The Sacrifice Game (73 page)

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D
ecember 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