Brian D'Amato - The Sacrifice Game

Hard up, little dude.

Now, now, NOW NOW NOWNOWNOWNOWNOWNOW. I held up the shaft, slid the spine into the underside right above the bulb, and slipped the point forward in the space between the loose skin and the deep fascia and poked it out again just under the corona, pulling the thorn-thread after it. The first mental state I was aware of was disbelief, amazement that I could be feeling like this and still be alive. The interpreter set the chili-coil basin down on my left, placed a larger terra-cotta trencher in front of me, and dropped thirteen triangles of blue sacrificial paper into it. He seemed to check the menstrual flow out of my glans and then stood back. I was too aware of the scores of great-bloods leaning in closer, watching for even a grimace or twitch of pain that might show I wasn’t the one. I dangled the cord down over the mound of paper, scattering red dots, and kept pulling it through. I watched the blood flow out of my groin, out over the ribbons on my legs, down into the trencher, spilling over its rim and off down the stairs and into the world, the inside becoming the outside, the most-private written out for the universe. It made sense. I pulled it through, hand over hand, as slowly as possible. It was the longest rope in the universe. And the thickest. It made the VSNL transpacific cable seem like a piece of dental floss. Come on. Too late to whiff out now. Go. Go. Go. Go. The heat of the capsaicin had already spread through my body, buzzing my eardrums and activating tear ducts I tried to choke off, but I did manage to just stand there, not jumping a rope-length into the air and screaming like I really had to do but just pulling and pulling, hand over hand, until it sank into its own groove. It was only while these things were happening that you could ever explain to yourself why we did it. I mean, pain has its own world and its own allure, but it’s not describable after the fact. When you get down to it we did it only for the only good reason to do anything, that is, just for the hell of it. It was just suffering for its own sake, or for its own clarity. When you become a connoisseur of agony it gets like anything else, like any acquired taste, you get into controlling it, you learn how to distribute it through your body and through time, how to teeter on the very edge of your expanding personal limit without falling off into insanity. It teaches you to separate yourself from your body and swim out into the ether. You learn how to distinguish four hundred different shades of pain. A ton of stuff. And as far as I know it’s a lost art, like knapping a statue out of obsidian.

I pulled the last thorn-knot through and out with an explosion of droplets and coiled the end of the bloody cord into the offering-trencher, and now the aftermath was already setting in, quarts of endorphins sloshing through my capillaries. Pain releases you from yourself and returns you to yourself. The interpreter took the trencher, raised it and showed it to the sky caves of the four directions, and set it down on a brazier. Curls of blood-smoke slithered up and out, my essence sent into the farthest reaches of the great gas-cloud. It made sense.

I stood there wobbling a bit in the warped gravity. It might have been just a figment of my lack of imagination, but I thought I could hear sniffing, the big cat checking out my scent. I teetered backward and caught myself. Watch it. I was feeling dangerously good. One thing I can guarantee is that that moment of recovering from intense pain is the truest peace anyone can ever experience. Especially if it’s self-inflicted pain. If you can dive into what you’re most afraid of and drift there and not swim up until you’re good and ready, everything gets different, the world looks all washed and every vertex of reality’s ten billion polygons a second is shard-keen against your Malpighian skin, like you’re a sphere of holographic film picking up every photon reflected by every facet of the world.

An acolyte knelt in front of me, squeezed tiny globs of anesthetic honey-lime into the two wounds on my penis, and wrapped it up again in its bloody bands. The sniffing sound segued into something like a purr. My mask came down over my head and my backrack attached itself to my torso, tying itself on with four hundred biting laces in eight hundred invisible hands.

He says to come a little closer, the interpreter said. How did he hear him from this distance? I wondered. Was there somebody else relaying sign language? Well, ask about that later. You can’t be an expert on all their little secrets. Remember, they’ve been staging these things for a long time. They know what they’re doing.

I positioned myself at the first step, sideways to the incline. The stairs had fantastically high risers, twenty-two inches according to the BYU map, and we were small people, so as I stood flat on what was effectively the first step, the one above it was above my knee, between it and the level of my groin. To raise myself up it I had to balance on my peg, lift my intact leg with its stilt-shoe as high as possible, like an eleve in ballet, position it on the upper step, shift my weight to it, and pull the peg up after me. I’d had them drill a shallow hole at the edge of each step, kind of like on Captain Ahab’s deck path, so I could fasten my hidden sole-spike into it between steps. But as I took the first one and wobbled on the pull-up I had trouble getting it in, and when it did slip in I tipped over to that side and panicked until I teetered back upright and found my center of balance. Whoa, I thought. Watch it.

Cripes. Two hundred and fifty-four steps to go. If I pulled this off, it really would be because of divine intervention.

The beaters signaled the next step. Okay. Next. Go. I had to move up one step every five beats. We hadn’t made any allowance for the fact that I’d been maimed. If we changed the requirements or faked it at all, I’d lose too much of my already leaky credibility.

I’d rehearsed this, of course, on a forty-step mock-up. But I hadn’t been brilliant and I’d been too sick to risk the drinking and blood loss. And it was getting breezy, and dark. And mainly I just wasn’t feeling too good. It wouldn’t have been so bad without the damn towering beaky Eagle headdress, I thought. And without the claw-foot Elton John platforms, of course. But I was starting to feel like with them I didn’t have much of a shot. I raised my foot but somehow I flicked my vision upward, toward the sanctuary, and my Cyclops eye somehow let an awareness of depth into my head.

Uh-oh. I’m in trouble.

The stairs just went up and uppity up, but it wasn’t even the horribly steep fifty-one-degree angle that had really hit me, it was the unbrokenness of the span, the subtle strangeness of the absence of railings, absence of landings, absence of turns between flights, the lack of all those little-noticed amenities that all stairs in the rest of the world always have. The stairs projected utter antihumanism, architecture as weapon, not just a complete disregard for comfort and safety but a will to grind you down, to trick you into climbing and then to make you slip and saw you into pulp. There’d never been and wouldn’t ever be anything like these stairs in the architecture of the entire rest of the world. You’re nothing against them, I thought. Call it off.

Nope. Don’t even think about it.

They’ll tear you to bits. Even now. They don’t love you that much. As far as I knew, all the kings and adders who had fallen had been posthumously disowned and wiped out of the records. It was one thing you just couldn’t wuss out on, the risk of being on the stairs was an essential bit of realness in the trial by ordeal.

I pushed up to the second step. I felt synovial fluid squirt out of my knee. I cracked and wrenched and got my peg into the hole almost on cue. Really, I could handle these stairs in a jiff, I thought. I mean if I weren’t also crippled, drunk, blood-poor, and in stilts Stop whining, I thought. Just shut up and deal. Third step. I blasted myself up faster than I was supposed to. My sweat-drenched foot slid forward on the plaster. Christ, watch it, watch the hell out. Slow down. Save it. You aren’t the athlete Chacal used to be. You were able to play that one ball game okay but it’s pretty much spoiled you for anything else. Not even counting injuries sustained since then. Chill. Beat. Fourth step. I could feel eyes pressing on my back, my clansmen and their clansmen, adders and bloods and dependents, all looking up at me, or rather to me. I could feel their need to trust, feel all the responsibility, all that stuff that sounds so dopey. Something was clicking into position beyond fear and resignation. I guess I’d have to call it a comprehension of the particularity of the moment, or of the brittleness of existence, but it was more abstract… anyway, only two hundred and fifty-two steps to go, I thought. No big whoop. Fifth step.