The Sacrifice Game

by Brian D'Amato

  So finally I’d said they were right. I could hardly stand the frustration, though. Knowing right where the guy was and not being able to get to him. I could tell I was working on an ulcer, on top of everything else. And torturing 2JS wasn’t helping. I mean, not only hadn’t it gotten anywhere so far but it also wasn’t making me feel any better. I would have probably tortured him anyway, of course, after what he did to Koh. But now I had to be careful about it. I pulled the point of the skewer back, slid it onto the mastoid process, and, starting delicately, scraped it against the bone.

  ( 64 )

  Despite himself, he moaned. I drew the point back and across more slowly, and he grunted more. Just like, shall we say, intimate relations, torture gives you that deep, instantaneous reaction from the other party. You have to look for rhythms and be responsive to whether this pain is on an escalating scale from the last one. It’s also like the intimacy of playing a good game against a clever opponent. They’re like three vertices on a triangle.

  2JS’s face didn’t change, but the grunting peaked and then faded and I had to stop before he passed out from the pain. The teaser crept over, undid a padded cotton binding from around 2JS’s shoulder, and started massaging his neck. It was important that none of his limbs got numb. Come on, crack, I thought. You’re either going to tell me what the signal is or you’re going to memorize every square micron of a continent of pain nobody else has ever even visited. I’m going to make a skinful of chili peppers feel like Marena’s memory-foam pouf. I was learning. Like they showed in that test, almost anyone can enjoy being a torturer, as long as someone tells them it’s the thing to do and how to do it. It’s for the whole family. The teaser selected an enema bladder and squeezed a few drops into 2JS’s mouth. It was a triple-refined balche flavored with vanilla and honey, almost a cordial. 2JS swallowed involuntarily, even upside down, and I could tell he was getting the pleasure of it despite himself. The idea was to keep offering rewards and respites at odd times, to get him down to an animalistic level of stimulus and response. Torture around here was like a martial art in Asia, it was something to do stylishly, or sometimes comically. In the twenty-first century there were basically two conflicting raps about torture. On the one hand big organizations like the U.S. Army tell their commanders not to interrogate using torture because the subjects will tend to just tell you what they think you want to hear. The second rap is that no one ever holds out for long against professional interrogators. Personally I think they both have some truth to them. It’s true that the first thing a subject usually tells you is whatever he thinks you want to hear. But that lasts only as long as you can’t check his information to see whether it’s accurate. If you can check the information, the next thing is that the subject has to trust the interrogator, at least that if the story does turn out to be accurate, he’ll either stop torturing him or at least, for instance, give him a knife to kill himself.

  Aside from that stuff, though, I think the second rap’s truer. As far as I know, whenever you hear about someone who’s supposedly held out against torture, it turns out it’s because the interrogators screwed up. Otherwise, in general you can forget it. Pain’s just too large.

  But getting something specific out of a Maya blood was a different story. It was a touchy thing, even though my teaser was a ninth-level master and definitely knew what he was doing. 2 Jeweled Skull was beyond tough. He was getting weaker, and at this point he was just pure will. But I got the feeling he could easily die from pain overload several times before he’d tell me Thing One.

  So we’d tried most of the usual non-pain-related tortures first. We’d slashed and desecrated his mats and planned murals of him losing the hipball game in various cowardly poses. We’d paid people to run around spreading rumors about him and then brought in people who’d heard them to make fun of him. We’d gotten together as many of his ancestors’ remains as we could find and let starving dogs teethe on them while he watched. But maybe he’d made his peace with that stuff already, because it didn’t have any effect. Maybe it was because he had so much of me in him, he had extra distance on the situation.

  And we’d offered him bribes, of course. Men, money and an escape route. We’d offered to kill off some of his old enemies, almost anything he wanted within the realm of credibility. But he was just totally obdurate. Maybe he could tell we were in nearly as much trouble as he was. Or he didn’t trust any of us at all no matter how many witnesses we brought in. Or he was just set on cheating me of the pleasure of seeing him crack, cheating my world of its chances for the future.

  So at the beginning of the second day we’d moved into the physical realm. Which is certainly a little different with somebody who likes pain, or at least is as comfortable as he was with it. But you have to remember there are different kinds of agony, there’s itchiness, there’s suffocation, and neither of those are exactly pain. And there are other things that it’s important for people to take care of that you can let them not take care of. Everybody doesn’t like something, and the trick is finding out what.

  The teaser had put in the flesh eels first, to get them started, and then moved on to suffocation. But he gave it up after a couple of hours. Most people go over the edge into sheer animal panic after a couple of near smotherings, but 2JS had just held his breath and tried to burst the veins in his head. Next the teaser had roasted and peeled the skin off the bottom of 2JS’s feet, salted the flesh, and let his dog lick off the salt. That didn’t get anywhere either. He’d defleshed 2JS’s middle finger on each hand, taken off the phalange, and sharpened the metacarpus, crawling his pumice-stone file across it over and over, polishing it down to a fine point, and he’d force-fed him water and tied off his penis, and plugged his anus, and brought in a bowlful of deerflies to bite him, and on top of all that he’d fed him the adrenal glands and also a few shots of psilocybe hallucinogens, the local equivalent of truth drugs. But 2JS had just quivered and snuffled and drooled and his core had never broken. You had to admire the guy.

  “They’re shifting,” the teaser said, feeling 2JS’s stomach for the flesh eels. I got onto my knees and looked closer. 2 Jeweled Skull’s abdominal muscles were shivering, and his face was darting in and out of all sorts of odd grimaces, like he had to let out a cosmic sneeze. He was having another attack. That tiny bit of alcohol had sent them into a literal tailspin. The teaser took a shell knife and sketched out a cut just below the navel.

  No, no, try the ones in the head, I said. I didn’t want him to die on us. The teaser palpated the swollen tissue around 2JS’s eye sockets.

  They’re getting fat, he said. I told him to get some of the critters out if he could. The teaser reached into 2 Jeweled Skull’s left nostril with a pair of bamboo tweezers and grubbed around.

  Gimmie the key, fucker, I thought. I couldn’t believe I was in this stupid position.

  Believe it.

  The teaser started pulling something out of 2 Jeweled Skull’s nose, the tapered end of a white noodly thing that just kept going on and on until it was a little over a foot long, until its blood-pinked nonhead finally popped out wriggling, drowning in the air. 2 Jeweled Skull’s body quivered, but he didn’t make a sound. The teaser dropped the sucker into a cup of balche. It writhed around, practically tying itself into a noose.

  “Drink plenty of balche,” the teaser chuckled, “and you’ll never have worms.” It was an old joke.

  What they called flesh eels were really some kind of river-tapeworm larva they raised for this sort of thing, yet another species I was kicking myself for not being able to identify, although I’m sure it was related to Spirometra mansoni. Anyway it was supposed to be the absolute most painful thing of all, or to be more specific the most unbearably painful, since other things might be just as painful but didn’t get such good results. People had cracked under it who had gone months without cracking under anything else. When the worms were in the abdominal cavity, they said it was like nausea, but that nausea was to this as an itchy finger was to gett
ing your hand crushed between boulders. When the worms were in your eye sockets and nasal passages, I guess it was like having stuffed-up sinuses on a depressurizing airplane, with the same degree of amplification.

  Gotta think of something here. Okay. Come on. He’s got some me in him. Do something with that. Maybe even if 2JS can stand anything, the Jed in him can’t.

  What’s my own Room 101? I wondered. What am I most afraid of? Blood loss, maybe. Bleeding. But I’d gotten over that. So had he, probably. Death? He was obviously over that too. Being open, being exposed, watching my mind crumble from inside?

  “Listen,” I said in English, “Jed? Old buddy? Old frenemy? I know you’re in there.”

  He clenched his face tighter. He was definitely lucid, even if the critters had Swiss-cheesed his innards.

  “Come on,” I said. My voice was hoarsing out. “Remember playing Go with Marena in the harvest-gold Boogie Van? Remember when we drove from Boulder to Panama City with No Way and Sylvia and Sylvania in that old Thunderbird without stopping and whenever we got pulled over we’d have to quick dump the coke through that hole under the gas pedal and CB ahead for more? You don’t want to just delete all that, do you?”

  No answer. Hmm. Maybe that stuff wasn’t really that great.

  “Okay. Remember when Sylvania said she wanted to sleep with you? And you were just like, whoa, okay, great? What about that skittles game when you clobbered Gata Kamsky five times in a row and he couldn’t deal with it? You know, it’s you getting killed, not just 2 Jeweled Schmuck. Remember when you got a whole mouthful of saccharine? Remember when Stan took you to that black-light poster store in Salt Lake and it blew your little mind? You know how you thought your chess clock was an owl face and how it had all those different expressions at different points in the game? Like how when the game started it looked all startled and when you were both around the three-hour mark it looked slit-eyed and weary or wary or whatever, or then when it would look like it was winking at one side or the other? What about making the Story of the Invisible Knight on your old plastic roll-up set? Remember the first time you slept out in the shed on the milpa with your father? Remember the story of Old Monkey and Young Monkey?”

  I shadowed his eyes with my hand and peered deep into the left one, down past the blood-flecked dark brown iris into the ragged pupil.

  “Come on. You really want to kill me too? You want to take me with you? Please. Jed. Get 2JS to cool it.”

  Was there a sign of just a little bit of an inner struggle there or was I just imagining it?

  “You know, everything’s going to be wrecked and it’s all your fault,” I said. “Our fault, I mean, but, you know, I’m gonna try to make it better. For us, right? Well, right, I know that’s corny, but really, I’m going to live for you, too, I promise, not in a stupid way, in a real way. I’m serious. Anyway, what about your whole culture thing? Remember that? Save the culture, right? Which is 2JS’s culture, too, by the way.”

  I thought there was something down in the dark well, like little flecks of gold leaf in hazelnut liqueur.

  ( 65 )

  Or maybe I was just imagining it. “Who’s running things in there?” I asked. “Come on. Take over. I know you’re tougher than that.”

  2 Jeweled Skull was gasping, something scraping deep down in his chest, like a stick over rough stone.

  “Come on, something’s happening, right? Something struggling to get out. Come on, come on.”

  I thought another worm was coming out of his nose and grabbed it, but it fell apart, it was just a lymph bubble. A big bead of blood swelled up under his eye and popped into a drip, and another was forming on the caruncle of his other eye, and one in each nostril and a big bubble of mucusy blood inflated in his mouth. I turned and grabbed the teaser by his thinning pigtail. What’s going on? I asked. He gave a humiliative no-excuses-sir gesture, the closest thing he could do to a shrug, and pressed his chest down onto the floor. You incompetent sicko moron, I thought, 2JS’s going to die, he’s dying without telling us anything, and there’s just nothing else for it.

  2JS’s face was freezing into this blank truculence.

  2JS out on the mat. I held his head in my hands and opened his mouth.

  Okay, okay, I thought. No absolute despair. The only thing to do is get yourself into that box of jelly with all the bugs and drugs and all the available information, hope that Marena and the Chocula gang can dig me out with some degree of me still left in my skull, and try to figure it out on that end.

  Except you won’t be able to do it, will you? Koh really didn’t tell you anything. You know a little, but not enough.

  Maybe with the J Machine working full-time, I thought.

  Right.

  It might take decades of computer searches to come up with the key. Even if you could really do it that way. Which I doubted. It was like everything was still encrypted through an array of NSA proprietary algorithms. At that point ciphers really do become unbreakable. Anyway, I knew enough to know that whatever Koh had been doing with that move, it wasn’t something you could figure out. It was a secret rule, not a strategy. It was like you were playing chess with someone who didn’t know that a pawn can turn into a queen on the back rank. Somehow she’d turned that runner into the equivalent of a queen, and it was according to some scheme nobody seemed to know.

  If only, if only, if only this stuff were some simple secret, like, sure, there’s such and such an asteroid at such and such a place and if you don’t blast it it’s going to getcha. But it just wasn’t simple, Blanche, it was this whole field of study, a whole branch of chaos and probability theory and all this other stuff that I wasn’t even enough of a mathematician to identify.

  Koh really should have let me in on that one. Should’ve trusted me instead of that Porcuputz fucker. Oh, well. Or maybe she thought that even if she told me everything she knew I wouldn’t be able to utilize it anyway. You never knew with that girl.

  I liked her anyway, though—

  A click. A little rattle. There was still breath in there. I raised one of his eyelids with my thumb. The pupil contracted.

  It focused. He saw me.

  IS HE STILL THINKING INSIDE?

  “Everybody leave,” I said.

  Hun Xoc scuttled everyone out. 2 Jeweled Skull and I were alone.

  “I’m here,” I said. “I’m here, last call, last move.”

  I moved my eye over him to where he could focus on it. His expression was weird but I thought he was conscious and that I had his attention. I put my one hand on the back of his head and stroked his forehead with the other.

  Come on, friend, I said in Chol. Friends. Right?

  There was a hint of a sound in his throat like someone cutting a tiny hole with a keyhole saw.

  I’m sorry it got this way, I said. I mean, I’m sorry too. I won’t tell anyone I learned from you. I’ll say spies told me . . .

  He seemed to be tuning out. I shifted into humilific court language.

  “My father, you have me in you, and I

  Apologize for giving pain; I know

  We’re both the same on different sides; I’m honored . . .”

  I was losing him.

  “Come on,” I said in English again. “Look in what you know from me. When you die you don’t just end, you never even happened. This planet’s a dust ball with a few suicidal cannibal viruses on it, and you’ll just, that’s it.” This is bullshit, I thought. We’re not getting anywhere.

  “All right,” I said. “Here’s the deal. I’ll take you back. I’ll dump your brain into the guck and have it in the casket and we’ll scan it into some poor shmuck in my k’atun.”

  Nothing.

  “Come on, look in my consciousness,” I said. My heart was whamming against my ribs. “You know I can do it. I’m offering you a chance. Come on. Just look in me and see what you can get, I’ll give you a monument and honors in the overtime, a whole new dynasty—”

  “YOU WON’T,” he said. His vocal cor
ds weren’t working and his tongue was sewn down onto the inside of his lower lip so he couldn’t swallow it. His breath was like swamp gas. I recoiled but got it back together.

  “I might,” I said. “That’s all you have. Play balls.”

  He was staring at me. My skin tingled.

  “Come on. It’s the closest thing to immortality you’ll ever have. You might as well start from scratch at this point. Right? And your name will still mean something. Or just do it because it’s the right thing to do. Even you can see that. Or just do it for fun, you know, sacal chakan can kin bin yx bolon. Just do it for the hell of it.”

  No response.

  “You know,” I said, “death, we all do it, right? In fact I probably won’t even live as long as you have. Just do it for me. We had a lot of fun, right? You did great here. You’re the greatest. Come on. It means you’ll stay in the game, right? No game, no fame, right? More game. Come on. Please, please, pretty please, ugly please with sugar and the blood of four hundred immortal kings on top, pleasy pleasyweazy pluz plaz pleez.”

  2 Jeweled Skull looked into my eyes for nine beats and I thought he almost smiled, and then I realized he was repeating something, over and over:

  “A wing-tip harpy feather,” he choked, “a wing-tip harpy feather, a wing-tip harpy feather . . .”

  ( 66 )