Cancel. Cancel. Step Five. Alligator Root handed me the Big Cup.
It was a thinned version of the hardener. If everything worked, it would spread through me and react with the solution as it spread into me through my skin and lungs. A thin skin had formed on the surface. I poked through it and drank the rest in two quick drafts like I’d practiced. Ghac yuk. It was thinned with honeyed pulque but it was still just a total bitter disgusto-sting. Ghastly. Just don’t barf, I thought, just don’t barf, just don’t barf. Do! Not! Barf!!! ’Gator handed me another cup of pulque and practically forced it down my throat to wash the goop down. I got spit all over his hand but he got me back together and he helped me lean back into the casket. I sank onto the sand cushions, settling an arm-length below the rim, still gagging, struggling to keep the stuff down. It was like cold chrome bocce balls were growing in my esophagus. I dry-swallowed a few times and it was like the balls supercooled and I was all numb inside, just a shell of feeling.
Whoa, it’s really comfy in here, I thought, it really did feel like a womb must feel. The solution had filled it up faster than I’d thought and was flowing over the rim. It smelled worse than the courts of Xibalba, though. I wished I could have popped my nose along with my ears. A shot of cold ran down my throat into my groin, and I got a flash from when I was in the Warren Hospital for Special Diseases when I was ten and they gave me total anesthesia, and I tried to stay awake and then realized I had to just dive into the big zero and see if there had been any water in the pool and I just let myself slide, and that was okay and I was still here, dammit. Six. I signed again. Gator bent down and pushed the knife into each of the two big bear-hide sandbags that counterweighted the lid. I could see a bit of the dry silver jets of fine sand, but I couldn’t see any motion in the lid at first. It’s stuck, I thought, it’s going to crash down and shatter and the whole thing’s fucked. But then the shadow grew slightly, it was coming down, gently, like an eyelid. I squinted up at it. It was convex on the lower side to push any air bubbles out of the surface of the liquid. For Keeps, the lid said. Except that was still too weak. It exuded this total eternal stay-putness no matter what.
Alligator Root took the sandbag out from under my head and it sank back, just floating on top of the liquid. It was getting to about the consistency of homogenized milk. The dark lid grew over me like the earth looming under a nocturnal skydiver. No parachute. I repositioned the wax-sealed box on my chest and folded my left arm over it. There were two things in it, Koh’s folded feather-cloth Game-mat and a doeskin book filled with my detailed and probably redundant notes on the Game. I was actually pretty proud of the notes, I figured that with them and the drugs a quick study like Marena would learn the Game overnight. She’ll handle it, I thought, she’ll play and beat the Smokers of Randomness, and in her first play, she’ll see past the rim.
I held my right hand on Hun Xoc’s forehead until the lid was about six finger-widths from the rim, and then pulled it back into the box. We got a last look in each other’s eyes. Before the stone came between us I turned away, to the left, to looked at Koh’s profile in the last swallow of light. She was still great-looking and all shiny in her coat of liquid wax. Her head was floating a little on the gel. It’s a shame we didn’t get to bring your brain back, too, I thought. I held her hand. The silence grew in volume but in my head it was like I could still hear them singing that counting rhyme with the parts of the deer. Relax, I thought. Safe. Safer than walking around waiting to die. I settled into the eternal subterranean cool. I felt like a bottle of great old Burgundy. We’ll gel no brine before it’s time. My leg was cold, but not shivery cold, and then it was gone, like it had passed directly to frostbite. The colloid was hydrogen bonding to the walls of my capillaries.
This isn’t so bad, I thought. It wouldn’t be too bad if I just stayed down here forever. Totally separate, out of my old time, out of my new time. Civilizations would flower and seed and rot and I wouldn’t have to sweat any of it. And eventually in a nanofraction of that universeful of time I’d be born, I’d be a little boy, I’d grow up and have friends and enemies and do stuff and meet Marena and come right back here and meet Koh and not be able to protect her, and the universe would spiral out to unimaginable emptiness again while I stayed all cozy right here dreaming in infinite slow motion, free of the clock like a demon on a beam of light. Maybe it was okay, I was finally where I was always going to be and Koh and I could finally rest for real, just be in ourselves, never have to go and do any goddamned things again. Rolled round in Earth’s diurnal course.
Okay, don’t forget to wink, I thought. Supposedly there was this French aristocrat who was executed during the Terror who told some of his friends to be sure to watch his execution, and he made sure the headsman was going to take his head out of the basket and hold it up to the crowd. And the idea was that if he was still living and conscious, he’d wink, just as an experiment. And his head did wink. So what I meant was not to wink, exactly, but to see whether I could still think or whatever after my heart had stopped, and for how long. It was just something I was interested in. A last little treat.
My heart was already bumping kind of hard, THUB-bub, THUB-bub. Settle down, you’re doomed, I thought. I sucked in a deep breath and had to stifle a cough from the dust from the cave-in and the smoke of the mint-and-musk torch sputtering in the reduced oxygen.
Cortez and Pisarro and DeLanda can trash this place all they want, I thought. I’ll rebuild it, and I’ll rebuild it better, Ocelot will rise, the Lords of the Mat can crack the skull-ball again out into the next age, the blue.
(79)
PANIC
PANIC
PANIC
Wait.
Hun Xoc and Alligator Root were still watching. Just to make sure everything was sealed up okay. They weren’t even going to bleed themselves to death until they were sure. The lid grew slowly, like the shadow of my hand when I used to cast it on the ceiling of my room with a flashlight when I couldn’t sleep. I used to bring it down as slowly as possible, like the claw of God. This won’t work, I thought, everything will have been for nothing, nobody’ll figure out the move, and everything’s over, by Christmas Eve of 2012 all the world and people and kids and art and giraffes and diseases and pyramids and, like, life itself, it’ll all just be a cloud of hot space dust.
I squinted up at the lid closing over me. There were about two finger-widths of space left. The gel was stinging my eye and the light diffusing through it faded, and I felt the pressure of the lid through the colloid, it had closed without even the vibration of a click through the stone, just with a stopping of everything like the stopping of breath, and it was dark. Sealed. Vacuum packed.
I found a last bubble of air, at the edge of the crack. I wheezed in a breath and the gel seeped in too. I clenched my teeth. My last air. Bye-bye, air. Always liked ya. My head was floating against the stone of the lid, turning sideways. I couldn’t feel anything below my chest, except for my nonexistent foot. There was an itch on it that I tried to scratch and couldn’t and I dropped into a wave of claustrophobia and tried to wriggle to get it, just this one itch, come on, tranqs not working, I thought, I should be getting happy, and then I was just blind suffocopanic, total insanity, what a tomato hornworm feels as it’s being eaten from inside by wasp larvae.
I could feel my heartbeat getting irregular. Calm down, du calme, calm down. You’ll live again, I thought. All your memories and everything. It’s all right, don’t worry, there, there, it’s all right. You’ll be just like any old e-mail, copied and read there almost before you’re even out of here, you’ll be just fine, just great, just fine No. Nope. No such luck. Wishful thinking. Even if they get you back, consciousness is nontransferable. You’re dying, plain as fuck. That big old yawning chasm opened inside me again, just that total terror of certain emptiness that there’s no way to describe, just that certainty of emptiness, it was just too much, but I was still here, I had to get out No, don’t think that way, everything you did, everything you learned, the world’s keeping all that, it’s living on, on and on.