The animal was stretched out on a broad wooden shelf, seemingly asleep, but as Jenny watched, its nose twitched, its ears sprang erect, and it opened its golden eyes. In an instant it leaped down from its perch and pressed its nose against the thick glass, staring at Moie. It panted; from its open mouth came a low, loud growl. Moie was making noise, too, a rhythmic chant, the same phrase repeated over and over again.

“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 reallyeverything 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 justwas. 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’saryu’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’saryu’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.