Pym (17 page)

Using these traditional methods more and less (luckily none of the creatures were sweating in this ice block), we picked two: a male and, going on the assumption that swollen pectorals were a sign of gender, a female.

Pym, who had spent the proceedings nodding off as he leaned against a far wall, was roused once more when Khun Knee returned. Seeing our selection, the elder gave a polite nod in my direction like a waiter pretending to be pleased with his customer’s order.

“In return, the Tekelians have decided on a price for the services of Krakeer and Hunka.” Pym paused, and for a moment I imagined that they must want a blood offering. “They would like one dozen hogsheads, that is twelve individual hogsheads of the normal size, filled to the brim with your special sweetmeats, delivered on Krakeer’s and Hunka’s return.”

“A ‘hogshead’? Why would you want to shove sugared meat into the head of a pig?” Jeffree interrupted. “That is so not kosher. That is some sick shit, right there.”

“He means a barrel filled with the pastries. And it’s probably the equivalent of about three or four cases of those Little Debbie snack cakes,” I told Nathaniel. “Garth has that.”

“How much would that cost? They’re only like a dollar a box.” In my memory, a calculator appeared over Angela’s head as she tried to figure it out. “About two fifty? Three hundred dollars? That’s it? That’s nothing,” she answered herself.

“Each!” Arthur Pym adjusted hearing this, clearly pleased at his own negotiating skills. “If that is too much, I’m sure you could exchange your chattel for payment.”

“They’re not my ‘chattel,’ Pym: I’m black too,” I snapped, my patience having evaporated after the third time I made this revelation to him only to have it ignored. “And you know what, I must inform you that you are really fucking with the wrong octoroon.” At this final word, Pym recoiled in horror, staring at me and then at his own hands, seemingly terrified of what he may have touched unknowingly.

Nathaniel squinted at me in disgust, then stepped between me and the cringing white man. “Two dozen ‘hogsheads,’ final,” he declared, recovering the negotiations. “Our word is our bond.”

And then Khun Knee hugged me, and up close he smelled of dead fish left too long in the freezer, and his old body felt more solid than any biped had a right to. And I knew immediately that with his gesture the deal was done and there was no turning back from it.

“My stash? All they want to trade for is my Little Debbie stash? Why not your stash? Why not all your books and shit?” Garth asked as we were driving away.

“They don’t need books on
Pym
, Garth. They have the real thing.”

“I’m saying, I’m the only dude that wasn’t down there, and then you come back and tell me how you traded all
my
stash, all my comfort foods—and man I need comfort—and nobody else’s? You don’t think that sounds a bit suspicious?” Garth demanded.

“Why do Negroes always have to have conspiracy theories?” I asked directly.

“Why are motherfuckers always conspiring?” Garth turned to face me, taking his eyes off the frozen road without slowing down a mile.

“They don’t just want those goddamn boxes of junk food: that’s just what they want first.” Booker Jaynes interrupted our standoff. He was downcast, resigned. “Garth’s food: that’s just what they knew we had. They’ll want more later, trust me. They’re white folks. Eventually they’ll try to take everything.” Behind us, White Folks the dog seemed equally hungry, barking without pause as he stared out the back window at the Tekelian monsters, who followed our moving truck.

I turned to look at the sight too. Outside the truck’s misty back window the white shrouded figures jogged, trailing us. Bouncing up and down like the wooden horses of a carousel, going nearly as fast on foot as we were in the vehicle. They had insisted on joining us as we returned to our base and had turned down our offers to accompany us in the bellies of our metal beasts. Even Khun Knee was among them, although I couldn’t see the elder at the moment. All I could really see was their outlines through our truck’s crystalline wake, the figures dancing on the horizon like the northern lights.

When we returned, Garth and I checked the hulking satellite dish placed on top of our cramped, one-story encampment. Although the dish had a heater, it still sometimes failed from the cold, so to avoid a loss of reception we covered the entire thing in electric tape and sprayed the receiver with nonstick cooking aerosol. At the moment, the dish did appear to be in complete working order, a fact I intentionally made note of so that I wouldn’t be sent out in the cold to check the thing if the reception wasn’t working. For a moment or even half of one, I believed I hallucinated the image of a white shrouded figure up on the roof, ducking behind the disk as we approached, but this sensation passed rather quickly.
^a
A green light on the base of the satellite receiver indicated that a strong connection was engaged, and that was my primary concern at that moment.

When I came inside they were all there, in the common room. By all of them I mean not just our crew but the contingent of creatures too, with Pym in tow. Literally in tow: one of the group of large, militaristic-looking warrior beasts had carried Pym in like a shawl over its monstrous shoulders and was only just letting him down. And it was freezing. Whether the heat was even on in this portion of the building I don’t remember, but I did see one of the guards holding open the front doors in a successful effort to make the climate more to their liking. Past my sober-looking cousin, our television projected a black, blank screen onto the unpainted white drywall. This, in my experience, simply didn’t happen: when there was no signal from the satellite, the TV said, “No Signal,” the words slowly bouncing around the screen in an almost taunting manner. If there was a problem with the connection on our end, a blue screen was usually the symptom. But the screen projected was simply black, sucking the light from the space it landed on.

“Why is it doing that? Is the cable loose? Is there a cable loose outside or something?” I asked.

“It’s not the cables, inside or out. That’s what comes in on every station. It ain’t a problem on our end. It’s something up there,” Captain Jaynes said with a nod out to the beyond, and I couldn’t determine if by “up there” he meant the satellite orbiting in the heavens or the rest of the world north of the pole. “Chris, I want you to do something for me, okay?” The others, my crewmates, were staring at me as though I had a grenade in my hand.

“You and Garth, go over to the computers, check your email.”

“What are those boxes of light and text?” Pym said, pointing at the computers as if they were aberrations only he noticed. I don’t know what he found more fantastic, that there were such fantastic inventions in the world or that black people had mastered them.

“The modem’s working. Look, it’s green, you can see the signal light from here,” Garth informed our captain.

“We know, we already checked our accounts. Now just look up your email clients, see if any mail came for you since we went away.”

There were several terminals around the room, each of which had been staked out by us individually. With the connection as unreliable as it was, it was good to have a computer up and attempting to retrieve your mail all day, so that even if a viable signal was present for only a ten-second interval, your letters from the outside world might get through. When I checked, there was one email message waiting for me, although even before I opened it, it appeared odd. First, I have fairly sophisticated junk mail protection, barring emails from all but the most recognized sources, known associates, et cetera. This email, however, was from no one. There was no name listed, only a blank space in the sender’s name category. Even more ominous was the subject line: ARMAGEDDON. That was it, ARMAGEDDON, in all caps, which seemed a bit dramatic and just the type of email you never open lest your computer spontaneously implode. The message itself was blank, whether because the toxic text had been filtered out or because the sender felt the subject heading said it all, I had no idea.

“ ‘Armageddon’? You get this thing, ‘Armageddon’ in your box too?” Garth looked over my shoulder for his answer before I could give it to him.

“Well I’ll be. We all got it,” Captain Jaynes confirmed. “In all of our email accounts. Personal mailboxes, business mailboxes, addresses that in no way should be linked. We all got this one email and nothing more, all day. ‘Armageddon.’ ”

We were all silent for about five seconds, our pale guests unaware that anything was amiss, and then Jeffree began crying. Actually no, crying implies one subtle tear down a somber cheek.
Wailing
is more apt. Wailing and praying at the same time. The sobs made the individual words difficult to decipher, but when he cried out “It’s the end of the world!” into Carlton Damon Carter’s shoulder, it was impossible not to hear him.

It was only then, as my cousin turned from the embarrassment of the engineer, that he seemed to remember our guests were even there.

“It appears we have a problem,” Booker Jaynes told Arthur Pym, who was before this moment marveling over an electric reading lamp in the corner by the couch, turning it off and on. Catching his attention, our captain continued. “We had planned on bringing our collection of snow monkeys and you back to civilization.”

“Yes, I am here. As are Hunka and Krakeer,” Pym said as the other two, apparently recognizing their names, revealed themselves, coming from behind the more average-heighted of their species. “We are here, and we are in your employ. We are ready to go.”

“Well see, that’s the thing,” I intervened. “There doesn’t seem to be anywhere to go to, at the moment. We’re trying to reach the rest of the world, and it doesn’t appear to be, you know, answering. We’re not going anywhere, at least not at the moment.”

There was a bit of commotion on their side at this revelation, and our crew watched the cloaked figures having an animated discussion with their disconcerting vocalizations. They were making such a violent fuss that once again the size of them was really impressed upon me: they were so damn big. It was after a lengthy discussion directly with the aged Khun Knee that Arthur Gordon Pym said to me, “The debt, it has begun with our employ. If you are not to take us, then Khun Knee says our price must be paid immediately.”

“Well, we don’t have the bounty now, do we? Would he take something else in its place? Some matches, perhaps? Blankets?” More snow beast discussion followed. I noticed that the more the old beast Khun Knee talked, the more the room smelled of herring.

“He says the debt must be repaid,” Pym translated. “If you lack the bounty, you can work it off.”

“Work? Well shit, how long will that take?” the captain shot back at him. His voice had risen an octave. There was something about a white man saying you had to work for him that I knew repulsed Booker Jaynes to his core.

“A few hundred cycles.”

“What’s a cycle?”

“The time from darkness to light,” Pym responded, and although his voice still seemed a bit distant, numb, I detected a bit of nervousness on his part as he kept glancing at the beings around him as if to avoid ownership of those words.

“A hundred days? You’re trying to tell us we owe you
a hundred days’ labor
for a deal that didn’t even go through?” The captain was getting exceedingly agitated at this point. The strain of the past hours, of this improbable discovery and the fate of all that we had left behind had finally overtaken him.

On orders from Khun Knee, the warriors under his control suddenly stood at attention. In response to the elder’s barked command, the soldiers bore arms. Literally bore arms, rolling up their sleeves to reveal horrifically muscled and veined biceps and triceps that seemed as hard and heavy and white as marble.

“Not days.” Angela stared at the approaching soldiers, her voice shaking slightly with each of their steps. “The nights here last all winter, right? And the days the entire summer too. He’s not saying we owe a hundred days of work. He’s saying we owe
a hundred years.
” The uncertainty in her lovely voice had nothing to do with her lack of faith in her own interpretation of this contract. It came from a deeper anxiety, one that in that moment fluttered through every black heart in that room.

And thus our slavery began.

*
To the horror of both of us, I’m sure.

†
Imagine the farthest cloud, on the brightest day, in the bluest sky. Imagine that just past the very top of that cloud was a hard, constructed ceiling. Then imagine how small you would feel under it.

‡
Americans love that last question, “Where are you from?” They see it as an excuse to go on about their peculiar local identity and tell you everything about themselves as people without really offering anything personal at all.