Pym_ A Novel - Mat Johnson [31]
Jeffree and Carlton Damon Carter are just two guys who make dirty water clean again, guys who share the same little Lefferts Garden apartment, where they sleep in the same marriage bed. Poetically, the last image that the ever silent Carlton Damon Carter films of Jeffree on that day is of the water engineer handing water out on the street to those last survivors straggling from the World Trade Center.
“See, I’m the performer, right? I’m like, to these people watching, the hero they want to be. But my man Carlton Damon Carter, he’s the one that filmed it and made it art. He’s the one that designed the website, the one that brings all I’ve done to the world,” Jeffree declared in another clip, one in a series of video journal entries. He had a hand firmly on Carlton Damon Carter’s neck and was roughly pulling on him as the other, lighter man blushed in response. It would have been a very masculine gesture if Jeffree hadn’t kissed Carlton Damon Carter lightly on the side of his forehead in the end.
“He’s my muse,” Carlton Damon Carter nearly whispered into the microphone. “I’m his lens.”
It was clear from the number of comments beneath each clip that they had a huge national and international audience for their exploits. But as I kept watching, I started to wonder if the national and international attention for their little site may have distorted their original intentions. The duo’s attempt to drive to Ohio during the Dayton Dirty Water Disaster was a disaster in itself, and the reams of tape basically just covered them stuck on I-95 in a U-Haul filled with barrels of New York tap sludge, only to be turned away by the National Guard. Here the same agonized futility on display in the 9/11 footage just comes off as plain stupidity. Clearly I was not the first person to perceive it this way; Jeffree admitted as much to me on the phone the next morning, calling me back a few hours after my fishing email.
“Something like this, that could really increase traffic. Negroes on Ice. That could be a whole documentary,” he told me, his live voice filled with even more bravado than the video editing had captured. Already I found him a bit annoying, but I was looking to discover literary history not make buddies, so I pawned him off to Booker Jaynes anyway. I was already preoccupied with the next stage of the recruitment.
I knew where she lived. I knew where she worked. I hadn’t talked to her in seven years, but that was because I held on to the hope that she would come back to me first. When I went into the city I made a habit of passing through those blocks that housed her residence and her job, walking from one end to the other in the hope I’d see her from a distance, but that was all I did. I didn’t call her. I clung to my hope instead, hope built on a shaky foundation of science.
With love, the scientific literature on the subject reveals that the human brain works according to a series of dependable cycles, ebbs and flows as natural as the current. We were seven months into our first love phase, and Angela Bertram’s endorphins ran out before mine did. I clung, she pulled away. I clung harder, and she walked out on my ass. I wasn’t bitter, this was actually my preferred understanding of events. Another way to look at it is that she grew up poor, and staying in a grad student’s little stinking hovel invoked a future life of pretty much the same.