Sacrifice

by Farris, John

  I sat up until after midnight in the kitchen, drinking coffee (regular, we had run out of decaf) and reading Dombey and Son, not concentrating well enough to shut out the sounds of the cabinet clock in the front hall. I was fatigued but not very sleepy when I finally put on my pajamas and went to bed. I slept fitfully, and the caffeine in my system prompted excitable, unpleasant dreams.

  In one of those dreams the homely Timekeeper in his rumpled black suit took me along a forest path to a clearing which contained a small pyramid perhaps ten feet on a side and twelve feet high, composed of smooth, round uncemented stones. I was naked in this dream, coppery from the sun, my bare legs bloodied from the ritual sacrifice. I had a crushing headache from the effects of fasting, but I fell to obediently taking down stone after stone until I had uncovered the pit with plastered walls that lay beneath the pyramid. I was not shocked or even surprised to find Bobby and Sharissa entombed, side by side in rich burial clothing, hands folded over emptied breasts . . .

  I woke up with a start, in a tropic sweat, thunder outside the bedroom windows. I had a rancid odor. Something stirred at the foot of the bed, giving me a moment's prickling fright. But it was Sharissa.

  "Daddy? Did I wake you up? I'm sorry. I didn't want to be by myself."

  "That's all right, baby."

  She curled up again. I got out of bed to get a drink of water in the bathroom. I saw myself in several mirrors, shadowy, my image repeated by lightning. I was fascinated with my faceless self, as if another dream was about to begin. But I'd had enough for one night.

  I thought Sharissa had gone to sleep. But as I sat down on the edge of the bed, rubbing my neck, she said in a small, bleak voice, "When will I stop thinking it really didn't happen? When will I believe it?"

  "It takes time, sweetheart."

  "I just have this terrible feeling, everything's going to go wrong now."

  "That isn't true," I said, lamely. Then I said, "Could I bring you a glass of milk or something?"

  "What was it—bad luck? Is life that stupid, and meaningless? I don't want to believe that, but I can't think about anything else! There's this lump in my throat that won't go away. Crying doesn't help. I feel so depressed, wanting to cry and not being able to anymore. Milk? Oh, no thanks."

  "What can I do, baby?"

  "I don't know." Her voice broke. She breathed shudderingly, sick in her soul. "I love you," she said after a while. "I love Mom. And I loved Bobby. Oh my God. I'm never going to love anyone as much as I loved him."

  Neither of us said anything else, and before long her breathing slowed and deepened; after a last quivering sigh I knew she had fallen asleep. I endured a short restless spell, then got up and dressed in old clothes. There was considerable thunder and lightning now, as brilliant and chilling as a migraine.

  I went outside anyway, and walked, walked around the lake in the rush of wind and the dazzling light. It never rained that night. I cried for Sharissa. I cried for her pain and loss and heartbreak, and finally for her innocence. By the time the sun came up I was able to think about the good times, my daughter year by year as she grew from faerie child in a soap-bubble bath to blessed young woman, and gradually my torment faded. Life, I reminded myself, is not meaningless; nor is it a process ruled by the randomness of events. Life is fate, and fate must be respected, if we are to live sanely and achieve our small purposes. My only regrets were that I could never hope to fully explain this to those whom I loved. To explain myself. To justify what I yet had to do.

  On the following Thursday I drove eighty miles to Hartsfield airport to meet Caroline's flight from Washington. The heat wave of the past few days was about to be broken, and with a vengeance: a storm front was moving in from the Gulf coast, and a severe weather watch had been issued for northwest Georgia.

  The concourse was crowded, and Delta switched gates at the last minute. By the time I reached the arrival gate the last passengers were deplaning. Caroline must have flown first class. I saw her waiting for me in the smoking area by the check-in counter. She was lighting a cigarette. Her hands were unsteady.

  She turned her cheek in a distracted manner when I tried to kiss her. She looked starkly tired in the unflattering light of the concourse.

  "How was Washington?" I asked her.

  "Humid." I couldn't interpret the look she gave me, yet I knew something was very wrong. "I don't know how anyone could live there during the summer." Suddenly she was chatty; determinedly so, I thought. "But some of us went for a cruise on the Potomac a couple of nights ago. That was fun. You don't mind if I smoke? Just one. I won't smoke in the car."

  It was raining when we left the terminal. Caroline said she wanted to drive. She's a better driver than I am, particularly in bad weather, so I let her take the wheel. We headed west on Camp Creek Parkway to I-285. Caroline couldn't, or didn't want to make conversation. It began to rain harder. There was lightning all around us. If she was exhausted, it didn't show in her driving.

  I was about to put the radio on, but she stopped me, a hand on my wrist, as if she resented the potential intrusion. I sat back and looked at her.

  "What is it, Greg?" Caroline said abruptly. "Is it something so bad you can't let anyone know? Are you a fugitive? Did you kill somebody?"

  That startled me; my reaction was to smile.

  She looked from me to the lights of a truck looming up through the rain behind us. Her voice was constricted when she spoke again.

  "Am I really Mrs. Greg Walker, or—did you have another name once?"

  "What have you been up to, Caroline?" I said after a few moments.

  "I'm a journalist by trade. So I did what any good journalist would do when—when she thinks the man she loves has lied to her all these years."

  A glaring light filled the inside of the Honda. Thunder cracked. Then we rode through the comparative quiet beneath an overpass.

  "Go on," I said, my voice louder than either of us expected.

  Again the onslaught of gray rain; it was like an ocean turned upside down. I wished she would pull over with other cars beside the expressway lanes to wait it out, but I didn't say anything.

  "I checked with the Pentagon first," Caroline said. "There've been dozens of Gregory Walkers in the various services, but no one of your age and description at the time you said you served. There was never a Lieutenant Greg Walker of the Third Transportation Company at Fort Belvoir, Virginia. Anyone can buy an officer's uniform, have papers forged; and phony driver's licenses are so easy to obtain, aren't they—Greg."

  "I suppose so."

  "I still wasn't—satisfied, so I spent a day and a half in Baltimore. Looking through birth records, checking with the welfare agencies. The date and place of your birth on our marriage certificate checks out okay—but the infant Gregory Walker, whose name you took, died at the age of six weeks. Needless to say you weren't shunted from one foster home to another in your youth. I doubt if you've ever been to Baltimore."

  "I've been there," I said.

  "For how long?"

  "Ten days. Long enough to familiarize myself with the city, and pick up an identity."

  "Mother of God!"

  "Please don't, Caroline."

  Her breath hissed. "I suppose I should be grateful for one thing. Your fingerprints aren't on file with the FBI. You're not on the National Crime Information Center's computers."

  "I've never been a criminal. Some occasional indiscretions, misdemeanors. You did a very thorough job. As for gratitude, you ought to be grateful for many things. I've been faithful to you, Caroline. We've had a good marriage. What else do you really need, or want to know?"

  "Everything."

  "You're going too fast," I cautioned her.

  Caroline eased off on the accelerator. I shook my head. "It's just human nature, isn't it? The hardest lesson life offers is learning to leave well enough alone."

  "Tell me! I want to know who you are."

  "Frederick Sullivan," I said.

  "Oh, no! Jesus! I d
on't believe that! The bullet in your head! I think it must have—you've gone completely—you're talking like a—a psychopathic—"

  I went on, calmly, "Psychopathic liar? You know better. You've lived with me for eighteen and a half years. I'm a perfectly normal, ordinary human being. Except for one crucial difference. Once every nineteen years I'm required—compelled, if you want to put it that way—to change my identity, my lifestyle, to become someone completely different from the person I was during my last cycle."

  Caroline sounded as if something was caught in her throat. I looked at our speed. We were going seventy, in blinding rain, nearing the interchange with I-75, the way home to Sky Valley. I took a deep breath. There had been some hard years, but I was going to miss the beauty, the orderly pace of life in Sky Valley.

  "Do you want me to go on, Caroline? It's an opportunity for me, actually. I've never been able to explain this to any of my wives or lovers. Maybe you'll understand."

  "I understand that you—need help, Greg." Her tone was milder, resigned, to the bare-bone facts of what she considered to be my mental illness. I couldn't tell, looking at her reflection in the windshield, if she was crying. There was so much rain streaming down the glass.

  "I was married to Roxanne Sullivan. Everything she said was true. Becoming a shitheel named Frederick Sullivan was an experiment in altering my personality, adopting a totally different exterior from that of Barnaby Wilde, who taught fifth-form French at a girls' school in New England during the thirties and forties, and wrote essays for little magazines. But Frederick exhausted me; it wasn't easy to be primitive, even in a raw, primitive place like New Lost River. So I went back to what was closer to my true nature: someone contemplative, religious, of no great importance, just a man who earns a decent living and values his wife, his home, his family. That's the man you married, Caroline. The name doesn't mean anything."

  "You're making this up. It's a—like a fantasy that you believe is—"

  "Caroline. Since becoming an adult I've aged only a few years in two and a half centuries, and, under normal circumstances, I'm immune to death. I'll continue to live as long as I observe the protocol of the nineteen-year prenatal eclipse cycle that saw me into this world, nearly fifteen cycles ago. These astrophysical cycles were discovered by the Chaldeans in 700 B.C., then passed on to the Maya of Central America when that part of the world was colonized. My cycle as Greg Walker expires next February, when the moon's north node returns to the eclipse degree of February 9, 1713. It didn't expire when I was shot in the head by Ricky Gene Kindor, because almost nothing short of total destruction of my body can kill me. I was gassed in the trenches during World War I. Run through my liver in an affaire d'honeur many, many years before that. I've been trampled by wild horses in Australia, fallen from the roof of a six-story building. I mended quickly; all scars disappeared. There is no foreseeable end for me. The solar eclipse cycle into which I was born will continue well into the twenty-third century. I'm not alone, either. I have many brothers and sisters, all of us descended from a single, remarkable progenitor. Men and women totally in control of their destinies. As long as we are willing to pay the small cost involved."

  "Insane. Insane. Oh, God. I'm afraid."

  She seemed frozen to the steering wheel, guiding us by instinct alone through the deluge. We were still going very fast for the conditions, passing everyone else on the interstate highway.

  "Isn't it better to know what you already suspected, Caroline?"

  "I wanted to believe—in a miracle. That God saved you. I wanted you—to grow old with me. Oh how I wanted that! But when I couldn't stand to see myself in a mirror anymore, you—you never looked a day older. I tried not to think about that."

  "It was an accident of birth, Caroline. I never asked to be immortal. Sometimes—it can be difficult to deal with. Try to help me, by understanding."

  "But you don't have to leave, do you, Greg? I'm sorry. I'm really sorry I called you a liar. I believe you now. You've been—a wonderful husband, a loving father. Think of us. Think of Sharissa. Stay with us, that's all I ask! Won't you go on being Greg Walker, for our sake?"

  "I can't do that, Caroline."

  "You were planning to—just walk away, disappear, always leave us wondering—"

  "That's the hard part," I admitted.

  "And—turn into someone else, marry another woman? But you can't—can't just say you love me, and do a horrible, treacherous, despicable thing like that! That isn't love. It's selfish. It's monstrous!"

  "Caroline!" I shouted. "Watch—"

  I don't know. Maybe if I hadn't tried to grab the wheel, we wouldn't have run into the concrete divider. Caroline had excellent reflexes, even under stress. It was just instinct on my part. But we were going much too fast, and after rebounding from the disintegrating divider the car flipped. We were wearing seat belts and shoulder harnesses, of course. The restraints probably would have saved Caroline's life, but the eighteen-wheeler coming along behind us in the second lane couldn't avoid the sedan in its path. The big transport struck us on the driver's side and tumbled the car off the road, down a long slope and onto an access road.

  Thinking back, I don't even remember the impact. What I see in my mind's eye is Caroline's face lit up by the lights behind us. Sometimes I imagine I hear her scream. But I'm human, aren't I? And not immune to guilt.

  THE FIRST PART OF THE NARRATIVE IS CONCLUDED

  PART TWO

  The Hotel Itzá Maya

  Cobían, Guatemala

  "A most tragic end to a fruitful period of your development," Francisco Colon said to me.

  He sipped dense black coffee from a small eggshell china cup. We were at breakfast on the terrace of the Itzá Maya, which he had inherited from his late father. "I hope you were not seriously injured in the accident."

  "A dislocated shoulder. I was cut by flying glass. No, nothing serious," I told him. "And your father?"

  Francisco gazed momentarily at a man with a tier of birdcages, containing cardinals and keel-billed toucans, which was strapped on the top of his head. Francisco gave directions to the peddler, who then walked, with a graceful swaying gait, down a winding stone path into the tropical gardens of the Colonial-style hotel, where it had been my good fortune to spend several pleasant winters preceding the station of my eclipse cycle.

  "Papa passed on peacefully in his sleep at the winter solstice," Francisco said, and turned back to me with a contented smile: contentment for his beloved father, the Timekeeper, and his own, newly elevated position. "He had one hundred twenty-one years." Francisco sipped coffee again, looking frankly at me with obsidian eyes. He was a broad brown man with a neat oval of mustache and beard and long oiled hair which he combed straight back from his forehead. The crook of his prominent nose, his build, were classically Maya.

  I glanced at the jade of prestige which he wore on a gold chain around his neck. It was a crudely carved eagle, perhaps as old as two millennia. I could be sure it was the same jade which Francisco's father, and his father's father, who I also counted as a friend, had worn before him.

  "Don Santiago's instructions to me before his passing were incomplete," Francisco ventured.

  "They were meant to be," I said. In the gardens, among the charming thatched-roof bungalows, which were a recent addition to the Itzá Maya, spider monkeys chattered in their cages and threw rotten fruit at anyone who came too close. On the terrace near us a tethered quetzal spread magnificent wings. The quetzal was the exact blue color of the flawless morning sky. Once you saw them everywhere in the unspoiled Petén region; now they were a rarity. So much had changed here, in a little more than three decades, after timeless centuries.

  Francisco lowered his gaze. He was very much like his father, except that he seemed to have too much fondness for vulgar diamond rings. Three of them flashed on his fingers. Don Santiago had been a simpler man.

  "I realize that I may not enjoy the longevity of the heirs of Can Ek. Still—whatever extension of my l
ife is available to me will of course be welcome."

  "How old are you now?" I asked him.

  "I have forty years, sir."

  "Then you are barely in the springtime of the long life that will be my gift to you."

  His face was immobile, but his chest swelled with relief and happiness. "Thank you, sir."

  I looked out over the extensive gardens, to a couple of badly deteriorated pyramids on the lake shore, remnants of a small Maya city of the fourth century A.D. Such sites were common in the region. There was still much to be discovered in the forest of the newly created Maya Biosphere Preserve, and under it. And much that would never be found, as long as the chattels of the Owl and the Harpy, the Timekeepers of the Underworld like Francisco Colon, were faithful to their trust.

  "Your time is near?" Francisco asked me, speaking now in the Mayan language as a tourist couple came near our table to take pictures of the rare quetzal.

  "On the 9th of February. Fourteen days from now."

  "And what will you require?"

  "The obsidian knife. The jaguarundi cup. One day soon you will guide me to the stairway of the Golden One, my father Can Ek." At this mention of the father of all immortals, he bowed his head. "So that I may be sure . . ."

  Francisco touched his breast over his heart, confirming the sacredness of his knowledge, and his obligation. "I know the way."

  "Of course." I smiled at him. There was no reason to remind Francisco that if he was attempting to deceive me as to the rightfulness of his succession, the penalty would be severe. The Itzá Maya would be in the market for a new owner.

  Xate palms on the spacious grounds of the hotel—more than half of it new, under Francisco's guidance—rattled in a strong breeze. Francisco glanced at me as if expecting more.

  "And—the sacrifice?" he murmured.

  "That does not involve you. You will be there only to receive the blood anointment that prolongs your life." He nodded. "And it is done—in the old way?"

  "You know how sharp the knife is. I remove the heart from the breast with a few strokes, at the culmination of the eclipse."