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president of Guatemala at the time—all took home millions. My guess is that Uncle Xac was hoping to go wide with the list at some point, either just to focus some attention on the Soreanos, who were a big local family whom everybody hated, or to try to discredit the generals in the next election, which shows you how naïve he was.

On Christmas Day of 1982 I had another episode of pneumonia following blood loss and my parents took me to the Sisters of Charity Hospital at San Cristóbal. Supposedly I was ranting and raving. There was one of the younger nuns, Sor Elena, who kind of looked after me and kept asking how I was doing, and I thought she was really great. I’m sure I’ve thought about her every day since then, maybe even every hour, at least when I’m not in one of my fugue states. Todo por mi culpa, all my fault. Four days after I got there, on la fiesta de la Sagrada Familia , December 29, 1982, Sor Elena told me that government troops had surrounded T’ozal and were interrogating the Cofradias, that is, “cargo bearers” or “charge holders,” who are a kind of rotating committee of village elders. Later I found out more. It had been a market day, when almost everybody had come into the village. A white-and-blue Iroquois helicopter with loudspeakers materialized and circled around and around like a big kingfisher, telling everyone to assemble in the plaza for a town meeting, where they were going to give out assignments for the next year’s civilian patrols. By this time the soldiers had already marched in on two barely used dirt roads. According to my friend José Xiloch—or, as we called him, No Way—who saw some of it from a distance, hardly anybody tried to run or hide. Most of the soldiers were half-Maya recruits from Suchitepéquez, but there were two tall men with sandy hair and USMC-issue boots along with them, and the squad was commanded, unusually, by a major, Antonio García Torres.

Only two people got shot to death in the plaza that day. My parents and six of their friends got loaded into a truck and taken to the army base at Co-ban. That evening the troops burned down the community center with eleven of the more resistant citizens alive inside it, which at that time was the terror tactic of choice. It was also the last time anyone I know of saw either of my brothers, although it’s not clear what happened to them. Much later I found out that my sister had eventually made it to a refugee settlement in Mexico. The troops spent two days forcing the citizens to level the village and then loaded them onto trucks for relocation.

T’ozal is one of the four hundred and forty villages the Guatemalan government now officially lists as destroyed. The final count names thirty-eight people as confirmed dead and twenty-six disappeared. I figure it’s about 90 percent certain that my parents would have been tortured by what they call the submarino, suffocation in water, and probably kept in these tall barrels they have where all you can do is squat (todo por mi culpa) and look up at the sky. One witness said that my father died when they were trying to make him talk by putting an insecticide-soaked hood over his head. Whether this was what killed him, or whether it even really happened, is still not clear. My mother, supposedly, was, like most of the women, forced to drink gasoline. Their bodies were almost certainly dumped in one of the eight known trench grave sites in Alta Verapaz, but so far the Center of Maya Documentation and Investigation hasn’t matched any remains to my DNA.

Retardedly enough, it took me years to start wondering whether my parents might have sent me away because they guessed there’d be trouble. Maybe it was just my mother’s idea. She’d used the Game before to find out whether there was any current danger from the G2, that is, the secret police. Maybe she saw something.

A week later the nuns got an order to ship me and four other kids from T’ozal—including “No