Brian D'Amato - The Sacrifice Game

“They’re shifting,” the teaser said, feeling 2JS’s stomach for the flesh eels. I got onto my knees and looked closer. 2 Jeweled Skull’s abdominal muscles were shivering, and his face was darting in and out of all sorts of odd grimaces, like he had to let out a cosmic sneeze. He was having another attack. That tiny bit of alcohol had sent them into a literal tailspin. The teaser took a shell knife and sketched out a cut just below the navel.

No, no, try the ones in the head, I said. I didn’t want him to die on us. The teaser palpated the swollen tissue around 2JS’s eye sockets.

They’re getting fat, he said. I told him to get some of the critters out if he could. The teaser reached into 2 Jeweled Skull’s left nostril with a pair of bamboo tweezers and grubbed around.

Gimmie the key, fucker, I thought. I couldn’t believe I was in this stupid position.

Believe it.

The teaser started pulling something out of 2 Jeweled Skull’s nose, the tapered end of a white noodly thing that just kept going on and on until it was a little over a foot long, until its blood-pinked nonhead finally popped out wriggling, drowning in the air. 2 Jeweled Skull’s body quivered, but he didn’t make a sound. The teaser dropped the sucker into a cup of balche. It writhed around, practically tying itself into a noose.

“Drink plenty of balche,” the teaser chuckled, “and you’ll never have worms.” It was an old joke.

What they called flesh eels were really some kind of river-tapeworm larva they raised for this sort of thing, yet another species I was kicking myself for not being able to identify, although I’m sure it was related to Spirometra mansoni. Anyway it was supposed to be the absolute most painful thing of all, or to be more specific the most unbearably painful, since other things might be just as painful but didn’t get such good results. People had cracked under it who had gone months without cracking under anything else. When the worms were in the abdominal cavity, they said it was like nausea, but that nausea was to this as an itchy finger was to getting your hand crushed between boulders. When the worms were in your eye sockets and nasal passages, I guess it was like having stuffed-up sinuses on a depressurizing airplane, with the same degree of amplification.

Gotta think of something here. Okay. Come on. He’s got some me in him. Do something with that. Maybe even if 2JS can stand anything, the Jed in him can’t.

What’s my own Room 101? I wondered. What am I most afraid of? Blood loss, maybe. Bleeding. But I’d gotten over that. So had he, probably. Death? He was obviously over that too. Being open, being exposed, watching my mind crumble from inside?

“Listen,” I said in English, “Jed? Old buddy? Old frenemy? I know you’re in there.”

He clenched his face tighter. He was definitely lucid, even if the critters had Swiss-cheesed his innards.

“Come on,” I said. My voice was hoarsing out. “Remember playing Go with Marena in the harvest-gold Boogie Van? Remember when we drove from Boulder to Panama City with No Way and Sylvia and Sylvania in that old Thunderbird without stopping and whenever we got pulled over we’d have to quick dump the coke through that hole under the gas pedal and CB ahead for more? You don’t want to just delete all that, do you?”

No answer. Hmm. Maybe that stuff wasn’t really that great.

“Okay. Remember when Sylvania said she wanted to sleep with you? And you were just like, whoa, okay, great? What about that skittles game when you clobbered Gata Kamsky five times in a row and he couldn’t deal with it? You know, it’s you getting killed, not just 2 Jeweled Schmuck. Remember when you got a whole mouthful of saccharine? Remember when Stan took you to that black-light poster store in Salt Lake and it blew your little mind? You know how you thought your chess clock was an owl face and how it had all those different expressions at different points in the game? Like how when the game started it looked all startled and when you were both around the three-hour mark it looked slit-eyed and weary or wary or whatever, or then when it would look like it was winking at one side or the other? What about making the Story of the Invisible Knight on your old plastic roll-up set? Remember the first time you slept out in the shed on the milpa with your father? Remember the story of Old Monkey and Young Monkey?”

I shadowed his eyes with my hand and peered deep into the left one, down past the blood-flecked dark brown iris into the ragged pupil.

“Come on. You really want to kill me too? You want to take me with you? Please. Jed. Get 2JS to cool it.”

Was there a sign of just a little bit of an inner struggle there or was I just imagining it?

“You know, everything’s going to be wrecked and it’s all your fault,” I said. “Our fault, I mean, but, you know, I’m gonna try to make it better. For us, right? Well, right, I know that’s corny, but really, I’m going to live for you, too, I promise, not in a stupid way, in a real way. I’m serious. Anyway, what about your whole culture thing? Remember that? Save the culture, right? Which is 2JS’s culture, too, by the way.”

I thought there was something down in the dark well, like little flecks of gold leaf in hazelnut liqueur.

Or maybe I was just imagining it. “Who’s running things in there?” I asked. “Come on. Take over. I know you’re tougher than that.”

2 Jeweled Skull was gasping, something scraping deep down in his chest, like a stick over rough stone.

“Come on, something’s happening, right? Something struggling to get out. Come on, come on.”

I thought another worm was coming out of his nose and grabbed it, but it fell apart, it was just a lymph bubble. A big bead of blood swelled up under his eye and popped into a drip, and another was forming on the caruncle of his other eye, and one in each nostril and a big bubble of mucusy blood inflated in his mouth. I turned and grabbed the teaser by his thinning pigtail. What’s going on? I asked. He gave a humiliative no-excuses-sir gesture, the closest thing he could do to a shrug, and pressed his chest down onto the floor. You incompetent sicko moron, I thought, 2JS’s going to die, he’s dying without telling us anything, and there’s just nothing else for it.

2JS’s face was freezing into this blank truculence.

2JS out on the mat. I held his head in my hands and opened his mouth.

Okay, okay, I thought. No absolute despair. The only thing to do is get yourself into that box of jelly with all the bugs and drugs and all the available information, hope that Marena and the Chocula gang can dig me out with some degree of me still left in my skull, and try to figure it out on that end.

Except you won’t be able to do it, will you? Koh really didn’t tell you anything. You know a little, but not enough.

Maybe with the J Machine working full-time, I thought.

Right.

It might take decades of computer searches to come up with the key. Even if you could really do it that way. Which I doubted. It was like everything was still encrypted through an array of NSA proprietary algorithms. At that point ciphers really do become unbreakable. Anyway, I knew enough to know that whatever Koh had been doing with that move, it wasn’t something you could figure out. It was a secret rule, not a strategy. It was like you were playing chess with someone who didn’t know that a pawn can turn into a queen on the back rank. Somehow she’d turned that runner into the equivalent of a queen, and it was according to some scheme nobody seemed to know.

If only, if only, if only this stuff were some simple secret, like, sure, there’s such and such an asteroid at such and such a place and if you don’t blast it it’s going to getcha. But it just wasn’t simple, Blanche, it was this whole field of study, a whole branch of chaos and probability theory and all this other stuff that I wasn’t even enough of a mathematician to identify.