Pym_ A Novel - Mat Johnson [88]
“What are you talking about? You’re the one always talking about getting away from normal white folks. Why the hell aren’t you down to run away from these monster ones?” I demanded.
“Separatism; look where it got me. I come all the way across the damn ocean to the South Pole, and they still here. I was wrong. You can’t run from Whiteness. You have to stand and engage it. They got courts: we can litigate our freedom. They like ice sculpture: we can learn the medium and then outshine them with our own artistry. We will teach them to respect us. We will show them how beautiful we are. And then, then they will be forced to love us, and that is our only salvation.”
In movies, when someone is talking crazy, you are allowed to smack him.* Unfortunately, I lacked the speed to pop the lunatic in question, and the thickness of my snowsuit would have cushioned the blow anyway.
“Booker. They’re enslaving us. They’re not even humans. And they’re assholes! You’ve changed, man. You’ve sold out. This is because you’re screwing that ice ape, isn’t it? You got Stockholm syndrome or something.”
“Don’t talk about Hunka like that,” Captain Jaynes snapped back at me, his corded dreadlocks bouncing around behind his wagging head to add punctuation. “Shut your mouth. That is a special creature there. Don’t add insult by pretending like you don’t think she’s fine.”
Already, Booker Jaynes was brushing himself off, preparing to pretend that this discussion and my visit had never happened and the new road he was choosing was a sane one. He had lost it, it was clear. His Jaynes eccentricities had misguided him, and his Jaynes stubbornness now ensured he would go all the way. “No point in running anymore, can’t you see that. We stay, and we struggle. Because the struggle is who we are,” he told me with finality.
Burdened by a profound sense of disappointment, I climbed once more from the bowels of the underground whiteness to meet the yellow sun above. I had intended to return from my trip with my three comrades, each high with the hope of freedom. What I returned with instead was a week’s supply of krakt, a gift from Captain Jaynes which I held on my shoulder in an oily sealskin sack. “She makes it from her own recipe. Take it or I’ll eat it all myself,” my cousin said proudly as he gave me the parting offering, along with a promise to get Hunka to buy Angela from her captors.
Beyond those emotions related to my failure, I began to realize that there were other feelings boiling up within me as well. With every step out of Tekeli-li, I began to wonder if this would be my last moment in this improbable community, an idea I considered with absolutely no sense of nostalgia. So regret-free were my actions that when I came closer to the surface I began to experience a wave of paranoia as well: surely it could not be this easy. Surely, if I had realized that I was leaving, others must have realized it as well, noticed my absence already, and were at the moment making preparations to stop me. Not Augustus, of course, but others more invested in my servitude. Maybe even Sausage Nose himself. In the light of this fear, I stopped several times along that final stretch of the path just to listen for footsteps behind me, ones I was sure I almost heard before I acknowledged that it was probably nothing more than an echo.
I found Garth in the truck’s cab, asleep and prone, feet up on the steering wheel, his socks reeking like deep-fried corn chips. Instead of taking a seat and warming myself by the truck’s running heater, I chose instead to leave the stash of krakt on the floor in front of Garth, then inspect the snowmobiles that would provide our escape. I wanted to be gone from Tekeli-li now. I wanted to have this place farther behind me with every second, lost in a cloud of snow and memory. I didn’t know much about mechanics, but I did know enough to understand that the internal wires