Pym_ A Novel - Mat Johnson [76]
In the living room of my former Antarctic home, I hoped to find the signs of a living society. I hoped to find the TV on, CNN blaring, maybe Garth eating a serving of spaghetti in a salad bowl, waiting excitedly for me so he could share the good news of the return of satellite communication with the rest of the planet and our impending freedom, wealth, and world renown. What I found was that while the TV was on, it showed nothing but static, a gray and blue electric blizzard on the screen. The computers were on as well, but each gave a “Failure to Connect” error message that flashed on, then off again. With the feeling that my organs were plummeting to my bowels in an attempt to escape my fate, I remained focused and kept walking past these screens to the lounge area. There I saw an even more bizarre sight: the communal room was covered with paintings. They sat across the couches and chairs, they lined the walls like tiles so that only glimpses of the surface behind were visible. Everywhere, in watercolors and oils and the reproductions of both, the worlds of Thomas Karvel competed against each other. The sun was setting. Oh, God, was the sun setting, but in parts of the room it was rising as well, and it was hidden by clouds, and it was at midday also. In some places, remarkably, it was actually dark, which was particularly impressive given the solar display that was going on around here. It was the entirety of Garth’s art collection, and within it, in the middle of the floor, collapsed in the remaining stacks of his master’s work, was my man Garth Frierson, snuggled next to White Folks, who barked a few times at Augustus after yawning a hello to me. Garth himself woke up but after an immediate head spinning didn’t actually seem that excited to see me.
“I’m sorry, dog,” he offered meekly as he rose. It had been only a week, but it was clear that the man had lost weight in that time. Maybe it was just water weight, but it was a whole fish tank’s worth. “Can’t eat, dog. Feeling all guilty and shit. You know you’re thinking it: if I’d just had more Little Debbies, I could have bought your freedom too.”
I assured him that I wasn’t thinking about that, and once he saw that I had not returned to enact some sort of revenge fantasy, the big man’s demeanor improved immediately. I was happy to see my boy, a human connection to the past and reality. I was also happy to hear that there was half a pound of powdered sugar in the cupboard over the stove, because this would take care of Augustus’s “sugar fang.” After I had guided his pale and now sweating paw into the bag, Augustus held up his powder-covered fingers to marvel at the warmth of this snowlike substance. The pupils of his gray eyes bulged in ecstasy when his tongue touched the smallest bit of pure cane sugar on his marble nail. I left my new roommate sitting down on the kitchen floor, his stained shroud balled on the linoleum, plunging his face into the bag like a dog.
Garth was as unhappy to hear about the fate of Jeffree’s left eye as I was to hear that the rest of humanity was still missing. For the moment, there was nothing we seemed to be able to do about either one of those things, and in our conversational pause to digest that fact, the room’s odd decoration seemed a safer topic.
“What’s with all the paintings? You airing them out or something?”
“Just makes me feel at home.”
I grew up with Garth, in the same neighborhood for ten years. This stuff didn’t look like our home. There were no black people in any of Karvel’s paintings, not one in all the ones that engulfed the room. Actually, that is not a fair assessment, there are no blacks in the paintings of Vermeer either, but I didn’t get the same feeling from his work—and Vermeer was Dutch, the old, scary Dutch West Indian kind of Dutch too, not the modern, happy-go-liberal version. It wasn’t just that there were no black people present, it was also that Karvel’s world seemed a place where black people couldn’t even exist, so thorough was its European romanticization. With its