“No, what’s that?”
“Chicken.”
“What do you mean?”
“Like with driving cars at each other, you know, how that kid got killed at the Colonial Gardens desert mall like, last-”
“No, I know, I mean, why, what do you mean about beating God?”
“Because-look, if one of the players is omniscient, like God, he loses. All you have to do is decide not to swerve.”
“Wait, so God can tell you’re not going to swerve, so he has to.”
“Right,” she said.
“Except if he’s God he can’t get hurt.”
“What? Oh-uh, maybe. But he still loses.”
“Are you sure about this?”
“Oh, yeah. They taught Max about it at Logic Camp.”
“Huh. Well, I guess that’s right.”
“We used to play a chicken variant, like, we’d stand on like a wall and throw lightbulbs to each other, and we’d step back each time. Did you ever play that?”
“Well, I had a health-uh, no. We used to play escondidas…”
“What’s that?”
“Like hide-and-seek.”
“Oh, yeah.” She looked at the board and then back up at me. “Did you ever play Time Machine?”
(7)
“What’s that?” I asked. “No, I don’t think so-”
“That’s like-well, I’d sit in this spot in my room just like this.” She closed her eyes and crossed her arms. “And I’d mark the exact-oh, wait, first I’d put on the B side of Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy — and I’d memorize the exact date and time, and I’d sit like, still enough to stop time. And then I’d decide that exactly twenty years, like, to the second, I’d sit in exactly this same position with the same music and have exactly these same thoughts, and all the intervening time would be like it hadn’t happened.”
“Oh.” I’d thought she’d meant some plasticky board game by Ideal or whatever. “Yeah, I guess I did play something like that.”
“Really.” She had a stone in her hand, but she wasn’t putting it down.
“Well, yeah. Basically. I hadn’t thought about it in a long time, though. And I thought I’d made it up.”
“Maybe we both made it up,” she said. She set the stone down on the side star point. It was a fine move, but it was still a book move. That is, not insightful. She hit her clock.
“I guess,” I said.
“It’s our psychic link.” She smiled. It wasn’t an ironic smile, or a wry, knowing, sardonic, nonconformist’s smile, not even a humorous smile. It was just a sincere friendshipish expression. A rare bird these days, I thought. It was a smile like, we’re hanging out and bonding and isn’t that great. I felt a smudge of mistiness in the back of my eyeballs. Squelch that. Hard up. Don’t forget how she made you a sucker. She conned you like she was Fa’pua’a Fa’amu and you were Margaret Mead “Or, I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe all kids play that.”
“No, I don’t think so. Just a few sad, introspective nerded-out kids.”
“Yeah, maybe.”
I cocked my head, closed my right eye, and looked at the board with my left eye to get a fresh look at the position.
“It’s good to keep your different life stages in touch with each other,” she said. “All those years just swish by.”
“Yeah.”
“Do you have any left?”
“Any what?”
“Any second parts coming up in Time Machine, you know, like, where you plan to sit in that position again and whatever.”
“Oh. Yeah, I guess I do,” I said. “I have one left.”
“When is it?”
“Uh… January twentieth. At noon. Four years from now.”
“That’s great, okay, so maybe we should do something together then.”
“Well, I don’t-uh, okay.” This topic was harshing my wave. I scooped up a stone and thwacked it down, a hane on her last point. Nothing board-shattering. I hit my clock. Maybe I don’t need to find out what’s the real deal with Tony. Maybe I should just take off now. No, don’t. Leave now and she’ll really know something’s up. In fact she’ll probably tell them to ratchet up the surveillance on you. Although that’s kind of weird, she’s a romantic interest and also your Stasi minder. Although the whole thing is weird. Well, NFML. Not For Much Longer. Just crush her flat in this one game, have two bites of bibimbap, and book. No sweat.
“Okay, it’s a date. Even if we’re both married to other people by then. Right?”
“Yeah…” I said. “… Why, are you getting married?” Damn it, Jedface, don’t ask girls questions like that. Have a drop of sangfroid. Forget Sick Tony Sic, you lost, get over it. Anyway, what do you care? Nothing matters. We were all going to be dead in-no, don’t think dead. Nonexisting “No, I’m not,” Marena said.
I said okay, or something. I tried to look at the board, but the game was at that point where the stones start to look and even feel like pustules erupting on your skin, and you just want it to be over.
“Are you upset about Tony staying here?” she asked, a little muffledly because she was working on that fingernail again.
“No, I mean, he, you know…”
“I totally haven’t touched him.”
Huh.
“It’s okay,” I said, “you get, you get to touch whatev-”
“It’s not a romantic thing, he’s just staying here because he’s, for a place to stay.”
“What about that getting-married business?”
“That was a different guy.”
“Oh.”
“And I’m not sure about that lately.”
“Oh. Okay.”
“I mean-look, this is all getting into feelings and, like, feelings.”
“Yeah. I have difficulty with those things.”
“Hmm,” she went. She sort of melted herself down into her oddly yielding Memory Foam cushions and stretched out prone.
“Maybe it’s okay, whatever happens,” she said, “maybe there’s another whole world out there, like with that Mr. Bubble thing?”
“Sorry? I don’t get the reference.”
“The Crazy Foam, you know, those two guys from the Layton Institute with the bubbly verses, uh…”
“Oh, the bubbleverse,” I said.
“Right.” She was referring to this incident back in 1998 when a pair of Warren-funded physicists reported that said they’d created a bubble in the quantum foam and created another universe that, at that moment, was the exact twin of our own, but which, because of random perturbation, would exhibit divergent outcomes later on. It was purest bullshit.
“That’s what I said.”
“Uh, yeah.”
“Do you think that’s possible?”
“You mean, that they created another universe in their lab?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, I, you know what Taro says, multiple uni-they’re, you know, cheap on theory, expensive on universes. So, no, I don’t, really. That’s just something people say when their equations don’t come out right, they say whatever’s left over just slides into some other handy universe.”
“Yeah, but they said they saw it.”
“How would they see it? It’s not in the same universe.”
“Anyway, we’d be in it,” I said.
“Okay, I don’t know. That’s what they said. And they said there was definitely not an infinite number of universes. There aren’t even a lot.”
“So how many are there? Like a handful?”
“Right. A few more ’n a couple.”
“Five or six?”
“That sounds about right.”
“Huh.”
“Still, that’s just my intuition,” she said. “And every once in a while one of them forks and makes two.”
“Fork in the road.”
“Yeah. And then, you know, when something bad happens in one of them, it might not happen in all the others.”
“Hmm. A very pleasant thought.”
“Sorry,” I said. “I don’t know, maybe it’s possible.”
“Never mind. Heck.”
“Maybe it’s going to be alien probes,” she said. “Running around the universe blowing up life-sustaining planets out of sheer pity.”
“Humanitaliens.”
“Yeah. Damn, damn, damn, damn,” she said, five times in total. “Damn. We really nearly all died. Sorry, my mind’s-I’m very free-associating.”
“Do you mean with the Madison thing or just the Hippogriff thing?”
“Oh… I was thinking about Madison, but yeah, I also feel bad about those pilots sometimes.”
“I wouldn’t,” I said. “Those guys dream about seeing action like that. They’d rather do one minute of real fighting than live to be a thousand.”
“Yeah, I guess you-you’re such a guy, ” she said. “You get stuff like that.”
“One crowded hour of glorious life.”
“Yeah, whatevs.”
I guess I mentioned the Hippogriff Incident in the press release, but just to clarify, we, or Warren Labs, were allegedly responsible for the incineration, on March 21, of two Fuerza Aerea Guatemalteca pilots, by, allegedly, an AIM-9 Sidewinder missile. It was an almost-major international incident that had exacerbated tensions between Guatemala and Belize, and even between Guatemala and the U.S. As of today, thanks to nearly sixteen million dollars of lawyering, Marena and the team and I seemed to have gotten away pretty clean, and even Executive Solutions still hadn’t been charged with anything. But the whole thing had made it harder for the Warren Group to rock the boat anywhere in Latin America.
“Look,” I said, “dying isn’t-I mean, they probably didn’t even notice.”
“Why, you know what it’s like?”
“Dying?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, I’m pretty sure it’s like, nothing.”
“But apart from that.”
“No, I mean, all I was saying was-look, the deal is, despite one’s ingrained denial of it, the fact is that every time you fall asleep, you die. In fact you basically die every time you even just lose your train of thought. And when you die for the last time, for you it won’t be any different, you’ll just forget what you were thinking about and not start up again. I mean, you won’t notice. The illusion of continuance is just pure nonsense.”
“So maybe the world did end and we just didn’t notice.”
“Well, that’s not exactly-”
“Or else the Bush administration covered it up.”
“Well, then we wouldn’t be making that speculation, though.” She didn’t answer, but she did look at me as though she was interested. “Actually, there are a lot of ways the world could end and nobody’d notice.”
“You mean like if it happened too fast?”
“Yeah.”
“How would that work?” she asked.
“Oh, you know, strangelets, earth-core perturbations, remote atom, atomic events from like naked singularities or whatever, um…”
“Well, that’d suck.”
“I don’t know, I don’t think most people wouldn’t even mind.”
“You mean if they didn’t understand what was happening?”
“No, I mean, even in advance, people wouldn’t-I mean, look, half of them are at least wannabe suicidal anyway. They just don’t want to deal with a lot of nooses and razor blades and guns and wreckage and starvation and fire and plague and stuff.” I half noticed that we’d gotten into dangerous conversational territory, but, as so often, I didn’t shut up. “They just don’t want to see that shot of the top of the Empire State Building poking out of the water.”
“Well, maybe. Still, that’s only half of them.”
“And the other half are just too dumb to be suicidal.”
“Okay, but everybody dying is a bigger deal because then nothing means anything.”
“You mean like it does now?”
“Well…”
“I mean, I wouldn’t go that far, right?”
“Yeah, I guess.”
“I mean, mean. You know, mean…”
“So anyway you think that’s just, that’s the boy of it,” she said. “Like, those pilots died happy.”
“I’m sure of it.”
“God, you’re so butch.”
Huh? I thought. “Wow. Thanks,” I said. “I wish I’d known that in high school.”
“And it’s like you don’t even know it. Which makes it that much eroticker.”
I mumbled something so incoherent I couldn’t understand it myself.
“I can’t get over how healthy you look,” she said. “You’re like, ruddy.”
“Rutty?”
“Have you been working out?”
“Oh… I don’t know…” I guess she’s right, actually, I thought. Ever since I’d knocked over that first domino this afternoon-despite the occasional twang of guilt, and even despite some trepanation, I mean, trepidation, or, let’s admit, fear-I’d felt this sort of… I guess, warmth. Hmm. Well, Jed, that’s the evolutionary psychology of it. Chicks always dig guys who’ve killed a few people. Or, evidently, guys who are about to kill a whole lot of people. It gives a dude a glow, like the third month of pregnancy.
Marena flopped mustelinely onto her side. “Okay, questies. What if I started making out with you right now?”
“Uh, well, I’d certainly reciprocate, for sure, I’d-”
“Don’t do me any favors-”
“No, I’m flattered, I mean-”
“Maybe I should get out my toy chest. You should see the thingy I just got.”
“Is it like, an orgasmatron?”
“Kind of. It’ll keep you going for, well, for a while.”
“Going, like, what?”
“Well, not quite climaxing.”
“Darn.”
“Still, that’s on the way.”
“Really?”
“Oh, yeah. In the future, everyone will be able to sustain an orgasm for fifteen minutes.”
“Wow.”
“Yeah. The very near future. So get ready.” She raised herself up in kind of upward-facing-dog position, stretched her head out on her long neck, and kissed me. I reciprocated. What if Max Sleeks in? I wondered. Better bar the door, Katie. Well, maybe he’s used to such things. Hot mama.
“Call A-sub-three,” she said. Pause. “Hi. Get me a half hour, okay? Yeah, Happy Rapture. Bye. Sorry.” She got my head in her hands. Whoa. What seemed like a hundred and eight fingernails swarmed over my doubly naked scalp, and I saw as well as felt schools of that silver glitter that fireworks makers call drizzle effects. I try to take my hat off indoors, but it’s a struggle, especially now after my head got shaved for the downloadings, and it was about the most gloves-offly intimate thing she could do, like she was slicing off my pants with bandage scissors. Wow, we’re making out, I thought, like I was back in fifth grade. Now one of her other hands was fumbling with my groin area.
“How about you fuck me like it’s still the end of the world?”
“Uh, mmm,” I said. Okay, I thought, one last time, it’s probably a good idea-but then at the same moment I thought how maybe I couldn’t deal with it, and/or, more importantly, it was feeling like Jed junior wouldn’t be able to deal with it. As they can, he could tell I was afraid of something. Chill out, I thought. No fear. Fear is the woody-killer. Fear is the little death that brings total erectile obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see the path where it has gone past on its path. And I will see that where the fear has gone there will be only a trail of tiny fearprints in the sands of the Erg. And only I will remain, picking grains of erg-sand out of my inner eye, like one whose water is frothy with liban and who has forgotten the ilm of his axolotls, one who Can it, Muad’Jed. Get a grip. I got a grip on her head, but it didn’t help. Marena came up for air.
“You’re distracted,” she sai
d.
“No, I’m… I’m, I’m, I’m a simple soul today, I’m-”
“No, your sacral chakra’s off-line. You’re up to something.”
“No,” I said, “I’m just, you know, preoccu-”
“No, I think you’re feeling distrustful.”
“Well…”
“Okay, fine,” she said. She pushed both of the buttons down halfway, stopping both clocks, and resettled herself in a lotosish position. “Look, tell you what, I’ll give you three Truth or Deaths.”
(8)
“Sorry?”
“You ask me anything, any one thing at a time, and I’ll tell you the absolute truth, and then I get to ask you and et sequels.”
“Sequentes,” I said.
“Right. Boy, you’re really on a Latin kick.”
“Well, I’m a Latin American.”
“Uh-huh.”
“What’s the death part?” I asked.
“You have to tell the truth, like, whole and nothing but. Or else drink hemlock.”
“Is that a real game?”
“So I’ll come totally clean if you will. Okay? Pinkie swear.”
“Okay.” We swore. Her pinkie nearly ripped mine off its metacarpal capitulum.
“You start. Ask me whatevs.”
“Okay. You set me up, right?”
“In what way?” she asked. She didn’t hesitate. She was a cool customer.
“All the time when I was explaining to you about the colored directions and whatever else about the Sacrifice Game and whatever, you actually knew all about it.”
“No, I did not-I didn’t know all that stuff, in fact I still don’t understand it, in-”
“But like, when I-the first time I came to your office, you guys already wanted to reel me in, right? Taro’d said I’d want to see the Codex and you used that to bait me. Right?”
“Well, there’s some truth to that, but you weren’t the only-I mean, we looked up at least four others of Taro’s students from when he was in New Haven and interviewed all of them.”
“But when I begged you to send me you’d already decided to.”
“No, not entirely.”
“But you thought I’d be better at it, I mean, instead of Tony Sic, to zap back to Mayaland, but you figured I’d get spooked unless I thought I was convincing you to let me do it. Right?”
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