Free The Sacrifice Game by Brian D’Amato Page A

lived experience, human, animal, and probably, now, even artificial, against that infinity-times-infinity of oblivion, you’d have to live, love, and lose a trillion times over even to glimpse how—
    “Are you okay?” Marena asked.
    “I’m fine.”
    “You were going to ask me about Tony.”
    “Okay, what about Tony?”
    “What about him?”
    “Are you and he having a thing?”
    “No.” She looked at me. I looked at she. Her eyes looked like she was—except, fuck, I thought, I really can’t tell, can I? Accursed Oriental inscrutability.
    “Are you having a thing with anybody else?”
    “That’s another question.”
    “Oh, come on.”
    “What are you, my mother?”
    “Look—”
    “Okay, fine. No. Nobody.”
    Naturally, I tried to watch for tells, but I couldn’t see anything one way or the other. Damn, I thought. I’m at a big disadvantage here. I’d always had a little issue with facial expressions. When I was six I found a sheet in my Nephi K–12 folder—which was in a filing cabinet with a four-digit combination lock, as though that was going to hold me up for more than two minutes—that said I had “PTSD presenting as pervasive developmental disorder.” That is, savant skills without IQ loss, but with defects of emotional affect. It’s not autism, but it presents like it, as they say. So, for instance, you know how most kids get flash cards with words and numbers on them? I got cards with smiling or frowning or whatever faces on them, so that I could learn emotions. I couldn’t even tell whether she was happy or sad just by looking at her. Telling whether she was lying or not would be like reading page 100 of a book while it’s still on the shelf in the bookstore, in stretch wrap, and in Arabic.
    “You said you were getting married to some jerk,” I said.
    “Nope. As of now, Octy is out.” Octy? I wondered. Who the hell is that, Emperor Octavian? Dr. Octopus? No, don’t ask and use up a question.
    “Okay, my turn,” she said.
    “Right.”
    “What did you do that’s making you feel so different?” she asked.
    “Well, there’s, there’s that long shot on—”
    “Okay, but why the hesitation just now?”
    “Asking about the hesitation is another question already.”
    “Oh, for fuck’s sake.”
    “Well—”
    “Just—look, you have to answer the whole thing, you know, whole truth, not bits and pieces. Right?”
    “Okay, fine.” Pause. “I just went very, very long on the corn futures and I’m—look, the reason I’m not talking about it is I feel a bit guilty, uh . . .”
    “Now you feel guilty?”
    “Yes.”
    “And yet you’re relieved.”
    “Well, yeah.”
    “Hmm. Apparent paradox.”
    “No, it’s, like—look, I said, I’m making a ton of cash but the longs, that is, some of the stuff I’m doing is going to cause some hardship, I mean, in fact, there are going to be more famine deaths than there are already, and of course I’m just getting on the bandwagon, but I still feel really guilty about it.” All true, I thought. “Okay?”
    “Well . . . that’s not the kind of thing I’m going to chew you out about, I mean, I work for Lindsay Warren, for God’s sake, I’m going to hell in a Hummer.”
    “Well, thanks,” I said. “That’s it.”
    “Okay.”
    “Okay,” I said. “What’s happening with Ix Ruinas?”
    “Sorry,” she said, “that’s a fourth question.”
    “Oh, for God’s sake, come on, we’re adults, and, you know, we’re leveling with each other.”
    “Sorry.”
    “Okay, let’s each agree to add a question.”
    “I’ll tell you what, I’ll give you the answer if you come back to work for us.”
    “On what?”
    “On Neo-Teo. It’ll be
the
art-and-life-and-everything work of the next century. It’ll be fucking
Rome
.”
    “Well, that’s great,” I said—I didn’t want to say, “Yeah, but the Warren Corporation makes
Caligula
look like
Heidi
,” or some other forcedly snippy thing—“but you’re the