Mat Johnson - Pym

“Do you know how to get there?” was the most important question I had to ask. Garth paused behind, and his threat definitely affected the speed of Pym’s answer, but I hoped not the content.

“Yes, of course. It’s a simple matter of tides. I could show you. Although, I must tell you: there is no point trying to set up trade with those niggers.”

Spurred by the last word of his statement, Garth gave the white man another smack, this time with the full force of annoyance. The blow left Pym on the ground, very, very unconscious.

“What the hell are you doing, man? He was going to tell us how to get to Tsalal!”

“I don’t like that word.” Garth shrugged. “And I ain’t the kind of nigga that’s gonna let some cracker say that to my face and get away with it.”

Garth showed some bit of regret by grabbing Pym by the collar and smacking him further, more lightly this time, in an attempt to wake him up. But it was clear that Pym would not be regaining consciousness for a while, and the longer we waited the more our immediate plans were at risk.

“Did you bring Dirk Peters’s bones from the base camp like I specifically asked you? I don’t want to lose them.”

“You’re a weird dude, Chris. Really, you’re not right sometimes. Yeah, I got it.”

“Good. We’re taking Pym with us too. That’s the only solution. We’re taking him with us, we can’t … I can’t let this chance slip away.”

“Man, do you not see what that fool did to the other two snowmobiles? We not carrying nobody. Besides, why do we need Tsalal? We already got somewhere to run to. We already got a plan, and I think it’s a pretty good one.”

“I’ll carry him. He’ll be my burden.”

With that, I rolled Pym’s limp body over and tied him up. Then I took the rest of the rope we could find in the truck’s cab and laid it out on the snow in the form of a Philadelphia soft pretzel. Once it was arranged, I poured water onto the line from the bottle that Garth kept in his coat, despite his complaining. And in seconds, when the water had frozen the rope and the snow around it into a hard shape and the makeshift sled was ready, I placed the knocked-out Pym on it and put our food supplies and my bag of bones beside him, securing all of them tightly so that they wouldn’t fall off during the quest ahead of us.

* In African American vernacular, it’s called “going upside the head,” and because of that I have always imagined an open-hand assault in a literal upswing, gliding past the ear and making contact with most of the temple.

† Pym said “black” the way really white people do: not like they are simply naming the pigment, which those people do in one quick syllable, but in the way that made the word specific to Negroes. This black had at least two syllables, b&-’lAk , and there was always enough emphasis on the second syllable to convey all of the anxiety the speaker had about my ethnic group as a whole. Ba-laaaaaaaak .

I have always loved quitting jobs. Whether because the job itself was repugnant or the people working at it with me, I have always held my right to quit my job as one of my most sacred privileges. An entire ritual surrounds this shedding of employment. First, there is the glorious moment when, after the unpleasantness of my position and my general unhappiness become overwhelmingly apparent to me, I say to myself (and I quote), “Fuck this. I don’t have to take this shit anymore. They think they can make me do what they want, but I’m out of here.” Ah, there it is, the almost orgasmic release I feel when I first make the profane declaration to myself, the feeling of reclaimed power coursing invisibly through me. But not just that: this singular moment, this coveted private knowledge is formed into a golden kernel and popped into existence again in my mind as a reaction to every unfortunate work-related moment I’m forced to endure before I make my destined departure. It’s such a glorious thing, the harboring of this secret knowledge, that in itself it has kept me at many a job even longer than I had originally intended, because just knowing that I would soon be free was the most effective of panaceas. So much so that there were times when even though it was impossible for me to quit I would say the same words to myself and mercifully delude my conscious mind that I could get the hell out of there if I wanted to.

As I marched through the snow with nothing but more snow in front and behind for hours, I began to wonder if all of my quitting dramatics might have some larger meaning. That they might in fact be evidence of some form of race memory from my genetic past. How many of my slave ancestors used such gimmicks to preserve their own sanity? Spending years obsessing over the intended escape that only they knew of. The intricate planning that they shared with no one. I have thought of their escapes before, and was usually impressed by the bravery and fear that must have accompanied those breakouts. But I forgot to think about the glory of all the acts of flight that never happened. And how powerful their inaction probably was to the slaves who did not perform them.

But me, I quit. I have quit very good jobs, and horrible ones. I have co-workers that I still miss, and co-workers that I regret never assaulting on the way out the door. And overall, I have enjoyed my resignations, enjoyed that last moment of walking away from each of the places that housed my misery, knowing that I would never have to return. I have walked down the street each time and bounced away, literally bounced in a skipping motion, knowing once more the effervescence of freedom.

And always, immediately after my departure, then comes the next feeling, the next sentence, which is just as inevitable as the first. It goes, “What the hell are you going to do now?” And thus begins my terror. The hell I was doing now was slogging forward through the wind, rope over my shoulder as I pulled, trying to ignore the pain in my right hand as I kept my grip on my makeshift sled. What I was going to do was ignore the sounds of the screaming Arthur Gordon Pym, who was surprisingly awake and still tied to the luggage pile behind me. What I was going to do was keep following Garth Frierson, staring at the back of his head like so many of his bus passengers must have, and trust as they did that the man knew where he was going.

“What is this shit?” Garth asked, staring at the sealskin container. It was Pym who responded.

“That, heathen, is krakt . It is the chosen meal of the Gods, the most perfect economy of taste and sustenance.” There was a snort that ended this description. I had untied Pym for the moment and replaced his many folded robes with one of the spare snowsuits just so that I could keep a better eye on what his limbs were up to. We sat out on the compacted snow taking a break, our footprints lost in the trail behind us, the mountain in front of us still infuriatingly distant. There was nowhere for Pym to run to, and this knowledge calmed him a bit. The fact that he seemed to be sobering up as our trip progressed contributed to his change in demeanor too.

“But does it taste good?” Garth retorted.

“No,” I said over my shoulder, and then continued relieving myself into a growing yellow hole a dozen yards past them.

“It is a staple of the very heavens,” Pym shot back, offended. “Everyone eats it there. Everyone eats it there for every meal, and for every occasion. It is the food of love. Everyone who consumes it has love for it.”

“Everyone?” Garth asked, and emboldened, he took a sample, dipping a bare finger into the gook and putting it on his tongue. “Dog, this is delicious” was Garth’s judgment.