Brian D'Amato

by In the Courts of the Sun

  “Hmm.”

  “I’m going to make up a special snakebite kit. And I want you to carry it on your person at all times.” She started to explain to me about how rattlesnakes and Gila monsters and a few other critters have this stuff that makes you make extra thrombin, which is like the glue T-cells use, and how it can get in your brain and totally glog you up if you’re already dosed up with extra clotting factors to begin with, but how on the other hand, if you’re a bleeder and you overdo the antivenins you could turn into a human sponge and crash out, and it’s a tricky balance. I kept nodding, trying to convey that I knew all that already.

  “Anyway, why would I get bitten by anything?” I asked.

  “It’s still a construction site,” she said. “There’s still jungle around it. Last week a bunch of howler monkeys stole all the peanut butter out of the cafeteria. And a month ago a worker got a pretty bad snakebite.”

  “Like a barba amarilla?”

  “Sorry?” she asked.

  “A yellowbeard. A fer-de-lance. Bothrops asperger, uh, asper.”

  “Oh. Yes, that’s right. Hemorrhagic toxin.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Still,” she said, “say you get tagged by a centipede or something exotic, I want you to ID it and reread the file and then run through the correct antigens in the kit, in order, before anyone even thinks about cutting the puncture. And if you do have to cut I want you to wait an hour and then quadruple the dose of the desmopressin. Of course, the main thing is for you to call me first if you can.”

  “Thanks,” I mumbled, trying not to sound like an ingrate.

  “ You know not to take aspirin or anything.”

  “I don’t even know what aspirin tastes like.”

  I started to go, but she made me sit back down. Just for a finishing touch, she jet-injected me with mefloquine, Ty21a, hepatitis A vaccine, and ten other kinds of snake oil, like I was setting out with Baron von Humboldt to find the source of the Amazon. When I got back to my seat my thighs ached like—like I don’t know what. Something with very achy thighs. Like a Vegas hooker on the morning after the Fat Acceptance Movement Convention? Well, maybe, Jed. Work on it.

  Complete physical indeed, I thought. Jed, you are such a pussy. Shoulda, coulda, and woulda just said no. Chíngalo insurance companies. Paranoids. Why don’t they just seal me in a big polypropylene bubble and get it over with?

  I looked out the porthole. Water. I looked over at Marena. She was sitting “next” to me, but the damn CEO-class seats were so spacious and plush and widely separated that it was like she was in a different time zone. Like me, she’d given up watching the same disaster coverage over and over, and now she was doodling on her phone. She looked back and asked if I was okay. I said yes.

  “I guess you guys looked up my medical records,” I said.

  “Oh, yeah,” she said. “Yeah, Lance did that. Sorry. I guess that’s illegal.”

  “No, it’s okay, I just, you know, it’s not that easy to do. Is it?”

  “For those guys that’s nothing,” she said. “If you asked them to find out Queen Elizabeth’s IUD size they’d get it to you in ten minutes.”

  She went back to her drawing. I found a USB on the arm of my chair and plugged in my phone. A connection came up, but most of my friendly sites were down or unupdated. Bad sign, again. Bad sign. I put on—donned?—earphones and tried CNN.

  “… thanks, Alice. This is Alexander Marning at the CNN All-Media News Center in Atlanta, thanks for joining us,” somebody whose name was Alexander Marning said. He paused. “The Disney World Horror has certainly been the most difficult period in the Southeast for many decades and stirred emotions all over the world. But the disaster has taken an emotional toll not just on Florida residents … but also on the reporters covering the story. Brent Warshowsky joins us … with more. Brent?”

  Rather than meet Brent, I flipped to C-SPAN. DISNEY WORLD EVENT WAS SILENT “DIRTY BOMB,” SAYS FEMA RESEARCHER, the caption said. That Octavia Quentin person was on again, testifying, in front of a Senate committee this time. She was moving up in the world.

  “… forensics that release time was roughly noon on the twenty-eighth,” she said. “And it’s true that for a while the particles were airborne, but they’re very heavy and because of the special coating they are also fairly sticky. So despite the high radioactivity in the No-Go Zone, we project there will be very little windblown particles—very little in the way of windblown particles in the months to come.”

  “But there will be particles in water runoff, is that correct?” a voice that sounded like Dianne Feinstein’s asked.

  “ Yes, that is correct,” Quentin said, “as far as the lake watershed goes, there is widespread—”

  This is bumming me out, I thought. I clicked off and risked another glance at Marena. She was still scribbling on her phone. I leaned over and snuck a peek at the screen. She was sketching on an elaborate architectural fantasia with reflecting pools and an ornate round pyramid in the background. After mapping the pyramid with red and pink stripes, she seemed to become frustrated and started on a line of naked pilgrims riding across the foreground on giant flightless birds like dyatrimas. She looked over at me.

  “Sorry,” I said. “I shouldn’t snoop, I got—”

  “It’s okay,” she said, a little too loudly. She pulled off her headphones.

  “Your drawing skills are really great.” Did that sound too flip for conditions? After a major tragedy, how long do you have to wait before you can smile? Other people seem to have an instinct for that sort of thing and I never do. It’s like I’m always laughing at a funeral. Or dying at a party.

  “Oh, thanks,” Marena said in a shrugging tone.

  “No, seriously. Is that a set for Neo-Teo II?”

  “Yep.”

  “It’s so weird that you’re an actual artist.”

  “Why is that weird?”

  “Well, no, it’s not weird, it’s just, you know—”

  “What?”

  “Just, how’d you get interested in this?”

  “In what? In the Sacrifice Game stuff?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’ve always been into games.”

  “Hmm.”

  “And you know, Lindsay’s been funding Taro forever,” she said. “And then when Neo-Teo did well, Lindsay thought I should look at some of the other game-related stuff they were into.”

  “Okay, but, the Sacrifice Game is not entertainment.”

  “Well, no, but it could become part of something like entertainment. Or you might say, something like entertainment could be, it could become a way to implement—or, like realize, something like the Sacrifice Game.”

  “You’re getting a little ahead of me,” I said.

  “Well, look,” she said. “My feeling about it—history goes through different stages. Right? From the eighteenth century the world’s dominant paradigm went from a religion thing to a science thing. Right? And now in the twenty-first century I think it’s shifting to a game thing.”

  “Okay.”

  “Games are kind of a third category. They’re between art and science. But they’re not just a mixture of them either.”

  “That sounds right,” I said. “I mean, I’m big on games myself—”

  “Sure. But what I’m getting at is, there’s all these people out there now, and they’re playing games all the time. To the exclusion of almost anything else.”

  “ Yeah, that’s true. That’s good for you guys, though, isn’t it?”

  “Oh, sure. But the thing is, I kind of think there’s a reason for that.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like—well, maybe this sounds kind of girly and spiritual …”

  “No, no—”

  “Just that, doesn’t it seem to you that a lot of these people are playing these games almost, I don’t know, desperately?”

  “Like how?”

  “Just, really intensely and with a big sense of urgency.”

  “I don’t know. But I’ve always played a lot of games, so I may not be the right person to ask—”

  “Just that they’re all kind of looking for something,” she sa
id. “Or another way of putting it is that a lot of other things, other media or activities or jobs or whatever, they’re all starting to seem obsolete. People intuitively know that the games are the future. In fact maybe they’re going to be the whole future. The whole social future, anyway. The whole human future.”

  “Hmm. I’m not sure about that one.”

  “Okay, maybe not, but I feel like—I feel like all the stuff I design, even when it’s kind of tacky and violent like Neo-Teo, I still think I’m at least heading in the right direction. I’m still in the Utopia business. Or is this not making any sense? Sorry, I’m just blathering—”

  “No, no,” I said, “no blather, no, it sounds good to me—”

  “That’s why Taro’s stuff is exciting, it’s, like, it’s trying to find out what, just, what it is about games.”

  “Well, I guess so,” I said. “That’s great. Maybe you should learn to play the Sacrifice Game.”

  “I’d like to. Especially now that I have all this free time.”

  “Sorry? You do?”

  “I’m kidding,” she said.

  “Well, I’ll teach you anyway.”

  “Great, it’s a date.” She closed her phone and her eyes and leaned back.

  Go ahead, my inner Cary Grant said. Kiss her.

  I can’t, I thought back at him. It’s in bad taste. All these people just got dead.

  Do it anyway, he said. She wants it.

  Sorry, I thought. I just can’t get it together.

  You wuss, Cary said. He vanished in a puff of Lucky Strike smoke.

  Hell.

  Just to do something, I tried the camera backups in my house for the 192nd time. It shocked me a little when I got through.

  The reactors and filters and protein skimmers had failed, one by one, between Wednesday and Thursday, but the cameras had kept running on their array of UPS backups. I watched them all suffocate and die: the Nembrotha colony I’d collected in Luzon and, tentatively, was planning to name if I proved it wasn’t a chamberlaini, the Chromodoris with their emerald stripes along the notum and glowing orange highlights on their rabbity heads, and the Spanish shawls with their yellow and ultraviolet bands, locomoting like tiny concertinas over the dead-man’s-fingers coral, all dissolved into shit-tan sludge. Todo por mi culpa. I’ll admit it, I cried, but not so anybody could see or hear. Crying is cheap. Crying’s what tween pop stars do on TV in the daytime. Through the porthole behind Marena’s ear I could just see the Belize coastline, black against the blue, with double dots of headlights moving through the Southern Highway like bubbles through IV tubes.

  [13]

  We flew west over More Tomorrow and the Valley of Peace—both were hopefully named refugee resettlement zones—and then turned south, toward the Maya Mountains. Marena talked on her ear. I sulked.

  “Hey, there is a scrap of good news,” she said, finally, to me.

  “Really?”

  “Taro and Tony and Larry Boyle—well, you don’t know Larry—but anyway they flew Taro down this morning and he’s fine.”

  “That’s great,” I said.

  The captain PAed that we were landing in two minutes. We came up on a big circular area dotted with electric lights and cooking fires.

  Warren Development had built two compounds in a wide plateau. It was about fifteen miles south of the ruins of Caracol and only four miles from the Guatemalan border. The sports complex site was 2,010 and a half glorious acres of freshly leveled cloud forest, perfectly circular, with a gigantic one-mile-diameter racetrack—which Marena said had a convertible surface that could accommodate horses, feet, Sleekers, or automobiles—forming the outer boundary.

  “So, look, why are we circling?” Marena asked.

  “Sorry?” I asked. “Oh.” She was talking to the pilot through her ear thing. She paused, listening.

  “Ears off,” she said. She turned to me. “He says the air traffic control observer is checking on us. Like we’re a typhus ship.”

  “Hmm. Damn.”

  “Yeah.”

  We dropped down to two thousand feet. At the center of the circle the main stadium—or Hyperbowl, as they called it—rose out of the black jungle. It was a gargantuan loaf of electrochromic glass that looked almost finished under its web of scaffolding, raked by halite floodlights and spangled with blue sparks from the arc welders.

  “All this will have to be redone for the Paralympic Games,” Marena said. She was chewing something. “You know, the Special Olympics? That’s six years from now.” If the world even exists two years then, we both thought. “It’s more than just a lot of ramps, they have to build special courts and put in giant Siamese Port-O-Lets and whatever.”

  “I thought this whole planet was the Special Olympics.”

  She said the deal was that eight years ago, as part of Belize’s bid for the XXXIIIrd Summer Olympiad, the Warren Group offered to build a self-contained facility sixty miles inland from the capital in order to avoid the city’s poverty and transportation problems.

  “The joke is that they had to let Belize host one because they never win anything and won’t, until they make drinking rum an Olympic event,” she said. “ You want some nicotine gum?”

  “Oh, no, thanks, I’ll stick with Vicodin for now—”

  “So after the games we’re going to convert the field-event grounds to golf courses and take over running the complex as a destination resort and themed community featuring Maya-style motifs and Neo-Teo-related activities, with a jaguar habitat, a state-of-the-art geothermal plant with a volcano-like steam fountain, and a subsidized population of over ten thousand local Maya craftspersons.”

  “I bet you could say that backward,” I said.

  “No, but I bet you can.”

  “Well, yeah, I guess I can.”

  “Yeah? Show me.”

  “Snos, repst, farc, nayam,” I said. “Um, lacold, nas—”

  “Okay, you’ve made your point,” she said. “There’s the shop.”

  The pilot had turned and was flying low across a straight asphalted road that led to the Stake, or as I should say, the Stake™, a mile and a half outside the Olympics complex.

  The tires engaged the earth. We slowed, turned, taxied, and stopped. We waited. The door opened. There was the usual slap of choking nostalgia as I sucked in the first lungfuls of Central American aeroplankton. Plus the heady aromas of horses and wet concrete, with maybe a top note of ozone. We disembarked. There were seven people waiting for us on the tarmac in the sharp white light.

  Two of them were Warren security guards in green outfits, and there was a Belizean inspector in his white short-sleeved shirt who checked everyone’s papers. Then there were two so-called Stake elders—who were only in their thirties—who seemed to be the place’s official greeters. One of them wore a sweatshirt with a picture of a robed guy with a wizard staff silhouetted against a big setting sun. “Moroní, 421 BC,” it said in Papyrus Bold. “Last of the Good GuysŽ.” They asked if we were all right and if our “people” were all right. My people haven’t been all right for over five hundred years, I wanted to say. They all crunched my hand. It’s times like these, I thought, that make me glad I’m left-handed. Finally, we were introduced to two tall burly agents from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

  Great, I thought. Here we go. Back to el bote. Did I mention how I’d been in jail for eight days in Guatemala, in ’01? Amazingly, though, all the two big guys did was take a little extra time making sure who we were. One of them scanned our passports and took pictures of us with his phone and waited for a response from his demonic overlords in their secret crypt under the Pentagon. They asked us whether we were planning to leave the construction site and we said no. They asked us if we could check in by phone at noon. We said sure. It was like being on parole. They set up an appointment with Marena for the next morning. I just stood there the way I do when I’m pretending to be foggy on English. They looked at me funny, but everyone looks funny at me. They didn’t tell us why they were keeping an eye on us, but of course we were Persons of Interest in the Disney World attack.

  “Here, let me start you
out on these,” the elder elder, the one without the sweatshirt, said. He gave Marena a live badge and helped her clip it on her jacket. For a second it looked like he was giving her a corsage for the prom. He gave me one and let me put it on myself. It had a bright scrolling green dot and a toothy alligator clip. Unsettlingly, it already had my picture on it, the one from the Strategy Magazine Web site that I’d made them take down years ago. Next he gave each of us a phone card.

  “There’s also a password for the LAN on there,” he said. “You can use your telephone or any handheld browsing device to find where you all are on the map, contact Stake personnel, access schedules of Stake activity, Freaky Friday timetable, meal times, and other useful information.”