Mat Johnson - Pym

“You stay here. You put up with this, I’m going. I’m going back to join that fat bus-riding bastard, and I’m going to get somebody up on that radio, and then we are all getting the hell out of here.”

“Don’t you think—” I started, but having made his decision, Jeffree began walking off. Back toward the tunnel we had first come through on discovering this place, in the opposite direction of his personal monster.

“RKARKKARKIV,” Sausage Nose roared with such a violent collection of consonants that my own body froze up. First the sound hit, then the air that made the sound. Angela’s petite hand flew to her equally diminutive nose to shield her from what came out of the screaming creature: the breath of a lifetime diet of lard processed through the body of an ape. Jeffree may have smelled the aroma too, but by now he’d walked pretty far away and made no motion to stop. Clearly infuriated, the beast repeated his roar, leaving poor Carlton Damon Carter to curl his arms over his ears and head in response. It was then I noticed that the other Tekelian breed, those that had been casually walking past us and stopping only to give us curious stares through their albino eyes, now had come to a complete and expectant halt as they waited to see how this situation was resolved. It was Jeffree himself who gave them an answer, although I doubt that the creatures had any understanding of what the raised middle finger signified, or of Jeffree’s verbal instruction to “sit on it and rotate.” What the crowd did understand, what it was impossible to misunderstand, was the meaning of Jeffree’s creature’s response. When Mr. Sausage Nose shot his hand out from his robe, I assumed it to be another violent hand gesture in response, but it was violence itself. The dagger, which is the only word I can think to describe it, was clearly made of bone that had been sharpened on one end. Thrown from fifty feet away in a blur barely visible, that point went directly into the socket that held Jeffree’s left eye. When Jeffree collapsed on the ice, red pooling into the ground around him in an unexpected burst of color, the crowd decided it had seen enough and moved on.

Close up, the wound was even more grizzly, even more so for Jeffree, still being unmercifully alive. It was only the angle that saved him from death — the dagger exiting at his temple instead of depositing in his brain. Judging from the blow, he should have been dead, but we knew he was alive because of how loud he was screaming.

After a few minutes, Angela and I had to pull Carlton Damon Carter off his lover, because Sausage Nose still demanded his attention. It took all of us to get Jeffree off the ground: he was stuck to it. In just minutes his own blood had frozen his soaking clothes to the floor.

“My eye,” Jeffree kept saying as he staggered to standing. “We’re sorry,” we kept saying back to him. And then in a sudden movement Carlton Damon Carter grabbed the knife poking out of Jeffree’s head as if the weapon might fly away, just as quickly yanking it free. I thought Jeffree would pass out from this, but he didn’t. To his credit, he stayed conscious and was still screaming a good ten minutes later, stopping only when his captor returned. That’s when Sausage Nose shoved some fabric in Jeffree’s mouth, then threw him over his massive shoulder like Jeffree was a bag of brown rice. Carlton Damon Carter trailed them as the monster stomped off again.

I found my captain, my cousin, not an hour later, having pantomimed his beard to a horrific assortment of beasts until enough pointing fingers added up to his location. Booker Jaynes was crushing a collection of glacial ice by stomping in a basin of ice shards. ‖Just past him, noting his progress, was a Tekelian form at rest, reclined on a slope carved into the wall behind. Leaning as it was, with its robes hanging back across its body, I realized that this beast was the one they called Hunka, the first creature I’d noticed to be clearly female: the collapsed gown held the shape of what appeared to be engorged breasts. aAfter seeing me, Captain Jaynes paused in his march, but when he heard his host’s guttural exclamation from behind, Jaynes resumed his motion, crushing the ice cubes beneath him with his boots as if he was stomping on grapes south of Napoli.

“That is the way of it. That is the way of our bondage. He’s lucky he just lost an eye” was his reaction to the news of Jeffree’s maiming, and this came after a long pause that seemed to offer even less than that paltry response.

“Booker, what if the ships never come back for us? What will we do if it takes a week for telecommunications to be restored? What if it takes a month? What if we can’t reach the world for years?”

“Then we will do what our people have always done: we will wait for our chance. And we will endure,” Booker Jaynes shot back, the words filled with disdain and disbelief that I would need this answer found. Returning to his crushing, he seemed more at peace in it than I had seen him in any of his Creole desk duties. Crunch, crunch, crunch. Stomp, stomp, stomp. That was his only answer. There was another overtone to his statement as well, one that I digested in the long, cold walk back to my own tunnel, my own servitude. There was relief in his voice. As if the man’s worst fears in life had been realized and justified all in the same moment.

* I realize honkies is a racial slur and the Tekelians might not even technically count as human, but this was the word that Booker Jaynes kept using and as such was stuck in my subconscious as well. In addition, the noises that the creatures made to communicate did have some literal honking sounds, which made the slur that much more difficult for me to shed.

† There are two types of lazy bosses. One is so lazy that they make you do not only your own work but theirs too. Worse, they lie to you about it, unloading all responsibility for their actions. The other is so lazy that not only do they not do their own work but they can’t even be bothered to provide you work to do. These bosses lie as well, but only to themselves, passively. The first is the hardest boss to work for, the second the easiest. In Augustus I sensed immediately which one I had.

‡ Fufu is a starchy paste made of boiled yams or cassava that comprises the staple of the Akan peoples. It is also used as glue for minor automobile repairs by tro-tro drivers in parts of Accra, Tema, and Kumasi.

§ Unlike the young of most mammals, the Tekelian children managed to be diminutive and large eyed and yet still utterly unendearing by my human standards. Their little white piranha teeth helped.

‖ This process I would soon be acquainted with as a method of preparing drinking water.

a The way she was sitting, leg up and leaning on her arm, disgusted me. Later I realized it was a mockery of the Farah Fawcett poster many of my white friends had when I was a child.

NATHANIEL Latham was a Morehouse Man, and to me this said everything about him. This is a distinctive breed, one possible to identify without the sight of a college ring or knowledge of its academic history. There is the entrepreneurial optimism, visible in his buoyant steps, there is the near-religious belief in the self and a refusal to acknowledge that any obstacle could thwart him. The Morehouse Man is a uniquely American creation and shares the young nation’s traditional certainty that the days ahead will be greater than the days behind. His clothes are crisp, conservative but energetic, ever waiting for that magazine cover that will one day reflect on his success. The Morehouse Man, at his finest, is America at its finest. Once, while sitting at a dusty café in Accra, I looked past my dog-eared copy of The Garies and Their Friends to see the red polo shirt, perfectly trimmed dreads, and platinum watch of a Morehouse Man sitting at the table next to me. What struck me about the scene was not seeing such a familiar sight thousands of miles away at a little burger stand in West Africa. No, what I found most impressive was that even so far out of context I could recognize the Morehouse Man, which a conversation with this brother soon confirmed.