Pym_ A Novel - Mat Johnson [107]
We sat too, Garth and I, on the flat roof of Thomas Karvel’s BioDome for a long time. Appraising this scene. Sitting in our snowsuits with our asses cold and numb, but not as numb as the rest of me was becoming. The solar panel was right beside us, positioned perfectly to take the place of one of the flag’s white stars. It was the size of a Ping-Pong table. On a good day, a day of sun and light, it might have offered enough power to operate the coffee machine back inside. This was good news, because when this place ran out of power, we were going to freeze to death, and I imagined a good cup of coffee might bring comfort as we died.
“It’s about to get dark down here. Not nighttime dark, but winter dark. There won’t be any sunlight for months. These panels don’t work without sunlight. And there’s just one. What’s he going to do then?” Garth said, his voice cracking.
“What’s Karvel going to do? Man, are you crazy? Forget him. What the hell are we going to do?” I asked. Garth said nothing. For a long time, he kept saying it. I started talking again when I felt like he was going to start crying.
“First we have to get them to turn down the heat in there, turn down the lights more, anything we can. Then we have to go get some oil. There’s a tanker back at our base camp. We could get our old solar panels too; even the Creole camp had more than this.”
“And the rifler. Maybe we can drill for some damn oil.”
“We don’t know anything about refining crude oil.”
“Dog,” Garth told me, “I’ll burn that shit in a cup to stay warm if I have to.” Thinking of this image, he drifted off.
“And now we bring the others. Angela, my cousin, the other guys. This is our leverage, Karvel can’t say no now.”
“The snow monkeys,” Garth whispered so low I could barely hear him over the wind. His eyes widened as he said it, and his jaw dropped when he was done and I could see the horror that was engulfing him.
“Yeah, but Karvel’s got some guns. We’ll do what we have to do to defend ourselves.”
“No, the snow monkeys,” Garth said, pointing. I followed his gloved digit out onto the snow-covered plain. And there, past a ridge not far from the direction I recognized we too had come from only weeks before, I saw them as well. An army of a hundred or more pale, shrouded figures, camped out. Rough igloos constructed in a circular formation. I didn’t know how long they had been there, but I did know why they were there. They had come for us.
“But then why so many, dog? If they’re just hunting us down, why bring an army when one could kick our collective black ass?”
* Unfortunately, the greener than green grass that surrounded our little three-fifths house, so mossy and moist beneath our feet, took its brilliance from a different source: it was fed by the runoff of the BioDome’s septic system.
† Scrapbooking, her husband told me.
WE wasted a lot of time just getting Karvel to believe what we were saying: that they existed, that they were out there, that they had come. It was only because we were so relentless, and because the painter started to respond to our fear with ample fear of his own, that Karvel finally relented and agreed to at least see what had made us so excited.
“Nobody’s busting in my dome, I’ll tell you that right now. That’s where I draw the line. I didn’t come all the way down here to get bushwhacked by some mythological creatures.”
To protect himself from being exposed to even a room that had been tainted by the outside air, Karvel insisted on wearing protective gear before entering the work area behind his grand illusion. I think he would have preferred a space suit, something airtight with its own supply of oxygen. In lieu of that, however, Karvel