Mat Johnson - Pym

“No,” I boomed, trying to assert my own. “This is nothing like that. Whoever it was that I first saw, whoever it was that built that tunnel, it’s not something modern, not something that’s been seen recently. No mechanical equipment we know of built that tunnel. It looked almost natural. It looked old. ” I leaned on the last word, let it hang in the air for a minute. When I saw I had them, I dug in and declaimed.

“Look, folks, as you know, I am not here by complete accident. I am with you, on the crust of the Cape of Good Hope, because that is where I believe the events cited in Pym from two centuries past took place. Historical precedent. Whatever it is out there, it has been noted before. We are simply the first to experience this phenomenon since the chasm—”

“Excuse me.” Jeffree, who had been whispering with Carlton Damon Carter, turned around to interrupt. “Before we get any further with this, this cave — since I was the one to discover it, I believe it should be referred to as, um, the Jeffree Tube. Yes. So if you could refer to it as the Jeffree Tube from this moment forward, I would appreciate that.”

“So are you meaning to imply some form of ownership here?” Angela stopped him, pointing her finger in a way that threatened permanent ocular trauma to its target. “You must be, if you’re already invoking naming rights. You don’t even know what this thing is besides a big crack in an ice block and already you’re claiming it as your own property?” There she was. This petite woman, small but centered. Her beauty alone would have made some men †cower, but along with the way she paced the tent, the way she shook her arms violently as she spoke, she erased any questions of stature. The woman at dinner had been less assured and a bit reeling, but already Angela had grown stronger. With Nathaniel. Like a beautiful blossom growing in horse manure.

“Hey, sister! Sister, please!” Jeffree jumped forward, his hand stretched out in suppressing motions, his face giving off his best impression of an individual hurt and affronted by false accusation. “I’m not saying I own it outright. You the one said our contract with ______ Cola says that the Creole collectively owns what we scrounge on our off days. I’m just saying, since I found it, I should be able to name it. That’s all.”

That’s all. That’s all you need to start a fight among a bunch of people sacrificing everything to get rich, to build a legacy. The largely deflated Garth Frierson still had enough air in him to float out the tarp as the conversation grew steadily more heated. ‡In the mix of things, amid the accusations and retractions, Captain Jaynes left the space. When he returned, my cousin had his full gear laid out before him: the steel spikes for his hiking boots, his face mask, pick, climbing rope, goggles, all in addition to his normal polar walkabout gear. As he prepared, the room became quieter. Even I, who had just been in the process of mounting a fierce defense of my more elaborate conclusions, joined the growing silence.

“Pardon, Booker, but what are you doing?” Nathaniel Latham asked Jaynes. Nathaniel seemed perplexed that the man appeared to be taking action when an argument was still being waged. Particularly when his wife was winning.

“Out,” Captain Jaynes responded. Tying up his dreads behind his head in a bun, he looked up at us and saw that further explanation was demanded. “I’m going down that tunnel, going to see what’s in there.”

Nathaniel opened his mouth to respond, but Angela interrupted him before he started. “With all due respect, sir, you don’t know what is down there. You don’t know that it’s safe.” Her tone was definitive, the hand on her hip conclusive, but the captain kept tying and zipping, working to get his boots back on over his thicker layers of socks. Frustrated by his lack of response, Angela continued louder. “What about the naming rights, Jaynes? That’s real intellectual property. If there is something down there, something huge, something with major social or scientific implications, whose ownership claim is that going to be?”

“Well hell, I guess it’s going to belong to whoever else comes to explore the thing with me,” Booker Jaynes declared and shrugged, pulling his bootlaces tight. Within moments, the others began preparing too.

There were seven of us standing before the chasm, ready to plunge below. Some of us felt like there was fortune waiting just beneath our feet, unseen. Garth came not because he believed that there was anything worth the effort but because he didn’t want to be left alone in an empty truck. “Dog, that shit is creepy,” he told me. As he struggled to be lowered into the chasm, the big man forced his eyes closed and clung to the two climbing cables supporting him. I took his box of Little Debbie Banana Twins cakes from the glove compartment and threw it to the bottom of the chasm so at least he had something to look forward to.

It was among the requirements of employment by the Creole Mining Company that all personnel should be skilled in rock surface climbing, with specific training in ice climbing. It was the captain’s belief that anybody who lived on the ice should at least have it in his or her power to climb that ice. Unfortunately, like many job requirements, this one was fulfilled more in the letter than in spirit in our little squad. My own wilderness training, for instance, consisted of an intensive two-day course on the climbing wall at the Reebok Sports Club/NY at Sixty-sixth Street to refresh my indoor, plastic wall climbing skills. The polar qualification of the certification came from the fact that, even though I took this course indoors, it was in January. I felt a bit guilty about that until I found out that Garth believed he had fulfilled his requirements by walking to his bus station once the day after a seven-inch snowstorm. “Don’t look at me that way. It was real slippery and shit,” Garth, catching my glance as he signed his waiver, told me. Although they presented a much better face on the subject, Nathaniel’s and Angela’s training wasn’t much better. While Nathaniel made a big fuss about their having gone glacial hiking in Seward, Alaska, in the early days of her separation, further anecdotes revealed that they’d flown to the flat glaciers in a prop plane and walked around for a few minutes before setting up a foldout table and having a picnic. Nathaniel had showed me pictures of the outing soon after we first met: the two sat in their matching snowsuits on metal chairs before a table covered in red checkered cloth. They toasted the camera with champagne flutes, their snow picks dangling loosely from their wrists as they smiled. “The pilot was a licensed masseuse too. It was sweet,” Nathaniel recalled. I don’t know what Angela had told him, but he seemed to have no concept of the fact that I despised him, or why.

This is not to say that no one of the Creole Mining Company had any training for the environment we found ourselves in. Jeffree and Carlton Damon Carter put us all to shame, and Jeffree clearly took great joy in this. It was their thing, the climbing, cross-country skiing, snowshoeing — whatever was the fringe sport of the moment. They were Afrocentrics who loved the adventure. It was an eccentricity that they (or rather Jeffree, as Carlton Damon Carter never bragged at all) were very proud of. Theirs was a type of pride peculiar to our ethnic group. It said, “Look, I’m black and I’m taking pleasure in something I’m not expected to.” I don’t know if it was the snow itself or the act of defiance they found more enjoyable.

After returning to our opening in the white wall, the entryway I did not then or will ever refer to as the Jeffree Tube, I was shocked to see the footprints still there, moving off into the expanse. Like dreams or haunts, in part I expected them to dissolve back into imagination and mythology. In fact, as we moved as a group, tentative and hushed by the cathedral-like quality of the tunnel, it became clear that the footprints had not only remained in our absence but multiplied.