Mat Johnson - Pym

Inching a little farther with one of the portable spotlights from my pack, I caught a reflection inside the crater of something red and metallic — the rifler was still visible. The only reason I could still see it was that the drill was lodged into a snowy ledge about two stories down. The hole went farther below that, but the depth swallowed my flashlight in its darkness.

“They going to stick this on us.” Garth shook his head beside me. “They just going to say it’s on us, dog. They’re going to try and make us pay out our checks for this. You have any idea how much something like that drill costs?” I didn’t, but it had to be a good chunk of what we were planning on earning. The money wasn’t what bothered me. The look of disgust I knew I would see on Angela’s face when we confessed our incompetence, that’s what I was thinking about. And the sight of Nathaniel, right behind her, smirking.

“I’ll go down there, bring it back,” I told him.

“Negro what?” Garth politely asked me, turning to see if I was ridiculing him.

“I’ll go down there, attach the rigging to it, and we’ll drag it up. Hook it to the truck and just pull.”

“You crazy, dog. Out of your goddamn mind.” Garth paused, put his weight on his leg as he grabbed the spotlight and leaned forward, staring down below at the rifler on its precarious perch. He was silent for a few seconds before his reason took control of his desperation once again. “Hell no. You’re bugging.”

“It’s my life,” I insisted.

“It’s my bank account. If you die, they going to make me pay for the whole thing.”

“Or we could just take care of this and pay nothing at all.”

Garth stared at me, then stared back into the hole for a while. Finally, he unzipped his jacket further and lifted off his hood to reveal his unpicked Afro. “Fine. But if you break your neck, I’m going to tell them it was all your fault to begin with,” he said and started walking away. Pausing after a few feet to look back, Garth added, “I’ll tell a better story, though. Something heroic, make you like the man.” He walked another three strides before turning again and adding, “I’ll tell them you died fighting a polar bear. Three of them.”

There are no polar bears in Antarctica. There are certainly not three of them. This didn’t matter to me because I had no intention of turning this into yet another polar epic of man succumbing to nature. I was not thinking about personal risk at all at the moment. I was thinking about attaching the harness properly to my chest, making sure the gear was securely fastened and could hold me. I was thinking about saving the money. Having the money. Using the money. I was thinking about how I might still be in shock or overrun with adrenaline, but that this manly act felt good, like something Nathaniel would never dream of doing. Even in death I would be redeemed, in life I would be a hero. Or was I just being a fool? Again. Too late. I refocused. I tried to find precisely the right angle to drift down, one that would land me right on top of my goal: a ledge that seemed composed of a solid enough lip of pale blue glacier ice on which both my own weight and eventually the hoisted rifler could be levered. And then, once I had successfully attached my line to the machine, I dropped below the edge of the surface, slowly letting go of my line through the clasp so that I hung out into the chasm. Dangling in the air, I distracted myself by thinking about white-shrouded humanoids.

I used to do the climbing wall at the gym and be embarrassed by the pretense that I was training for anything more than other climbing walls. Who knew it would pay off in a frozen chasm at the bottom of the world? My spotlight hung by my belt’s loop, its power on and its beam circling erratically as I took care to ease into the slack and drop farther. The lamp created the feeling of movement below me, and that was all my imagination needed. Was it an illusion of dim light and shadow, or were there really tunnels and their openings just beyond me? Tunnels whose course had been interrupted by this recent avalanche? As I slowly dropped, my attention focused far below toward the crevices, hoping for something more, so I was surprised when I felt the hard and real metal of the rifler jam my toe.

“Don’t land on it! You not supposed to land on it, man. You could set off a whole other cave-in,” Garth boomed from above. He was leaning over the edge and his morbid obesity suddenly seemed like a mortal threat. I yelled him back.

I dangled in front of the drill. It looked to be in fairly good condition, considering the fall. A bit dented but functionally unharmed. Grappling hook in hand, I maneuvered myself to attach the line to the sturdiest section of the carriage it could hold. As I did this, giving it a good yank for security, the bulk of the rifler shifted from the vibration, sending a shower of loose snow farther below, into the darkness. As my eyes adjusted, I could make out more than I had before below me. Even at these depths, light managed to permeate the frozen crust, leaving the ice to illuminate the surroundings. The Antarctic gives the impression of being white, but really it’s blue. Almost entirely constructed of that pale, powder blue that at times can darken to rich, cobalt haze, as it did now around me. Through this glow, I could see the bottom of the pit, not more than another two stories below me. I could also make out the rough pattern of the fallen snow at the bottom of the cavern. In some places the debris was thick soup, in others chunks of ice the size of coffins stood upright in the floor. It was already an impressive sight before one of the large spears of ice started to fall forward, giving movement to the static scene.

Except it wasn’t falling forward, it was walking. Walking forward, arms swinging, along the crater floor. And then it was looking up to me.

Let me say this as I said it to the others, soon thereafter. I know what I saw. And what I saw was a figure. I saw a figure of massive proportions and the palest hue, standing below me. I saw a creature with two legs and two feet, with arms that shook off clouds of snow as they sprang out beside it. I saw that what I first took to be a slab of ice was in fact a shawled figure, one whose cloth now rippled with movement as the beast hustled forward.

And what did I do? I looked up, I looked to see if Garth also saw it, catching the quickest glimpse of my greatest revelation. But Brother Garth was gone. Above was just the taut rope that held me.

When I turned back to look down, it was gone. So that’s when I did the only thing I could do, the only thing that came to my mind.

“Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!” I yelled into that now empty crater, the words echoing lightly against the walls of the abyss. “Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!” I kept screaming louder and louder, till Garth started pulling me up once more. I fell silent now, waiting for a response.

* Or rather, as the cliché goes, bitched and moaned, but you couldn’t hear the bass of moaning over the machinery hum.

† These are sometimes also called “scams.”

‡ I should say here that, in America, every black man has a conspiracy theory. (That statement in itself reveals a conspiracy, omitting as it does the conspiracy theories of black women [copious though they may be].) Some theories are quite creative, fascinating. But most are quite mundane, because they’re true. This obsession with conspiracies is most likely due to the fact that our ethnic group is the product of one.

§ This I found out after searching through Garth’s laptop while he was in the shower (bored). Confronted, Garth responded, “I like to look at women who would actually sleep with my fat ass.”

WHEN we got to the base camp we found the crew in the communal room at full attendance. The TV news channel was on, and on the screen was chaos.