Mat Johnson - Pym

“EEEEErrrrrgggggggggg—” was what the elder was winding into when another call came from behind the crowd and beyond the cluster of igloo-type buildings in the distance, from a large cave opening much like the one our own crew and guides had descended through minutes before. Hearing the sound, the speaker cut short his wailing with visible relief and joined with the rest of the crowd in looking back toward the newcomers. Jaynes nodded his head to the side, as if we should just turn and run for it right then. But there was nowhere to go. We couldn’t possibly hope to climb back up those caverns, or even to navigate the route back to the surface, fast enough to distance ourselves from these creatures so clearly bred for the environment.

Besides, I was caught up. Hypnotized. For now, coming to our gathering, Sausage Nose and another of the larger creatures seemed to be carrying a child, each with one hand holding a shoulder. A diminished, dangerously thin boy, with a slight pinkish color that contrasted with the bluish tones of the other creatures. He appeared to be unconscious, flopping like a stringless marionette. The three figures came through as the crowd opened a path for them. When they dumped the smaller creature between the elder and myself, I saw that it wasn’t a child at all but the body of a man.

It was undeniable. It was the single most bloodless corpse I had ever seen in history, but it was definitely a human one. A white man, with dark hair on his head and a dark mustache. I carefully stepped toward the body and stuck a hand on its shoulder. Aside from fabric tied around his neck in a makeshift scarf, the Caucasian was dressed very much like the creatures who had produced him, swaddled in cloth.

“He’s dead, isn’t he? Is this like an initiation or something? Do you think they want us to eat him?” Jeffree asked as he hunched next to me, not at all kidding. I was in the process of dismissing his interpretation when, to my surprise, the corpse opened his eyes and looked directly at the two of us, startling us even more than we already were. Equally surprised, the guy scrambled backward across the ice to get his distance. Eyes wide, trying to lose himself in a crowd of creatures that scrambled away from him as soon as he arrived there, the white dude kept pointing and muttering, “You’re not there, you’re not there, you’re not there.”

“Yes, we are,” I told him. The comment seemed to have the desired effect. The man ceased his panic and turned to look at us directly.

“Did you actually say something?” he asked, crouched and cowering. He spoke with an odd accent, a hint of the American South but a bit of the Brit too.

“I did say something,” I told him, and then the obvious questions were lobbed over my head by my yelling co-workers: What is this place? What are these people? Who are you? It was only the last question he seemed willing to discuss, the rest he just looked away at and shook his head at nervously. But his identity, that he seemed clear on. Adjusting the material on his collar, standing straight and short, and looking directly up at me, the man said:

“Well of course my name is Arthur Pym, of the Nantucket Pyms, sir.”

I wasn’t stunned. I wasn’t shocked. I wasn’t even impressed, because he was clearly a lunatic and I didn’t believe him. Because unless we’d stepped into a time warp, that would make him over two hundred years old. He looked bad, but still.

I nodded my head, smiled, and said my name back to him. Politely, the madman nodded as if to pretend my own name held some weight with him. Then this Pym looked quickly at Jaynes, then at Jeffree, then at Nathaniel, lingered over Angela, and then turned back to me.

“So tell me then, Mr. Jaynes,” he began, his voice hoarse from disuse and possibly misuse, “have you brought these slaves for trading?”

* I thought of smiling at them too but held off on this with the distant memory that chimpanzees take grinning as a hostile bearing of fangs.

† The events that follow are fantastical and challenged the imaginations even of those of us who experienced them firsthand. I will therefore attempt to relay them to you in the most straightforward manner I can manage, taking on the same level of distance I did on that day, simply to avoid being completely overwhelmed.

‡ And the rest of the females too, because really they all seemed to have some kind of beard.

§ I’ll confess that due to my lack of knowledge they all pretty much looked the same to me. Same skin color, same hair color, same hair texture. All the same.

A point of plot and order: I am a mulatto. I am a mulatto in a long line of mulattoes, so visibly lacking in African heritage that I often appear to some uneducated eyes as a random, garden-variety white guy. But I’m not. My father was white, yes. But it doesn’t work that way. My mother was a woman, but that doesn’t make me a woman either. Mandatory ethnic signifiers in summary: my hair is fairly straight, the curl loose and lazy; my skin lacks melanin — there are some Italians out there darker than me. *My lips are full and my nose is broad, but it’s really just the complexion and hair that count. Octoroon would have been the antebellum word for me. Let me be more clear, since some people can’t get their heads around it even when I stand before them: I am a black man who looks white.

I grew up in a working-class neighborhood in the “Black Is Beautiful” era and suffered in school from my poor timing. Fifty years before, being the only European-looking brother on a black campus might have made me class president in the Adam Clayton Powell mold, but during my era it made me the symbol of Whiteness and all the negative connotations it held. This is probably assigning too much political acumen to my fellow middle-schoolers. A less ambitious assessment might be just that I stood out, and the wolves attack the weak separated from the herd. Because of the color of my skin, I was targeted for abuse as much as the kid who wore his Boy Scout uniform every day.

In sixth grade a little effete frog named James Baldwin whupped my ass. He was a foot shorter than me, but he hung with hulking eighth-grade girls, who towered over both of us the entire time, taunting. It was by the bushes in the asphalt driveway of my apartment building and it was because I’d gotten lazy. I had a whole plan for getting home unmolested, it involved shortcuts along the train tracks and alternating building entrances, but it’d been two weeks since the last attack and I let my guard down. I bought a Reggie bar at the drugstore before heading toward my building: they must have monitored the corner, followed me. I didn’t fight back, because if I did the ladies would have really hurt me, and the only thing more humiliating than getting my ass kicked by this little shit would have been getting my ass kicked by a gaggle of girls, even ones as prematurely huge as these postpubescent vultures. I had never even met James Baldwin, but it didn’t matter, he attacked me anyway. I was different. He was puny, weak, but I was weaker. Kids have to feel like they’re more powerful than someone.

The worst part of all this was when my mother forced me to report to the school where James Baldwin kicked my ass. Mrs. Alexander, the librarian, was not much darker than me but was armed with a mouth full of ghetto to make up for it. She couldn’t get enough of my story. She asked me to repeat it again and again, “James Baldwin beat me up.” “Who you say?” “James Baldwin,” and the librarian, as round and yellow as the sun, shuddered with laughter. I asked her what was so funny and Mrs. Alexander told me, “Young bru, you gots to gets your little yellow butt down to my library. You gots to learn who you is.” Mrs. Alexander was no great fan of books; everyone knew she had been placed in her position after suspension for beating her second-grade students with a ruler. She had a bachelor’s degree in education but talked like her college was located in the back of a deli. Still, even for her the broken grammar she used to tell me this message was exaggerated, and I heard another meaning within it. That I, like her, would have to overcompensate for my pale skin to be accepted. I would have to learn to talk blacker, walk blacker, than even my peers. Or be rejected as other forever.