Mat Johnson - Pym

By week eight, Garth and I had fallen into a routine. Our little surveying trips were like vacations. Outside our windshield was no hint of humanity for miles and miles. Just ice and air, wind that shaped the snow on the ground into modernist curves and Victorian angles. Garth seemed almost comfortable out there. Cold climates look good on fat people. With all the layers, everybody else looks fat too. If you still managed to look skinny under all that cloth, you also looked miserable.

“They out there, dog. On the ice. Hiding.”

“The shrouded white figures?” I asked. I was thinking the same thing. When you were looking out there, into the emptiness, it wasn’t long before you could imagine anything you wanted there to be.

“No. Karvel and his people. Makes sense, don’t it? You got all that money, you want to go where no bombs or nothing can get them. That’s what I’d do,” Garth told me, again. In bringing him down here, I had introduced Garth to his new favorite conspiracy theory. ‡I’d stopped countering with logic by this point, because doing this made me even more tired of him.

When Garth became excited he talked while he ate, his Little Debbie snack cakes inevitably smearing some sort of cream or multicolored glazing across his thin outline of a mustache. Garth knew his appetites and had come prepared to fill them. He’d brought cases of the cakes, as well as videogames (most of which involved him shooting imaginary loads into fantasy people) and porn (same). The actresses in the latter clips were older, matronly looking women with large breasts and hips and guts who hugged the men assigned to act with them. §He’d also brought his entire collection of paintings of Thomas Karvel to be signed by the artist when he found him, certain that this ultimate feat as a Karvel spotter would be rewarded by the Master of Light, who would use his pen to magically ink Garth’s investment into a fortune.

“ Shackleton’s Sorrow looks just like those mountain ridges out here. Tell me it don’t. Now how could Karvel know that?” With a sweeping movement, a coconut creme roll clutched in his glove, Garth motioned to the space beyond our frozen windshield, his thick parka and snack cake cellophane rustling in unison to accent his gesture. It did look like the painting to me. So did all the other mountain ridges Garth had made the same claim of in the weeks before. This range was about ten miles away; its pale ridges were all that gave the landscape a sense of scale. Antarctica felt to me like nothing. Frozen nothing. Nihilism in physical form. If it was to be loved, it was to be loved for its lack of content, people, possessions.

The drill was mounted to an all-terrain vehicle (ATV) the size of a Volkswagen, and it took a good ten minutes just to get it unchained off the flatbed tow and then driven down to the ground. It was my turn, so Garth helped me set it up, then abandoned me for the warmth of the cab. It was an expensive piece of equipment. Every time we took it out, Booker Jaynes told us it was an expensive piece of equipment, but it looked mean and old. Once again it shook, it shuddered, and burrowed its way down the hole to its bottom, pumping and thrusting into the cold ground. Once it reached its target, the drill would remove an eight-inch tubular sample, and then we could drive on.

After I got the drill going, I walked back to the cab to refill my thermos. Garth was looking through his rumpled Karvel catalog. Nearly every page was worn from overuse, its corner intentionally turned. I tapped on the window, and he rolled it down, reached his thermos to mine, and poured.

“You hear that drill? Your mom wants one with rubber on the end,” I told him. When the cup was filled, I took it into two thickly gloved hands, where it was not so much held as laid.

“Dog, you joke. But she had one. And your pop stole—”

Midsentence, Garth’s expression turned from squinting speculation to wide-eyed revelation. Before I could react, one of his padded mitts reached out to grab my shoulder but slipped and took a firm sirloin grip on my neck instead. I reflexively jumped back, but not far because the big man had a grip on me, his face twisted with an emotion I had never read there before. I grabbed Garth’s wrists just as he hit the accelerator on the truck — if I hadn’t he might have run over me. With the engine roaring, we lurched forward, me holding on to Garth’s arm with both mittened hands as fiercely as he was holding on to my neck. Under our mittens, we locked onto each other with a death grip. I looked up at Garth, his face ashy from the blistering cold, eyes facing the windshield, and saw that he was screaming. Between the roaring engine and the jackhammer of my adrenaline-pumped heart, I couldn’t make out what he was saying. It might have been “Chris, I am about to ram into a snowdrift about twelve feet high, so you should brace yourself,” but I didn’t hear it. Just felt the jolt as the truck slammed into a powdered wall.

The truck bounced lightly back from the resistance; I came to rest less gracefully. Maybe it was the shock of the moment, or the shock of slamming into the drift, but I felt nothing on impact. Only confusion as I looked back at the truck.

Garth got out of the cab, his jacket unzipped in the polar wind, and didn’t even glance at me, collapsed on the ground. He was looking back in the direction from where we came.

“Sweet baby Jesus.” I could just make out his mumbling. “Ain’t that something?”

In the space where we had just been standing, there was now nothing. Nothing: not the drill, not the ATV it was attached to, not the ground it sat on either. There was only air. A crater the size of a good-size Texas house. The abyss spread eighty yards from one crumbling side to the other. The twin tire lines of the truck led straight up to the lip of the hole and disappeared.

Garth was an expert on driving away from danger. On the day of the November Three Bombings, Garth Frierson was driving down Shankaw Boulevard as the third attack of that national bombing campaign went off, right there in Detroit. I’d heard the story only once before, right after it happened, but after we stood there silent, in shock, for near a minute, Garth, wired, started talking about it again as if I had just asked.

“Man, when they went off in Houston and D.C. that morning, I was driving my route thinking how safe I was, right there in Motown. Then boom . Passed the bomb site right on the left side, blew half my passenger area’s windows straight out. Couldn’t hear nothing in my ears for hours. Right then, I drove straight home, dog. I mean straight — didn’t even let the people off the bus, didn’t brake for red lights, didn’t stop till I got to my apartment. Ran upstairs, I don’t know what those people in the bus did. I got to my house and kept going, headed straight to my bedroom. I look up and I got this painting over my bed, Thomas Karvel’s Mississippi Mist , and I look at it, and I stop. First time since the explosion, ears ringing, I stop.” Garth shook his massive head. “But that was it, that was that feeling again. Like the world’s coming to an end. Now you know.”

We stood close to the edge of the crater, and after a few minutes our minds shifted to the lost drill and other suddenly uncertain ground: financial stability, job security. We came as close to the edge as we dared, which was about fifteen feet away from it. The thing just went down. How far down it was difficult to say. The opening seemed to be smaller than the cavern inside of it.

“I hate ice,” I admitted. “I don’t even like ice in my soda.” At the ends of my wrists, my hands were still shaking so bad you could see the movement through the gloves.

“Goddamn global warming.” Garth leaned forward to get a better view. “Ain’t our fault. It was all them Escalades in the ghetto.”