Mat Johnson - Pym

“Aaaggaakkaarraagagh,” he said. Looking at Augustus’s greedy paw, I saw something startling: the empty wrapper of a Little Debbie snack. No, not just one but several, balled into his palm and now falling to the floor, each with the last traces of their caloric goodness sticking to the cellophane. Augustus had eaten every one, clearly, and just as clearly, his appetite was in no way satiated. In his primitive, albino snow monkey way, Augustus had just discovered what every food-stamp foodie had before: the more you ate of the things, the greater your desire to eat more. Poor Augustus was already addicted. And there was only one man left on the continent who could offer him more.

While the Tekelians were by far the most notable of our discoveries, there were less sensational revelations to be had in Tekeli-li, ones no less substantial. Chief among these were the white beetles that infested the frozen city and were in particular abundance in the cramped hovel of the insulin-fueled ice monkey I called Augustus. Going for a more scientific angle, I named this insect Scarabaeidae colonialis , although admittedly this appellation soon degenerated in my mind to colons for short. At first I mistook these pale bugs for pieces of snow, as which evolution had camouflaged them, but after I felt the evil little things climbing on me, I soon discovered their true nature. It was an age of discovery, even when you didn’t want it to be, even when you just wanted to sleep for a few hours and hope that the world hadn’t been destroyed. But in my waking hours, with nothing else to amuse me (upon reflection I found that, as a modern man, I had spent most of my day amusing myself), I had taken to watching the creatures go about their day.

All these bugs seemed to do was eat, their meals being the scatterings of krakt and whatever pieces of dried leather they got near; they even ate bits of rubber off the bases of my shoes. They didn’t seem to be too particular about what they ate, they just consumed and consumed, and when they got food they almost instantly seemed to breed so that they could eat it faster. A few would arrive on a previously “undiscovered” property, and after immediately claiming it for their own they would eat and multiply, and only hours later they would be swarming in disgusting multitude and their object devoured. It seemed like such a short-term survival strategy, one based on the premise of abundance. When, however, they were placed within a finite space (such as four blocks of ice around them high enough so that the bastards couldn’t get out), they mindlessly continued with the same strategy of overconsumption and overbreeding. After a few hours of my experiment, the last of them had turned as cold and hard as the little snowballs they resembled. In the back of my mind, with my last sliver of optimism, I was hoping that I might write some sort of academic paper on the subject, something I would dedicate to the memory of Jeffree’s left eyeball.

Before I managed to wipe out the most recent wave of the colon bugs in Augustus’s hovel, the little bastards were able to enact a bit of revenge in the form of the holes that now perforated my nylon snowsuit. These holes caused a draft that, after a few miles of trekking through the tunnels with Augustus as my lead dog, threatened to freeze my sweat right onto my long johns. The only thing to do was to keep walking, which I did, and try to avoid slowing down enough that I lost the crucial body heat that was the key to my survival.

I had no fear that I would lose sight of Augustus as he walked on in front of me, because as he stomped forward he sucked the last remnants of Little Debbie goodness from his collection of wrappers, leaving a trail behind him when he discarded each bit of cellophane. Augustus, I now noticed, had a bit of a limp, whether from an accident or from abuse it was impossible to say, but based on how the others of his tribe derided him as we passed them in the halls, I guessed the latter. It wasn’t just a limp but a sway, an oscillating motion I found almost soulful. †The trip was much longer than I remembered it, much more vertical, and I was petrified that after we finally got to the surface there would still be the miles of trudging in the open air before we arrived at the Creole’s base camp. With time the ice around us became brighter, more solid as the mild signs of perplexing melting that plagued Tekeli-li moved farther behind us and my eyes adjusted from the subterranean dim. The wind that whistled through the frozen channel became stronger, more direct, and soon there was literally the light at the end of the tunnel. To my surprise, when I stood aboveground, I discovered that the tunnel, all but the final opening of which looked as if it had been carved centuries before, came out not a hundred yards from our Creole Mining Company camp. Ours were not the first footprints here either: the Tekelians had possessed a direct underground route to our front door all along. Putting a hand on Augustus’s hulking shoulder, I tried to ask him about this, motioning to the cave opening and then to the Creole barracks, where I could already see Garth had the lights on. Augustus looked back at me with his ghostly eyes to see what I was gesturing about, then held me in a stare for a moment before nodding slowly and deliberately, as frustrated by our language barrier as I was at that moment.

In the living room of my former Antarctic home, I hoped to find the signs of a living society. I hoped to find the TV on, CNN blaring, maybe Garth eating a serving of spaghetti in a salad bowl, waiting excitedly for me so he could share the good news of the return of satellite communication with the rest of the planet and our impending freedom, wealth, and world renown. What I found was that while the TV was on, it showed nothing but static, a gray and blue electric blizzard on the screen. The computers were on as well, but each gave a “Failure to Connect” error message that flashed on, then off again. With the feeling that my organs were plummeting to my bowels in an attempt to escape my fate, I remained focused and kept walking past these screens to the lounge area. There I saw an even more bizarre sight: the communal room was covered with paintings. They sat across the couches and chairs, they lined the walls like tiles so that only glimpses of the surface behind were visible. Everywhere, in watercolors and oils and the reproductions of both, the worlds of Thomas Karvel competed against each other. The sun was setting. Oh, God, was the sun setting, but in parts of the room it was rising as well, and it was hidden by clouds, and it was at midday also. In some places, remarkably, it was actually dark, which was particularly impressive given the solar display that was going on around here. It was the entirety of Garth’s art collection, and within it, in the middle of the floor, collapsed in the remaining stacks of his master’s work, was my man Garth Frierson, snuggled next to White Folks, who barked a few times at Augustus after yawning a hello to me. Garth himself woke up but after an immediate head spinning didn’t actually seem that excited to see me.

“I’m sorry, dog,” he offered meekly as he rose. It had been only a week, but it was clear that the man had lost weight in that time. Maybe it was just water weight, but it was a whole fish tank’s worth. “Can’t eat, dog. Feeling all guilty and shit. You know you’re thinking it: if I’d just had more Little Debbies, I could have bought your freedom too.”

I assured him that I wasn’t thinking about that, and once he saw that I had not returned to enact some sort of revenge fantasy, the big man’s demeanor improved immediately. I was happy to see my boy, a human connection to the past and reality. I was also happy to hear that there was half a pound of powdered sugar in the cupboard over the stove, because this would take care of Augustus’s “sugar fang.” After I had guided his pale and now sweating paw into the bag, Augustus held up his powder-covered fingers to marvel at the warmth of this snowlike substance. The pupils of his gray eyes bulged in ecstasy when his tongue touched the smallest bit of pure cane sugar on his marble nail. I left my new roommate sitting down on the kitchen floor, his stained shroud balled on the linoleum, plunging his face into the bag like a dog.