Mat Johnson - Pym

Garth was as unhappy to hear about the fate of Jeffree’s left eye as I was to hear that the rest of humanity was still missing. For the moment, there was nothing we seemed to be able to do about either one of those things, and in our conversational pause to digest that fact, the room’s odd decoration seemed a safer topic.

“What’s with all the paintings? You airing them out or something?”

“Just makes me feel at home.”

I grew up with Garth, in the same neighborhood for ten years. This stuff didn’t look like our home. There were no black people in any of Karvel’s paintings, not one in all the ones that engulfed the room. Actually, that is not a fair assessment, there are no blacks in the paintings of Vermeer either, but I didn’t get the same feeling from his work — and Vermeer was Dutch, the old, scary Dutch West Indian kind of Dutch too, not the modern, happy-go-liberal version. It wasn’t just that there were no black people present, it was also that Karvel’s world seemed a place where black people couldn’t even exist, so thorough was its European romanticization. With its overwhelming quaintness, its thatched roofs and oversaturated flowerings, this was a world that had more to do with the fevered Caucasian dreams of Tolkien and Disney than with any European reality. During my African sojourn, I remember having seen my Afrocentric countrymen land at the airport in Accra and wander around a city that wasn’t there. They were so firmly entrenched in their ideologies, so tightly wrapped in their kente cloth, helmeted from truth by leather kufis, that they failed to see the real Africa before them. They wanted only the Africa where everyone was either a king, a queen, or a descendant of both. Where a Wakandian fantasy civilization hid just beyond the palms. ‡Where black diasporans would be greeted at the airport as long-lost offspring, like the Hawaiians do with the leis. Determined, they walked on the continent seeing only what they wanted and blamed all they didn’t like or understand on the white man. All the while ignoring that at the same moment the locals called them “white man” to their backs and faces. But on the other end of the spectrum, how much better than real Europe was this fantasy of Whiteness which Garth took for granted? The romance of castles and armor removed from the context of constant war, serfdom, and feudal lunacy. Conan barbarianism, Dungeons & Dragons alternates to plague-ridden reality. That delusion was everywhere, but it was a dreamworld that was no less absurd for its ubiquity.

“It’s not art,” I blurted out. It was a cruel thing to do, but at the moment I wasn’t responding to Garth Frierson’s taste in art, just fighting for intellectual space in this oversaturated room.

“Dog, you silly. Course it’s art. It’s the best art. Thomas Karvel, he’s the bestselling painter in America, probably in the world. See this one right here, this one?” Garth grabbed a sunset over a sandy beach with seagulls flying by. “This is Dawn at Surfside . When Thomas Karvel was creating this, they did a limited release of like twelve hundred hand-painted, signed copies. I ordered mine three months in advance, and by the next day, it was sold out. By the time the FedEx man dropped it at my door, it was already worth damn near double what I paid for it. The majority of people love it. It’s art.”

“But what if now the majority of people are dead out there, Garth? Then what good would it be?” I asked, motioning to the paintings around us.

“Shit. If that was true, what good would anything be?” It was a question we both responded to with silence, just sitting there.

I was hoping that Augustus would want to spend the night at the Creole base camp, and that maybe I could even convince him this would be a much better living arrangement for both of us — given the state of his hovel, I had high hopes for this plan. Unfortunately, I wasn’t back in my room for more than fifteen minutes before I heard an explosion of liquid violence coming from the kitchen area. There, sprawled out on the linoleum, was Augustus, heaving and clammy. A long stream of white vomit strung from his pale lips to the hard floor around him. I would have thought this reaction was due to his caloric overindulgence had we not experienced a fairly significant breakthrough at that moment.

“Cold,” Augustus said.

The creature had spoken! Making sure that Augustus hadn’t simply caught something in his overused throat, I repeated the word I thought I had heard, and he, in progressively fainter tones, said it back to me. Cold , he kept saying. It made sense that he would have knowledge of the word’s existence, having heard me use it repeatedly as I chattered my teeth. His comprehension of the word was obviously limited, though, because it was specifically not cold inside the Creole base. In fact, for the first time in days the frozen ache I’d felt all over my body had left me and I was even working up a light sweat, dressed as I was. Augustus was clearly not cold either because he was dripping with sweat as if he had a great fever and his pale pores were trying to flush it away.

“Goddamn. I think that boy is melting,” Garth offered as he leaned over me. While not literally losing his solid form, Augustus did look like a Popsicle in a microwave. “Cold,” he’d said, but “hot” was what he meant. Still, even this small breakthrough in comprehension was staggering. So was Augustus’s weight: they say that muscle weighs more than fat, but I can’t imagine any of the Tekelian warriors possibly weighing as much as the doughy creature Garth and I lifted up off the floor and out onto the tundra so that it could recover itself.

While Augustus moaned back into good health, I managed to shovel down a quick can of a premade pasta, filling my gut with just enough calories to see me back to Tekeli-li, the constant threat of falling and polar air staving off the ’itis. Garth’s last words to me, Just wait, when I know anything I’ll come get you , haunted my every step, but I distracted myself by teaching the words hot, walk, ice, good , and bad to the eager Augustus, who aped them back to me as we trudged along. While it was impossible to say whether he got the full concepts behind the sounds, listening to his effort was worth more effort, if for nothing more than the comedy of it all.

By the time we arrived back at Augustus’s cave, I was hungrier than I had been in my life, but more tired than ever before also. Augustus predictably went straight back to his stash of krakt, but I didn’t have the fortitude to stomach it at the moment. Neither, apparently, did he, because it was mere minutes before I heard the labored breathing of his sleeping, his sticky paw still in his glazed mouth. It was very late at night, I’d forgotten. But my body remembered.

“Sleep,” I said to Augustus.

“I can’t,” Angela Latham said from behind me, her voice skipping lightly off the white walls and kissing on my spine.

She stood at the doorway, and she was lovely. Akan cheekbones that hinted at a smile even when her eyes had been crying, lips so full they seemed perpetually puckered for a kiss: she was as lovely as she had ever been, even in my dreams. And there was this pause, when she just looked at me, actually looked at my eyes for a moment for the first time in so long. And there was a second of veiled recognition when we both acknowledged that it was late, too late for her to be showing up at my door even if the impetus was insomnia.

“Nathaniel has been out to see me just once in three days. Three days, can you believe that shit?” she asked me. Of course I could believe that, the man could barely walk. How the hell was he supposed to get all the way over to this side of the city? Crawl?