Pym_ A Novel - Mat Johnson [60]
“What are you doing?” I asked. Carlton Damon Carter simply jumped back, muttered to himself, and got a new seat behind Jaynes.
“Checking the gums. Is that not the best way to discover the beast’s health?” When he heard the word beast, Jeffree leaped up to slap Pym upside his head, but to his credit he didn’t struggle too hard when Nathaniel held him back. Pym continued on as this was happening, without embarrassment. His eyes, already fairly wide to begin with, grew momentarily larger. “They are a feisty bunch” was all he had to say. And despite my efforts, the idea that we wanted Pym to accompany us off of this frozen continent so that we could reintroduce him to the modern world was clearly incomprehensible to the man.
“Why would I want to leave Heaven?” he started repeating absently, which indicated he understood at least part of what I was saying.
“Well, Arthur, don’t you want to go home? You said you were bored. Don’t you want to see your family? Where are you from?”‡ Nathaniel stepped in to ask all this, and when Pym ignored him, I repeated the questions.
“I’m a Nantucketer,” he replied.
“Well, are your family landowners?” At this the supposed Nantucketer shook his head with enthusiasm and then annoyance that I would even question that fact.
“Well, you’ve been gone awhile, things have gone up in value,” Nathaniel followed, and this time Pym deigned to hear him directly. “Land in Nantucket sells for about two million, two hundred thousand an acre on today’s market. You probably have quite an estate to attend to.” Already growing a bit more alert, at the sound of the figure Pym’s eyes seemed to gain a greater level of consciousness. The ghost of a man leaned in toward me.
“Is this true?” he muttered.
“Yes, it is,” I told him, relieved that we finally seemed to be getting closer to an actual conversation.
“In a world where people would pay so much for sand,” Pym started, clearly awed by the thought of this, “how much did these niggers cost you?”
I flinched and looked over at my cousin when the derogative was said, waiting for a reaction. Despite being confronted with someone who was, in his racial outlook at least, a throwback to the white American nineteenth century, Captain Booker Jaynes did not lose his composure or for that matter seem in any way surprised or offended by Arthur Pym’s word choice. In my cousin’s head, this was how all white people were. Of this Jaynes had no doubt: they were all racist, they looked at all of us as niggers and were blind to us in every human way.§ Even after Obama; a black president in Booker Jaynes’s mind was just the nigger white folks voted to be their servant.
Calling these strange beings back in to see us, Pym soon proved to serve better as a translator of information than as a conversationalist. The older creature of before again took a position of leadership, and Pym spoke directly to the snaggletoothed elder in what sounded like a series of attempts at dog barking. The chief moved as the old do, with the knowledge that things broken might never heal.
“Please tell him we would like you to accompany us far away from here, back to our native land” was what I said to our translator. This was a fairly direct sentence, meant to put our primary position on the table. While I couldn’t understand the harsh sounds Pym was making, I could not believe that it could possibly take so long to relate this relatively simple proposal. The old creature, sitting on a rumpled pile of skins and leaning against his own upright knee as if it was the most stable thing in the world, listened and listened to Pym’s monologue. I saw what seemed to be an increasing hemorrhaging of patience