Pym_ A Novel - Mat Johnson [80]
When I next opened my eyes I saw that Augustus had drifted off, presumably in search of food, and I spent the day alone lying there, increasingly delirious, feeling the acid bubble inside my gut attack my stomach’s walls. It was a few hours into this pain when I saw it scurry through the room, just out of the corner of my eye, just beyond visual recognition. Scurry, though, is wrong: that implies a sense of urgency this creature didn’t convey. Skip would be the best way to describe the action of the thing, a casual hopping motion that bounced buoyantly across the far end of the room. At first I took this to be one of the Tekelian pickaninnies, maybe lost or just being devilish by invading the local eccentric’s eyesore flat. But as it continued to dart around, I began to realize that this creature in the room with me was something entirely different. First, there was the sharp percussion sound of its walking, crisp and metallic on the ice as if it was wearing tap shoes. And there was a whistling sound as well. I thought it was the wind, but it was more solid, stronger. It was a happy sound, although I confess in my state I wasn’t paying attention to the tune of it. At that moment, I was too focused on the little head I saw poking out from some of the cluttered debris of animal refuse Augustus had accumulated. It was a human head. It was a child’s head. A white girl, no older than four years by my estimate, whistling and skipping with curly chestnut hair billowing out of her blue summer bonnet. All that protected her from the freezing air was a blue and white, checkered sundress, but she seemed fine. There were no signs of hypothermia at all, in fact her cheeks were quite rosy (and not from frostbite). She just whistled along, pausing only to take a bite out of the Swiss roll snack treat in her lovely little hand, the pastry’s delicate chocolate covering falling like ebony snow to the ground.
“Little Debbie,” I called to her, but my delusion just giggled and kept skipping around. Skipping and chewing, swallowing then whistling. This was a girl whose feet didn’t touch the ground. Literally, they didn’t touch the ground, floating a good two inches above it yet still managing to make those lovely tapping sounds. Little Debbie’s shoes may have missed the floor, but her crumbs didn’t, and the more she skipped around, the more her crumbs fell where I could come eat them later. Skip, Little Debbie. Dance! If it would help, I would be her beige Bojangles. For that pastry good stuff, I would bug out my eyes and hop up and down the stairs with her in blackface just like Louis Armstrong had done for Shirley Temple.† I didn’t care about principles, and I didn’t even care that this was surely all a hallucination. I wanted some of that sweet stuff too. Bite off her head and scoop the cream filling out of her neck with my hands.
I made it down to the market area because I didn’t want to die of starvation alone. It was not so much the “die” part, rather the “alone” aspect that most scared me. Before leaving, I managed a quick check for Angela, hoping to find both comfort and food, but she was gone. I saw a lot of Angela by this time, usually at night, and in my bed. Fully clothed and no kissing, but there she was. In fact, aside from those evenings when her captors didn’t allow it, Angela was there with me every night she could be. I never attempted to push it further. It was enough that there she was in my heavily bundled arms, and there she would stay until the next waking. I hadn’t yet transitioned past the role of placeholder, I understood this. But what a place to be.
While our growing interaction was unknown to Angela’s second husband, it was keenly noticed by Angela’s captors, who shooed me away from their kitchen vigorously on every occasion I made to go find her. Now that I was starved to the point of losing my mind, looking for whatever scraps she may have been able to give me, she was nowhere. Instead of the sustenance I needed, I received a blow when one of the more matronly