Mat Johnson - Pym

“Help me get this goddamn drill out of here,” Jaynes ordered, and I went over and pulled on it with the others. It had to be flipped, but the impact had packed the snow into its every groove, and the only reachable part was the bumper. If we tried to lift it up from that, chances were the bumper would just rip off it. Forcing myself to focus on the task at hand, I joined my muscle with Jeffree’s, pulling as Jaynes offered direction from off to the side. There was the difficult first lifting, then the teetering, then it fell over with the slightest of bounces on the giving surface. I turned to Jeffree when it was done, but he wasn’t even looking at the thing. Staring back from where the drill had just come, Jeffree was instead focused on the hole of maybe four feet that the machine’s removal had revealed.

“You see that too, don’t you?” he asked. I just saw a hole. Behind me, Captain Jaynes just saw something that was not worth his attention, and he was already fastening the harnesses to the rifler’s frame.

Jeffree pushed past us, went to the little opening in the side of the hollow. I followed. The hole seemed to lead to another chasm. Or rather something more, its depth becoming more apparent as I got closer. It was a room that someone had recently entered; when I approached I saw those massive footprint-looking indentations, obscured as they were by the falling snow and the rifler’s landing, heading directly toward this space.

“What is it, some kind of crevice?” In spite of my belief, or maybe because of it, I felt the first pangs of fear at what might be beyond. Jeffree shook his head at me. Or maybe not at me — his eyes were wide and distant, his thick jaw slackened in a rare moment of self-reflection. I could see Carlton Damon Carter adjusting his zoom to catch the expression as well.

With the sounds of Jaynes’s diligent working still behind me, I crouched to look into the space. No, it was not simply an ordinary crevice. It was long, it was expansive, the footprints going far off into the distance and fading into the rest of the snow. It was tall too, this ceiling; the opening was just a space in the collapse. There are many natural ice caves under the surface of Antarctica. But it was hard to believe that this was one of them. The walls looked chipped away, the space too straight, and if there had been any debris it had been cleared away.

“It’s a cave,” Jeffree managed, beside himself at the sight of it. Even at this depth, the sun shone through the surface, offering illumination. Everywhere glowed a haunting blue that seemed electric from the throb.

“No, it’s not a cave,” said a voice that surprised me before I realized that Captain Booker Jaynes had stopped what he was doing and crept up behind us. Jaynes, to my surprise, now wore an expression much like Jeffree’s, and I realized that I also wore the same foolish, overwhelmed look. Jaynes’s eyes were focused on the things that I dared to think were the tracks of a creature that had walked upright through here only hours before.

“It’s a tunnel,” Captain Jaynes finally managed.

We kneeled silently in the cold, taking in the sight and its repercussions. Far above us, Carlton Damon Carter filmed, and unseen beyond him, Garth and the Lathams sat warm in the trucks that hummed and roared. Finally, as my knees began to numb and my excitement threatened to overpower me, I broke the meditation.

“Captain, what do you want us to do now?” I asked. Booker Jaynes was a man who lived life by either being in control or pretending he was long enough to gain control again. Here was a situation that no one besides myself had ever thought they’d face. Captain Jaynes met it with belligerent, folded arms, but then his attitude just fell away. My cousin turned to me, slapping me several times on the shoulders as if discharging any responsibility for this new discovery.

“Me? Hell, looks like we got a snow honky problem. You’re the expert.”

* I really, really liked that dog.

† This he displayed in his office in a way that others took, rightly, as a veiled threat.

‡ Or Jeff-Free, as it said on the website, although I don’t think that was the legal spelling.

§ I’d heard grunting in the area of his and Carlton Damon Carter’s storage unit but didn’t pry.

‖ Or perhaps it was Carlton Damon Carter, who was also a high alto when speaking above a whisper.

OF course, I was the expert on the phenomena we seemed to be encountering. Unfortunately, my sole primary source was those few lonely paragraphs in The True and Interesting Narrative of Dirk Peters. Coloured Man. As Written by Himself:

As we go south, the sky darks in a polar dusk and the fog gets thick. The birds, white gulls (or albatross or some such) were not stopping, gray ugly things that kept croaking “Tekeli-li” like we supposed to understand them. Infernal! The Tsalalian had been dying for days, then in a few minutes he dead. I says that we should dump the corpse immediately, for the sake of decency if not good health and stink, but Arthur Pym was looking by the body. Dripping more spit than I thought he still had in his self, he says, “That wouldn’t be prudent.” Alas, the flesh that had been Nu-Nu got saved for then as we were soon up on a strong current that shot us past the broken ice at fast speed. What can I say of what was seen next? Not nothing. So let me just say that we approached an ice shelf too long to be another iceberg, going into the distance of east and west. As we were move forward, a slice of this thing fell into the ocean before us, showing both a crack in the ice and a shrouded figure in white standing within it. *

Floating forward, we moved into a cave within the ice itself. There we come to a landing, and they surrounded us. Arthur Pym stepped out of the boat despite me yelling to stay put, so transfixed was he. The group surrounded him. And then I kicked off and made a quick exit out of there.

After that, Dirk mostly talks about how the current pulls him back, and how he’s really fortunate that he listened to Arthur Pym and didn’t get rid of the body of the late Mr. Nu-Nu, coasting as he did in the monthly return tide back to Tsalal. “You never know what you’ll eat if you [ sic ] hungry enough. I cut up Nu-Nu’s corpse into bite-size pieces, then I used them as bait for the Bich de Mere. Those things taste like horse shite,” was the entirety of Dirk’s recorded reflection on the experience.

So from my research I knew that we should avoid eating bêche-de-mer . Beyond that I had no idea what we were supposed to do next.

We lifted ourselves back up to the trucks. Now that I had their complete attention, I replayed in detail what I had seen the first time.

“Come on, Professor, what the hell is it?” Booker Jaynes demanded. “Some kind of monkey? Some kind of Neanderthal? Or just men, the CIA or something?”

“It’s the twelfth tribe of Judah,” Jeffree asserted as he stroked his goatee, nodding to Carlton Damon Carter, who stood behind him in our circle, reviewing his video footage. It was not clear that Jeffree actually believed this, but it was obvious that he liked the sound of it, its biblical and Diasporan overtones. We huddled in a makeshift tent, a tarp pulled between the roofs of two trucks and hung over the sides to keep the wind out.

“It’s definitely government shit,” Garth added, sounding like a weary big man preparing for a fall. “It’s the feds that built that, dog. If not ours, then someone else’s. Believe me, I know: I used to work for the government.”

“You worked as a bus driver, Garth. As a bus driver for the city of Detroit. That hardly qualifies you as an expert witness on the government,” Angela said with a roll of her almond eyes, and it was almost possible to see the air deflate out of the big man, sending him drifting into the corner. He gave me a look of sympathy from over there, but all I could do was marvel at her power.