Pym (16 page)

“Well they’re obviously not gods, so we can begin from there,” Nathaniel offered after the uneven crunching rhythm that was this Pym’s gait had sufficiently receded into the distance. “But what in God’s name are they?”

“As spectacular as it sounds, I think it’s pretty clear we’re dealing with some sort of lost Neanderthals here. Or possibly another line of hominid, a spur of
Homo erectus,
” I offered. They were already looking at me funny, as if what I had to say could somehow be more fantastic than what was just beyond our frozen walls. I didn’t care.

“Their size: there was a humanoid that walked the earth relatively recently that we call ‘Colossus,’ nearly the same size as these beings. It’s said that the race died off because they couldn’t radiate enough heat for their size, but down here that wouldn’t be a problem.” Booker Jaynes just kept staring at me, a suspicion of madness reflected back. “Hey, I said I’ve done the research,” I tried, but their looks continued unchanged.

“They’re just crackers,” Captain Jaynes returned. He stared down at his boots’ spikes as he continued, the weight of it all clearly on him. “Trust me, I know white folks, I can smell them a click away. These are just plain old, backward-ass white people. Big ugly ones, but still.” He spoke with an air of unassailable finality.

“All due respect, are you for real?” Jeffree said. “I know white folks too, and these guys don’t look nothing like any white folks I ever seen in my whole life. Did you see how pale they are? Everything about them—they got nails like ivory, you catch that shit? And you could hammer a nail with those foreheads.”

“Just some ugly, big-headed honky albinos,” continued Booker Jaynes, undaunted. “I don’t know, maybe some Vikings got lost down here a long time ago, something like that, inbred for a few centuries. Who the hell knows? But these things are white folks, I’d bet White Folks on that. Maybe the whitest folks you ever met, but white folks just the same. They sure as hell ain’t some sci-fi monkey creatures out of your imagination. They even got that smell too, that white folks smell they get in the rain.”

“We just have to ask Mr. Arthur Gordon Pym,” Nathaniel calmly interrupted. Nathaniel smiled when he was nervous, he smiled when he was calm, he smiled when he was attempting charm as well. Individually, all these uses of the expression were appropriate, but together their uniformity was disgusting. “Stop and think about this another way for a moment. Think about it from a business standpoint. Let’s say for a second he actually is your Arthur Pym, alive after what? Two centuries on? That would be an even bigger discovery than a village of albino monkey people. It would mean
the fountain of youth
—the most sought after resource in human history. It would mean an infusion of wealth like nothing ever seen before.”

“Nathaniel’s got something.” Jeffree’s breath billowed before him in excitement. “Maybe being on the ice slows down the aging process—like people who survive drowning because of hypothermia.”

“Right. See, I don’t know, but you don’t either. And either way, marketing wise …” Nathaniel drifted off on the last syllable as he waited for us all to fill in the rest of his thought. Apparently the others did, or at least Angela did, because she started nodding excitedly behind him.

“Honey, we could bottle that whole concept up and sell it with the quickness. Run tours down here, set up one of those ice hotels like in Finland,” she absolutely bubbled.

“Think of the documentaries—you remember all that stuff on the Yanomamö tribe we watched on the Discovery Channel?” Jeffree said to Carlton Damon Carter, who nodded eagerly back to him. “This could be even bigger. A reality show, an ongoing series—”

“Whatever they eat could be the next great diet,” Angela interrupted. “Do you know how much those synergistic diet corporations pull in a year?”

“Just honkies. Just really cold, really big honkies, nothing more,” the captain chimed in, not amused by the direction the room was taking.

“I love the way you think, baby. Right here could be a bar-nightclub. We could serve vodka shots in ice cups for twice the cost of the bottle. Honey. Honey. The
money.
” Nathaniel, lost in his own vision, kept going.

When my darker cousin, being the true leader of our group, tried to engage Pym in a dialogue on his return to this small ice house, you could almost see the well-glazed eyes in the pale man’s head take on an additional layer. Instead of responding, Pym would simply look over toward me nervously, as one might toward the owner of an unruly and possibly dangerous pit bull. It was clear by Pym’s mannerisms that he would listen only to me—his fellow white man. That isn’t to say he did this task particularly well. On his return, it took the good part of an hour to convey to this Pym that I was not in fact a slave trader but rather a member of a crew populated by the descendants of slaves. He kept nodding, but then he just nodded off. At one point I really felt he was listening to what I had to say, but then out of nowhere, distracted, he started reaching for Carlton Damon Carter’s mouth.

“What are you doing?” I asked. Carlton Damon Carter simply jumped back, muttered to himself, and got a new seat behind Jaynes.

“Checking the gums. Is that not the best way to discover the beast’s health?” When he heard the word
beast
, Jeffree leaped up to slap Pym upside his head, but to his credit he didn’t struggle too hard when Nathaniel held him back. Pym continued on as this was happening, without embarrassment. His eyes, already fairly wide to begin with, grew momentarily larger. “They are a feisty bunch” was all he had to say. And despite my efforts, the idea that we wanted Pym to accompany us off of this frozen continent so that we could reintroduce him to the modern world was clearly incomprehensible to the man.

“Why would I want to leave Heaven?” he started repeating absently, which indicated he understood at least part of what I was saying.

“Well, Arthur, don’t you want to go home? You said you were bored. Don’t you want to see your family? Where are you from?”
^‡
Nathaniel stepped in to ask all this, and when Pym ignored him, I repeated the questions.

“I’m a Nantucketer,” he replied.

“Well, are your family landowners?” At this the supposed Nantucketer shook his head with enthusiasm and then annoyance that I would even question that fact.

“Well, you’ve been gone awhile, things have gone up in value,” Nathaniel followed, and this time Pym deigned to hear him directly. “Land in Nantucket sells for about two million, two hundred thousand
an acre
on today’s market. You probably have quite an estate to attend to.” Already growing a bit more alert, at the sound of the figure Pym’s eyes seemed to gain a greater level of consciousness. The ghost of a man leaned in toward me.

“Is this true?” he muttered.

“Yes, it is,” I told him, relieved that we finally seemed to be getting closer to an actual conversation.

“In a world where people would pay so much for sand,” Pym started, clearly awed by the thought of this, “how much did these niggers cost you?”

I flinched and looked over at my cousin when the derogative was said, waiting for a reaction. Despite being confronted with someone who was, in his racial outlook at least, a throwback to the white American nineteenth century, Captain Booker Jaynes did not lose his composure or for that matter seem in any way surprised or offended by Arthur Pym’s word choice. In my cousin’s head, this was how all white people were. Of this Jaynes had no doubt: they were all racist, they looked at all of us as niggers and were blind to us in every human way.
^§
Even after Obama; a black president in Booker Jaynes’s mind was just the nigger white folks voted to be their servant.

Calling these strange beings back in to see us, Pym soon proved to serve better as a translator of information than as a conversationalist. The older creature of before again took a position of leadership, and Pym spoke directly to the snaggletoothed elder in what sounded like a series of attempts at dog barking. The chief moved as the old do, with the knowledge that things broken might never heal.

“Please tell him we would like you to accompany us far away from here, back to our native land” was what I said to our translator. This was a fairly direct sentence, meant to put our primary position on the table. While I couldn’t understand the harsh sounds Pym was making, I could not believe that it could possibly take so long to relate this relatively simple proposal. The old creature, sitting on a rumpled pile of skins and leaning against his own upright knee as if it was the most stable thing in the world, listened and listened to Pym’s monologue. I saw what seemed to be an increasing hemorrhaging of patience the more Pym’s verbosity continued, which was confirmed when the old creature, in a surprisingly swift movement that left no room for misinterpretation, put his long, vein-traversed palm directly over Pym’s mouth,
^‖
clamping it shut instantly. Once assured that Pym had received this in no way subtle message, the elder removed his hand and barked one fiercely declarative sentence directly at the man.

Hearing the dismissive nature of that sound, I felt for sure we were denied. Worse, I feared we’d caused offense as well. When I asked for the translation, Pym turned back in my direction and said, “Khun Knee says, ‘Go.’ ” There was no question, from Pym’s deflated manner, who this directive was intended for. Him.

“Make sure to tell them you want a pair of the creatures to come with us. A male and a female,” Nathaniel approached my other ear to coax. Among the crew we had already decided that two would be a good number, since one might be misconstrued as a hoax or a genetic anomaly. Apparently, Nathaniel’s current manner seemed too forceful, because Arthur Pym leaned in with his own whisper to me soon after.

“Would you like the guards to discipline them? The Tekelians can be quite … 
vigorous
when motivated,” he said, rubbing an unseen knot in the corner of his balding head that I assume proved this point.

“No thanks,” I said and turned my attention back to Khun Knee.

“Also, we would like to take two of your …” I stumbled here, because the word
people
didn’t seem to be quite right, “community to accompany us in our employ.”

“Do you intend to purchase slaves from amongst them? Is that what you are implying?” Pym looked at me aghast, casting a rare glance to the others and shuddering at the unthinkable vision: of his gods in the same position he imagined the Creole crew to be in.

“No, no. Never as slaves, not at all,” I continued, carefully. “More like, ambassadors really, to be put in our legal care for the duration of the tour. We’ll pay well.” This rephrased job description seemed to be a bit more palatable to both Pym and eventually the elder Khun Knee, who nodded sagely as if he knew just what we wanted, and just who should do the job.

When the dozen or so potential ambassadors were paraded before us within the hour, we were at a disadvantage in choosing who among them to take as samples of this species, having just that day been introduced to their existence. That said, while we didn’t know much about their alien physiology or beauty standards, it was pretty clear that the gathered specimens were not the most exquisite examples of this remarkable life-form.

“These guys are clearly morons, right? They look retarded,” Jeffree said to me, adding a second note directly to Carlton Damon Carter’s video lens, “I mean that in a literal sense, y’all. Jeffree got no prejudice against the handi-able.”

“They all look like monsters,” Angela whispered, as if they could understand any of this. “How can you tell the difference?”

“They’re a bit irregular in comparison with the others we’ve seen, honey, I’ll agree with Jeffree on that,” Nathaniel said. “But irregular isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It heightens the difference between them and us. It’s dramatic.”

“Inspect their teeth with your fingers, poke a finger into the backs of their mouths to see if they’re missing any,” Captain Jaynes declared, his tone implying that he was both well read and practiced in the art of ice monkey commerce. “Check their hair, make sure it’s not falling out. If they’re sweating, taste it to make sure they’re not salty and sickly. That’s how these things are done.”