Pym: A Novel

by Mat Johnson

  Garth and I were about five hundred yards away, steering a path clear of the enemy camp, when the first explosion went off behind us. Such was the power of the blast and the sound it produced that I lost control of my speeding snowmobile from the vibrations. Still, it was nothing compared to the second explosion, which left my ears ringing to the point of deafness and knocked me completely over, my snowmobile skidding off beyond me.

  I righted myself on the snow as soon I had gathered my senses. Behind me, a quarter of Karvel’s amazing dome was now nothing more than fire and ruin, the section where the boiler was situated consumed by a fire that spread across the surface of the roof.

  “Jeffree,” I said aloud.

  “It’s not their fault,” Garth said back at me, but my mind had not even gotten that far. The destruction of a quarter of the 3.2 Ultra BioDome, and the impending destruction of the rest of the building, paled in its catastrophic weight in comparison to the long line of ice caves that I could see were now imploding.

  The ground turned from resolute to uncertain. It shook violently beneath us, until both of us were floored once more by the power and length of the quake. And even when our immediate ground grew less spastic, the roar of the landscape around us told of a destruction just beginning. Coffins of ice collapsing upon themselves where, only moments before, the still unbroken surface had sat placid. Yard by yard, the heat-weakened ice caves tumbled upon themselves, lines of jumbled ice succumbing like so many dominoes in a line of destruction I could see moving off into the sunset and toward the heart of the Tekelian empire.

  Even Pym in his near-comatose state was momentarily awakened by the catastrophe, and had an opinion on the matter. Sitting up in the boat, staring left and right to see the surface collapsing into canals that stretched as far as I could witness, Pym seemed almost unfazed by the enormity of it.

  “And so the heavens fell to earth,” he yelled when the worst had subsided, taking another lethal swig straight from the bottle’s neck before passing out again.

  * Or at least I haven’t.

  The circumstances connected with the late sudden and distressing death of Mr. Pym are already well known to the public through the medium of the daily press. It is feared that the few remaining chapters which were to have completed his narrative, and which were retained by him, while the above were in type, for the purpose of revision, have been irrecoverably lost through the accident by which he perished himself. This, however, may prove not to be the case, and the papers, if ultimately found, will be given to the public.… Peters, from whom some information might be expected, is still alive, and a resident of Illinois, but cannot be met with at present. He may hereafter be found, and will, no doubt, afford material for a conclusion of Mr. Pym’s account.

  —Note, Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym

  IT would seem that The True and Interesting Narrative of Dirk Peters was that promised material that would reveal the true end of Arthur Pym’s Narrative, despite the fact that it was never delivered to the public during Peters’s lifetime.* Of course, Dirk Peters did make the effort to construct those missing chapters, and his memory should not be impugned just because he (unlike Booker T. Washington) was unable to hire a ghostwriter who could sufficiently convey his story. Peters’s attempt to secure the services of Edgar Allan Poe to relay his story may have failed, but this was not to be the end of his ambitions in the matter.

  In a folder at the bottom of the Dirk Peters papers sat an envelope somewhat different from the others in the collection. For one thing, this packet contained stubs from what appeared to be both train and ocean-liner tickets, both of which were dated in the spring of 1895. The note that accompanied them is even more difficult to decipher than the muddled script in the rest of the collection. Its lines are shaken, the curves large and slow—this would of course make sense if it was indeed written in 1895, by which time Peters would have at least been in his eighties, his poor penmanship having even further degraded. Here it is in its entirety:

  Arrived in Amiens. The canals make it smell something horrible. I went to the writer’s house, had a copy of 20,000 Leagues under [sic] Sea, going to tell him I like it, I want his help. I’m thinking that’s a good one, on account of it’s got an Indian in it, like me. That Nemo was a seafaring one two [sic], so if he can tell his story I don’t see why the man can’t tell mine. I speak a little of the Frenchy, so I plan on Parla vousing [sic] that to the man. Seems the book selling is behind him, and this Verne man he working at the politics. I ask the locals, they say just look for him. Then I see him like they say. It’s easy to see because the man got a bad limp, in his left leg, like the kind you get after you been shot. Well, I start feeling sorry for him, being a cripple, then I’m walking up to him telling him who I was and what I’m wanting. But then, after he listens for a bit and I tell him how that Poe man took my story from me and now for the truth I want Jules Verne writing in stead, being as my writing boy, he hits me with his cane! I run off a bit and then I’m glad he got a gimp leg, because I do believe he was still trying to kick me.

  While there is no other historical record of this interaction, this final effort on Peters’s part to let his memoir be heard, it should be noted that Le Sphinx des Glaces emerged from Verne’s publisher just two years later.† While the account that Verne gives bears little resemblance to the one Dirk Peters hastily relayed and is largely a hackneyed attempt to find closure to Poe’s original tale, there are points of interest nonetheless. Verne’s sequel has a black ship chef as well, much like Poe’s novel. Describing this chef’s reaction to being cast away on an iceberg, Verne wrote, “As a Negro, who cares little about the future, shallow and frivolous like all of his race, he resigned himself easily to his fate; and this is, perhaps, true philosophy.”

  * Material is an excellent word for Dirk Peters’s collection; debris would be another less generous one.

  † Or as this book is also known: The Sphinx of the Ice Fields.

  ON our return journey to the place where our saga began, we made “good time,” although we did not have one. With rope tied from both of our vehicles to the boat, Garth and I plowed forward side by side while behind us, without clue or concern, Arthur Gordon Pym drunkenly continued sleeping. The journey back is often less labored than the trail blazed forward, and this was no different. We didn’t stop unless we found ourselves cut off by one of the newly formed ravines created by a tunnel’s collapse. We didn’t talk, and in truth my ears were still ringing so much from the last explosion that I wouldn’t have heard much anyway. We just followed our own tracks, and the tracks of the Tekelian war party that followed them, both of which were still frozen into the powder. The journey was so swift that I didn’t realize we were even close when I first saw the billowing gray smoke rising in the distance. A half hour later, on our arrival at the scene, I barely recognized it to be the remains of the Creole base camp, our former home.

  “They blew that shit up, dog,” was the first thing Garth had said to me in hours. I don’t even know when or how he’d managed to clean his face and arms off. The big man got off his snowmobile and walked over to the edge of the burning hole, sat down on its side, and let his legs dangle over. That was when I first realized that Garth was in shock, oddly enough. And I knew I must be in shock too, although this knowledge registered no further. I got off my snowmobile to see it, to look in the crater at the destruction that had been created. The only thing I recognized was the roof, the same one I’d climbed up to several times to adjust the satellite dish. That antenna was now gone, possibly blown free, and what remained of the wreckage was only black and smoking and sinking into the frozen ground, reeking of burnt rubber and unnameable plastics and pork rinds.

  “Blew it to high hell,” Garth repeated, pointing now at the massive, smoking crater that cut off our path to the ocean.

  What I saw as I continued to look into the ruins was something far more horrific. Poking through the snow, I could see the charred gray limbs of the beasts in questio
n as well, probably contributing to the pork smell.

  This was not just a crater, this was a crevice, spreading a good fifty yards across. And then, lengthwise, it spread far, far beyond that. Leading back along the same line that Augustus’s tunnel once had was a tunnel which had clearly become little more than debris and sunlight like the rest of them. I didn’t know if every Tekelian tunnel had collapsed, but I knew that all those close to the surface must have, and that, even if the village still existed below, there was no way to return to it now.

  We rode along the crevice’s edge, following it back in the direction I knew Tekeli-li to be. Looking to my side as I drove, I waited for the massive crack in the ground to narrow and close, but it didn’t. It just got wider. And then, it got so big that, had Garth not been focusing primarily on what lay in front of us, we might have driven directly into it.

  At the sight of Tekeli-li, or at least where I estimated Tekeli-li to have once been carved, there was now only a space the size of a small village sunken into the ground. It looked as if a great and literal god had poked his hand from the sky and with one massive finger pushed the snow down. There was no sign of our vehicles, or the captors who held both. Just more broken fragments of ice that had once appeared to be solid ground.

  Let me say here that I never saw the remains of any more of the species and so can’t make concrete assertions about them. Nor do I have any information other than what I am currently presenting. But out of respect for all who must have fallen in the ice’s collapse, regardless of race or species, Garth and I did say what words we could, and acknowledged the already present silence. After this, there was little more for us to do but move on. It was time to sail for Tsalal. Or to die in the noble effort of trying.

  Following a groggy Pym’s instructions, we rode to the southernmost point of what was once Tekeli-li, to the edge of the Ross Sea, and waited for the tide to begin its recession. Then, making our own room in the boat next to our semiconscious passenger, we pushed off into the water. Once we had sufficiently broken free from the mainland, Garth and I pulled our paddles in, letting faith and the surprisingly strong current pull us away.

  The following I take from my written notes, composed during the journey. While I can’t pretend strict accuracy in these dates, since we didn’t have the battery power to run the electronic devices necessary for even figuring that out, I will note that they are accurate to the best of my knowledge. As was done before, they are given principally with a view to perspicuity of narration, and as set down in my pencil memorandum:

  March 1

  Although it is a region of novelty and wonder, I am glad to be leaving that world behind. When I think back to Thomas Karvel and his dome, I do not wonder about the last moments of his life, or of his art or even of Garth’s lost collection—both of which are taboo subjects with the big man. No, despite all the free time, I find myself thinking about Karvel’s pigeons. Or rather, why is the white dove so highly regarded because of its lack of pigmentation? How is it that something so minor as the color of a bird’s feathers can make the difference between being regarded as the international symbol of peace and being the urban symbol of filth and nuisance? It might be argued that this disparity has to do not just with the vagaries of shade but rather with differences in breed, but since I can’t tell the differences in species, that distinction would be lost on me. What then about the mice? my mind drifts to. Why are albino mice deemed worthy to be kept as pampered personal pets while their nearly identical darker brothers are viewed completely as pests? Does whiteness hold so much value for us that its presence is a wealth in itself?

  Pym is awake. No, he has begun to wake, his consciousness rising in cycles, then sinking back into a stupor as the wealth of alcohol poison in his system works its way out again. In the last cycle, finding himself in a sailboat at sea, he weakly demanded to know where we were taking him, despite the fact that earlier he had mumbled to us the site we should depart from to find it. “Tsalal, dog,” Garth said to him. “Tsalal,” Pym said back in a hissing sound that sizzled off his lips until he drifted to unconsciousness once more.

  March 2

  On the following morning, Arthur Pym woke up once again, this time more coherent than I had ever seen him, and extremely thirsty and complaining of nausea, a symptom that only got dramatically worse when we told him yet again where we were going.

  March 3

  True to his word, the instructions Pym had given earlier proved to be right. This is to his great luck, because his endless nonsensical discussion of coppering versus whaling in the New England maritime economy is annoying and, had he been wrong, I know I would have strangled him by now. Amazingly, around the three of us there stretched an expanse of broken ice which filled the water’s surface like the foam atop a fountain soda. In front of as well as behind us on our stretch of roadlike path, the water was both improbably warm and ice free, the current shooting us forward, out of the frozen way, almost as if this hot spring poured from the center of the earth through a hole at the pole and now was rushing north to make the trip to the other pole and down once more.

  Garth shivers all the time, wrapped in many blankets though he is. Still, he barely talks to me.

  March 4

  The highlight of our day was when, after a black blanket was laid over Arthur Pym’s face in order to keep his hanging tongue from freezing, he woke with a horrific scream. “Tsalal. Tsalal,” he kept murmuring in a drowsy stupor, falling back asleep without removing the thing.

  March 5

  The polar cold is retreating as the current pushes us on, squeezing us out and up. Garth, at the front of the boat, is inscrutable to me, as quiet as the waters we sit on. I don’t know if he’s mourning our lost compatriots or his life’s art collection more, but I assume both weigh significantly on his thick shoulders. As it becomes warmer, the dread I have long been feeling begins to abandon me, along with the numbness I realize I had become so accustomed to. The closer we get to the heat, the more I feel my existence. The more I am ready to feel. To see color, to feel the dark earth, to be alive.

  March 6

  In the morning, I saw the darkest cloud I have ever witnessed coming from the distance. But it could not be a cloud, because it took up the whole sky, coming in a line and pulling over it like a blanket until it was directly above us. Then it started snowing. Except, this wasn’t snow. It was not white, it was gray. It was not cold, rather it was warm to the touch. It was ash. Volcanic ash. We are near land, and land where there is a volcano that can produce this. Although for the moment this ash blocked the very sun, I was elated about this fact, and shared this across the boat with Garth Frierson. Garth just nodded, and asked me to pass the Cheetos, of which we still have many. Arthur Pym, for his part, threw himself on his face in the bottom of the boat, and no persuasions could induce him to get up.

  March 7

  To quiet his squealing, I offered Pym more food from our supply. The only thing I could reach at that moment, packed as it all was, happened to be a bag of Oreo cookies. These Pym accepted only after great protest, and then only eating the creme filling and dropping the cookies to the boat’s bottom like they were feces. I found this extremely wasteful, and shared my thoughts with the man. When I did so, he screamed, “Your teeth!” cringing away from me in horror. Admittedly, my smile was darkened by my own Oreo indulgence, but I still found this further outburst very rude and told him that.

  March 8

  This afternoon I was woken by the screams of the lately mute Garth Frierson, who was yelling “Dog! Dog!” as he pointed off into the water. As it was his habit to preface much of what he had to say to me using the canine diminutive, I thought he was merely calling me. This, however, was not the case. Garth continued with “It’s a dog, in the water.” My first thought was that our journey was affecting the former bus driver’s mental health. Following his finger, however, I did see something. What I at first took to be a log came closer to reveal a snout, eyes, and whiskers. It looke
d like a Labrador retriever, soaking and in search of dry land, just like the three of us were. But it wasn’t bobbing in the water as it should, it was gliding, and within seconds I realized that it was in fact a seal of some kind, equally caught in this tepid current. For the next few minutes we watched the beautiful black creature circle our boat, inching closer with every cycle until he came close enough so that I could almost reach a hand out to pet his shining forehead. It was then that Arthur Pym, who had again drifted off, came back to consciousness. Turning listlessly to the side, Pym caught a glimpse of the black creature coming toward him, and this vision caused the man to begin a pattern of deep and grave sighing to the point of hyperventilation. This reminded me of a fact once read and long forgotten: in some segment of European folklore, there was a demon that came to earth in the form of a massive black dog, a monster seen along highways by those traveling by coach through the darkness. Although distinctly American, Pym did have the air of that continent about him, so maybe it was for this reason that continent’s mythology now burdened him.

  March 9