Mat Johnson - Pym

Unfortunately, while Morehouse had trained Nathaniel Latham for many things, none of those things had to do with physical survival in Antarctica. His college had forged Nathaniel’s will, filled him with enough optimism to convince him that his will was sufficient to overcome even the most absurd situations, but as for practical polar matters, such as choosing proper metal studs for ice spelunking, it was woefully inadequate. I say this because after only a week of walking back and forth between his captors’ lodging and his wife’s, Nathaniel’s top-of-the-line, custom-order boots’ lack of proper studding had resulted in a sprained ankle. Sure, Nathaniel’s soft feet were kept warm, but on the iced-over floors on the path that separated our two neighborhoods he would have been better off with spiked golf shoes. I heard Nathaniel moving outside my door five nights after Jeffree lost his eye, calling my name, calling out a bunch of cusses as well, although those weren’t directed at me.

“Yo, Chris. You watch out for Angela, okay? That’s your job,” Nathaniel told me, not even bothering to look at me directly. I felt a shameful rush at this request, like he was acknowledging that had always been my job, no matter what role he served for her at the moment. As Nathaniel talked to me, he limped forward a bit, and his injury became apparent. “This ankle is killing me; it’s puffed up like a … Forget it. But I’m not going to be able to walk back here for a couple of days. Maybe a week. I should really take the week because I need to recuperate. I’m going to start getting migraines, at this rate.”

“Did you tighten your shoestrings at the tops? That will brace the ankle,” I generously offered.

“Yeah, I tightened the goddamn shoestrings, Chris. Jesus Christ. What do you think is keeping me upright? I’m barely going to make it back to those bastards where I am tonight, and you would not believe what they’re capable of. So your job is to watch out for Angela. I don’t like what’s mine fucked with, and I don’t want them fucking with her.”

She wasn’t his, but I did watch out for Angela Latham. Minutes after the usurper limped off, I found my way down the hall, using for illumination one of the fatty candles that were ubiquitous down there, made from a substance that seemed to be stale krakt or, if not, something almost identical in composition. *The neighboring residence, the one of Angela’s enslavers, was only a hundred yards away, and yet I had never visited, waiting instead in my off moments in the halls for Angela to pass through so that I might stalk her without seeming to. Now that I was actually taking time to investigate her residence for the first time, I immediately felt a moment of disorientation. Expecting to find another small hovel, I instead discovered something much grander. What I had taken before to be the front entrance to a simple hollowed-out cave like Augustus’s (not a home but home to a few smelly sealskin rugs) was merely the back end, the alley exit, of a palatial fortress. Instead of rough markings made into the ice, these walls were perfectly smooth, except where moldings and primitive candelabra had been expertly carved into the surface. And there was furniture as well, not just heaps of animal carcasses but elegant pieces carved out of the very ice into chairs and tables and even baskets for storage. I saw this and was amazed, and also shamed: if you have to suffer the indignity of being a possession, it’s an even worse insult to be the possession of a pauper. Angela certainly seemed to have landed a prince, or some other branch of royalty, although to look at him you couldn’t tell. Or at least I took the beast I now saw to be her principal captor, but that was just because I found the thing standing behind her, staring intently at the woman as she worked. Angela was in what appeared to be the dining hall, a cavernous room immaculate aside for the smell that hung in it. There was a soft-shell crab place in South Philadelphia on Passyunk I used to go to, open for decades nearly twenty-four hours a day: this cave smelled like that joint’s sidewalk. But the place was spotless, clearly owing to the labors of the brown woman making it so. Still, there was a haughtiness to the creature sitting behind her on a raised surface, as if he himself was responsible for the efficiency of her work. He was no more responsible for his clean home than I was for Augustus’s messy one (I wasn’t touching that place, it was disgusting), yet there the creature was, as arrogant as a Shar-Pei.

At the moment, Angela was down on her knees, digging at the debris in the pale floor with a bone tool, pouring wet slush over the crater to smooth the surface in her wake. Despite the thick Gore-Tex and fleece which padded the majority of her body and limited her movement, Angela had the task down to industrial-level efficiency. She was so consumed by her efforts that she didn’t notice me for a long moment and, when she did see my boot, barely looked up.

“Is he still there?” Angela asked finally, not pausing from her digging. The debris she threw onto a skin which lay beside her, one that kept freezing to the floor, so that as she progressed she kept giving it firm tugs. I looked over at the creature directly and, thinking of Jeffree’s now missing eye, smiled the best I could at him, bowed my shoulders a bit, and tried to look stupid and harmless.

“Still there. Is he giving you trouble? Do you want me to do something about it?” It felt manly at first to offer the help, but the moment after I said it, fear quickly performed its castration. What we both knew: there wasn’t a damn thing I was going to do. This monster was huge, and even if he was made of more krakt than muscle, like Augustus was, the whole of their society was too much for me. This was their frozen territory, I could barely keep the turns correct in my mind to make it through the tunnels to town. As to how to make it back to the Creole base, I knew the direction was up but not how to get there without getting lost and freezing to death first.

Angela flashed her eyes to mine just long enough to make contact, and even then the creature made a bellowing sound, removing his hand from within his shroud and making me wonder uncomfortably about where his paw had been resting moments before. “You have to get me out of here, Chris. I’m not going to make it. I’m not made for this life, you know that. I went to Spelman , Christopher. I am a soror of Delta Sigma Theta, ” Angela emphasized, her whispers otherwise barely audible over her snow-cone scraping.

“You’re even more than that. I love you, and I don’t want to see you like this,” I told her. She didn’t even flinch at the L-word. She just got a little tear in her eye, which she wiped on her glove, where it froze. It had been almost a decade since I had told her that I loved her, and last time she didn’t cry at all. I did. “And I will get you out of here. I promise,” I told her. And we both believed me.

Back in Augustus’s hovel, I lay on the pungent skins by the hearth, staring into the blue gloom of it all. Augustus’s sty was increasingly cluttered. I began to realize that when I had first entered the hole it had been at its cleanest; maybe he’d straightened up in anticipation of the trip that never happened. Now it was horrendous, with pieces of everything that had frozen to both our shoes cluttered around us. Augustus, true to form, was eating, and I could hear the krakt swooshing around his jowls. I actually considered cleaning the place up a bit. Most of the mess was not mine, of course, but for the moment I did live here. After witnessing Angela suffering, however, I couldn’t motivate myself to do any work. Augustus for his part chomped away, staring back at me with curiosity.

The more the image of the other Tekelians became normalized for me, the odder Augustus appeared in my eyes. My captor’s peculiarities extended beyond his wretched smile: his back was bent forward, stuck in a perpetual bow; his shoulders collapsed on either side of him so that his head was the only thing that kept his shroud from sliding down to the floor. I also noticed that while the rest of the Tekelians seemed to travel in groups, or at least congregate in groups in the city center, Augustus seemed to be perpetually alone. In my entire time with the creature, I never once saw him socializing with another of his species. Staring across at him, watching his pale, watery eyes looking at me, I actually felt a moment of pity. Perhaps in response to this empathy, Augustus did the most human of things: he rolled his marble eyes at me. Shaking his hands free from the krakt (and thereby making even more of a mess of himself) he reached into his cloak with a sigh. In my mind, the casual amusement of the situation immediately dissipated and thoughts of Jeffree’s maiming emerged once more. As pathetic as he was, Augustus was still one of them, and so I had reason to be on guard. The next dagger could come for me. Immediately, I got on the floor picking things up, frantically attempting to bring order to the place, smiling all the way. That is, until Augustus put his cold and pudgy claw on my shoulder. It was a bracing grip, belying a strength that was not immediately apparent, and I almost expected a blow to follow. Instead, I heard crinkling.