Mat Johnson - Pym

“Don’t worry about him, dog. He sure wasn’t worried about you. You know that fool tried to eat you last night?” I told him that, yes, I did remember the cannibal conversation. “Conversation? Dog, when I got back, I had to pull that lunatic off you. Look at your leg.” I did. There was the perfect oval of human teeth marks traced in red on my pale calf.

“Yeah, I saw that when I was stripping you down; I put a little peroxide on it. That’ll heal,” Karvel told me, returning. “It’s a shame about your crew member. Some people, they can’t handle being alone down here. All that PC nonsense, it made men soft. Hell, the lesbos are stronger than most of the men nowadays. Me, I love it down here. You make your own reality in this place. The ultimate luxury. But I always lived in my own world, least that’s what my wife says.”

“I do say that,” Mrs. Karvel called from the kitchen. “Because it’s the damn truth, even before you dragged me down here.”

“So … what was with the strip-us-naked thing?” I used this opportunity to ask my host. I felt a big foot kick my knee at the end of this sentence and looked across the table to see Garth was staring me down. We were both currently clad solely in Karvel’s bathrobes. It didn’t seem like an inappropriate question.

“Hey, don’t worry, I ain’t one of those,” he said, laughing. “Just didn’t want to throw your clothes in the incinerator with you in them. Who knows what they’re contaminated with? We don’t know what happened out there in the world, do we? I was hoping you all would know, but it’s pretty clear not one of us does. One minute I’m sitting here watching Fox & Friends , then they start talking about some riot. I go get some nachos, next thing you know I come back and it’s all dark. It’s dark everywhere: TV, phone, Internet. Nothing.” Shaking his head, taking a swig of his beer, Karvel drops his voice both in volume and in pitch before continuing. “First thought: nukes. Iran, North Korea, Pakistan, they’ve been begging for it for years. But a nuclear attack couldn’t have taken out everything at once, not even a big one. So I’m thinking, something biological. Then you got a bigger list: add in Syria, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, Cuba, Somalia, Chechnya, China, and I sure as hell don’t trust Russia. Probably engineered or something, sitting dormant in everybody’s system while it spreads across the world. Silently spreading all across the world, see? The smart people, they been talking about this for years. Then on a set time, on a set date, boom, it goes off. Just like that, everyone’s dead. Blood in the street, blood pouring from eyes, babies screaming, dogs dying. Everything. We been talking about stuff like that for years, but still, when it happens …”

I looked at the painter for a moment, petrified. As he talked, Karvel became increasingly morose, his voice dropping with his shoulders, joining in with the chorus above. It was almost as if you could see the fear radiating off of him, that if you reached out your hand you could feel it blowing out his pores.

“Well, let’s hope that’s also highly unlikely, right? Could just be a satellite problem, or an international computer virus.”

“Yeah, that’s what I thought at first. Then the repair and supply plane stopped showing up. We were supposed to get that boiler fixed, damn thing probably won’t go over seventy-two degrees without exploding like the Fourth of July — it’s a menace. Course, they use computers for everything now, so who knows? Right? Let’s just hope it wasn’t the Rapture, ’cause if my wife finds out that Jesus came and didn’t take us with the righteous, she’s going to make my life a hell,” he said. “I’m kidding,” he followed with. I didn’t know about which part.

After the meal of brown bunnies with Kraft mac and cheese, “Jiffy” mix muffins, and heaping portions of Betty Crocker roasted garlic and cheddar mashed potatoes, Mrs. Karvel cleared our plates and even complimented us on our appetites. Mrs. Karvel was a plain woman who was also plainly a bit intrigued by Garth and me: her smile was a little too wide, her laugh a little too quick, her retreat to the kitchen a little too nervous. I thought this might be a reaction to our race, but that was probably more about me than about her. †I did know that the food was a welcome change from our moment of starvation and weeks of krakt, and after I was done I felt more like a man again. Garth, though, seemed like less of one, having regressed in the presence of his hero. For one thing, he couldn’t stop staring at the painter, darting his eyes in Karvel’s direction every time the man looked away. When not staring, Garth just rotated his head, slack jawed at this life-size terrarium Karvel had created.

“It’s a state-of-the-art 3.2 Ultra BioDome,” Karvel told us as he gave his tour. We had each been given a pair of his pajamas at supper’s conclusion. Unfortunately, like many men of big accomplishment, Karvel was a short guy. Only the pants fit us, and even those just made it as far as our shins before retreating. Above the waist we were naked, but thanks to Garth’s bloated physique, I didn’t mind this as much as I might have. In contrast to his C-cup breasts and overhanging gut, my own academic torso appeared almost sculpted.

“The 3.2 Ultra, that’s top of the line; you don’t get something like that at Sam’s Club. Hermetically sealed, fully self-contained. Got solar panels all over the roof, even. NASA contracted for these things to colonize Mars someday. The fauna, the exchange of CO 2and oxygen: it’s all set up so we can get our own ecosystem fully self-contained. You can’t even find it with infrared satellite imagery: the exhaust system shoots the hot air right down into the ice tunnels, which makes the heat signatures invisible. Not even the government could find us. This is the safest place on the earth, right here.”

When one was standing in the middle of the construction, it really was awe inspiring. I’d seen other faux habitats before, but never walked around freely within such a big one. ‡Even more stunning was the amount of detail that went into the realism of the place. The sky, although stuck in perpetual sunset, was no mere clunky mural painting, it was clearly an actual photograph of a Karvel original, blown up to span the hundreds of yards that constituted the entire ceiling. The sides of the structure were equally meticulous in their attempt to continue the illusion: the room did not appear to end. Rather, the foliage around us became too dense to see through. Besides the apartment that floated above the waterfall, there was no sign that we were not really outside. And yet, despite these nods to realism, the overall look of the room was utterly unreal. The grass we walked on was green, but it was too green. The water that ran through the rambling stream that went diagonally through the space was actually blue . The azaleas and roses and tulips that appeared across the space were all, simultaneously, in the most vivid bloom. It was as if we were walking through a world that had been colorized with markers by an enthusiastic eight-year-old.

“God created nature. I just improved on it.”

“NASA’s biodome looks like this?” I asked, hard-pressed to imagine this landscape populated by bookish men in white overcoats. Garth flashed me a look, darting his eyes back to his hero in fear of finding him offended, but Karvel was indulgent, even jovial.

“Oh no, no, no. This is all custom,” he said, walking to the water’s edge. Bending down on his knees, he took a cup into his hands, sipped some water, and motioned for us to do the same. “For years, I kept painting all of those pictures, trying to create a perfect world. One day, I’m standing there with a brush in my hand, and I realize: I don’t just want to look at this world, I want to live in it.”