Mat Johnson - Pym

“We got to get the hell out of here, dog. We can leave the doors open, see if Jeffree and C-note make it out from a distance, but this sitting and shitting thing ain’t going to work,” Garth said, his eyes stuck on the door to the hallway behind us. And Garth was right. His face was covered in toothpaste, but he was right. Our gas tanks were full, the engines started. I was sitting on a bright pink bike with floral decals, but I didn’t even care at this point. We hit the door opener and were out onto the snow at full speed the moment the gate had risen high enough for us to duck through.

Garth and I were about five hundred yards away, steering a path clear of the enemy camp, when the first explosion went off behind us. Such was the power of the blast and the sound it produced that I lost control of my speeding snowmobile from the vibrations. Still, it was nothing compared to the second explosion, which left my ears ringing to the point of deafness and knocked me completely over, my snowmobile skidding off beyond me.

I righted myself on the snow as soon I had gathered my senses. Behind me, a quarter of Karvel’s amazing dome was now nothing more than fire and ruin, the section where the boiler was situated consumed by a fire that spread across the surface of the roof.

“Jeffree,” I said aloud.

“It’s not their fault,” Garth said back at me, but my mind had not even gotten that far. The destruction of a quarter of the 3.2 Ultra BioDome, and the impending destruction of the rest of the building, paled in its catastrophic weight in comparison to the long line of ice caves that I could see were now imploding.

The ground turned from resolute to uncertain. It shook violently beneath us, until both of us were floored once more by the power and length of the quake. And even when our immediate ground grew less spastic, the roar of the landscape around us told of a destruction just beginning. Coffins of ice collapsing upon themselves where, only moments before, the still unbroken surface had sat placid. Yard by yard, the heat-weakened ice caves tumbled upon themselves, lines of jumbled ice succumbing like so many dominoes in a line of destruction I could see moving off into the sunset and toward the heart of the Tekelian empire.

Even Pym in his near-comatose state was momentarily awakened by the catastrophe, and had an opinion on the matter. Sitting up in the boat, staring left and right to see the surface collapsing into canals that stretched as far as I could witness, Pym seemed almost unfazed by the enormity of it.

“And so the heavens fell to earth,” he yelled when the worst had subsided, taking another lethal swig straight from the bottle’s neck before passing out again.

* Or at least I haven’t.

The circumstances connected with the late sudden and distressing death of Mr. Pym are already well known to the public through the medium of the daily press. It is feared that the few remaining chapters which were to have completed his narrative, and which were retained by him, while the above were in type, for the purpose of revision, have been irrecoverably lost through the accident by which he perished himself. This, however, may prove not to be the case, and the papers, if ultimately found, will be given to the public.… Peters, from whom some information might be expected, is still alive, and a resident of Illinois, but cannot be met with at present. He may hereafter be found, and will, no doubt, afford material for a conclusion of Mr. Pym’s account.

— Note, Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym

IT would seem that The True and Interesting Narrative of Dirk Peters was that promised material that would reveal the true end of Arthur Pym’s Narrative , despite the fact that it was never delivered to the public during Peters’s lifetime. *Of course, Dirk Peters did make the effort to construct those missing chapters, and his memory should not be impugned just because he (unlike Booker T. Washington) was unable to hire a ghostwriter who could sufficiently convey his story. Peters’s attempt to secure the services of Edgar Allan Poe to relay his story may have failed, but this was not to be the end of his ambitions in the matter.

In a folder at the bottom of the Dirk Peters papers sat an envelope somewhat different from the others in the collection. For one thing, this packet contained stubs from what appeared to be both train and ocean-liner tickets, both of which were dated in the spring of 1895. The note that accompanied them is even more difficult to decipher than the muddled script in the rest of the collection. Its lines are shaken, the curves large and slow — this would of course make sense if it was indeed written in 1895, by which time Peters would have at least been in his eighties, his poor penmanship having even further degraded. Here it is in its entirety:

Arrived in Amiens. The canals make it smell something horrible. I went to the writer’s house, had a copy of 20,000 Leagues under [ sic ] Sea , going to tell him I like it, I want his help. I’m thinking that’s a good one, on account of it’s got an Indian in it, like me. That Nemo was a seafaring one two [ sic ], so if he can tell his story I don’t see why the man can’t tell mine. I speak a little of the Frenchy, so I plan on Parla vousing [ sic ] that to the man. Seems the book selling is behind him, and this Verne man he working at the politics. I ask the locals, they say just look for him. Then I see him like they say. It’s easy to see because the man got a bad limp, in his left leg, like the kind you get after you been shot. Well, I start feeling sorry for him, being a cripple, then I’m walking up to him telling him who I was and what I’m wanting. But then, after he listens for a bit and I tell him how that Poe man took my story from me and now for the truth I want Jules Verne writing in stead, being as my writing boy, he hits me with his cane! I run off a bit and then I’m glad he got a gimp leg, because I do believe he was still trying to kick me.

While there is no other historical record of this interaction, this final effort on Peters’s part to let his memoir be heard, it should be noted that Le Sphinx des Glaces emerged from Verne’s publisher just two years later. †While the account that Verne gives bears little resemblance to the one Dirk Peters hastily relayed and is largely a hackneyed attempt to find closure to Poe’s original tale, there are points of interest nonetheless. Verne’s sequel has a black ship chef as well, much like Poe’s novel. Describing this chef’s reaction to being cast away on an iceberg, Verne wrote, “As a Negro, who cares little about the future, shallow and frivolous like all of his race, he resigned himself easily to his fate; and this is, perhaps, true philosophy.”

* Material is an excellent word for Dirk Peters’s collection; debris would be another less generous one.

† Or as this book is also known: The Sphinx of the Ice Fields .

ON our return journey to the place where our saga began, we made “good time,” although we did not have one. With rope tied from both of our vehicles to the boat, Garth and I plowed forward side by side while behind us, without clue or concern, Arthur Gordon Pym drunkenly continued sleeping. The journey back is often less labored than the trail blazed forward, and this was no different. We didn’t stop unless we found ourselves cut off by one of the newly formed ravines created by a tunnel’s collapse. We didn’t talk, and in truth my ears were still ringing so much from the last explosion that I wouldn’t have heard much anyway. We just followed our own tracks, and the tracks of the Tekelian war party that followed them, both of which were still frozen into the powder. The journey was so swift that I didn’t realize we were even close when I first saw the billowing gray smoke rising in the distance. A half hour later, on our arrival at the scene, I barely recognized it to be the remains of the Creole base camp, our former home.