Night Of The Jaguar

Sixteen

Morales left, but Paz waited in the shade of the tree. After a while, a Florida Power and Light van rolled up and parked across the street. Two men in hard hats and harnesses emerged who, despite this apparatus, did not visibly engage themselves in improving the flow of electricity. Paz waved to them and was ignored. Perhaps they would fool a primitive native of the Orinoco, but he doubted it.

He smoked another cigar and wandered over to the water fountain near the school and drank from it. He hoped that no one called any other police; people nowadays so often did when they observed a grown man hanging around an elementary school. Thinking this, his mind moved to the general phenomenon of men behaving monstrously, and thence to the kidnapped girl, Jenny. Why had they taken her? For information, obviously, but he could not figure out what a girl described by Cooksey as somewhat dim could know that would inspire a bunch of Colombiandrogeros to snatch her from a Miami street, committing a murder in the process. Unless she wasn’t that dim; unless Cooksey was lying about that and other things; unless there were connections between all these ongoing crimes that no one had thought of. In any case, the girl was gone, they’d torture the knowledge, if any, out of her and her broken corpse would go into the Glades or the bay. So convenient, Miami, for disposing of the illegally dead; sad about the girl, but only in principle. He didn’t know her and was no longer obliged to concern himself with such pathetic victims. He strolled back to the tree, noting the arrival of some school buses and a number of cars in the lot, good parents, eager to collect their offspring, Paz himself happy to be in their number for a change.

A growing din from the school building and the brightly colored mob of children burst forth. Some were ushered by teachers into the waiting buses, some ran to the parental cars, flapping garish infant art (Look what I made in school today!) producing general cooing and the rumble of expensive engines. The remainder, bright Miss Milliken their shepherdess, moved in a pack across the lawn to a bench beneath the tree. Amelia spotted him, and he noted with mixed feelings the expressions that flew across the dear face: first surprised delight and then feigned indifference. His darling had discovered cool, it seemed, and was showing a primitive version of the untaught universal reluctance of the young to acknowledge the existence of the parent while among peers. With a pang Paz experienced the start of his destined slide from demigod to hapless jerk.

Miss Milliken chivvied the children into seated rows, sat on the bench, and openedCharlie and the Chocolate Factory. Paz, still something of a detective, noted that his daughter had arranged herself at the extreme end of the seated arc of tots, and that shortly after the revelations at the chocolate factory spilled forth she had slipped off into the shadows of the hanging boughs. He followed her into the heart of the tree.

“He’s not there anymore, baby,” he said.

“How do you know?”

“I just do. Tito went up there a little while ago. Your friend’s gone and I don’t think he’s coming back.”

“Why did he? I mean Tito.”

“Because…Moie…because the police think that Moie may have, I mean he might know something about some crimes and the police want to talk with him real bad. Do you know anywhere else he hangs out?”

“No. What kind of crimes?”

“Bad crimes. Look, we need to talk about this a little bit. What do you say we walk down to El Piave and get some ice cream.”

This was disgraceful. The poor child had a jones for ice cream, the mom doled it out like methadone, and so Daddy could always win a point by playing the genial pusher. She brightened immediately and they walked off, threading through the narrow flower-scented streets of the Grove until they arrived at Commodore Plaza. El Piave, which specialized in homemade Italian gelati, was crowded with after-school business, but Paz and daughter had no trouble getting a seat via the freemasonry of the food service business. Paz had a vanilla soda with coffee ice cream and the girl pigged out on two scoops of cherry vanilla with fudge. The counter guy saw who it was and added, gratis, a tower of whipped cream, several maraschino cherries, and topped it with a paper parasol. Amelia-a foodie princess of Miami -accepted this graciously as her due.

Paz waited for the sugar to drug her into a happy stupor and then said, “Look, I know Moie is your pal, but you need to think about what if he’s really not.”

“He is. He’s nice.”

“He may seem nice, Amy, but let’s face it-you don’t know a lot about him. You say he’s magic, for example. Okay, I believe you, he’s magic. But what kind of magic? You know there’s not just the good kind.”

No response to this; she was looking away from him now, concentrating on carving away at the mound of ice cream, artfully saving the whipped cream and cherries until the last bites. He tried another tack. “You know about Santería, right?”

“Uh-huh. What Abuela does.”

“That’s right. There’s a world we can’t see, and there are spirits that live in that world. Sometimes they help us and sometimes they hurt us, but the thing you have to remember is they’re different from us and dangerous. That’s why Abuela and her friends try to find out what they want so we don’t get caught in their…doings, and maybe get stepped on.”

“By bad spirits?”

“No, baby, it’s not about good and bad. It’s just about power. See, it’s like a bunch of boys playing football on the grass and a little kitten wanders out there and maybe it gets stepped on and squashed. The boys didn’t really mean to do it, but the kitten is still squashed. You had those bad dreams about a jaguar, remember? And I had the same kind of dreams and I think your mom is having those dreams, too, which is why she’s been so upset lately, and-”

“You made them stop with that Santería thing.”

“Right, theenkangue, and I hope Mommy’s got stopped, too. But the thing is, I think Moie was sending those dreams, not him really but a kind of spirit he works for, a jaguar spirit, and I think that spirit wants to hurt you, not because it’s bad or Moie is bad but because it’s doing something that we don’t understand and hurting you is part of it.”

Amelia looked up from her dish and met his eye. She seemed suddenly older. “This is likeThe Lord of the Rings, isn’t it?”

“Just like,” said Paz.

“And we’re like the hobbits.”

“Uh-huh. Except I think Abuela is more like Gandalf.”

Amelia nodded at this-obvious. “And what are you like, Daddy?”

“I don’t know, baby. This is all pretty new to me.”

“I want you to be the king, Aragorn.”

Paz laughed. “You do, huh? Well, I think I’m just another hobbit, and not Frodo either. But the main thing is you need to tell me if you see Moie again, all right? That part isn’t make-believe. Amelia, look at me! Promise, now.”

Amelia looked into her father’s eyes. There was something she had to tell him about…about a word she couldn’t remember, a little girl and a caiman and a jaguar, but it was all mixed up in her head. So instead of that she said, “Okay. I’m going to be Galadriel, and I could make a silver crown, couldn’t I?”

When they were on the street again, Paz called the restaurant and asked Yolanda to fall by the Grove and give them a lift home. The lunch rush would be over by now. He rarely exercised his feudal powers in this way, but he felt it was a special circumstance, his daughter being pursued by a…whatever, and besides Yolanda was always ready to do anything for Jimmy. More shameless manipulation added to Paz’s heavy score.

Yolanda arrived in her battered white Toyota pickup truck. They all squeezed into the front seat, and Paz was glad that he had Amelia as flesh insulation between his thigh and Yolanda’s lush brown one, bared by her pink shorts. Yolanda was a reformed bad girl, a mélange of the races and the heartthrob of all the younger waiters and staff, although she had eyes only for the unobtainable Jimmy. This often happened in the restaurant business, and many other sorts of business as well; Paz didn’t take it personally. He flirted but did not (despite his tales to his wife) actually grab ass. They talked restaurant on the way home, with Amelia uncharacteristically silent. When they reached the house in South Miami, the girl darted from the truck and into the house without a good-bye.

“Something wrong?” asked Yolanda.

Paz shrugged. “Just growing pains. I’ll see you at the place later this week, I guess.”

“They caught that guy already? I mean the one that…”

“They think so,” Paz said, and with a wave turned up the walk to his house.

Entering his bedroom, he was relieved to observe signs of life in his spouse. She blinked, rubbed her eyes, her face, stretched, said, “Oh, God. I fell asleep. What time is it?”

“A little past four.”

She struggled into a sitting position against the headboard. “I should call the hospital, see if I still have a job.”

“You’re cool. I talked to Kemmelman. Apparently it happens all the time. I mean people in the ER losing it. It’s no biggie.”

Her eyes narrowed. “You talked to Kemmelman aboutme? When was this?”

“I don’t know-yesterday morning, I think.”

“Yesterday morning? Jimmy, what’re you talking about?”

“Lola, it’s a little past four onWednesday. You’ve been out for over forty-eight hours.”

The suspicion on her face turned to stunned astonishment. “That’s impossible.”

“But true. Did you have any dreams?”

Her eyes flicked away from his. He moved his head to catch them again. “No,” she said, “not that I can recall.”

“Good. But you were having dreams before, weren’t you?”

“I guess. What does this have to do-”

“No, not ‘I guess,’ Lola. You were having nightmares every night, just like me and just like Amy. You couldn’t sleep at all, and it made you crazy. Now, let me use my magic powers to tell you what your dreams were about. I don’t know the details, but they were all about Amelia. A big jaguar was going to eat her, and even though you wanted to stop it, it made sense that she was going to get eaten, you thought it was a good thing. That’s what made it so horrible. Same dream every night, night after night.”

He watched her closely, her mouth working, her eyes darting around. “Am I right?” he demanded.

A nod. “I thought I was going crazy.”

“Not crazy, no,” he said and sat on the bed, enfolding her in his arms. “Look, I know you don’t buy this stuff, but here it is. These are the observable facts. One: three members of this family were having nightmares on the same subject. Two: a couple of rich Cubans, including my father, have been murdered, and the killer seems to be a very large cat-”

“What? You know this? The police think…?”

“I know it. The police just want it to be a regular revenge killing. Let me finish. Three: there’s a South American Indian in town, who claims to be able to turn himself into a jaguar. This Indian has been stalking Amelia. I mean physically. I’ve observed this myself on one occasion, at the beach, and he’s been hanging out in the big tree at her school. She was talking to him and passing him Fritos. Four: at my mother’silé, hersantero predicted that Amy would be in danger from a big animal of some kind.”

“Jimmy, this is crazy-”

“Shh! I know. The last thing is that the jaguar dreams of all three of us have stopped, because I got my mom to crank out some protective charms,enkangues. One of them’s under Amy’s bed, one of them’s around my neck, and the other is under here.” He patted the bed.

She pulled away from him and stared. She looked like she was about to cry. “I can’t believe that. There’s some other explanation.”

“You keep saying that. I tell you what, in the interests of science, we’ll take theenkangue away and see if you have the dream again. It’s only fair to advise you, though, that Eleggua won’t like it when you reject his gift. He’s the guardian of the ways between this world and the dream world. So it might not work again. Want to try?”

Now she let out a sigh, as if rationality were a gas leaking from a puncture somewhere deep inside her, and fell away from him down to the pillows. She pulled the light blanket up over her face. “What I want is for this not to be happening,” she said.

He tugged the hem of the blanket down so he could see her eyes. “Can’t do that, babe. But I think that if we play this right we can get out from under.”

“Butwhy?” she wailed. “Why is this Indian after Amy? She hasn’t done anything to him, she’s achild, for God’s sake.”

“Yeah, Amelia and me were discussing that just the other day. Isaac was innocent, too, so why did God want to kill him? Innocents die every day, without any ceremony at all. It’s something about the way the world works, patterns of fate we can’t understand. That’s why we have Santería and the rest of all that. And science, of course. But scientific civilization doesn’t seem to be any better at stopping the slaughter of the innocents than voodoo. Probably does worse, when you think about it. There are forces. You can ignore them, pretend they don’t exist, try to control them, or appease them, and hope they won’t notice you. We’re all hobbits, Amelia says. Meanwhile, more to the immediate point, a four-hundred-pound magic jaguar wants to eat our kid.”

“Oh, stop it! You’re scaring me.” She shivered despite herself, despite the coziness of the room.

“Oh, you thinkyou’re scared? I’m fucking petrified.”

“What should we do?” Her voice had gone high, like a child’s, and there was a look on her face that he hadn’t seen there before. What we look like when the patina of materialism cracks and we behold the immemorial terror; he’d been there himself. He grasped her hand and replied, “I’ve been thinking about that. Obviously, my mom is the key player. We’ll get her Santería people in on this and see what they recommend. Until then, I want to stick close to Amelia, so she’s going to have to skip school for a while. The other thing I want to do is talk with Bob Zwick. In fact, I believe I’ll invite him out on the boat tomorrow, with Amelia along, too. We’ll fish.”

“Why Zwick?”

“Because he’s smart and because I want to take one last crack at convincing myself this is all bullshit.”

Cooksey waited until dark and then, with a small khaki bag on his shoulder, he walked down Ingraham to the Providence School. The moon had not risen and it was perfectly black in the shade of the giant fig. Feeling his way, stumbling over roots, he reached the gray column of the main trunk, and cupping his hands around his mouth, he imitated the vocalizations of the hoatzin. Shortly, he heard the cry repeated from above and then a faint rustling sound. Then Moie was standing in front of him, although quite invisible in the utter darkness.

“That was a very good hoatzin, Cooksey,” said Moie. “For a moment, I thought I was dreaming, or that I had flown back to my home.”

“Thank you. I thought I might be a little out of practice. I’m happy to see that the police have not caught you yet.”

“No. A man climbed this tree today. He found my hammock and Father Tim’s bag and took them. I was very close to this man but I made him not look at me. Thewai’ichuranan are such bad hunters that it’s a good thing for them that their food comes from machines. Two of them are approaching the tree right now. I think they will catch you.”

“I believe you’re right, but that doesn’t matter. I doubt that they’ll catchyou, however. Listen, Moie, thechinitxi have killed the Monkey Boy and have stolen the Firehair Woman. Can you find them and bring her back to me?”

“I can find them, yes. They are south of here and not far. Perhaps I can free her, too. But where she goes after that, I can’t say. She is on her own path, that one.”

“That’s true. Well, go now and do the best you can. And I thank you.”

Cooksey felt the air move against his face and he knew he was alone again in the dark. He removed a flashlight and some equipment from his bag and set to work. Within minutes strong beams of light penetrated the root forest, and Cooksey found himself grabbed, braced against the tree trunk, and frisked by two strong policemen.

“Where’s the Indian?” one demanded.

“I didn’t see any Indian,” said Cooksey, with perfect honesty.

“What are you doing here, then?” the cop asked.

“I am collecting nocturnal insects. This is a fig tree, and I study fig wasps.” Cooksey knew he was a bad liar and so tried always to tell nothing but the truth, although quite often not the entire truth.

Moie has a map in his head showing where to go, but it was not an ordinary map, not a picture of the earth’s surface seen from above, drawn to scale. This map he had made at night, while he flew through the dreams of the dead people. Its landmarks were dread and desire, lust and hatred, love and harmony, and while it is difficult to do, he can generate within his own being a concordance between this world and the streets and buildings where thewai’ichuranan dwell. He trots south at a steady pace along the delightfully smooth rock paths they have in this land. He is naked except for his loincloth, dream pouch, and woven bag. People see him pass down U.S. 1, but when they look to confirm this surprising sight, he is always gone. I thought I saw an Indian running down the highway, they may remark to one another, if there is another, but the second one never saw what the first one had; and if someone alone catches sight of Moie, they tend to forget it very quickly. Every cop in Miami is on the lookout for a lone Indian, but not one of the several officers he passes on his way south pursues him or calls in the sighting.

He finds the building then, with little trouble. Two of thechinitxi are inside it and one is standing in front, in the shadows of a doorway, smoking a cigar and looking around. Moie can also feel the girl within the building. He slips around the back to see if there is a way in.

At the back of the building there is a door that will not open. Moie has observed this of the doors in this land. Sometimes they open and sometimes not, and he has wondered why this is so. It may be, he thinks, that thewai’ichuranan are as bad at making doors as they are at hunting. Near the door are heaps of useful things that thewai’ichuranan have left out for anyone to take: metal, glass, paper, and high stacks of tires. Moie has observed that this was something they like to do: each morning great trucks drive through the streets and the men on them take away bags and baskets of food and other good things, perhaps to give to other people who did not have enough, or perhaps this is how the food gets into their machines. He does not spend much time considering these mysteries, however, but instead scrambles lightly up the stack of tires to the roof. There he walks toward a little house made of glass. He spits on his hand and wipes the dirt away from a pane and sees what he seeks lying below.

In the garage office, Dario Rascon awoke from a troubled dream to the sound of breaking glass. He rose lightly from the cracked leather couch on which he had been sleeping, drew his pistol, and, without bothering to wake the snoring Iglesias, went through the door to the garage bay. After waiting a few moments in the dark, ears straining at silence, he snapped on the lights. Of the eight fluorescent tubes in the pair of hanging fixtures only three came on, but there was enough light to see the Indian, a small brown man, nearly naked, with facial tattoos and a bowl haircut. He was standing under the dark skylight, with sparkling shards of glass all around him.

Rascon pointed his pistol and ordered the man to approach with his hands up, but the Indian, with a movement too swift for any response, vanished behind a workbench. It was dark at that end of the garage, but Rascon was not afraid of Indians. He had shot lots of Indians at home. He moved forward confidently. The Indian was not behind the workbench. Rascon moved farther into the darkness, pointing his pistol here and there like a snake striking.

Ararah. Ararararh.

He jumped at the sound and whirled. Some kind of motor starting up, he thought, the littlependejo must have tripped a switch. Then, amazingly, he was on his face on the concrete, the gun gone skittering across the floor. He felt, as his last earthly sensation, a hot breath on his neck.

Jenny was positioned in the right place to see the whole thing. She saw Moie go dark and vague and his form thicken and grow and then the thing was standing there lashing its tail. She saw what it did to the man. Then another man appeared in the garage and shouted out something, and she saw a speckled blur fly through the air and heard a thump, then a strangled human cry and, after a moment, liquid gnashing sounds. These stopped. Then came the slighter noise of claws clicking on concrete and the beast’s head was near her own, inches away. She looked into the golden merciless eyes. Through chattering teeth she managed to say, “Moie, don’t kill me.” Jaguar opened his mouth. She saw the red blood spattered on its muzzle, the long yellow fangs. A breath issued from its mouth, smelling of fresh meat, coppery and rank, and of something else, some sweeter scent, an overwhelming perfume. She gasped and took it into her body. Then she felt the aura, the familiar cool feeling in her center and slipped, rather gratefully this time, into the seizure.

When she awoke her bonds had been cut. She found a water spigot and took a drink and washed her face and her hands. Urine had dried on her legs, and she washed this off, too. It was perfectly quiet in the garage, save for the usual hum a city makes. She did not look at what was on the floor. A merciful amnesia had descended on her mind, which now resembled a vast dusty warehouse in which only a few motes of thought floated, the chief of which was LEAVE NOW. She obeyed this and walked out of the repair bay quite nude, pausing only to switch off the lights, having been firmly trained from an early age always to switch off the lights when leaving a room.

Even in Miami, a city void of dress codes, it is hard for a naked woman to go far on a major thoroughfare without someone noticing. Within a quarter mile of where she started, Jenny was fortunate enough to meet a couple of social workers coming home from a movie. Both of them were women and both of them had plenty of experience with drug intoxication among teenagers. They grabbed her, wrapped her in a blanket, and took her to the nearest emergency room, which was at South Miami Hospital.

Prudencio Rivera Martínez, after finishing his cigar, had walked a block to a taco joint and used the toilet. Returning to the garage office, he was surprised to see his two companions gone. He went into the repair bay and shouted their names several times. Hearing no reply, he took another few steps and slipped on something, landing painfully on his knee and hand. Standing again, he looked at his hand and found it covered with blood. After he turned the light on, he discovered that what he had slipped on was a piece of Santiago Iglesias’s liver. The donor of this morsel was lying a few yards away. In the distance, he could just make out a little mound in the center of a large dark pool, and he concluded that this was Rascon. The girl was gone. He took out his cell phone and was about to push the buttons, when a novel thought entered his mind. He placed the cell phone on a tool cabinet and considered his situation: he had several thousand in cash and a new van and a gun and a small personal stash of very pure cocaine. It was more than enough to make a start in New York. Hurtado might come looking for him, or El Silencio, but they would first have to deal with whatever had silently taken out two extremely experienced and tough Colombian gangsters, or three, counting Rafael in Calderón’s house, and he thought that they might have a difficult time doing that. In any case, he was himself no longer willing to participate in thisfregada. He got into the van and, like so many of his countrymen, immigrated to America.

Paz’s boat was a locally made plywood craft, ugly as the devil and painted peeling pink. It had been calledMarta, but one of the stick-on metallic letters had fallen into the sea and so it wasMata now, which Paz had liked as being suitable for a homicide dick and had left it so. It was damp and uncomfortable and ran like blazes on its planing hull in front of twin Mercury Optimax 200s. Just now it was anchored in Florida Bay over a hole Paz had been fishing for years. They had been out since just past dawn and caught two fat snook (Paz) and a small permit (Zwick) and now it was eleven and the fish had stopped biting. The only person still fishing seriously was Amelia, who was methodically feeding live shrimp to the crabs on the bottom with her hook.

The two men were sitting on a padded locker, working on their second six-pack. Zwick had been talking about his work, a subject he was never reluctant to pursue, but Paz had been encouraging. As a result he had learned a good deal about Penrose’s theory that consciousness was in some sense a quantum phenomenon lodged in the exquisitely fine microtubules of neurons, and Edelman’s theory that the brain is a set of maps, with sheets of neurons having systematic relationships to sheets of receptor cells wired to the whole sensorium. In this theory, sensory experience essentially constructs consciousness. It was Zwick’s idea that the real key lay in a concordance of the two theories: Edelman’s notion of reentry mapping explained the way the brain built a picture of the world and of the self within it; Penrose explained, as far as Paz could understand the jargon, why minds were not like machines, why human minds could think up new stuff, something no computer had ever done. Paz listened, asked questions, received detailed answers, some of which he even understood, and waited patiently for Zwick to get drunk enough to deal with Paz’s less orthodox queries. He thought it was a lot harder absorbing information from Zwick than from a naked woman in bed, which had been for many years Paz’s almost exclusive tutelary venue. Did sex make the neural sheets more receptive? Or did the spray of testosterone that Zwick emitted when making a point have the opposite effect? A good doctoral thesis, Paz thought, but one unlikely ever to be written.

“So what about hallucinations, Doctor?” he asked now. “It can’t be a mapping thing because by definition it doesn’t exist to be picked up by the senses. But it seems real.”

Zwick waved his hands dismissively. “It’s all bad connections, neurotransmitter imbalances in the midbrain. We can produce any type of hallucination we want by electrical stimulation, magnetic fields, chemicals…it’s not a particularly interesting field of study.”

“Unless you’re having them. What about a hallucination that leaves physical evidence behind it?”

“Then by definition it’s not a hallucination.”

“Unless the evidence is also hallucinatory. Where do you draw the line?”

“Through your dick. What are you talking about, Paz? More spooky shit?”

“Spooky indeed. Are you drunk enough to give me a scientific opinion?”

“Barely. Why isn’t this vessel equipped with daiquiris? Isn’t that a Coast Guard requirement?”

“Only in international waters. What do you think of shape-shifting? Speaking as a renowned physicist and drunk?”

“What do you mean, ‘shape-shifting’?”

“I mean that it’s universally accepted among shamanic peoples that certain highly trained people can turn themselves into animals.”

“Oh, that. I thought they onlythought that the spirit of the great lion, or whatever, was taking them over and they growled and imagined they were chasing zebras.”

“Yeah, they have that, but I meant for real, assuming there’s such a thing as real. What it is, I was called in recently to consult on a Miami PD case. A couple of citizens got killed, and all the evidence says it was done by a large animal, a cat of some kind. We got footprints, we got claw marks, the wounds are consistent with teeth and claws. They even figured out how much it weighs, a little over four-fifty. Needless to say, no one has reported such an animal in the area. We also have this little Indian running around town, comes from the jungles in South America, got a grudge against the victims, and also claims to be able to change into a jaguar, more or less. We also have some anecdotal evidence this guy has the ability to, let’s say, modify his appearance. What do you make of all that?”

“Of that I make horseshit,” said Zwick. “Technically, we in science are not allowed to say that anything’s impossible, just that some things are so improbable as to be not worth thinking about, and this falls in that category. I mean organic forms do change shape, obviously, but as growth over time, and via evolution over humongous ranges of time. They don’t just change shape like in fairy tales, not in real life.”

“Okay, but look at it another way. If you were God, and making a world in which something like thatcould happen, how would you do it?”

“Oh, well, that’s the way to my heart, letting me play God.” Zwick laughed and finished his beer, tossing the can over his shoulder into the bay. “Although among the many improvements I’d make, that one would probably not be high on the list. Let’s see now…” Zwick leaned back against the rail and opened another can. His eyes lost focus as he raised his head to the sky, seeming to seek counsel from the current deity. Paz observed him with interest, as a phenomenon of nature. Watching Robert Zwick cogitate was less fascinating than watching Nolan Ryan pitch or Michael Jordan shoot baskets, but it was the same sort of thing, a thing regular people couldn’t hope to do.

“Right,” said Zwick after several minutes of this. “We all have in us a neural map of our bodies. No one knows how detailed it is, but let’s say for the sake of argument that it descends to the molecular level. So your shape-shifter would have to have a duplicate image of the selected animal in there somewhere. How it’s instantiated we don’t know, but it’s not through any strictly biological process. On the other hand, we’re constantly discovering biological processes we never suspected, so call that a gimme. We observe in nature the caterpillar turning into a butterfly, a completely different creature, over a fairly short time. Let’s say it’s the same kind of thing, but faster. Okay, we need energy. Well, there are humongous reserves of energy in the universe, the so-called dark energy for one thing, and ordinarily we have no access to it. But suppose Penrose is correct, that consciousness is partly a quantum phenomenon, and suppose our little guy has solved the dualism problem, don’t ask me how…”

“Sorry, what problem?”

“We talked about this before, remember? Substance dualism, the idea that consciousness is its own thing and exists independently of the material brain, as Descartes believed. It satisfies all the problems of consciousness by explaining them away-the ghost in the machine, as they call it, or rather all problems except one, and that’s the killer: how do you imagine any gearing or connection between the material and the immaterial? How does an immaterial mind cause a material event, say, the firing of neurons in the motor cortex that move your arms? Which is why it’s bullshit, and also why there’s no God.”

“Except you.”

“Of course. But never mind that for the moment. Substance dualism implies conscious immaterial beings that are nevertheless capable of influencing matter, so that takes care of a lot of your energy concerns. This putative being moves the molecules into the right place according to the alternate body plan he keeps in his head. Animal flesh is just air and water and a few minerals, easily obtained from ordinary dirt, if you have godlike powers. So that’s one solution. Alternatively, we could posit that there are other universes intimately connected with our own, the unseen world of superstition. We think that our four dimensions are generated by vibrations of the strings wrapped up in the Calabi-Yau geometry, but for the math to work there have to be seven other dimensions tangled up in there, of which we know zip and probably never will. Again, the central question is, What is consciousness? Maybe it can get in there and arrange for the passage of mystic beings. Maybe that’d be a simpler solution than assembling your jaguar from molecules on order. The thing just steps through, and the little Indian goes back the other way, like a revolving door. The energy cost would be huge, but who’s counting?”

Paz nodded. He had some experience both with beings appearing from nowhere and with uncanny geometries. “I like that one. So you think it’s possible.”

“Not the right question. Like I said, anything’s possible, but almost everything except what we observe is ridiculously improbable. On the other hand, we don’t know shit about either consciousness on the fine grain, or about the probability set associated with dimensions other than the familiar ones.” He regarded the present beer can, found it empty, flung it away. “There, that solves the physical problem, but it leaves the sociopolitical one, which I think is the most telling.”

“Which is what?”

“Which is that if these little guys, these shamans, can do all that subtle moving of energies with their minds, how come they don’t rule the world now? How come scientific technology totally destroys any competing worldview? I mean, destroys it physically? The Indians are all on reservations, if you notice, and all the indigenous people, so called, are flocking into cities, dying to sew underwear and get a TV.”

“Mozart,” said Paz.

“Say what?”

“A woman I once knew, an anthropologist, said that magic was like a creative art. There were geniuses that could do things that no one else could, just like Mozart, but that they couldn’t package what they did so that the whole culture could do it, too. But any asshole can use science packaged as technology, so the primitives get killed off everywhere, like you said.”

“Hmph. Sounds like something an anthropologist would cook up. Now, do you want to know the real explanation?”

“If you would be so kind.”

“You have perfectly ordinary murders by human murderers, who are also charlatans. The so-called evidence is planted and faked. The observers are distracted and/or scared to death, or are believers and autohypnotize themselves.”

“Yeah, that’s the current police theory. But how come me and my wife and my kid are having the same dream about a jaguar while this is going on?”

“Oh,dreams! Nowthere’s a body of reliable evidence! Look, the reason science more or less abandoned self-reporting in the study of the human mind is that with the right suggestion people will report fuckinganything. I mean the whole purpose of the scientific enterprise is to eliminate-”

“Daddy! My hook is stuck!”

Both men looked at Amelia, whose rod was bowed nearly double. Paz realized with a guilty shock that he had nearly forgotten she was on board. The drag on her reel let out a number of clicks. Paz jumped to her side and took the rod from her. He heaved on it and felt the tug of a live weight on the line. Handing it back, he said, “That’s not stuck, baby, you have a fish on there. Reel it in!”

As she did, Zwick leaned over the side and observed the line. “I think it’s an old tire. It doesn’t seem to be doing much running.”

“Shut up, Zwick! Don’t tell a Cuban about what’s a fish. Am I right, Amelia?”

“It’s a fish,” she cried. “I can feel it moving.”

She was correct. After five minutes of steady cranking a large gray shape could be seen moving toward the surface. Paz reached out with a landing net and heaved the thing over the rail, but it was lively still and with a violent gyration it leaped from the net and began to skip and bounce along the deck.

“What is it, Daddy?” the girl shouted.

“It’s a hardhead catfish. God, it must be a two-pounder. Wait a second, I’ll get the net on it again…”

But the fish skittered across to where Zwick was standing. He raised his foot. Paz saw what he was about to do and a negative expostulation formed in his throat. Too late. Zwick stamped down heavily on the catfish’s back, and the sharp, thick, venom-coated spine that marine catfish wear in their dorsal fins went right through the bottom of his sneaker and pierced his foot to the bone.

“Does it still hurt?” Paz called out twenty minutes later as theMata skipped over the bay toward Flamingo, going all out.

“Not really. I just amputated my foot with your bait knife.”

“Seriously.”

“Seriously? It’sagony! Why the hell didn’t you tell me the goddamn thing had a poison spine in its back?”

“Because I thought you knew everything,” said Paz. “Who could imagine that the world’s smartest man would tromp on a catfish? We’re almost at the channel. Do you want me to take you to Jackson?”

“Hell, no!” said Zwick. “I might get touched by one of my students. No, let’s go to South Miami, it’s closer anyway.”