Mat Johnson - Pym

“Niggas on Ice!” Garth yelled at me when I got the door open. It was late, he was early to sleep and rise, and I was surprised to see Garth even awake. But there he was, smiling, Antarctic images on his laptop and a doppelgänger of Shackleton’s Sorrow on the page he waved, compliments of my own printer and a whole cartridge of my colored ink. “Get this, they say he’s down there, dog. That’s the rumor, this is where he lives. The ultimate in Karvel spotting,” Garth ranted. I paid attention to him, but more to the large package I’d picked up at the door. “Mathis Estate” was listed at the top of the return address, in care of a law office in Hammond, Indiana.

I’d tried calling Mahalia Mathis, asking her to mail Poe’s letter to me, of course, but no answer till now. This wasn’t just a letter, though. It was as large as an icebox, and this made sense, because when I removed its outer paper, I saw that it was just that, a Styrofoam cooler. On top of the lid was a folder with not one copy of the Poe letter but five. All quality, professionally done. But the box, this huge box. Electric taped. Razoring the edges, I lifted slowly as Garth continued babbling about Thomas Karvel hidden away in Antarctica behind me. I was prepared for several things, a hat, tom-toms, maybe one of her performance gowns, but none of those were close to what I saw inside. A severed human head, sockets empty, staring back up at me.

The flesh was gone, all that was left was a brown skull resting on a puzzle of aged skeleton pieces. It was enough to make me jump. It was enough to end Garth’s rant when he came up next to me. Beside this head was a note, handwritten in the elaborate cursive loops of the woman herself.

To Be Sent to Christopher Jaynes, on the Event of My Untimely and Unfortunate Passing:

My family has carried this burden, cast down from one generation to the next, since 1849, when they had to dig him up to hide his bones from Rufus Griswold. My plan for our last unfortunate meeting had been to ask that professor to test them next, but you saw how he made a fool of himself with his little Q-Tip nonsense. Please find me a good Jewish doctor who can run that DNA test right. Redeem him, Christopher Jaynes!!! You’re my only hope!!! *

There was the skeleton of Dirk Peters. The man himself, in my possession. It was almost as great an honor as the book. And I made a vow to myself right then that I would redeem him. I would redeem him, beyond the petty prejudices of his family, distanced and departed as well though they were. Someday, I would find Tsalal. And I would go to Tsalal with these remains. And there, on the highest mountain, I would bury Dirk Peters in the ground, on the island of blackness that he, a black man, had discovered and, by leaving Pym behind, had preserved from the predations of white supremacy, colonialism, slavery, genocide, and the whole ugly story of our world. This was Dirk Peters’s legacy. Even if he was an Uncle Tom.

“Damn, dog. A box of bones, ain’t that some shit? From here, nothing can surprise you. You’re not going to get a bigger shock than that in this life.”

Garth was wrong. Very wrong. A bigger shock came three months later, when we met at the hotel in Ushuaia, Argentina, the day before the journey. To save money, Garth and I were sharing a hostel room with four other considerably unwashed German backpackers down the street, but I made sure that when I began my journey with Angela Bertram I was ironed and fresh shaved.

She was standing in the lobby, the woman I used to call the Ashanti Doll, her skin a wealth of rich melanin above the white vinyl of her snowsuit. And I saw myself with her, I saw a vision of us spooning on an iceberg, within an iceberg, the blue and white and the rest of the world impossibly hard and cold but the two of us warm in an embrace. And then I literally saw myself, right there, behind her. Me but chewed up me. Me but chewed up, digested, and shit out again. This guy. Like me but bloated and stupid and going bald where I was going gray.

Angela introduced her new husband. Nathaniel Latham told me how “fucking psyched” he was that “his babe” chose this as their “honeymoon journey.” Garth put a hand on my shoulder to make sure I wouldn’t do anything. Aside from murmuring “someone adventurous, creative,” I didn’t. I couldn’t. My brain was flushing down my spinal column. My head was empty, my eyes blank.

“He’s an entertainment lawyer,” Angela Latham said and beamed back at me. “Being here, doing this, now I know the divorce came too late. Nathaniel reminds me so much of you too.” The rock now on her finger matched her earrings. “You guys are going to get along great.”

* Although represented as three, there were in truth at least a dozen exclamation points at the end of the note’s final sentence. And each of those had a frowning face drawn carefully into its base dot, which I am both unable and unwilling to re-create here.

IT was the last continent; man had overrun all the others. It hid on the bottom of the planet, below, white and silent and as still as it was cold. And it was very very cold. Our crew was black and loud, running and stuck, always freezing and yet sweating in our insulated clothes. It was boring. It was too bright. The sun never set, just went red at two in the morning and then back to yellow an hour later. And I was stuck in a double-wide aluminum box with Angela who was now Angela Latham, not even a hyphen this time that I could cling to.

The miners sailed down from Argentina to work in fourteen-hour shifts, Monday straight through till Friday, and slept on their own boat till their week was done. We oversaw them, provided direction, counted up the ice blocks they piled into their tanker’s hull before taking them back north for bottling. During the week, the site boomed as the engines of the giant mining machines did their banging. At 3:00 P.M. on Friday, our world immediately became quiet once more. The last large sound was that of the latest tanker belching as it drifted, fully loaded, away from us. Heavy with clean water, it began its journey back up the planet again, first to Buenos Aires to drop off the workers and then all the way to exotic locations like Newark and Bayonne, its melting cargo becoming more valuable with every nautical mile.

When the drilling was going on, we bitched about the sound. *The day after the workers sailed away from our Antarctic home, the silence was louder. The God-I-can’t-hear-anything roar, building in your ears like a snowball on a cartoon hill. The constantly rustling wind didn’t help. That was just the sound of silence moving.

Every Saturday after the workers had gone back to the warmer continent, Booker Jaynes sent Garth and me on out to drill in the surrounding tundra. Soil samples, ice samples, we even had a standing order to grab a penguin if we got the chance. Booker Jaynes had several “clandestine business opportunities,” †had promised things to a lot of people, it became clear. I wasn’t sure how much of his intended take was outside our agreed upon communal take, but I didn’t really care. It was a chance to get out of the box, away from her. Seeing her with this man, the ring, smelling the cigars he reeked of mingling with the scent of her, it was a lot to bear. I spent my time either working for my cousin or translating Dirk Peters into English from the blurred script he wrote in. I consoled myself with the self-evident truth: Their marriage would fail. He was clearly lazy. He had “taken time off” from the agency in L.A. she worked for, and on return, he would burn through their savings. Once he was stripped bare, she would see him as the fraud I knew he must be. Her fear of being broke would kick in and she would walk away from him as she had done to me years before. By this time, I would have published my edition of The True and Interesting Narrative of Dirk Peters to major fanfare. All would be restored. This was my fantasy. In the moments when I allowed myself to see past my despair, this is what I hoped for.