Free Pym by Mat Johnson Page B

large companies that I was sure Booker Jaynes would hate if I notified, and not much else. The best I could find was two water treatment guys from Queens who ran what they called an “Afro-Adventure Blog” on the side. Sewage management wasn’t exactly the same thing as aquatic engineering, but I figured if they could handle all the shit in Queens, they could handle anything.
    Their website was a strange hybrid, half devoted to their sewage treatment services, half to video clips of their adventure exploits. I clicked on the first clip. One of the two men, Jeffree, was on-screen, the other, apparently, behind the shaky handheld camera. They were running west on the Brooklyn Bridge, fighting through the traffic of a terrified mob. The camera shifted away from Jeffree and to the Twin Towers in the distance, their tops flaming. The footage was bouncy and jumbled. But it was sincere. They were running against a panicked tide to get to the disaster. There is Jeffree, this dark-skinned man past forty with a shaved head and theatrical goatee, and he just wants, as he says again and again when he looks back at the camera, to “do something.” It’s black superhero shit. But then the fantasy ends. They reach the site of the World Trade Center and in moments it’s in rubble. More chaos and running and horror. Tidal waves of dust and then sirens and rogue herds of insanely frightened office workers. But they can do nothing.
    Jeffree and Carlton Damon Carter are just two guys who make dirty water clean again, guys who share the same little Lefferts Garden apartment, where they sleep in the same marriage bed. Poetically, the last image that the ever silent Carlton Damon Carter films of Jeffree on that day is of the water engineer handing water out on the street to those last survivors straggling from the World Trade Center.
    “See, I’m the performer, right? I’m like, to these people watching, the hero they want to be. But my man Carlton Damon Carter, he’s the one that filmed it and made it art. He’s the one that designed the website, the one that brings all I’ve done to the world,” Jeffree declared in another clip, one in a series of video journal entries. He had a hand firmly on Carlton Damon Carter’s neck and was roughly pulling on him as the other, lighter man blushed in response. It would have been a very masculine gesture if Jeffree hadn’t kissed Carlton Damon Carter lightly on the side of his forehead in the end.
    “He’s my muse,” Carlton Damon Carter nearly whispered into the microphone. “I’m his lens.”
    It was clear from the number of comments beneath each clip that they had a huge national and international audience for their exploits. But as I kept watching, I started to wonder if the national and international attention for their little site may have distorted their original intentions. The duo’s attempt to drive to Ohio during the Dayton Dirty Water Disaster was a disaster in itself, and the reams of tape basically just covered them stuck on I-95 in a U-Haul filled with barrels of New York tap sludge, only to be turned away by the National Guard. Here the same agonized futility on display in the 9/11 footage just comes off as plain stupidity. Clearly I was not the first person to perceive it this way; Jeffree admitted as much to me on the phone the next morning, calling me back a few hours after my fishing email.
    “Something like this, that could really increase traffic. Negroes on Ice . That could be a whole documentary,” he told me, his live voice filled with even more bravado than the video editing had captured. Already I found him a bit annoying, but I was looking to discover literary history not make buddies, so I pawned him off to Booker Jaynes anyway. I was already preoccupied with the next stage of the recruitment.

    I knew where she lived. I knew where she worked. I hadn’t talked to her in seven years, but that was because I held on to the hope that she would come back to me