Pym_ A Novel - Mat Johnson [78]
While Augustus moaned back into good health, I managed to shovel down a quick can of a premade pasta, filling my gut with just enough calories to see me back to Tekeli-li, the constant threat of falling and polar air staving off the ’itis. Garth’s last words to me, Just wait, when I know anything I’ll come get you, haunted my every step, but I distracted myself by teaching the words hot, walk, ice, good, and bad to the eager Augustus, who aped them back to me as we trudged along. While it was impossible to say whether he got the full concepts behind the sounds, listening to his effort was worth more effort, if for nothing more than the comedy of it all.
By the time we arrived back at Augustus’s cave, I was hungrier than I had been in my life, but more tired than ever before also. Augustus predictably went straight back to his stash of krakt, but I didn’t have the fortitude to stomach it at the moment. Neither, apparently, did he, because it was mere minutes before I heard the labored breathing of his sleeping, his sticky paw still in his glazed mouth. It was very late at night, I’d forgotten. But my body remembered.
“Sleep,” I said to Augustus.
“I can’t,” Angela Latham said from behind me, her voice skipping lightly off the white walls and kissing on my spine.
She stood at the doorway, and she was lovely. Akan cheekbones that hinted at a smile even when her eyes had been crying, lips so full they seemed perpetually puckered for a kiss: she was as lovely as she had ever been, even in my dreams. And there was this pause, when she just looked at me, actually looked at my eyes for a moment for the first time in so long. And there was a second of veiled recognition when we both acknowledged that it was late, too late for her to be showing up at my door even if the impetus was insomnia.
“Nathaniel has been out to see me just once in three days. Three days, can you believe that shit?” she asked me. Of course I could believe that, the man could barely walk. How the hell was he supposed to get all the way over to this side of the city? Crawl?
“That’s not right, Angela,” I told her. “A man should be there for those who depend on him.” When she sighed and nodded, relieved that someone could mirror her anxiety, my moral fiber was mushed into so much krakt. “That’s what makes a man a man,” I added, and with that, she was next to me.
I pulled her close, or rather I pulled her thickly insulated Gore-Tex Arc’teryx coat close. Angela laid her head on my heart, and through a good two inches of insulation and laminate I imagined she could hear my pulse accelerating.
“When this is over, I’m going to buy a mansion in Oak Bluffs, with a maid for every floor,” Angela managed to say to me before drifting off finally. The absurdity, I thought, but knew that Garth and I were no better. Our goals, what had brought us down here, were out there on the ice like shining oases, luminescent to us individually. Now, frozen, trapped, I couldn’t help thinking that maybe they didn’t matter. That what really mattered is what our ambitions had led us to. That we were in this moment because of the futures we imagined for ourselves. That even without the snow beasts, we were enslaved. By our greed, our lusts, our dreams.
On my pile of tattered furs and leathers, we lay spooned. Intimate and clothed and with our boots on. No words were said, and for the first hour I could hear that Angela Latham was awake and swiftly breathing. And then, after that hour, her breathing slowed to nearly match that of the nearby Augustus. I, on the other hand, grew more awake and energized with