The Sacrifice Game

by Brian D'Amato

  “Wait, that wasn’t good,” he said. “I’m gonna do it again.” He did it again. We told him how great it was and how seeing it again would dilute our enjoyment of its surprising and utterly radical greatness. Marena asked what I wanted for sort of dinner. I started to say how, well, I hadn’t been planning on making them feed me, but she wouldn’t hear of it. She negotiated Max down to a “vegetarian array” of Korean food and he left to give the orders. Fuckez moi, I thought. I’d felt like a jerk before, but it had gotten a whole lot worse, that is, if it’s even possible to be the worst person who ever lived and then get even more disgustingly evil. I’m the bad guy, I thought. Oh, well. He’s still at the stage where things seem interesting. Better for him to just disappear before he finds out what the world’s really like. Who’s—

  “Hey, don’t rapture those Krispy Kremes,” Marena called after him.

  “Max is really great,” I said.

  “Oh, définitivement,” she said. “It’s like a whole, it gives you a whole different set of priorities, about what’s important, I mean, momming . . . hey, guess what he’s going to be tomorrow.”

  “Sorry?”

  “For trick-or-treating.”

  “Oh. I can’t guess.”

  “Dick Cheney. He wrote a paper on him for Social Studies.”

  “Gosh.”

  “Hey, speaking of the date, I got something for you.”

  Oh, right, I thought. It’s my birthday. Actually, for Maya folks your name day—mine was three days from now—is a bigger deal, but maybe she didn’t know that. She handed me what was clearly an elephant-folio book, cleverly folded up in blue Genji-cloud kozogami. I coaxed it open without wrap rage. It was a book from 1831, von Stepanwald’s Curious Antiquities of British Honduras. I must have told her how I’d lost my copy and ABE wasn’t finding another.

  “Wow,” or something, I said. I thanked her profusely. I flipped through it. The copper engravings—and a few etchings—were as sharp as if they’d been pulled yesterday. “This is great,” I said. There—

  Wait.

  Huh.

  Hell.

  The Citadel of the Ocelot Dynasty at Ixnichi Sotz in Ancient Days

  As It Was Described by Señor Diego San Niño de Atocha Xotz

  Curious Antiquities of British Honduras

  By Subscription • Lambeth • 1831

  ( 6 )

  You’d think I’d be beyond it at this stage, but I felt a welling up of some sort of good feeling mixed with some sort of bad feeling. I couldn’t quite hit on their names, though. I guess the good one was like coziness or fuzzy-’n’-warmness and the bad one was . . . guilt? No. No way. Well, maybe. Dude. You’re slipping. Undo, undo. You did the right thing. And you knew there’d be moments like this. You need to just get through the next fifty-one days. And there’s only one way you’re going to do that: denial. Right? Right.

  “Okay, anyway,” she said, when the little scene was over, “well, that gives us twenty minutes to finish that game.”

  “Okay,” I said, managing to leave out the introductory “uh.”

  She steered me around to where there were two quadricolored Korean cushions on either side of an old and very thick straight-grained kaya-wood Go board, the one that had been in her now-closed office downtown, and which I figured was worth north of fifty K. You could just see the sunken pyramid on its underside reflected in the dark tile floor. She took the bowls off the board, set them down, opened them, and started scooping out stones.

  “You don’t like Indian food?” I asked.

  “Hate. That stuff is dirty.” The way she said the word it sounded like it was in that Tales-from-the-Crypty drip font, like

  “I didn’t know that about you.”

  “Well, I’m sure it’s the last thing.” She dug an old Insa analog chess clock out of somewhere, wound up both sides, and settled it next to the board.

  “Oh, no, I’m sure there’s lots I don’t . . . you’re a woman of mystery . . .”

  “You’re the mystery,” she said. “You’ve got something going on.” Marena started laying out the game where we’d left it three months ago, at the seventieth move. We’d started it at the Stake, during the Madison business, and a lot had happened since then, but—as I maybe should mention for the benefit of non-Go players in the audience—there wasn’t anything outstandingly mentally acrobatic about picking it up again now. Actually, all Go players above a certain level can remember all their games and can pick up any of them at any stage. Also, as long as we’re making explanations, maybe I should say how it might seem a little odd that we’d do this now, but only to people who don’t play. No Go player wants an unresolved game hanging around in the air like a hungry ghost.

  “Sorry?” I asked.

  “You’re not planning some damn thing for my birthday, are you? Because I’m not putting this one on my résumé.” She snuck her right middle finger into the side of her mouth and, discreetly, bit on it.

  “Oh, uh, sorry, no.” Mierditas, I thought. I hate mind readers.

  “So what’s up? I bet you made another huge and foolishly attention-getting investment coup.”

  “No, no . . . it’s just you haven’t seen me for a while, that’s all—”

  “Uh-huh.” She conveyed a mass of dubiousness. Hell, I thought. (EOE) I’m transfuckingparent. Better take off now. No, wait. That’s even more suspicious-making. I looked up at the nearest one of the nine or so clocks on her desk. It was some I guess Masonic antique that said it was to . The next one in the row was an impossible-to-read skeleton clock—maybe it told the time in Xibalba—but the third one was highly legible: “6:41,” it said. “Smartlite Sweeper™/Quartz USA.” Damn. The night is far-effing young. Damn. Okay, just stick it out. It’s no biggie. Don’t get para. All chicks have empath powers. Right? But she can’t actually read your mind. Not without a whole lot of gadgetry, anyway.

  “Nothing’s up,” I said. (EOE! EOE!)

  “Are you sure—wait, hang on.” She paused for eight seconds. I finished laying out the game. “Okay, just use the Amex number,” she said. “Sorry,” she said to me. Oh, that’s why, I thought. I mean, why she had those big earrings. They were telephones. I mean, one of them was. The other probably had an extra condom in it or something.

  “Okay,” I said. I nodded. Marena nodded. I punched my clock. As it does, time seemed to slow down slightly. I’d decided on my move weeks ago, so I put it right down. She’d anticipated it and responded immediately. The world slowed down another five clicks. Despite everything else that was going on, despite whatever little secrets she had and despite the big deal-breaking secret I had, we were in Gametime.

  And so it came to pass that there now followed about twelve and one-fifth minutes of silence, punctuated by six raps of stones hitting the thick wood. I always thought one of the most off-balancing things in life is when there’s a pause at the wrong time, and this felt especially wrong, a strange interlude with nothing happening in the middle of—well, maybe it just feels wrong to me. Damn it, how can Korean food take so long? Like it takes time to open ten jars of assorted kimchee. I focused on the board. In the first stages of a Go game it feels like you’re emplacing forts on a wide, desolate frontier. But at this point, almost halfway in, the stone pictures were coming into focus, crosses, flowers, a poodle, a long black staircase growing out of her second corner and bifurcating near the center into distended jaws, like the Star Rattlers balusters at Chichen. I pushed through a gap in the stairs and, maybe too fliply, hit the clock.

  She didn’t make a move. One minute. She bit down again on her presumably nonconforming fingernail, noticed she was doing it, and pulled her hand away and tucked it under her thigh. Two minutes.

  “Damn,” she said, at two minutes and eighteen seconds. Her biggest group was in real trouble. “This is not good.”

  “Sorry,” I said.

  “Not good. Maybe you should give me three stones next time.”

  “I shouldn’t even be giving
you two stones.”

  “I’m rusty, I’ve been running an empire and saving the planet and decluttering the kid’s room and stuff. You should give me four stones.”

  “No way. With four stones you can beat anybody. Theoretically.”

  “Yeah? How many to beat God?”

  “The world champion would be at a disadvantage by the fiftieth move with one stone against God.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Seriously.”

  “Hey, do you know what game I can beat God at every time?” she asked. “Without a handicap?”

  “No, what’s that?”

  “Chicken.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Like with driving cars at each other, you know, how that kid got killed at the Colonial Gardens desert mall like, last—”

  “No, I know, I mean, why, what do you mean about beating God?”

  “Because—look, if one of the players is omniscient, like God, he loses. All you have to do is decide not to swerve.”

  “Wait, so God can tell you’re not going to swerve, so he has to.”

  “Right,” she said.

  “Except if he’s God he can’t get hurt.”

  “What? Oh—uh, maybe. But he still loses.”

  “Are you sure about this?”

  “Oh, yeah. They taught Max about it at Logic Camp.”

  “Huh. Well, I guess that’s right.”

  “We used to play a chicken variant, like, we’d stand on like a wall and throw lightbulbs to each other, and we’d step back each time. Did you ever play that?”

  “Well, I had a health—uh, no. We used to play escondidas . . .”

  “What’s that?”

  “Like hide-and-seek.”

  “Oh, yeah.” She looked at the board and then back up at me. “Did you ever play Time Machine?”

  ( 7 )

  “What’s that?” I asked. “No, I don’t think so—”

  “That’s like—well, I’d sit in this spot in my room just like this.” She closed her eyes and crossed her arms. “And I’d mark the exact—oh, wait, first I’d put on the B side of Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy—and I’d memorize the exact date and time, and I’d sit like, still enough to stop time. And then I’d decide that exactly twenty years, like, to the second, I’d sit in exactly this same position with the same music and have exactly these same thoughts, and all the intervening time would be like it hadn’t happened.”

  “Oh.” I’d thought she’d meant some plasticky board game by Ideal or whatever. “Yeah, I guess I did play something like that.”

  “Really.” She had a stone in her hand, but she wasn’t putting it down.

  “Well, yeah. Basically. I hadn’t thought about it in a long time, though. And I thought I’d made it up.”

  “Maybe we both made it up,” she said. She set the stone down on the side star point. It was a fine move, but it was still a book move. That is, not insightful. She hit her clock.

  “I guess,” I said.

  “It’s our psychic link.” She smiled. It wasn’t an ironic smile, or a wry, knowing, sardonic, nonconformist’s smile, not even a humorous smile. It was just a sincere friendshipish expression. A rare bird these days, I thought. It was a smile like, we’re hanging out and bonding and isn’t that great. I felt a smudge of mistiness in the back of my eyeballs. Squelch that. Hard up. Don’t forget how she made you a sucker. She conned you like she was Fa’pua’a Fa’amu and you were Margaret Mead—

  “Or, I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe all kids play that.”

  “No, I don’t think so. Just a few sad, introspective nerded-out kids.”

  “Yeah, maybe.”

  I cocked my head, closed my right eye, and looked at the board with my left eye to get a fresh look at the position.

  “It’s good to keep your different life stages in touch with each other,” she said. “All those years just swish by.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Do you have any left?”

  “Any what?”

  “Any second parts coming up in Time Machine, you know, like, where you plan to sit in that position again and whatever.”

  “Oh. Yeah, I guess I do,” I said. “I have one left.”

  “When is it?”

  “Uh . . . January twentieth. At noon. Four years from now.”

  “That’s great, okay, so maybe we should do something together then.”

  “Well, I don’t—uh, okay.” This topic was harshing my wave. I scooped up a stone and thwacked it down, a hane on her last point. Nothing board-shattering. I hit my clock. Maybe I don’t need to find out what’s the real deal with Tony. Maybe I should just take off now. No, don’t. Leave now and she’ll really know something’s up. In fact she’ll probably tell them to ratchet up the surveillance on you. Although that’s kind of weird, she’s a romantic interest and also your Stasi minder. Although the whole thing is weird. Well, NFML. Not For Much Longer. Just crush her flat in this one game, have two bites of bibimbap, and book. No sweat.

  “Okay, it’s a date. Even if we’re both married to other people by then. Right?”

  “Yeah . . .” I said. “. . . Why, are you getting married?” Damn it, Jedface, don’t ask girls questions like that. Have a drop of sangfroid. Forget Sick Tony Sic, you lost, get over it. Anyway, what do you care? Nothing matters. We were all going to be dead in—no, don’t think dead. Nonexisting—

  “No, I’m not,” Marena said.

  I said okay, or something. I tried to look at the board, but the game was at that point where the stones start to look and even feel like pustules erupting on your skin, and you just want it to be over.

  “Are you upset about Tony staying here?” she asked, a little muffledly because she was working on that fingernail again.

  “No, I mean, he, you know . . .”

  “I totally haven’t touched him.”

  Huh.

  “It’s okay,” I said, “you get, you get to touch whatev—”

  “It’s not a romantic thing, he’s just staying here because he’s, for a place to stay.”

  “What about that getting-married business?”

  “That was a different guy.”

  “Oh.”

  “And I’m not sure about that lately.”

  “Oh. Okay.”

  “I mean—look, this is all getting into feelings and, like, feelings.”

  “Yeah. I have difficulty with those things.”

  “Hmm,” she went. She sort of melted herself down into her oddly yielding Memory Foam cushions and stretched out prone.

  “Maybe it’s okay, whatever happens,” she said, “maybe there’s another whole world out there, like with that Mr. Bubble thing?”

  “Sorry? I don’t get the reference.”

  “The Crazy Foam, you know, those two guys from the Layton Institute with the bubbly verses, uh . . .”

  “Oh, the bubbleverse,” I said.

  “Right.” She was referring to this incident back in 1998 when a pair of Warren-funded physicists reported that said they’d created a bubble in the quantum foam and created another universe that, at that moment, was the exact twin of our own, but which, because of random perturbation, would exhibit divergent outcomes later on. It was purest bullshit.

  “That’s what I said.”

  “Uh, yeah.”

  “Do you think that’s possible?”

  “You mean, that they created another universe in their lab?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, I, you know what Taro says, multiple uni—they’re, you know, cheap on theory, expensive on universes. So, no, I don’t, really. That’s just something people say when their equations don’t come out right, they say whatever’s left over just slides into some other handy universe.”

  “Yeah, but they said they saw it.”

  “How would they see it? It’s not in the same universe.”

  “Anyway, we’d be in it,” I said.

  “Okay, I don’t know. That’s what they sai
d. And they said there was definitely not an infinite number of universes. There aren’t even a lot.”

  “So how many are there? Like a handful?”

  “Right. A few more ’n a couple.”

  “Five or six?”

  “That sounds about right.”

  “Huh.”

  “Still, that’s just my intuition,” she said. “And every once in a while one of them forks and makes two.”

  “Fork in the road.”

  “Yeah. And then, you know, when something bad happens in one of them, it might not happen in all the others.”

  “Hmm. A very pleasant thought.”

  “Come on.”

  “Sorry,” I said. “I don’t know, maybe it’s possible.”

  “Never mind. Heck.”

  “Maybe it’s going to be alien probes,” she said. “Running around the universe blowing up life-sustaining planets out of sheer pity.”

  “Humanitaliens.”

  “Yeah. Damn, damn, damn, damn,” she said, five times in total. “Damn. We really nearly all died. Sorry, my mind’s—I’m very free-associating.”

  “Do you mean with the Madison thing or just the Hippogriff thing?”

  “Oh . . . I was thinking about Madison, but yeah, I also feel bad about those pilots sometimes.”

  “I wouldn’t,” I said. “Those guys dream about seeing action like that. They’d rather do one minute of real fighting than live to be a thousand.”

  “Yeah, I guess you—you’re such a guy,” she said. “You get stuff like that.”

  “One crowded hour of glorious life.”

  “Yeah, whatevs.”

  I guess I mentioned the Hippogriff Incident in the press release, but just to clarify, we, or Warren Labs, were allegedly responsible for the incineration, on March 21, of two Fuerza Aérea Guatemalteca pilots, by, allegedly, an AIM-9 Sidewinder missile. It was an almost-major international incident that had exacerbated tensions between Guatemala and Belize, and even between Guatemala and the U.S. As of today, thanks to nearly sixteen million dollars of lawyering, Marena and the team and I seemed to have gotten away pretty clean, and even Executive Solutions still hadn’t been charged with anything. But the whole thing had made it harder for the Warren Group to rock the boat anywhere in Latin America.