The Sacrifice Game

by Brian D'Amato

  In approving the measure, the city has prompted a sometimes emotional conversation about suicide and mental illness, government spending, and Akron’s image and future as it continues to remake itself and adjust to a new economy without the thousands of tire manufacturing jobs that once led people to call this the Rubber Capital of the World.

  You could Google the rest, but you get the idea. And, really, who could be more representative of the general run than someone, anyone, from Akron, Ohio? Although I admit that four hundred and sixty-eight people is a hard-to-believe statistic. I mean, you’d think they’d have that many every couple of days. You’d think that by now the entire population of Akron, along with a large percentage of citizens from the neighboring communities of Cottage Grove, Barberton, and Cuyahoga Falls, would have taken the opportunity to jump. I mean, just typing the word Akron a few times has depressed me so much that I’m close to hanging myself right now with my mouse cord and not waiting around for the twenty-first. So why pull the thing down? If anything, you’d think the town fathers would just build a designated suicide platform up there, and put up bleachers and concession stands and sell tickets so that at least they could reduce the deficit. Or, if they absolutely insist on keeping their taxpayers alive, why not just work on making Akron less depressing? Although I guess that would probably cost more than a million dollars. A trillion? Infinity? Who knows?

  So anyway, basically, they want it even if they can’t ask for it. And I accepted the responsibility to give it to them. I didn’t want to be the villain (But y’are, Jed. Y’are!), but without villains nothing happens.

  And that’s the whole reason. I’m not doing this because I’m frustrated or enraged at my co-workers or any of those postal things, although I suppose I’m as angry as the next gink. It’s not because people are no damn good, although I’ve always had a deep faith in their awfulness, even before watching that toddler-in-the-microwave clip on Rotten Video. It’s not because I think the real world is just some collective hallucination or alien holographic projection or veil of Maya or whatever. If only. Nope. The reason, the only reason, is that I spoke to the babies. That is, I met the unborn. All of them. I listened. And they don’t want to be here. And I’m the person who’s in a position to do something about it.

  So, I have reason and opportunity. Do I also have the right?

  I don’t know. But I do tend to think that’s a meaningless question. The only point is, like I say, I’m in a position to do it, and so I have the duty to do it. I didn’t want to be the villain. Nobody does. But some are called—

  PING. Ah. My imaginary internal alarm’s telling me it’s time to check in on that second domino.

  Hmm. I’m almost afraid to look.

  Okay. Not almost. I’m terrified.

  Maybe if I don’t look it won’t have happened. Maybe it’s all just a fantasy . . . maybe it can’t happen, things like that don’t happen, things stay the same, there’ll still be things, there’ll still be coffee and Japan and mornings, another season of Battlestar Galactica, there’ll be parrot fish, crimson sea slugs, Fluffernutter sandwiches, snow—

  Jed. You’re getting maudlin. Stop. Get a grip.

  I called up the price feed and scrolled down . . . slowing . . .

  there it is—

  . . .

  Chix, chix, chix . Xkimik, xkimik. Ay, dios. Oh God, oh God. It’s not true, it’s not true . . .

  But it is. It happened. I did it. It’s happening, it’s happening. Todo por mi culpa. All my fault. Oh my God, ohmyGodohmyGodohmyGod, OMG, O, O, O. Ya estuvo. It’s done. There was that numbing swell again, like I’d inhaled a chestful of chilled helium. And there was just garden-variety terror, of course, and even a smudge of—well, I don’t know if I’d call it, exactly . . . would I call it doubt? Cancel, cancel. It’s done, Jed, it’s done, even if I, even I, can’t believe it’s really happening, it is, it is, it is, it is—

  Breathe.

  Whew. Well, it can’t be helped.

  Okay. It’s getting late, so I’ll take a last question from the house. If the Game works so damn well, why don’t you use it to show you how to avert all these horrible eventualities and make the future great for everybody?

  Answer. I have. This is it.

  Well, that’s about it. And, like I—

  Hang on.

  Okay. I noticed I’d thrown up a little in my mouth and managed to choke the bolus of sour mush back down into the right tube. Okay.

  And, like I say, you want it. Search your feelings and you’ll find you crave release. Just like this mutilated dog I knew one time, you want it even if you can’t ask for it. You’d thank me, if you could, for building us all a bridge out of Akron. And at least now you know. That is, you know all there is that’s worth knowing, that the world won’t end in fire, or in ice, or with a bang, or with a whimper, or even with a shrug. Just a click.

  Very, very sincerely,

  Joachim Carlos Xul Mixoc DeLanda

  ( 2 )

  Marena’d texted me while I was in the middle of writing my Dear Doomed World letter. She said she was back from Belize, and she was in her house, and I should come by. Wow, now what? I thought. And what do I tell her, besides nothing? I knew I wouldn’t be able to resist, though. She still had a hook in me. Well, let’s say a harpoon. And she knew it. Beeyotch. Anyway, I hadn’t even been to her house yet, so I guess it was on my bucket list. Okay. I got the tanks into self-maintenance mode. I had some Fluffernutter and, just for clarity, a shot of tsam lic. It was basically the same proportional combination of the same two molecules as the drugs that Jed2 had buried in Oaxaca, except that they were now synthetic, of course, and each with a few pairs of hydrogen atoms added for ease of absorption. It rocked.

  I cleaned up and even got out a sort of nice gray summerweight Dormeuil jacket. Wait, is that a moth hole? FUU—oh . . . it’s not. Just a speck of something. Polonium-210, probably. Whatever. I slipped on the jacket. Ahh. Now I’m an adult. Actually, since the unpleasantness at Disney World, I’d kept the garment all stocked up with my wallet, backup wallet, glasses, Purell wipes, SightSavers wipes, Q-tips, Twist-Em ties, Theraputty, Krazy Glue, grandessa, mandatory medication, optional medication, Adderall, OxyContin, Klonapin, clotting spray, wound dressing pads, blue Pilot Rolling Ball, Post-its, ToothTowels, Go-Between Plaque Stix, red astronomy flashlight, two competing telephones, the Gerber Suspension Butterfly Multi-Tool (which I much recommend), my real passport, my Warren-provided fake passport, nine blank checks from three different banks, about fifteen thousand U.S. dollars in premagnetic twenties, and a little nylon coin folder with twenty-five Krugerrands, which at the moment represented another seventy-five thousand, one hundred and two dollars. And a few other things, because, you know, one never knows. I checked the three working tanks again—I’d had Lenny replace everything after the Disney Die-off—and the apps on my phone that link to the tanks and the tank cameras, and then used the other new app to set the alarms and house cameras. I got my feet into a fully charged pair of Sleekers—just to show my support for the Firm, I rationalized— and selected an indoors-almost-appropriate hat. Wallet, keys, backup wallet, backup keys. Check, che—

  Damn. I was feeling a subsonic throb version of the first two bars of “Transfusion.” The alarm on my 1 phone. Time for another shot. Right.

  I rolled up my female—I mean, left—pant leg and found a new virgin target on my inner thigh. Dr. Lisuarte, from Warren, had set me up with a PowderJect system that looked, irresistibly, like a better-tooled version of the 1946 Daisy Buck Rogers U-238 Atomic Disintegrator Pistol, and I gave myself a Ject of recombinant coagulation factor IX. Fweeeeeeeeyup! Ow. Fuck this, I thought. Well, it’s not for much longer. Anyway, these days my clotting was nearly always up to at least seventy percent of normal, so if I wiped out on the Sleekers I’d still live to see the big quarter-second. In fact I barely worried about it consciously anymore, except still, if you’ve ever had any kind of hemophilia the whole world always feels a little dif
ferent. Like for instance you’re always a little on the lookout for sharp objects. It’s like that feeling you get when you’re sitting shirtless on that butcher’s paper in a doctor’s examination room and you look at the waste container that says SHARPS. If you’re a bleeder, that feeling’s permanent.

  I went out, let the door suck itself closed, and listened to the motion alarms beep on. The overcast and 102 degrees and 79 percent relative humidity and no wind made you feel like you were stuffed in a box with a half ton of styro-peanuts and left on somebody’s porch and not getting picked up. There was a top note of burning something in the air, over the bases of mold and fried crabgrass. Devil’s Night, I thought. Starting a little early. Amazingly, I remembered to let the jacket slide off before I eased into the 120-degree interior of the Barracuda Thermador. It was a metalflake-mango-orange hardtop 1970 Plymouth that I’d gotten ten months ago, with the original body, engine, and drive train, and I called it that because the inside had been scooped out and replaced with all-up-to-code everything.

  “Please tell me your destination,” the car purred. Its voice was like the Stepmother’s from the Disney Cinderella.

  “How can I turn you off?” I asked. It didn’t answer. Hell and corruption. It wasn’t even the right voice. If this car could really talk, it would sound like Amy Winehouse. Should hire her to do it. Just a few phrases and synth the rest. Where was I going? the car asked again. This time I told it, out of sheer weakness. It suggested I head west on Magnolia Street. I obeyed. Indiantown looked like a neighborhood from The Sims, if there were a “seediness” option and you slid it up halfway. And today it seemed to be deserted. Everybody’s hiding, I thought. Afraid of getting lynched by yahoos. Lately there’d been a rumor the Horror had been caused by some kind of Native American magic, and Indians had been attacked all over Florida. Sometimes I wondered whether that was what the “shoulder the blame” line in the Codex Nuremberg had been trying to mean. Except it didn’t seem really plausible. I mean, that’s too specific even for me to believe. Except, well, you never know. That One Ocelot was a pretty shrewd cat.

  “Please make a . . . right turn onto Martin Luther King Boulevard,” Car Voice said. I did, even though I knew another way and even liked it better. Damn. Getting servile like the rest of the sheep-men. Should’ve kept the old dashboard. On the radio, which of course hadn’t really been a radio since 2003, a woman who kept telling you her name was Anne-Marie García-McCarthy was saying how a mob had stormed the Fort Polk army base in Louisiana and may have been fired upon. The Nation of Islam had issued a statement saying that the U.S. had declared war on the black population, who had to fight back by any means necessary. Time for a new catchphrase, I thought. She said that Dick Cheney, the mind apparently behind the DWH—the Disney World Horror—was still missing, but probably somewhere in Pakistan. She said spot gold had hit a new high of $3,004 this morning and corn, as we know, hit a new high after-hours. She told us her name was Anne-Marie García-McCarthy. Onto 710. It was pretty empty. Future Site of Rockingham Vistas, the first big video billboard said. That’s what we need, more GCs. That is, what we real estate buffs call gated communities. Windsor Forest—Based on the Masterpieces of Thomas Kincaid, Painter of Light®. Coke™ . . . Life Tastes Good®. Take Back Florida/ George Prescott Bush/ Republican for Governor. An old Mustang with a scrolling LED bumper sticker: IN ANOTHER UNIVERSE, MY SON IS AN HONOR STUDENT. Pilgrim Homesteads, which I guess was code for a WASP-flight enclave. An antiabortion ad scrolled by with an upset-looking fetus on it. No worries, little guy. You didn’t miss anything. Anne-Marie was saying how analysts had thought that with statewide 30 percent unemployment more people would want to be police officers, but the opposite had turned out. Past the Baja Fresh and Fran’s Anemones. They both looked closed. Damn. Fran used to compete with Lenny but I still got brine shrimp from her sometimes. Federation Forest™. Enterprise Estates™. Those were both for aging Trekkies. Actually, I only knew about them because they’d been developed by the “Warren Intentional Communities Family.” They were big, but WICF’s biggest hits were still the Golden Year Gothams, which were like whole cities made of nursing homes, and the Special Youth Plantations, which I guess were like a cross between giant day-care centers and reform schools. Colonia Años Dorados™. Long John Silver’s. Future Site of Pandora®. I guess that one was going to be based on Avatar™. Rancho Pasa de Uva™. Or had I just made that one up? I looked back but couldn’t read it anymore. God, this is stultifying. Well, this might be the last time you have to deal with the ol’ Pike, I reminded myself. Even the last time you have to drive anywhere. Out over my left arm the big dirty orange sun touched the line of scrub behind dead orange trees. Six-forty P.M., I thought. Right on the dot. Just a hair west of west-by-southwest. Creeping toward the winter solstice on the Fourth Overlord. Which’ll be the last one. Ever. Ever, everer, even more ever, Everest. OMG, OM—

  Cancel, my other side said. That is, I call it “my other side,” for convenience, but of course it can be either side, it’s just whichever voice speaks second in my internal dialogue. Cancel, my other side said. Think Pos.

  Okay. I passed the strip mall that had Reefer’s Madness in it. They looked closed too. In fact the whole complex looked closed. Geez, it’s like I’m already the Omega Man, even without doing anything. I kept repeating the happy end-of-everything thoughts, but still the boredom was so overpowering that at the four-lobe cloverleaf onto the turnpike I came within a few synapses of taking the crate up to 170 mph and ramming it into the uprights. Instead I just pulled up at the checkpoint. It could have been an ordinary toll plaza from “plaza” from thirty years ago, except for the brighter light, more cameras, and a trio of Rolly PoPos edging between the queues of cars. One of them waddled up to me.

  ( 3 )

  “Hi there, welcome to Florida’s scenic Ronald Reagan Turnpike,” he or it said in the voice of, I think, Will Ferrell. Its wide black grin narrowed and widened roughly along with the consonants and the vertical black ovals that represented its eyes rotated thirty degrees in apical opposition, signifying childlike delight. “Could I jus’ get a peek at your handprint real quick please?” He held out his right “hand,” a thick four-fingered white glove with a round glass scanner in the center of the palm like a Jain dharmachakra.

  “These aren’t the droids you’re looking for,” I was about to say, but then I figured they must hear that a thousand times a day. Instead I just held out my hand, palm down. Green laser light flashed over it. Nanny Jackboots, I thought, except that I guess I should be glad now that I have stock in the company. Parts of the outfit he wore, and the whole Rolly Po-Po Program design, were Warren Group products. Marena’d shown me a brochure. It was from the Zerothruster division, which was all about mastering crowd psychology, and its current tagline was “The Fun, Fuzzy, and Family-Friendly Frontier of Nonconfrontational Law Enforcement.” Basically the outfits were the regular water-cooled Explosive Ordinance Disposal Advanced Bomb Suits made by the Westminster Group, but since 9/11, when they’d started supplying them as character suits for Disney and Six Flags and other parks, Zerothruster had been facelifting the Nomex/Kevlar with poodlefurry flocking in “varied and cheerful designer colors,” and adding big round outer heads that fit over the high collar and SCBA helmet and that featured “a wide array of designs customizable for cultural nonaggression and local correctness.” This one was a black-and-orange neotenized cat with a teal-blue T-shirt that meant, I guess, that it was the mascot of the Jacksonville Jaguars, and an oversized round badge that said FLORIDA HIGHWAY PATROL.

  “Good-o, guy, well, jus’ gimmie a sec here,” the thing’s next prerecording said. The thing’s left “hand” held a long angled stick with a camera on the end, and he started sweeping it under the ’Cuda. Was he watching the video with one of his eyes, or was someone or something else watching it?

  “Hey, you’re good to go, have a good one,” the thing said. The words $14.50 RRT TOLL appeared on my bright new dashboard screen
. Thanks, I thought. And enjoy being MicroHitler. For another fifty-two days. I merged law-abidingly onto the Turnpike. A blast of tianguiscore Dopplered by on the right at eight-five, coming from a Cutlass low-rider with curb sensors like catfish barbells and a young but obese Tejano hunched over the tiny steering wheel. Bet it could one-eighty on a peso at sixty-five. Well, I’m just an old square bourgie fart. Except why should I hurry? I least of all people ever to walk the earth. The Rapture’s coming and it’s todo por mi culpa. He zinged around an orange Yellow Van Lines truck and back into the right lane. Probably heading into the No-Go Zone, I thought. Some monster delirio. It’s not a party unless you burn the place down at the end. Well, I agree. Have fun, hermano. Maybe I’ll drop by on the way back from MP’s. One of the odder things about the No-Go Zone was that even though some places were still clocking in at over 40 curies per square kilometer, since it covered over four thousand square miles, and there were about four hundred different roads leading into it, and since squatters don’t much care about long-term health anyway, the police speculated that the population of the NGZ area had actually gone up since the Horror. I’d been there a couple of times to buy fake identity papers and it was actually kind of great, a whole sort of lawless Pirates’ Nassau Town with a smorgasbord of meth, horse, crank, dogfighting, and preteen BJs, but actually not all that dangerous because M13 and a couple of the smaller gangs wanted to keep the carriage trade and policed the place themselves. Next, since it was a personalized feed, I got the malacological news: Sun-Min Hsu and Tobi Ramadan had described a species of nudibranch from the Line Islands area that they said might be eusocial, that is, divided into castes like ants and bees, although I couldn’t imagine how that could be possible, and I actually do know a little bit about opisthobranches. Some people think nudibranchs are the world’s most beautiful living things, with all the extruded gills and polyps in Fantasia-Phiokol colors, and other people think they’re the ugliest, and most people haven’t heard of them at all. Although to some other critter—to a lobster, say—they probably look pretty drab. Anyway, they have some unusual characteristics, including the almost unique ability to devour their prey and, instead of digesting all of it, incorporate some of its useful cells—cnidarians’ stinger cells, for instance, or photosynthesizing algae—into their own bodies. I’d miss them. Except of course I wouldn’t, because I wouldn’t exist. And, experientially anyway, not existing is exactly equivalent to never having existed. So really we didn’t have a problem. Anyway, after the Jedcentric news, for some reason the car decided I’d heard all the news and now wanted to listen to a feed called Last Age of Heroes, which seemed to be having a Stones/Byrds/Doors festival. Debuting at Marker 31, DHSMV had initiated another decade of postdeconstruction on the granny lane—INJURE/KILL A WORKER—$7,500 + 15 YEARS, a sign said, so temptingly that I couldn’t imagine anyone resisting the offer. At the Kissimmee exit I voice-texted Marena that I’d be there in ten minutes. Why give her any more time to stage the place? See what she’s really wearing, doing, reading, smoking, fucking, fisting, et ceteris paribus ad foetidus hepaticum. Right?