I have always loved quitting jobs. Whether because the job itself was repugnant or the people working at it with me, I have always held my right to quit my job as one of my most sacred privileges. An entire ritual surrounds this shedding of employment. First, there is the glorious moment when, after the unpleasantness of my position and my general unhappiness become overwhelmingly apparent to me, I say to myself (and I quote), “Fuck this. I don’t have to take this shit anymore. They think they can make me do what they want, but I’m out of here.” Ah, there it is, the almost orgasmic release I feel when I first make the profane declaration to myself, the feeling of reclaimed power coursing invisibly through me. But not just that: this singular moment, this coveted private knowledge is formed into a golden kernel and popped into existence again in my mind as a reaction to every unfortunate work-related moment I’m forced to endure before I make my destined departure. It’s such a glorious thing, the harboring of this secret knowledge, that in itself it has kept me at many a job even longer than I had originally intended, because just knowing that I would soon be free was the most effective of panaceas. So much so that there were times when even though it was impossible for me to quit I would say the same words to myself and mercifully delude my conscious mind that I could get the hell out of there if I wanted to.

As I marched through the snow with nothing but more snow in front and behind for hours, I began to wonder if all of my quitting dramatics might have some larger meaning. That they might in fact be evidence of some form of race memory from my genetic past. How many of my slave ancestors used such gimmicks to preserve their own sanity? Spending years obsessing over the intended escape that only they knew of. The intricate planning that they shared with no one. I have thought of their escapes before, and was usually impressed by the bravery and fear that must have accompanied those breakouts. But I forgot to think about the glory of all the acts of flight that never happened. And how powerful their inaction probably was to the slaves who did not perform them.

But me, I quit. I have quit very good jobs, and horrible ones. I have co-workers that I still miss, and co-workers that I regret never assaulting on the way out the door. And overall, I have enjoyed my resignations, enjoyed that last moment of walking away from each of the places that housed my misery, knowing that I would never have to return. I have walked down the street each time and bounced away, literally bounced in a skipping motion, knowing once more the effervescence of freedom.

And always, immediately after my departure, then comes the next feeling, the next sentence, which is just as inevitable as the first. It goes, “What the hell are you going to do now?” And thus begins my terror. The hell I was doing now was slogging forward through the wind, rope over my shoulder as I pulled, trying to ignore the pain in my right hand as I kept my grip on my makeshift sled. What I was going to do was ignore the sounds of the screaming Arthur Gordon Pym, who was surprisingly awake and still tied to the luggage pile behind me. What I was going to do was keep following Garth Frierson, staring at the back of his head like so many of his bus passengers must have, and trust as they did that the man knew where he was going.

“What is this shit?” Garth asked, staring at the sealskin container. It was Pym who responded.

“That, heathen, is krakt. It is the chosen meal of the Gods, the most perfect economy of taste and sustenance.” There was a snort that ended this description. I had untied Pym for the moment and replaced his many folded robes with one of the spare snowsuits just so that I could keep a better eye on what his limbs were up to. We sat out on the compacted snow taking a break, our footprints lost in the trail behind us, the mountain in front of us still infuriatingly distant. There was nowhere for Pym to run to, and this knowledge calmed him a bit. The fact that he seemed to be sobering up as our trip progressed contributed to his change in demeanor too.

“But does it taste good?” Garth retorted.

“No,” I said over my shoulder, and then continued relieving myself into a growing yellow hole a dozen yards past them.

“It is a staple of the very heavens,” Pym shot back, offended. “Everyone eats it there. Everyone eats it there for every meal, and for every occasion. It is the food of love. Everyone who consumes it has love for it.”

“Everyone?” Garth asked, and emboldened, he took a sample, dipping a bare finger into the gook and putting it on his tongue. “Dog, this is delicious” was Garth’s judgment.

“Great. Eat as much as you want, my man,” I told him. “You sure you know where you’re going, right?” I asked, but Garth was too engrossed in his culinary discovery to answer.

“Where the hell are we going, Garth?”

I didn’t want to seem like the child on a long trip calling out Are we there yet? but yet and still, were we? We were stopped for yet another “bathroom” break, as it was clear that the krakt was proving too rich for the mortal stomach of Garth Frierson, who at least did me the honor of going downwind to shit himself this time.

I’d given up tying Arthur Pym’s hands an hour before, since there was no point to it. For the most part, as I trudged along behind the tracks that Garth laid down just before me, Pym was the least of my fears. Mostly, I worried about Garth. I watched through the small cloud of snow in his wake as he stomped along, the fat of his hips swiveling to get him there. I watched as he Karvel-spotted, removing the picture of the mountain peak from his jacket and raising it to whatever new vista we approached. And I waited. Impatiently. Trying to calculate the point at which our bodies would be sufficiently depleted so that even the life of servitude behind me was literally beyond my reach. And only after that horror became too much to contemplate did I think of Pym instead. And I thought of something. I turned my body and mind to Pym, who was trying to scrape the last of the krakt out of the empty seal bladder onto his fingers.

“Arthur Pym, why’d you say ‘the Gods found you’?” The Caucasian turned up from his feeding to look at me inquisitively but said nothing. Although centuries old, he didn’t look more than thirty-eight. A drunkard’s watery thirty-eight but a lot better than most two-hundred-year-olds nonetheless. Down here, white didn’t crack either.

“You know,” I continued, “when we were talking back at that pub before, why did you say ‘the Gods found you’ about the Tekelians, when I found them? I discovered the Tekelian at the base of the chasm. That was me.”

“You are not half so clever as you imagine, Christopher Jaynes. Did you really believe yourself to be so lucky as to trip upon their perfection? Did you really think it was you that had the element of surprise?”

The tunnels that led to our base camp—immediately I made the connection. My mind lurched forward, fueled by explosive possibilities. The Tekelians had been watching us all along. They had planned for all of it to go down.

In a rush of euphoria, I began to believe that the entirety of humanity was probably still alive and carrying on in the rest of the world without bother. But then I remembered the emails and the missing workers’ boat, and my mind came crashing down once more. There was no way the ice monsters could have made their own computers from bones and snow, or made phones to cancel work orders.

“Do you intend to starve me? For if murder was your dark intent, it would have been better to kill me back in Tekeli-li rather than drag me this far.” It was two hours later, and Pym had a good point on that one; even though it had been only a few hours, I was hungry too.

“Garth, two protein bars, please. No, maybe you should make that four.” It was a hard thing to ask for; I’d eaten so many before we left that the mere thought of those faux chocolate fiber bricks threatened my gut. Still, it was better than the pangs of hunger which I was already starting to feel again.

“Ain’t no more, dog,” Garth said, not even bothering to put his binoculars down and face me.

“What? Of course there are more. There was a whole unopened box; just take one out of that pile.”

“Ate ’em,” the big man said while looking back through the binocular lenses. He kept scouring the horizon as if his magical mountain would just jump up and reveal itself if he stared at the distant ridges long enough.

“ ‘Ate ’em’? That is a sentence fragment, Garth, among other things. What you’re missing primarily is a defining noun. Your subject. If you are going to eat all of the food, you could at least say ‘I ate them.’ If only because now you’re going to have to watch us starve.”

Garth didn’t respond. As he walked on toward the ridge, he just kept looking around.

By our next stop, the tip of my nose had gone numb: there was barely any of it showing past my hood. Mine was a wide, Negroid nose, and yet and still its tip had gone numb. For a good half hour, I lost Garth in front of me, his massive figure growing smaller on the horizon until the dot that he had become simply vanished. Pym trudged not far behind me, just one wrist now bound and attached by rope to the sled. The white man complained bitterly the entire way, but luckily the wind blew loudly enough that the specifics of his discontent were lost. It started to seem like maybe Garth had gone on to die alone and without accusations, because the idea that we were actually moving forward toward something seemed absurd. Not even looking up anymore, I just stared at the ground. Following the tracks of Garth’s boots print for print, at some point I just stopped thinking, became hypnotized by watching the powder as I trudged by. Given my state, if it wasn’t for Garth’s screaming, I would have slammed into him when I eventually found him standing there.

Garth Frierson was yelling, but as I took his presence in, pulling back my hood to better hear him, I saw that he was doing something else even more spectacular: Garth was jumping. Jumping up and down, pumping his plump, gloved fist as he did so. Despite my exhaustion, it was a moving sight: given the general rotund shape of his outline, his actions gave Garth the appearance of a blubbery ball, bouncing up and down at improbable intervals.

“We’re here!” he finally managed to communicate to me.

“The camp? You see the camp? Where is it?” I called back to him.

“The mountain ridge! That’s it, dog. That’s the one we’re looking for, over there.”

Following Garth’s pointed finger, I did see the mountain ridge. It was true, it was the same one that I saw in the painting. Then, looking past and around that landmark, I saw something else. I saw that there was nothing out here. No sign of an eco-habitat, no sign of life, nothing. If not for the printed image that Garth had of this very spot, I would have assumed there had never been any form of human contact with this place at all. But I was sure it was this spot, just as Garth was as he held up the image and compared it to the landmarks around us.

“This is it!” he kept declaring.

“Yeah, this is it. Fine. But what are we going to do now, Garth?” I asked, searching around for salvation and seeing nothing but snowdrifts.

“So is this to be the site of our grave?” asked Pym, sitting on the sled as he massaged the blood back into his feet.

We pitched a tent. As we did, the wind picked up and carried a storm cloud directly over our heads, then kept it there, dumping its snow down on us as if we had asked for more. By the time I began to drag my gear inside the thin nylon walls, the top of our shelter was already lined with an inch of powder. I thought, Good, that will keep some of the wind out, because I had decided to lie to myself for a while until there was some truth worth hearing.

We dragged whatever we had inside the tent before it was lost in the storm. With the last of my strength, I took the gloves off my nearly numb hands and zipped down the front tent flaps as if this act would magically turned the fabric into the sturdiest of doors. Hunched over, turning around, I saw Pym at my canvas bag, my treasure. He’d opened the strap at its mouth. In an act completely lacking in respect, he’d pulled out a blackened and aged femur and was holding it as if it was a drumstick he might want to take a bite of.

“Enough!” I managed the energy to snatch it back from him, replacing the contents and hugging my collection as if the remains were still living.

“Why do you have a dead man among your luggage?” Arthur Gordon Pym asked me, the judgment and disdain as palpable as the wind that blew against our refuge’s walls. “What is this, one of your victims?”

“No,” I replied, pointing. “It’s one of yours. It’s Dirk Peters.”

Pym dropped what was in his hands, pulled away from it for a second before looking into the rest of the sack. And then he looked back at me, smiled broadly, and gave a laugh of madness. Picking up the skull, he held it out to me.

“Alas, poor Dirk! I knew him, Christopher: a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy: he hath borne me on his back a thousand times; and now, how abhorred in my imagination it is!” The sight of this white guy holding the sacred remains of my black brother pissed me off more than any of the events before. I grabbed the skull back out of Pym’s hands with the one-word curse, “Blasphemy!”

“Well, if this is who you say, which I believe not, then who are you to throw such a stone?”

“The weirdo’s right, dog. What you’re doing with it?” the former bus driver asked me.

“I’m taking it to Tsalal. For a proper burial,” I said, holding the bag to me.

“I’m saying, if you ever do find Tsalal, this big black island, why the hell would you bury his bones there? Isn’t that, like, the last thing this dude and this Mathis lady would have wanted?”

“It’s not about what they would have wanted. It’s about what’s right,” I told him. Consumed by cold and overwhelming hunger, I barely bothered to offer that explanation. Why struggle to fight such silliness?

We sat in silence for hours awaiting death, the three of us. Then, after a while, Arthur Pym said:

“Do either of you count straw or twigs among your many wondrous possessions? For I believe that to find sustenance we may have to look amongst our own circle.” Despite myself I looked and saw a pool of spittle spill out the side of the Caucasian’s mouth in anticipation. Although Garth was the one currently being stared at, the big man paid Pym no mind. Instead, as Arthur Pym argued to no one the merits of his culinary suggestions, Garth put back on his gloves, goggles, and hat, and left the tent.

“I am just going outside and may be some time” was his sole remark, and like Lawrence Oates before him he was gone. I was too far gone to try to stop his sacrifice.

“So, are you going to try to eat me now,” I asked Pym, but he shrugged this off.

“Let us acknowledge this: yours is a rather odorous breed, and you, sir, are a particular pungent example of this. I fear even my starving appetite could not overcome that truth.”

“My people don’t stink. And I wouldn’t stink if those Tekelians you love so much had let me take a bath.” At the mention of criticism of his beloved snow monkeys, Pym’s head shook side to side as if he’d bitten something nasty.

“This end is a judgment, I fear. For your theft of yourself,” Pym returned, looking toward the tent door Garth had just walked out of, perhaps considering if he should go and chase after his meal.

“What are you talking about? Steal myself? You basically admitted that they scammed us into that deal, that they were watching us all along.”

Again, the head shake. Pym wouldn’t hear anything negative about the race from the caves. That is it, that’s the trick, I realized as my brain began to go numb. Drifting off, staring across at the two-hundred-year-old man just to make sure that the needs of his stomach didn’t overpower the needs of his nose, I saw it all become clear to me. That is how they stay so white: by refusing to accept blemish or history. Whiteness isn’t about being something, it is about being no thing, nothing, an erasure. Covering over the truth with layers of blank reality just as the snowstorm was now covering our tent, whipping away all traces of our existence from this pristine landscape.