Pym_ A Novel - Mat Johnson [96]
D. Just as Poe’s vision of the blackness of Tsalal is perfectly horrific, his vision of this complete whiteness of his Antarctica is perfection itself. How then, as a writer of stories based on conflict (as all tales are), can Poe go forward with the narrative? “And then we got there and everything was just absolutely without flaw in every way” does not make for a gripping story. Or even a feasible story. So, this theory states, the narrative reaches a dead end. It can go nowhere. Conflict, the basis of all storytelling, itself has been negated by an overwhelming worship of whiteness.
* Le Sphinx des Glaces, in the original French.
I woke up dead. I woke up naked, lying on a bed of soft green moss, my body warmed from the golden glow above me. There were voices. Men mostly, some women. Not a conversation, not listening, just talking, over each other and united only by their passionate tone. Angry voices, words and meaning lost in their muddle. I was in Hell. As my eyes adjusted, I found hope for Heaven instead. Looking around, I could see that it had to be one or the other, because Purgatory could not be this decisive, this stunning. Gone was the snow with its frozen white death, and now in its place were fauna and lavender and color. Bushes of every hue, more vivid than I could have imagined, stretched out around and past me, along the small hill to a waterfall that fed the Pierian spring that babbled a few feet beyond, large orange carp swimming visibly beneath the surface. Gone was the vast frozen whiteness that was the taker of life, because now I was lying on the green bank of a river, naked, smelling lavender in the air and hearing the faint sound of harps present under the chatter.
Yes, there was the noise of the voices, but it was so beautiful. The more I looked, the clearer that was. As a matter of fact, with the white doves flying by and the clouds which hung above perfectly billowing their fluff, it was so overwhelming that it was almost too much for my mind to negotiate. No, not almost, definitely, it was definitely too beautiful, too perfect, for my mind to wrap around, my ears all that grounded me. In fact, the air was so sweet it was saccharine. Really, it was like pouring perfume under your nose. I started to feel sick in my stomach at it, but there was something so familiar about this place and the voices in my head. That’s when I noticed that, despite their appearance of flowing, the clouds above weren’t actually moving. Tracing their path off into the horizon, I saw that right before the farthest clouds disappeared past a blooming cherry tree, there were black letters written right onto the blue sky. It was a signature, the autograph of this land’s creator.
In my terror I realized that this was not my heaven, this was Garth’s. This was my hell. I was trapped inside a Thomas Karvel painting.
“Dog, you up?”
I rolled over onto my side and saw my friend. Garth stood buck naked. Eating a bag of Cheetos.
“Where the hell are we?” I managed, taking him in. Orange cheese dust powdered Garth’s various bodily hairs from his goatee down, his overhanging belly covering his genitalia, fortunately.
“We’re here, dog. I found it—don’t sleep on the big man. I told you I knew what I was doing. I found it and came back and got you.”
“Where the hell is here?” I asked, raising myself up as well, a hand covering my groin in an act of modesty.
“This is Eden, dog. As in ‘the garden of.’ You standing in the Dome of Light.”
Dome was an apt description. And not just in the sense of the shape of the structure I now found myself in but also in the “sports arena” usage of the word. This was no modest little science station. The interior really was the length of a football field,