Mat Johnson - Pym

Already, Booker Jaynes was brushing himself off, preparing to pretend that this discussion and my visit had never happened and the new road he was choosing was a sane one. He had lost it, it was clear. His Jaynes eccentricities had misguided him, and his Jaynes stubbornness now ensured he would go all the way. “No point in running anymore, can’t you see that. We stay, and we struggle. Because the struggle is who we are,” he told me with finality.

Burdened by a profound sense of disappointment, I climbed once more from the bowels of the underground whiteness to meet the yellow sun above. I had intended to return from my trip with my three comrades, each high with the hope of freedom. What I returned with instead was a week’s supply of krakt, a gift from Captain Jaynes which I held on my shoulder in an oily sealskin sack. “She makes it from her own recipe. Take it or I’ll eat it all myself,” my cousin said proudly as he gave me the parting offering, along with a promise to get Hunka to buy Angela from her captors.

Beyond those emotions related to my failure, I began to realize that there were other feelings boiling up within me as well. With every step out of Tekeli-li, I began to wonder if this would be my last moment in this improbable community, an idea I considered with absolutely no sense of nostalgia. So regret-free were my actions that when I came closer to the surface I began to experience a wave of paranoia as well: surely it could not be this easy. Surely, if I had realized that I was leaving, others must have realized it as well, noticed my absence already, and were at the moment making preparations to stop me. Not Augustus, of course, but others more invested in my servitude. Maybe even Sausage Nose himself. In the light of this fear, I stopped several times along that final stretch of the path just to listen for footsteps behind me, ones I was sure I almost heard before I acknowledged that it was probably nothing more than an echo.

I found Garth in the truck’s cab, asleep and prone, feet up on the steering wheel, his socks reeking like deep-fried corn chips. Instead of taking a seat and warming myself by the truck’s running heater, I chose instead to leave the stash of krakt on the floor in front of Garth, then inspect the snowmobiles that would provide our escape. I wanted to be gone from Tekeli-li now. I wanted to have this place farther behind me with every second, lost in a cloud of snow and memory. I didn’t know much about mechanics, but I did know enough to understand that the internal wires and tubes of the vehicles should not be strewn loosely around the snow, packed into the ice by an orgy of footprints. I knew enough to know the vehicles shouldn’t have their front visors smashed, or be lying on their sides, hoods open and guts ripped out, metal corpses even more still because of their ruin. I brushed the snow from the snowbikes as if I could comfort them, tears starting to build in my freezing eyes. It was during the process of doing this that I saw him, caught a glance of him in a cracked rearview mirror sneaking up behind me to observe my mourning.

“Arthur. Arthur Gordon Pym!” I yelled to my tormentor. The culprit still held a piece of bone in his hand, preparing to do more damage. If it really was him, if he really was that old, I suddenly felt as if it would be my duty to nature itself to kill him. In that moment, eyes blurry, it was clear to me. If Pym was the destroyer of my dreams, then I would be the destroyer of the dreamer.

“You did this,” I yelled at him, with as much venom as those three words could carry. Pym paused just out of lunging distance, kept his arms open at his sides in case he needed to spring into some form of action.

“You would speak to me about what I have done, you dark character? I know what it is that you are doing,” the Caucasian said to me, and when he did the full fear of our discovery and possible punishment hit me, and I felt a cold chill well beyond the one in the air.

“What the hell are you talking about?” I yelled back at Pym. Looking at all the tubes and wires at my feet, I thought nothing appeared so damaged by his human hands as not to be salvageable. If I knew how to stick them back into the machines properly, which I didn’t.

“You have a secret treasure trove of the prized sweetmeats, I have no doubt. But you, sir, have been discovered!” Food. That was what he thought this was about in its entirety. There was a tone to his voice that was as self-righteous as it was wrong, and it warbled and bounced just like his finger did as it pointed at me.

“Why would I be hiding the snack cakes if I knew they could buy my freedom, Pym? That’s not even logical.”

“So you say, so you say, but logic is exactly what it is that I apply to your chaos. For if that is not what you are doing, why else did I see your mate attempting to harness your carriages, except to …” There was a pause here, a moment when the two of us were just standing out there in the snow, and I could almost see the cold synapses fire in his brain as Arthur Gordon Pym came to the realization of what Garth’s and my true intentions were. “You scoundrel! You foolish beast! Do you really mean to steal your person from your rightful owner? Not only have you been a lazy slave but now you indulge in this madness as well? Are you such a fool that you intend to run away from Heaven itself? Has the taint of your blood made you so black and stupid that you can’t—” Pym stopped abruptly, taking the time to recover from the blow that Garth landed on the back of his neck. Garth’s big hands were like leather gloves filled with pudding, and the sound of the impact reverberated well beyond the site of impact. Spinning around to look at his assailant, Pym jumped forward so that now he was trapped between Garth and me. As he took in the massive figure of the bus driver, augmented even further by the layers of thermal padding to keep Garth’s flesh warm, Arthur Pym suddenly remembered that he should be afraid of us.

“On further consideration and reflection, I must say I am sorry for the insults. You and your brethren make excellent slaves. You are truly born for it. Much more so than those poor specimens from Tsalal, I assure you.”

It was that ‘excellent slaves’ part that made Garth walk toward Pym, landing another slap to the back of his nearly perfectly round skull, his balding raven mop bouncing in response. It was the line about Tsalal that startled me, though. I held a hand up to Garth, beckoning him to pause his thrashing. Tsalal . Oh, the sound of it. Even from Pym’s dismissive lips it struck a fire in part of my soul that I worried had gone frozen. Tsalal . The dream was out there. And it was with Pym’s pronunciation of the word, with all its slithering and disdain, that I knew it was within reach. That the greatest revelation was still in front of us.

“Tsalal? What do you know about Tsalal?” Even if there was no world left above us anymore, did that make this goal of discovering Eden any less lofty? Maybe now it was even more so. Tsalal was the world my crewmates and I were destined for.

“I have known of the island, for I discovered it, and the Tekelians did so before me. They sought to use its natives as a source of labor. But the human crop, it was useless. Unfit for proper bondage. Now they grow wild, I presume.”

Trying to calm myself, to avoid betraying how much I wanted this information and letting Pym know he could extort it from me, I continued. “And what else do you know about these Tsalalians?”

“They are black,” Pym said as if this said it all, pausing after each of these three words so that I could perceive the weight of them. †