Pym_ A Novel - Mat Johnson [35]
The miners sailed down from Argentina to work in fourteen-hour shifts, Monday straight through till Friday, and slept on their own boat till their week was done. We oversaw them, provided direction, counted up the ice blocks they piled into their tanker’s hull before taking them back north for bottling. During the week, the site boomed as the engines of the giant mining machines did their banging. At 3:00 P.M. on Friday, our world immediately became quiet once more. The last large sound was that of the latest tanker belching as it drifted, fully loaded, away from us. Heavy with clean water, it began its journey back up the planet again, first to Buenos Aires to drop off the workers and then all the way to exotic locations like Newark and Bayonne, its melting cargo becoming more valuable with every nautical mile.
When the drilling was going on, we bitched about the sound.* The day after the workers sailed away from our Antarctic home, the silence was louder. The God-I-can’t-hear-anything roar, building in your ears like a snowball on a cartoon hill. The constantly rustling wind didn’t help. That was just the sound of silence moving.
Every Saturday after the workers had gone back to the warmer continent, Booker Jaynes sent Garth and me on out to drill in the surrounding tundra. Soil samples, ice samples, we even had a standing order to grab a penguin if we got the chance. Booker Jaynes had several “clandestine business opportunities,”† had promised things to a lot of people, it became clear. I wasn’t sure how much of his intended take was outside our agreed upon communal take, but I didn’t really care. It was a chance to get out of the box, away from her. Seeing her with this man, the ring, smelling the cigars he reeked of mingling with the scent of her, it was a lot to bear. I spent my time either working for my cousin or translating Dirk Peters into English from the blurred script he wrote in. I consoled myself with the self-evident truth: Their marriage would fail. He was clearly lazy. He had “taken time off” from the agency in L.A. she worked for, and on return, he would burn through their savings. Once he was stripped bare, she would see him as the fraud I knew he must be. Her fear of being broke would kick in and she would walk away from him as she had done to me years before. By this time, I would have published my edition of The True and Interesting Narrative of Dirk Peters to major fanfare. All would be restored. This was my fantasy. In the moments when I allowed myself to see past my despair, this is what I hoped for.
By week eight, Garth and I had fallen into a routine. Our little surveying trips were like vacations. Outside our windshield was no hint of humanity for miles and miles. Just ice and air, wind that shaped the snow on the ground into modernist curves and Victorian angles. Garth seemed almost comfortable out there. Cold climates look good on fat people. With all the layers, everybody else looks fat too. If you still managed to look skinny under all that cloth, you also looked miserable.
“They out there, dog. On the ice. Hiding.”
“The shrouded white figures?” I asked. I was thinking the same thing. When you were looking out there, into the emptiness, it wasn’t long before you could imagine anything you wanted there to be.
“No. Karvel and his people. Makes sense, don’t it? You got all that money, you want to go where no bombs or nothing can get them. That’s what I’d do,” Garth told me, again. In bringing him down here, I had introduced Garth to his new favorite conspiracy theory.‡ I’d stopped countering with logic by this point, because doing this made me even more tired of him.
When Garth became excited he talked while he ate, his Little Debbie snack cakes inevitably smearing some sort of cream or multicolored glazing across his thin outline of a mustache. Garth knew his appetites and had come prepared to fill them. He’d brought cases of the cakes, as well as videogames (most of which involved him shooting imaginary loads into fantasy people) and porn (same).