Pym_ A Novel - Mat Johnson [79]
Lying with her, I thought of Tsalal. I didn’t think of finding anyone there, of excavating evidence of whoever had once inhabited it, or academic fame that might come from its discovery. I just thought of us, like this, alone on its beach. I thought of escape, but escape to an Eden. The two of us, spooned together, the heat of the sun above and the warm sand beneath us. Lying there, drunk on purple water.
* Blubber.
† For a good portion of our walk, I passed the time imagining that Augustus was moving to the rhythm of Stevie Wonder’s “Superstition.”
‡ Wakanda is the African utopia of the Black Panther comic books. Although initially I struggle with the fact that it is an Afrocentric romanticization funneled through the imagination of its white creators, the first issues produced by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby are the sole memorabilia that Captain Booker Jaynes and I share in our respective collections.
THE issue of starvation in American slavery was a central one, for the slaves. For the slavers, not so much. But for the slaves starvation was extremely important. In modern America, most of us have never had to endure the constant hunger that was once commonplace among our people, but the legacy of centuries of starvation is still present in our culture. Before the stereotype of the black man running down the street with a TV under his arm existed, the same racist archetype was carrying a stolen chicken, or a watermelon. Similarly, the stereotypical embodiment of black masculine superiority, with his rippling muscles and flat abs, owes much to a slave history of endless toil fueled by little food, lifestyles no modern diet and exercise plan could compete with. All this is to say of the crew of the Creole that, after three weeks under the ice, at least we looked good. In the modern era, Americans starve with full bellies, starve on high-fructose corn syrup and hydrogenated oils, carbohydrates too complex for our bodies to bother deciphering. We starve and yet are fat as shit at the same time, morbidly obese and vitamin deficient, hands shaking if we take too much time in between pies. That was a much more desirable form of starvation than our current situation, if you had to pick, but an anemic existence nonetheless. Ironically, both forms of starvation can cause diarrhea, which shows you how limited the human body is in its range of defenses. There are those who say that it is important to “listen to your body,” that “your body knows what it needs.” If your body knew what it needed, it would listen to the brain, the only part of it worth a damn when it comes to thinking. Diarrhea is the worst possible reaction to not having enough food to digest. It’s mutiny. It’s everything inside you trying to get out while it still can.
I wasn’t sure why I was afflicted with this symptom, whether it was from barely eating the krakt or from eating any of it. Either way, I wanted to eat more. I wanted more of the vile stuff because I wanted desperately to eat, and I no longer cared what the cost of that desire was. Yet ironically, there was food equally desperate to get out of me, forcing me to undress and bundle back up in a torturous cycle. But there was not enough food coming in, not enough to sustain me. When I finally managed to gather the energy to rise, Augustus sat across from me, staring at me like a retriever eager to be walked.
“Smell,” he offered, pointing a cold, pale digit in my direction. “You. Smell,” he followed with, conjoining the words awkwardly and, in my opinion, just showing off. Overwhelmed and undernourished, I lay back down again and drifted into unconsciousness