“Help help, help help!” he ventriloquized. “How did my body ever grow so big?” He forced his right thumb in through the neck and wagged it through the mouth like a tongue. His left hand pretended to turn the reluctant head around, pulled it down to his crotch, and forced it into sucking motions. He howled. He’d gotten two other fingers of his right hand up behind the shell eyeballs and pushed them out from inside, making them bounce bug-eyed. Meanwhile his left hand had found a bowl of white atole and as he pretended to come he shrieked, blasted the gruel up over himself in a milky shower, pushed the head away, and shook himself off like a dog.
Charming, I thought. Japanese game-show humor. Next vee have zee socolate-mousse wrestlink “Six sproutings, fourteen witherings,” Koh said.
She was at August 12, 2005.
“Next fifteen rainings, eighteen crackings; next,
Six sparkings, twenty-seven darkenings.”
The beat divided again into sixteenths-about the length of a p’ip’il, an eyeblink-and the branches of possibility spread out at such a steep curve that they almost headed into reverse, like the umbrella profile of a ceiba tree with branches that curve out almost to the horizontal, but never quite droop. I could see there was some equation there. If only I had room to write it down in the margin of my brain, I thought. My fingers were aching from setting and resetting the seeds, but it didn’t affect the performance of my autopiloted hands. Koh moved her sapphire right through the equivalent of 2007 and out toward the rim. I thrashed along after her. She was down to two quarries. The sun and moon and the two Venuses flashed their ellipses over the board, and it churned underneath them motokaleidoscopically like heaps of floating rhinestones going down a drain, although really I could have been either seeing it or just imagining it. The catchers closed in on the last runner. Koh came to the threshold at 2012.
(62)
The runner was surrounded at the northwest corner of the board, cut off at the edge of the world. It was like Koh and her avatar were checkmated, there was nowhere for the sapphire to escape to. Oh, shit, I thought, that’s really it, the end, the end, the end, the end. I looked up at Koh. She was still studying the board. I saw movement at the nose-edge of my right eye and bent down to focus on the board again. Koh was definitely seeing something, she’d made another move in her head, but I couldn’t imagine where. I tried to see what she was seeing on the board but it was all murky and distorted like the lens in my eye was melting. Koh picked up her sapphire and moved it toward the center of the board, like the runner was somehow jumping over the mass of catchers.
Something touched her shoulder and she looked up. The Porcupine Clown had gotten all the way up to our level and was leaning over Lady Koh herself, flirting with her like he was trying to lead her down into the zocalo. Was he supposed to do that? I wondered. Wait a beat, I thought. Koh stood up and I thought she was laughing but then I thought maybe something was actually wrong, the Porcupine was hugging her, and she wasn’t just being a good sport in the act, she was really struggling. Where were the guards? I wondered, but of course it had looked like just part of his act. I jumped over the table at them but I was too groggy and the Porcupine was too fast, he was already over the lip of the sanctuary and rolling down the steps with his arms and legs wrapped around Lady Koh. I lurched down after them but my Ahab leg slipped out from under me and I slid down into the arms of one of the guards. Attendants were bouncing down the steps below me and for a beat I thought Koh had rolled down all the way, but as I screamed for them to get me down, DOWN!!! Porcupine had fetched up on the tenth step below us, caught by a ball of belayed guards, and I saw some of Koh’s robe in the knot. I couldn’t hear anything over cataracts of blood through my ears, but the guard got me down to them and I sort of slid down into the cluster, held by a couple of the roped guards while a few more of Koh’s attendants rolled down, leaving spatters of blood on the white stairs. Some of her other women and a couple of attendants were coughing and gagging like they had rocks stuck in their throats. I got my hands on Koh’s crushed brittle headdress and threw it aside.
I thought for a beat that she’d smeared her face paint, because the white parts of her skin were a purple I couldn’t imagine was real. Below her the three bloods who’d caught Porcupine were sprawling back on the edge of the platform, gasping for breath and choking. Another one had gotten his quill costume off and was trying to ask him the eternal question, who’d sent him, but the clown’s tan skin was already turning to blueberry-black and there was a huge maroon erection popping out from under his raggedy underwear. His chest was pocked with little sticks.
I got Koh’s head into my hands. She had a surprised, disgusted look. She said, “You-”
“It’s all right,” I said stupidly in English, “you’re going to be great. Right?”
She didn’t answer. Foamy snot was running out of her nose and mouth and her open eyes were getting that matte finish. There were little sticks stuck to her face and chest and I picked one out of the underside of her chin, automatically holding it by the side. It was smooth and tiger-striped, a spine taken from a living scorpionfish, with a neurotoxin that kills by suffocation. They’d been woven into Porcupine’s suit, mixed in with the hard-oiled black feathers that mimicked quills, and when he’d hugged her some of them had gone into his own flesh too.
“Get water in her NOW!!!” I screamed in Chol. I got my hands around the back of her head and blew air into her mouth, but there was just this whiffling blob of mucus in there. I turned her over and tried to Heimlich her but she wasn’t responding, she was just a lump. I started hitting her but there was nothing. You’re dreaming, this shit’s lethal at half this dose. I yelled for someone to help me get the fucking quills out but they didn’t know what I meant because I was speaking English again and then they were afraid to touch her because they weren’t allowed. Alligator Root appeared and he and I pulled them out. Each time they left this blob of thick-looking blood. An attendant had gotten a pot of water and we tried to get her to drink, but there was nothing, and I made them find an enema gourd and we forced some down her throat, but she wasn’t really swallowing. I screamed to Alligator Root that there must be some antidote, that he had to run and get the surgeons, but of course there was no antidote. If they really knew one thing around here it was poisons. I got on top of her and started stupidly trying to massage her heart back to life, crashing down on her and breaking her ribs like I’d forgotten how to do from No Way’s survival books, but I just rolled off the stair and nearly tumbled down after the others, it was like we were on the steep slope of an icy mountain with barely any friction keeping us in place and it seemed for a beat like the whole knot of guards and attendants was going to come off its moorings and go rolling down the saw stairs, but one of the bloods got to me and tied me to a sacrificial rope with a scarf-he didn’t want the rope to touch my skin-and I got so upset at him for messing with me and not doing something for Koh that I elbowed him in the face and he skidded off down the blades of the stairs. I’m a jerk, I thought. I grabbed the enema gourd and sprayed water in her face. No response. I grabbed her puffy blue tongue and pulled on it. Nothing. Okay, still not too late. Miracle worker, right?