Mat Johnson - Pym

“I want to know if he’ll switch jobs with me.”

“You want him to come all the way across Tekeli-li to scrub down that kitchen floor?” I asked.

“No, I want to trade households with him. Even if it’s only for a day or two. You’ve seen Booker: he’s the only one of us who looks well fed and not beaten down.” I had noticed this in my quick passing in Tekeli-li’s main square. I put it down to the legendary Jaynes endurance in the face of opposition, but a generous employer was the more likely factor. “He’s your cousin, Christopher,” Angela continued, squeezing my hand, which she still cupped in hers. “You talk to him. I need this. I called his name into the cave a few times; I heard something in there, the moans those Neanderthals make sometimes. But I don’t feel safe going in uninvited.”

“You don’t have to worry about that anymore. I have an escape plan for us,” I told her. There was intimacy in the way I said “us,” and no small amount of expectation on my part. I admit I wanted desperately in that moment to play the hero, for Angela to see me in that light. This might be the final break she would need to mentally annul her second marriage. Not reacting to any of this, Angela instead became excited about the main point of my statement and jumped to the conclusion that the modern world had reappeared in the form of radio contact or the workers’ ship arriving, and that we would be soon traveling back to it. This assumption contrasted painfully with the reality that I was really discussing Garth’s belief that if we marched out onto the uncharted ice we might find the hidden lair of his artistic crush.

“Chris, that’s just insane. That’s not even stupid, it’s past stupid and straight into suicidal madness,” Angela nearly whispered, pulling away from me and tugging absently on her snowsuit’s zipper as if a half inch of flesh had been exposed.

“Staying here is suicidal madness,” I rebutted, trying not to sound hurt.

“Maybe. But at least it requires a hell of a lot less effort. And anyway, Nathaniel isn’t going to make it on the ice: he can barely limp out of the village square.” Angela paused for a moment, dragging the image of her ailing second husband into both our minds. “Even if I wanted to go, if I wanted to risk it all for freedom and just run: how can I just leave him?” she asked. For a moment I entertained the hope that it was a question of logistics. “Go. If you find a way to rescue us, come back for me,” she said.

After arranging for me to make the request to my cousin on her behalf, Angela departed, leaving me alone in the corridor just as she had been. Immediately I missed her, but I comforted myself with the thought that Captain Jaynes most certainly would join the escape, and that, with his vote secured, Angela (and Nathaniel too, of course) could be convinced to join us. Given the urgency of the situation, I was much less timid about finding Captain Jaynes than Angela was, so instead of passively sitting it out in the hall, I crept into the opening of his captor’s dwelling.

As I moved slowly through the entrance, past the curves of the first walls that hid the interior, I heard that moaning sound that Angela had mentioned. There was no question something was home, and in deference to the Tekelian inhabitant (and the breed’s considerable strength), I attempted to move with all the stealth I could manage. Staring down at my boots, trying to limit their crunch, I became aware that there wasn’t simply one voice moaning: this was a duet. And one of them was not the canine roar of the Tekelian, but instead the intermittent wailing of a human. Forgetting care and caution, I ran forward, turning the corner to enter the great room.

What I saw there I have no words for. Except these: Captain Jaynes lay prone on an elevated slab of ice with his Tekelian mistress, Hunka, on top of him. Together they were performing an act that I did not find entertaining. That’s all that I’m prepared to offer on the subject, because to this day I haven’t fully recovered from the trauma the vision inflicted. And to be real, it was a blur, the flash of an image rather than a clear one, because the moment my presence was known, the snow monkey was gone, having run off in embarrassment to more secluded quarters. So fast was Hunka that one second I was seeing a blur of white and the next moment, in the very same spot, a solitary brown member stood its ground, saluting me.

“What were you thinking? Don’t you knock?” Captain Jaynes demanded of me as he struggled to cover himself and stand. There was, of course, no place to knock, as the melting ice tended to swallow the vibration of most percussion. As to what I was thinking, it would take me much longer than the time provided to decipher that. Once my cousin had repackaged himself, pulling up his snow pants and zipping up his zipper, he began to act as if I had seen nothing at all. In appreciation of this mercy, I went along with the act, telling him the details of our impending flight to freedom, and this time I made a real effort to sell the feasibility of the quest. I was so successful in arguing my case that as the words came out of my mouth my own ambivalence about Garth’s plan slowly cemented into certainty. By the time I was summing up my pitch, there was no doubt in me. Our journey would be successful. Our destination was a real one.

From the look on my cousin’s face as he leaned against the far wall, hugging himself with one arm and stroking his beard with the other hand, I could see he was taking it all in. Better yet, from the seriousness with which he was studying the situation, the moments of silence that followed, there could be no doubt that Captain Jaynes actually believed me enough that he felt the merits of the whole crazy plan should be weighed like gold. This was the man I had worked for, the one I was proud to call my family. This was the representative of that generation of leader caste that would take us to tomorrow.

“No, we shouldn’t leave this place,” Booker Jaynes interrupted my rush to euphoria. “Nope. No.”

“What? What the hell do you mean ‘no’? You believe me, don’t you? This place is out there. It could be complete luxury.”

“Could be, could be. There’s probably something out there, I trust you on that. That’s not what I’m saying at all. Sure, that all may be out there. But the problem, our problem with these people, is right here. They don’t respect us. They treat us like animals. What we need to do is stay here and fight that.”

“What are you talking about? You’re the one always talking about getting away from normal white folks. Why the hell aren’t you down to run away from these monster ones?” I demanded.

“Separatism; look where it got me. I come all the way across the damn ocean to the South Pole, and they still here. I was wrong. You can’t run from Whiteness. You have to stand and engage it. They got courts: we can litigate our freedom. They like ice sculpture: we can learn the medium and then outshine them with our own artistry. We will teach them to respect us. We will show them how beautiful we are. And then, then they will be forced to love us, and that is our only salvation.”

In movies, when someone is talking crazy, you are allowed to smack him. *Unfortunately, I lacked the speed to pop the lunatic in question, and the thickness of my snowsuit would have cushioned the blow anyway.

“Booker. They’re enslaving us. They’re not even humans. And they’re assholes! You’ve changed, man. You’ve sold out. This is because you’re screwing that ice ape, isn’t it? You got Stockholm syndrome or something.”

“Don’t talk about Hunka like that,” Captain Jaynes snapped back at me, his corded dreadlocks bouncing around behind his wagging head to add punctuation. “Shut your mouth. That is a special creature there. Don’t add insult by pretending like you don’t think she’s fine.”