Pym_ A Novel - Mat Johnson [55]
Besides, I was caught up. Hypnotized. For now, coming to our gathering, Sausage Nose and another of the larger creatures seemed to be carrying a child, each with one hand holding a shoulder. A diminished, dangerously thin boy, with a slight pinkish color that contrasted with the bluish tones of the other creatures. He appeared to be unconscious, flopping like a stringless marionette. The three figures came through as the crowd opened a path for them. When they dumped the smaller creature between the elder and myself, I saw that it wasn’t a child at all but the body of a man.
It was undeniable. It was the single most bloodless corpse I had ever seen in history, but it was definitely a human one. A white man, with dark hair on his head and a dark mustache. I carefully stepped toward the body and stuck a hand on its shoulder. Aside from fabric tied around his neck in a makeshift scarf, the Caucasian was dressed very much like the creatures who had produced him, swaddled in cloth.
“He’s dead, isn’t he? Is this like an initiation or something? Do you think they want us to eat him?” Jeffree asked as he hunched next to me, not at all kidding. I was in the process of dismissing his interpretation when, to my surprise, the corpse opened his eyes and looked directly at the two of us, startling us even more than we already were. Equally surprised, the guy scrambled backward across the ice to get his distance. Eyes wide, trying to lose himself in a crowd of creatures that scrambled away from him as soon as he arrived there, the white dude kept pointing and muttering, “You’re not there, you’re not there, you’re not there.”
“Yes, we are,” I told him. The comment seemed to have the desired effect. The man ceased his panic and turned to look at us directly.
“Did you actually say something?” he asked, crouched and cowering. He spoke with an odd accent, a hint of the American South but a bit of the Brit too.
“I did say something,” I told him, and then the obvious questions were lobbed over my head by my yelling co-workers: What is this place? What are these people? Who are you? It was only the last question he seemed willing to discuss, the rest he just looked away at and shook his head at nervously. But his identity, that he seemed clear on. Adjusting the material on his collar, standing straight and short, and looking directly up at me, the man said:
“Well of course my name is Arthur Pym, of the Nantucket Pyms, sir.”
I wasn’t stunned. I wasn’t shocked. I wasn’t even impressed, because he was clearly a lunatic and I didn’t believe him. Because unless we’d stepped into a time warp, that would make him over two hundred years old. He looked bad, but still.
I nodded my head, smiled, and said my name back to him. Politely, the madman nodded as if to pretend my own name held some weight with him. Then this Pym looked quickly at Jaynes, then at Jeffree, then at Nathaniel, lingered over Angela, and then turned back to me.
“So tell me then, Mr. Jaynes,” he began, his voice hoarse from disuse and possibly misuse, “have you brought these slaves for trading?”
* I thought of smiling at them too but held off on this with the distant memory that chimpanzees take grinning as a hostile bearing of fangs.
† The events that follow are fantastical and challenged the imaginations even of those of us who experienced them firsthand. I will therefore attempt to relay them to you in the most straightforward manner I can manage, taking on the same level of distance I did on that day, simply to avoid being completely overwhelmed.
‡ And the rest