Pym_ A Novel - Mat Johnson [116]
Pym looked over his shoulder, back behind him at the creatures he represented. How did he like that? There was a nervousness to Pym, a nervousness that he bore every moment I encountered him. His love of the Gods was based on his fear of them, and it was clear which of the two emotions was most overwhelming.
“What kind of food might you have?” Pym asked, preparing as he was to make the offer as attractive as possible to his masters.
“A feast?” I asked aloud as we closed the door behind us. It seemed a brilliant idea to me, truly inspired. The breaking of bread, the universal action of communal friendship. What more agreeable act could we offer? I was surprised at the rationalism displayed by Mrs. Karvel.
“A supper,” Mrs. Karvel said in response to me, lighting another cigarette and nodding. “We’ll give them a good, strong supper, and that will take care of all our troubles.” She went to the back of her little storage room and started unpacking the boxes, lifting them out of their furniture shapes and lining them up on the floor before us.
“Well, I don’t know if that’ll take care of all our troubles, but at least that’ll begin to—” I stopped when I realized what she was doing. Inside the boxes labeled with the images of rats were more little boxes with more little rats imprinted upon them. And as I watched Mrs. Karvel, I saw that inside those little boxes were little poisonous blue pellets, the kind you would feed to rats if you wanted them to cease being nuisances and start being dead.
“All our troubles. You said they have a village under the ice, right? A place big enough for a homestead, if we need to?” Mrs. Karvel asked, holding a box of poison and shaking it like a maraca before us. “Now help me look. I know there’s some packets of Kool-Aid back here.”
“You can’t just poison them, dog,” Garth kept complaining, simultaneously dipping his fingers into untainted cooking bowls to scoop up leftover food. Garth addressed me, but he was loud, offering criticism for the entire room. And, apart from my cousin, the room ignored him. Garth was different from us: we might have shared an ancient slave past, but we did not share our immediate one. Garth hadn’t been caught with us below. Garth hadn’t had his own brief taste of bondage to give him something invisible and bitter to suck on. No, Garth was an outsider in this regard, and we ignored him.
“I mean, what you guys are talking about is like some germ warfare shit, you know what I’m saying? It’s like some anti–Geneva conventions shit. It ain’t right.”
“Right. It ain’t tactical.” Captain Jaynes took over the discussion. “See, when you fight against your oppressors, it’s got to be tactical. There’s no point in poisoning them, there’s too many for that. And if you do that, you can’t never win the argument. You can’t never see that look on their faces when they know that you were right and they are so wrong.” We ignored Captain Jaynes for entirely different reasons. For one, he was clearly in shock, shivering there in his blanket despite the heat, and he was now so pale from his discomfort that he had gone from brown to gray. But really, the captain never sounded much more sane than this, so there was no confusing his current physical condition with his mental one. No, the real reason we didn’t listen to my cousin would’ve hurt the man if it’d been said aloud: even though I was the only one who had witnessed the actual intimacy between him and his personal captor, the truth was suspected by all. So we ignored him and kept quietly at our diabolic work. Garth filled the new silence.
“But dogs, you can’t just kill people. It’s not right, it’s not how you’re supposed to do things. I mean, these creatures freaked me out just as much as they freak you out, but there are some things that are right and some things that are wrong and poisoning a bunch of folks is