Life Blood---XXVIII---Page No 102



When we reached the parking lot, several more Army thugs
were waiting, grown-ups now, khaki shirts and dense mustaches,
the regulation G-2 sunglasses even though it was still dark, with
9mm automatics in holsters at their belt. I took one look at them
and I think I blacked out. Steve and I were about to "disappear,"
and possibly Sarah too. Probably in another hour or two. My
tattered mind finally just slipped away.
Soon afterward, I sensed myself being transported in a large
vehicle, and after that I was being carried, up, up, as though I
were floating into the coming dawn. When I regained
consciousness, I realized I was standing in a rainstorm near a
small stone building. A dozen Army men were huddled inside,
shielding their cigarettes from the blowing rain while they guarded
a row of olive-green bassinets. Around me, censers were spewing
copal smoke into the soggy air.
I became aware of the cooling sensation of the fresh rain
across my face, and wondered if it might clear some of the toad
venom (surely that was what it was) from my brain. Maybe it was
working. Instead of seeing vivid colors everywhere, I was abruptly
experiencing a hyper acute clarity of every sensation. The stones
beneath my bare feet were becoming so articulated, I felt as
though I could number every granule, every crystal, every atom.
The paintings and carvings on the lintel above the door to the
stone room—I recognized it as where I'd spent the first night—
sparkled, leapt out at me.
"Stand there on the edge of the platform," Alex Goddard
commanded, urging me forward. It was only then I realized we'd come up the back steps of the pyramid, where the G-2 men had parked their black Land Rovers, unnoticed and ready.
Looking down at the crowd of people gathered in the square, I
realized they couldn't really see much of what was going on atop
the pyramid. To them it was just a cloud of copal smoke and foggy
rain. Although the sun was starting to brighten the east, the only
real light still came from the torches stationed around the plaza.
Then like a ghost materializing out of the mist, Marcelina
moved up the steep front steps, leading a line of Maya mothers
from the clinic—I counted twelve—each carrying her newborn, the





"special" baby she would give back to Kukulkan, perhaps the way
Abraham of the Old Testament offered up his son Isaac in
sacrifice to Jehovah. It was a sight I shall never forget, the
sadness but also the unmistakable reverence in their eyes. I
wanted to yell at them to run, to take Sarah's votive babies and
disappear into the forest, but I didn't have the words.
        Next the women arrayed themselves in a line across the front
of the pyramid, facing not the crowd below, but toward Alex
Goddard and me. Then, holding out a jade-handled obsidian
knife, he walked down the line, allowing each woman to touch her
forehead against its flint blade. I assumed each one believed it
was the instrument that would take her child's life, ceremonially
sending it back to the Maya Otherworld whence it came. Had he
drugged them too, I fleetingly wondered, hypnotized them or
given them some potion to prevent them from comprehending
what was really going on?
I kept remembering . . . a hundred other insane episodes of immortal yearning leading to a mass "transport" to some other "plane." This, I thought, must be what it was like in the jungles of Jonestown that death-filled morning. And Alex Goddard was their "Jim Jones," the spiritual leader of the moral travesty he'd
imposed upon the lost village of Baalum.
I was going to stop it, somehow. By God, I was. I stared at the
women and felt so sad at the sight of the hand-woven blankets
they held their babies in, primary greens and reds and blues
lovingly woven into shimmering patterns that mirrored the
symbols across the sides of the stone room. Their faces,
especially their eyes, were transcendent in a kind of chiaroscuro
of darkest blacks and purest whites, as though all their humanity
had been caught by their blankets and shawls, surely created for
this ultimate moment. And the mother of Tz'ac Tzotz was there,
carrying him, the baby I'd so wanted to hold one last time.
        Next Alex Goddard emerged from the stone room bearing a
basket filled with sheets of white bark-paper. He approached
Tz'ac Tzotz's mother, then took a wide section of the paper and
secured it around her face with a silk cord, covering her vision.
Down the line, one after another, he carefully blindfolded the
women, while they stood passively, some crying—from joy or
sorrow, I could not tell. Finally, at the last, he also covered
Marcelina's face.
So she's not supposed to know what's really happening.
Nobody's supposed to know except him, and me. And, of course,

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