Pym (27 page)

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, and the waterfall that coursed on the far end of the room poured down from at least three stories high. As I looked at the falling water, I could see that there was actually a fenced deck just above the falls with a table and chairs, past that the reflection of windows. Above, the clouds were painted right onto the ceiling.

Garth leaned down and whispered firmly into my ear, “I told him we’re Republicans. Black. Republicans. Got it?”

“What? What are you talking about? Why are we naked?” I had many questions, but this seemed the most pertinent.

“Contamination, dog,” was Garth’s answer.

“Contamination from
what
?” I must have yelled on that last word, because just then out of the turquoise bush beside me hopped an Easter bunny, clearly startled. Albino and obese, it darted its nervous red eyes in confusion at the scene.

“I was hoping you could tell
me
‘what,’ ” a male voice answered. And there, on an outgrowth of granite rock, stood a Caucasian with a thin black mustache, his arms outstretched like the Rio de Janeiro Jesus, white terry-cloth robes in each hand.

“You fellows hungry for some Welsh rabbit?” asked the Master of Light himself, whom I recognized immediately from Garth’s catalogs. In response to Thomas Karvel’s query, the Easter bunny to my side scampered back into the bushes, presumably for cover.

When I heard “Welsh Rabbit,” I expected cheese on toast. So it was with surprise that I received my plate.
^*
Instead of being populated by a metaphorical rabbit, it was instead occupied by a real one, dead and skinned and glazed. A cherry tomato stuck into its little bunny mouth.

“Is this one of those?” I motioned with my fork at the scattered white bunnies it was possible to see jumping around below. From the deck atop the waterfall, one could see the entire length of the life-size terrarium we were inside of.

“Those cute little white ones? Oh no, I would never do that. Those are for the missus. I shot most of these back in Ohio,” Karvel assured me. I could barely hear him, though, over the sounds of all the voices, pumped through speakers attached to the wall.

“Nothing’s come through the satellite in weeks, but luckily I had hours taped. I got Rush over here by the kitchen, because he’s the granddaddy. I got Beck going in the southwest corner. Northwest is O’Reilly, southeast is Hannity, I think. Honey, is southeast Hannity?”

“How the hell would I know?” came from the kitchen.

“She’s sick of it. Keeps me grounded, though. Makes this hallowed ground, the way I see it. Makes it America. America without taxes, and big government, and terrorist bullshit. I knew this was coming, end of the world, been saying it since the sixties. I got out because I love it too much, really. But I’ll never leave the U.S. of A. God bless America.” Karvel lifted his glass, and we toasted with him.

“Where’s Pym?” I asked Garth when Karvel went to lower the volume of the speaker over our table. Given the current circumstance, the idea of a kidnapped Caucasian seemed like it might prove problematic.

“I don’t know. Frozen on the ice? Maybe all the way back at our departure site? Last time I saw him, he was running off away from me, following the tracks back in that direction.” I could tell by the way Garth said “departure site” that he had avoided telling our hosts of our Tekelian adventure.

“Don’t worry about him, dog. He sure wasn’t worried about you. You know that fool tried to eat you last night?” I told him that, yes, I did remember the cannibal conversation. “Conversation? Dog, when I got back, I had to pull that lunatic off you. Look at your leg.” I did. There was the perfect oval of human teeth marks traced in red on my pale calf.

“Yeah, I saw that when I was stripping you down; I put a little peroxide on it. That’ll heal,” Karvel told me, returning. “It’s a shame about your crew member. Some people, they can’t handle being alone down here. All that PC nonsense, it made men soft. Hell, the lesbos are stronger than most of the men nowadays. Me, I love it down here. You make your own reality in this place. The ultimate luxury. But I always lived in my own world, least that’s what my wife says.”

“I do say that,” Mrs. Karvel called from the kitchen. “Because it’s the damn truth, even before you dragged me down here.”

“So … what was with the strip-us-naked thing?” I used this opportunity to ask my host. I felt a big foot kick my knee at the end of this sentence and looked across the table to see Garth was staring me down. We were both currently clad solely in Karvel’s bathrobes. It didn’t seem like an inappropriate question.

“Hey, don’t worry, I ain’t one of those,” he said, laughing. “Just didn’t want to throw your clothes in the incinerator with you in them. Who knows what they’re contaminated with? We don’t know what happened out there in the world, do we? I was hoping you all would know, but it’s pretty clear not one of us does. One minute I’m sitting here watching
Fox & Friends
, then they start talking about some riot. I go get some nachos, next thing you know I come back and it’s all dark. It’s dark everywhere: TV, phone, Internet. Nothing.” Shaking his head, taking a swig of his beer, Karvel drops his voice both in volume and in pitch before continuing. “First thought: nukes. Iran, North Korea, Pakistan, they’ve been begging for it for years. But a nuclear attack couldn’t have taken out everything at once, not even a big one. So I’m thinking, something biological. Then you got a bigger list: add in Syria, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, Cuba, Somalia, Chechnya, China, and I sure as hell don’t trust Russia. Probably engineered or something, sitting dormant in everybody’s system while it spreads across the world. Silently spreading all across the world, see? The smart people, they been talking about this for years. Then on a set time, on a set date, boom, it goes off. Just like that, everyone’s dead. Blood in the street, blood pouring from eyes, babies screaming, dogs dying. Everything. We been talking about stuff like that for years, but still, when it happens …”

I looked at the painter for a moment, petrified. As he talked, Karvel became increasingly morose, his voice dropping with his shoulders, joining in with the chorus above. It was almost as if you could see the fear radiating off of him, that if you reached out your hand you could feel it blowing out his pores.

“Well, let’s hope that’s also highly unlikely, right? Could just be a satellite problem, or an international computer virus.”

“Yeah, that’s what I thought at first. Then the repair and supply plane stopped showing up. We were supposed to get that boiler fixed, damn thing probably won’t go over seventy-two degrees without exploding like the Fourth of July—it’s a menace. Course, they use computers for everything now, so who knows? Right? Let’s just hope it wasn’t the Rapture, ’cause if my wife finds out that Jesus came and didn’t take us with the righteous, she’s going to make my life a hell,” he said. “I’m kidding,” he followed with. I didn’t know about which part.

After the meal of brown bunnies with Kraft mac and cheese, “Jiffy” mix muffins, and heaping portions of Betty Crocker roasted garlic and cheddar mashed potatoes, Mrs. Karvel cleared our plates and even complimented us on our appetites. Mrs. Karvel was a plain woman who was also plainly a bit intrigued by Garth and me: her smile was a little too wide, her laugh a little too quick, her retreat to the kitchen a little too nervous. I thought this might be a reaction to our race, but that was probably more about me than about her.
^†
I did know that the food was a welcome change from our moment of starvation and weeks of krakt, and after I was done I felt more like a man again. Garth, though, seemed like less of one, having regressed in the presence of his hero. For one thing, he couldn’t stop staring at the painter, darting his eyes in Karvel’s direction every time the man looked away. When not staring, Garth just rotated his head, slack jawed at this life-size terrarium Karvel had created.