Night of the Jaguar (14 page)

“What’re you doing?” she said, and it felt like her ears were stuffed, the sound of the words seemed stuck in her head. Her stomach felt tense, as with fear, but it might have just been the corn dog, she thought that Rupert was right, she shouldn’t eat crap like that, and there was something wrong with her eyes, too, a kind of flickering of the light, and she looked up at the ceiling fixture to see if maybe it was that. She had to be careful of flickering lights because bad fluorescents sometimes set off a fit, but these were concealed spots casting a dim rain-forest type of glow against the ceiling, and she realized that it wasn’t the lights but really
everything
that was flickering, and the angles of the walls seemed a little off and the glass of the cage was sort of bending like the surface of wind-blown water. She took a deep breath now because she found that she had forgotten to breathe.

She tried to blink away the distortions, but they got worse and there was a low hum that was coming in a weird way from the words that Moie was chanting, and the hum got lower and lower until it was almost a scraping sound. She looked around to see if there was anyone she could ask what was going on, but the lights had somehow dimmed way down, and it was as if she and Moie and the cage were the only things left in the world, the corridors leading out in either direction were full of gray nothing.

When she looked at the cage again, Moie was inside it, squatting on his haunches. The animal was sitting, too, with its face six inches from his. They were motionless in profile, as if carved on the wall of a jungle temple. She touched the glass, and it was just glass, slick and slightly warm. She tapped on it twice with her knuckles, softly, to check if it was still really solid. Slowly, Moie turned his head to face her. She saw that his eyes were no longer their former deep and mild brown but green-gold, with vertical slit pupils. She let out a little cry and then a cool breeze seemed to flow upward through her body, and she tasted the familiar tang of something like sweet ashes, and felt the dread of the epileptic aura.

When she came to, a middle-aged woman with a kind, competent face was wiping her mouth. Jenny was on her side on the hard floor, with
something soft stuffed under her head, which throbbed painfully. The good news was that nothing had been jammed into her mouth, and since she’d just gone to the toilet, she hadn’t pissed herself. Her vision cleared, and she saw Moie standing with Kevin and a cop, who was talking into his radio and some zookeepers and people cruising by, with the moms telling the kids not to stare while staring themselves. The kind woman helped her to her feet and asked her if she needed anything. Jenny said she was fine, and she said the same to the policeman, to the worried representative of the zoo, and to the paramedics who came dashing up as she was leaving the building, although she was not at all fine. She ached in all her limbs and wanted to go to sleep and not wake up.

In the truck, Kevin said, “I thought you were taking those pills.”

“I stopped. They made me sleepy and nauseous.”

“Sleepy is better than throwing fits.”

“Seizures. They don’t call them fits anymore. I don’t know, I guess I was hoping I was cured. Sometimes it goes away when you get older. I only had that one since we hooked up.”

“One is too many. Jesus, man, you looked all gray. I thought you were going to croak on me. Why did it happen? You said there had to be strobes to make it start.”

“Yeah, but other stuff does it, too.”

“Like what?”

“You’ll laugh.”

“No, I won’t. Tell me.”

“Moie did…something, some kind of chant and everything got crazy and, um, he walked through the glass. He was in the cage with the jaguar.”

“In it? How the fuck’d he do that. The access doors are locked.”

“I don’t know, man, he just
was.
It was like he was talking to the jaguar, and when I tapped on the glass, he turned around and he had, like, jaguar eyes.”

Kevin laughed. “Oh, shit, man, are you fucked up!”

“You said you wouldn’t laugh. I’m telling you what I saw.”

“Oh, fuck, you didn’t see shit. You had a fit and then you imagined it.”

“I did not,” she said uncertainly.

“Yeah, you did,” said Kevin, “because stuff like that only happens in horror flicks, or when you’re taking acid and shit. You imagined it. Hey, ask him! Moie,
mi hermano,
did you change into a jaguar back there? No? See, you made it up.”

This exchange made her even more tired than she usually was after such an episode, and she drifted into sleep, from which she was awakened by a change in the motion of the truck.

She looked out the window. They were driving slowly down a street of luxurious houses in the Spanish style, set deeply in yards full of lush tropical plantings. The street signs were white-painted concrete markers set upon the sidewalks.

“Why are we in the Gables?” she asked.

“Just checking something out. That big job coming up on our right is where Juan Xavier Calderón lives.”

“What is he, in a band?”

“No, dummy, he’s one of the three Consuela Holdings guys your little man here told us about. There used to be four, ha-ha.”

“So why do you want to see his house?”

Kevin ignored the question. “Be nice to live like that, wouldn’t it? That’s what you get for fucking up the world. I bet he’s got a pool back there, and a tennis court and shit.”

“Okay, you saw it,” she said nervously. “Could we go home now? I got a bad headache.”

“There’s always some goddamn thing wrong with you, you know that?” said Kevin. He punched up the radio volume and threw the van roughly into gear. They drove away in a cloud of exhaust and heavy metal.

Moie wonders why Monkey Boy always makes the car shout at him when he drives. He has noticed that when Firehair Woman drives, the car speaks more softly, with a gentler humming. Perhaps it is to keep him awake, as Monkey Boy’s
aryu’t
is so shrunken that he is barely human anymore. Firehair Woman is trying to make him human but does not know how. If Moie could speak her language, he could give her some advice on these matters. And there are powders he has that could help. The
woman’s
aryu’t
is rich and thick, but uncultivated, like a yam plant in an abandoned garden. Although he does not speak their language, Moie has the keen ears of a hunter and has heard the name Calderón, which he knows. He will be able to find this house again, and the man who lives in it.

Professor Cooksey went for a walk after supper when the weather suited, as now. In the tropical evenings he would wander through the little streets in back of Ingraham Highway, and along the Coral Gables Waterway, inhaling the balmy blossom-scented air and the dank odor of that broad canal, and wondering whether this would be the evening he would throw himself into it and die. A sense of propriety more than the scraps of religious faith he retained kept him always just at the brink of action, although he had many a night stared for a long time past the toes of his sandals down at the slick black skin of the water. He did not think that he was actually depressed, a word that in any case he despised, as he despised the grotesque self-involvement of most Americans, because he did his work, he was alert, he tried to be kind, he took an interest in the world of nature around him. He thought of it as sadness, or melancholy, and it had a reason.

Despite the suicidal thoughts, these late jaunts almost always produced some animal delight: a little parade of raccoons, a night heron fishing under the canal bank, an opossum in a tree, a roosting macaw, a giant African toad; and often the trilling of a mockingbird overhead. At such moments he would occasionally exclaim and call out to his wife, to share the joy, and recall that she was dead. Sometimes he did not recall this quickly enough and heard her voice in his ear. On those evenings he would scuttle home and drink whiskey, courting oblivion.

No such event occurred on this particular evening, which was only memorable for the observation of a green monkey high up in a palm tree, an escapee from some domestic or commercial zoo. He entered his room in a lighter mood than was normal therefore and was not entirely surprised to find Moie waiting there, squatting in a corner, contemplating the skull of just such a monkey.

“Remarkable,” Cooksey said in Quechua, “I just saw one of those out on the street.”

“Only one?”

“Yes.”

“A lonely thing, then.”

“Yes. It must have escaped from its cage. Or from a large zoo full of monkeys that used to exist some small distance from here; a hurricane blew the place apart and many escaped. The city is full of them.”

Moie placed the skull carefully back in the case from which he had taken it.

“I went to such a place today.”

“So I understand. And how did you like it?”

“I didn’t like it. It was a dead place, even though the animals seemed to be alive. They moved and ate and drank, but they were not all there…it is hard to say what I mean, even in Quechua. It is a
cosmological
difficulty. So Father Tim Perrin always called it.”

He had used the English word and Cooksey smiled. “Yes,
cosmological
difficulties are the worst.”

“Yes. There was a jaguar they had in a glass box. I spoke with her. She had been born in a box and had never killed, and she didn’t even know who she was. It was like a child who has been dropped on its head and afterward can’t speak or see. It was very sad. Then I felt Jaguar stirring in me, and he let me…the word in Runisi is
jana’tsit
. Do you know this word?”

“I do not.”

“No, I’ve seen that you don’t do this. It is a way of going to another place without going on the path that leads to it through this world. In this way I was led to this animal and I spoke to her and told her who she was. But as I was speaking to her, a holy person climbed into the Firehair Woman, and she fell down and shook and white waters flowed from her mouth.”

“You mean Jenny?”

“Yes, Jenny. I didn’t know that
wai’ichuranan
could carry holy ones in this way, but I knew there was something about her that was not dead, and this shows it well.”

Cooksey thought for a moment. “Among us, we say that is a sickness.”

“Of course, but you think you are alive as you are, so that means
nothing. But she didn’t know how to welcome the holy one, so she suffered. Or so it seemed. Did you know there is a plan to steal my spirit and place it with the others, and all the demons, in the spirit box?”

Cooksey suppressed a smile. “Yes, but this is another cosmological difficulty. I will explain. You wish to stop this company from logging your forest, and among the
wai’ichuranan,
who are very many and live in many villages and towns far from Miami, this is how it is done. We have a machine that is like a mirror, but where a mirror holds your reflection only while you are standing in front of it, this machine saves the reflection and can send it through the air to all the spirit boxes, which we call televisions. And it can also remember your speech and say it in your own words to all the
wai’ichuranan
. So you will appear in everyone’s television, and the people, or some people, will be angry at what is being done, and perhaps this will make the company stop what it’s doing. It has nothing to do with your spirit. The television is not a spirit box at all, but only a machine, like this lamp on my desk. There are no witches involved. What you call demons are pictures made by machines. The people you see behind the glass are real people in faraway places, and not stolen spirits.”

“I hear what you say, but it’s hard for me to believe it.”

“Why is it hard?”

“Because the faces of the people in the spirit box, the
television,
are different from the faces of real people, and even different from the faces of many
wai’ichuranan.
They have no…I must use my own language…no
aryu’t
. Having a real spirit inside you. You have it and Jenny has it, and the Hairy Face Man, too, and even the others a little, but not these behind the glass. We say that when a spirit is torn from a human through sorcery it becomes separated from the world, and because of this it is very hungry all the time. It wishes to fill itself up and suck the spirit from living things. It thinks only of itself, how it can grow greater, until it fills the whole world. And when we see such a spirit in the forest, we know it is one and not a real person because this hunger shows on its face. They can’t disguise it, although they can talk in soothing ways. We are not often fooled. And I see the same kinds of faces on the people behind the glass of the
television,
and therefore I say that they are all dead spirits, whatever you say about machines. Tell me, haven’t you ever observed this difference yourself?”

“I have,” Cooksey admitted. “But, with us it is a kind of mask. Don’t you put on masks and paint your faces when you talk to your gods?”

“We do, certainly. But now you say that the television dead people are worshipping gods, where before you said that they were speaking to people far away, as a deer might smear musk on a tree to give a message to other deer. What gods are worshipped in this way?”

“Wealth and fame,” said Cooksey. “Our chief gods, and also sometimes the god of fornication.”

“Of course; you are dead, so you worship the gods of death. I understand. Nevertheless, I can’t go into the spirit box. It would be death for me, and then I would be not Moie, and become happy to live in a zoo, like that poor animal I saw today. I will have to find another way to make the company stop, or, I should say, I will have to wait for Jaguar to find another way.”

“What would that be?”

“How should I know? Am I Jaguar? In any case, I might not be allowed to tell anyone. Jaguar doesn’t want everyone to know his business.”

“I thought you considered us your allies.”

“Yes, I do. I think you want to help, but often magical allies are stupid, especially when they are humans, and even more so when they are dead people. I will have to…there is no word in this language for it; we say,
iwai’chinix,
to make them live in a different way before they can help, and I’m not even sure I can do it, since I am very weak here. But for now, I believe I must leave this place.”