Pym_ A Novel - Mat Johnson [94]
“Enough!” I managed the energy to snatch it back from him, replacing the contents and hugging my collection as if the remains were still living.
“Why do you have a dead man among your luggage?” Arthur Gordon Pym asked me, the judgment and disdain as palpable as the wind that blew against our refuge’s walls. “What is this, one of your victims?”
“No,” I replied, pointing. “It’s one of yours. It’s Dirk Peters.”
Pym dropped what was in his hands, pulled away from it for a second before looking into the rest of the sack. And then he looked back at me, smiled broadly, and gave a laugh of madness. Picking up the skull, he held it out to me.
“Alas, poor Dirk! I knew him, Christopher: a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy: he hath borne me on his back a thousand times; and now, how abhorred in my imagination it is!” The sight of this white guy holding the sacred remains of my black brother pissed me off more than any of the events before. I grabbed the skull back out of Pym’s hands with the one-word curse, “Blasphemy!”
“Well, if this is who you say, which I believe not, then who are you to throw such a stone?”
“The weirdo’s right, dog. What you’re doing with it?” the former bus driver asked me.
“I’m taking it to Tsalal. For a proper burial,” I said, holding the bag to me.
“I’m saying, if you ever do find Tsalal, this big black island, why the hell would you bury his bones there? Isn’t that, like, the last thing this dude and this Mathis lady would have wanted?”
“It’s not about what they would have wanted. It’s about what’s right,” I told him. Consumed by cold and overwhelming hunger, I barely bothered to offer that explanation. Why struggle to fight such silliness?
We sat in silence for hours awaiting death, the three of us. Then, after a while, Arthur Pym said:
“Do either of you count straw or twigs among your many wondrous possessions? For I believe that to find sustenance we may have to look amongst our own circle.” Despite myself I looked and saw a pool of spittle spill out the side of the Caucasian’s mouth in anticipation. Although Garth was the one currently being stared at, the big man paid Pym no mind. Instead, as Arthur Pym argued to no one the merits of his culinary suggestions, Garth put back on his gloves, goggles, and hat, and left the tent.
“I am just going outside and may be some time” was his sole remark, and like Lawrence Oates before him he was gone. I was too far gone to try to stop his sacrifice.
“So, are you going to try to eat me now,” I asked Pym, but he shrugged this off.
“Let us acknowledge this: yours is a rather odorous breed, and you, sir, are a particular pungent example of this. I fear even my starving appetite could not overcome that truth.”
“My people don’t stink. And I wouldn’t stink if those Tekelians you love so much had let me take a bath.” At the mention of criticism of his beloved snow monkeys, Pym’s head shook side to side as if he’d bitten something nasty.
“This end is a judgment, I fear. For your theft of yourself,” Pym returned, looking toward the tent door Garth had just walked out of, perhaps considering if he should go and chase after his meal.
“What are you talking about? Steal myself? You basically admitted that they scammed us into that deal, that they were watching us all along.”
Again, the head shake. Pym wouldn’t hear anything negative about the race from the caves. That is it, that’s the trick, I realized as my brain began to go numb. Drifting off, staring across at the two-hundred-year-old man just to make sure that the needs of his stomach didn’t overpower the needs of his nose, I saw it all become clear to me. That is how they stay so white: by refusing to accept blemish or history. Whiteness isn’t about being something, it is about being no thing, nothing, an erasure. Covering over the truth with layers of blank reality just as the snowstorm was now covering our tent, whipping away all traces of our existence from this pristine landscape.
And now we rushed into