Pym by Mat Johnson

Escalades in the ghetto.”
    Inching a little farther with one of the portable spotlights from my pack, I caught a reflection inside the crater of something red and metallic—the rifler was still visible. The only reason I could still see it was that the drill was lodged into a snowy ledge about two stories down. The hole went farther below that, but the depth swallowed my flashlight in its darkness.
    “They going to stick this on us.” Garth shook his head beside me. “They just going to say it’s on us, dog. They’re going to try and make us pay out our checks for this. You have any idea how much something like that drill costs?” I didn’t, but it had to be a good chunk of what we were planning on earning. The money wasn’t what bothered me. The look of disgust I knew I would see on Angela’s face when we confessed our incompetence, that’s what I was thinking about. And the sight of Nathaniel, right behind her, smirking.
    “I’ll go down there, bring it back,” I told him.
    “Negro what?” Garth politely asked me, turning to see if I was ridiculing him.
    “I’ll go down there, attach the rigging to it, and we’ll drag it up. Hook it to the truck and just pull.”
    “You crazy, dog. Out of your goddamn mind.” Garth paused, put his weight on his leg as he grabbed the spotlight and leaned forward, staring down below at the rifler on its precarious perch. He was silent for a few seconds before his reason took control of his desperation once again. “Hell no. You’re bugging.”
    “It’s my life,” I insisted.
    “It’s my bank account. If you die, they going to make me pay for the whole thing.”
    “Or we could just take care of this and pay nothing at all.”
    Garth stared at me, then stared back into the hole for a while. Finally, he unzipped his jacket further and lifted off his hood to reveal his unpicked Afro. “Fine. But if you break your neck, I’m going to tell them it was all your fault to begin with,” he said and started walking away. Pausing after a few feet to look back, Garth added, “I’ll tell a better story, though. Something heroic, make you like the man.” He walked another three strides before turning again and adding, “I’ll tell them you died fighting a polar bear. Three of them.”
    There are no polar bears in Antarctica. There are certainly not three of them. This didn’t matter to me because I had no intention of turning this into yet another polar epic of man succumbing to nature. I was not thinking about personal risk at all at the moment. I was thinking about attaching the harness properly to my chest, making sure the gear was securely fastened and could hold me. I was thinking about saving the money. Having the money. Using the money. I was thinking about how I might still be in shock or overrun with adrenaline, but that this manly act felt good, like something Nathaniel would never dream of doing. Even in death I would be redeemed, in life I would be a hero. Or was I just being a fool? Again. Too late. I refocused. I tried to find precisely the right angle to drift down, one that would land me right on top of my goal: a ledge that seemed composed of a solid enough lip of pale blue glacier ice on which both my own weight and eventually the hoisted rifler could be levered. And then, once I had successfully attached my line to the machine, I dropped below the edge of the surface, slowly letting go of my line through the clasp so that I hung out into the chasm. Dangling in the air, I distracted myself by thinking about white-shrouded humanoids.
    I used to do the climbing wall at the gym and be embarrassed by the pretense that I was training for anything more than other climbing walls. Who knew it would pay off in a frozen chasm at the bottom of the world? My spotlight hung by my belt’s loop, its power on and its beam circling erratically as I took care to ease into the slack and drop farther. The lamp created the feeling of movement below me, and that was all