The Sacrifice Game
Page 65
“Sit in this,” Marena said. She kind of molded me into one of the Aeron chairs and rolled me past some pieces of door. I guessed the bang I’d heard had been exploding bolts blowing the door outward into the tunnel. Thoughtfully designed for just such an emergency. I’d expected to run into a crowd of refugees in the tunnel, but there was nobody. Evidently this one was for VVIPs only, and we were the only ones left.
She started pushing me along like I was in a wheelchair. “Stop leaning over,” she said.
“I’m not.”
“Lean in the other direction.”
“Why don’t you go ahead and come back and get me after you get settled?”
“You know,” she said, “I’ve just about had it with your martyr syndrome.”
“Sorry.”
Bathetically, there was still that Dvorakmusak on somewhere and it echoed behind us, woodwinds wailing. We went a long way. Lindsay fell down a few times—despite everything, he really was an old guy, I thought—and I had to hold his arm most of the way. I knew that later all I’d be able to remember would be long, long, long passages, dreary pipes and concrete, and a sense that we’d walked for at least two-score rope-lengths. At some point Marena was banging on a door above us, and then she was strongly encouraging us to climb up some stairs, and eventually, on all fours, I did. She steered me through a door and up more stairs and it took me more than a minute to realize we were outside because the fresh air wasn’t fresh, it was full of gasoline smoke, although there were a few nicer smells in it, wood and green-leaf smoke that made me think it was the burning season, and it was hot, and it was night already. No twilight. Except it wasn’t dark. The sky was charred tangerine. I listened for explosions or artillery but didn’t hear anything, just distant sirens and that sort of over-Niagara-in-a-barrel sound of the wind of glass rushing past us on its way to the giant updrafts, columns of a million different carbon compounds rolling up into the stratosphere, and then I thought I heard lightning but I think it was actually malfunctioning defense lasers firing blind. They make a sort of crackle as the air boils away in the beam, and then a miniature thunderclap as the surrounding atmosphere closes in around the vacuum.
“Lie here,” she said. I said thanks. I lay down on the asphalt, near the top step. She duct-taped Lindsay to a Siamese pipe connection. I got it together to look around. The door was down in a sort of retaining wall, and the stairs came up sheltered between two sort of huge concrete Jersey barriers. There was a warehouse or something across the whatever that seemed intact but I couldn’t see very far. Anyway, it didn’t feel worth it to go back to try some other branch of the tunnel. A few leaves of plasticky fallout fell around us like the pages of an incinerated book. A big sheet of red-anodized metal siding rattled up and down around on the pavement in front of us, threatening to chop us into bits when the pressure changed. Latin American builders, I thought. Cruddy house-of-cards postmodern architecture. One little thing and it’s all over the place.
“I was thinking about sending a distress signal,” Marena said. “But now I think I won’t, okay?” I noticed she had something over her shoulder, a big transparent bag with a big orange word EMERGENCY on it and all kinds of electric beacons and radios flares and things inside.
“Sure,” I said. She was probably right. If we went exploring we’d be more likely to get hit by flying whatever, or caught by Executive Solutions or even by troops from the UN or Belize or anybody else.
I thought I heard a scream not so far away, but it could have been shrapnel.
“I don’t think we’re going to burn up here,” Marena said. “And if the smoke gets bad we’ll go back into the tunnel. I don’t want to get stuck in a fire. Okay?”
I said something like “Fine.” I would have agreed to anything. My field of vision was reverse-tunnelling. That is, widening, weirdly, past 200 degrees. Marena was saying something about how the best thing to do is sit tight until morning, walk east, find the highway, and try to get a lift to Belmopan. I mumbled that that sounded right. We sat.
“Are you Jed again?” she asked. “Or Chacal?”
“I don’t know,” I said. I really didn’t.
Marena took out her phone. The line was dead, but we watched the clock. Nine minutes left, it said. And then it would be officially a new b’aktun, and a new sun, and a new creation, and, and, and . . .
The Pleiads, Called the Rattle of the Celestial Ophidian, as They Will Appear in Times to Come with a Nascent Eighth Star, According to the Native Cociques of Alta Verapaz
Curious Antiquities of British Honduras
By Subscription • Lambeth • 1831
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December 21 came and went like any other day.
But of course that didn’t mean that nothing had changed. Everything had changed. Everyone’s tomorrow, and the next day, and the day after that, and the next tun, and the next k’atun, and the universe’s final seven b’aktuns—what Koh had called the “remainder of twenty minus thirteen,” would be whatever I made of it. Or whatever we deigned to make of it, Marena and I, or let’s call her what she would be called: One Ocelot.
My field of vision kept widening. Now I could see above and behind and above my head and now in every direction, even, it seemed, into my body, and, as I rose through the tree and curved into higher dimensions, I could see through objects, and out past the last straggling galaxies, until I even seemed to get a glimpse or two or three of that other universe, the bubbleverse, our less lucky twin, the one that had diverged from ours thirteen years and three hundred and fifty-two days ago, the one where One Liberty Plaza hadn’t burned down on 9/11 and so Lindsay hadn’t been able to use the marble floor from it in his fucking VVIP Skybox, the one where both towers had collapsed all the way instead of that half of the South one still sticking up like a fodder pollard, the one where the Disney World Horror hadn’t happened, where Dick Cheney hadn’t killed himself as he was being arrested, where Amy Winehouse had died in that coma and had never recorded or even written “Shake Before Serving,” one where the nine-stone Game had never come back and which was, therefore, on the royal road to ruin because at some point soon, somewhere, some doomster would hit on the right combination and there’d be no way to stop him or even find out about him until it was too, too, too too late, where I and Marena, maybe, had never met, and where I’d never even heard of Lady Koh, and where they were not yet, even, aspects of each other, if they even ever . . .
Don’t think about it. We’re here, in our own friendly universe, and it would still last a while. Until 19.19.19.17.19, 9 Kawak, 12 Yaxki’in. Thursday, October 12th, 4772. After that, the big nothing. Well, that was still quite a distance off. Don’t think about that either. Look, you bought the world quite a good amount of time. Human-scale-wise. Anyway, things’ll be quite different then, right? In fact I could already see some different . . . yes. I already saw the new city, the capital of the world, with its double mul rising in undulating omnichromatic stairways to an apex higher than Popocatépetl and, then, widening, filling the zeroth sky. I saw odd decisions being made, the Pantheon in Rome exploding in violet lava, a fashionably naked pair of two-ropelengths-long humans with thirteen pairs of dainty thalidomidesque arms sprouting centipedishly down their sides nuzzling each other as they reclined on a fur toboggan drawn through the Park Avenue Tunnel by four yellow phororhacci, and the trail led down an alley of titanic ceiba trees that shed clouds of jade razors around my defleshing body, and there was something horrible waiting at the end of the path, something pustuled with screaming larvae but still wearing the knowing smirk of the toad, and I already knew, I knew why it had started and when it had to end, the smell of a graviton, the color of the Ku band, the reason a skull smiles. But as I came to know I stayed to forget, thirteen, nine, five, I was already forgetting, four, three, I will have already forgotten, two, zero, I’ve already forgotten.
End of Book II
APPENDIX
The Ancient Future of the Seventh Skin
; (a fragment of the “New Maya Calendar”)
According to Ahau-Na Koh of Ixnich’i Sotz
Thirteen b’ak’tuns and no ka’tuns, no tuns,
No uinals, and no kins, 4 Overlord,
3 Yellowribs, on Friday, on December
The twenty-first, in twenty-twelve, Sun Zero:
The White Road’s nine last overlords burn themselves,
The sun’s last thirteen overlords drown themselves,
One Ocelot’s new flesh reseats the May.
Thirteen b’ak’tuns and no ka’tuns, no tuns,
No uinals, and one kin, on 5 Sobralia,
4 Ununennium, on Saturday,
December twenty-second, twenty-twelve:
The thirteen newborn overlords take the sun,
Nine newborn overlords retake the dark.
Thirteen b’ak’tuns and 1 ka’tun, and thirteen
Tuns, and two uinals and two kins, 5 Helicon
And Zero Kaon, Saturday, the twelfth
Of August, twenty-forty-five: the Chewer
Gobbles the day above the new mul-garden.
Xiamen is the seat of the ka’tun.
The Ludic May ensorcells the b’ak’tuns,
The Coiler molds new followers from pyroxene
And they take refuge in new citadels,
In orthorhombic tetrahedral muls.
Pain and cessation cease, but not aloneness
Despite mass melding. Now the earth falls mute
Since others might feel pity. Now eternal
Electromagnetic silence is our burden.
Fifteen b’ak’tuns and no ka’tuns, no tuns,
No uinals and no kins, 2 Nothingness,
18 Ununennium, Thursday, June
The twenty-eighth, in two-eight-zero-one,
At the sun’s pubescence, at his third thirteenth,
The solar hurricanes erase nine billion
Bright consciousnesses. Mourning is our burden.
Fifteen b’ak’tuns, fourteen ka’tuns, twelve tuns,
Twelve uinals and three kins, on 13 Scattering
And 16 Kaon, Wednesday, on December
Eighteenth, in thirty-eighty-nine: the sun’s
First brightest dog rejoins his master, after
Six hundred and eighteen thousand and three hundred
And seventy-three opposing suns. Now rises
The second regency of 7 Macaw,
The consciousness of his four hundred times
Four hundred times four trillion breathing things.
Unclouded and lidless eyes become our burden.
Then in the nineteenth and the last b’ak’tun, and in
The nineteenth and the last ka’tun, and in
The nineteenth and last tun, and seventeenth
And final uinal, in the eighteenth kin,
8 Amethyst, 11 Funge, October
Eleventh, Wednesday, anno domini
Four thousand seven hundred seventy-two,
One Ocelot and Turquoise Ocelot
Enter the courts of the sun, and play to a draw.
All possibilities occur in a single ninth.
Now in the nineteenth and the last b’ak’tun, and in
The nineteenth and the last ka’tun, and in
The nineteenth and last tun, and seventeenth
And final uinal, in the eighteenth kin,
9 Shuddering, 12 Funge, October twelfth,
Four thousand seven hundred seventy-two,
The nine and thirteen lords unspeak their names.
The seas of consciousnesses choose dissolving
Over another repetition. The Zeroth
Burden is equal to never having been.
On a field, turquoise, Brunnian roundels, red,
Unclasp and collapse to twenty, to thirteen,
To nine, five, four, three, two, one, zero, never.
GLOSSARY
ahau—lord, overlord
ahau-na—lady, noblewoman
bacab—“world-bearer,” one of four local ahauob subject to the k’alomte’
b’ak’tun—a period of 144,000 days, roughly 394.52 years
b’alche’—lilac-tree beer
b’et-yaj—teaser, torturer
Ch’olan—the twenty-first-century version of the language spoken by the Ixians and others
grandeza—a pouchful of pebbles
h’men—a calendrical priest or shaman. Also translated as “sun adder” or “daykeeper”
hun—“one,” or “a” as a definite article
k’atun—a period of 7,200 days (nearly twenty years)
k’iik—blood, a male belonging to a warrior society
k’in—sun, day
koh—tooth
kutz—a neotropical ocellated turkey
milpa—a traditional raised cornfield of about 21 x 20 meters, usually cleared by burning
mul—hill; by extension “pyramid” or “volcano”
nacom—sacrificer
pitzom—the Maya ball game
popol na—council house
quechquemitl—Mexican woman’s triangular serape
sacbe—“white path,” a sacred straight causeway
sinan—scorpion
tablero—the horizontal element in a Mexican-style pyramid
talud—the sloped element in a Mexican-style pyramid
teocalli—Nahuatl for “god house,” or temple
tun—360 days
tu’nikob’—sacrificers or offering priests, or, literally, “sucklers”
tzam lic—“blood lightning,” a frisson under the skin
tz’olk’in—the ritual year of 260 days
uay—a person’s animal coessence
uinal—a period of twenty days
waah—tortilla
Xib’alb’a—the Underworld, ruled by the Nine Lords of the Night
xoc—shark
yaj—pain, pain smoke
Yucatec—the present-day language of the Yucatán Maya, a version of which was spoken during the Classic period
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Rosemae Aristomene, Ron Bernstein, Anthony D’Amato, Barbara D’Amato, Robertson Dean, Julie Doughty, Jonny Geller, Karin and Timothy Greenfield-Sanders, Jessica Horvath, Erika Imranyi, Janice Kim, Stefan Lübbe, Diana MacKay, Helmut Pesch, Prudence Rice, Dietmar Schmidt, Deborah Schneider, and Brian Tart should all be thanked on, at least, the front cover, and not back here.
More thanks to Jacqueline Cantor, Lisa Chau, Brian DeFiore, Michael Denneny, Sajna Dragovic, Molly Friedrich, Cathy Gleason, Lynn Goldberg, Justin Gooding, Sherrie Holman, Marissa Ignacio, “Mad P,” Victoria Marini, Phillip McCullough, Jamie McDonald, Liza Cassity, Erica Ferguson, Stephanie Kelly, James Meyer, Mary Ellen Miller, Robert Pincus-Witten, Bruce Price, David Rimanelli, Michael Spertus, Rebecca Stone-Miller, Jane Tompkins, Mari-Jo Van Malsen, “Tony Xoc,” “Flor Xul,” and Ivan Zlatarski.
Thanks also to the Foundation for the Advancement of Mesoamerican Studies and pauahtun.org.
Thanks to Brian D’Amato for any and all errors.
For a select bibliography, please see briandamato.com
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Brian D’Amato can usually be found in New York, Michigan, or Chicago. He is an artist who has shown his sculptures and installations at galleries and museums in the U.S. and abroad, including the Whitney Museum, the Wexner Center for Contemporary Art, and the New Museum of Contemporary Art. In 1992 he co-organized an exhibit at the Jack Tilton Gallery in New York that was the first gallery show exploring the then-new concept of computer games as an art medium. He has written for magazines including Harper’s Bazaar, Index, Vogue, Flash Art, and most frequently Artforum and has taught art and art history at CUNY, the Ohio State University, and Yale. His 1992 novel, Beauty, which Dean Koontz called “the best first novel I have read in a decade,” was a bestseller in the U.S. and abroad and was translated into several popular languages. For more information please see www.briandamato.com.
Table of Contents
COVER
ALSO BY BRIAN D’AMATO
TITLE PAGE
COPYRIGHT
DEDICATION
A NOTE ON PRONUNCIATION
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