In the Courts of the Sun (36 page)

AJSAT!

Like all important words it didn’t quite translate. But there is an English word that’s very close, especially if you imagine it used in a setting of high social pressure, say in an important kickball match in, say, fourth grade:

LOSER!

You’ve made me LOSE, you made me LOSE, LOSE, LOSE, I AM A LOSER BECAUSE OF YOU, LOSER, LLLLOOOOOOSSSZERRRR—
Chíngate,
I thought, fuck you, I fucked you up. I tried to step back from the edge but my body had seized up again. Something rose out of the city, a collective intake of breath. What were they thinking? Somehow we seemed to tip forward without quite falling and I saw the frozen crowd rotating up over me and the chopper-steps rising to meet me, and as my eyes focused on the flint teeth of the third stair from the top, the one that was going to cleave into my face, time really did stand still.
I’m dead, I thought. That was the last thing I saw, and it’s etched on what’s left of my brain. Going to fade out slowly.
Na’ na.
Mommy. Please. Hmm. Odd things were happening in the hinterlands of my vision. A sort of wicker beach ball floated past me on the left and bounced down the stairs. On its fourth bounce it shattered and iridescent green and magenta things exploded out of it. Feathers? No, too fast. One darted by us. Hummingbirds. Huh.
No, it’s not subjective, I thought. We’re not falling. We’re really suspended somehow, or rather, somebody’s holding us from behind. Hmm. A huge unfired-clay pot—it was at least as big as one of those man-size olive-oil jars
(pithoi?)
in the palace at Knossos—arced over my head, slowly settled on the seventh step, and smashed into a house-size puff of yellow and black. The puff grew and spread around us. They were bees. Other things fell around me, orchids, marigolds, bits of jade, stiff white tortillas Frisbeeing over the stairs, but now we’d already turned around, or rather we’d been turned around, our back was to the sun and we were facing the door of the sanctuary, a black lamprey’s mouth in a giant cat-toad’s face crowned with vegetable glory. Don’t let me fall backward, that would be just
too
undignified. Did I think that? Or was it Chacal?
I also realized we weren’t breathing.
We die, we burst.
Well,
that
was Chacal. Hey, sorry I blew your big—
Zero, zero. Gak. Claustrophopanicaphobiofear.
Don’t choke us, please, just breathe, just breathe in, breathin. Got. To. Suck. In. This. Sucks. Breathe. In.
Gkk.
Hands held me on either side and a giant live thing reared up in front of the doorway. At first, what they’d call the purely associational or prediagnostic or whatever part of my perception read it as a bird, and not just any bird, but a phororacoid, an eight-plus-foot flightless flesh-eating Miocene hell-butcher with nine-inch talons and an eyespotted cockscomb the size of yearling pigs. But the Chacal side of me—and it was a side of me, by this time—knew who it was. It was a greathouse, that is, an aristocrat, in his full ceremonial headdress. Although headdress isn’t a strong enough word. It was a swollen prosthesis, a vegeto-mechanico Synthetic-Cubistic construct avant la lettre. One of the long plumes of its crest brushed my forehead and I saw that it was artificial, a composite of hundreds of red macaw feathers sewn onto a bamboo stalk. It extended a claw and held me by the chin. Under its bone-inlaid papier-mâché beak, deep down in its gizzard, I saw it had just swallowed someone else, there was a tiny head down there, as bald as a turtle’s and wrinkled like brain coral, glistening red, glaring at me with burnt-orange vulturine eyes. I could feel that Chacal had known him personally, that in fact to Chacal he was both close and revered, and then I realized I knew he was the red
bacab
, the bacab of the east. It was 2 Jeweled Skull.
Kill me, Chacal thought. Absolve me. I have ruined us, I have ruined myself, kill me, renounce me.
Shame. God damn it, I tried to think, this is
not
about
me
. But Chacal and I shared emotions the way conjoined twins share a blood supply, and I thrashed along with him in that quicksand of cosmic embarrassment. It was an emotion I knew but hadn’t felt since—well, I don’t even know when. But I suppose anyone can bring back a whiff of it by remembering something from kidhood, like, maybe in the recess period following that kickball game the other kids ganged up on you and started pelting you with those big red shards of processed cedar bark, and if you could relive what it felt like to have everyone you knew laughing at you, how desperately you tried to will yourself to melt down into the ground, and how there was no contradiction between hating the teasers and still needing their acceptance . . . but then you’d have to add that for Chacal there wasn’t even the hope of eventual refuge that you might have seen dimly on the horizon of the playground. There’d never be any parents to run home to, no sympathetic school nurse, no eventual growing up, nothing. There’d only ever been one exit for him and I’d just welded it shut. My vision tunneled in on 2 Jeweled Skull’s arm, on the jade scutes around his wrist, on the exposed upper arm with a crust of cinnabar cracking into scales on his loosening skin, on a lone shoot of black hair sprouting out of the scales like an
Aporocactus
in the Mojave, I mean, epiphytic cacti, grow, usually . . . whoa. Dizzying out. By now we hadn’t taken a breath in over a minute and I was getting that gray fuzz like the times when I was little, when I’d cut myself and nearly bled out. A vulturine voice I thought was 2 Jeweled Skull’s pierced the carbon-dioxide buzz in our skull and I thought I caught the word
luk’kintik
, “defilement.” There was something in the tone, something maybe even—apologetic? Pleading? Hot fingers wriggled into my mouth and even though I’d lost proprioception, there was still a sense of falling into the soft red dark. Am I finally rolling down? I wondered. Please let me fall, don’t catch me, let me roll, it’s what I want, it’s what I want.

[29]

I
realized I’d been aware of the dimensions of the box for a long time without seeing or feeling it. It was a bit too short to stretch out in and a bit too squat for me to sit up. Which was fine with me. I was thrilled just to curl.
Itchy. Eye itchy. Scratchme.
Can’t. Hands tied somewhere.
Thirsty.
I tried to swallow and couldn’t close my mouth. Finally I managed anyway but it was a dry swallow that just made it worse. Ouch. Shit.
I had a notion that I was in a fetal position on my left side, or, no, rather, on my right side. One arm was missing. Or, hmm, probably just pinned under me. Numb from the shoulder down. Right foot gone too. Or left. Easier to tell if I could see them. At any rate, pretty much the earthward half of my body was numb. And the upper side was a grab bag of aches and strains. Whatever.
Itchy. I noticed I was squirming, trying to scrunch my left eye onto the wall of the box to scratch it. Got it. Ah. Bliss.
Huh.
I thought I’d stopped wriggling, but there was a residue of motion. No, it wasn’t me. The box is moving. Back and forth. No, it’s swinging. I’m hanging up somewhere. How high? I ground my cheek into the wall again. It was nubbly and yielding. It’s not a wood box, it’s wicker. I’m in a basket. Basketcase.
Well, that makes sense. No edges to slice yourself on, no hard floor to crush your head against, basically a padded cell. They want to keep me alive. Roughly. No wonder I can’t close my mouth. There’s a wad of stuff in there so I can’t bite my tongue off and bleed out. I uncurled a little and then rolled a little, pressing on the walls of the box. It was about one arm wide and two arms long—and somewhere in my jumbled head I noticed that I was already thinking in Maya arm lengths, that is, units of about twenty-six inches, and not in feet or meters—and, I thought I could sense, about one and a half arms high . . . that is, not high enough to stand up, not long enough to stretch out, not . . . oh hell oh hell. A chord of claustrophobia swelled up and I figured I was about to lose it but then maybe just because my new body was still so exhausted I managed to think, Chill, chill,
cálmate,
it’s all right, Jed, you’re alive, and it settled. Stay frosty. Fros-T-Freez. If you panic you’re really done for.
Thirsty.
Maybe it was something about the air currents or the stored heat radiating off stone beneath me or the way a puppy was yipping somewhere behind stone walls, but I was pretty sure I was in a small enclosed courtyard and that it was late afternoon. I listened. There was a kind of creaking sound somewhere, and turkeys making that burbling-brook noise, and another dog, not the puppy, barking a long way away, and then, beyond all that, there was a distant but pervasive chorus of innumerable clicks, the nostalgic tearjerking sound of women making
waahob,
tortillas, tossing the corn dough from hand to hand. It was the same exact sound, it was going to stay unchanged until Jed’s childhood, I mean my childhood. And then even beyond that—damn, I thought, these new ears really rock—I thought I could hear echoes of game calls and the mother’s-heartbeat thunk of a rubber ball.
Whoa.
I’d gotten a visual flash of a game, that is, a hipball game, and it wasn’t mine. That is, it was Chacal’s. There was a forest and a strip of cleared dirt with a pile of logs and dirt on either side—the barest possible excuse for a hipball court—and two naked boys facing me, with a vague bunch of people behind them, standing around the end zone. One of the kids’ faces was a sheet of blood, and I thought for a second that I was being punished. But then I heard or remembered something like cheering, and I understood that knocking the ball into his face had been a winning move, a big achievement. But that was all I saw of it before it somehow blended into Chacal’s last so-called game, the one that had been an entirely staged event, a one-on-one against 9 Fanged Hummingbird, where the ahau played 7 Hunahpu, the hero twin, and Chacal impersonated the Ninth Lord of the Night. That is, Chacal was the bad guy. It was a night game, lit by hundreds of overhead torches. 9 Fanged Hummingbird had just stood there at the other end of the court, fully masked and in stiltlike platform sandals but still obviously an achondroplastic dwarf. Stagehands—or maybe “invisibles” would be a better term, like in Noh theater—maneuvered a hollow paper ball with two thin cords attached to long poles, swinging it back and forth like a bird in a marionette show. Of course, it hadn’t fooled the audience, but it wasn’t meant to. As far as the spiritual effect was concerned, going through the motions was as good as the real thing.
Two of the faces I was pretty sure were real were people I guessed were my teammates in the ball game, a smooth-faced guy whose revealed name, I thought, was Hun Xoc—that is, 1 Shark—and a stockier, flatter-faced kid named 2 Hand. But it was hard to find my way around, flipping through his memories, it was like—
Well, there’s the same question again. What does it really feel like to be part of someone else? Like waking up in total darkness and finding you’re in a large, unfamiliar house, crowded with furniture and
objets,
and having to work out how to get out? I’d thought that I was pretty hard-core Maya, deep down, but now I knew I’d been just another couthless clueless Yankee yuppie yob, that from this body, from this mind, the universe was truly another species. For instance, I still knew that the earth—or as we’d say,
mih k’ab’
, “zero earth,” or the zeroth shell of creation—was round, that is, globe-shaped. But if I didn’t think about it I felt a different world around me, neither spherical nor flat, but more like a stack of tortillas. Each layer, or shell, was inside the other, kind of, maybe like skins in a squashed onion, but they were also alive.
Choke.
Come on. Breathe. Thing in mouth. A sponge, maybe. Open. Okay. Shut. Can’t. Ouch. Acid reflux sores. I tried to pull a big slug of air into my cracked throat and my pain graph hit another peak, but I ignored it in a way I couldn’t have as Jed. Chacal’s body’s pretty tough, no question. Not much good if I can’t move, though. Thirsty. I have really just got to swallow. Get tongue involved. Where is it? Cut out? No, wait. Numb. Still there. Good tongue. Up, boy.
I got my tongue peeled off my palate, and I got my teeth together, although they didn’t quite fit right, and I swallowed but it was all just dry, it hurt worse, ouch, ouch, wait. Wait a while. I pulled his tongue—
my
tongue, I thought,
pronoun trouble
—back into my cottony maw and twisted it, digging for liquid, and finally got some and started working around the sponge, painting the unfamiliar bumps and fissures of my mouth with thick sour goo. Hey, where’s my flap? Oh, right. Gone. Hmm. Something wrong with my teeth. Not wrong. Just different. The two upper central incisors had been filed to sort of squat L shapes. That is, about one-third of each tooth, on the medial side, projected normally, but then to the left and right of those sort of spurs they were each missing a chunk. I hadn’t realized how much I used to enjoy sliding my tongue around my old teeth. I was a total stranger to these pointy little suckers. I’d cut myself on them if I wasn’t careful . . . whoa, what’s this . . . hmm. There was a gap on the female side where it seemed like two molars were missing. Oh, right. I lost those in the One Cane game at 39 Courts, also against 2 Sidewinder, when I scored four and killed—
No, I thought, not
I
.
Chacal
. That was
Chacal’s
hipball career. Watch it.
Okay. Get those eyes open.
Ouch. Can’t.
Going to sneeze.
La gran puta,
I thought, what a
Schande
this turned out to be. Why did it have to be me back here? I should’ve been the one who stuck around in aught-twelve. The other me is probably in a sleeping bag with Marena right now. I mean, so to speak right now. Bastard. He doesn’t know the half. Wait a second, now I’m getting jealous of myself. Stop obsessing. Keep it together.
Okay. Open eyes.
Nothing.
Well, this is great. A six-hundred-million-plus-dollar project and I end up in a basket like moldy pears from Harry & David. How long have I been in here? Days? Thirsty. What about the volcano? Could I have missed it? No,
ni modos
. I haven’t been here three days. No way. Anyway, they said it wouldn’t be possible to miss it, that even this far away it would still bruise your eardrums. And supposedly a day or two afterward, when the ash clouds got high enough, you’d be able to see the glow at night from anywhere in Mesoamerica.
Hmm. Maybe they’re waiting to see if it happens like you said. Maybe you have a chance. And at least that Chacal character’s gone. Or rather, I don’t still half-think I’m Chacal. That’s all it is, right? The self is something you think you are, not something real—
Ow. Itchy eyes a little too real, though. Scratchem. Okay. I flexed my—
CRACK.
Ouch.
I got the fingers of one hand going. Each one left a little trail of crackles and pops of welcomely focusing pain. Ow. Okay, get that other arm out from under there. Wait, where—
Shit, amputated! Panic.
I felt for what I thought was the stump with my other hand. Nothing. Shit. Wait. You’re moving something, it’s just the wrong hand in the wrong direction. Weird.
Huh. Maybe I’ve been reversed. I must be right-handed now.
Hmm.
Yeah, that’s it. Okay. I worked on getting my working hand rubbing the numb one, but it kept slipping off. It was like trying to move a cursor around when the screen’s unexpectedly shifted from landscape to portrait mode.
Get hands up to eyes. Ow. Hell. Do it again. Ow. My hands kept stopping before they got there. Oh, I get it. They’d been tied together in front of me and then tied by a longer rope to the roof of the box. Shit. I tried to pull myself up toward them but couldn’t do that either. Maybe my chest was strapped to the bottom. Yeah, that’s it. Damn. Thirsty.
I took another snort of air. For some reason that sort of icky sweet smell brought up a picture of Desert Dog. He had those big raw spots on his forearms. Yeah. It was ooze or pus or something, from an open sore, the scent of a skin disease. Damn. Probably on me. Hell.
Wait.
Listen.
The creaking that I think I mentioned had gotten louder, to the point where it definitely wasn’t creaking. It was more like a sort of mewing. A cat, maybe? No, it’s human. It’s moaning.
My eyes tried to open and then gave up. A little kid? No, it’s not, it’s . . . oh. It’s an old man.
The moaning finally pulled up a pic out of Chacal’s hard drive: It was a line of eight or ten or so of the same big wicker boxes, hanging from a sort of bare arbor in front of a wall. The image even had very specific colors: That is, the two baskets on the far right were fresh and green, but the ones to the left of them were sun-bleached to gray. Maybe it was this same courtyard, where I was now, or maybe it was a place like it. But either way, I knew through Chacal that each of the baskets held a prisoner, and that I was in the one on the far right, and that the fluttering was the other captives breathing, and the oozy smell was their rotting skin slowly falling off their flesh, and the moaning was from one of the oldest baskets, and that the prisoner in it had been there for years, and years, and years.
You’ll be in this box for a long, long time. Maybe a whole k’atun if you’re unlucky, that is, twenty years, until the same deathday rolls around again. They’ll get more pain out of you that way. More pain, more rain, more grain.
Hell. This is it. This is everything. This is the last thing I’ll see. This is the last place I’ll be. Ever. Ever. Forever. Oh God, oh God, oh God.
Deep panic isn’t like a dream or a blackout, but it’s still hard to remember. I suppose I thrashed around for a while, and probably screamed, or maybe one of the other prisoners screamed, and then I was trying to see again, got to get my eyes open, come on, have to see. Focus on eyes.
I flexed and strained. Nothing. There were orbital muscles there I didn’t even know about. I flexed them again and again. Still no go. At some point I realized—either from the pain, or from the strength of the bond, or maybe because Chacal had seen it done to other people—that my eyelids had been sewn shut. Oh, Jes—
Wait.
Someone out there. Close by. Shouldn’t have jiggled this thing. What are they doing? Watching me? Thirsty. No, don’t ask. Don’t let—
Off. I fell up. Something me hit. Ouch. Too bright, even just through eyelids. The eruption? Wait—