Pym (20 page)

“Booker, what if the ships never come back for us? What will we do if it takes a week for telecommunications to be restored? What if it takes a month? What if we can’t reach the world for years?”

“Then we will do what our people have always done: we will wait for our chance. And we will endure,” Booker Jaynes shot back, the words filled with disdain and disbelief that I would need this answer found. Returning to his crushing, he seemed more at peace in it than I had seen him in any of his Creole desk duties. Crunch, crunch, crunch. Stomp, stomp, stomp. That was his only answer. There was another overtone to his statement as well, one that I digested in the long, cold walk back to my own tunnel, my own servitude. There was relief in his voice. As if the man’s worst fears in life had been realized and justified all in the same moment.

*
I realize
honkies
is a racial slur and the Tekelians might not even technically count as human, but this was the word that Booker Jaynes kept using and as such was stuck in my subconscious as well. In addition, the noises that the creatures made to communicate did have some literal honking sounds, which made the slur that much more difficult for me to shed.

†
There are two types of lazy bosses. One is so lazy that they make you do not only your own work but theirs too. Worse, they lie to you about it, unloading all responsibility for their actions. The other is so lazy that not only do they not do their own work but they can’t even be bothered to provide you work to do. These bosses lie as well, but only to themselves, passively. The first is the hardest boss to work for, the second the easiest. In Augustus I sensed immediately which one I had.

‡
Fufu is a starchy paste made of boiled yams or cassava that comprises the staple of the Akan peoples. It is also used as glue for minor automobile repairs by tro-tro drivers in parts of Accra, Tema, and Kumasi.

§
Unlike the young of most mammals, the Tekelian children managed to be diminutive and large eyed and yet still utterly unendearing by my human standards. Their little white piranha teeth helped.

‖
This process I would soon be acquainted with as a method of preparing drinking water.

a
The way she was sitting, leg up and leaning on her arm, disgusted me. Later I realized it was a mockery of the Farah Fawcett poster many of my white friends had when I was a child.

NATHANIEL Latham was a Morehouse Man, and to me this said everything about him. This is a distinctive breed, one possible to identify without the sight of a college ring or knowledge of its academic history. There is the entrepreneurial optimism, visible in his buoyant steps, there is the near-religious belief in the self and a refusal to acknowledge that any obstacle could thwart him. The Morehouse Man is a uniquely American creation and shares the young nation’s traditional certainty that the days ahead will be greater than the days behind. His clothes are crisp, conservative but energetic, ever waiting for that magazine cover that will one day reflect on his success. The Morehouse Man, at his finest, is America at its finest. Once, while sitting at a dusty café in Accra, I looked past my dog-eared copy of
The Garies and Their Friends
to see the red polo shirt, perfectly trimmed dreads, and platinum watch of a Morehouse Man sitting at the table next to me. What struck me about the scene was not seeing such a familiar sight thousands of miles away at a little burger stand in West Africa. No, what I found most impressive was that even so far out of context I could recognize the Morehouse Man, which a conversation with this brother soon confirmed.

Unfortunately, while Morehouse had trained Nathaniel Latham for many things, none of those things had to do with physical survival in Antarctica. His college had forged Nathaniel’s will, filled him with enough optimism to convince him that his will was sufficient to overcome even the most absurd situations, but as for practical polar matters, such as choosing proper metal studs for ice spelunking, it was woefully inadequate. I say this because after only a week of walking back and forth between his captors’ lodging and his wife’s, Nathaniel’s top-of-the-line, custom-order boots’ lack of proper studding had resulted in a sprained ankle. Sure, Nathaniel’s soft feet were kept warm, but on the iced-over floors on the path that separated our two neighborhoods he would have been better off with spiked golf shoes. I heard Nathaniel moving outside my door five nights after Jeffree lost his eye, calling my name, calling out a bunch of cusses as well, although those weren’t directed at me.

“Yo, Chris. You watch out for Angela, okay? That’s your job,” Nathaniel told me, not even bothering to look at me directly. I felt a shameful rush at this request, like he was acknowledging that had always been my job, no matter what role he served for her at the moment. As Nathaniel talked to me, he limped forward a bit, and his injury became apparent. “This ankle is killing me; it’s puffed up like a … Forget it. But I’m not going to be able to walk back here for a couple of days. Maybe a week. I should really take the week because I need to recuperate. I’m going to start getting migraines, at this rate.”

“Did you tighten your shoestrings at the tops? That will brace the ankle,” I generously offered.

“Yeah, I tightened the goddamn shoestrings, Chris. Jesus Christ. What do you think is keeping me upright? I’m barely going to make it back to those bastards where I am tonight, and you would not believe what they’re capable of. So your job is to watch out for Angela. I don’t like what’s mine fucked with, and I don’t want them fucking with her.”

She wasn’t his, but I did watch out for Angela Latham. Minutes after the usurper limped off, I found my way down the hall, using for illumination one of the fatty candles that were ubiquitous down there, made from a substance that seemed to be stale krakt or, if not, something almost identical in composition.
^*
The neighboring residence, the one of Angela’s enslavers, was only a hundred yards away, and yet I had never visited, waiting instead in my off moments in the halls for Angela to pass through so that I might stalk her without seeming to. Now that I was actually taking time to investigate her residence for the first time, I immediately felt a moment of disorientation. Expecting to find another small hovel, I instead discovered something much grander. What I had taken before to be the front entrance to a simple hollowed-out cave like Augustus’s (not a home but home to a few smelly sealskin rugs) was merely the back end, the alley exit, of a palatial fortress. Instead of rough markings made into the ice, these walls were perfectly smooth, except where moldings and primitive candelabra had been expertly carved into the surface. And there was furniture as well, not just heaps of animal carcasses but elegant pieces carved out of the very ice into chairs and tables and even baskets for storage. I saw this and was amazed, and also shamed: if you have to suffer the indignity of being a possession, it’s an even worse insult to be the possession of a pauper. Angela certainly seemed to have landed a prince, or some other branch of royalty, although to look at him you couldn’t tell. Or at least I took the beast I now saw to be her principal captor, but that was just because I found the thing standing behind her, staring intently at the woman as she worked. Angela was in what appeared to be the dining hall, a cavernous room immaculate aside for the smell that hung in it. There was a soft-shell crab place in South Philadelphia on Passyunk I used to go to, open for decades nearly twenty-four hours a day: this cave smelled like that joint’s sidewalk. But the place was spotless, clearly owing to the labors of the brown woman making it so. Still, there was a haughtiness to the creature sitting behind her on a raised surface, as if he himself was responsible for the efficiency of her work. He was no more responsible for his clean home than I was for Augustus’s messy one (I wasn’t touching that place, it was disgusting), yet there the creature was, as arrogant as a Shar-Pei.

At the moment, Angela was down on her knees, digging at the debris in the pale floor with a bone tool, pouring wet slush over the crater to smooth the surface in her wake. Despite the thick Gore-Tex and fleece which padded the majority of her body and limited her movement, Angela had the task down to industrial-level efficiency. She was so consumed by her efforts that she didn’t notice me for a long moment and, when she did see my boot, barely looked up.

“Is he still there?” Angela asked finally, not pausing from her digging. The debris she threw onto a skin which lay beside her, one that kept freezing to the floor, so that as she progressed she kept giving it firm tugs. I looked over at the creature directly and, thinking of Jeffree’s now missing eye, smiled the best I could at him, bowed my shoulders a bit, and tried to look stupid and harmless.

“Still there. Is he giving you trouble? Do you want me to do something about it?” It felt manly at first to offer the help, but the moment after I said it, fear quickly performed its castration. What we both knew: there wasn’t a damn thing I was going to do. This monster was huge, and even if he was made of more krakt than muscle, like Augustus was, the whole of their society was too much for me. This was their frozen territory, I could barely keep the turns correct in my mind to make it through the tunnels to town. As to how to make it back to the Creole base, I knew the direction was up but not how to get there without getting lost and freezing to death first.

Angela flashed her eyes to mine just long enough to make contact, and even then the creature made a bellowing sound, removing his hand from within his shroud and making me wonder uncomfortably about where his paw had been resting moments before. “You have to get me out of here, Chris. I’m not going to make it. I’m not made for this life, you know that. I went to
Spelman
, Christopher. I am a soror of
Delta Sigma Theta,
” Angela emphasized, her whispers otherwise barely audible over her snow-cone scraping.

“You’re even more than that. I love you, and I don’t want to see you like this,” I told her. She didn’t even flinch at the L-word. She just got a little tear in her eye, which she wiped on her glove, where it froze. It had been almost a decade since I had told her that I loved her, and last time she didn’t cry at all. I did. “And I will get you out of here. I promise,” I told her. And we both believed me.

Back in Augustus’s hovel, I lay on the pungent skins by the hearth, staring into the blue gloom of it all. Augustus’s sty was increasingly cluttered. I began to realize that when I had first entered the hole it had been at its cleanest; maybe he’d straightened up in anticipation of the trip that never happened. Now it was horrendous, with pieces of everything that had frozen to both our shoes cluttered around us. Augustus, true to form, was eating, and I could hear the krakt swooshing around his jowls. I actually considered cleaning the place up a bit. Most of the mess was not mine, of course, but for the moment I did live here. After witnessing Angela suffering, however, I couldn’t motivate myself to do any work. Augustus for his part chomped away, staring back at me with curiosity.

The more the image of the other Tekelians became normalized for me, the odder Augustus appeared in my eyes. My captor’s peculiarities extended beyond his wretched smile: his back was bent forward, stuck in a perpetual bow; his shoulders collapsed on either side of him so that his head was the only thing that kept his shroud from sliding down to the floor. I also noticed that while the rest of the Tekelians seemed to travel in groups, or at least congregate in groups in the city center, Augustus seemed to be perpetually alone. In my entire time with the creature, I never once saw him socializing with another of his species. Staring across at him, watching his pale, watery eyes looking at me, I actually felt a moment of pity. Perhaps in response to this empathy, Augustus did the most human of things: he rolled his marble eyes at me. Shaking his hands free from the krakt (and thereby making even more of a mess of himself) he reached into his cloak with a sigh. In my mind, the casual amusement of the situation immediately dissipated and thoughts of Jeffree’s maiming emerged once more. As pathetic as he was, Augustus was still one of them, and so I had reason to be on guard. The next dagger could come for me. Immediately, I got on the floor picking things up, frantically attempting to bring order to the place, smiling all the way. That is, until Augustus put his cold and pudgy claw on my shoulder. It was a bracing grip, belying a strength that was not immediately apparent, and I almost expected a blow to follow. Instead, I heard crinkling.

“Aaaggaakkaarraagagh,” he said. Looking at Augustus’s greedy paw, I saw something startling: the empty wrapper of a Little Debbie snack. No, not just one but several, balled into his palm and now falling to the floor, each with the last traces of their caloric goodness sticking to the cellophane. Augustus had eaten every one, clearly, and just as clearly, his appetite was in no way satiated. In his primitive, albino snow monkey way, Augustus had just discovered what every food-stamp foodie had before: the more you ate of the things, the greater your desire to eat more. Poor Augustus was already addicted. And there was only one man left on the continent who could offer him more.

While the Tekelians were by far the most notable of our discoveries, there were less sensational revelations to be had in Tekeli-li, ones no less substantial. Chief among these were the white beetles that infested the frozen city and were in particular abundance in the cramped hovel of the insulin-fueled ice monkey I called Augustus. Going for a more scientific angle, I named this insect
Scarabaeidae colonialis
, although admittedly this appellation soon degenerated in my mind to
colons
for short. At first I mistook these pale bugs for pieces of snow, as which evolution had camouflaged them, but after I felt the evil little things climbing on me, I soon discovered their true nature. It was an age of discovery, even when you didn’t want it to be, even when you just wanted to sleep for a few hours and hope that the world hadn’t been destroyed. But in my waking hours, with nothing else to amuse me (upon reflection I found that, as a modern man, I had spent most of my day amusing myself), I had taken to watching the creatures go about their day.

All these bugs seemed to do was eat, their meals being the scatterings of krakt and whatever pieces of dried leather they got near; they even ate bits of rubber off the bases of my shoes. They didn’t seem to be too particular about what they ate, they just consumed and consumed, and when they got food they almost instantly seemed to breed so that they could eat it faster. A few would arrive on a previously “undiscovered” property, and after immediately claiming it for their own they would eat and multiply, and only hours later they would be swarming in disgusting multitude and their object devoured. It seemed like such a short-term survival strategy, one based on the premise of abundance. When, however, they were placed within a finite space (such as four blocks of ice around them high enough so that the bastards couldn’t get out), they mindlessly continued with the same strategy of overconsumption and overbreeding. After a few hours of my experiment, the last of them had turned as cold and hard as the little snowballs they resembled. In the back of my mind, with my last sliver of optimism, I was hoping that I might write some sort of academic paper on the subject, something I would dedicate to the memory of Jeffree’s left eyeball.