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.
“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.”
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.
* 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.
§ My cousin felt that a white liberal was a Caucasian who said to himself or herself every day, “Don’t hate niggers. Don’t hate niggers.” And that the rest of white America’s racial perspective was “Don’t let the niggers hear you say ‘nigger’ out loud.”
‖ Still talking.
a Let me assure all who inquire that I did spend time considering this image later. At the moment it didn’t seem possible. None of it did.