“You’re distracted,” she said.
“No, I’m… I’m, I’m, I’m a simple soul today, I’m-”
“No, your sacral chakra’s off-line. You’re up to something.”
“No,” I said, “I’m just, you know, preoccu-”
“No, I think you’re feeling distrustful.”
“Well…”
“Okay, fine,” she said. She pushed both of the buttons down halfway, stopping both clocks, and resettled herself in a lotosish position. “Look, tell you what, I’ll give you three Truth or Deaths.”
(8)
“Sorry?”
“You ask me anything, any one thing at a time, and I’ll tell you the absolute truth, and then I get to ask you and et sequels.”
“Sequentes,” I said.
“Right. Boy, you’re really on a Latin kick.”
“Well, I’m a Latin American.”
“Uh-huh.”
“What’s the death part?” I asked.
“You have to tell the truth, like, whole and nothing but. Or else drink hemlock.”
“Is that a real game?”
“So I’ll come totally clean if you will. Okay? Pinkie swear.”
“Okay.” We swore. Her pinkie nearly ripped mine off its metacarpal capitulum.
“You start. Ask me whatevs.”
“Okay. You set me up, right?”
“In what way?” she asked. She didn’t hesitate. She was a cool customer.
“All the time when I was explaining to you about the colored directions and whatever else about the Sacrifice Game and whatever, you actually knew all about it.”
“No, I did not-I didn’t know all that stuff, in fact I still don’t understand it, in-”
“But like, when I-the first time I came to your office, you guys already wanted to reel me in, right? Taro’d said I’d want to see the Codex and you used that to bait me. Right?”
“Well, there’s some truth to that, but you weren’t the only-I mean, we looked up at least four others of Taro’s students from when he was in New Haven and interviewed all of them.”
“But when I begged you to send me you’d already decided to.”
“No, not entirely.”
“But you thought I’d be better at it, I mean, instead of Tony Sic, to zap back to Mayaland, but you figured I’d get spooked unless I thought I was convincing you to let me do it. Right?”
“We hadn’t decided between you and Tony yet.”
“But you thought I should do it and not Sic. You were being really deceptive.”
“Well, okay, I’ll say-but, I mean, come on. Would you say you’re a very trusting person?”
“Uh, no.”
“If you’d thought we had any-you wouldn’t have gotten near us. Right?”
“Well, maybe I… I guess not.” Any what? I wondered. Nefarious designs, I guess. Let it go.
“So I’ll say yes, but now you’re glad anyway, right?” Finally, she succeeded in severing the fingernail’s last attachment with her left canine tooth.
“Okay, right,” I said. “That’s all I wanted to know.” Somehow, now, it didn’t seem like she’d done anything so bad.
She moved the loose nail into position with her tongue and started chewing on it with the same level of unself-conscious purposefulness my Jasus crayfish exhibit when they eat their molted exoskeletons. “Okay,” she said. “My turn.”
“Okay.” Okay, I thought. Don’t stiffen up. But don’t flail either. Make normal-sized arm gestures. No hunching over. And if you have to lie, it’s just like with a polygraph, you have to make yourself believe you’re telling the truth. How’d I get into this? I don’t have to do-except I still wanted to find out about what had happened in Guatemala. If anything. After all, she’d been down there for months. The last I’d heard she’d still been at the Stake, trying to get permission from the Guates to dig officially at Ix Ruinas. But maybe something more had happened. Or was going to happen. Maybe they’d found the tomb and there was more info in it. And if it looked like Jed 2 ’s memories would get through, well, that would be huge. There “Okay. I think there’s something big going on, and it’s making you feel happy and powerful, but also you’re a bit worried about whether it’s going to come off. Am I right?”
Damn. Okay, I thought. Don’t make any partial shrugs. No quick changes of expression. I checked my hands-that is, without looking at them, I thought about them. They were open with the fingers extended. Good. Okay. I focused on the bridge of her nose and, lowering my usual pitch a bit, said, “Yes.”
“Okay, great. That’s progress. So what is it?”
“That’s a second question,” I said.
“Okay, fine. You go.”
“Okay. You guys are watching me. Right?”
“What do you mean us guys?”
“The Warren Spook Corporation.”
“They’re keeping an eye on all of us.”
“That’s not a good-I mean, I can tell I’m under surveillance.”
“So what’s the question?”
“Well…”
“Look, what do you think they’re going to do? The Game-you’re a Sacrifice Game specialist, right? It’s like you’re driving around with a trunkful of hydrogen bombs. We all are. They’re watching me too, I mean, of course, and, you know, I think Corporate’s being pretty reserved about it, frankly.”
She had a point. “Well, you have a point.”
“Okay, my turn,” she said. “What did you do to make yourself so excited?”
“I wouldn’t say I’m excited.”
“But you are happy about something. Or relieved.”
“No, I’m not-I mean, I’m relieved about the EOE.”
“What’s that stand for again?”
“The End of Everything.”
“Oh, right. Okay, you’re relieved that’s not happening?”‘
“Um, yeah. That’s right.”
“But that’s not new. You said something new was going on.”
“I did?” I had? I wondered. When? Or was she doing some hypno-thing on me? Bitch. Just be cool. Okay.
“Okay,” I said. “I went very long on some futures a little while ago and I’m doing super well on them. I’m completely on Easy Street.”
She looked at me. I tried to look back. Her eyes seemed bottomless. Finally it felt like I was staring into a gale-force wind. Fine, let her win the stare-down. I looked over at the Neo-Teo model. Most of the window lights and signs and had gone out, and its walls were a convincing range of deep-night blacks and blues.
“Well, that’s great,” she said finally. “Okay, ask me about Tony.”
Huh. Well, maybe I’d passed, I thought. “Okay, well, are you and-”
Hell.
(9)
The main phone, the one in my key pocket, had pulsed-silently, but it felt as loud as if were standing in a foghorn. Time to check on the, you know. The thing.
I said something like “Hang on, I’ve got a call I’ve got to blow off,” or something. I pulled the thing out. The CBT site had automatically come up on the screen. I hesitated. I looked closer.
Oh, Dios.
They’d suspended after-hours trading. The third domino had fallen. Oh God, oh God. I–I guess I should say even I-felt a twinge, and more than a twinge, of that gray free-falling terror, another notch of acceptance that it was really happening, that it was not reversible. My nefarious plan was working to perfection. Todo mi culpabilidad.
In a way, even-well, not in a way, forget the qualifiers-even I still couldn’t believe it. I know I said that because of the Game and everything I’d become uniquely able to comprehend astronomical figures, humanly unfathomable amounts of money, of grains of corn, of suffering… but even so, the thing that was going to happen-let alone the fact that I’d made it happen-the thing that would happen in about four and a half million seconds was I think more than any human or maybe any consciousness of any possible type could ever comprehend. By definition, for that matter. You’d need a brain the size of the Hyperbowl, one that had been living for millions of years, enough parallelism to weigh the mass of lived experience, human, animal, and probably, now, even artificial, against that infinity-times-infinity of oblivion, you’d have to live, love, and lose a trillion times over even to glimpse how “Are you okay?” Marena asked.