Mat Johnson - Pym

“This is the deal. Drinking. Water bottling. In Antarctica. All above sea level. Go down, cut and drill blocks of glacial ice, then ship it on tankers back up Stateside. Big corporate thing, but I got an in. Government is giving huge tax breaks for using minority-owned businesses. We get some black people, front a bit of our own money, incorporate with a few others who can do the same, and it’s a guaranteed fortune. Here’s the number to get in on it. Can you do this?” Checking around the room first for prying eyes, Booker Jaynes pulled out a folder from his satchel, let me see the numbers. The number to get in and a much larger number, the number I would leave with after the money started flowing. I could pay it. It would be all of my money, but the projected earnings would set me up for five years. Enough time to construct a detailed analysis of Peters, even if we didn’t find anything. And the plan made sense too. No one drank tap water since the Dayton Dirty Water Disaster; the clean stuff was worth as much as petroleum. The ice down there was centuries old, formed long before the modern world began collapsing.

“Looks good, but can we go to this location?” I said, pushing the coordinates across the table with equal paranoia, giving the room my own once-over.

“We can go and do whatever we want, that’s the thing. Long as we get the water, put up the funds, we’ll be on our own. We can drill for whatever’s down there, the petroleum treaty is over, and what we find we can keep. Get it? Nothing but upside to this. Just need a skeleton crew. That’s it. All black, so we qualify. And also because I don’t trust white people.”

“Who do you have in mind?” I asked, thinking of Garth. Thinking this could be employment for both of us.

“I start asking around for people, and it’s out the bag. Any of my contacts could turn around and take the whole thing before we can seize this opportunity. But you, no one knows you. So you have to find the people. We’ll need another general helper like yourself, two water treatment engineers, and two lawyers. Got to have the lawyers, I want protection. The laborers we’ll ferry-boat in for week shifts from Tierra del Fuego. Find the crew, and I’ll take you right down to your chasm and you can have the coldest damn book club on the planet.”

I’d reserved a hotel room in Queens for the night; it was cheaper and safer than Manhattan and I’d thought my family reunion would be longer and more social than it was. On the way there, I got off the train to stop in at a Thomas Karvel Emporium of Artistry on Fifty-second. The painter didn’t just sell his work in galleries, he owned his own, and the store was awash in sunsets and saccharine. I was planning to see if the “Master of Light” had done any South American vistas, maybe even set in Argentina or Chile, that could be used to tempt Garth to come Karvel spotting below the equator. The closest I could find was a red sunset shining past the Jesus looming over Rio de Janeiro, a vision which had magically erased the actual city below in favor of green hills, sea, and sand. Waiting in line to purchase the overpriced print, I looked into the glass room at the back of the store. To get in there, you had to see one of the clerks, and then they walked in with you and hovered while you checked out the premium Karvelia on the walls. From the line I could see one of the paintings in the back. The top of the frame was yellow laced with orange and red and pink, and capturing the same end of day as the rest of the visions that crowded the place, but beneath the sky it was blue. I saw snow. I ditched the line and got closer. The guard was answering questions from a jewel-encrusted woman perusing some English cottages on the other wall, and in his moment of distraction, I took a shot of the snowy scene with my phone. Outside, my excitement barely let me control my thumbs. I texted it to Garth, along with its title. Shackleton’s Sorrow .

I had an assignment from my cousin, to fill out a crew, but I knew absolutely nothing about aquatic engineering. An Internet search that night led me to several large companies that I was sure Booker Jaynes would hate if I notified, and not much else. The best I could find was two water treatment guys from Queens who ran what they called an “Afro-Adventure Blog” on the side. Sewage management wasn’t exactly the same thing as aquatic engineering, but I figured if they could handle all the shit in Queens, they could handle anything.

Their website was a strange hybrid, half devoted to their sewage treatment services, half to video clips of their adventure exploits. I clicked on the first clip. One of the two men, Jeffree, was on-screen, the other, apparently, behind the shaky handheld camera. They were running west on the Brooklyn Bridge, fighting through the traffic of a terrified mob. The camera shifted away from Jeffree and to the Twin Towers in the distance, their tops flaming. The footage was bouncy and jumbled. But it was sincere. They were running against a panicked tide to get to the disaster. There is Jeffree, this dark-skinned man past forty with a shaved head and theatrical goatee, and he just wants, as he says again and again when he looks back at the camera, to “do something.” It’s black superhero shit. But then the fantasy ends. They reach the site of the World Trade Center and in moments it’s in rubble. More chaos and running and horror. Tidal waves of dust and then sirens and rogue herds of insanely frightened office workers. But they can do nothing.

Jeffree and Carlton Damon Carter are just two guys who make dirty water clean again, guys who share the same little Lefferts Garden apartment, where they sleep in the same marriage bed. Poetically, the last image that the ever silent Carlton Damon Carter films of Jeffree on that day is of the water engineer handing water out on the street to those last survivors straggling from the World Trade Center.

“See, I’m the performer, right? I’m like, to these people watching, the hero they want to be. But my man Carlton Damon Carter, he’s the one that filmed it and made it art. He’s the one that designed the website, the one that brings all I’ve done to the world,” Jeffree declared in another clip, one in a series of video journal entries. He had a hand firmly on Carlton Damon Carter’s neck and was roughly pulling on him as the other, lighter man blushed in response. It would have been a very masculine gesture if Jeffree hadn’t kissed Carlton Damon Carter lightly on the side of his forehead in the end.

“He’s my muse,” Carlton Damon Carter nearly whispered into the microphone. “I’m his lens.”

It was clear from the number of comments beneath each clip that they had a huge national and international audience for their exploits. But as I kept watching, I started to wonder if the national and international attention for their little site may have distorted their original intentions. The duo’s attempt to drive to Ohio during the Dayton Dirty Water Disaster was a disaster in itself, and the reams of tape basically just covered them stuck on I-95 in a U-Haul filled with barrels of New York tap sludge, only to be turned away by the National Guard. Here the same agonized futility on display in the 9/11 footage just comes off as plain stupidity. Clearly I was not the first person to perceive it this way; Jeffree admitted as much to me on the phone the next morning, calling me back a few hours after my fishing email.

“Something like this, that could really increase traffic. Negroes on Ice . That could be a whole documentary,” he told me, his live voice filled with even more bravado than the video editing had captured. Already I found him a bit annoying, but I was looking to discover literary history not make buddies, so I pawned him off to Booker Jaynes anyway. I was already preoccupied with the next stage of the recruitment.