Mat Johnson - Pym

An hour later, we were headed for the roof. Fortunately, Mrs. Karvel had been less than exact in her following of her husband’s orders on our arrival, and instead of burning our snowsuits, she’d just washed them instead. We dressed and made our way back to the terrarium’s exit hatch, located behind a discreet and wholly cosmetic cave formation, itself hidden by an abundant cluster of hydrangea shrubs that distracted attention in a pink trademarked by Mattel.

Past the door, what was revealed was the hard, cold, industrial shell that kept our controlled world from the real one’s chaos. Here, the sound of the all-powerful boiler echoed violently and you could feel it in the air like humidity. A narrow corridor of metal and concrete rose up several stories to the ceiling, lined with storage containers and what appeared to be freezers. There was even a sailboat back here, wrapped in a tarp. It wasn’t a yacht, but it was still three times the size of a canoe, just small enough to ride the fifty yards down the Kool-Aid stream if you were so inclined. Past that, we saw the red “exit” signs pointed to an open garage door, where his and her snowmobiles with racing stripes sat waiting. On a metal balcony far above, I saw the image of Mrs. Karvel, so out of place in this industrial environment, waving at us. Braving one of the grated ladders that were embedded into the outer shell, Garth and I huffed our way up to her, climbing two stories of metal catwalks to do so. When we arrived on the right level, however, Mrs. Karvel had disappeared. It was only after we walked out to the exact place we had seen her that I noticed there was an actual room hidden up here, off to the side. And that’s when the smell hit me, followed by the image of Mrs. Karvel sitting on a large cardboard box, smoking, a heavy pink parka draped over her wiry frame. The rolled joint smoking in her hand.

“I grow it over to the side of the waterfall, near the boiler. Gets good heat,” she said with a shrug, by way of explanation. “Usually come out here, light up first, then do the washing, manage the machinery, organize the meals. By the time I’m done, you can’t really smell it on me quite so much. Not with all that perfume he’s got going in there. He knows, but, y’know …” She trailed off, the smoke from her narrow spliff dancing optimistically in front of her.

It was then that I noticed something even more shocking: a cold breeze that I could feel even in all of my padding. The window just past Mrs. Karvel was open. I must have let out a bit of a gasp at the sight of this, because my sound made her shoot her head back up, and her mind back into the present. It was Garth, though, who said what I was thinking.

“Hey,” a wounded sound, less a word than an emotion. “I thought this place was supposed to be hermetically sealed and self-contained and all that?”

“Yeah, well, you gut a couple hundred feet of high-yielding plant life from the plans and replace that with lawn sod and rhododendrons, and you kind of have to throw that whole ‘self-contained’ thing out the window.” And then, coming to the end of her smoke, Mrs. Karvel did just that, flicking her roach out the open window in such a practiced, casual motion that I imagined there must be a huge pile of similar butts forming a frozen mountain in the snow below.

“There’s the door over there, that’ll get you up on the roof, boys. I’ll just wait here till you’re done.” Lighting a cigarette from a produced pack, Mrs. Karvel motioned to the metal door with her elbow. The little room was clearly a storage room, filled with tobacco cartons and identical yellow boxes with illustrated dead vermin stuck on the sides. “Tommy likes bunnies, but he sure don’t like rats,” his wife offered by way of explanation. Mrs. Karvel had stacked some of the poison boxes in the shapes of chairs and a table, a group of eight with an old blanket on top formed a makeshift bed against the far wall, rumpled women’s magazines lined in a neat pile just beside it. It looked poisonous but comfortable.

“Mrs. Karvel, you don’t have to wait. This could take a long time, trying to find out which of the solar panels is making the noise, out of a whole roof of them,” I told her.

“Nope, that won’t take you long. There’s only one out there, and they’re all together on one hinge.” Mrs. Karvel took a long puff on her cigarette after that. “The original redesign, it had solar panels all over the roof, but then Tommy changed that so he could add satellite dishes aiming in six different angles. Y’know, so that damn satellite radio never goes on the fritz or nothing, God forbid. The solar panels there, they’re just so our accountant could get us a tax break. Mostly, this whole place runs on gas. Tommy likes to forget that.”

“Well then, what will you do when your gas runs out?” I asked in disbelief.

Mrs. Karvel thought about it for a moment, sucked on her menthol, then blew a cloud out. “ ’Spect that solar panel is going to get mighty useful.”

The entire roof surface, we saw, standing outside, was painted in the colors of the American flag. Red and white stripes ran in front of us, and there was a patch of blue with white stars all the way at the other end, in the corner. If he was trying to hide his heaven, he wasn’t trying very hard. The dome was covered in snowdrifts along its sides, part of the reason we hadn’t seen it at first when we originally arrived here. It was a flat roof at the very top, curved on the sides; it wasn’t as much a dome as it was a giant jelly mold. But it was all-American. Whether Karvel wanted to make sure the helicopters had the right place or he thought Old Glory was some kind of talisman, I never discovered. Even the communications satellite dishes had been painted, each according to the stripe it sat on.

We sat too, Garth and I, on the flat roof of Thomas Karvel’s BioDome for a long time. Appraising this scene. Sitting in our snowsuits with our asses cold and numb, but not as numb as the rest of me was becoming. The solar panel was right beside us, positioned perfectly to take the place of one of the flag’s white stars. It was the size of a Ping-Pong table. On a good day, a day of sun and light, it might have offered enough power to operate the coffee machine back inside. This was good news, because when this place ran out of power, we were going to freeze to death, and I imagined a good cup of coffee might bring comfort as we died.

“It’s about to get dark down here. Not nighttime dark, but winter dark. There won’t be any sunlight for months. These panels don’t work without sunlight. And there’s just one. What’s he going to do then?” Garth said, his voice cracking.

“What’s Karvel going to do? Man, are you crazy? Forget him. What the hell are we going to do?” I asked. Garth said nothing. For a long time, he kept saying it. I started talking again when I felt like he was going to start crying.

“First we have to get them to turn down the heat in there, turn down the lights more, anything we can. Then we have to go get some oil. There’s a tanker back at our base camp. We could get our old solar panels too; even the Creole camp had more than this.”

“And the rifler. Maybe we can drill for some damn oil.”

“We don’t know anything about refining crude oil.”

“Dog,” Garth told me, “I’ll burn that shit in a cup to stay warm if I have to.” Thinking of this image, he drifted off.

“And now we bring the others. Angela, my cousin, the other guys. This is our leverage, Karvel can’t say no now.”

“The snow monkeys,” Garth whispered so low I could barely hear him over the wind. His eyes widened as he said it, and his jaw dropped when he was done and I could see the horror that was engulfing him.