Pym_ A Novel - Mat Johnson [68]
My first night in the compound, while Augustus snored, I explored my surroundings. The dwelling was in a tunnel like the ones we had been in when we first came down here, only a hole had been burrowed into the side and beyond that a room carved. Along the way, we had passed several other residential holes, giving the hallway the appearance of the interior of a flute, and in these I saw others of these creatures going about their lives. Despite my novelty here, I was ignored by all but the children, who would stop what they were doing in order to taunt me. Surrounded by the little monsters, I was struck mostly by how utterly alone I was in this world. No sooner had this thought appeared in my mind than I saw a flash of brown, similarly engulfed by a gaggle of toddlers.§ It was her. Angela. Despite the distance we’d traveled, fate had placed us on adjacent properties, and when she saw me approach her, the look on her face said that she seemed to rejoice at this.
“Have you seen Nathaniel? Is he with you?” was the first thing Angela said when she saw me. The last time I saw her second husband, he was being pushed into the exact opposite direction. Whether Nathaniel reached his destination shortly after or had kept moving far off into the reaches of the outer tunnels I had no idea, and I didn’t care. It seemed to me that we were on the extreme outskirts of this village. If we weren’t in the rural area, then certainly we had landed in the Tekelian suburbs. Or maybe, off in this well-worn frozen backwater, inconveniently remote from the main area, we had landed in its ghetto.
“Chris, this is crazy. These things expect me to clean up after them. They’re disgusting. I tried kicking loose what I could, putting it into a pile, and this bitch in there—I mean I think it’s a female, it looks like it has tits—just keeps pointing at the frozen-in bits going ‘Ung!’ Pointing at stuff stuck to the ice for god knows how many years, how many inches down. I’d need an ice pick to get it out.”
“Wait.” I calmed my excitement over the fact I could do something to the benefit of her. Retreating to Augustus’s quarters, I reached through my backpack for one of the only possessions I had deemed worthy of taking with me. Pressed in my reading edition of The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, stuck right by the page where Richard Parker was being served up for dinner, was a nineteenth-century bronze letter opener that had served as my favorite page holder since I had bought it off Benjamin. Without a statement about its history, either sentimental or antiquarian, I made a gift of it to the lady. The gift Angela Latham gave in return, a relieved smile, was greater.
“You’re always there for me, Chris. I always knew that, always loved that about you.” Angela poked the Tekelian air with her little saber as she winked at me. “Look at this thing. I bet Nathaniel could stab a couple of these bastards with this in his hand.”
I didn’t expect to stay the whole night in this Augustus’s hole, huddled for warmth inches away from the site of my labor. I expected Garth to appear in a matter of hours, declare that our communications with the world had resumed, and that we were all shortly going to be getting out of here. I didn’t know how Garth would get this information to me, but I was certain