“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
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 Popocatepetl 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.
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Document creation date: 21.07.2012
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The Sacrifice Game jd-2 Page 64
