The Sacrifice Game

(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.

“I’m fine.”

“You were going to ask me about Tony.”

“Okay, what about Tony?”

“What about him?”

“Are you and he having a thing?”

“No.” She looked at me. I looked at she. Her eyes looked like she was-except, fuck, I thought, I really can’t tell, can I? Accursed Oriental inscrutability.

“Are you having a thing with anybody else?”

“That’s another question.”

“Oh, come on.”

“What are you, my mother?”

“Look-”

“Okay, fine. No. Nobody.”

Naturally, I tried to watch for tells, but I couldn’t see anything one way or the other. Damn, I thought. I’m at a big disadvantage here. I’d always had a little issue with facial expressions. When I was six I found a sheet in my Nephi K-12 folder-which was in a filing cabinet with a four-digit combination lock, as though that was going to hold me up for more than two minutes-that said I had “PTSD presenting as pervasive developmental disorder.” That is, savant skills without IQ loss, but with defects of emotional affect. It’s not autism, but it presents like it, as they say. So, for instance, you know how most kids get flash cards with words and numbers on them? I got cards with smiling or frowning or whatever faces on them, so that I could learn emotions. I couldn’t even tell whether she was happy or sad just by looking at her. Telling whether she was lying or not would be like reading page 100 of a book while it’s still on the shelf in the bookstore, in stretch wrap, and in Arabic.

“You said you were getting married to some jerk,” I said.

“Nope. As of now, Octy is out.” Octy? I wondered. Who the hell is that, Emperor Octavian? Dr. Octopus? No, don’t ask and use up a question.

“Okay, my turn,” she said.

“Right.”

“What did you do that’s making you feel so different?” she asked.

“Well, there’s, there’s that long shot on-”

“Okay, but why the hesitation just now?”

“Asking about the hesitation is another question already.”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake.”

“Well-”

“Just-look, you have to answer the whole thing, you know, whole truth, not bits and pieces. Right?”

“Okay, fine.” Pause. “I just went very, very long on the corn futures and I’m-look, the reason I’m not talking about it is I feel a bit guilty, uh…”

“Now you feel guilty?”

“Yes.”

“And yet you’re relieved.”

“Well, yeah.”

“Hmm. Apparent paradox.”

“No, it’s, like-look, I said, I’m making a ton of cash but the longs, that is, some of the stuff I’m doing is going to cause some hardship, I mean, in fact, there are going to be more famine deaths than there are already, and of course I’m just getting on the bandwagon, but I still feel really guilty about it.” All true, I thought. “Okay?”

“Well… that’s not the kind of thing I’m going to chew you out about, I mean, I work for Lindsay Warren, for God’s sake, I’m going to hell in a Hummer.”

“Well, thanks,” I said. “That’s it.”

“Okay.”

“Okay,” I said. “What’s happening with Ix Ruinas?”

“Sorry,” she said, “that’s a fourth question.”

“Oh, for God’s sake, come on, we’re adults, and, you know, we’re leveling with each other.”

“Sorry.”

“Okay, let’s each agree to add a question.”

“I’ll tell you what, I’ll give you the answer if you come back to work for us.”

“On what?”

“On Neo-Teo. It’ll be the art-and-life-and-everything work of the next century. It’ll be fucking Rome.”

“Well, that’s great,” I said-I didn’t want to say, “Yeah, but the Warren Corporation makes Caligula look like Heidi,” or some other forcedly snippy thing-“but you’re the artist, designer, whatever, I’m just a code monkey-”

“No, seriously, we really want you on the team.”

“Doing what?”

“Like, getting the imagineering and architecture into tune with the Game, more in tune with the new calendar…”

“What new calendar?” Have you been studying?” I meant studying the Game.

“Yeah.”

“Great.”

“But we are already missing your expertise. And it’ll be fun to work with you. I like you.”

“Oh. Thanks. Well, I like you.”

Her body sort of constricted and extended. “Hmm,” she said. “Maybe we’re getting into feelings here.”

“Yeah, I have a little trouble with, you know, feelings whoo whoo whoo feelings.”

“Everybody has trouble with feelings.”

“I guess.”

“But, like I say, I do feel very fond of you.”

“Thanks,” I said. “That’s great, I, feel fond of you.” Hell. I really did, and it was cramping my act. I guess the takeaway is when you’re planning to betray, destroy, and murder somebody and her child, bonding is not a good idea. Damn. It and I and everything all felt dark, evil, and not as inevitable as I’d “So let’s hang out together and do this project.”

“Thanks, but still, no, I don’t have time, I mean, it’d take a lot of time.”

“It’ll take an hour a day, what’s the problem?”

“I mean, I just don’t feel like doing it.” Except I was realizing that I did kind of feel like doing it. Or at least I was realizing that being here felt good. No, worse than that. I was realizing that I wanted to see what Max looked like in his little Dick Cheney costume, I wanted to see how the next Bond movie would turn out, I wanted to see whether she was right about that orgasm thing, I wanted to settle down in some gated compound and wake up with Marena every morning and go out together to feed the turkeys and water the soybeans and pull the corpses off the electric fence. Hell. Maybe these people really weren’t so bad, I thought. Maybe even a nontrivial fraction of people everywhere weren’t so bad, maybe people in the future would adapt themselves to be even less bad. Maybe I hadn’t been weighing the decency fraction heavily enough, maybe I was wrong, maybe I’d made a mistake, I mean, with the EOE, maybe I had to stop it, maybe “Jed. You said you don’t have time to do it. Not that you don’t want to do it. Which is it?”

“It’s, uh, the latter.”

“Bullfuckingshitfuckbullcrapfuckingshit.”

I thought. I was sure I hadn’t touched my nose or rubbed my ears or any of that stuff. Had I looked toward the door? Maybe she could spot microexpressions. Maybe that’s how she got to be such a big deal in the competitive, high-stakes world of the international entertainment industry. I mean, besides talent. She could walk into a meeting and “Okay, why don’t you have time to do it?” she asked. “What’s going to happen?”

“Sorry, you’re out of questions-”

“Fuck the three questions.”

“ You came up with the three questions.”

“Then fuck me and the three questions, I’m asking you, as one concerned adult to another.” She bounced up, walked to a built-in bookcase on the south wall, and dug a pack of Camel shorts out of their hiding place behind a copy of Autodesk Maya 9 Fundamentals.

“Okay, fine. Nothing’s going to happen.” Wow, I thought, she’s feeling some real angst. Of course, one realizes that nobody ever really quits, but in her case, and with Max in the house “Again I call bullshit,” she said. She lit a cigarette with an old blue-enamel Decoish desk lighter, came back around, sat down, pushed the Go board aside, and set down a big, heavy glass cigar ashtray in its place.

Pause. She pulled in a long, luxurious drag, vaporizing a full inch. Despite everything else, you could feel the satisfaction of long-denied addiction.

Damn it. I’d thought the Q-and-A was over, and I’d been thinking about something else-well, honestly I’d been wondering again what kind of name Octy was besides Roman/Shakespearean/Peakean-and then she’d come in and zapped me.

“Something’s going to-” she started to say.

Pause. “What?” I asked.

“Oh, God-”