Mat Johnson - Pym

I made it down to the market area because I didn’t want to die of starvation alone. It was not so much the “die” part, rather the “alone” aspect that most scared me. Before leaving, I managed a quick check for Angela, hoping to find both comfort and food, but she was gone. I saw a lot of Angela by this time, usually at night, and in my bed. Fully clothed and no kissing, but there she was. In fact, aside from those evenings when her captors didn’t allow it, Angela was there with me every night she could be. I never attempted to push it further. It was enough that there she was in my heavily bundled arms, and there she would stay until the next waking. I hadn’t yet transitioned past the role of placeholder, I understood this. But what a place to be.

While our growing interaction was unknown to Angela’s second husband, it was keenly noticed by Angela’s captors, who shooed me away from their kitchen vigorously on every occasion I made to go find her. Now that I was starved to the point of losing my mind, looking for whatever scraps she may have been able to give me, she was nowhere. Instead of the sustenance I needed, I received a blow when one of the more matronly examples of the beasts hurled a block of ice the size of a softball at my nose. I managed to avoid the brunt of the assault but took enough of it to leave my jaw swollen and my head throbbing with even more pain than my starvation had already inflicted. In this haze of nauseated famine, I made it into the village, guided by will alone. It was my guess that Augustus had relocated himself to the center of town, because often when he disappeared from our flat, he came home reeking of the grog I had seen him drink there. It was a good guess, because it was the only choice I had. It was possible that Augustus was coiled up in the smelly hovel of some other hermit, but the idea that he might have a friend besides me seemed improbable.

I was on my way toward that area of the village in which the bar had been carved when I came upon a crowd of fifty or so of the Tekelians standing around in a circle, muttering their harsh consonants as they stared into their grouping’s epicenter. It is in man’s nature to be drawn by the crowd, if only to see what everybody else is up to. Even when that crowd was composed entirely of albino snow monkeys, I wasn’t any better (perhaps there was more krakt!). Weakly, I began to insert myself into the middle of the assembly, but thinking better of it, I decided to gain a more remote access point from which to watch the spectacle. Kicking a notch in the ice of a nearby building, I hoisted myself just high enough to see past all of those cloaked hoods that were getting in my way. What I saw at first I took to be an icon: appropriately, they were worshiping a block of ice. ‡It was about ten feet tall, roughly hewn, powdered white by snow on its sides, upright and phallic in presentation. This was not the only phallic presentation in this spectacle. In response to some fierce barking call, the assembled crowd returned a roar of its own and from within their cloaks removed long, pointed bones, what appeared to me at first to be the tusks of a mammoth but were more likely the ribs of a small whale. To my great and growing horror, I saw that the ends of these were sharpened to fierce points like calcium swords, with grooves cut into their bases for handles.

“KARARUM!” one of the beasts yelled from his perch by their frozen idol, and above the tall crowd the bone sabers rattled, banging horribly off each other in deliberate percussion.

“They’re going to war,” I muttered in disbelief.

“No shit. You really are a genius.” The sarcastic words came with a hand on my startled ankle, and when I looked down from my perch I saw that they belonged to Nathaniel. It was unnerving to see him in the state he was, in some ways more so than to see the monsters get more monstrous. The Morehouse Man was now unshaven, and a scraggly beard had gotten the best of him, clinging to the sides of his face like a mold. Strong cheekbones that had once protruded now seemed to just poke out, the cheeks below nothing more than sunken caverns. Stains of krakt were apparent on the front of his coat and gloves. The Morehouse Man is a well-groomed man. I didn’t know who this Nathaniel was. This is not to say that at the moment I cut a stunning figure myself, but even in the real world I was known to let myself go for the sake of a good book with more than three hundred pages.

“You okay?” I asked, climbing back down. It was a rhetorical question, but the man Nathaniel had become was in no mood for rhetoric.

“Am I okay? Nigger, do I look okay? I can barely walk. It’s going on three weeks and my ankle still looks like a cantaloupe. And once they saw I still couldn’t walk, my snowmen kicked me out. Carried me down here and left me. Can you believe that shit?” he asked. I could. Behind us the creatures yelled the mindless syllables of nationalism followed by more waving of swords in the wind.

“ ‘The Melt.’ That’s what they’re saying. That’s what they say they’re going to fight.”

“ The Melt ? How the hell do you know they’re saying ‘The Melt’?”

“The melt, or the heat, or something like that. It’s the word they use to describe when things start dripping around here. And the next word is the one they use right before they hit you.” With this, Nathaniel said the sound, doing a decent job of reproducing the barbaric Tekelian tongue. Although Augustus had never even attempted to strike me, I still recognized the word instantly.

“That’s what the beast that keeps Jeffree said right before it poked his eye out for trying to escape.” When I said this out loud, I realized how I had rationalized Jeffree’s maiming: I had decided to believe that he had been disfigured because he was obnoxious. Because he was prone to clichés, garish behavior, and meaningless grand gestures. Not because he had tried to run for his freedom but because he could be a dick. But trying to break free had not been simply a grand gesture, or even a heroic one, although it was both of those things. It had also been a rational response. They were going to kill us one by one, I became certain. That had been their plan all along. That was what the rally was for: our genocide.

“They’re not trying to kill us. Look at them, they look like an army.” Nathaniel gestured with the ski pole he was using as a cane. “Do you really think they’d need an army to kill us off?”

“I think they’re going to kill me next, Nathaniel. They’re starving me,” I explained. Suddenly, my hunger made complete sense: they were experimenting, trying out different ways to kill each of us. Just for sport. By the time they came for Garth they’d be ready to attempt burning him on the stove like a luau pig.

“Don’t you get it?” Nathaniel was shaking me now. His pole fell to the floor, but with a firm grip on each of my shoulders he was at no risk of tumbling. “They’re not trying to kill us, because we are commodities. I’m a businessman, Christopher. I know what I am seeing here. They don’t hate us, or at least they didn’t when this started. They just want us to do their work for them, to get a return on their investment. That’s why they didn’t just kill Jeffree; they didn’t want the capital loss. They’re not starving you, they’re just keeping their expenditures low. My captors didn’t hate me, they just declared me a loss and had me liquidated. It’s not personal.”

“It’s personal to me: I’m starving. I take that very personally.”

“And my ankle feels like an elephant’s standing on it. But if you asked them, they’d probably tell you that my ankle’s hurting them more than it’s hurting me. And if they had a balance sheet, they could prove it. That’s why I’m learning the language, get it? Life is all about improving your assets,” Nathaniel told me, then added a series of growling syllables I took to be a Tekelian translation of the same sentiment.