guy. Only the pants fit us, and even those just made it as far as our shins before retreating. Above the waist we were naked, but thanks to Garth’s bloated physique, I didn’t mind this as much as I might have. In contrast to his C-cup breasts and overhanging gut, my own academic torso appeared almost sculpted.

  “The 3.2 Ultra, that’s t
op of the line; you don’t get something like that at Sam’s Club. Hermetically sealed, fully self-contained. Got solar panels all over the roof, even. NASA contracted for these things to colonize Mars someday. The fauna, the exchange of CO2 and oxygen: it’s all set up so we can get our own ecosystem fully self-contained. You can’t even find it with infrared satellite imagery: the exhaust system shoots the hot air right down into the ice tunnels, which makes the heat signatures invisible. Not even the government could find us. This is the safest place on the earth, right here.”

  When one was standing in the middle of the construction, it really was awe inspiring. I’d seen other faux habitats before, but never walked around freely within such a big one.‡ Even more stunning was the amount of detail that went into the realism of the place. The sky, although stuck in perpetual sunset, was no mere clunky mural painting, it was clearly an actual photograph of a Karvel original, blown up to span the hundreds of yards that constituted the entire ceiling. The sides of the structure were equally meticulous in their attempt to continue the illusion: the room did not appear to end. Rather, the foliage around us became too dense to see through. Besides the apartment that floated above the waterfall, there was no sign that we were not really outside. And yet, despite these nods to realism, the overall look of the room was utterly unreal. The grass we walked on was green, but it was too green. The water that ran through the rambling stream that went diagonally through the space was actually blue. The azaleas and roses and tulips that appeared across the space were all, simultaneously, in the most vivid bloom. It was as if we were walking through a world that had been colorized with markers by an enthusiastic eight-year-old.

  “God created nature. I just improved on it.”

  “NASA’s biodome looks like this?” I asked, hard-pressed to imagine this landscape populated by bookish men in white overcoats. Garth flashed me a look, darting his eyes back to his hero in fear of finding him offended, but Karvel was indulgent, even jovial.

  “Oh no, no, no. This is all custom,” he said, walking to the water’s edge. Bending down on his knees, he took a cup into his hands, sipped some water, and motioned for us to do the same. “For years, I kept painting all of those pictures, trying to create a perfect world. One day, I’m standing there with a brush in my hand, and I realize: I don’t just want to look at this world, I want to live in it.”

  “See, that’s what I been talking about. That’s brilliance.” Garth took to his knees too, gathering some of the stream’s water in his hands. Thomas Karvel’s palms went to Garth’s shoulders, blessing.

  “A man who lives a life worth living, he’s a hunter. He hunts for something, he hunts for his dream. And his dream is always the same thing: to create a world he can truly live in, without Big Brother enslaving him to mediocrity. So I created this free land. First within my art, and now in life,” Karvel said, motioning grandly around him, the king of all we could survey. “Had to come down here to do it too. As blank as the morning snow. A clean canvas. A place with no violence and no disease, no poverty and no crime. No taxes or building codes. This is a place without history. A place without stain. No yesterday, only tomorrow. Only beauty. Only the world the way it’s supposed to be.”

  “This river tastes like grape Kool-Aid!” Garth exclaimed, staring at the bit left in his cupped fingers in disbelief.

  “Yeah, but with Splenda instead of the real stuff. I tried to use corn syrup, but it killed all the damn koi.”

  The cottage we were to stay in was the adjective quaint made manifest. At least from the outside. With a real thatched roof and stone façade, it seemed as if it had been sitting there for centuries. Even from a distance, I could see that the windows bore the distorted surfaces of handblown glass, the candlelight flickering behind each one running beautifully along their imperfect surfaces.

  “That’s Lamplight Brook.” Garth turned to me, as if this was supposed to mean something.

  “That’s right. This was the original model I used to paint it. Bought it with the money from that painting. I had it removed stone by stone from Bourton-on-the-Water, in England. Took them thirteen months, four jet trips to fly it down. No expense was spared.”

  This last part was not entirely true. While the outside of this house indicated that we might find a plush and comfortable household just beyond its threshold, what I found instead when I entered was just an empty shed. The floor itself seemed to be original, the wood beams were wide and old and well worn, but there was not much else in this space besides them. Gas-fueled “candles” hid just below the windows, as did some sort of piped device that hummed so loudly I could feel the vibrations through my bare feet, but no furniture. Our interior tour revealed that this house had no back. After only ten or twelve feet, the building ended abruptly at the metal wall of the BioDome, giving the impression that God was cutting the building in half with his knife. Worse still, that knife seemed to have cut off the part of the Lamplight Brook that contained the bathroom.

  “You can stay here. I’ve got some packing material you can use for mattresses. It ain’t much, but you’ll fix it up.”

  “Don’t worry about us, we’ll be fine, Mr. Karvel, sir. We are taken care of, don’t you worry,” Garth gushed, ensuring I could make no statement to the contrary, not even “Where do I take a crap?”

  “Good, good. Well, the tools are in the back. You might as well take that patch of land past the cottage; I can’t see that from my place. Need anything, you just holler, ’kay boys?”

  “What tools?” I asked as soon as Karvel had fully departed. I saw him walk down the path toward his quarters, pausing to snap an orchid off a low hanging branch on the way. What was that made of? I wondered. Mars bars?

  “Well, they have a food budget, don’t they? So when I first got here I promised we’d do some vegetable gardening. You know, to cover what we’re going to eat, in addition to just helping out around the place.”

  “What else did you tell him? Did you tell him about the others?”

  “Told him we were working for a corporation harvesting water. He liked that. I left out the snow monkey part. You want him to know that, you tell him.”

  “Good. I really don’t think this guy’s prepared for a Negro invasion,” I said. Garth’s head cocked to the side as if yanked.

  “You can’t help yourself, can you? The man takes us in. Feeds us. Almost clothes us. And there you go with the racism talk.”

  “Just because someone’s not scared of minorities, doesn’t mean they want to be one.”

  Outside our window, Karvel paused on his walk to pull another pink orchid from the low-hanging branch of a cypress tree. Then he put the flower in his mouth and chewed.

  It took most of the next three days to clear out the patch of vegetation to the far side of Lamplight Brook cottage. It was difficult to define a “day,” really, because the sun was always setting§ in Karvel’s world. It did get a bit dimmer at “night,” though, and this helped our well-earned hours of sleep. It was hard, muscle-aching work. I needed all the rest I could steal.

  It wasn’t that the roots of the plants were particularly deep, or that the soil was particularly hard, it was just that there was a lot of it. The spot we cleared was nearly half the size of a basketball court, and the removed flora was strewn as high as the three-fifths of a house we were living in. Still, we took great care to keep the roots of our transplants intact, and the majority of the greenery was still living. I was in shock those first days, I even knew at the time, reeling from the trauma of the past weeks and the oddity of the present. But it felt good to work, to focus on my hands instead of my mind. To not be a freeloader on someone else’s land. I even started to tune the ever-present voices out. This habitat was so much a creation of our host that, in a Lockean sense, it was a relief to establish some form of ownership through our labor.

  By the afternoon of the fourth day, Garth and I were finally prepared to stop the reaping of the aesthetic but useless flowers and begin sowing the veget
ables and fruits we could live on. When Mrs. Karvel came by with our daily rations (Stove Top stuffing mix, Sylvia’s canned collard greens, and Spam) Garth made a point to show her our progress before she scuttled away as usual, making the request for the seeds we would need for the next stage in our victory garden. Mrs. Karvel seemed perpetually stressed, rarely out of motion any time I saw her. Standing still for a moment, without food or an emptied plate or a feather duster in hand, seemed almost a painful act for her.

  “You gonna have to make that patch bigger, ain’t you?” she said, looking out at the rows of rich, dark earth we had uncovered. This comment came to me as a surprise, because I thought if anything we’d perhaps been overzealous.

  “You want it bigger?” I muttered aloud, more out of shock than as an actual question.

  “Honey, we ain’t got enough food to feed you. A few months, tops, but it ain’t like the cans in storage are breeding new ones,” she told us, leaning forward and dropping her voice as if her husband might hear us, as far away as he was. “This is the deal. Either you guys got to figure out a way to grow us all some new food or you tell me how the hell we can get out of this goddamn fish-bowl.”

  * The culinary term “Welsh rabbit,” is of course a joke. A very old one as jokes go, dating back to the early eighteenth century. The joke, English in origin, was that the Welsh were either too poor or too stupid or too generally pathetic to have actual meat on their plates, so cheese grilled on toast was their delusional equivalent. The other version of this title, “Welsh rarebit,” is in fact a degradation of the original, a mishearing that was later adopted as a less offensive alternative. To little avail. In fact, the English so derided their neighbors to the west of the isle that in their language the very word Welsh became synonymous with substandard or imitation goods.