Pym_ A Novel - Mat Johnson [13]
“We’re late. We going to miss the golden hour. You talk about me being fat, you so damn out of shape, we’re not going to make it till dawn,” Garth huffed. Once he got going he could still move fast. Like a dump truck on the highway.
“It’s right there, that’s your painting, isn’t it?” I managed, relieved that he shot on up the path in front of me and I could lean on my thighs and wheeze a bit in dignity. When I caught up to him, Garth was pacing the open field on top of the hill that overlooked the Hudson and the Catskill Mountains that began on the other side of the water. This was a good place to live. We were far enough north from the Point Pleasant nuclear reactor that if it was hit, we’d survive the radiation. Even a dirty bomb in Manhattan would be okay; the wind blew south from here. People moved here for that, and for the natural beauty. And that spot had a stunning view, locals hiked out all the time to see it. Garth was barely looking at it. Mostly he was looking at the ground, walking around a bit, pulling up his print of the painting to compare nature’s majesty with Thomas Karvel’s manufactured mess, then walking to another spot and trying it again.
“Well is this the right place or not?” My phone was ringing, but I was already impatient.
“Yeah. But I’m trying to find the really right place. Karvel spotting is a discipline.” Like a dog looking for a place to piss, he kept circling. Small and smaller loops, and then he was still. I thought he was going to look for artifacts at his feet, try to find a paintbrush or something, but he just looked back up and finally took in the vista. Garth held out the painting before him one more time, and then sighed. It was windy, and he was not close anymore, but I could hear him.
“Stock of the Woods! He must have been standing right here. Right here, in this very spot. The Master of Light!” Garth yelled back to me, and more such ramblings. I nodded and forced a smile, and when he was done, I checked my voice mail, and was soon as high as Garth was pacified.
“There was an item listed today in a certain Hertfordshire house’s catalog as a ‘Negro Servant’s Memoir, dated 1837,’ I yelled after I heard the news. Garth was too chilled to even get my meaning. He didn’t understand, but I knew. Just that winter a well-known Africanist intellectual had found a place for himself on several of the major news outlets merely because of his purchase of a previously unknown slave narrative.
“This is the stuff academic names are built on, man. Careers. Careers are made on this kind of thing.” As we walked back to Garth’s car, images of a rogue intellectual career flashed before me, and I pictured a new life for myself, one of glamour and packed lecture halls. All the recent damage repaired.
“I like seeing the original site of the art. It’s like being able to climb in one,” Garth told me. I felt the same way, but it took me a moment to realize he was talking about the print he’d tucked in his coat like it was a sacred scroll.
When we arrived back at my rented house, the Ichabod Crane frame of Oliver Benjamin, book pimp, was on the porch, poking through the rotted mound of my literary history.
“How could you do this?” he said by way of hello. He had a moldy reproduction of the only issue of Fire! in his hand, holding the soggy thing as gently as if it were an original. I gave him a synopsis of the calamity and his response was “But still. You don’t know how to treat your things.”
He kept going. Pacing the travesty, listing off titles and cursing. He wouldn’t shut up. So he knew how to hurt me. I was so depressed at the end of his rant that I let him smoke in my living room, and even still Oliver spent the first minutes inside repeating a catalog of all that I had lost, specifically the volumes he’d found for me. Garth gave him coffee, and finally he relented. Oliver slurped and his Adam’s apple bobbed, and then