The Sacrifice Game (6 page)

Oh, right, I thought. It’s my birthday. Actually, for Maya folks your name day—mine was three days from now—is a bigger deal, but maybe she didn’t know that. She handed me what was clearly an elephant-folio book, cleverly folded up in blue Genji-cloud
kozogami
. I coaxed it open without wrap rage. It was a book from 1831, von Stepanwald’s
Curious Antiquities of British Honduras.
I must have told her how I’d lost my copy and ABE wasn’t finding another.

“Wow,” or something, I said. I thanked her profusely. I flipped through it. The copper engravings—and a few etchings—were as sharp as if they’d been pulled yesterday. “This is great,” I said. There—

Wait.

Huh.

Hell.

( 6 )

Y
ou’d think I’d be beyond it at this stage, but I felt a welling up of some sort of good feeling mixed with some sort of bad feeling. I couldn’t quite hit on their names, though. I guess the good one was like coziness or fuzzy-’n’-warmness and the bad one was . . . guilt? No. No way. Well, maybe. Dude. You’re slipping. Undo, undo. You did the right thing. And you knew there’d be moments like this. You need to just get through the next fifty-one days. And there’s only one way you’re going to do that: denial. Right? Right.

“Okay, anyway,” she said, when the little scene was over, “well, that gives us twenty minutes to finish that game.”

“Okay,” I said, managing to leave out the introductory “uh.”

She steered me around to where there were two quadricolored Korean
cushions on either side of an old and very thick straight-grained kaya-wood Go board, the one that had been in her now-closed office downtown, and which I figured was worth north of fifty K. You could just see the sunken pyramid on its underside reflected in the dark tile floor. She took the bowls off the board, set them down, opened them, and started scooping out stones.

“You don’t like Indian food?” I asked.

“Hate. That stuff is
dirty
.” The way she said the word it sounded like it was in that
Tales-from-the-Crypt
y drip font, like

“I didn’t know that about you.”

“Well, I’m sure it’s the last thing.” She dug an old Insa analog chess clock out of somewhere, wound up both sides, and settled it next to the board.

“Oh, no, I’m sure there’s lots I don’t . . . you’re a woman of mystery . . .”

“
You’re
the mystery,” she said. “You’ve got something going on.” Marena started laying out the game where we’d left it three months ago, at the seventieth move. We’d started it at the Stake, during the Madison business, and a lot had happened since then, but—as I maybe should mention for the benefit of non-Go players in the audience—there wasn’t anything outstandingly mentally acrobatic about picking it up again now. Actually, all Go players above a certain level can remember all their games and can pick up any of them at any stage. Also, as long as we’re making explanations, maybe I should say how it might seem a little odd that we’d do this now, but only to people who don’t play. No Go player wants an unresolved game hanging around in the air like a hungry ghost.

“Sorry?” I asked.

“You’re not planning some damn thing for my birthday, are you? Because I’m not putting this one on my résumé.” She snuck her right middle finger into the side of her mouth and, discreetly, bit on it.

“Oh, uh, sorry, no.”
Mierditas,
I thought. I hate mind readers.

“So what’s up? I bet you made another huge and foolishly attention-getting investment coup.”

“No, no . . . it’s just you haven’t seen me for a while, that’s all—”

“Uh-huh.” She conveyed a mass of dubiousness. Hell, I thought.
(EOE)
I’m transfuckingparent. Better take off now. No, wait. That’s even more suspicious-making. I looked up at the nearest one of the nine or so clocks on her desk. It was some I guess Masonic antique that said it was
to
. The next one in the row was an impossible-to-read skeleton clock—maybe it told the time in Xibalba—but the third one was highly legible:
“6:41,”
it said.
“Smartlite Sweeper
™
/Quartz USA
.” Damn. The night is far-effing young. Damn. Okay, just stick it out. It’s no biggie. Don’t get para. All chicks have empath powers. Right? But she can’t
actually
read your mind. Not without a whole lot of gadgetry, anyway.

“Nothing’s up,” I said.
(EOE! EOE!)

“Are you sure—wait, hang on.” She paused for eight seconds. I finished laying out the game. “Okay, just use the Amex number,” she said. “Sorry,” she said to me. Oh, that’s why, I thought. I mean, why she had those big earrings. They were telephones. I mean, one of them was. The other probably had an extra condom in it or something.

“Okay,” I said. I nodded. Marena nodded. I punched my clock. As it does, time seemed to slow down slightly. I’d decided on my move weeks ago, so I put it right down. She’d anticipated it and responded immediately. The world slowed down another five clicks. Despite everything else that was going on, despite whatever little secrets she had and despite the big deal-breaking secret I had, we were in Gametime.

And so it came to pass that there now followed about twelve and one-fifth minutes of silence, punctuated by six raps of stones hitting the thick wood. I always thought one of the most off-balancing things in life is when there’s a pause at the wrong time, and this felt especially wrong, a strange interlude with nothing happening in the middle of—well, maybe it just feels wrong to me. Damn it, how can Korean food take so long? Like it takes time to open ten jars of assorted kimchee. I focused on the board. In the first stages of a Go game it feels like you’re emplacing forts on a wide, desolate frontier. But at this point, almost halfway in, the stone pictures were coming into focus, crosses, flowers, a poodle, a long black staircase growing out of her second corner and bifurcating near the center into distended jaws, like the Star Rattlers balusters at Chichen. I pushed through a gap in the stairs and, maybe too fliply, hit the clock.

She didn’t make a move. One minute. She bit down again on her presumably nonconforming fingernail, noticed she was doing it, and pulled her hand away and tucked it under her thigh. Two minutes.

“Damn,” she said, at two minutes and eighteen seconds. Her biggest group was in real trouble. “This is not good.”

“Sorry,” I said.

“Not good. Maybe you should give me three stones next time.”

“I shouldn’t even be giving you two stones.”

“I’m rusty, I’ve been running an empire and saving the planet and decluttering the kid’s room and stuff. You should give me four stones.”

“No way. With four stones you can beat anybody. Theoretically.”

“Yeah? How many to beat God?”

“The world champion would be at a disadvantage by the fiftieth move with one stone against God.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Seriously.”

“Hey, do you know what game I can beat God at every time?” she asked. “Without a handicap?”

“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?”