In the Courts of the Sun (25 page)

“So it’s just like today, nobody knows how to make a real ice-cream soda anymore,” Lindsay said. “Right?”
“Definitely,” Boyle said.
“Also,” I said, “the ancient Maya’s priorities may not have been the same as ours. They may not have wanted to take over the world.”
“Well, even today, not everybody wants to take over the world,” Marena said. “For instance, I don’t.”
“Righty right,” Lindsay said. He shot his left cuff back and looked at his watch, a silver Oyster Perpetual on a brown calfskin band. Like, instead of looking at the digital time readout, which was right there in a window on the live tabletop, and which like all computer timers these days was synchronized with the cesium-decay clock at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Boulder, Colorado, which is accurate to within a picosecond a century, he had to go out of his way to read a vastly less precise time measurement off a mechanical movement that hasn’t really changed since the eighteenth century. I watched the second hand sweeping from two to three. Finally, he decided what time it was.
“Well, it’s about five of,” he said. “We’d better be movin’ out.” He looked back at me. “Maybe we’ll jaw about this all later on.”
“Great,” I said. I was about to try to say something either wishy-washy or stupid, but Marena saved me.
“Well, anyway, Jed, I have to justify my existence here for a few minutes,” she said. One could tell that she meant they were going to vote on me right now. She started steering me toward the door.
“Hold your horses a sec,” Lindsay said. “Jus’ let me give you a copy of this thing. I’m handing ’em out like beechnuts these days, but I can’t help myself. First-time-father’s pride.” He took a little pigskin case from the top of a short stack on the table and flipped it open. Inside was a dedicated e-book, which he signed across the screen with a sort of silver Swiss Army multithing with a stylus on it. He handed it to me.
“Oh, great, thanks,” I said. His signature was in dark blue, with gold sparkles permanently coursing through it like bulbs in an old theater marquee, and it took me a second to read the title graphics underneath:

TEAM SPIRIT™:
COACHING SECRETS of MOSES, JESUS,
LOMBARDI, and JACKSON

The timeless teamwork wisdom that will give you that “Leg Up—”
Both on the competition and in your family and spiritual life

By International Entrepreneur Lindsay R. Warren

With an Introduction by Dr. Stephen Covey, Ph.D.

I started scrolling through the text to show how interested I was. “Harnessing the Power of Pain,” one chapter heading said. Little ads kept popping up in the corners, for audiovisual versions of the book, children’s versions, subliminal versions, related teaching materials, courses and seminars and spiritual resorts and corporate retreats and motivational posters and indium energy bracelets and a large selection of something called “incentives.” Creeds for the credulous section, I thought.
Easy Answers for New People. Harnessing the Power of Self-Delusion—
“God bless,” Lindsay said.
We had to crush hands all around again before I could leave. I slunk back out through the empty rooms. Hell, I thought. They hate me. I looked like a
papisongo
in there. And I sounded like two
papisongos
. They’re voting for Sic. Hell, hell, hell.
The SkyBox was empty. Anne-Marie’s voice was still burbling out of a speaker somewhere, going on about how the once (presumably) happy-go-lucky city of Orlando was now all death and devastation.
“But the long-term social and economic effects . . . are only beginning,”
she said. I drifted over to the window. Sheesh, the place was frugging monstrous. You could drop two Salt Lake Cosmodomes in here and still have room left for the Taj Mahal and some pizza. The funicular track was even with the zero-yard line, and so from here the field was perfectly symmetrical, and some optical illusion made it seem like the enormous oval was tipping up toward you. I indulged in another slug of chocolate, put the mug down, and spread my hands on the desktop, trying to stay steady.
¿Y ahora que?
Now what?
“Hi,” Marena said behind me. And even before I turned around, just from the sound of her voice, I knew it was a go. I’m in, I thought. I’m going to get to see it. I’m
there
. I was that Dawn of Man Australopithecine Dude in
2001
, tossing up that Zarathustran femur. I was Marie Curie squinting down at that 0.0001-gram speck that was brighter than the sun. I was the New Prometheus. What a feeling.
I turned. She made a double thumbs-up.

[19]

C
ampeche, Mexico, is a yellow city in the Yucatán with the gulf on the wrong side. Calle 59 was narrow and hot with bus horns and a sewage smell. What they were now calling
rakjano
music—which I guess is basically Ozomatli at four hundred beats per minute—throbbed out of a likely-looking bodega. I went in and got four six-packs of Shasta Tamarindo, five bags of de la Rosa
malvaviscos,
that is, marshmallows, five big candles, and a carton of 555s, all in a real brown paper bag like in the old days. I walked back across the street and into a little door in the south side of the Iglesia de San Francisco. The façade and most of the nave had been built in 1694, but it had just been repainted, for what must have been at least the hundredth time, so that it looked like it had grown a new layer of birch bark. It had that cool stony waxy myrrh scent inside and before I could catch myself I dipped my hand in a font and crossed my heart. And hope to die, I thought.
My name’s Jesus, Son o’ God, take and suck, this is my cod. Peace!
Goddamn childhood conditioning. Padre Manuda was still standing at the altar, trying out a new sound system—bought with our money, I guessed—but he had the main amp too close under the hanging microphone and when he hit a high note it picked up the reverb off the pink-washed stone walls. He didn’t look at me. I passed a pair of ancient nuns with cornets and big white bibs, two of few remaining members of the once numerous sisterhood of Poor Clares. From what I could gather, over the last few hundred years the order had driven itself almost out of business by refusing to compromise on the austerities issue. Supposedly they were pretty hard-core, and the nuns spent all their time not speaking, kneeling on stone floors, eating barley gruel, and fisting each other. The only other customers were two old Tzotzil women in wool scarves and cotton three-web
huipiles,
spanking white and embroidered with green and red toad-and-Earthlord patterns. Workday wear. Four mangy pigeons fluffered around the vault.
I walked up the nave to the second transept and stopped in front of a newish retablo dedicated to Saint Teresa of Ávila, who, as I think I mentioned, was a patroness of the Sacrifice Game. She’s also the patron saint of chess and headaches, which must keep her pretty busy. I ground one of the candles onto a spike, lit it with No Way’s Zippo, and laid the other four next to it. I turned into the right transept and went into a little side chapel.
The room was taken up by a cream-colored cracquelured casket, closed on the top but with windows on the sides:
“El mero ataúd della santísima Abadesa Soledad,”
as the priest had put it, “the very coffin of the blessed Abbess Soledad.” It had turned out she was something of an off-the-books local saint. It was just the two of us in here. I crouched down, and even though I’ve had a real problem with nuns since my Sisters of Charity days, I had to resist the urge to kneel. The glass had sagged over the centuries, but you could still just see a little skully head like a five-year-old’s, cupped in a web of opus araneum lace, with bisque skin like strudel dough pulling back from projecting gray teeth. The notion of chickening out crossed and recrossed my mind, but I did the what-the-fuck trick and got over it. Basically you just repeat “What the fuck, the world is shit” to yourself over and over, with conviction. You don’t even have to do any special breathing.
I left. I walked around the chancel rail and up the other side, behind the altar. I really am being silly, I thought. They’re not trying to put something over on me. Why would they bother? Especially with anything this elaborate. Still, it didn’t hurt to be sure. This is just a dry run anyway, I thought. Controlled conditions. It’s not a big deal. Don’t be scared.
Guarde sus pantalones.
Okay.
There was a little steel door at the end of the south transept, and, like I owned the place, I opened it and went into the old rectory hall. At the far end of the hall there was a courtyard and, on the far side of that, a wing that used to be Convento de la Orden de las Damas Pobres. I took a route I’d rehearsed a few times, up eighteen tiny zigzag stairs to the second floor, which was just a long low hall with five little doors on each side.
Grgur was slouching outside cell #4, poking at a military-looking laptop. He was wearing a polo shirt and seafoam-gray Ralph Lauren slacks, like he was the assistant manager of a cruise line. I waved. He nodded, glowering. I’m glad he’s joined us, I thought. He really brightens up the place. The various gadgets spread out in the hall included two thirty-inch monitors, two boxes that looked like big speakers, a four-foot steel rod with a handle on it, and two things on tripods that looked like ordinary portable radar dishes, that is, shallow Plexiglas parabolas about thirty inches across, with big cylindrical sponge-covered boxes out in front where the microphone would be. I edged around Grgur into the tiny white room. The little window was open and letting in flies, but the place was still like a moldy sauna. There was a camp cot, a cheap new crucifix on the wall, an electrocardiogram reader, and an IV rig. Terror. Whoa. The combination of rig, cot, and whitewash triggered this flash from when I was six and in the hospital in San Cristóbal—
Squelch that.
The cell was also crowded with people. Taro and his Ashley, that is, the one they called Ashley
₂
, not, as I had first thought, Ashley Thieu, to distinguish her from the other Ashleys, were sitting on the floor messing with a workstation and Marena and Dr. Lisuarte were talking in the arch by the window. Hitch, the cameraman—we called him that because he was an aspiring director who looked a bit like a young, Hispanic Alfred Hitchcock—was gaffing a microphone to the top of the door frame. I offered my snacks around, but nobody wanted any. I fished out the last surviving box of Shasta. The thing had an autocooler on it—
“¡Está Frigorífica!”
it said—and I was worried that it was going to taste all defanged and updated, but . . . no!, it still had that bitter Cold War Apollo-era ultraviolet aftertang, the great taste of basic esters and aldehydes before the flavorists got too clever. Could you even get this stuff in the States anymore? Dr. L said we had to get going and this was as good a time as any.
I said okay.
Yikes, yikes. Okay. Chill. Be a mensch, for Christ’s sake. I deshoed and sat cross-legged on the cot. Supposedly it was in the same orientation of the original pallet, and the crucifix was in the same spot as Sor Soledad’s would have been when she died here. Of course, in a way it was overkill. We didn’t really need to do this here. The point in real space—whatever that is—where this room had been in those days was millions of miles away by now, so theoretically I could have been back at the Stake, or in the lab in Orlando, or anywhere. But the feeling was that it would be less disorienting if I was in the same place now as I would be back then, with the same weight of mud brick and plaster all around me, the same courtyard outside, and the noises of the same city. Although of course back then there were more sheep and goats around here than people. And it would be the same time of day, but not the same time of the year.
“You don’t mind if I’m here, do you?” Marena asked.
I said no and that I used to like watching my mom pluck chickens.
I don’t think Marena really heard me, though. A menacing buzz arose,
repente,
behind my head. Dr. L didn’t even start with scissors; she just drove into my hyacinthine locks with her clipper thing like it was a McCormick Harvester, which, I suppose, it was descended from.
“How’d it go with Padre Cual-es-su-nombre?” I asked.
“He’s been a pain,” Marena said. “We offered them enough cash to buy this whole shit town and they didn’t want to take it.”
“Well, they’ve about had it with worldly ambition around here,” I said.
“No kidding, we had to call his boss and endow a school.”
“You talked to God?”
“No, no, the bird guy, the, the cardinal,” she said. “I bet God would have taken half that much. It’s going to be called, like, the Sisters of the Blessed Immaculate Sacred Bleeding Technical Virgin K through Twelve or something.”
“What a waste.”
Dr. Lisuarte finished the left side.
“Yeah. And even then we had to throw in two cases of El Tesoro.”
The whole thing took about two minutes. I felt weak, not like I was Sam-son to begin with or because I put that much faith, even unconsciously, into the whole Indian hair thing, but it was just that my ostrich-eggshell helmet was just way out there in the breeze.
“Done,” Lisuarte said. I touched my forehead and moved tentatively up and over. My hand felt like the Lunik 3 moon probe. Into the farthest reaches of—
“Hey, that’s a great look for you,” Michael Weiner’s voice said. I hadn’t seen him come in, and of course he hadn’t knocked or anything. I said thanks. He clapped me on the back. Ow. Schmuck. Too many warm bodies in here. Michael asked Taro how they were doing. Taro said they were ready. Dr. Lisuarte said ten minutes. This was already getting to be routine for them.
“Okay, well . . . just to review?” Michael said for the camera in his TV voice. “The good sister croaked at terce, that’s about nine in the morning, on November 28, 1686.”
Was that supposed to sound all jaunty and irreverent for TV? I wondered.
Ocho ochenta,
dork. This guy is a total stiff and always will be.
“She hadn’t left this room for at least a month before that,” he went on. Or let’s say prattled on. “But she was conscious on the twenty-fourth because she signed her will on that date. Which had about three objects in it. Then it says she was able to take a last communion on the twenty-seventh. Otherwise there’s not much to know about her, but I think if we go for one in the morning on the twenty-fifth we’ll be fine.”
Yeah,
we,
I thought. Egomaniac. You’re not on the Pop Archaeology Channel anymore. Can it. “We’ll go for between matins and vespers. That’s when they were all supposed to be alone, so theoretically nobody else would have been in here.”
“One hopes,” Marena said.
“I’m going to palpate your cranium,” Dr. Lisuarte said. I said it was fine as long as she didn’t feel my skull. She did, though. It’s weird to feel fingers on your scalp. Where no hand had gone before. Except for my mother’s, I mean, my real mother’s, when I was really tiny. I got a flash of myself sitting in her lap, her stroking a scratch on my forehead, rubbing white ashes into it to stop the bleeding. Lisuarte asked if it was okay to give me the injections and start the countdown. I said sure. Blast off, Flash. She unwrapped two syringes. The stuff didn’t come in a hypospray. I tightened up. Like most hæmophiliacs I have a touch of aichmophobia, that is, fear of pointed objects.
“O-
kay,
” she said, “how about if I start you out with forty mgs of Adderall?”
“Great,” I said. I didn’t tell her that for me that was about the equivalent of a demitasse of green tea.
She swabbed my right inner thigh and slid in the needle. Ow. Next I got 3.8 ccs of ProHance. It’s a solution of a paramagnetic contrast medium called gadoteridol. It makes every tiny little microevent in your brain show up loud and clear on the screen, like the fissures in Angelina Jolie’s lips.
“All right, lean back,” she said. I did. The foam of a cheap institutional pillow gave and bounced under my delicate head. I was in borrowed CONCA-CAF sweat pants and a Neo-Teo T-shirt and already felt highly vulnerable all over. She asked if I was really ready to sit for six hours. I said yes. She asked if I wanted to go to the bathroom. No, I said. If I want to do that I’ll tell you, I thought. In fact, I’ll make you hold the jar. Nosy bitch. Clara Barton, she-wolf of the Red Cross.
“Okay,” she said, “I’m going to glue on some positional ’trodes.” There was a hiss and a tiny Boreas of solvent above my occiput.
“Do you want this?” Marena asked. She meant my hair, which she’d thoughtfully collected. I said I did, thanks, I wanted to knit a suicide voodoo doll out of it.
Lisuarte and A
₂
squeezed my head into a kind of bathing cap—it was made out of that fabric that’s spun out of old soda bottles, which I guess is invisible to electromagnetism—and opened a big Zero Halliburton case. Marena helped them lift out a portable magnetoencephalograph, that is, a thick enamel-coated metal ring about the size of a Vespa tire, with two thick cables coming out. We called it the Toilet, since you stuck your head in it and upchucked your brains. It didn’t really look like much. In fact, not much of anything around here looked like a high-tech operation. One thing Taro had said that I was catching on to was how 90 percent of the technology they were using had been around since the 1970s and that they were just putting it together. They nestled the big ring into the pillow. I nudged my head up next to the opening. They twisted it down around my head and squnched the fabric up into the gap with slivers of foam, so that the bagel’s lower lip was just over my eyebrows. Lisuarte asked if it was too snug. I said it was just exactly snug enough. She hooked it up and switched it on. There was a discreet hum from the electromagnets cruising around and around inside the ring at about 380 miles per hour. When I’d tried the thing on before, I was afraid it was going to find a sliver of steel in a sinus or somewhere and pull it out through my eyeball, but evidently I was shrapnel-free. A
₂
rolled over a sandbagged tripod with a big monitor on a swing arm and positioned the big OLED screen just below the crucifix.
“Can you see the monitor?” she asked.
“A little closer,” I said. She moved it toward me and angled it down. “Okay.” My gray matter was all up there in layered translucencies like it was my carry-on bag in an airport scanner.
“Taro?” Marena asked. “Are you on?”
“We are already sending a leader signal,” he said.
“How do you feel?” Lisuarte asked. She’d given me a combination of aripiprazole and lamotrigine a few hours before, supposedly just to get me thinking clearly but not obsessively. I wasn’t sure it was working, but I said I felt tip-top.
“Okay, we’re scanning,” Lisuarte said.
I made a thumbs-up.
“You’ll be fine,” Marena said. “Remember, it’s all about motivation.”
“Yeah,” I said.
“I’m betting my bra on you.”
“Great.” Hmm, I thought, well, that sounded at least a little suggestive. Over the last few days it had felt like Marena and I were getting pretty close to the border of Intimacyland. Or at least it felt that way, but lately it had seemed more like we were approaching it asymptotically and might never get there. And also, to me, anyway, the fact that it hadn’t either been crossed or definitively not crossed was becoming a bigger deal every day.