Night of the Jaguar (12 page)

“Fuck Occam and fuck his razor,” said Paz, and then, “Wait a second, hold that thought!”

A tiny clock had just rung its notional alarm in Paz’s nonexistent mind, and he got up and snatched the cover from the grill, revealing racks of glistening, steaming ribs at the precise moment at which they were perfectly done.

“Let’s eat,” said Paz, and everyone applauded.

During the actual dinner, Lola turned the conversation artfully away from cosmological themes, drawing Beth out about her work, which was a study of the lives of Miami street prostitutes, or girls who let boys kiss them for money, as they explained to Amelia, and herself supplied numerous amusing anecdotes about life as a neuropsych resident in the
emergency room, her current duty, and also about going through med school with Zwick, his complete incompetence at any healing task, apparently a man who had never once found a vein on the first try, and often not on the twelfth either. Zwick took this good-naturedly enough, asserting that he’d only become a doctor to be able to do fiendish experiments on human beings and had no guilt about it at all.

They drank nearly half a gallon of the Spanish white, and after they cleared away and served dessert, Paz brought out a bottle of Havana Club añejo rum, and they sipped off that for a while until the child got cranky and had to be dragged off to bed.

“I’m scared to go to sleep, Daddy,” she said when he’d got her under the covers at last.

“You’re so tired you’ll be asleep before you know it.”

“Yes, but what if the dream animal comes back?”

“It won’t. It’s bothering another little girl tonight.”

“Who?”

“A naughty girl, probably. Not like you.”

“But what if another animal comes?”

“Well, in that case, would you like to borrow my
enkangue
? No dream animals are going to mess with that.”

“Uh-huh. Abuela made that for you, didn’t she. To protect you from the monsters.”

“That’s right.”

“Mommy says it’s just superstition.”

“Mommy’s entitled to her opinion,” said Paz blandly and slipped the charm on its thong over his head. He tied it carefully to the bedpost. “Don’t open it, okay?”

“What will happen?”

“It might stop working. Now, good night.”

“I want a story.” She got one and held out for just three pages of
Charlotte’s Web
.

Back on the patio, Paz slipped an Ibrahim Ferrer CD into the machine and stood listening to the mellow voice singing an old bolero, music from the great age of
son,
the 1940s, his mother’s music. It was velvet
dark now, insects buzzing in the trees, jasmine floating in the air, the only light coming from citronella candles in yellow glass jars on the table. He put an arm around his wife’s shoulders and led her into a close dance. From a distance, from out in the dark yard, he heard the sound of Zwick and Beth having an argument.

“What’s all that about?” he asked into her ear.

“She’s drunk and belligerent. He doesn’t respect her mind enough. He doesn’t think people who want to have serious careers should have kids. She was looking at Amy like she wanted to kidnap her. The biological clock is running down on old Beth, and a tenure-track associate professorship don’t seem to be filling the void, nor do brilliant heartless dudes like Bobby Zwick, the poor bitch.”

“You’ve been there.”

“I have. With guys like that, too.” She gave him a hard squeeze.

“What I get for being a dummy.”

“You’re not a dummy, dummy.”

“But not as smart as Zwick.”

“No, but you’re cuter. I’m not sure
anyone
is as smart as Zwick. Although that line about Whitehead threw him a little. You never fail to amaze me.”

The sounds of argument faded, succeeded by some weeping, some softer talk; then, the faint creak and rattle of a rope hammock.

“Uh-oh, do you think they’re doing it back there, in our hammock?” Paz asked.

“I hope so. They can warm it up for us. God, when was the last time we did it in the yard?”

“Not since Amelia learned about doorknobs.”

“Go have children,” Lola said.

Zwick wandered back and sat at the table and poured himself a couple of fingers of old rum. Paz and Lola joined him.

“Where’s the girlfriend?” Lola asked. “Strangled?”

“Passed out in the hammock. It’s all your fault, Paz, you and your daiquiris and your añejo and your ontological speculations. Did you know that physics is a patriarchal conspiracy to promote a dominant worldview? As is medicine.”

“Well, when you solve the mystery of consciousness it won’t matter,” said Paz. “You can recode everyone’s brain.”

Zwick laughed, a little more elaborately than the comment deserved. “Yeah, and what if that changes physics? Listen, you want me to tell you the secret of the universe?” He mimed a paranoid looking over both shoulders. “Don’t tell anyone. Okay, so let’s say we have these vast pillars of physics, relativity and quantum electrodynamics, and they’re both as elaborately confirmed as anything in the world. Maybe
too
elaborately confirmed, out to a part per billion or more. Now, you’re a detective, right? What if I told you that every time there’s been a physical breakthrough, we’ve found a piece of abstract math that’s just tailor-made to fit the new concept? Einstein
just happened
to find Riemann geometry to fit general relativity. And the quantum boys
just happened
to find matrix algebra and tensors. And when they first proposed string theory, it
just happened
to fit Euler’s beta-function, a two-hundred-year-old piece of math that had never been used for anything before. And Calabi and Yau’s canoodling with hyper-dimensional geometries
just happened
to describe how the extra dimensions required by string theory are curled up. Not to mention the fact that a whole bunch of universal constants
just happen
to lead to a universe where conscious life evolves, and if one of them was changed even a tiny bit there’d be no stars, no planets, no life. What would you say to a case like that?”

“I’d look for a frame-up. Or it might just be a slam dunk.”

“Yes! But
which
? That’s the killer question. Now let’s say they confirm string theory physically. Let’s say it’s Hawking’s conjecture that black holes radiate outside their event horizons, and we find a black hole small enough to study and string theory predicts that radiation exactly. Then we know it’s true, hallelujah! Physics has the theory of everything at last, except…except what if we made it all up? Observation is a slender reed when you come right down to it. Thousands of astronomers observed the skies and fit their observations into the Ptolemaic system, making loops and littler loops to save the appearances until the whole thing collapsed, but string theory can’t collapse because it’s a theory of everything, everything is already accounted for,
and confirmed by a zillion observations. But observation itself is a product of consciousness, and
we don’t know what that is
!”

“Why you’re a doc now.”

“Why I’m a doc. So let’s say I’m wrong, John Searle and all of them are wrong, consciousness is not a little trick of the brain, let’s say it’s its own thing, a basic constituent of the universe on a par with space-time and mass, that only occasionally comes to rest in brains but has its own life, maybe down in the Calabi-Yau spaces or out in some connecting universe. That’s your substance dualism, yes? You and Descartes. Then you could have your gods and demons, hey? Your miracles.”

“But you don’t believe that,” said Paz. His throat was suddenly dry, and he poured himself a little of the fruit juice they had laid out for the child.

“Nah, this is just drunk talk. But let’s say it
is
true we did discover the secret of consciousness, just like we discovered the secret of the physical world, and then there would be these two new pillars of knowledge, the exterior and the interior worlds reaching up to the heavens, and then some Einstein would come along and figure out how they locked together. Then what? We might hear a buzzer, like
ennnnnhk
! And across the sky in humongous letters, GAME OVER. Or we might learn not only how to observe the quantum world but to actually change it. Actually manipulate the intimate fabric of space-time and mass-energy!”

“This is not going to happen soon, is it?” asked Lola. “Because I just dropped off a big load of dry cleaning.”

Zwick snatched up a candle and held it under his chin, and in a horror-movie voice intoned, “We would be like GODS! Mwah-ha-ha-ha-ha!”

And they all laughed, but each was a little uneasy in the laughter, each for a different reason.

J
enny tossed a broken banana into the blender to keep company with the celery, the beets, the spirulina protein powder, and the psyllium husk extract and goosed the HI button. Through the glass top she watched the smoothie come into being, a pinkish gray vortex. Making the midmorning smoothie for Rupert was one of Jenny’s tasks, along with feeding the birds, the cats, the boyfriend, and recently Moie, the Indian; or the Runiya, as she had to remember to call him. But Moie didn’t eat, which worried her, although she herself did not think much of the cuisine at FPA. Rupert thought that it was wrong to consume animals raised for food, and thought that they should set a good diet-for-a-small-planet example, and also establish solidarity with the indigenous people of the rain forests. Rupert got Professor Cooksey to question Moie about his diet, and how to prepare it, but Moie didn’t know about any foodstuffs but meat (in which he included fish, which in turn included turtles, reptiles, and waterfowl) and seemed somewhat affronted to be asked about “women’s things.” Meat and women’s things were how he divided edible substances.

She was supposed to watch him as well, which was not difficult, much easier than minding a kid, for he was in general docile and gentle. In the mornings, when she did her chores, and during the times, as now, when she had to prep and serve food, she parked him in front of the big
TV in the living room. They had cable, and she usually punched up a nature program for him. He seemed to like these, and he would also sit solemnly with her while she took in
One Life to Live,
her favorite show, although here she had to explain what was going on, because it was kind of hard to get into the plot if you hadn’t been watching for a long time.

She poured the smoothie into the special smoky green glass that Rupert liked to drink it from, placed it on a serving tray, added Luna’s herbal tea and Geli’s coffee and Professor Cooksey’s regular tea, extra-strong with milk, a plate of chocolate chip cookies and a Sprite for herself, and brought it into the office. They were all talking about Moie and what to do about him now that there was this murder of the old Cuban guy, and she was sort of interested in that, so after she’d placed the tray on the table and everybody had their stuff, she sat down in a chair away from the meeting table and listened. That was cool according to Rupert because she wasn’t to think of herself as anything but a full member of the community and not just, like, a maid or anything. Which she mostly thought. She had been an actual maid at one time and so she knew the difference.

Jenny thought that coming into a meeting in the middle of it was a little like coming into the middle of
One Life to Live,
it took a while to figure out what was going on, but you knew the characters, so in a little bit it made sense. Luna was all about using Moie to make a big stink about the people trying to cut down his forest. She had a friend who was a TV producer on Channel Four, and she thought she could get a feature made, and also some of the national enviro groups might pick it up. It was a great story, how this little guy had traveled all that way from South America in a canoe. Geli said, unfortunately he’s not a Cuban, and when Luna asked what that meant, Geli said, he’s illegal, he’s in the country illegally, and if he comes out in public the INS will arrest him and he’ll be stuck in Crome Avenue behind a wire with all the Haitians, and then Luna said, oh, shit, I didn’t think of that, and then added, Rupert, you should talk to your congressman, because Rupert gave a lot of money to this congressman, Jenny always forgot his name, something like Woolite, and he sometimes got him to do stuff, like make a speech about something the FPA was hot on, in the Congress. But Rupert said,
maybe that’s not such a good idea at this point until we have clarified about this murder. And he asked Professor Cooksey what he thought, was Moie capable of killing someone that way?

“Well, he says no and I believe him, up to a point,” Cooksey answered, after a considered moment. “He says Jaguar killed the man, which gives me pause.”

“What do you mean?” asked Luna.

“I mean it sounds like this ‘jaguar’ is a kind of god to him, so it might be a figure of speech, as we would say when someone of whom we disapproved met with a bad end, ‘God punished him.’ On the other hand, it could be a case of shape-shifting.”

“Which is…?” said Luna.

“It’s a form of ritual. I’ve observed it any number of times in the field. A shaman takes some drug, usually a form of
ayahuasca,
which is an extract of the
Banisteria
vine together with other plant materials, and goes into a trance, during which his animal tutelary spirit takes possession of him and confers special powers. These can be things like superhuman strength, the ability to see in the dark, the ability to travel in spirit form, and so on. It’s no longer him, d’you see, but the animal spirit. And in that case, our Moie could possibly have committed a murder and have no real knowledge of the crime.”

Jenny noticed that Rupert’s face had assumed the dreamy half smile that it wore when he had heard something he didn’t want to hear and wished that someone would do something to make it go away. “That’s unfortunate, then,” he said. “Obviously, that greatly reduces, or rather eliminates, the possibility of him being of any value to us as an organization. In fact, I’m not sure it wouldn’t be the best thing, all things considered, for us to inform the police.”

Luna’s face had become pale under her tan, and her eyes had become all pinched looking, which Jenny knew was a signal that something bad was going to happen, and so it did.

“The
police
! Rupert, what the
fuck
are you talking about? What the hell have we been fighting against besides the kind of shit that’s going down in the Puxto, of which Moie is living evidence?
Living evidence!
And you want to lock him up because some Cuban scumbag got himself killed?”

In his most maddeningly reasonable voice, Rupert replied, “Of course I don’t
want
to lock him up, but giving, ah, refuge, to someone who may be a serious felon would compromise the principles of our organization and open us to, ah, the possibilities of criminal prosecution. You can see that, surely?”

That was a big mistake, Jenny thought: when Luna got that pinched look what you wanted to do was either agree with her or get the fuck out of town for, like, three days.

“No,” said Luna, “what I see is that, in fact, this organization has no principles at all, except making some rich people feel good about their money. Oh,
I
don’t buy tropical hardwoods and
I
use shade-grown fair trade coffee in my three-thousand-dollar espresso machine, give me a fucking good citizen medal! And so let me make it really, really clear. If anyone calls the cops on that man, I personally am off the reservation on it. I will blow the whistle. I will let every enviro in the world know what went down, who he is, and what’s happening. I will call every TV station in town. There’ll be TV crews in permanent residence outside that gate, and you can explain why the preservation of the rain forest is important but not quite important enough for Rupert Zenger to take any risk at all of even being suspected of doing an illegal act. I don’t care if you kick us out, I don’t care if me and Scotty have to sleep in our fucking van and live on rice and beans—”

“We could make a tape,” said Geli Vargos into the angry speech; Luna stopped her rant, and they all stared at Geli. “We could tape his story, just him talking into the camera, with a voice-over, and then we could add subtitles translating what he said. And send out copies to the media. That would expose the Consuela company and put pressure on the Colombians to stop them from destroying a national park, especially since the Puxto got set up by contributions from enviro organizations in the first place.”

Rupert said, “I don’t see how that solves our problem. A tape like that is meaningless to the media unless they have confirmation that the man is what and who he says he is. A little brown man with a bowl haircut and tattoos could be anyone. So we would have to identify ourselves in any case, present him for interviews….”

“No, it’s a good idea,” said Luna. “If we do it right, it’ll cause a sen
sation. He’ll be a public figure, and it won’t matter if he’s an illegal immigrant.”

“Why won’t it, Luna?” Rupert asked.

“Because if we do it right, a mass mailing of tapes, by the time the INS gets around to it, it’ll already have happened. We’ll have the interviews already. I could offer Sunny Riddle an exclusive on it, the epic voyage from the Orinoco. And after that, hell, let them take him and stick him in the jail. Let them repatriate him. He doesn’t
want
asylum, for God’s sake. He just wants his forest intact. And we could get a book out of it, too, we could get a grant, send a team back to Colombia, Moie in his natural habitat. Jesus, it would put this organization on the map!”

“I see we’re no longer concerned,” offered Professor Cooksey in a dry tone, “that this fellow might be in the habit of carving people up while in a drug-induced trance?”

“Actually,” said Rupert, “we have no real evidence of that, do we? It’s just, ah, speculation, as you admit yourself. And Geli’s right. And Luna. It could be a big breakthrough for us.” He turned away from Cooksey and regarded the two women with his benign brown eyes. “Now, how shall we arrange this taping? Perhaps a more anonymous location would be best, away from the property.” He took a large bite of chocolate chip cookie and awaited their response. Professor Cooksey turned his head and looked Jenny full in the face, as if he knew just what she was thinking.

Jenny got up and walked out, not bothering to collect the snack tray or ask if anyone wanted anything, as she usually did. She rarely felt anger, because what was the use of getting angry, anyway? But she had not liked what she’d heard. She thought Professor Cooksey could have made an objection, or she could have herself, although she never spoke up when organization business was discussed. The conversation had reminded her unpleasantly of other conversations she had heard, between social workers and foster parents, about her. They always spoke over her head, as if she wasn’t there, deciding what to do about her
problem
. Of course, Moie wasn’t actually there, but they were treating him the same way, as a hassle and not as a real person who might have something to say about what was going to happen to him. Professor Cooksey was the one who spoke most often to Moie,
knowing the language and all, but he mostly talked about plants and the kind of weird stuff he did in his home in the rain forest, and about gods and spirits.

She walked through the courtyard and down a garden path to the pool. There, as she had expected, was Moie, gazing morosely at the waterfall and humming to himself. She squatted down next to him and asked him how he was doing.

He said in Runiya, “When I first came to the land of the dead, I thought you
wai’ichuranan
could move the stars in the sky and I was very afraid. Cooksey says that isn’t so. But this is nearly as bad. You make a little world here, as in this pond, as in your garden, but it is all wrong, all
siwix,
and it hurts my belly to see it. The creatures are alive, but the thing is dead. Have you never once listened to what a plant or animal has to say?”

She nodded and smiled. “Yeah. It’s pretty cool. See, it’s like all natural. The pump runs off solar. The sun, see”—she pointed to the sky—“it makes the water go around. Sun, waterfall, see?”

“You are a most strange being,” said Moie. “If I could speak to you properly, I would examine you and find out why you are barren, even though the Monkey Boy drags you into his hammock very often. I should ask Cooksey about this, although perhaps it is part of being dead that you make few children. Also I wonder where your elders are. I have heard some tribes eat their elders and so perhaps you do this as well. Again, I will ask Cooksey.”

“Cooksey’s having a meeting in the office,” she said, recognizing the spoken name. “We can go see him later. You want to come watch my program with me?
One Life to Live?
Jessica and John? And Starr?” She mimed turning on a TV and sketched a screen in the air. She backed away from him making come-hither gestures. A few minutes later they were settled in front of the screen, she in a worn but cozy rattan armchair, he on his haunches leaning against the sofa.

Moie watches the stolen ghosts of the dead people in the spirit box. They seem to be living the ordinary lives of dead people, although it is clear to him that the box is ruled by demons. Sometimes the dead
people disappear and a demon appears and shouts and makes noises. As now, he sees a demon come out of a bottle and shout at a dead woman, who smiles at it. The demon flies around her hut making everything into metal, like an axe blade, with sun shining from the furnishings, although they are inside the hut and there is no sun. Then the demon returns to the bottle and the woman speaks of how she loves the demon. Her daughters will never have children, Moie knows. Now a dead person tries to poison a demon dog, but it doesn’t work. The dead person places poison in two bowls, but the demon dog picks the wrong one, and eats, and doesn’t die but instead talks to the man and tells him how foolish he has been—he should have put the poison in both bowls! It’s clear that the
wai’ichuranan
are not as clever as the Runiya when it comes to killing demons. Now some flashing that he can’t understand, one scene after another so fast he doesn’t know what’s happening, then come the humming, squeaking sounds that always presage the return of the spirits.

The Firehair Woman is talking, as she always does when the spirits are showing in the box. Moie thinks this is part of her worship. He himself can catch spirits in a box, if they are causing trouble in the village, for example, or if there is a bad person around, like a witch or murderer, then he would steal the man’s spirit and lock it away, so his body could more easily be burnt up. But no Runiya would think of talking to them. Only really stupid or bad people leave their spirits behind when they go above the moon, and what can be learned from talking to these? He wonders if these spirits are her ancestors. That would at least make sense, for the Runiya speak to their ancestors all the time, and for this purpose they keep their ancestors’ dried hearts in beautifully decorated pouches hung from the rafters of their longhouses. He wonders if there are dried hearts in this spirit box. Once, the first time she showed him the spirit box, he tried to pry the back of it off with his knife, but she became excited and pulled at his arm. He understood that looking into the spirit box was
siwix
for her, and so he didn’t do it.