Pym (9 page)

“See, I’m the performer, right? I’m like, to these people watching, the hero they want to be. But my man Carlton Damon Carter, he’s the one that filmed it and made it art. He’s the one that designed the website, the one that brings all I’ve done to the world,” Jeffree declared in another clip, one in a series of video journal entries. He had a hand firmly on Carlton Damon Carter’s neck and was roughly pulling on him as the other, lighter man blushed in response. It would have been a very masculine gesture if Jeffree hadn’t kissed Carlton Damon Carter lightly on the side of his forehead in the end.

“He’s my muse,” Carlton Damon Carter nearly whispered into the microphone. “I’m his lens.”

It was clear from the number of comments beneath each clip that they had a huge national and international audience for their exploits. But as I kept watching, I started to wonder if the national and international attention for their little site may have distorted their original intentions. The duo’s attempt to drive to Ohio during the Dayton Dirty Water Disaster was a disaster in itself, and the reams of tape basically just covered them stuck on I-95 in a U-Haul filled with barrels of New York tap sludge, only to be turned away by the National Guard. Here the same agonized futility on display in the 9/11 footage just comes off as plain stupidity. Clearly I was not the first person to perceive it this way; Jeffree admitted as much to me on the phone the next morning, calling me back a few hours after my fishing email.

“Something like this, that could really increase traffic.
Negroes on Ice
. That could be a whole documentary,” he told me, his live voice filled with even more bravado than the video editing had captured. Already I found him a bit annoying, but I was looking to discover literary history not make buddies, so I pawned him off to Booker Jaynes anyway. I was already preoccupied with the next stage of the recruitment.

I knew where she lived. I knew where she worked. I hadn’t talked to her in seven years, but that was because I held on to the hope that she would come back to me first. When I went into the city I made a habit of passing through those blocks that housed her residence and her job, walking from one end to the other in the hope I’d see her from a distance, but that was all I did. I didn’t call her. I clung to my hope instead, hope built on a shaky foundation of science.

With love, the scientific literature on the subject reveals that the human brain works according to a series of dependable cycles, ebbs and flows as natural as the current. We were seven months into our first love phase, and Angela Bertram’s endorphins ran out before mine did. I clung, she pulled away. I clung harder, and she walked out on my ass. I wasn’t bitter, this was actually my preferred understanding of events. Another way to look at it is that she grew up poor, and staying in a grad student’s little stinking hovel invoked a future life of pretty much the same. The fact that she left me for a lawyer fits into this theory too well—evolution had hardwired women to be attracted by ambitious, successful providers, as it had predisposed men to physically fit women capable of bearing healthy young. So I gave her this. It was not Angela Bertram’s fault, it was evolutionary reality. She already had my heart, I didn’t have much choice. I didn’t fight her abandonment, because you can’t fight science. Fighting science just makes you pathetic, like spitting in the wind or breathing underwater. The best thing to do is let the wind abate, float to the top. And then breathe.

Science is a glorious thing. Angela divorced after seven years, a number predicted by her endorphin cycle. Even though I heard for years that the marriage was in trouble I stayed away because research shows that the vast majority of relationships that begin as extramarital affairs end within a year after the partner has left her or his spouse, and my love for her was undying. Angela Bertram had been separated completely from the bastard for almost two months. I’d heard something about infidelity, but made sure not to torture myself with specifics. I’d stayed away because rebound relationships initiated in the first three months after the conclusion of a long-term relationship had a dismal success rate. I had been planning on contacting her in three weeks, on the exact date of the third month of her final separation, before fate had changed the calendar. If I was a religious man, I would have seen the hand of God. Instead, I saw the wonders of the scientific method and the fruits of self-discipline. There had been other women in my life, there was sex and sometimes romance and much flirtation. But no love. No one had gotten to my heart because my chest was hollow. Whatever was once there, Angela Bertram now possessed it.

She came out of the subway, and she blinked and looked around for a few seconds, orienting herself. Her sense of direction was poor, her eyesight worse. Angela refused to get glasses because she was a little vain and was afraid of falling into a downward spiral of myopia, that the lightest prescription would soon lead to lenses thicker than the Hubble Telescope. She found the street sign, found the direction, and walked toward the restaurant, where I sat by the window. The look when she reached me at the table, the hug that started with the arms and pushed in with the full body behind it, it was everything I’d been waiting for. Always let them be the last to contact you when you split, even when they dump you and say they don’t love you anymore, so that you both know that you are the one who never called them back.

“You look great. You look the same. Like you haven’t changed one bit,” Angela told me, still holding my hand as she took her seat. Another victory on my part. Seven years without increasing your body mass index is a great accomplishment. Especially for a man soon to hit forty. It was the great age, when poor lifestyle choices and bad genes started to show dramatically on the human form. For her, I’d kept myself encased in amber, mind and body. From this position, though, up close, I could see all the ways Angela Bertram had changed over the years of name hyphenation. Her once braided hair was now untwined and ironed. The darkness of her skin banished the thought of wrinkles, though. It still shone like the skin of an orca. Accented now by diamonds that covered most of her earlobes.

“Don’t you ever wish you could go back, make different decisions?” she asked after entrées, a sadness there I planned to rub away. “The divorce has taught me, I’m creative. Even if I’m not doing art anymore, I need to be a creative person. I needed a partner who’s a creative, adventurous person. How did I think I could be content with someone whose idea of life was just raking in the cash from corporate acquisition contracts?”

I knew she’d never be happy in that life. I knew that when we were together. What I didn’t know was how terrified she was of growing old in the same poverty she’d been raised in. This I figured out later. This I deciphered from “I love you, but I can’t live like this. I’m going with David …” And then she probably finished the sentence—maybe she was going with David to the store or on a Caribbean cruise or to the chapel to be wed that very day—but I’ve long since deleted the rest from my memory banks.

“You always knew that. You always knew me.” Angela laughed. And I laughed back because I did and I didn’t hate her for it. She had fear. I had fear. Our demons had just been working at cross-purposes.

“I do know you. That’s why when I heard about this, I knew I had to let you in,” I said and pushed Booker Jaynes’s folder across the table. I’d already sent her the scans, but I felt like the actual papers might serve as a talisman.

“Well, I’m at a crossroads. The marriage, the job even—I can’t work with him anymore. Infidelity will do that,” she said, and I gave a little shrug. Not enough to show my awareness of the irony in her statement. Bitterness was the enemy.

“Well, I’ll have to look further, but I’m intrigued, that I can say now. I know I wouldn’t have a problem getting a second lawyer to join as well.” She smiled, took a sip of the white I’d picked for the occasion. A pinot—a refined version of the rotgut I used to lug for her up to my fourth-floor walk-up. It worked. We made it all the way to dessert, talking about the lost days we once had together. She listened to my
Pym
ravings. She was fascinated. We kept talking in front of the bistro as the lights went off inside the place.

“Look, Chris, I could use a capital investment like this right now. Hell, I need adventure too. But, I’ll tell you, if I do this, if I do the crazy thing of coming all the way down to Antarctica, it won’t be about me,” Angela admitted to me, walking to her subway. “There’s someone I know who this would be even more important to. Someone who this would be a dream come true for. A special guy who needs this. Someone very important to me.”

I didn’t go for the kiss. At the gate, I shook her hand and received another hug for my restraint. Excusing myself before I burst, I floated back home. Technically I took the train, but I felt like I could have glided on the tracks and made it there just the same. No present worry, not a thought that wasn’t future or past. All my patience, my self-control, then victory. I promised myself I wouldn’t contact her again until we were below the equator. I wasn’t going to crowd her, scare her off. Give her any reason to second-guess the odyssey. I turned her over to Booker Jaynes, and I would just see her down there. See her on the ice. Wait for the opportunity to be cooped up with Angela Bertram on an utterly isolated Antarctic base. Let the inevitable take place.

“Niggas on Ice!” Garth yelled at me when I got the door open. It was late, he was early to sleep and rise, and I was surprised to see Garth even awake. But there he was, smiling, Antarctic images on his laptop and a doppelgänger of
Shackleton’s Sorrow
on the page he waved, compliments of my own printer and a whole cartridge of my colored ink. “Get this, they say he’s down there, dog. That’s the rumor, this is where he lives. The ultimate in Karvel spotting,” Garth ranted. I paid attention to him, but more to the large package I’d picked up at the door. “Mathis Estate” was listed at the top of the return address, in care of a law office in Hammond, Indiana.

I’d tried calling Mahalia Mathis, asking her to mail Poe’s letter to me, of course, but no answer till now. This wasn’t just a letter, though. It was as large as an icebox, and this made sense, because when I removed its outer paper, I saw that it was just that, a Styrofoam cooler. On top of the lid was a folder with not one copy of the Poe letter but five. All quality, professionally done. But the box, this huge box. Electric taped. Razoring the edges, I lifted slowly as Garth continued babbling about Thomas Karvel hidden away in Antarctica behind me. I was prepared for several things, a hat, tom-toms, maybe one of her performance gowns, but none of those were close to what I saw inside. A severed human head, sockets empty, staring back up at me.

The flesh was gone, all that was left was a brown skull resting on a puzzle of aged skeleton pieces. It was enough to make me jump. It was enough to end Garth’s rant when he came up next to me. Beside this head was a note, handwritten in the elaborate cursive loops of the woman herself.

To Be Sent to Christopher Jaynes, on the Event of My Untimely and Unfortunate Passing:

My family has carried this burden, cast down from one generation to the next, since 1849, when they had to dig him up to hide his bones from Rufus Griswold. My plan for our last unfortunate meeting had been to ask that professor to test them next, but you saw how he made a fool of himself with his little Q-Tip nonsense. Please find me a good
Jewish doctor who can run that DNA test right. Redeem him, Christopher Jaynes!!! You’re my only hope!!!
^*

There was the skeleton of Dirk Peters. The man himself, in my possession. It was almost as great an honor as the book. And I made a vow to myself right then that I would redeem him. I would redeem him, beyond the petty prejudices of his family, distanced and departed as well though they were. Someday, I would find Tsalal. And I would go to Tsalal with these remains. And there, on the highest mountain, I would bury Dirk Peters in the ground, on the island of blackness that he, a black man, had discovered and, by leaving Pym behind, had preserved from the predations of white supremacy, colonialism, slavery, genocide, and the whole ugly story of our world. This was Dirk Peters’s legacy. Even if he was an Uncle Tom.

“Damn, dog. A box of bones, ain’t that some shit? From here, nothing can surprise you. You’re not going to get a bigger shock than that in this life.”