Pym (28 page)

“It’s a state-of-the-art 3.2 Ultra BioDome,” Karvel told us as he gave his tour. We had each been given a pair of his pajamas at supper’s conclusion. Unfortunately, like many men of big accomplishment, Karvel was a short guy. Only the pants fit us, and even those just made it as far as our shins before retreating. Above the waist we were naked, but thanks to Garth’s bloated physique, I didn’t mind this as much as I might have. In contrast to his C-cup breasts and overhanging gut, my own academic torso appeared almost sculpted.

“The 3.2 Ultra, that’s top of the line; you don’t get something like that at Sam’s Club. Hermetically sealed, fully self-contained. Got solar panels all over the roof, even. NASA contracted for these things to colonize Mars someday. The fauna, the exchange of CO
₂
and oxygen: it’s all set up so we can get our own ecosystem fully self-contained. You can’t even find it with infrared satellite imagery: the exhaust system shoots the hot air right down into the ice tunnels, which makes the heat signatures invisible. Not even the government could find us. This is the safest place on the earth, right here.”

When one was standing in the middle of the construction, it really was awe inspiring. I’d seen other faux habitats before, but never walked around freely within such a big one.
^‡
Even more stunning was the amount of detail that went into the realism of the place. The sky, although stuck in perpetual sunset, was no mere clunky mural painting, it was clearly an actual photograph of a Karvel original, blown up to span the hundreds of yards that constituted the entire ceiling. The sides of the structure were equally meticulous in their attempt to continue the illusion: the room did not appear to end. Rather, the foliage around us became too dense to see through. Besides the apartment that floated above the waterfall, there was no sign that we were not really outside. And yet, despite these nods to realism, the overall look of the room was utterly unreal. The grass we walked on was green, but it was too green. The water that ran through the rambling stream that went diagonally through the space was actually
blue
. The azaleas and roses and tulips that appeared across the space were all, simultaneously, in the most vivid bloom. It was as if we were walking through a world that had been colorized with markers by an enthusiastic eight-year-old.

“God created nature. I just improved on it.”

“NASA’s biodome looks like this?” I asked, hard-pressed to imagine this landscape populated by bookish men in white overcoats. Garth flashed me a look, darting his eyes back to his hero in fear of finding him offended, but Karvel was indulgent, even jovial.

“Oh no, no, no. This is all custom,” he said, walking to the water’s edge. Bending down on his knees, he took a cup into his hands, sipped some water, and motioned for us to do the same. “For years, I kept painting all of those pictures, trying to create a perfect world. One day, I’m standing there with a brush in my hand, and I realize: I don’t just want to look at this world, I want to
live
in it.”

“See, that’s what I been talking about. That’s brilliance.” Garth took to his knees too, gathering some of the stream’s water in his hands. Thomas Karvel’s palms went to Garth’s shoulders, blessing.

“A man who lives a life worth living, he’s a hunter. He hunts for something, he hunts for his dream. And his dream is always the same thing: to create a world he can truly live in, without Big Brother enslaving him to mediocrity. So I created this free land. First within my art, and now in life,” Karvel said, motioning grandly around him, the king of all we could survey. “Had to come down here to do it too. As blank as the morning snow. A clean canvas. A place with no violence and no disease, no poverty and no crime. No taxes or building codes. This is a place without history. A place without stain. No yesterday, only tomorrow. Only beauty. Only the world the way it’s supposed to be.”

“This river tastes like grape Kool-Aid!” Garth exclaimed, staring at the bit left in his cupped fingers in disbelief.

“Yeah, but with Splenda instead of the real stuff. I tried to use corn syrup, but it killed all the damn koi.”

The cottage we were to stay in was the adjective
quaint
made manifest. At least from the outside. With a real thatched roof and stone façade, it seemed as if it had been sitting there for centuries. Even from a distance, I could see that the windows bore the distorted surfaces of handblown glass, the candlelight flickering behind each one running beautifully along their imperfect surfaces.

“That’s
Lamplight Brook.
” Garth turned to me, as if this was supposed to mean something.

“That’s right. This was the original model I used to paint it. Bought it with the money from that painting. I had it removed stone by stone from Bourton-on-the-Water, in England. Took them thirteen months, four jet trips to fly it down. No expense was spared.”

This last part was not entirely true. While the outside of this house indicated that we might find a plush and comfortable household just beyond its threshold, what I found instead when I entered was just an empty shed. The floor itself seemed to be original, the wood beams were wide and old and well worn, but there was not much else in this space besides them. Gas-fueled “candles” hid just below the windows, as did some sort of piped device that hummed so loudly I could feel the vibrations through my bare feet, but no furniture. Our interior tour revealed that this house had no back. After only ten or twelve feet, the building ended abruptly at the metal wall of the BioDome, giving the impression that God was cutting the building in half with his knife. Worse still, that knife seemed to have cut off the part of the Lamplight Brook that contained the bathroom.

“You can stay here. I’ve got some packing material you can use for mattresses. It ain’t much, but you’ll fix it up.”

“Don’t worry about us, we’ll be fine, Mr. Karvel, sir. We are taken care of, don’t you worry,” Garth gushed, ensuring I could make no statement to the contrary, not even “Where do I take a crap?”

“Good, good. Well, the tools are in the back. You might as well take that patch of land past the cottage; I can’t see that from my place. Need anything, you just holler, ’kay boys?”

“What tools?” I asked as soon as Karvel had fully departed. I saw him walk down the path toward his quarters, pausing to snap an orchid off a low hanging branch on the way. What was that made of? I wondered. Mars bars?

“Well, they have a food budget, don’t they? So when I first got here I promised we’d do some vegetable gardening. You know, to cover what we’re going to eat, in addition to just helping out around the place.”

“What else did you tell him? Did you tell him about the others?”

“Told him we were working for a corporation harvesting water. He liked that. I left out the snow monkey part. You want him to know that, you tell him.”

“Good. I really don’t think this guy’s prepared for a Negro invasion,” I said. Garth’s head cocked to the side as if yanked.

“You can’t help yourself, can you? The man takes us in. Feeds us. Almost clothes us. And there you go with the racism talk.”

“Just because someone’s not scared of minorities, doesn’t mean they want to be one.”

Outside our window, Karvel paused on his walk to pull another pink orchid from the low-hanging branch of a cypress tree. Then he put the flower in his mouth and chewed.

It took most of the next three days to clear out the patch of vegetation to the far side of Lamplight Brook cottage. It was difficult to define a “day,” really, because the sun was always setting
^§
in Karvel’s world. It did get a bit dimmer at “night,” though, and this helped our well-earned hours of sleep. It was hard, muscle-aching work. I needed all the rest I could steal.

It wasn’t that the roots of the plants were particularly deep, or that the soil was particularly hard, it was just that there was a lot of it. The spot we cleared was nearly half the size of a basketball court, and the removed flora was strewn as high as the three-fifths of a house we were living in. Still, we took great care to keep the roots of our transplants intact, and the majority of the greenery was still living. I was in shock those first days, I even knew at the time, reeling from the trauma of the past weeks and the oddity of the present. But it felt good to work, to focus on my hands instead of my mind. To not be a freeloader on someone else’s land. I even started to tune the ever-present voices out. This habitat was so much a creation of our host that, in a Lockean sense, it was a relief to establish some form of ownership through our labor.

By the afternoon of the fourth day, Garth and I were finally prepared to stop the reaping of the aesthetic but useless flowers and begin sowing the vegetables and fruits we could live on. When Mrs. Karvel came by with our daily rations (Stove Top stuffing mix, Sylvia’s canned collard greens, and Spam) Garth made a point to show her our progress before she scuttled away as usual, making the request for the seeds we would need for the next stage in our victory garden. Mrs. Karvel seemed perpetually stressed, rarely out of motion any time I saw her. Standing still for a moment, without food or an emptied plate or a feather duster in hand, seemed almost a painful act for her.

“You gonna have to make that patch bigger, ain’t you?” she said, looking out at the rows of rich, dark earth we had uncovered. This comment came to me as a surprise, because I thought if anything we’d perhaps been overzealous.

“You want it bigger?” I muttered aloud, more out of shock than as an actual question.

“Honey, we ain’t got enough food to feed you. A few months, tops, but it ain’t like the cans in storage are breeding new ones,” she told us, leaning forward and dropping her voice as if her husband might hear us, as far away as he was. “This is the deal. Either you guys got to figure out a way to grow us all some new food or you tell me how the hell we can get out of this goddamn fish-bowl.”

*
The culinary term “Welsh rabbit,” is of course a joke. A very old one as jokes go, dating back to the early eighteenth century. The joke, English in origin, was that the Welsh were either too poor or too stupid or too generally pathetic to have actual meat on their plates, so cheese grilled on toast was their delusional equivalent. The other version of this title, “Welsh rarebit,” is in fact a degradation of the original, a mishearing that was later adopted as a less offensive alternative. To little avail. In fact, the English so derided their neighbors to the west of the isle that in their language the very word
Welsh
became synonymous with substandard or imitation goods.

†
I often forget that to some I actually look “black,” not just ethnically but along the “one drop” line. I become comfortable in one category in the world’s eyes and then am surprised by the next person’s interpretation when it’s altogether different. The difficulty lies not in the categories of looking “white” or “black” but in the inability to simply choose one self-image to rest in, never knowing how the next person will view or interact with me. In that sense, Mrs. Karvel’s discomfort with my presence as a Negro was more comforting to me than the trepidation I often feel not knowing how I will be perceived.

‡
Mostly at the zoo. And the mall.

§
Or possibly rising, I was never quite sure.

IN the two weeks it took to clear and sow a patch of land big enough for a suitable amount of vegetables to be grown, my head was in my job. My heart, though, was still in the frozen hell along with Angela. It hurt, and when it didn’t that was only because it had frozen numb. I thought of her, and of them, often. But not too often. I couldn’t call, I couldn’t write, and I had no real power to change this situation. So I made myself busy in work instead. And as I labored, I learned the truth behind the mysteries of this new world where I found myself. I discovered the smell of lavender was not coming from the flowers of the same name: it was pumped out from the air ducts that lined the far walls and appeared in the bushes, through vents disguised in concrete made to look like igneous rock formations. After a while, I didn’t take notice of it, except during those times every few hours when the smell cycled, and all of a sudden there was a new odor in the air, spearmint or rose, or lemon scent. My favorite was the wave of jasmine that hit at exactly 12:30
P.M
. every day, because this meant it was time to take our lunch break.

The vivid floral bushes that surrounded everything in this landscape were similarly assisted in their otherworldly blooms. Part of the reason that it took us so long to clear the space we needed for our vegetable garden was that there were so many different water lines leading out to the fauna beyond. These messily woven hoses would have been hard to untangle in themselves, but what made it even more difficult was that each hose contained water with a different color ink. There was pink water to make the pink bushes pinkish, purple water to make the purple flowers more purplectic, red water to make the red flowers appear to bleed the new blood of the vegetative world. And to even call it water is not truly accurate, because there was not only an ample amount of paint in these concoctions, but also a good amount of steroids, to keep the plants in perpetual bloom. These colored lines shot around the room in miles of tubing, crossing over each other to deliver their gifts in seemingly random order.
^*

The animals too, while appearing carefree (though really not wild), lived a carefully maintained existence. The white rabbits, for instance, were managed as closely as any rosebush. The afternoon following my discovery of a litter of fresh young rabbits hopping around close to the stream trying to taste what it had to offer, the bunnies were gone. Clearly they were picked up and moved out of the main arena, although what fate they headed to I didn’t want to think about. Mrs. Karvel served a stew that very evening, but maybe the painter was right and this was just coincidence. Likewise managed were the white birds who populated the upper regions of the terrarium, the ones that liked to sit on our cottage’s nonfunctioning roof and coo loudly. Each evening after supper these birds were gathered up by hand and placed behind the inner dome in cages, only to be released the following morning. Why anyone would make the effort to transport a dozen pigeons down to Antarctica I couldn’t understand; just because they were white didn’t seem enough reason. The birds’ feces were white too, but they weren’t cherished. All the animals were white: I heard some scurrying in the walls while sleeping on my mat and half expected to see a white lab mouse run by.

The person who did all of this work, the person who did all the work in the dome except for Garth and me, was Mrs. Karvel. I woke up every morning to the sound of her setting up her ladder to dust the wide leaves of the trees with her rainbow-colored feather duster. By the time I was dressed and down at the river for a drink, she was usually finishing combing it of any unsightly floating objects with a pool net, having cleaned the filter already. It was Mrs. Karvel who removed the dead monarch butterflies, placing them gently into Ziploc bags.
^†
It was Mrs. Karvel who lit the very sun in the sky: we could see her shadow behind the ceiling’s façade as she changed the lightbulbs accordingly. All of this was done in addition to her preparation of meals, laundry, and more mundane duties. If she slept, I’m sure she did so fully dressed, with a ladle in one hand and a Swiffer in the other.

“That’s why she wants to leave here. She just needs more help,” Garth dismissed: he wanted a petty reason for the rejection of his utopia. Sounded like a good enough reason to me, though.

In contrast to his wife, the great painter himself went to bed early and with regularity in timing. This I knew because the second he went down, the world went dark, the sunset simply blowing out, being replaced by the faintest of stars, stuck to the roof in the form of glow-in-the-dark decals. In the last stage of our garden installation, this was our cue to begin work, we having switched our work hours from the daytime to the night by that point. This was done by the request of Mrs. Karvel, and while no explanation was given, it seemed clear the reason was that, although Mr. Karvel wanted us to do this work, he wasn’t interested in seeing it.

Working nights, I began to be able to tell when it was that Thomas Karvel not only went to bed but fell fast asleep as well. It wasn’t that he snored or, if he did, that his apartment was close enough that I could hear. What I would hear instead was the sound of his waterfall, whose roar accompanied the radio voices every moment of our day, spontaneously ceasing its voluminous Kool-Aid spew. The water went off, and the loudspeakered pundits with it. It was an abrupt silence, as if someone had simply turned off a faucet, and this of course is exactly what Mrs. Karvel did. Sound removed, the artifice of this environment was even more obvious, because without this roar a second, more mechanical one was revealed from the boiler room. This was clearly the waterfall’s primary purpose: to mask the bass intrusion of the engines that kept this South Pole oasis a nearly tropical seventy-two degrees Fahrenheit. The waterfall was only off for maybe an hour, long after midnight. After Mrs. Karvel had entered the little door below the lightly dripping fall and attended to whatever hot and agitated machinery the room held, she emerged, climbed the earthen stairs to their apartment, and turned the waterfall’s supply back on, its contents pouring down again and thus hiding the little door below it in both sight and sound. Karvel himself restarted the taped verbal spew hours later.

Once, after two weeks on our plantation, I was returning the dishes from our dinner to the kitchen to save Mrs. Karvel the bother. The painter himself was out on his deck, standing over his waterfall, staring at a canvas in the same way he had been off and on for a few days now. This canvas rested on an easel, and Karvel would look at it, get up as close as he could, and then step back and look at the room, repeating the action every minute or so, pausing at both places of inspection before switching again. As I walked closer, I tried to figure out what the hell he was focusing on but couldn’t—his eyes definitely looked at different parts of his expansive view. Maybe his subject moved, I figured, maybe it was a bird or something and he was trying to find it again (although as far as I was concerned one albino pigeon looked pretty much the same as any other). I climbed the stairs, prepared to head for the kitchen, and as my head peaked onto the landing I got a good glimpse of Thomas Karvel close up, without him seeing me. That’s when I noticed the weird thing. He had no brush. No brush, no paint. Nothing but the painting itself, which he walked up to so close that the oil almost touched his nose.

“You planning a new work?” I asked. It was none of my business, and in general I just tried to stay out of the man’s way, not wear out my welcome. But I had to know. Not only did I have to know but I had to repeat myself, louder. The guy was gone, mentally. Stuck walking back and forth before his creation. When Thomas Karvel finally looked up at me, he was a man possessed, lost in a vision that had nothing to do with his retinas. There was a good two seconds before the realization of who and where he was seemed to hit him, and then a smile erupted across his pale face.

“You want to see it?” he asked me. Garth would be jealous. Garth would be blind with envy, I thought, and already planned to amuse myself teasing him about his missed opportunity. Hours of fun to be had, I was sure. I placed the dishes at the top of the stairs and went over to my host. The painting, it looked just like every other Thomas Karvel painting, and besides the one that brought us here, each one of them looked basically the same to me.

“It’s nice. It’s really nice,” I told him, smiling down at the canvas. It was a compliment on autopilot, without thought, only purpose. Looking a moment more, just to be polite, I finally got it. It was his view of the entire dome. There was our little partial house at the far wall, his white animals, his sucralose stream. Our vegetable garden and the impact it made on the environment was obscured just as he insisted it be from his view.

“Are you done painting it?”

“Painting it? What? The painting was done years ago. Years. No, what I’m still creating is the land itself.”

I looked around at his land, this hall, this cave. It seemed nothing if not complete. It was a world without chaos, or really even the hint of it. Every detail was man-made, controlled. And specifically controlled by this man, its master planner. A utopia in a bottle. Not my paradise, but certainly his. Unless he was planning to float expanses of cotton candy from the rafters, I couldn’t see what was left to do.

“You want to change things around? Redecorate? Go for a different look?”

“No. There is only one look. There is only one vision. Perfection isn’t about change, diversity. It’s about getting closer to that one vision. And there’s still so much, so much to do. Like the palms. Look at those damn palms, in the back there; they keep trying to grow any way they want. Look at them, then look at the painting.”

I looked. There were palms, in the back of the dome’s inner space, spreading out their umbrella foliage just beyond the rest of the tree line. They were a bit out of place, a tropical presence in this reproduction of European fantasy, but it wasn’t like that was the oddest thing going on in this space.

“So you’re going to have them cut down and taken out?” I asked.

“Do you know how much money it costs to ship fully grown palm trees to Antarctica? No, they’re part of the vision. But look at the painting, then look at them again,” Karvel insisted, clearly annoyed by the fact that I couldn’t even notice what seemed to be bugging him so much.

“Coconuts,” Mrs. Karvel said. I hadn’t heard her arrive, hadn’t heard her pick up the tray of dirty dishes or come up behind me.

“Coconuts!” her husband screamed, staring at the painting, pointing at the little oil dots he’d made at the top of his palms’ trunks. “Ever-loving coconuts!” I looked back out at the actual trees, and he was right, no coconuts.

“Because I told you, when you were ordering those things,” his wife began with the weariness of an explanation often started, “that type of palm you wanted doesn’t grow coconuts, but you said—”

“The other kind was too skinny. It needed to have a thicker trunk.”

“It ain’t natural is all.”

“Nature was created to serve man. And now this man wants some coconuts up there.” Karvel paused to get his message out, stopping where he could to control his temper. It wasn’t menace there, a threat of violence. Just frustration. Just an utter conviction of what was right and what must happen.

“This man wants coconuts up there,” his wife said back to him, the repetition of his point careful and deliberate as if she were dealing with the single-minded obsession of an overly indulged child.

“Thank you, honey,” he said to her, appeased, and since he was already leaning in at the canvas looking for the next flaw, he didn’t see her roll her eyes. But I did. Her bloodshot eyes. They rolled around like her corneas were going on a world tour. There was no sigh, no word of complaint, but there was expression. Following Thomas Karvel’s lead, I looked away from this moment of intimacy as well and pretended I didn’t see any of it.

I don’t know if, somehow, she already had coconuts in storage. I don’t know if she made the coconuts out of clay or papier-mâché: it was impossible to see if they were real because they were so high up. At least three stories. And I really don’t know how she got them up there. I can’t imagine a ladder that high, or her scaling the trunks in mountain-climbing gear. All I know is that she did it. Less than a week later, they were there, out of nowhere. Sometime in the night, quietly enough that neither Garth nor I heard her. Brown balls in the air. Resting under the treetops as if God had made them grow there.