Mat Johnson - Pym

It was the familiar trauma. There were the jumpy camera angles of smoke in the streets and people coughing into cloths ripped from their shirts. There were flashes of blood with no clear points of origin. There were people leaning quietly on other people who screamed loud enough for both of them. There was dust piling onto running crowds, as if they were being buried not just alive but in motion. There were legs that lay still in the streets, feet flopped out and hanging lifeless. But this time there wasn’t just one place identified in the chyron, one nation, one landmark in flames. This time there was Tokyo, and Paris, and Berlin. And then there was London, and New York, and L.A., and Sydney, and Seoul, and at one point even Stuttgart, and then there was bouncy footage from locales that were defined by solemn commentators as being “________ miles outside of” other places.

“The drill fell in a little crater. It’s down about two stories, we’re going to need help getting it up. Wasn’t our fault.” I saw the bad news on the TV, but the only good thing about really bad news is that it provided good timing for a less bad news dump.

“Man, it’s blowing up, up there. Blow. Ing. Up,” Jeffree responded, not listening. I’d accepted Jeffree’s theatrical nature over the weeks, but that made it no less annoying. But he was right. On the set, the trusted news anchor relaying the latest events started choking up. The television blared but we were quiet. Nobody talked or moved much. Nobody had to because the television was relaying all the words and action a mind could comprehend. An image of smoke coming out of the subway entrance flashed by. I saw the green balls of the 4-5-6 train lines logo.

“Your condo,” Nathaniel said, pulling Angela closer on the couch.

“My cousin Antoine works two blocks from Seventy-second Street Station,” she returned, pushing into him. I remembered Antoine. I said, “Antoine’s probably fine, just fine,” but I don’t think she noticed.

“We should be out there,” Jeffree offered, no small bit of heroic longing in his voice. Carlton Damon Carter, Jeffree’s lanky partner in engineering and love, was always silent, but at that moment, his silence felt profound. We in the room were all listening.

When the satellite suddenly lost its reception and went to static, we didn’t even look away from the screen. Our satellite was always going down, and the signal was never very strong. I remember thinking that the white noise was a bit of a relief, a chance to brace ourselves before the next wave of chaos blinked into view.

“Turn it off. Turn it,” Captain Jaynes said, pointing. His voice was deep and bellowing and full of enough drama that it demanded authority or confrontation if he could get it. “There’s nothing you can do, nothing any of us can do down here. We’re not just going to sit and watch all day going crazy. That don’t make no kind of sense. Best thing to do: turn the news off for a bit, get our work done, get our minds off of what we can’t change for the moment. When the satellite feed comes back through, we’ll deal with it.”

“Boss man, I likes the way you think,” Jeffree agreed. “But it’s Saturday. The day off. The Shabbat, baby. We got nothing to do but wait for the TV to come back on, then watch it.”

“No,” Captain Jaynes disagreed, his voice rising so that the whole room could take in his declaration. “What we have is a very expensive piece of mining equipment that has to be retrieved from a hole in the ground.”

The only white folks Captain Jaynes, Race Man, invited onto our crew’s Antarctic mining mission was White Folks, his dog. And even that dog was a thickly spotted Dalmatian. My cousin loved calling his name in anger, and the poor mutt gleefully suffered it. I was nice to him, though, *and as we drove Captain Jaynes to the site White Folks leaned into my hands to be scratched.

“I saw something. I saw someone down there. A creature. Just walking by,” I confessed to my cousin. Past him, Garth gave me the funky eye. Jaynes looked over like he knew there were two kinds of Jaynes minds too, and he was pretty sure how I should be categorized.

“This ain’t going to be some great excuse for you to start going off about your book again, is it? People don’t want to hear it, man; that shit on the TV just makes it more so. So promise me, no more stories about super ice honkies. Understood?” he asked.

I nodded. Because I did understand. I was obsessed, I knew it even though I couldn’t stop being that way. I bored myself, truly. But I saw what I saw, and I said so.

“To think that a work of fiction, no matter how old or what you think you’ve discovered about it, has any reality. It ain’t normal, son,” Captain Jaynes offered. “I’ll tell you something else, life is too short to be reading more books by white people. Especially dead ones. We got our own books. We got our own culture. We don’t got to borrow theirs.”

Garth followed the tire tracks we’d made on our last visit, deeply concentrating on the road, lining up his wheels with their initial journey to save the trouble of replowing. The others behind us did the same. Nobody talked. Besides the last comment, the only sound in the cab was White Folks panting between his master’s legs, his enormous pink tongue hanging out past his muzzle. Around the dog’s neck was his uncomfortable looking collar: an old iron chain, weathered and with links nearly two inches long. I’d seen it before, but staring longer I realized what it was: old slave bonds.

“Are they real?” I motioned to White Folks’s neck. I even repeated it as the captain stared mutely back at me.

“Real enough for White Folks,” he told me. My cousin was a collector of black memorabilia, this was one of the things we had in common. Most of Captain Jaynes’s acquisitions were of the remnants of slavery: chains like this one, bills of sale, sale adverts, runaway notices, cages, neck spikes, face masks, the like. Jaynes even had a vintage hogshead barrel that he’d filled with various cat-o’-nine-tails. †I would imagine that the links would pull at the Dalmatian’s short hair or pinch his skin, but White Folks didn’t seem to mind as he pushed back eagerly into his owner’s hand.

“Why do you do it, then? Why exactly do you collect all the slavery stuff?” It was an obvious question, but we still had ten minutes to the accident site to kill. Captain Jaynes was quiet for a good two minutes before he answered, visibly turning the question over in his mind.

“I’m collecting evidence” was what my cousin told me, and the great trial that Booker Jaynes was preparing for unfolded before me. In the captain’s living quarters, office, and many storage lockers, crowded with artifacts as they were, the case was perpetually made, stuck in closing arguments with judgment ever forthcoming.

My cousin was not the only one with an idiosyncratic collection on base. Booker Jaynes understood people needed their passions to keep sane on the ice. Everyone was provided a storage space. Angela and her usurper had fitness equipment in their hold. At six most mornings she dragged their machines into the cargo space, where she moved her limbs until breathing heavily as the blubbery Nathaniel sat on a foldout lawn chair, reading the The Wall Street Journal on his tablet. Garth brought his sizable collection of Little Debbie snack cakes by the case. When he worked the late shift, Garth could be seen passing the sweating blur of Angela en route to his stash of calories, and the difference in physicality between the bus driver and the lawyer was like a display in the natural history museum. The remaining space of Garth’s hold held his prized Thomas Karvels. His own sleeping quarters had so little wall space that, like the finest museums, he circulated his collection regularly. In their hold, Jeffree and Carlton Damon Carter stored the extra servers for their website, their video equipment, sets, and lighting. At times, their small area became a miniature television studio, recording clips that quickly found their way around the world via their site. “If we wanted to do porn, we could be rich overnight,” Jeffree joked, repeatedly. Painfully (personally). “Not sharing you” was Carlton Damon Carter’s constant response, his statement no less adamant for the fact that it always came in a near whisper.