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.
Gee, that’s comforting.
Not. Nope.
I couldn’t hold my breath any longer and I let it out but it barely even bubbled out into this shit that was now the consistency of warm yogurt as the polymer chains linked up and twined around me. Around my foot, where they’d poured in the hardener, it was already like solid clay.
I’ve had it, I’ve had it.
THUB-bub. THUB-bub.
I could tell there was something different about my thinking, even under the chorus of panic it was slower but also clearer, like I’d had a massive dose of THC. I’ve had it, that’s it, that’s it, that’s it. That’s what it is like. This is what it is. This is the big one. Meet the Void. I couldn’t feel tears but I could feel the swelling behind my eyes. Something clicked in my stomach and I was sinking into an endless gray vacuum tube, let me out, it’s time, I thought, I’m ready, I knew it had all already happened. Ix had been eaten by the jungle, Pedro de Alvarado had come and the People had died, atom bombs thrummed through the stone, Marena and I had been born and she’d given up and gone away and died and they’d all gone away, they weren’t going to come for me, no one was ever going to come for me, I was just spinning out into the graphite stars and no one would ever remember. Looosing meeeee. Packed in fuzz. Big cotton fuzz. Somewhere I realized my hands were pounding on the lid and I was biting the stone. I’d forgotten something, something important. What the hell was it? Something green, maybe? Something window.
THUB-bub
THUB-bub
Are you getting up, Mr. Wolf? It’s twelve o’clock. I got rhythm, I got myugaaallllummmaorm. Thub. Aerror. Aearror. Bub bub. I died. I dead. Nn. Died. A. Bub.
Auriooonium. Raoiony oiny onny ooon oon oon.
Aorny oon oon. bub. Oun ou
THREE
The Remains of an Ancient Sovereign at Rest upon His Bier
Discovered at Aguateca by Graf von Stepanwald
Curious Antiquities of British Honduras
By Subscription Lambeth • 1831
(80)
The first thing I saw was a red dot on an indigo field.
“Please focus on the red dot,” a bonesetterly-I mean, doctorly-female voice said.
I did.
“Please follow the dot,” the voice said. The dot slid up, down, to the left-I mean, right-and then to the left.
“That’s good,” the woman said. Her name wasn’t coming through, but I knew who it was: It was the project’s head doctor. Right. And I knew where I was. Well, not exactly where. But I mean I knew that I was in the twenty-first century, and in some modern facility, a dimly lit, medium-sized room with scents of Phisohex and latex and some, but not all, other components of That Hospital Smell. Definitely not a hospital, though, I thought. There were at least several well-washed but not recently washed bodies in the microatmosphere, but no smells of ejected foul liquids, foul semiliquids, and foul solids, or that special cleaner for what they call an “appliance.” So more like a small clinic or a corporate or school nurse’s office. Hmm. Somewhere nearby a pink-noise generator was generating pink noise. Something about the sound, or lack of other sounds, or lack of certain types of echoes, or something,
