Pym_ A Novel - Mat Johnson [74]
“You’re even more than that. I love you, and I don’t want to see you like this,” I told her. She didn’t even flinch at the L-word. She just got a little tear in her eye, which she wiped on her glove, where it froze. It had been almost a decade since I had told her that I loved her, and last time she didn’t cry at all. I did. “And I will get you out of here. I promise,” I told her. And we both believed me.
Back in Augustus’s hovel, I lay on the pungent skins by the hearth, staring into the blue gloom of it all. Augustus’s sty was increasingly cluttered. I began to realize that when I had first entered the hole it had been at its cleanest; maybe he’d straightened up in anticipation of the trip that never happened. Now it was horrendous, with pieces of everything that had frozen to both our shoes cluttered around us. Augustus, true to form, was eating, and I could hear the krakt swooshing around his jowls. I actually considered cleaning the place up a bit. Most of the mess was not mine, of course, but for the moment I did live here. After witnessing Angela suffering, however, I couldn’t motivate myself to do any work. Augustus for his part chomped away, staring back at me with curiosity.
The more the image of the other Tekelians became normalized for me, the odder Augustus appeared in my eyes. My captor’s peculiarities extended beyond his wretched smile: his back was bent forward, stuck in a perpetual bow; his shoulders collapsed on either side of him so that his head was the only thing that kept his shroud from sliding down to the floor. I also noticed that while the rest of the Tekelians seemed to travel in groups, or at least congregate in groups in the city center, Augustus seemed to be perpetually alone. In my entire time with the creature, I never once saw him socializing with another of his species. Staring across at him, watching his pale, watery eyes looking at me, I actually felt a moment of pity. Perhaps in response to this empathy, Augustus did the most human of things: he rolled his marble eyes at me. Shaking his hands free from the krakt (and thereby making even more of a mess of himself) he reached into his cloak with a sigh. In my mind, the casual amusement of the situation immediately dissipated and thoughts of Jeffree’s maiming emerged once more. As pathetic as he was, Augustus was still one of them, and so I had reason to be on guard. The next dagger could come for me. Immediately, I got on the floor picking things up, frantically attempting to bring order to the place, smiling all the way. That is, until Augustus put his cold and pudgy claw on my shoulder. It was a bracing grip, belying a strength that was not immediately apparent, and I almost expected a blow to follow. Instead, I heard crinkling.
“Aaaggaakkaarraagagh,” he said. Looking at Augustus’s greedy paw, I saw something startling: the empty wrapper of a Little Debbie snack. No, not just one but several, balled into his palm and now falling to the floor, each with the last traces of their caloric goodness sticking to the cellophane. Augustus had eaten every one, clearly, and just as clearly, his appetite was in no way satiated. In his primitive, albino snow monkey way, Augustus had just discovered what every food-stamp foodie had before: the more you ate of the things, the greater your desire to eat more. Poor Augustus was already addicted. And there was only one man left on the continent who could offer him more.
While the Tekelians were by far the most notable of our discoveries, there were less sensational revelations to be had in Tekeli-li, ones no less substantial. Chief among these were the white beetles that infested the frozen city and were in particular abundance in the cramped hovel of the insulin-fueled ice monkey I called Augustus. Going for a more scientific angle, I named this insect Scarabaeidae colonialis, although admittedly this appellation soon degenerated in my mind to colons for short. At first I mistook these pale bugs for pieces of snow, as which evolution had camouflaged them, but after I felt the