Pym (23 page)

“Don’t you get it?” Nathaniel was shaking me now. His pole fell to the floor, but with a firm grip on each of my shoulders he was at no risk of tumbling. “They’re not trying to kill us, because we are commodities. I’m a businessman, Christopher. I know what I am seeing here. They don’t hate us, or at least they didn’t when this started. They just want us to do their work for them, to get a return on their investment. That’s why they didn’t just kill Jeffree; they didn’t want the capital loss. They’re not starving you, they’re just keeping their expenditures low. My captors didn’t hate me, they just declared me a loss and had me liquidated. It’s not personal.”

“It’s personal to me: I’m starving. I take that very personally.”

“And my ankle feels like an elephant’s standing on it. But if you asked them, they’d probably tell you that my ankle’s hurting them more than it’s hurting me. And if they had a balance sheet, they could prove it. That’s why I’m learning the language, get it? Life is all about improving your assets,” Nathaniel told me, then added a series of growling syllables I took to be a Tekelian translation of the same sentiment.

Regardless of his plans for the future, it seemed that, in addition to suffering his sprain, Nathaniel was not doing much better on food than I was. I had little hope that I would be able to remedy the situation, but out of pity I asked him to travel with me on my quest to find something to eat. When I pulled Nathaniel’s arm around my neck, through the frigid air I received a good whiff of him. His musk was pretty bad, but it couldn’t have been much worse than mine, it having been weeks since either of us had had the supreme pleasure of a hot shower. As he limped and I dragged, we made our way through the midday village traffic, past pale stares, their hostility obvious regardless of their alien, simian nature.

Fortunately, the location I had in mind was not far along the path. This was good because I don’t believe that I could have carried Nathaniel much farther, and it was only the guilt of sleeping with his wife (albeit only literally) that let me heave his burden as far as I did. The spot was an ice cave like most in the main center, carved into a wall away from the village’s primary action. What set this one ice cave apart was that a long window had been cut out of the wall separating the room from the outside, and the open rectangle was a bar for those Tekelians inclined to consume its liquids, served in thick goblets of opaque ice whose blue tint turned dark yellow when filled up. I didn’t see Augustus with the crowd of patrons. (Tekelians, I believe, were genetically predisposed to the drink, and seemed to make its consumption a part of their daily rituals.) Who I did see, however, surrounded as he was by his frozen cups, was the only other human in this subterranean community. The one whose ancestors came not from the Tekelian caves but from the caves so far away in the Caucacus Mountains.

“Arthur Gordon Pym,” I said to him. At the moment, the white man was pulled into the far corner of the bar’s wall, surrounded by cast-off cups of past customers. Bent over, walking among them, Pym was gathering up the mugs that lay discarded, picking up a fresh one as a particularly tall Tekelian lobbed one in Pym’s basic direction. From his custodial actions, it appeared that I had interrupted Pym at his job, that he was perhaps the pub’s owner, or at least one of its stewards. However, I then saw Pym find a cup with a little drink still frozen solid to its inside. He immediately dropped all the other cups again and began scraping out the prized remainders of the one with his pink hand, shoving the garbage into his mouth.

Nathaniel, seeing this process, let go of me, limping heavily until he reached the pile Pym had dropped, and scooped his own brown fingers in search of leftovers as well.

“This tastes like fermented whale piss” was his critique of the now frozen beverage, as he scooped a bit from an ice glass with his pinkie.

“Close” was Pym’s response, and as soon as he had licked the last remnants of the stuff off his fingers, Pym dropped the glass in hand straight to the floor, turning to look for another one. I don’t know if Nathaniel didn’t hear Pym’s confirmation of the drink’s ingredients or if Nathaniel’s own hunger was simply too great for him to object, but he kept eating from the discarded receptacle regardless. I too was tempted: if this was all there was left of the world, what else would there be for me to dine on?

“I say to you that good liquor is not light on the tongue,” Pym continued, lips smacking. “And this is the drink of the Gods. It is the elixir of life, keeping me alive longer than I’m sure I have a right to live.” Swallowing down another bite of his frozen spirit, the clearly inebriated man took a good look at me.

“This is how you survived two hundred years, huh?” Nathaniel perked up. It was clear that he didn’t believe the Caucasian but just as clear that he knew he didn’t need to believe him in order to sell this dreck by the barrel back on the mainland. The optimism intrinsic in this speculation, that there might still be a mainland to return to, put a little pep in Nathaniel’s limp as he searched through the pile for other samples.

As Pym chewed, his mustache bounced up and down over his top lip like a caterpillar in a circus. He was taking me in now, really looking at me for the first time since he’d realized I was not a fellow white man. “You look awful. Or like offal. One or the other; I care not,” he told me.

“Of course I look awful, these creatures have me living like a fucking slave. What the hell am I supposed to look like?” To this, Pym raised his eyebrows in disapproval before continuing with his binge. His manner seemed to imply that he found my reply not only boorish but pathetic.

“That is not what I have heard. Your master Krakeer was just over there—”

“Who, Augustus?” I asked in disbelief. The idea that Augustus, even with his considerable strength, could ever be the master of me was ridiculous.

“Do not interrupt me. As I was saying, I heard from the very source that in fact you were being put up for sale. I suspect in mere weeks your indolent character has revealed itself.”

“He’s not feeding me, Pym, he doesn’t have any food. I’m starving. I’m not working around the house because I’m so starved I can barely move.”

“Well, you managed to walk all the way into town, didn’t you?” Pym replied smugly, very impressed with his own impish wit. “I suspect your master will have food enough shortly, for that is him addressing the great warrior Barro. In fact, I imagine your price is being paid as we speak. You know, when the Gods found you, they believed your people would make fine additions to their lives. Tis sad; you are shaming their generosity.”

I followed Pym’s pointing hand in the direction of the interior of the public house, and there, in the shadows, was Augustus, talking to another, taller figure I couldn’t see from where I was standing.

“He wouldn’t do that. He wouldn’t sell me,” I told Pym or myself. For the most part I thought all the Tekelians were the same, but I realized then that I had grown soft on my Augustus, as damaged as he clearly was. And in comparison, he was good to me. When he noticed my presence, Augustus pointed me out to the other man, and I could tell he was speaking of me in high regard from his expression and his hand motions. This began to make me nervous until, to my relief, Augustus’s conversation came to a seemingly uneventful end, and soon my Tekelian roommate was joining me. In Augustus’s hands were two great frozen cups of the pub’s fermented liquid. One of those he held out to me. I drank that mess down too.

“Katow Knee Cracto Khee!” Augustus declared joyously.

“He says he sold you to Barro for two full glasses of khrud. Says it will be better for you—Barro has a fur-padded bed and can feed you,” Pym instantly translated for me, not even giving me a chance to take my drink from my lips.

“You eat!” a grinning Augustus offered, tapping his frozen mug against my own, clearly proud of himself.

“Who the hell is Barro?” I got out after my first swallow. Khrud did taste like fermented whale piss, along with less pleasant fluids of the whale as well. Or Ballantine malt liquor. Either one. “Barro.” Augustus shrugged sheepishly, acknowledging the minor drawback of his victory. Before more words could answer me, actions did, and behind Augustus his trading partner emerged from the bar. They all looked the same, but this one looked a lot like the one that had poked Jeffree’s eye out. I was now in the possession of Mr. Sausage Nose, I shuddered to realize. When he passed me and smacked me upside my head without breaking his stride, I was sure my identification was correct.

“He said, ‘Come to me tonight.’ ” Pym translated. “If I were you, octoroon, I would heed that beckon.”

The thought of having my own eyes poked out of my head in a Tekelian game of William Tell gave me enough energy to make a break for the surface. That and the odd Tekelian liquor I had swilled, which took the bite off my pain for the majority of my journey. Even slightly drunk, I knew better than to try to make it all the way back to the Creole base and risk being seen by Barro or his associates. Instead, I was attempting to get up to the trucks, which were still parked directly above us at the site of our original contact. And, as the alcohol quickly wore off, I decided not only that I would make it there but that if I could not get one of the vehicles to start, or find one of the extra sets of keys I knew to be hidden on them, I would instead die there. That I would simply lie down to sleep in a front-seat cab and not have to wake up again. This was actually a comfort in the final stretches of my journey, when I could no longer imagine ever gathering the energy to walk back again. Even for Angela.

After finding the crater we’d entered on our first descent, using the last of my energy and will to climb the rope that still hung down as we had left it, I located the vehicles. My eyes adjusting to the amount of unfiltered sunlight that shone from above, I saw something else: that the wheels of all three trucks had been slashed. Long, deliberate cuts that were identical on each wheel and machine, sinking all of them a good two feet closer to the ground than they ever should have been. And I saw that their gas tanks had been opened, that petrol had spilled and dispersed into the ground around them. Except on the last massive truck, which despite its equally flattened tires, had its engines running.

The windows were fogged, and I saw movement inside. I thought: Little Debbie, you have come to have a final feast with me, and imagined a cornucopia overflowing with every snack cake there ever was, every snack cake currently on the market and every snack cake yet to exist. Instead, after I opened the door, I found a black man, chomping on protein bars.

“I know where it is, dog!” Garth said to me, completely unsurprised by my arrival. “Thomas Karvel’s base camp. I figured it out, found the mountain peak in the painting, found it in one of the photo books Jaynes has. It’s right there!” he gushed, holding his snapshot of the painting up to the horizon and the mountains of ice that stood there. The resemblance between the two images was nonexistent to me.

“No, man. Look at the ridges, look at the outline. The top’s basically the same, right? Just flipped. That’s why it looked so familiar but I couldn’t place it. This image was painted
from the other side
. That’s where Karvel’s base is, man. Over that ridge. Has to be. It takes him weeks to create a masterpiece; he would need somewhere to stay.”

Looking at the outer shape of the formation, wanting to believe it so much because I had no other vision to invest in, I began to think that for a moment I’d seen what Garth was talking about. There were similarities. I ignored the fact that all the mountains basically looked the same to me.

“So, you down? You want to run away to the promised land?” Still staring at the photo and then back at the horizon, still wanting to see what Garth saw that gave him this level of conviction, I nodded my cold head in the affirmative. However mad the big man’s suggestion, it was the closest thing to a logical course of action available.

*
This sound was yet another trait I had seen exhibited only by Augustus and not by his race in general. The others either didn’t laugh or did so in a way that seemed less like they were clearing their sinuses of a decade of congealed mucus.

†
Shirley Temple was America’s biggest star during the twentieth century’s Depression, but she was a national obsession that from a distance of time now seems quite disturbing. Just a little girl, Temple was the ultimate symbol of purity: the sacred virgin, worshiped by all. There is an innocence to the virgin icon, but at its center it is still a sexual role. Little Debbie, I must say, was beyond such considerations, her purity unassailable. You don’t talk about Little Debbie.

‡
I had wondered about these creatures’ religious inclinations, whether they believed in a soul or felt they had one, and what I saw I took to be a sign of their primitive faith. Of course they worshiped an ice cube. Without natural predators—which were often the favorite subjects of worship of primitives—what would they bow down to? In the absence of bears or big cats to run from, the ice itself seemed a natural (though abstract) choice.