In the Courts of the Sun (5 page)

T’ozal is one of the four hundred and forty villages the Guatemalan government now officially lists as destroyed. The final count names thirty-eight people as confirmed dead and twenty-six disappeared. I figure it’s about 90 percent certain that my parents would have been tortured by what they call the
submarino,
suffocation in water, and probably kept in these tall barrels they have where all you can do is squat
(todo por mi culpa)
and look up at the sky. One witness said that my father died when they were trying to make him talk by putting an insecticide-soaked hood over his head. Whether this was what killed him, or whether it even really happened, is still not clear. My mother, supposedly, was, like most of the women, forced to drink gasoline. Their bodies were almost certainly dumped in one of the eight known trench grave sites in Alta Verapaz, but so far the Center of Maya Documentation and Investigation hasn’t matched any remains to my DNA.
Retardedly enough, it took me years to start wondering whether my parents might have sent me away because they guessed there’d be trouble. Maybe it was just my mother’s idea. She’d used the Game before to find out whether there was any current danger from the G2, that is, the secret police. Maybe she saw something.
A week later the nuns got an order to ship me and four other kids from T’ozal—including “No Way” José, who became my oldest remaining friend—to
la capital,
that is, Ciudad Guate, where, eventually, we’d be sent on to relocation camps. I barely remember the Catholic orphanage because I escaped the first day, although it wasn’t much of an escape since I just walked out the door. I found my way across town to a much better-funded children’s hospital called AYUDA that was administered by the LDS, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, or, as they don’t like to be called, the Mormons. There was a rumor they were sending kids from there to the U.S., which at the time I visualized as a garden of earthly delights with french-fry bushes and rivers of dry-ice-cold Squirt. There was a hugely tall woman with bright hair at the back door who hesitated for a minute and then, against regulations, let me in. I only saw her a couple times after that and didn’t learn her name, but I still think about her when I see that shade of chrome-yellow hair. Later, when I was listed as a probable orphan, they transferred me to something called the LDS Paradise Valley Plantation School, outside of town.
It took a long time for me to get any idea of what had happened to my family, and in fact I still don’t know. There wasn’t any one moment when I knew my parents were dead, just an endlessly swelling blob of revolting acceptance. Saturdays at the PVPS were free and relatives, if any, were allowed to visit with inmates in a back classroom, and every Saturday morning I’d borrow a math book from the upper grades and go in there and just lurk in the back in the cool hug of two pea-green cinder-block walls and a pea-green linoleum floor and just keep an eye on things. Nobody ever showed up trying to find me.
La mara,
the gang, made fun of me about it but I was already getting oblivious. I still have trouble with Saturdays, in fact; I get antsy and catch myself looking out the window a lot or rechecking my e-mail ten times an hour.
I was at PVPS for nearly two years before I got into their Native American Placement Program—which is partly a refugee-adoption foundation—and, just after my sixteenth tz’olk’in nameday, that is, when I was eleven, a family called the Ødegârds, with a little financial help from the Church, flew me to Utah.
To give the devils their due, the LDS actually do a lot of good things for Native Americans. For instance, they helped the Zuni win the biggest settlement against the U.S. government that any Indian nation has ever gotten. And they run all these charities all over Latin America, and this is all despite the fact that the Church was still officially white supremacist until 1978. They believe that some Native Americans—the light-skinned ones—are descendants of a Hebrew patriarch named Nephi, who’s a main character in the Book of Mormon. But who cares what their motives are, right? They looked after me and many others. I couldn’t believe how rich the Ødegârds were. Running water was one thing, but they even had an unlimited supply of
angelitos
, that is, marshmallows, in both the semisolid and the semiliquid forms. I kind of thought the U.S. had conquered us and I was a captive being raised in a luxurious prison in the imperial capital. It took a long time for me to learn that by U.S. standards they were lower middle class. I mean, these are people who say
supper
instead of
dinner
and even
dinner
instead of
lunch,
and who have a wall plaque in the kitchen with a recipe for “Baby Jesus’s Butter ’n’ Love Sugar Cookies,” with ingredients like “a dollop of understanding” and “a pinch of discipline.” And out there they’re considered intellectuals. So it’s taken some work for me to become the jaded sophisto I pretend to be today. Still, Mr. and Mrs. Ø were nice, or rather they wanted to be nice, but they had to put so much energy into retaining their delusions that there wasn’t a lot of time for each individual child. Also, my stepbrothers were horrible—deprived of mainstream TV and video games, they’d relax by torturing small animals—but of course the parents thought they were God’s chosen cherubs.
Needless to say, I never converted to the LDS. Or got “helped to understand,” as they put it. That is, made to realize that one had been a Latter-Day Saint all along. According to the program they weren’t supposed to do that to you until you were a little bit older, and by then I was beginning to realize that baptizing your long-dead ancestors and laying on hands and wearing Masonic long johns wasn’t entirely normal behavior, even in El Norte. They even took me to a Catholic church once or twice, but it didn’t have the right smell or the right saints in it or offering bottles all over the floor, like in Guatemala, so I said don’t bother. They were cool enough about it, in their way. In fact I still call Ma and Pa Ø every once in a while, even though I can’t bear them. When I ask about my stepbrothers they’ve always each just sired another brace of twins. What with the combination of ideology and fertility drugs down there, they multiply like brine shrimp.
As an alternative to becoming a living saint, I got steered onto the extracurricular-activities track. I started with the Chess Team and the Monopoly Team. The folks at Nephi K-12 forced me to play the cello, the orchestra’s most humiliating instrument. I wasn’t good. I thought music was math dumbed down. I hid in the library a lot, taking mental pictures of dictionary pages for later retrieval. I learned to read English by memorizing H. P. Love-craft, and now people say I talk that way. I politely refused to bob for apples at the school Halloween party—well, actually I dashed crying out of the multipurpose room—because I thought I was about to get waterboarded. I got involved with the Programming Team, the Computer Games Team, and the Strategy Games Team. You’d think that someone on that many teams would have had to talk with the other students, but I didn’t. Most of the time I got to stay out of real PE because of the hæmo thing. Instead they made me and the other cripples sit on mats and pretend to stretch and lift weights. The only sport I was ever really good at was target shooting. The family were all gun nuts and I went along with it. I joined the Math Team, even though I thought it was silly to think of math as a team sport. It’s like having a masturbation team. One time my math coach gave me a stack of topology quizzes and was surprised that I aced them. He and another teacher tested me a bit and said I was a calendrical savant and that I calculated each date at the time, unlike some who memorized them, although I could have just told them that myself. It’s not really a marketable skill, though. It’s something about one in ten thousand people can do, like being able to lick your own genitals. Around that same time I got involved with the Tropical Fish Team. I built my first few tank systems out of garden hoses and old Tupperware. I decided that when I grew up I’d be a professional chess player. I wore my skateboard helmet on the bus. I decided that when I grew up I’d be a professional Sonic the Hedgehog player. I appeared, as “J,” in a study in
Medical Hypotheses
called “Hyper-numeric Savant Skills in Juvenile PTS Patients.” I decided that instead of learning to play the cello, I’d learn to
build
cellos. I listened to the Cocteau Twins instead of Mötley Crüe. I made my first thousand buying and selling Magic cards. I acquired a hillbilly nickname. I did Ecstasy alone.
New treatments got my hæmophilia under control, but in the meantime I’d been diagnosed as having “posttraumatic-stress-disorder-related emotional-development issues,” along with “sporadic eidetic memory.” Supposedly PTSD can present like Asperger’s. But I wasn’t autistic in all the usual ways, like for instance, I liked learning new languages and I didn’t mind “exploratory placement in novel pedagogic situations.” One doctor in Salt Lake told me that PTSD was a blanket term that didn’t really cover whatever I had, or didn’t have. I figured that meant I wouldn’t get any scholarship money out of it.
In September of 1988 an anthropology grad student from BYU, Brigham Young University, came to speak at our junior high school and redirected my life. She showed videos of old kivas and Zuni corn dances, and just as I was falling asleep she started showing Maya pyramids, and I sat up. I got my nerve up and asked some questions. She asked me to tell where I was from. I told the class. A few days later they let me and the other redskins out of school to go to a Native American Placement Program scholarship conference that she was chairing in Salt Lake. It was in a gym at the high school and included things like flint knapping and freestyle face painting with Liquitex acrylics. A student teacher introduced me to another professor named June Sexton and when I told her where I came from she started talking to me in pretty good Yukateko, which really blew me away. At some point she asked whether I’d ever played
el juego del mundo,
and when I didn’t know what she meant she said it was also called
“alka’ kalab’eeraj,”
the “Sacrifice Game,” which was close to a word my mother had used. I said yes and she brought out an Altoids box full of curiously red tz’ite-tree seeds. I couldn’t play at first because I was having something that I might identify as nostalgia, or the poor second cousin of nostalgia, but when I got it back together we played through a few dry rounds. She said a mathematician colleague of hers was working on a study of Maya divination and would love it if I could teach him my version. Sure, I said, thinking quickly, but I couldn’t do it after school hours. Anything to get out of PE.
Incredibly, a week later a green van from a place called FARMS—the Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies—actually did pick me up right before lunch period and drove me north into the mountains, to BYU in Provo. June babe led me into a forgettable building and introduced me to Professor Taro Mora. He seemed to me like a wise old sage, like Pat Morita in the
Karate Kid
saga, even though he was only forty. His office was totally plain, with a wall of books and journals on Go—which is that Asian board game played with the black and white pebbles—and another wall of stuff on probability and game theory. He worked in catastrophe modeling. He said he’d collected versions of the Sacrifice Game from all over Central America, but that the variant I’d learned was one that only a couple of his informants had even heard of and that differed from the usual game in a few important ways. First of all, in most places the client just comes in and says, “Please ask the skull/seeds this for me,” and the sun adder does everything else. But the way my mother did it, the client played
against
the adder. Second, she’d made a board in the shape of a cross, while almost all other adders just sorted the seeds into a single row of piles on a flat cloth. The third and most tantalizing thing was simply that I’d learned the Game from a woman.
This was almost unheard of. Throughout 98 percent of the Maya region, adders were invariably men. Taro said he wasn’t an anthropologist but that he guessed my mother might have represented a survival of some Ch’olan tradition of female secret societies that had otherwise disappeared soon after the Conquest.
Taro met with me twice a week until the end of the semester, when he went back to New Haven. By that time I’d found out that he was the head researcher of something called the “Parcheesi Project” and that he and the graduate students in his lab had a theory that all or almost all modern games are descended from a single ancestor, an ur-game. They’d started out trying to reconstruct it by collecting tribal games in Central Asia, but pretty soon the research had led them to the Americas.
A lot of anthropologists at the time tore down the idea. And it did sound a bit like another Thor Von Danekovsky cult-archaeology crock-pot contact theory. But Taro was really a mathematician and didn’t care. He was a pure researcher and one of only a few people working on the overlap between catastrophe theory, the physics of complex systems, and recombinant game theory, or RGT. RGT is basically the theory of games like chess and Go, where the pieces form different units of force in space. Economists and generals and whoever have been using classical game theory—which is mainly about gambling—since World War Two, but applied RGT only really got going in the 1990s. Taro’s idea was that using a reconstructed version of the Sacrifice Game as a human interface could significantly improve performance in strategic modeling, like simulations of economics, of battles, or maybe even of weather. He’d had some experimental success with it before he even met me, but he said he wanted even more spectacular results before he published anything. His lab had worked up dozens of different reconstructions of what the original game board might have looked like. We all put in hundreds of hours, both before and after I went to college, trying to dope it out. But the thing that kept stopping us was that even if we’d been sure about the design of the board, there was no way to know what the exact counting protocol had been in the old days or how many seeds or pebbles or whatever they’d used. So Taro decided to try another approach. He brought in brain scanners.