Mat Johnson - Pym

The thought of having my own eyes poked out of my head in a Tekelian game of William Tell gave me enough energy to make a break for the surface. That and the odd Tekelian liquor I had swilled, which took the bite off my pain for the majority of my journey. Even slightly drunk, I knew better than to try to make it all the way back to the Creole base and risk being seen by Barro or his associates. Instead, I was attempting to get up to the trucks, which were still parked directly above us at the site of our original contact. And, as the alcohol quickly wore off, I decided not only that I would make it there but that if I could not get one of the vehicles to start, or find one of the extra sets of keys I knew to be hidden on them, I would instead die there. That I would simply lie down to sleep in a front-seat cab and not have to wake up again. This was actually a comfort in the final stretches of my journey, when I could no longer imagine ever gathering the energy to walk back again. Even for Angela.

After finding the crater we’d entered on our first descent, using the last of my energy and will to climb the rope that still hung down as we had left it, I located the vehicles. My eyes adjusting to the amount of unfiltered sunlight that shone from above, I saw something else: that the wheels of all three trucks had been slashed. Long, deliberate cuts that were identical on each wheel and machine, sinking all of them a good two feet closer to the ground than they ever should have been. And I saw that their gas tanks had been opened, that petrol had spilled and dispersed into the ground around them. Except on the last massive truck, which despite its equally flattened tires, had its engines running.

The windows were fogged, and I saw movement inside. I thought: Little Debbie, you have come to have a final feast with me, and imagined a cornucopia overflowing with every snack cake there ever was, every snack cake currently on the market and every snack cake yet to exist. Instead, after I opened the door, I found a black man, chomping on protein bars.

“I know where it is, dog!” Garth said to me, completely unsurprised by my arrival. “Thomas Karvel’s base camp. I figured it out, found the mountain peak in the painting, found it in one of the photo books Jaynes has. It’s right there!” he gushed, holding his snapshot of the painting up to the horizon and the mountains of ice that stood there. The resemblance between the two images was nonexistent to me.

“No, man. Look at the ridges, look at the outline. The top’s basically the same, right? Just flipped. That’s why it looked so familiar but I couldn’t place it. This image was painted from the other side . That’s where Karvel’s base is, man. Over that ridge. Has to be. It takes him weeks to create a masterpiece; he would need somewhere to stay.”

Looking at the outer shape of the formation, wanting to believe it so much because I had no other vision to invest in, I began to think that for a moment I’d seen what Garth was talking about. There were similarities. I ignored the fact that all the mountains basically looked the same to me.

“So, you down? You want to run away to the promised land?” Still staring at the photo and then back at the horizon, still wanting to see what Garth saw that gave him this level of conviction, I nodded my cold head in the affirmative. However mad the big man’s suggestion, it was the closest thing to a logical course of action available.

* This sound was yet another trait I had seen exhibited only by Augustus and not by his race in general. The others either didn’t laugh or did so in a way that seemed less like they were clearing their sinuses of a decade of congealed mucus.

† Shirley Temple was America’s biggest star during the twentieth century’s Depression, but she was a national obsession that from a distance of time now seems quite disturbing. Just a little girl, Temple was the ultimate symbol of purity: the sacred virgin, worshiped by all. There is an innocence to the virgin icon, but at its center it is still a sexual role. Little Debbie, I must say, was beyond such considerations, her purity unassailable. You don’t talk about Little Debbie.

‡ I had wondered about these creatures’ religious inclinations, whether they believed in a soul or felt they had one, and what I saw I took to be a sign of their primitive faith. Of course they worshiped an ice cube. Without natural predators — which were often the favorite subjects of worship of primitives — what would they bow down to? In the absence of bears or big cats to run from, the ice itself seemed a natural (though abstract) choice.

GARTH explained to me that the cutting of the truck’s tires didn’t matter to us, that our journey wouldn’t require them. The ice ahead was uncharted, and any seemingly harmless stretch of untouched snow might conceal a deadly chasm, or paper-thin surfaces unable to carry the weight of the vehicles. It was better to take the snowmobiles and hope that even they weren’t too heavy. Garth had managed to bring one bike by himself to the site and used it to drag another. There were two more waiting back at the Creole’s base camp; the captain could get one and Angela could double up on another. Now that he knew I was game, Garth would make a quick trip back for supplies and meet me here again. That was our escape plan.

After this course of action was agreed on and I had blissfully filled my belly on forgotten glove compartment energy bars, my first order of business was to find my cousin and put Booker Jaynes back in charge, because now more than ever we needed his leadership. Captain Jaynes was a member of the baby boomers, the last generation of African Americans to fight the race war directly — I can admit without embarrassment that I have always been impressed by that. Leaving Garth on the surface so that I could bring the good news to Angela and the others, I headed immediately for the hold Jaynes served in, which fortunately for me was on the way to town in the tunnel I was traveling. When I got there I found Angela as well. Seeing her at the door of Jaynes’s cave, leaning against the wall, I was almost immediately hit with a wave of euphoria that seemed to imply that everything was going to be okay. What a divine coincidence. That there was, contrary to my suspicions, an order to the universe, and that it was a benevolent one. The beauty of this woman only contributed to this feeling: even now, after she’d spent weeks in the same dirty clothes, her grip over me was not lessened. The scarf that wrapped up Angela’s unwashed hair only increased her hold on me, made my mind think back to our grad school days, before any misstep had been taken. Hugging her, I told Angela how lucky it was that I’d found her here at this moment.

“No, it’s not lucky. I’ve been waiting here in front of your cousin’s door for half an hour. My thighs are frozen, my feet are almost numb, but here I still am waiting, all this time waiting just to ask the old man a question. This is so not covered in my job description.”

“Babe. What do you need to know that could be so important?” I pulled out one of Garth’s protein bars as I talked, taking the time to remove my gloves and unwrap it for her. To my surprise, Angela didn’t grab the offering from me, instead with her gloved hands she cupped my bare ones, guiding them to her mouth. There was no risk of the chocolate melting on her gloves, as cold as it was. Looking at her, her lips drained to gray, I found it hard to believe there would be enough warmth in her gut to melt the food either. Seeing her lips part and then collapse as they chewed, I was overwhelmed by the desire to touch them. To touch any of her, and not just acrylic thermal padding.