Brian D'Amato

by In the Courts of the Sun

  “It’s up here,” she said with a beckoning motion, like, “Come on, it’ll be fun, you’ll see.”

  “Right,” I said. “Thanks.” I squeaked after her. Imagine what it would be like having a job, I thought. Next thing I’d be showering. Just kidding. I shower. Sometimes.

  “So Professor Mora tells me you’re one of the Mayans,” she said at me. She pronounced it to rhyme with paeans.

  “Uh, Ch’olan Maya, yes,” I said. And by the way, I thought for the ten-to-the-nth time, the plural of Maya is Maya. Mayan is the language group. You speak in Mayan to the Maya about Maya stuff.

  “I think all that is absolutely fascinating,” she said. She was tall with a lot of blond wool and, I suppose, pretty in an ovine way.

  “It is?” I asked.

  “Being from South America and everything.”

  “Central America.”

  “’Scuse me?”

  “We’re not from South America,” I said, “we’re from Central America. Like, north of Panama?”

  “Oh, inter-esting.” She laughed. We went up a ramp to the second floor, past a vacant retro-thirties screening room. “You know what?” Whatsherhair asked. “Two weekends ago I went to an initiation workshop with Halach M’en.”

  “Oh?”

  “He taught us how to make Mayan dreamcatchers.”

  “Oh, great. What do they do?”

  “He said the Mayans were very spiritually advanced.”

  “We were?”

  “We’re here,” she said. She led us into a waiting area with a black floor and green Djinn sofas, like a negative of the scene in 2001. From there the receptionist took us into a trading-floor-like space with apparently happy workers in heavily personalized glass cubicles and snack-and-coffee stations with little condiment bars and Capresso machines and dwarf Sub-Zeros with notes on them like AMARANTH MILK IN HERE. We passed into a carpeted zone and she peeked around an ajar door. The occupant must have waved, because she guided me in.

  Marena Park sat cross-legged on top of her desk, looking at a big green screen in her lap. It was the new trendy kind that can sense its owner’s hands from across the room, because she was drawing something with her finger in the air next to it. She was smaller than she looked in photographs, at least a head shorter than I was, which made her teensy. Her face seemed flatter and more Korean than it had looked all made up, but I actually thought it was more attractive this way, “a face like a full moon,” as they say in The Thousand and One Nights. She was wearing a sort of Issey Miyake pleated gray polyamide in-line skating costume, like she was from a luxurious and athletic future. She held up her one-moment finger. I blinked around the room. There was a wall-inset 125-gallon tank of the new Monsanto glow-flashing oranda goldfish. I tried not to sneer at them visibly. The immune systems on those things are totally for shit; they’re so inbred they get hole-in-the-head septicćmia if you tap on the glass twice. There was a thick bias-cut katsura-wood Go board on the floor next to her desk, with old mulberry bowls that probably held a set of thick pink extinct-clam Go stones. If they did, the set would have to be worth at least a hundred thousand dollars U.S. The window behind the desk faced northwest, and you could just see the Epcot Buckyfullersphere floating on pea-green foliage like an old soccer ball in a duckweed-choked pond. She looked up.

  “Hi, hang on a tick,” she said. She had a little voice but not a high voice, like a male jockey’s. There was a pause. “So just Babel fish it into Sanskrit or what-evertheshit they speak over there, what’s the probs?” It took me a second to realize she had a phone somewhere in one of her ears. I didn’t sit down. I realized my heart was coshing against my rib cage. I tethered my hands in my pockets and eased over to check out a big tchotchke shelf on the east wall. The largest and most imposing item on it was a brass skeleton clock that looked like it had been made sometime in the 1950s. It had five rotating wheels, with four of them grinding through the Maya calendar and the outer and largest one slowly ticking off Gregorian dates, all the way from 3113 BC

  to December 21, 2012. There was also a ring of portrait glyphs, but it didn’t seem to make sense. Maybe it was just something somebody made up. There was another clock next to it, a smaller one with a triangular Masonic dial—it said “Waltham/17 Jewels/Love Your Fellow Man” and that it was trowel minutes from mallet o’clock—and the other things on the shelf were all trophies, little silver cups for Go and rock climbing, a couple of Webbys, a World Shareware Award, a bunch of E3 Game Critics Awards, two skinny glass pyramids from the Academy of Interactive Entertainment Arts and Sciences, a lot of things for stuff nobody’d ever heard of, and near the back, like she didn’t want to look like she cared about it, an Oscar statuette dressed in a one-sixth-scale costume from Neo-Teo, standing like Jesus in a crowd of adoring Nephites. You really like me? I thought. Little me, king of the world? I wish I had someone to thank. Well, I guess I’ll just thank Satan, who allowed me to trade this moment for my soul. On the wall over the shelf there was a child’s drawing of Santa Claus holding a big universal remote and driving a team of robot reindeer, taped over and partly obscuring a framed Cibachrome of Ms. Park, who evidently had prehensile toes, dangling upside down from a yellow-granite overhang. A caption over it read, Solo Ascent “Chocolate Swastika,” E7 6c, Hallam View Buttress, Gritstone, 14/9/09. Next to that there was a tiny-by-comparison framed snapshot in the exaggerated blues and russets of 1950s Kodak, an eager-faced young Korean in a USN flight jacket standing arm-in-arm with a familiar-looking five-star general in front of a dusty B-29 with a seven-up pair of dice, a chesty brunette, and the words Double or Nothing painted on its nose. A hand-scribbled note in the top left of the photograph read, To Pak Jung—Thanks Always for Service “Above and Beyond”—S.C.A.P. Gnl. Douglas C. MacArthur, Kadena 12/27/51.

  “Yep,” she said into the void. Pause. “Byebyeonara.” Her eyes focused on me. “Hi.”

  She didn’t get up. Usually it’s a blessing the way people hardly shake hands anymore, but in this case I wouldn’t have minded a little skin contact. I said hi. I wondered if I should say who I was, even though she knew. I didn’t.

  “Taro really thinks you’re the greatest,” Ms. Park said.

  “That’s very gratifying.”

  “I bet you play Go, right?”

  I nodded. Maybe she’d seen me looking at the board. It’s weird how people can tell stuff about me. I’ve always felt like I’m on the Planet of the Telepaths. Of course, it’s supposed to be something to do with my putative PTSD.

  “How strong are you?” she asked.

  “Uh, six dan. Amateur.”

  “That’s godless,” she said. “I’m a five. Maybe we should play sometime.”

  “Great,” I said. Five dan is actually pretty impressive, especially since most people in the entertainment industry would have trouble getting through a game of Cootie. Go is considered a martial art in Asia, and a dan is a belt. So a six-dan is like a sixth-degree black belt. I was still nothing next to a professional player, though. Anyway, a six-dan spots a five-dan one stone, which still gives you a really good game. She and I would be playing far into the night in the tatami room of her thrillingly minimalist sky-high doorman quadruplex loft to the romantic strains of vintage Jello Biafra, and as I apologized for clobbering her again by seventy and one-half points she’d push the board aside and grab me by the—

  “Please, Setzen Sie sich,” she said.

  I sat. The chair had looked solid, but it yielded under me and conformed to my body type, so my feet flailed for a second. Doofus. “Hey, I’m a big fan,” I said. “I play your game all the time.”

  “Oh? Thanks. What shell are you on?”

  “Uh, thirty-two.”

  “That’s very excellent.”

  “Thanks.” Even though it was her product, I was embarrassed to admit I’d spent so much geek time on the thing.

  “The thing is,” she said, “even though it’s my product I really don’t know anything about the ancient Maya.” No kidding, I thought. “Or maybe you can tell that from the game,” she said, beating me to it.

  “Well …”

&nb
sp; “It’s okay, it’s just a fantasy. I know it’s not historically accurate.”

  “Sure,” I said. I realized I hadn’t taken my hat off. Damn. I have this thing where it’s weird to have my head uncovered, and I still forget to peel off my headpiece indoors. Better take it off now, I thought. No. It’s too late. But she’s got to think I’m pretty weird with the hat thing, right? No, don’t do it. That’s my look. The Hat Look. Better just be comfortable. Right? Bueno. Seńor Hat stays.

  “ You grew up speaking Mayan, right?” Marena asked.

  “Yes.” I took my hat off. “Actually, the language where I’m from is called Ch’olan.”

  “Taro says you’re from Alta Verapaz.”

  “ Yes.”

  “Did you ever hear anything about any ruins down there, around, um, Kabon?”

  “Sorry? Where, like the Río Cahabón?”

  “That’s it. Michael said something about an oxbow area.”

  “Downstream of T’ozal?”

  “That sounds right.”

  “There are ruins all over around there,” I said. “People know the hills aren’t natural. My uncles used to tell us the hunchbacks built them, before the Flood.”

  “What hunchbacks?”

  “Just, you know, magic mud dwarfs or boulder babies or trolls or whatever. I kind of pictured them as big chunky gravelly guys with, like, huge heads.”

  “Oh, okay.”

  “Why? Do you know the area?”

  “Just on the map. But Michael’s been trying to get a permit to excavate the royal tombs. Before this dam goes in and trashes the place.”

  “Well, that’s good—”

  “You know, maybe I shouldn’t say this, but you don’t look that much like a Native American.”

  “No, it’s okay, I get that. Maya don’t look much like the Navajo or whatever anyway. Sometimes we even get mistaken for Southeast Asians.”

  “ You don’t look Asian. Or Latin American.” She smiled to give it all a flirty spin, like she was afraid of seeming racist. But it was true, I don’t really look like much of anything. The Maya tend to be short ’n’ chunky, but I was half Ladino, and because of all the calcium I’d gotten in Utah—atypically, I wasn’t lactose-intolerant, and I’d landed on a planet where milk is practically the only approved beverage—I’d shot up to a towering five nine, more than a head taller than anyone else in my original family. Currently I was around 135 pounds, so I couldn’t really shop in the Husky Department, and that seemed to have thinned my face out. A pure Maya usually has a wide face that looks like a hawk from the side and an owl from the front. But I just look vaguely tropical. Sometimes, when people hear my last name, they ask if I’m from the Philippines. Sylvana, that is, my sort of ex, used to say that my long hair made me look like a bad-looking version of Keanu Reeves in Little Buddha. I thought about saying all this to Marena and then decided to chill. Have a little mystery, for God’s sake.

  When I didn’t say anything, she maybe got a little concerned. “You don’t find the Ix game offensive, do you?” she asked.

  “Oh, no—”

  “I was afraid we might be making the Mayan dudes a little too, you know, uh …”

  “Savage?”

  “That’s it.”

  “Well … ,” I said, “at least you didn’t make them cute.”

  “No.”

  “Anyway, I’m sure things were rough in those days.”

  “ Yeah, people getting their hearts yanked out and whatevs.”

  “Actually, the Maya didn’t do that,” I said. “I mean, not so far as anybody knows.”

  “Really?”

  “Maybe later on, like in the fourteen hundreds. Not in the Classic period. The hearts are more of a Mexican thing.”

  “Oh. Sorry. Still, they were really into cannibalism and everything, right?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, “maybe that was just Spanish propaganda. They certainly sacrificed a few people sometimes. It’s not that clear whether they ate them.”

  “Oh. Sorry.”

  “And anyway, what’s the big deal with that? I mean, at this point cannibalism’s so mainstream, it’s like golf.”

  “Heh. Rather.”

  “You know, there was medicinal cannibalism in England into the nineteenth century.”

  “Like mummy dust and stuff?”

  “Yeah, and, like, for instance they thought that the blood from somebody who died violently could cure epilepsy, so, like, at Lincoln’s Inn Fields the pharmacists used to bleed people who’d just been hanged, and they’d reduce the blood down and mix it with alcohol, and you could buy it at Harris Apothecary.”

  “Neat.”

  “Yeah, and now there’s some sort of, uh, Christianized consensual-cannibalism sect somewhere, it’s called like the Church of the Overly Literal Communion or something.”

  “Oh, so so so, I did hear about that. Well, maybe it’s just another weight-loss fad.”

  “Maybe.”

  “But I guess you’re right, it’s not a big deal. I mean, I ate my placenta.”

  That stopped me.

  “Sorry, did that gross you out?” she asked.

  “Well—”

  “Hey,” she said, “Taro also says you do astronomy tricks.”

  “Really?”

  “ Yep.”

  “Did he tell you how I can catch Frisbees in my mouth?”

  “Oh, come on. Indulge me.”

  “Okay, pick a date.”

  “A date when?” she asked.

  “Whenever.”

  “Okay, uh, February twenty-ninth, um, 2594.”

  “That’s not a leap year.”

  “Okay, how about February twenty-eighth?”

  “That’s a Friday,” I said.

  “ You’re gonking me.”

  “It’s true.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah. However, I can also tell you that sunrise on that day—assuming there is one—will be at about six fifty A.M. Eastern, and then sunset’s at roughly six twenty-four.”

  “Sure,” she said. “And I’m Anastasia Romanov.”

  “Wait, there’s more. On that date Venus is going to rise at eight fifty-seven A.M.—although you wouldn’t see that, of course—and set at nine fifty-six p.M. I mean, if you’re around here. And Saturn’s going to set at four thirty-four A.M.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “Google it.”

  “Never mind,” she said. She had a big smile. “That’s godless.” Evidently godless was the new awesome. “So how many people can do that?”

  “I don’t know of anybody else. There are people who can do other things—”

  “Hmm.” She half giggled. Yeah, I thought, I’ve got a beautiful mind, all right. I’ll unscramble your old Rubik’s Cubes, I’ll solve the undone pages in your Sudoku books, I’ll do your taxes in base sixteen, just show me the book—

  “Is it true that you speak twelve languages?” she asked.

  “Oh, no, no way,” I said. “I only really speak three. Unless you count the different Mayan languages. I can speak most of those.”

  “So you speak English, Spanish, and Mayan.”

  “Right. I can understand a few others. Like, to read. Maybe I could speak them well enough to buy tomatoes.”

  “Like which?”

  “Just usual stuff, German, French, Greek, Nahuatl, uh, Mixteca, Otomi—”

  “So, look,” she said, “what do you think about the world ending? You think that’s going to happen?”

  “Um … well …”

  I hesitated. We have a little problem here, I thought. On the one hand I was a little nervous about it despite myself. On the other hand I didn’t have a single solid fact. And of course I wanted to say that there was a problem and that I could help her with it, but then again I was already getting a sense that Ms. Park might be a tad harder to snow than your average chica alegre.

  “Um … well,” I said, “no, not on the basis of anything I know. Why, are people around here nervous about it?”

  “Some people are, and then, then I guess Taro said it might only apply to the Maya … not that that’s not important, of course.”