Pym_ A Novel - Mat Johnson [39]
And what did I do? I looked up, I looked to see if Garth also saw it, catching the quickest glimpse of my greatest revelation. But Brother Garth was gone. Above was just the taut rope that held me.
When I turned back to look down, it was gone. So that’s when I did the only thing I could do, the only thing that came to my mind.
“Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!” I yelled into that now empty crater, the words echoing lightly against the walls of the abyss. “Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!” I kept screaming louder and louder, till Garth started pulling me up once more. I fell silent now, waiting for a response.
* Or rather, as the cliché goes, bitched and moaned, but you couldn’t hear the bass of moaning over the machinery hum.
† These are sometimes also called “scams.”
‡ I should say here that, in America, every black man has a conspiracy theory. (That statement in itself reveals a conspiracy, omitting as it does the conspiracy theories of black women [copious though they may be].) Some theories are quite creative, fascinating. But most are quite mundane, because they’re true. This obsession with conspiracies is most likely due to the fact that our ethnic group is the product of one.
§ This I found out after searching through Garth’s laptop while he was in the shower (bored). Confronted, Garth responded, “I like to look at women who would actually sleep with my fat ass.”
WHEN we got to the base camp we found the crew in the communal room at full attendance. The TV news channel was on, and on the screen was chaos.
It was the familiar trauma. There were the jumpy camera angles of smoke in the streets and people coughing into cloths ripped from their shirts. There were flashes of blood with no clear points of origin. There were people leaning quietly on other people who screamed loud enough for both of them. There was dust piling onto running crowds, as if they were being buried not just alive but in motion. There were legs that lay still in the streets, feet flopped out and hanging lifeless. But this time there wasn’t just one place identified in the chyron, one nation, one landmark in flames. This time there was Tokyo, and Paris, and Berlin. And then there was London, and New York, and L.A., and Sydney, and Seoul, and at one point even Stuttgart, and then there was bouncy footage from locales that were defined by solemn commentators as being “________ miles outside of” other places.
“The drill fell in a little crater. It’s down about two stories, we’re going to need help getting it up. Wasn’t our fault.” I saw the bad news on the TV, but the only good thing about really bad news is that it provided good timing for a less bad news dump.
“Man, it’s blowing up, up there. Blow. Ing. Up,” Jeffree responded, not listening. I’d accepted Jeffree’s theatrical nature over the weeks, but that made it no less annoying. But he was right. On the set, the trusted news anchor relaying the latest events started choking up. The television blared but we were quiet. Nobody talked or moved much. Nobody had to because the television was relaying all the words and action a mind could comprehend. An image of smoke coming out of the subway entrance flashed by. I saw the green balls of the 4-5-6 train lines logo.
“Your condo,” Nathaniel said, pulling Angela closer on the couch.
“My cousin Antoine works two blocks from Seventy-second Street Station,” she returned, pushing into him. I remembered Antoine. I said, “Antoine’s probably fine, just fine,” but I don’t think she noticed.
“We should be out there,” Jeffree offered, no small bit of heroic longing in his voice. Carlton Damon Carter, Jeffree’s lanky partner in engineering and love, was always silent,