In The Falling Light (26 page)

I saved almost all my cash, wrapping it in
tight bundles and hiding it in my apartment.

And every time I was at the ranch, just as
the night was winding down, Vera would yell,
“Ladies!” and there would be that opening and closing of doors.
Veronica always kept me in her office during that time. I asked her
what was going on, but she just smiled sweetly and shook her head.
I was starting to get sort of a crush on Veronica, and even asked
her out once. She gave me a polite but firm no, and I didn’t ask
again.

One morning at the ranch, right around four
a.m., I was sitting in Veronica’s office while my clients - a gang
of seven frat boys from U.C. Berkeley - were busy in the back.
Veronica had stepped out for something, and I was alone when Vera
called, “Ladies!” Opening and closing doors, as usual. I looked
outside the office, didn’t see anyone, and decided to have myself a
look. I went into the back hallway where the girls had their
rooms.

Curiosity. A truly unhealthy condition.

Just a peek, I told myself, quietly opening
the first door I came to.

One of the frat boys, a redhead with a lot
of freckles and a woven bracelet with Jamaican colors, was naked
and spread eagle on the bed, his eyelids fluttering. Two of the
girls – one was the pretty, dark-haired one I’d chatted with in the
lounge – were flanking him in kneeling positions, hands pinning him
down, grunting as they worked their mouths at each side of his
neck. I must have gasped, made some sound, because the dark-haired
girl’s head snapped up, and suddenly I was looking into a pair of
yellow eyes with pinpoint pupils. Her face and neck were smeared
with blood, as were her fangs. Not the canine-types you’d expect,
these were incisors, side by side and long and sharp, like a
Nosferatu in a black and white movie. Her black tongue flickered
out and she hissed.

“Oh, shit…” I stumbled backwards out of the
room and into the hallway, where a single hand caught my shoulder
and spun me around. Another hand gripped my throat, slammed me
against the wall and lifted me off my feet. I started choking,
couldn’t breathe.

Veronica wasn’t so pretty anymore, with her
yellow eyes and Nosferatu fangs and generally pissed-off
expression. She held me up there effortlessly, staring at me, as
the girls came out of the room behind her. In the hallway, more
doors opened and the ladies emerged, all with the twin fangs, all
wiping their palms and forearms at the blood on their faces. Even
Big Vera appeared in the hall. They were hissing, and a few
snarled.

“Why didn’t you stay in the office?”
Veronica asked.

“I…I’m sorry…so sorry…” I wheezed.

Veronica looked over her shoulder at the
others. “Finish up,” she snapped, and they responded, quickly
disappearing back into their rooms. Then it was just me and
Veronica. She slowly lowered me so my feet touched the floor, and
the pressure came off my throat. Her fangs slid back in and her
eyes shifted once more to dark brown. She shook her head, a
bittersweet smile on her face.

“Why?”

I was trembling. I didn’t know, didn’t have
an answer.

“We make the marks go away, we make them
forget after we feed,” she said. “They just go home tired. Maybe
they have some bad dreams for a while, but no damage done.”

“Please, Veronica,” I said, beyond being
ashamed at my little boy’s voice. “Make me forget, too.”

She seemed to think about it for a moment,
then slipped her arm around my waist and walked me slowly back to
her office. She gently pushed me into a chair, and sat across from
me. “I don’t think I will. I think you should remember everything
tonight.”

I shook my head, started to speak, but she
held up a hand and shushed me.

“You’ve been doing a terrific job, and your
client list is growing. No sense spoiling a good thing. I’m going
to up your cut to a full fifty percent of the action. Plus, if you
can bring us someone disposable, like a prostitute or a runaway…no
vagrants…you’ll get ten grand per head.”

“Disposable?”

She nodded. “Someone who won’t be missed.
It’s easier that way. The girls get tired of always having to use
restraint, to let them live. Sometimes they need to blow off steam,
really rip into something.”

Vera and the muscled goombah walked past the
office door then, carrying a long, limp shape in a bloody white bed
sheet between them. An arm slipped lifelessly out of the sheet,
knuckles dragging on the carpet. The wrist wore a Jamaican
friendship bracelet.

Veronica giggled and looked at me.
“Accidents happen. We’ll make your clients forget he was with them.
You’re the only one who will know.” She smiled, and the tips of her
fangs lowered just the smallest bit as her eyes took on a yellow
tint. “And you
will
keep working, and you
will
keep
bringing them here. Do you understand me?”

I didn’t respond, and she rolled her office
chair over to me and placed her palms on my thighs, leaning in
close, her lips brushing my ear. Softly she said, “I want you to
remember what happens here, and remember something else. If you try
to quit, or run away, or tell anyone…I
will
find you.” Then
she teased my ear with her tongue, and gave my earlobe a playful
nibble before standing up, still smiling.

“Off you go, now.”

How big of a whore was I? This was the
question I asked myself all the way home, my half-empty clients
dozing in the back. I asked myself the question all morning,
sitting in a Denny’s and drinking coffee, then again later, on a
park bench in the sunlight, too tired and scared to sleep. How big
a whore?

Twenty years. I’ve been living here just
about that long.

It’s a Catholic monastery in upstate New
York, close to the Canadian border. We get a lot of snow. No, I’m
not a monk, but the brothers let me live here in a small attic
room, and don’t ask questions. Brother Tobin is sympathetic but not
pushy. He says we all wrestle with our own demons. Brother Tobin
doesn’t know the half of it. I dropped off the limo and left
California that day, drove east until I couldn’t see straight,
somehow managed to pull off to the side of the road and catch some
sleep, then just kept on going. All those tightly-wrapped bundles
of cash went to the brothers as a donation. That could be the real
reason they don’t ask questions, but I like to think they keep me
here as an act of charity. I attend mass in order to be polite. I
read the bible looking for answers, and still haven’t found
anything satisfying. I pray, even though I know no one is
listening. I’m pretty sure I sold that privilege in Nevada. No one
here knows my background, and no one calls me Rocco. I left it all
behind.

I’m not here seeking absolution.

I’m hiding, nothing more. The 9mm Beretta is
the only reminder of that former life, and I keep it under my
pillow.

Twenty years of trying to forget those
images, forget what I did.

It hasn’t helped.

There’s tapping at the glass now, way up
here with a four story drop below. Tap, tap, tap. I ease the
Beretta out from under my pillow as Veronica, smiling and floating
outside, pushes the widows in with a rush of cold air, and steps
barefoot onto my wooden floor.

The barrel has an oily, metallic taste, and
as she reaches for me, I have a fingertip’s worth of pressure to
wonder if it will hurt when it goes off.

The Mayans were right. And wrong. As the
crowning achievement to his postgraduate work at MIT, Lawrence
Singh intended to prove both.

It was a Friday night and he sat at his work
station on the third floor of the Media Lab, an intense young man
in need of a haircut, six screens working in front of him as his
fingers danced over a pair of keyboards like a concert pianist.
Eleven empty Mountain Dew cans filled a wastebasket beside the work
table, the lab quiet and empty around him.

On one screen there was a close-up color
image of a stone with four columns of ancient glyphs carved into
its surface. It had been digitally altered to become a graphic
where each column could move up and down independently. Currently
they were scrolling upwards at different speeds. Four other screens
were busy flowing through rapidly-changing series of complex
formulas and algorithms, and the last and largest displayed another
graphically-modified representation of a huge disc covered in rings
of strange, carved symbols.

“Their calendar is based on twenties, with
repeating sets of nine and thirteen, and four-hundred being a pure
number.” His eyes didn’t leave the screens as he spoke. In a swivel
chair beside him, her high heels propped on the work table, Kiera
yawned.

“I thought we were going for drinks.”

“We are, in a little bit.”

Her taut stomach was bared by a tight belly
shirt, and she placed her hand on the smooth skin and played with
the little jewel piercing in her navel, tracing a red fingernail
slowly around it. She looked at her boyfriend and bit her lower
lip.

No reaction.

She sighed. I should be dating one of the
guys from crew, she thought, muscled upper bodies and shoulders,
big arms hard from rowing. Lawrence was brilliant but not much
else, and as soon as he got her through her math requirements she
was gone.

Lawrence pointed at the screen with the
disc. “This middle ring maintained a five-hundred-eighty-four count
Venus cycle, and it’s geometrically aligned with these nine symbols
placed closer in, called the Lords of the Night.”

“Lords? The Mayans were Catholics?”

He made a face. I should be dating one of
the chicks from Anthropology, he thought. Of course none of them
looked like Kiera, a sultry mix of Polynesian and black, with dark
eyes and waist-length black hair. And he doubted the Anthropology
chicks were as flexible. He had noticed her toying with the
piercing, but he tried not to. He was so close to completion, and
he had to stay focused.

“No, they were about as far from Catholic as
you get. The Nine Lords feature in their mythology, the Aztecs had
them too, representing their gods, each ruling over a particular,
rotating night. But that’s just part of their religion. What’s
significant is the number nine, repeating sets of nine. The Mayans
were mathematicians.”

Kiera looked at her nails.

Lawrence’s fingers tapped, and he began
nodding. “Nines, thirteens, twenties…the core of the randomized
algorithm. It’s going to be worth an Order of Magnitude.”

Kiera, a med student at Harvard, blinked at
the screens. Her own studies required a considerable amount of
math, but this was so over the top it might as well have been in
Martian. “And what exactly is going to win you an Order of
Magnitude? In English, please.”

“Remember when I told you the Mayans were
right, and wrong?”

“Thousands of times.” She could feel a
lecture coming, and leaned further back in her chair. It might even
sound like new information, since she had paid so little attention
the last time.

“The Mayan calendar stops on-“

“December twenty-first, twenty-twelve,”
Kiera said, “the end of the world, right?”

“Wrong, and any Mayan who thought so was
wrong too. That’s all Hollywood and media bullshit. Twenty cycles
of the Mayan long count calendar equals a
Baktun
, 144,000
days. December twenty-one, twenty-twelve, is simply the day the
calendar rolls to a new
Baktun.”

She tipped forward. “That’s it?” He actually
had her attention now. “The calendar just starts over?”

“Yeah, that’s pretty much the only
significance of it. If it didn’t have the capacity to refresh, and
you were a Mayan, you’d end up having to carve that monstrosity
again and again. It’s pretty clever, actually.”

“No end of the world?”

“Nope. The last time it happened was the
year 1617. No end of the world.”

“If it’s no big deal, then why all the hype
and panic?”

Lawrence grinned. “Because you don’t sell
movies and books and newspapers with the mundane.”

She leaned back, feeling a little
disappointed that the epic catastrophe she had half believed in was
explained away by something as simple as throwing out your old day
planner at the end of the year and picking up a new one.

“So,” he continued, “wrong about the end of
the world, if they ever even thought that. But right with their
other calculations, the hidden ones.”

“You lost me.”

Lawrence switched his right hand to the
mouse while his left tapped keys, his eyes rapidly tracking the
moving images on screen. “The Mayans had their own algorithms
concealed within the symbols of the calendar, and it’s taken me two
years to uncover them. I also discovered that
this Baktun
,
the one we’re in, is mathematically different from any that have
gone before. On the final day of our current
Baktun
, the
hidden Mayan equation finally falls into place.”

“Which means what?”

He looked sideways at her. “Every
mathematical operation leads to something. Sometimes it’s an
effect, usually it’s another equation, but there’s always something
at the end of it. I don’t feel like waiting until it comes around
by itself, so I’ve set up this program to simulate the final day of
the
Baktun
, and apply the hidden algorithm, right now.”

“What’s going to happen?”

Lawrence shrugged. “Can’t say.” A massive
calculation began scrolling across several screens, and the graphic
image of the calendar itself, crafted so each ring could be turned
independently, began rotating. “When they make me the president of
MIT you can say you were here to see it first.”

“I don’t think you should be messing with
this, Lawrence.” She was suddenly very uncomfortable.