got the feeling Ms. Park was a pretty big deal. The guard gave me a live badge and I clipped it onto my right wrist. I drove in and parked where he’d said. The complex was a menacingly tasteful scattering of low Dryvited buildings in a treesy office park with a giant green sculpture of three linked rings reflecting in a big reniform pond. The main building was six stories, higher than the others. Glass veils parted and I walked into heavily processed air. The big lobby had an overhanging clerestory of conference and exercise rooms and a giant potted Douglas fir with spherical video-display ornaments playing happy faces of Children of Many Lands. A woman greeter with hair greeted me by mispronounced name and steered me in around a sort of atrium that had a Healthy Gourmet Café and a big stone pizza hearth. A cruft of Generation Yuzz techies stroked around us, some on Segways and some on what I guessed were Sleekers.
“It’s up here,” she said with a beckoning motion, like, “Come on, it’ll be fun, you’ll see.”
“Right,” I said. “Thanks.” I squeaked after her. Imagine what it would be like having a job, I thought. Next thing I’d be showering. Just kidding. I shower. Sometimes.
“So Professor Mora tells me you’re one of the Mayans,” she said at me. She pronounced it to rhyme with paeans .
“Uh, Ch’olan Maya, yes,” I said. And by the way, I thought for the ten-to-the-nth time, the plural of Maya is Maya . Mayan is the language group. You speak in May an to the Ma ya about Ma ya stuff.
“I think all that is absolutely fas cinating,” she said. She was tall with a lot of blond wool and, I suppose, pretty in an ovine way.
“It is?” I asked.
“Being from South America and everything.”
“Central America.”
“’Scuse me?”
“We’re not from South America,” I said, “we’re from Central America. Like, north of Panama?”
“Oh, inter- es ting.” She laughed. We went up a ramp to the second floor, past a vacant retro-thirties screening room. “You know what?” Whatsherhair asked. “Two weekends ago I went to an initiation workshop with Halach M’en.”
“Oh?”
“He taught us how to make Mayan dreamcatchers.”
“Oh, great. What do they do?”
“He said the Mayans were very spiritually advanced.”
“We were?”
“We’re here,” she said. She led us into a waiting area with a black floor and green Djinn sofas, like a negative of the scene in 2001 . From there the receptionist took us into a trading-floor-like space with apparently happy workers in heavily personalized glass cubicles and snack-and-coffee stations with little condiment bars and Capresso machines and dwarf Sub-Zeros with notes on them like AMARANTH MILK IN HERE. We passed into a carpeted zone and she peeked around an ajar door. The occupant must have waved, because she guided me in.
Marena Park sat cross-legged on top of her desk, looking at a big green screen in her lap. It was the new trendy kind that can sense its owner’s hands from across the room, because she was drawing something with her finger in the air next to it. She was smaller than she looked in photographs, at least a head shorter than I was, which made her teensy. Her face seemed flatter and more Korean than it had looked all made up, but I actually thought it was more attractive this way, “a face like a full moon,” as they say in The Thousand and One Nights . She was wearing a sort of Issey Miyake pleated gray polyamide in-line skating costume, like she was from a luxurious and athletic future. She held up her one-moment finger. I blinked around the room. There was a wall-inset 125-gallon tank of the new Monsanto glow-flashing oranda goldfish. I tried not to sneer at them visibly. The immune systems on those things are totally for shit; they’re so inbred they get hole-in-the-head septicæmia if you tap on the glass twice. There was a thick bias-cut katsura-wood Go board on the floor next to her desk, with old mulberry
“It’s up here,” she said with a beckoning motion, like, “Come on, it’ll be fun, you’ll see.”
“Right,” I said. “Thanks.” I squeaked after her. Imagine what it would be like having a job, I thought. Next thing I’d be showering. Just kidding. I shower. Sometimes.
“So Professor Mora tells me you’re one of the Mayans,” she said at me. She pronounced it to rhyme with paeans .
“Uh, Ch’olan Maya, yes,” I said. And by the way, I thought for the ten-to-the-nth time, the plural of Maya is Maya . Mayan is the language group. You speak in May an to the Ma ya about Ma ya stuff.
“I think all that is absolutely fas cinating,” she said. She was tall with a lot of blond wool and, I suppose, pretty in an ovine way.
“It is?” I asked.
“Being from South America and everything.”
“Central America.”
“’Scuse me?”
“We’re not from South America,” I said, “we’re from Central America. Like, north of Panama?”
“Oh, inter- es ting.” She laughed. We went up a ramp to the second floor, past a vacant retro-thirties screening room. “You know what?” Whatsherhair asked. “Two weekends ago I went to an initiation workshop with Halach M’en.”
“Oh?”
“He taught us how to make Mayan dreamcatchers.”
“Oh, great. What do they do?”
“He said the Mayans were very spiritually advanced.”
“We were?”
“We’re here,” she said. She led us into a waiting area with a black floor and green Djinn sofas, like a negative of the scene in 2001 . From there the receptionist took us into a trading-floor-like space with apparently happy workers in heavily personalized glass cubicles and snack-and-coffee stations with little condiment bars and Capresso machines and dwarf Sub-Zeros with notes on them like AMARANTH MILK IN HERE. We passed into a carpeted zone and she peeked around an ajar door. The occupant must have waved, because she guided me in.
Marena Park sat cross-legged on top of her desk, looking at a big green screen in her lap. It was the new trendy kind that can sense its owner’s hands from across the room, because she was drawing something with her finger in the air next to it. She was smaller than she looked in photographs, at least a head shorter than I was, which made her teensy. Her face seemed flatter and more Korean than it had looked all made up, but I actually thought it was more attractive this way, “a face like a full moon,” as they say in The Thousand and One Nights . She was wearing a sort of Issey Miyake pleated gray polyamide in-line skating costume, like she was from a luxurious and athletic future. She held up her one-moment finger. I blinked around the room. There was a wall-inset 125-gallon tank of the new Monsanto glow-flashing oranda goldfish. I tried not to sneer at them visibly. The immune systems on those things are totally for shit; they’re so inbred they get hole-in-the-head septicæmia if you tap on the glass twice. There was a thick bias-cut katsura-wood Go board on the floor next to her desk, with old mulberry
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