Brian D'Amato

by In the Courts of the Sun

  Incredibly, a week later a green van from a place called FARMS—the Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies—actually did pick me up right before lunch period and drove me north into the mountains, to BYU in Provo. June babe led me into a forgettable building and introduced me to Professor Taro Mora. He seemed to me like a wise old sage, like Pat Morita in the Karate Kid saga, even though he was only forty. His office was totally plain, with a wall of books and journals on Go—which is that Asian board game played with the black and white pebbles—and another wall of stuff on probability and game theory. He worked in catastrophe modeling. He said he’d collected versions of the Sacrifice Game from all over Central America, but that the variant I’d learned was one that only a couple of his informants had even heard of and that differed from the usual game in a few important ways. First of all, in most places the client just comes in and says, “Please ask the skull/seeds this for me,” and the sun adder does everything else. But the way my mother did it, the client played against the adder. Second, she’d made a board in the shape of a cross, while almost all other adders just sorted the seeds into a single row of piles on a flat cloth. The third and most tantalizing thing was simply that I’d learned the Game from a woman.

  This was almost unheard of. Throughout 98 percent of the Maya region, adders were invariably men. Taro said he wasn’t an anthropologist but that he guessed my mother might have represented a survival of some Ch’olan tradition of female secret societies that had otherwise disappeared soon after the Conquest.

  Taro met with me twice a week until the end of the semester, when he went back to New Haven. By that time I’d found out that he was the head researcher of something called the “Parcheesi Project” and that he and the graduate students in his lab had a theory that all or almost all modern games are descended from a single ancestor, an ur-game. They’d started out trying to reconstruct it by collecting tribal games in Central Asia, but pretty soon the research had led them to the Americas.

  A lot of anthropologists at the time tore down the idea. And it did sound a bit like another Thor Von Danekovsky cult-archaeology crock-pot contact theory. But Taro was really a mathematician and didn’t care. He was a pure researcher and one of only a few people working on the overlap between catastrophe theory, the physics of complex systems, and recombinant game theory, or RGT. RGT is basically the theory of games like chess and Go, where the pieces form different units of force in space. Economists and generals and whoever have been using classical game theory—which is mainly about gambling—since World War Two, but applied RGT only really got going in the 1990s. Taro’s idea was that using a reconstructed version of the Sacrifice Game as a human interface could significantly improve performance in strategic modeling, like simulations of economics, of battles, or maybe even of weather. He’d had some experimental success with it before he even met me, but he said he wanted even more spectacular results before he published anything. His lab had worked up dozens of different reconstructions of what the original game board might have looked like. We all put in hundreds of hours, both before and after I went to college, trying to dope it out. But the thing that kept stopping us was that even if we’d been sure about the design of the board, there was no way to know what the exact counting protocol had been in the old days or how many seeds or pebbles or whatever they’d used. So Taro decided to try another approach. He brought in brain scanners.

  I still had my five quartz pebbles from Guatemala. In fact, they were the only things from there I still had, since the tz’ite seeds had eroded to pink powder and had been replaced with Skittles. I’d only scattered—that is, played the Sacrifice Game—a few times since I’d been in the States. But when I started again, sitting all wired up in a Ganzfeld chamber in the basement in Provo, it seemed like I’d been a beneficiary of the particular sort of improvement that comes from not practicing. At first they had people in a room on the other side of the building acting out different scenarios, and I’d try to predict those. I did pretty well. Then we found it worked better when the experimenters were actually losing money, or getting hurt, or something real. After a few months we started working on events in the real world, the spread of the AIDS virus or the first oil war or whatever, which was a lot harder to set up controls for. We kept beating the odds and getting better and better but still on an agonizingly gentle curve. He said my calendrical savant thing was helping me play faster but that so far I wasn’t really playing deeper. That is, I wasn’t focusing enough. I was like, well, I’m a teenager, how should I be able to focus at all? Anyway, five years later, when I started working with Taro again at Yale, he’d given up the isolation tests and was back to trying to crack the design of the original game board. By the time I left we were using two runners and playing on a game board that worked better but which he still didn’t think was the original layout. It made the Game more flexible but also easier to play, even though it was more complicated than my mother’s design:

  My break with Taro was over something stupid. I’d thought my tuition was getting paid by the Berlencamp Fund and by his lab at Yale, but it turned out the money had come from FARMS, the same lunatics he’d been working for back in Provo. I’d known for a while that the foundation was a Mormon soft-think tank dedicated to proving, among other things, that American Indians are the descendants of the Tribe of Joseph. When I got into my angry Pan-Maya Coalition phase it started to really bother me and I grilled him about it. There’s no pleasing some people, right? What an ingrate I was. Am. Anyway, he said that FARMS wasn’t even the original source, and actually their account came from the same people who were funding the lab. He said he couldn’t tell me who it was. I got cranky and walked out. At best the whole thing’s commercial, I thought, just a bunch of mercenary economics grads looking for ways to beat the market.

  And there were other changes going on. Before Taro left Utah, he’d hooked me up with a group at the University of Texas that was working on therapies for some of the lack-of-emotional-affect problems I was supposedly having. He made sure I wasn’t in the control group and that I got the whole course. By the time I’d (barely) graduated and gotten the hell out of New Haven, I’d acquired something like real emotions. I started learning new things about humans. Like for the first time I got clued into the whole secret about facial expressions and what they meant, and how people try to hide their emotions or fake ones they don’t have. Weird stuff. A whole shadow-world of interpersonal politics lurked out there, affectations and masks and subtexts and just plain lies. I became sensitive to my personal appearance, or, rather, learned I had an appearance. I lost thirty pounds and kept it off. I read a book called How to Pick Up Chicks for Dummies. I did 182,520 abs crunches. I moved to Grand Avenue in Los Angeles. I picked up some chicks for dummies. I decided to be an ornithologist. I started using the Game to research investments. I made some money right away, maybe just by luck. I had some motivation, because in those days prophylactic treatment for hćmophilia B cost about $300K per year, but without it you spent all your time worrying about getting bruised or cut and then plugging leaks like Super Mario. I gave up ornithology because I found out that really, people already know about everything there is to know about birds. I decided to go professional with the chess thing. I worked my FIDE rating up to 2,380. On May 11, 1997, when Deep Blue beat Kasparov, I gave up the idea of being a chess player. What was the point? It was like being a Dial-A-Matic adding machine. I decided I was going to move to Seoul and study to be a professional Go player. I learned some Korean. Then it turned out you had to learn some Chinese to learn Korean, so I learned some Chinese. I gave up the idea of being a professional Go player because it turned out they don’t have empanadas de achiote in Asia. I decided to be a marine biologist. I left L.A. and moved to Miami. I gave up the idea of being a marine biologist because it was too depressing to go through water samples, logging all the different vintages of toxic waste. I decided I’d study biology and specialize in chemosensation. I gave up building cellos because of all the lacquer and varnish and glue. I
decided I’d study olfactology. Then I gave up being a chemist at all because the field had become so industrialized that at the rate things were going I’d have been lucky to come up with even one decent molecule. I decided to get out of the sciences and write a novel. I moved to Williamsburg, Brooklyn. I wrote a few articles on computer games and whatever for magazines like Wired and Artforum and even Harper’s Bazaar. The editor there told me a jaunty, irreverent tone was mandatory. I went around drinking single malts and picking up chicks for dummies. The phase didn’t last long. I started trading commodities online. I gave up the idea of being a novelist because, as I learned more about the field, it turned out that even in this day and age novelists are expected to cover a pretty narrow range of subjects. You’re supposed to be interested in certain things, things like, say, emotion, motivation, self-expression, relationships, families, love, loss, love and loss, gender, race, redemption, women, men, women and men, identity, politics, identity politics, writers, Brooklyn, writers who live in Brooklyn, readers who wish they were writers who live in Brooklyn, the Self, the Other, the Self versus the Other, academia, postcolonialism, growing up, the suburbs, the 1970s, the 1980s, the 1990s, growing up in the suburbs in the 1970s, 1980s, or 1990s, personhood, places, people, people who need people, character, characters, the inner lives of the characters, life, death, society, the human condition, and probably Ireland. And of course, I have exactly zero interest in any of these things. Who wants to hear about the characters’ inner lives? I’m not even interested in my own inner life. I decided I’d become a professional Hold ’Em player. I moved to Reno, Nevada. In those days there were so many fish at the tables that almost anyone who could count could make money. I made some money. I did some math for Indian-reservation casinos in Utah, Arizona, and Florida, coming up with new ways to fleece the white man. I made some more money. I gave up the idea of staying on the pro poker circuit because I was already making more money in commodities than I could at online or even real-world tables, and with a lot less interaction. I kept up my column at Strategy magazine just out of sentiment. I made some more money.

  Money. Right. I suppose I should mention that.

  By ’01 I had enough cash to do what I wanted if I didn’t mind wearing off-the-rack jackets. I looked up No Way, my cuate viejo from T’ozal—who was still with the Enero 31 resistance group, which had gone underground after the cease-fire of ’96—and I spent four years in Guatemala. I worked for his friends in the CPRs, that is, the Communities of Population in Resistance, and I quietly tried to find out what (todo por mi culpa) had happened to my parents. And I went around and asked a lot of old sun adders about the Game. I decided Taro’s team had been right, that there had been a complete and complex version of the Sacrifice Game, but that now it was just a dim collective memory. Most of the old h’menob’ used the same much-abridged version and even then worked mainly by instinct, like Alzheimer’s patients who can’t play duplicate bridge anymore but who still enjoy a few hands of Go Fish.

  I never did track down any more complete versions of the Sacrifice Game. But my secret objective got me into enough trouble that as of 2011 the National Police still had an arrest warrant out for me. García-Torres was, in typical Guate fashion, still in the army and now a general. No Way and I worked up a profile of him—what his habits were, how his different houses were laid out, which cockfighting pits he went to and when, where his personal bodyguards lived, the whole thing, but I must not have done a very good job because one night No Way—who had a coyote uay and could get around silently in the dark—snuck in the back way and said he’d heard the G2 was onto me. My choice, he said, was either to clear out before morning or, probably, vanish. I cleared out. I moved to Indiantown, which is a Maya émigré settlement on Lake Okeechobee about twenty miles inland from Florida’s Atlantic Coast.

  In Florida word had gotten around about some good results I’d had with the Sacrifice Game, and I couldn’t get out of taking on a few clients. I could never really be a really great community sun adder, though. One problem is that, in a traditional village at least, an adder has to do a lot of drinking, and alcohol’s never really plugged my wound. As far as I’m concerned, C2H6O’s a poor man’s drug no matter how much you tart it up. Another problem is that a lot of the craft is just being a good listener, a relentlessly traditionalist pillar of the community, and a repository of local lore. And what fun is that? You also ought to be an intuitive psychiatrist, a Person Who Deals with People. And most adders, frankly, also do a lot of plain fakery—cold reading, behind-the-scenes research, stooge planting, and even sleight of hand.

  And I can’t do the religious stuff with conviction, and I hate leading people on like some TV medium. It’s just too depressing to see how desperate and gullible they are. I’ve been told more than once that I’m kind of touchy about the adder thing because it sounds like it could be a scam. When they do surveys of most-and least-admired professions, “fortune teller” is usually second from the bottom, right above “telemarketer.”

  Which brings up the personal question: “If he can do what he says he can, why is Jed not rich?”

  Well, the simple answer to that is that, as a matter of fact, I am.

  [3]

  I hate my autobiography. One hates all autobiography. Autobiography is the world’s second-most-loathsome literary genre, just above haikus in English. The last time I went into a real bookstore—it was just to get a cannabispresso, by the way—I picked up an autobio by Ava Gardner while I was waiting, and the first sentence was “In Johnston County, North Carolina, you couldn’t be any kind of farmer at all without a mule.” It’s like, uh-huh, that’s sweet, Ava, but frankly, if you’re not in bed with Howard Hughes, Frank Sinatra, Johnny Stompanato, Artie Shaw, Mickey Rooney, or some combination of the above by the bottom of this very page—or unless you’re leading up to a comparison of the mule’s genitalia to Frank’s—your book is taking a header back into the remainders bin. Autobiographies are all alike, it’s always “Okay, just because I’ve attracted a certain amount of attention I’m going to drag you through everything that ever happened to me even though 99 and 44/100 percent of it is the exact same basura that happened to everyone else.” So if you get anything out of this it shouldn’t be about me, even if I do figure in it a bit. It’s not about me. It’s just about the Game.

  Oh, right. We were going to treat, briefly, the Game as Gold Mine issue. Well, let’s skip ahead a bit.

  In the fourth watchfire of 4 Owl, 4 Yellowness, 12.19.18.17.16—or, in the newfangled reckoning, at 4:30 A.M. on Friday, December 23, 2011—the Nikkei closed up 1.2 percent and sent my estimated combined portfolios just north of the five-million-dollars U.S. mark. I was splayed out on the floor—I like hanging out on stone or cement floors—blinking up at a big screen on the low ceiling of my so-called house, which was a bit west of Indiantown and only one vacant block from Lake Okeechobee, Home of the Estrogenically Hermaphrodized Bullfrog. The house wasn’t really a house but rather a bankrupt tropical-fish store, Lenny’s Reefin’ Stall, that I’d picked up for debt plus fixtures and was now converting into a 450,000-cubic-foot experiment in one-room mixed-phylum living. The only light in the room was an actinic blue glow from a 440-gallon cylindrical tank of Baja nudibranchs, which are basically sort of gaudy sea snails with the shell on the inside.

  Damn, I thought, blinking up at the screen. After years of vagar, screwing around, I had finally worked out a way to use the Sacrifice Game to make real money. The Game won’t work in casinos, of course, because it takes too long. It didn’t help much with lotteries, because they’re too close to truly random. The Game needs to work on something you already know about. Basically, it helps you notice things. Which isn’t the same as predicting the future, but it beats just flailing around in the dark like most people. Anyway, the Sacrifice Game did work, slightly, with horses and sports books, especially with basketball, but I’d have to learn everything I could about the posted horses and the track, and by the time I’d played it all out a few times I could barely get the bet in before the bell. So I
needed something that came at me a little slower. I started getting serious about stocks. But they were randomer than I’d thought, and I’d almost given up when I tried my hand at corn futures.

  The advantage with commodities was that the harvest cycle was slow. Also, there weren’t many players in the field. So I worked up histories of most of the big individual investors and started treating them as absent players in a giant Sacrifice Game. Usually I ran about twenty long-range climate simulations and then bought straddles on stuff that looked unclear. Pretty soon I had a slight but definite edge. Six months ago I’d banked my first half-million, and now I was heading into private-plane territory. Speaking of which, I thought, I’ll lock up a little cash right now. Good idea. SELL 3350 DECEMBER CONTRACTS at 223.00 at MARKET to OPEN, I clicked. Hah. I hit COMPLETE TRANSACTION, counted the zeroes twice, and lay back on the floor.

  Hot spit, I thought. Yes! I am KING of the FUCKIVERSE! ĄĄDOMINO EL MUNDO!! I RULE THE WASTELAND!!! Finally. I’m an eater, not an eaten. It was like the eyes that had been on either side of my head had migrated to the front and given me binocular vision. Predator, not prey. Dang. Next thing you know old Jed’s a thrillionaire.

  Hmm, what to do next? Well, I thought, with great power comes great responsibility. I must use my abilities for the cause of good.