Mat Johnson - Pym

“Great. Eat as much as you want, my man,” I told him. “You sure you know where you’re going, right?” I asked, but Garth was too engrossed in his culinary discovery to answer.

“Where the hell are we going, Garth?”

I didn’t want to seem like the child on a long trip calling out Are we there yet? but yet and still, were we? We were stopped for yet another “bathroom” break, as it was clear that the krakt was proving too rich for the mortal stomach of Garth Frierson, who at least did me the honor of going downwind to shit himself this time.

I’d given up tying Arthur Pym’s hands an hour before, since there was no point to it. For the most part, as I trudged along behind the tracks that Garth laid down just before me, Pym was the least of my fears. Mostly, I worried about Garth. I watched through the small cloud of snow in his wake as he stomped along, the fat of his hips swiveling to get him there. I watched as he Karvel-spotted, removing the picture of the mountain peak from his jacket and raising it to whatever new vista we approached. And I waited. Impatiently. Trying to calculate the point at which our bodies would be sufficiently depleted so that even the life of servitude behind me was literally beyond my reach. And only after that horror became too much to contemplate did I think of Pym instead. And I thought of something. I turned my body and mind to Pym, who was trying to scrape the last of the krakt out of the empty seal bladder onto his fingers.

“Arthur Pym, why’d you say ‘the Gods found you’?” The Caucasian turned up from his feeding to look at me inquisitively but said nothing. Although centuries old, he didn’t look more than thirty-eight. A drunkard’s watery thirty-eight but a lot better than most two-hundred-year-olds nonetheless. Down here, white didn’t crack either.

“You know,” I continued, “when we were talking back at that pub before, why did you say ‘the Gods found you’ about the Tekelians, when I found them? I discovered the Tekelian at the base of the chasm. That was me.”

“You are not half so clever as you imagine, Christopher Jaynes. Did you really believe yourself to be so lucky as to trip upon their perfection? Did you really think it was you that had the element of surprise?”

The tunnels that led to our base camp — immediately I made the connection. My mind lurched forward, fueled by explosive possibilities. The Tekelians had been watching us all along . They had planned for all of it to go down.

In a rush of euphoria, I began to believe that the entirety of humanity was probably still alive and carrying on in the rest of the world without bother. But then I remembered the emails and the missing workers’ boat, and my mind came crashing down once more. There was no way the ice monsters could have made their own computers from bones and snow, or made phones to cancel work orders.

“Do you intend to starve me? For if murder was your dark intent, it would have been better to kill me back in Tekeli-li rather than drag me this far.” It was two hours later, and Pym had a good point on that one; even though it had been only a few hours, I was hungry too.

“Garth, two protein bars, please. No, maybe you should make that four.” It was a hard thing to ask for; I’d eaten so many before we left that the mere thought of those faux chocolate fiber bricks threatened my gut. Still, it was better than the pangs of hunger which I was already starting to feel again.

“Ain’t no more, dog,” Garth said, not even bothering to put his binoculars down and face me.

“What? Of course there are more. There was a whole unopened box; just take one out of that pile.”

“Ate ’em,” the big man said while looking back through the binocular lenses. He kept scouring the horizon as if his magical mountain would just jump up and reveal itself if he stared at the distant ridges long enough.

“ ‘Ate ’em ’? That is a sentence fragment, Garth, among other things. What you’re missing primarily is a defining noun. Your subject. If you are going to eat all of the food, you could at least say ‘I ate them.’ If only because now you’re going to have to watch us starve.”

Garth didn’t respond. As he walked on toward the ridge, he just kept looking around.

By our next stop, the tip of my nose had gone numb: there was barely any of it showing past my hood. Mine was a wide, Negroid nose, and yet and still its tip had gone numb. For a good half hour, I lost Garth in front of me, his massive figure growing smaller on the horizon until the dot that he had become simply vanished. Pym trudged not far behind me, just one wrist now bound and attached by rope to the sled. The white man complained bitterly the entire way, but luckily the wind blew loudly enough that the specifics of his discontent were lost. It started to seem like maybe Garth had gone on to die alone and without accusations, because the idea that we were actually moving forward toward something seemed absurd. Not even looking up anymore, I just stared at the ground. Following the tracks of Garth’s boots print for print, at some point I just stopped thinking, became hypnotized by watching the powder as I trudged by. Given my state, if it wasn’t for Garth’s screaming, I would have slammed into him when I eventually found him standing there.

Garth Frierson was yelling, but as I took his presence in, pulling back my hood to better hear him, I saw that he was doing something else even more spectacular: Garth was jumping. Jumping up and down, pumping his plump, gloved fist as he did so. Despite my exhaustion, it was a moving sight: given the general rotund shape of his outline, his actions gave Garth the appearance of a blubbery ball, bouncing up and down at improbable intervals.

“We’re here!” he finally managed to communicate to me.

“The camp? You see the camp? Where is it?” I called back to him.

“The mountain ridge! That’s it, dog. That’s the one we’re looking for, over there.”

Following Garth’s pointed finger, I did see the mountain ridge. It was true, it was the same one that I saw in the painting. Then, looking past and around that landmark, I saw something else. I saw that there was nothing out here. No sign of an eco-habitat, no sign of life, nothing. If not for the printed image that Garth had of this very spot, I would have assumed there had never been any form of human contact with this place at all. But I was sure it was this spot, just as Garth was as he held up the image and compared it to the landmarks around us.

“This is it!” he kept declaring.

“Yeah, this is it. Fine. But what are we going to do now, Garth?” I asked, searching around for salvation and seeing nothing but snowdrifts.

“So is this to be the site of our grave?” asked Pym, sitting on the sled as he massaged the blood back into his feet.

We pitched a tent. As we did, the wind picked up and carried a storm cloud directly over our heads, then kept it there, dumping its snow down on us as if we had asked for more. By the time I began to drag my gear inside the thin nylon walls, the top of our shelter was already lined with an inch of powder. I thought, Good, that will keep some of the wind out, because I had decided to lie to myself for a while until there was some truth worth hearing.

We dragged whatever we had inside the tent before it was lost in the storm. With the last of my strength, I took the gloves off my nearly numb hands and zipped down the front tent flaps as if this act would magically turned the fabric into the sturdiest of doors. Hunched over, turning around, I saw Pym at my canvas bag, my treasure. He’d opened the strap at its mouth. In an act completely lacking in respect, he’d pulled out a blackened and aged femur and was holding it as if it was a drumstick he might want to take a bite of.