Pym (11 page)

I used to do the climbing wall at the gym and be embarrassed by the pretense that I was training for anything more than other climbing walls. Who knew it would pay off in a frozen chasm at the bottom of the world? My spotlight hung by my belt’s loop, its power on and its beam circling erratically as I took care to ease into the slack and drop farther. The lamp created the feeling of movement below me, and that was all my imagination needed. Was it an illusion of dim light and shadow, or were there really tunnels and their openings just beyond me? Tunnels whose course had been interrupted by this recent avalanche? As I slowly dropped, my attention focused far below toward the crevices, hoping for something more, so I was surprised when I felt the hard and real metal of the rifler jam my toe.

“Don’t land on it! You not supposed to land on it, man. You could set off a whole other cave-in,” Garth boomed from above. He was leaning over the edge and his morbid obesity suddenly seemed like a mortal threat. I yelled him back.

I dangled in front of the drill. It looked to be in fairly good condition, considering the fall. A bit dented but functionally unharmed. Grappling hook in hand, I maneuvered myself to attach the line to the sturdiest section of the carriage it could hold. As I did this, giving it a good yank for security, the bulk of the rifler shifted from the vibration, sending a shower of loose snow farther below, into the darkness. As my eyes adjusted, I could make out more than I had before below me. Even at these depths, light managed to permeate the frozen crust, leaving the ice to illuminate the surroundings. The Antarctic gives the impression of being white, but really it’s blue. Almost entirely constructed of that pale, powder blue that at times can darken to rich, cobalt haze, as it did now around me. Through this glow, I could see the bottom of the pit, not more than another two stories below me. I could also make out the rough pattern of the fallen snow at the bottom of the cavern. In some places the debris was thick soup, in others chunks of ice the size of coffins stood upright in the floor. It was already an impressive sight before one of the large spears of ice started to fall forward, giving movement to the static scene.

Except it wasn’t falling forward, it was walking. Walking forward, arms swinging, along the crater floor. And then it was looking up to me.

Let me say this as I said it to the others, soon thereafter. I know what I saw. And what I saw was a figure. I saw a figure of massive proportions and the palest hue, standing below me. I saw a creature with two legs and two feet, with arms that shook off clouds of snow as they sprang out beside it. I saw that what I first took to be a slab of ice was in fact a shawled figure, one whose cloth now rippled with movement as the beast hustled forward.

And what did I do? I looked up, I looked to see if Garth also saw it, catching the quickest glimpse of my greatest revelation. But Brother Garth was gone. Above was just the taut rope that held me.

When I turned back to look down,
it
was gone. So that’s when I did the only thing I could do, the only thing that came to my mind.

“Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!” I yelled into that now empty crater, the words echoing lightly against the walls of the abyss. “Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!” I kept screaming louder and louder, till Garth started pulling me up once more. I fell silent now, waiting for a response.

*
Or rather, as the cliché goes, bitched and moaned, but you couldn’t hear the bass of moaning over the machinery hum.

†
These are sometimes also called “scams.”

‡
I should say here that, in America, every black man has a conspiracy theory. (That statement in itself reveals a conspiracy, omitting as it does the conspiracy theories of black women [copious though they may be].) Some theories are quite creative, fascinating. But most are quite mundane, because they’re true. This obsession with conspiracies is most likely due to the fact that our ethnic group is the product of one.

§
This I found out after searching through Garth’s laptop while he was in the shower (bored). Confronted, Garth responded, “I like to look at women who would actually sleep with my fat ass.”

WHEN we got to the base camp we found the crew in the communal room at full attendance. The TV news channel was on, and on the screen was chaos.

It was the familiar trauma. There were the jumpy camera angles of smoke in the streets and people coughing into cloths ripped from their shirts. There were flashes of blood with no clear points of origin. There were people leaning quietly on other people who screamed loud enough for both of them. There was dust piling onto running crowds, as if they were being buried not just alive but in motion. There were legs that lay still in the streets, feet flopped out and hanging lifeless. But this time there wasn’t just one place identified in the chyron, one nation, one landmark in flames. This time there was Tokyo, and Paris, and Berlin. And then there was London, and New York, and L.A., and Sydney, and Seoul, and at one point even Stuttgart, and then there was bouncy footage from locales that were defined by solemn commentators as being “________ miles outside of” other places.

“The drill fell in a little crater. It’s down about two stories, we’re going to need help getting it up. Wasn’t our fault.” I saw the bad news on the TV, but the only good thing about really bad news is that it provided good timing for a less bad news dump.

“Man, it’s blowing up, up there. Blow. Ing. Up,” Jeffree responded, not listening. I’d accepted Jeffree’s theatrical nature over the weeks, but that made it no less annoying. But he was right. On the set, the trusted news anchor relaying the latest events started choking up. The television blared but we were quiet. Nobody talked or moved much. Nobody had to because the television was relaying all the words and action a mind could comprehend. An image of smoke coming out of the subway entrance flashed by. I saw the green balls of the 4-5-6 train lines logo.

“Your condo,” Nathaniel said, pulling Angela closer on the couch.

“My cousin Antoine works two blocks from Seventy-second Street Station,” she returned, pushing into him. I remembered Antoine. I said, “Antoine’s probably fine, just fine,” but I don’t think she noticed.

“We should be out there,” Jeffree offered, no small bit of heroic longing in his voice. Carlton Damon Carter, Jeffree’s lanky partner in engineering and love, was always silent, but at that moment, his silence felt profound. We in the room were all listening.

When the satellite suddenly lost its reception and went to static, we didn’t even look away from the screen. Our satellite was always going down, and the signal was never very strong. I remember thinking that the white noise was a bit of a relief, a chance to brace ourselves before the next wave of chaos blinked into view.

“Turn it off. Turn it,” Captain Jaynes said, pointing. His voice was deep and bellowing and full of enough drama that it demanded authority or confrontation if he could get it. “There’s nothing you can do, nothing any of us can do down here. We’re not just going to sit and watch all day going crazy. That don’t make no kind of sense. Best thing to do: turn the news off for a bit, get our work done, get our minds off of what we can’t change for the moment. When the satellite feed comes back through, we’ll deal with it.”

“Boss man, I likes the way you think,” Jeffree agreed. “But it’s Saturday. The day off. The Shabbat, baby. We got nothing to do but wait for the TV to come back on, then watch it.”

“No,” Captain Jaynes disagreed, his voice rising so that the whole room could take in his declaration. “What we have is a very expensive piece of mining equipment that has to be retrieved from a hole in the ground.”

The only white folks Captain Jaynes, Race Man, invited onto our crew’s Antarctic mining mission was White Folks, his dog. And even that dog was a thickly spotted Dalmatian. My cousin loved calling his name in anger, and the poor mutt gleefully suffered it. I was nice to him, though,
^*
and as we drove Captain Jaynes to the site White Folks leaned into my hands to be scratched.

“I saw something. I saw someone down there. A creature. Just walking by,” I confessed to my cousin. Past him, Garth gave me the funky eye. Jaynes looked over like he knew there were two kinds of Jaynes minds too, and he was pretty sure how I should be categorized.

“This ain’t going to be some great excuse for you to start going off about your book again, is it? People don’t want to hear it, man; that shit on the TV just makes it more so. So promise me, no more stories about super ice honkies. Understood?” he asked.

I nodded. Because I did understand. I was obsessed, I knew it even though I couldn’t stop being that way. I bored myself, truly. But I saw what I saw, and I said so.

“To think that a work of fiction, no matter how old or what you think you’ve discovered about it, has any reality. It ain’t normal, son,” Captain Jaynes offered. “I’ll tell you something else, life is too short to be reading more books by white people. Especially dead ones. We got our own books. We got our own culture. We don’t got to borrow theirs.”

Garth followed the tire tracks we’d made on our last visit, deeply concentrating on the road, lining up his wheels with their initial journey to save the trouble of replowing. The others behind us did the same. Nobody talked. Besides the last comment, the only sound in the cab was White Folks panting between his master’s legs, his enormous pink tongue hanging out past his muzzle. Around the dog’s neck was his uncomfortable looking collar: an old iron chain, weathered and with links nearly two inches long. I’d seen it before, but staring longer I realized what it was: old slave bonds.

“Are they real?” I motioned to White Folks’s neck. I even repeated it as the captain stared mutely back at me.

“Real enough for White Folks,” he told me. My cousin was a collector of black memorabilia, this was one of the things we had in common. Most of Captain Jaynes’s acquisitions were of the remnants of slavery: chains like this one, bills of sale, sale adverts, runaway notices, cages, neck spikes, face masks, the like. Jaynes even had a vintage hogshead barrel that he’d filled with various cat-o’-nine-tails.
^†
I would imagine that the links would pull at the Dalmatian’s short hair or pinch his skin, but White Folks didn’t seem to mind as he pushed back eagerly into his owner’s hand.

“Why do you do it, then? Why exactly do you collect all the slavery stuff?” It was an obvious question, but we still had ten minutes to the accident site to kill. Captain Jaynes was quiet for a good two minutes before he answered, visibly turning the question over in his mind.

“I’m collecting evidence” was what my cousin told me, and the great trial that Booker Jaynes was preparing for unfolded before me. In the captain’s living quarters, office, and many storage lockers, crowded with artifacts as they were, the case was perpetually made, stuck in closing arguments with judgment ever forthcoming.

My cousin was not the only one with an idiosyncratic collection on base. Booker Jaynes understood people needed their passions to keep sane on the ice. Everyone was provided a storage space. Angela and her usurper had fitness equipment in their hold. At six most mornings she dragged their machines into the cargo space, where she moved her limbs until breathing heavily as the blubbery Nathaniel sat on a foldout lawn chair, reading the
The Wall Street Journal
on his tablet. Garth brought his sizable collection of Little Debbie snack cakes by the case. When he worked the late shift, Garth could be seen passing the sweating blur of Angela en route to his stash of calories, and the difference in physicality between the bus driver and the lawyer was like a display in the natural history museum. The remaining space of Garth’s hold held his prized Thomas Karvels. His own sleeping quarters had so little wall space that, like the finest museums, he circulated his collection regularly. In their hold, Jeffree and Carlton Damon Carter stored the extra servers for their website, their video equipment, sets, and lighting. At times, their small area became a miniature television studio, recording clips that quickly found their way around the world via their site. “If we wanted to do porn, we could be rich overnight,” Jeffree joked, repeatedly. Painfully (personally). “Not sharing you” was Carlton Damon Carter’s constant response, his statement no less adamant for the fact that it always came in a near whisper.

The chasm didn’t seem nearly as deep upon return to the site, or nearly as wide. But then I started thinking about having to hang down on a cable into the abyss again and it seemed as scary as it always had. I was already sore from the first attempt, but that was fine because Jeffree
^‡
eagerly volunteered for the task of trying to rescue the drill this time.

“Ever since we got to Antarctica, the traffic to the blog has started building again. We’re getting more unique hits every day. They love it. Polar adventure. I’m like a super-nigger on ice! The people, they need someone to live through. Trust me, I used to be in roller derby back in the day. People need a hero.”

Even as Jeffree prepared to go down and secure the drill, he managed to create a dramatic air about himself. It was in the beat to his jaunt, the elaborate kufi that covered his bald head, the fact that he let his parka crack open just low enough at the top that his cowrie-shell necklace still affirmed his blackness into the frozen air as his breath turned white before him. Carlton Damon Carter, as always, hung behind. Like Garth, Carlton Damon Carter would not even remove himself from his truck’s driver’s seat. I found Carlton Damon Carter much more intriguing than his louder accomplice, because Carlton Damon Carter seemed to have no need for attention at all. Sure, he kept himself looking dapper, his lightly processed hair sculpted neatly with Dax pomade, but while Carlton Damon Carter clearly took pride in looking attractive, he seemed to feel no need to attract attention from anyone but the protagonist of his own life story, which of course was not Carlton Damon Carter. Even there, staring across the distance through his truck’s frosted window, I could see that Carlton Damon Carter sat preparing his camera equipment to focus on what really mattered to him.

“Looks like you didn’t fuck it up too bad” was Captain Booker Jaynes’s estimation on seeing the drill below. With that blunt assessment I felt better; the fact that it was Jeffree who was attaching the climbing harness through his legs and not me added to my mood. In that moment the earlier vision of the white shrouded figure, the stress of the initial accident, it all began to dissipate. Melt away, just like we hoped none of the snow that surrounded us ever would. My obsession was starting to scare me. It was leaping off the pages of the old manuscript and into my real world. That thing I saw was either real or a sign of just how advanced my mania had become. Back now, though, was the ever present mundane. We would get the drill, we would fix the damn thing, we would keep going. Back on TV and in reality, the world would not end, and just like all the other unrest, this spike would gain a vague name and be sectioned off into the land of anecdote. I would address my obsessions, and no longer let delusions of massive pale monsters get the better of me.