Pym (15 page)

“This is not good. This is not good at all,” Captain Jaynes said as we were surrounded. It was already too late for complaints, whatever was going to happen had already started. So many faces, so many pale eyes, now staring at us. So much familiarity within the alien. They pointed just like we did. They whispered. I had no idea how genetically connected we all were, but I felt some link must be there—if not as fellow humans, then as fellow primates, or at least as mammals.

As I was guessing at their taxonomy, a male stepped forward, a shriveled specimen in comparison to the stoutness of the rest. This was clearly an elder, his silver beard was fuller, longer than those of the other males.
^‡
He came directly forward, past the imaginary boundary around us that his tribe had respected, and stopped in front of me. This was odd: the gesture seemed intended to initiate a meeting of leaders, and Captain Jaynes was obviously the elder of our group.

“Tekeli-li,” their chief said to me. The pronunciation was so different from what I had imagined, containing warbles hidden within the word that no tongue groomed on Romance languages could duplicate.

“Tekeli-li,” I responded back to him. This was greeted by a polite nod—I doubt he imagined that I was trying to respond to his greeting—and then a motion to one of the other creatures who stood behind him. The second humanoid looked similar to the one who had taken a bite of Garth’s cake upstairs.
^§
Big and pale, pale and big. But this one was clearly a leader—his paunch of overindulgence poking out like a massive phallus beneath his robe, his face bloated in comparison to those that peeked from behind him. And the nose. In comparison to those of the other monsters who came to gawk at us, this guy’s nose was freakishly massive; gray, long, and lumpy, like poorly packed boudin. The sausage-nosed beast spun off at the old beast’s orders, and then the elder tried to continue.

“Ergg Eyy Ossen Aublatt?” is what the odd old thing said to me. This is as near as I can manage to catch how it sounded to my ears, and the only thing I understood was that it came in the form of a question. I looked over at my captain for guidance. He looked back at me and slowly shook his head. He’d had enough.

“I don’t know who these folks are, I don’t even know
what
the hell these folks are, but I do know that now we got to get the hell out of this place. We seen enough. Jeffree can stay if he wants,” he barked. I could hear in his voice that it was clearly too much for the old man.

“Agreed,” offered Nathaniel. “We’ve established first contact, and established our respective stakes in intellectual property and other rights of exploitation. Let’s go while we still got the good health that makes money worthwhile.”

“We come in peace,” Jeffree, stepping forward and past me, declared suddenly, Carlton Damon Carter zooming his lens in on the intensity in his partner’s eyes. The elder paid Jeffree no mind, quickly sidestepping him while keeping his glare on me. He looked at me expectantly, as if I was about to give an answer to his burbled question. I felt obliged to comply. Pointing to myself, I said, “Chris Jaynes.” The long beard simply stared at me with an expression of confusion.

“EEEEErrrrrgggggggggg—” was what the elder was winding into when another call came from behind the crowd and beyond the cluster of igloo-type buildings in the distance, from a large cave opening much like the one our own crew and guides had descended through minutes before. Hearing the sound, the speaker cut short his wailing with visible relief and joined with the rest of the crowd in looking back toward the newcomers. Jaynes nodded his head to the side, as if we should just turn and run for it right then. But there was nowhere to go. We couldn’t possibly hope to climb back up those caverns, or even to navigate the route back to the surface, fast enough to distance ourselves from these creatures so clearly bred for the environment.

Besides, I was caught up. Hypnotized. For now, coming to our gathering, Sausage Nose and another of the larger creatures seemed to be carrying a child, each with one hand holding a shoulder. A diminished, dangerously thin boy, with a slight pinkish color that contrasted with the bluish tones of the other creatures. He appeared to be unconscious, flopping like a stringless marionette. The three figures came through as the crowd opened a path for them. When they dumped the smaller creature between the elder and myself, I saw that it wasn’t a child at all but the body of a man.

It was undeniable. It was the single most bloodless corpse I had ever seen in history, but it was definitely a human one. A white man, with dark hair on his head and a dark mustache. I carefully stepped toward the body and stuck a hand on its shoulder. Aside from fabric tied around his neck in a makeshift scarf, the Caucasian was dressed very much like the creatures who had produced him, swaddled in cloth.

“He’s dead, isn’t he? Is this like an initiation or something? Do you think they want us to eat him?” Jeffree asked as he hunched next to me, not at all kidding. I was in the process of dismissing his interpretation when, to my surprise, the corpse opened his eyes and looked directly at the two of us, startling us even more than we already were. Equally surprised, the guy scrambled backward across the ice to get his distance. Eyes wide, trying to lose himself in a crowd of creatures that scrambled away from him as soon as he arrived there, the white dude kept pointing and muttering, “You’re not there, you’re not there, you’re not there.”

“Yes, we are,” I told him. The comment seemed to have the desired effect. The man ceased his panic and turned to look at us directly.

“Did you actually say something?” he asked, crouched and cowering. He spoke with an odd accent, a hint of the American South but a bit of the Brit too.

“I did say something,” I told him, and then the obvious questions were lobbed over my head by my yelling co-workers:
What is this place? What are these people? Who are you?
It was only the last question he seemed willing to discuss, the rest he just looked away at and shook his head at nervously. But his identity, that he seemed clear on. Adjusting the material on his collar, standing straight and short, and looking directly up at me, the man said:

“Well of course my name is Arthur Pym, of the Nantucket Pyms, sir.”

I wasn’t stunned. I wasn’t shocked. I wasn’t even impressed, because he was clearly a lunatic and I didn’t believe him. Because unless we’d stepped into a time warp, that would make him over two hundred years old. He looked bad, but still.

I nodded my head, smiled, and said my name back to him. Politely, the madman nodded as if to pretend my own name held some weight with him. Then this Pym looked quickly at Jaynes, then at Jeffree, then at Nathaniel, lingered over Angela, and then turned back to me.

“So tell me then, Mr. Jaynes,” he began, his voice hoarse from disuse and possibly misuse, “have you brought these slaves for trading?”

*
I thought of smiling at them too but held off on this with the distant memory that chimpanzees take grinning as a hostile bearing of fangs.

†
The events that follow are fantastical and challenged the imaginations even of those of us who experienced them firsthand. I will therefore attempt to relay them to you in the most straightforward manner I can manage, taking on the same level of distance I did on that day, simply to avoid being completely overwhelmed.

‡
And the rest of the females too, because really they all seemed to have some kind of beard.

§
I’ll confess that due to my lack of knowledge they all pretty much looked the same to me. Same skin color, same hair color, same hair texture. All the same.

A point of plot and order: I am a mulatto. I am a mulatto in a long line of mulattoes, so visibly lacking in African heritage that I often appear to some uneducated eyes as a random, garden-variety white guy. But I’m not. My father was white, yes. But it doesn’t work that way. My mother was a woman, but that doesn’t make me a woman either. Mandatory ethnic signifiers in summary: my hair is fairly straight, the curl loose and lazy; my skin lacks melanin—there are some Italians out there darker than me.
^*
My lips are full and my nose is broad, but it’s really just the complexion and hair that count.
Octoroon
would have been the antebellum word for me. Let me be more clear, since some people can’t get their heads around it even when I stand before them: I am a black man who looks white.

I grew up in a working-class neighborhood in the “Black Is Beautiful” era and suffered in school from my poor timing. Fifty years before, being the only European-looking brother on a black campus might have made me class president in the Adam Clayton Powell mold, but during my era it made me the symbol of Whiteness and all the negative connotations it held. This is probably assigning too much political acumen to my fellow middle-schoolers. A less ambitious assessment might be just that I stood out, and the wolves attack the weak separated from the herd. Because of the color of my skin, I was targeted for abuse as much as the kid who wore his Boy Scout uniform every day.

In sixth grade a little effete frog named James Baldwin whupped my ass. He was a foot shorter than me, but he hung with hulking eighth-grade girls, who towered over both of us the entire time, taunting. It was by the bushes in the asphalt driveway of my apartment building and it was because I’d gotten lazy. I had a whole plan for getting home unmolested, it involved shortcuts along the train tracks and alternating building entrances, but it’d been two weeks since the last attack and I let my guard down. I bought a Reggie bar at the drugstore before heading toward my building: they must have monitored the corner, followed me. I didn’t fight back, because if I did the ladies would have really hurt me, and the only thing more humiliating than getting my ass kicked by this little shit would have been getting my ass kicked by a gaggle of girls, even ones as prematurely huge as these postpubescent vultures. I had never even met James Baldwin, but it didn’t matter, he attacked me anyway. I was different. He was puny, weak, but I was weaker. Kids have to feel like they’re more powerful than someone.

The worst part of all this was when my mother forced me to report to the school where James Baldwin kicked my ass. Mrs. Alexander, the librarian, was not much darker than me but was armed with a mouth full of ghetto to make up for it. She couldn’t get enough of my story. She asked me to repeat it again and again, “James Baldwin beat me up.” “Who you say?” “James Baldwin,” and the librarian, as round and yellow as the sun, shuddered with laughter. I asked her what was so funny and Mrs. Alexander told me, “Young bru, you gots to gets your little yellow butt down to my library. You gots to learn who you is.” Mrs. Alexander was no great fan of books; everyone knew she had been placed in her position after suspension for beating her second-grade students with a ruler. She had a bachelor’s degree in education but talked like her college was located in the back of a deli. Still, even for her the broken grammar she used to tell me this message was exaggerated, and I heard another meaning within it. That I, like her, would have to overcompensate for my pale skin to be accepted. I would have to learn to talk blacker, walk blacker, than even my peers. Or be rejected as other forever.

Going to the library was excellent advice, it turned out. The library was open for another hour after school, the byproduct of an academic initiative long since forgotten. Hiding in the library immediately after dismissal allowed the tsunami of juvenile violence that occurred at the end of each day to ripple on beyond me, clearing the area for a safer retreat to my apartment once it was gone. So I went every afternoon from that day forward. The only one not pleased with my new routine was Mrs. Alexander herself, who’d grown accustomed to leaving in time to watch her stories. But after a week or so of missing
General Hospital
for my sake, Mrs. Alexander showed me how to turn out the lights and lock the door behind me, and then we were both happy.

Alone there, wasting the hour, I couldn’t bring myself to read the real James Baldwin. I wouldn’t read the man until college, another thing I blame on my abuser. But the cover of another book on the African American literature shelf spoke to me. A picture of a weak-looking boy, one who was still proud, one who wanted the world to see him as the person he knew he could be. He was wearing an ascot—I didn’t know the word for this accessory at the time, but I knew that if he wore that at my school he would also get his ass whupped. The book itself revealed that I was right. The entire story was a chronicle of who had robbed him, who had beaten him, who had ripped him off. Sure, there was slavery as well, but Olaudah Equiano’s narrative was about more than that for me. It was the diary of the first black nerd. And the language, it sung and pleaded and was as graceful as I wished I would become. Reading it I knew that if I was to acquire the language of blackness, if my own survival and sanity depended on it, then this was the voice that spoke to me. What blacker form could there be than African America’s first literary son? It is a great moment in every freak’s life when he or she finds out that at least they are not the only one. Diving in to the pantheon of slave narratives, through Mary Prince and Harriet Jacobs and Solomon Northup and the others, I found my people. I was by myself in this era, but across time I was joined by a great and powerful tribe. But even that solitude didn’t last. I would not be alone for long.

When I heard the sounds from the back of the library, I knew they had come for me. Mrs. Alexander had driven away at 3:15
P.M
. after the principal’s car was gone, like always. It was them. The violent horde had noticed my absence and would now be correcting the order of things. I heard the sound and knew that I had always expected this moment to come, that the ignorant’s natural fear of books could only keep them at bay for so long. Emboldened by my literary peers, though, I stepped forward into the darkness of the art history stacks. If a beating was inevitable, I would at least retain my pride by facing it directly. There were books strewn across the floor, oversize, colorful painting books and for a moment I thought they’d just fallen down. That this is what I’d heard. Then I saw him. Standing there, naked, at the end of the aisle. Naked except for a red scarf around his neck and a copy of Norman Rockwell’s
World of Scouting
held to hide his genitals.

“Why doth thee have no garments?” I asked the boy.

“They took my badges. They took all my badges, and my clothes. And they took my French horn too,” he told me. Saying who “they” were wasn’t necessary. They were the beasts at the door. They were the unthinking. They were the elementals of destruction we both knew intimately. We looked at each other, relaxed. He knew who I was, and I knew who he was too. He was the Boy Scout guy. He was Garth Frierson. Garth sat down Indian style on the floor, continued slowly turning through the pages in his book as if he was looking for someplace to escape to. I sat down, joining him, and did the same with my own book. We locked the library up together from that afternoon until high school.

Even in comparison to my own, sometimes ambiguous, identity, the claim of this found Caucasian to be Arthur Pym seemed like bullshit. The cracker was crazy, I assumed. While possibly an obscure little story in the whole of the English-speaking world,
The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym
held a vaunted position in the literature of the Antarctic, being as it was the first great text of this continent’s imagination. And when dealing with a place of such desolate reality, the imagination can be as important as the place itself. So as noms de plume went, “Arthur Pym” made sense. Soon after his introduction was made, “Pym” suggested we move to more private quarters for further discussions. I turned to Booker Jaynes upon hearing this, and my cousin nodded, clearly eager to get away from the monsters, so our group made to follow Pym. Noticing that the rest of my party would be coming with me as well gave this Pym a pause.

“Are you sure you might not rather deposit the chattel elsewhere as we conduct our business?” he asked me. There was a fermented smell to his breath that I hadn’t noticed until we came close to each other. I didn’t see how wobbly he was on his feet either till he was walking next to me.

“You’re not actually serious, are you?” was Nathaniel’s response. He had a polite, indulgent smile on his face as he said this, whether because he was amused by this character’s display of racism or in disbelief. I told Pym that we were all of the same crew, and when he heard this
c
word, the guy relented.

The hut we entered was a construction entirely of ice, as was the rest of this primitive subterranean village. It was a good thing to be in a small space for the moment, because the majesty of the larger hollow was just too damn much.
^†
While the space was still considerably colder than what we would ever think of as comfortable, I noticed that it was significantly warmer. The skins of some unknown animal, probably some form of walrus or seal, had been placed along the bulk of the floor, paler side up, enabling us to take seats without literally freezing our asses. This Pym, for his part, seemed to come further into consciousness the longer he was awake, and the more awake he got the more excited he was about our presence. Mine in particular. The white man began to rant on about how long it had been, and how bored he’d been, how eager he was to finally hear stories of the North he had left behind. Here, I was forced to interrupt him.

“Mister? Mister, listen. Who are these people? Where are we?”

I spoke to him loudly enough that he paused from his verbal riff on “the calming effect of staring directly into the ice walls.” A look of utter perplexity came over this would-be Pym’s face when he realized the depth of my confusion. He solemnly took my arm and spoke in comparatively sober, measured words.

“My good man, do you not realize? These creatures around you, they are perfection incarnate. They are the end of being, for after them there is nowhere to go. You, sir, are in the presence of the
Gods
,” he said calmly. Hearing this statement, I looked to my co-workers where they sat behind me, and they looked back at me. In that moment, silently, we agreed that we were indeed in the presence of an exceptionally delusional white man—which is of course one of the most dangerous things in the world.

“And what exactly is this place here? Tekeli-li?” I followed with.

“Well, is it not obvious? Where else would the Gods reside? Tekeli-li is
Heaven
, of course,” he finished, his mustache hairs twitching at the ends much like the whiskers of a mouse.