Jaguar Night, ahau and k’alomte of the nine underwaterworlds, lounged in a high referee’s chair woven from the ribs of whale sharks. He was all gooey with baby oil and laden with bracelets and anklets of glistening human eyeballs and a belt of severed hands endlessly clasping each other. His cape was sewn of thousands of woven eyelids, their lashes rippling over the surface like a thin layer of scalloped fur, and he had barbels on his mucous-slick face, like a catfish. White chunks of raw porous bone protruded from his wrists and his brow ridge and his knees and his back, and fat round ticks and white leeches crawled over his irregularly sited pseudopods, leaving interlocking slime-trails. Blue fungi bloomed in the crevices of his groin. He was sick and decayed and in obvious pain, but in his case his condition just increased his strength, he lived on the power of his own diseases, like a sea urchin digesting the mites on its skin. Beautiful little girls and boys climbed over him, oiling him, scraping and licking his pustules. They weren’t Xibalbans. As far as I could tell, they were living humans from the middle-world. Maybe the Xibalbans snatched them every so often. Or they’d captured some a long time ago and kept them here to breed. A few of the boys and girls lay in gnawed pieces on big plates. A giant fat hairless food dog with a peg-toothy grin rolled on the amber floor, chewing a child’s ear. Four-hundred-scores of husks of lunar fanged rabbits imploded overhead and rained bloody fur like rose petals into the Domus Auria, and orange twilight filtered flickering through a lattice in the floor, the captive sun struggling in the dark below. “My greatest greatfather-greatmother,” I said.
“I know you from somewhere,” he mewed. “Somewhere later on.”
I repeated the salutation.
You don’t fool me, he said, you’re not 2 Jeweled Skull. His voice was a nonvoice, like something on an old Moog synthesizer. He peeled a dark-red strip off this little Scab Boy he had next to him-it was a kid who’d evidently been sanded down a few days ago and allowed to crust over until now-and chewed it up like a tortilla chip.
No, I said, I’m not, I thought you might want his skin so I kept it fresh for you. I didn’t think my voice sounded too convincing. Jaguar Night gestured and two of his preparators came out, carefully cut the skin’s stitches, and shucked it off me. I hung on to my last gift box. The preparators sewed 2JS’s skin onto a big howler monkey, like it was a mannequin, and let it hop around. The crowd went wild. I was naked and getting a serious case of that Maidenform-dream vulnerable feeling.
Why haven’t you brought me anything? Jaguar Night asked.
I brought you a cat and a boy, I said, and Where are they? he asked.
Your ambassadors ate them on the way here, I said.
I don’t believe you, he said.
I cracked open my last box, unrolled the bundle in front of me, and fanned out four hundred of the largest and most perfect whole quetzal skins. I made him an offertory gesture. It’s hard to explain how valuable those things were, but they were like Leonardo drawings. If you worked it out in terms of man-hours or whatever, what I’d brought would be worth the Ixian equivalent of between thirty and forty million 2012 dollars. Still, their main attraction wasn’t the cost. We’d chosen them because we figured they were hard to get down here, even more than fresh chewing tobacco.
One of the boys slid a plate under the green fan and climbed up to the Lord’s mangler-hand. He took one of the skins and raised it to stroke his pustulated cheek, enjoying the soft pressure of the feathers against his boils. I guessed it was okay to assume they were accepted. Meanwhile, I’d noticed the largely defleshed name-soul of 2JS seated in the row of ghouls on the reviewing stand, smirking at me. Like everyone who died and went to Xibalba, he was aging in reverse, and despite his skeletality he already looked a little younger than when I’d seen him last.
“Hmm, look who seems to be seated below the salt,” I said.
“2JS has been given the position of Chief Convivitor,” Jaguar Night said. He meant that 2JS mixed up the blood and burning turpentine they drank as toasts to each other.
“Ooh, I’m impressed,” I said. “They really gave you a platinum parachute, didn’t they? You’ve done really well for yourself. That’s like being head urinal attendant at the Wilshire Grand.”
“Laugh while you still have a trachea,” 2JS said.
“Hey, I’m going back and you’re staying here in Tabascoenemastan.”
Enough, I thought. I was being rude to my primary host. I turned back to Jaguar Night.
A question, please, I said.
He made a “whatever” gesture.
We thought you might know where Lady Koh’s uay has gotten to, I said as casually as possible.
We ate it, he said.
Nonsense, I said.
You’re right, we didn’t, he said. She stopped by, but she left two nights ago.
I need to ask her something, I said.
You should have had plenty of suns already, he said.
That’s true, I said.
All right, he said, just give us your own skin, and we’ll see you get to her.
I can’t do that, I said. I didn’t even bother to say that I needed to get back. He knew that anyway, he was just giving me a hard time.
Too late, he said.
I know you can, I said, I know how strong you next to me are.
I won’t, he said.
Then I challenge your champion to a hipball match, I said. It was my last-resort prepared sentence.
He looked at me with an eye a like plucked-out rabbit’s eye floating in a Petri dish of upscale shampoo. He sighed through his pleuroceles and, pensively, scratched his tentacles with a testic-that is, rather, he stenched his tensicles with-I mean, he tested his scratchsicles with a tenticrotch-never mind.
All right, he screaked. Then field five balls. And if you win we’ll show you the way to Lady Koh.