Brian D'Amato

by In the Courts of the Sun

  Silence. That is, mental silence.

  Chac man? Compadre?

  Let me tell you something. Okay? Okay. All this around here isn’t everything. There’s a whole lot more to the world. Just take a peek in my memories. You can see in there, right? Check it out, Europe, Asia, computers, marshmallows … you see how relative everything is? Look into my memories. Bet you didn’t know the earth was ball-shaped. Cool, huh? And there’s other stuff. Doesn’t this maybe provoke a few tiny second thoughts?

  YOU ARE A SCAB CASTER’S MAGGOT-UAY AND THESE ARE YOUR USUAL LIES, Chacal thought.

  Huh? I thought back. I didn’t get all that. At least we’ve got a dialogue going, though. That’s good. Okay. Chacal? Listen. You know I’m not lying. We’re a team now. We’re in this together. And I, for one, am just fine with that. What do you think? I think we’ll do very well together. Chacal?

  YOU ARE POLLUTED AND YOU ARE AFRAID. I WILL NOT LET YOU DEFILE THIS PUREST OF PLACES.

  Fine, I thought. Whatever. Look, come on, Chaco dude. Wake up. You’re being used.

  IT IS TOO LATE FOR YOU. I HAVE MADE THE DUTIFUL DECISION.

  Oh. Okay. Well, good, I respect that. At least you do realize there isn’t any One Ocelot, right? Not in any Womb of the Sky or anywhere else. That’s just propaganda. You know what propaganda is? Anyway, the thing is, even if it was the right decision at the time, the right thing to do now, even in terms of helping out your family, say, may be to at least see what I have to offer and then—

  SILENCE FROM THE MAGGOT-UAY.

  “Seventeen suns, eighteen suns …”

  Okay, look, Chaco, let’s just give it a shot, why don’t you let me just say what I have to say and then see what happens. I promise that for both of us, things will improve dramatically—

  NO MORE FROM YOU.

  One second. I really have some ideas here. A few days and you’ll be in charge. Crush your enemies, reward your friends. Live it up. I have magic. I’ll just say a few really powerful—

  NO!

  It was his last word on the matter.

  There was another constriction around me, tighter. Can’t breathe. Can’t think, even.

  Nnn.

  Come on. Resist. Have to get him to say the thing, one way or another. Think of something.

  Nnnnn.

  Okay. Come on, Jed. It’s still quite possible that you can control this guy’s movements. Maybe he’s not really the dominant consciousness. Maybe he just thinks he is. It’s probably just a matter of point of view. It’s all about strength of character. Taking charge. Be a mensch for once.

  Come on. Just show him you’re tougher than he is. Say it! I am the blinder of the coming sun. Say it. Come on, Jed, assert your chingado self for once. I am the blinder of the coming sun. Come on, TWIST THE WHEEL! Get it out. I am the blinder of the coming …

  Nnnnt.

  “Nineteen suns …”

  Come on, Jed old guy. Resist this jerk. Resistance is not useless. I strained.

  Nnnnnnnn.

  Jed! Hey! Now!

  You must do something. Talk, scream, grunt, anything …

  NnnnnmmmmNNNzzznnkk. Fuck! It was like being hopelessly constipated, straining and squeezing and getting nothing, nothing coming out, nothing—

  “Zero suns.”

  Come on, Jed. Save the Project, save the planet, save your ass, come on, just this one time, got to do something, something, come on do something clev—

  ONE

  The Qarafa of Megacon

  [1]

  But hold on a second. Maybe we’re getting a little too cute here.

  Maybe I’m throwing too much out at once. Maybe we need to answer some basic questions. After all, this is a deposition of a kind. I have a whistle to blow. So maybe I should take it a little seriously and not get coy, and briefly run through how the hell I got here. Maybe you can’t escape at least a smidgen of backstory any more than you can escape, say, the future.

  My full name is Joaquín Carlos Xul Mixoc DeLanda. Unlike most Maya Indians I was born in a real hospital, in a small city called San Cristobal Verapaz, in the Alta Verapaz area of southeastern Guatemala and thirty miles west of the Gulf of Honduras. SCV is about ninety miles northeast of CG, that’s Ciudad Guatemala, or Guatemala City, and ten miles west of T’ozal, the village, or really the hamlet, where I grew up. My naming day, which is more important than my birthday, was three days later, on November 2, 1974, or, in our reckoning, 11 Howler, 4 Whiteness, in the fifth uinal of the first tun of the eighteenth k’atun of the thirteenth and last b’ak’tun. This was exactly one million eight hundred and fifty-eight thousand and seventy-one k’inob—suns, or lights, or days—since the first day of the Long Count calendar on 4 Overlord, 8 Dark Egg, 0.0.0.0.0, or August 11, 3113 BCE. And it was a mere thirteen thousand nine hundred and twenty-eight days before the last sun, on 4 Overlord, 3 Yellowribs, on the last day of the last k’atun of the thirteenth b’ak’tun. That is, before December 21, AD 2012. Which, as you probably already have heard, is the day they say time stops.

  My father was a half-Hispanic K’ekchi speaker and something of an intellectual by local standards. He’d gone to the Santiago Indigenous Institute in Guate City and ran the area’s rudimentary school system. My mother spoke Ch’olan, which, of all the living Mayan dialects, is the closest to the ancient southern Maya language. Her family had been displaced from Chiapas in the 1930s and was now part of a small Ch’olan enclave south of their main concentration. I learned more than most of the local kids did about who we were and the history of the country and whatever. But I still didn’t know much. I knew that in the old days we had been architects and kings, but that now we were poor. Still, I didn’t know our culture was dying. I thought our akal, that is, a house with cinder-block walls and a thatched roof, and—Jesus, I grew up under a thatched roof, for God’s sake, it’s like I’m Grout of the Cave Sloth Clan, I can hardly believe it myself sometimes—and our jon-ka’il, the town plaza, was the center of a very small universe. When I look back on it, it seems pretty benighted. But really I suppose I didn’t know much less about history than the average U.S. public-school kid does today. Most people probably have an idea there are all these odd-looking ruined pyramids somewhere down south. A smaller group would be able to tell you there were ancient people down there called the Aztecs, the Toltecs, the Inca, and the Maya. A lot of people might have seen the Maya in the Mel Gibson movie about them, or they might have been to Mexico City and seen the ruins of Teotihuacan. But it would be unusual to just run into someone in the U.S. who could tell you, say, what the differences were between the Aztecs and the Toltecs, or who would know that there were a lot of other equally accomplished but less famous people, like the Mixtecs and Zapotecs and Tarascans, in the area from Central Mexico to Honduras that we now prefer to call Mesoamerica, or that the Inca lived thousands of miles to the southwest, on a whole other continent, so that as far as we Maya were concerned, they might as well have been on Neptune.

  There are also huge stretches of time between the flowerings of these different civilizations. The Toltecs hit their peak around 1100. Teotihuacan was largely abandoned sometime between 650 and 700. What they call the Maya’s Late Classic Period lasted from about AD 600 to 850, and by the time the Aztecs were getting started, about six hundred years later, the Maya were in an advanced state of political decline. The old saw in introductory Mesoamerican studies is that if the Maya were like the ancient Greeks, the Toltecs and Aztecs were like the Romans. Except that the only thing the Maya really had in common with the Greeks was genius.

  Now, of course, these days you have to say each culture or whatever is outstanding in its own way. When I was in school there was a day when they went around and changed all the labels in the university art museum so that instead of reading, say, “Dung Fetish, Ookaboolakonga Tribe, Nineteenth Century,” they’d read “Dung Fetish, Ookaboolakonga Civilization, Nineteenth Century.” Like five huts and a woodcarver and it’s a civilization. But the sad fact is that cultures are like artists: Only a few of them are real geniuses. And of
all the world’s genius cultures the Maya seem most to have bloomed out of the blue. Phonetic writing was only invented three times: once in China, once in Mesopotamia, once by the ancestors of the Maya. Zero was only invented twice: once near what’s now Pakistan, and once, before that, by the Maya. The Maya were and are special, and that’s all you need to know.

  Not so many people know even this much, probably for two reasons. One is plain prejudice. The other is that it’s probably fair to say that probably no other civilization, and certainly no other literate civilization, has ever been so thoroughly eradicated. But there are more than six million living speakers of Maya languages left, more than half of whom live in Guatemala, and a lot of us still know something about the old days.

  My mother, especially, knew something. But I had no sense there was anything remarkable about her, beyond being the most important person in the world. And I suppose you could say there wasn’t, except for one little thing she taught me about in 1981, during the rains—when I got sick, as our padre charmingly put it, “unto death.”

  [2]

  I got what they now think was dengue fever. It was more dangerous than it is these days, and on top of that I was hemorrhaging in my lungs and sneezing up blood because of what turned out to be a factor-8 deficiency, that is, hćmophilia B. I spent three months lying rolled up behind the hearth, counting the bright red stitches in my cotton blanket and listening to the dogs. My mother mouth-fed me corn gruel and Incaparina milk substitute and told stories in our quiet singsong style, sometimes in Spanish and sometimes in Ch’olan. Everyone else, even my youngest sister, was working down in the fincas, in the lowlands. One evening I was lying on my side, trying not to vomit, and I noticed a tree snail crawling up a wet patch on the cinder-block wall. It was a blue-green balled cone, like a plumb bob, striped with orange and black, a Liguus fasciaticus bourboni, as I learned much later. My mother told me the snail was my second chanul, a “chanul de brujo,” that is, a warlock’s familiar.

  All traditional Maya have a chanul—or, to use the Classic Mayan word, a uay. It’s generally outside your body, but it’s also one of your souls. If you’re hungry, it gets hungry, and if someone kills it, you die. Some people are closer to their uays than others, and a few can morph their own body into the body of their uay and prowl around as an animal. It’s a bit like the animal familiars in the His Dark Materials books, except it’s more part of you. I already had a normal uay—a sa’ bin-’och, which is sort of like a hedgehog—but according to my mother the snail was going to be just as important. It’s an unusual uay to have and seemingly not very powerful. But a lot of brujos’ uays are small and secretive.

  Around this same time my mother started playing a counting game with me. At first, I guess, it was just to teach me numbers. Pretty soon we played it every afternoon. She used to roll the rush mat aside from next to where I was lying. Underneath she’d spooned twenty-five little holes out of the clay floor, in a cross shape. The idea is to visualize the cross as though it were in the sky and you were lying supine on the ground, with your head at the sun’s current azimuth in the southeast:

  She used to spread a thin white cloth over the square and push it down a bit into each of the depressions, and chew up a bit of tobacco and smear some of the juice on the inside of her left thigh. When I learned to do it, she had me rub it on my right thigh. Peeling open one of her prized Tupperware containers, she’d take out her grandeza—which is a pouch of amulets and stones and things—and pour out a mound of red tz’ite beans, which are really these hard seeds from a coral tree—and set out her quartz pebbles, which I would hold up to my eye and look for bouncing lights inside. I never understood why she did this next bit—she’d smear a line of wet black across her face, starting from the crown of her left ear, running under her left eye, across her upper lip, and down her right cheek to the right mandibular angle. The routine was that we’d each take a random handful of seeds out of the mound and empty it out on the margins of the cloth, to the east and west of the depressions, while we each asked for help from the protector of the day. Then she’d tap the ground five times and say,

  “Hatz-kab ik,

  Ixpaayeen b’aje’laj …”

  That is,

  “Now may I borrow

  The breath of the sun

  Of today, now I borrow

  The breath of tomorrow’s.

  Now I am rooting

  And now I am centering,

  Scattering black seeds

  And scattering yellow seeds,

  Adding up white skulls

  And adding up red skulls,

  Counting the blue-green suns,

  Counting the brown-gray suns.”

  In Ch’olan the word for “skull” is also a word for “corn kernel.” Next we’d take turns counting out the seeds into the bins in groups of four and use the beans to mark today’s date on top of that. Then she would bring out a single thumbnail-size crystal of carnelian quartz. This was the runner.

  Just like the pieces in Parcheesi, the runners move through the game board based on a randomizer. Instead of dice we use corn kernels that have a black dot on one side. You throw them up and count how many land with the black side up. Unlike Parcheesi, though, the number of kernels you throw varies on the basis of where you are in the Game. There were different counting protocols applied, like if your last group had three counters in it you’d sometimes break it up into two and one and count it as one even number and one odd one.

  And the Game is complicated in other ways. There’s a whole set of question-and-answer jingles, starting with one for each of the two hundred and sixty day-name-and-number combinations in the ritual calendar. Each of those names intersected with another three hundred and sixty names for the solar days. Combinations had their own attached proverbs and their own shades of meaning, depending on other aspects of the position. So—a little like in the I Ching or in Yoruban Ifa—the Game generates little phrases, which you could read as sentences. And because there are so many possible combinations, it can seem like it’s conversing with you in a pretty unpredictable way. Usually my mother said it was Santa Teresa, who was something like the goddess of the Game, interpreting for us. When something bad came up, though, she said it was Saint Simón who was talking. He was a bearded man who sat at the crossroads, at the center of the Game, and whom some people still called Maximón.

  So anyway, the Game is like a combination of a map, an abacus, and a perpetual calendar. Movements of the quartz pebble, the “runner” piece, give you variables depending on how far ahead you want to read and how much you want to rely on intuition. Sometimes out of two reasonable moves one just looks better. There’s also a special way to press intuition into service. My mother taught me to sit still and wait for tzam lic, that is, “blood lightning.” It’s a kind of a twitch or fluttering feeling under the skin, maybe some kind of a miniature muscle spasm. I guess you could call it a frisson. When it came, its intensity and its location and direction on your body told you things about the move in question. For instance, if it were on the inner edge of your left thigh, where the tobacco stain was, it might mean a male relative was coming to see you from the northeast, and if it were the same feeling but on the outside of the thigh, it might suggest that the visitor was a woman. Usually my mother would try to find out—I don’t want to say “predict”—just basic things, most often about the crops, like whether the squash beetles were getting ready for another attack. Nearly as often it was about the weather, with the red runner representing the sun and the others standing in for clouds or marking mountains. Sometimes she’d use the runner to represent relatives or neighbors, to try to help them with big events in their lives like marriages or, if they were sick, to find out when they’d get better. One time I remember I’d asked her to play for my maternal cousin’s paternal grandmother, who had a bad stomach worm, and my mother stopped the Game in the middle. Much later on I got wise to the fact that it was because she’d seen that the old woman wasn’t going to recover.

  As my mother said, the Game didn’
t work so well for little things. There were times when I said I wanted to guess when my father was coming home that day. She’d resist it at first because it was too trivial, but finally she’d let me move the quartz pebble around as a standin for Tata, and she’d kind of play against him. So my counter had to stay ahead of my mother’s seeds as they came after me. If at the end she finally trapped my counter in, say, the northwest bin, that would mean he was coming home to us very late, by way of the town northwest of us. If he fell in the south bin, that meant he was still at the school. If he ended up in the center bin, that meant he was just about to come home. And he always did. Within a few minutes he’d crouch through the door.

  None of this seemed at all like fortune telling or astrology or any of that disparate. It was more like the Game—or just for continuity, let’s call it, prematurely, the Sacrifice Game, although I realize I haven’t properly introduced this idea yet—it was like the Sacrifice Game was helping you realize things consciously that your mind had already noticed. One time one of my uncles said that in the old days the original people had owls’ eyes and could see up through the shell of the sky and through mountains into the caves of the dead and the unborn. If someone was sick you could look through his skin and into his organs to find the problem. You could see your birth behind you and your death in front of you. But since then our eyes had become clouded and we could only see a tiny fraction of the world, just what was on the surface. I practiced a lot. On the first day of my twelfth tz’olk’in—that is, when I was about eight and a half years old—my mother initiated me into life as a h’men.