Mat Johnson - Pym

I stood there waiting for Angela to continue walking toward the sound, which she did not. It seemed that Angela had changed her mind about being the first to discover our big-footed prey. Nor did she appear to want to let Nathaniel engage with the unseen beast either. Me, she was willing to sacrifice, and she reached out and pulled my sleeve, giving a slight push in the small of my back in the direction of my destiny.

Never had my own footsteps seemed so loud. Fortunately, the closer I came to the source, the louder its inhuman breath seemed to boom. Turning the corner, I saw the beginning of the beast, a massive black form in the shadow. As I inched closer, I could see that whatever it was was sprawled out, legs before it as it sat leaning against an ice wall. Heading forward in my slowest gait, I could see its chest heaving in the shadow, shuddering from the effort. Then as I came even closer, I saw the creature push a massive hand into its side and remove a small, high-fructose-corn-syrup laden Little Debbie snack cake and shove half the thing into its mouth.

“Damn Negro, you about scared me half to death. Why you creeping like that?” Garth managed. I say “managed” because he had a good amount of pastry in his jowls at the time. Hearing his voice, Angela and Nathaniel came up behind me. Angela used her adrenaline-fueled energy wisely: by giving Garth a good unwarranted kick in his leg before turning around and stomping back in the direction of our starting point. Nathaniel offered a smile and a shrug before he followed her.

Leaning an arm over me for support, the huffing Garth let some of his girth onto my shoulders, and as I walked us out I was soon breathing as hard as he was.

“You’re weak,” Garth huffed.

“You’re fat,” I pointed out.

“Yeah, but I’m strong, see? I carry all this fat around every day like it’s nothing.”

Angela and Nathaniel were far beyond us. By the time I’d pulled Garth up and started moving, they’d made a significant distance. Even in the halls that didn’t turn for hundreds of yards, I couldn’t see the end of them. Despite the rustling, despite the considerably heavy wheezing of my boy, the massive silence of this cavern started to hang over me. It occurred to me, more so than before, that if the ice above us gave in to its own weight, we would be completely lost. Enveloped in the cold, the labyrinth returned to nothing more than the packed solid mass it was supposed to be. Just when I was really starting to feel the strain, Garth removed his arm and attempted to walk again unaided.

“Listen,” he said as he trudged along. “You laughed at me before, but let me tell you something: Thomas Karvel is down here, you know, in Antarctica. He’s down here, waiting all the bad shit in the world out. Just chilling, hibernating almost. This could be his hideout.”

“What the hell does that have to do with anything? Look: I’m sure the rich have taken off to faraway places to escape the poisoned reservoirs, the bombs, wars,” I acknowledged. “But it’s to places like Aruba. White sand, not white snow.”

“Naw, dog. Karvel, he’s too smart for that. This is a man that went from a nobody to a billionaire selling pictures. Pictures . No, Karvel’s down here, away from everything. Nuclear, chemical, suicide bombs, everything.”

I got pissed. At him, at his fantasy. Here I was, on the cusp of my own great dream, my own impossible truth, and this gluttonous man was crowding it with his improbable vision. There wasn’t enough magic in the universe for both of us. Worse, Garth’s mad theory put mine in an altogether new light. Was I as crazy as his fat ass? You saw something, the footprints, I told myself, but as soon as I did, my rational mind began asserting dominance once again. The corporations were everywhere. It was a fact that a major corporation had hired the Creole itself — wasn’t it possible that our efforts were being surveyed, or that we were hired as a front for a greater subterranean effort? It was all viable, and the viable always outweighed the improbable.

Looking at the ground beneath my feet, I saw the footprints, numerous now and going in a variety of directions. Mundane, lost, mindlessly treading. I could hear with some relief that the others were shuffling along in front of us, their crunching steps and muffled voices audible.

“There are no billionaire painters down here, Garth. And let me admit this, there are no albino monsters or Neanderthals either. Nothing other than the mundane abounds, as usual.”

I said this last bit, this stubborn pessimism, just as I turned in to door — a narrow crevice in the ice between corridors. What I saw on the other side was a crew standing around, talking to each other. I say “a crew” because they were not my crew, not the members of the Creole. Nor were they a crew of humans. At least not in any understanding I had of my species.

Garth came behind me, continuing his mumbles about a rumor some Karvel dealer in Buenos Aires had told him, then bumped into my back, looking up at his surroundings just as these other figures were doing, and he was no less startled.

There were six of them, standing there, mountainous creatures. Their white robes hung loosely around them, and while they stood frozen by the sight of us, those robes continued to sway. There was a moment when I questioned those first seconds of physical movement, being tempted to believe instead that the monsters were merely statues carved from the snow around us, garbed for effect. But then one turned his eyes from Garth to me, and held his massive, pale hand out before him. I knew by some instinct that this was the one, this was the one that I had seen earlier in the day. Even before I spoke, I understood the scene we had walked in on: the creature had been explaining to the others what he’d seen and what it meant, much as I had done earlier to my people.

His hand continued to move in the air before him, whether reaching to me or pointing at me I couldn’t tell. I could, however, testify to what the creature said. In a slow, deliberate imitation of my own nervous chatter, the creature spread his colorless lips, revealing an alabaster tongue as devoid of blood as his skin was, his slick gums as pale and shiny as porcelain.

“Tekeli-li” is what he told me.

* The last paragraph in Peters, Narrative , chapter XVII, the following paragraph being the lead paragraph in chapter XVIII (pp. 146–148).

† Me.

‡ One of the unfortunate side effects of the imposed artifice that is “race” is that it forces its way into every categorization. For instance, as the crew of the Creole began to become increasingly argumentative and confrontational, instead of thinking A: “This group is plagued by overblown personalities and is socially dysfunctional” or B: “The issue at hand, with its extraordinary circumstances and implications, is one that sparks immediate difficulties,” what one infected with the American racial mythologies might have come up with was, instead, C: “Why can’t Negroes get their shit together long enough to get anything done?” This, of course, is a fallacious and offensive implied accusation. There are countless successful organizations in a variety of professional arenas founded and run by people of African descent to prove the implication wrong. At that moment, though, in this tent with these specific individuals tearing at each other before the event had even begun, I must confess that, when summarizing the scene in my own warped mind, I succumbed. In my mind, I had skipped over reactions A and B, even managing to degrade past response C to come another down, to D. This response consisted solely of the word N*ggers , which I confess I uttered, wagging my head in frustration.