Mat Johnson - Pym

“But sir, it doesn’t have to be this way,” Garth asserted, jutting his gut forward in the center of the assembly, as if to use his girth to stop the momentum of the room. “Why not — I don’t know — just listen to what the snow monkeys are saying. I mean, they have actual demands here, right? I’m saying, can’t we just turn down the heat? That’s what they’re asking, right? We can just turn down the heat and figure out some other way to keep warm. We could save energy, you know? I bet if you turned off that waterfall for one, that alone would make the boiler chill a little. Dim the lights. I don’t know. And then we could just turn the heat down to fifty degrees or something—”

“Fifty degrees! You’re talking to me about fifty degrees? You lost your mind? If I wasn’t worried the boiler wouldn’t blow to high hell, I’d have it running at eighty. Fifty?! Forget fifty, why not thirty-two degrees? You drop it to fifty, then they’re going to want it below that. You show them weakness now, and where does it stop? Where?” Karvel’s face was flushed with indignation. Motioning with his arms to provide an invisible canvas, Karvel painted this horrific vision for the room. “Hell, we could even have snow in here.” He spun around on his heels after that declaration, joining his wife in her culinary preparations.

“Well, all right then. That sounds settled to me.” Angela was the first to break the silence. It was no small thing that her legal husband was out there, serving the savages of the cold as we spoke. If she could move forward, if she could move on, what could the rest of us say?

Although Garth’s complaints were ignored almost as quickly as they were registered, it should be said that the final decision to poison the Tekelian Army wasn’t made quickly. There were logistics to consider. For one, we had no real knowledge of their physiognomy: would this even work? What if it offered the beasts no more than a case of heartburn or just left them groggy?

“We’ll feed them up on the roof. We got some foldout chairs, some pullout tables. It’s too hot in here anyway. And if they get a little drunk, hopefully it will be enough to just push them off the side.”

“ ‘The side’?” Angela asked, confused.

“Yeah. The side of the roof. That ought to take care of them.” Mr. Karvel took up the direction. “Sure thing it’ll work. When times get tough, you got to go back to the simple things to get them done. You do what you have to. And we have to survive. Even if we lose the dome, we have to survive.”

It was simplistic and brute, and nobody argued with it because nobody had a better idea. Each of us on our own mumbled about the improbability of it all, but the simple fact was that there were no other legitimate options. Even my Plan B of getting that little boat and sailing to the Tsalalian refuge of blackness depended on us getting out of this dome alive, and that seemed impossible now. The Tekelians knew of the exhaust tunnel, and they had seen Jeffree here as well, so it was safe to assume that that exit would soon be obstructed.

In our absence, Augustus managed fairly well in the freezer. I went to visit him as Carlton Damon Carter and Angela helped Mrs. Karvel prepare her feast, to at least alert him of the invasion and take some of the prepoisoned Betty Crocker golden food cake out to where the creature lay in his robe on a sack of frozen burritos as if it was furniture. There was a moment there as I watched him that I empathized not only with this individual, who had been so kind to me, but with the race that he was connected to. These were living creatures, regardless of how abhorrent I found their social values to be. It was so easy to let that xenophobic element within me, that part inclined to dehumanize those different from myself, have its way. But it was my duty to fight this mentality. Watching my creature gorge upon his yellow cake, shoving his head into the plate much like a spaniel does, crumbs erupting around his jowls, I reminded myself that, though his mannerisms were bestial, he was still a living, caring being.

The food that covered the dining room table ready to be transported upstairs, it looked like it could kill you, but kill you by clogging your arteries or sending the kind of fat that sits in your gut and waits to stop your heart when you’re not looking. Now the poison, it did have a smell. But that smell was as sweet and inviting as the marshmallows that melted over the tops of those salad bowls of candied yams. All the food that was in the white porcelain and Tupperware containers had enough rat poison in it to kill the kind of vermin that stalked the streets of Tokyo, knocking over buildings in black-and-white movies. All the food in the Fiestaware serving bowls was good enough to eat — good enough to eat and still live to the next day to talk about what a great meal was. We were betting that the monsters didn’t know what poison smells like. We were betting that none of them collected Fiestaware either.

Once the food was properly prepared, Mrs. Karvel, triumphant, came forth upon the roof plateau to announce its impending arrival. All seemed as civil as the circumstance could allow for. Arthur Gordon Pym even volunteered to help us bring the serving trays out onto the landing, and for a while I saw him sitting in Mrs. Karvel’s storage room, holding the exit door open. Presumably Pym was there to oversee any foul play, but the gift of a bottle of Kentucky bourbon quickly stilled his own apprehensions, a distraction we’d counted on. What we weren’t counting on was that our party would be such a success. After we brought all the food upstairs, all the little paper plates and plastic silverware, after we located the foldout tables and chairs and removed them from their storage, passing them up along a bucket line to the roof exit, after it was all ready and we knew there was no turning back, again we opened the roof exit door. It was windy outside, and we hadn’t even started when a whole pile of napkins blew past us and off the edge, but the napkins were white, and when they hit the snow you couldn’t see the litter.

And there they were. All of the warriors, which we expected, but more. Beyond them, all of the women of Tekeli-li. And then among the females, I saw them. All the little Tekelian children had been brought as well. Screaming gleefully at the feast they were about to indulge in. Little, hairy albino kids of no more than six and seven, four and five, one, two, and three. Mrs. Karvel looked up at the spectacle of youth as she carried in her deadly Sara Lee easy cook and bake rolls, and I believe I saw her almost collapse for a second. It might have been the wind whipping across there or the slippery, slight curve of the plateau, but I know her shoulders did buckle for a moment and I thought she might fall down at the sight of them. They were hideous, but they were young in the way that’s familiar across species: clumsy, endearing, trusting, innocent. But Mrs. Karvel recovered. Without anyone other than me noticing. And she kept walking to the serving table, looking down at her wares without breaking her smile.

“Oh, you brought quite a crowd. I hope y’all also brought your appetites!”

THE Tekelians sat on folding chairs on the roof, their asses stretching the fabric halfway to the ground, their minds conscious only of their own fingers and the food that they grasped and that stuck to every crevice and nail. The creatures ate without utensils, ate in the most natural way, but also in a style that was completely alien to me. There was a time when I lived in West Africa that I had to train myself to eat solely with my right hand. *Despite this simple task, I couldn’t do it. Food fell from my fingers and back into the communal bowl, and I longed for the ease and dignity of a simple fork. But there is grace in hand-to-mouth eating for those who are used to it. These creatures were experts at their task. They were so focused on their meals that not a crumb was spilled, leaving only the smallest of visible evidence of their feast on the plates. They ate it up. And what they ate was poison. And they didn’t seem to mind that either.