“But that’s just, you know, imaginary. Isn’t it?”

“That would depend on what you meant by imaginary. Or imagination, for that matter. You and I were just speaking of intelligence, and there you have a good example. Our imagination works with our particular kind of intelligence to produce televisions and nuclear bombs. His works to allow visits to other people’s dreams and the manipulation of mass and energy in entirely different ways to how we do it. You remember his footprint? My mother always swore she’d seen a shaman walk flat-footed up the side of a vertical tree as if he were walking on a street, and she was not, I can assure you, an easy person to fool. Moie imagines, so to speak, that he can turn himself into a jaguar, and perhaps in some strange way he can.”

Jennifer felt a sickish laugh bubble out of her throat. “That’s wack,” she said, and then recalled what had happened at the jaguar cage in the zoo and was silent.

He drained his glass and said, “I think there’s a bit more left in the bottle. Would you like some?”

“No, thanks. I’m pretty dizzy as it is.”

He nodded. “Well, then, I’ll say good night. I’m a bit unsteady myself, and I want to get some reading done before I pass out. I’ll leave the workroom light on for you.”

When he had gone, Jennifer went down the path to the pool and sat on the low stone bench placed at the foot of the pond. The moon had topped the tree, she saw. It wobbled brightly on the surface of the dark water and turned the little waterfall into a stream of silver. She stared at the moonlit ripples, feeling strange, and it wasn’t just the wine. She reached for an explanation and found that she hadn’t the words, but…it was just that she couldn’t simply let go and sink into the thoughtless depths as she had her whole life, there wasstuff in her head now: that wasp and the business of naming it after her, and Cooksey’s whole story and his wife and the idea of a mode of life she had not imagined existed. No, that was wrong: she knew it existed, had seen it all on the TV, but now she had been invited into it in Real Life, and she found herself quaking in the doorway. Flowers and fish were not going to be enough after today, and she found herself racked with longing for what she had been and at the same time with yearning for another and still terrifying life. But I’m too dumb, she thought vainly: her hidey-hole now too small.

She wept then, silently as she had learned to do long ago in strange houses where they didn’t like whiny kids, her face distorted into a tragic mask, hugging herself, rocking back and forth on the smooth stone, while from her throat came the tiniest mewling sound, like a kitten lost. It was strange to her to be doing this in the open air, and not in a broom closet, shut up on account of messing herself during a fit, or hiding from taunting children in a girls’ room stall at school. She thought this, however, after it was over. A new kind of thought, a reflection on her life. Cooksey had just demonstrated to her how to do that, to look at a life from outside, like it was a movie. But while she wept, she thought nothing at all.

Now she coughed because her throat always hurt after these cries, and her face, too, because of being so scrunched up. She knelt at the edge of the pond and splashed water on her face, and stood and wiped her face with the bottom of her T-shirt. She heard a screen door slam and then steps on gravel, and here was Kevin.

He stopped and looked her over. “Planning a little moonlight swim?” he asked in a stoned drawl. She could smell the marijuana on him. His face was slack with the drug, something she’d never really noticed before.

“No, just sitting.”

He handed her his bandanna. After a tiny hesitation she took it and wiped her face.

“Want to go for a drive?”

“Where?”

“Maybe the beach. It’s a nice night.”

Two weeks ago Kevin being this sweet would have lit up her whole day, but now she saw that he was counting on just that-she actually saw behind the mask of his face to the being within, the empty desperate sadness of that being. She saw also the nature of their deal, that she wanted someone to think for her and take care of her because she was stupid and a spaz, and he wanted someone to admire him and be subject to him because he was a useless piece of shit. This is just like my dream, she thought, and at that moment recalled it to mind, and that she had dreamed it not just last night but for many. She was a child locked in a storm cellar. She’d been bad, and the foster parent was going to do something awful to her, the man would when he got home and she had to get out. There was another child locked in with her, and in a strange dream-way she knew this was Kevin. They were both kids but also themselves. The walls of the cellar were earth, and she started to dig. The substance she dug was not real earth, but soft and slimy like Jell-O and came away in great chunks. She tried to get Kevin to dig, but he wouldn’t. Instead, he was taking the chunks of Jell-O and arranging them neatly against the wall. He said he didn’t want to get in trouble with the parents. She was torn now, desperate to get free but also fascinated by the construct Kevin was building from the quaking blocks. There was a yellow cat there, too, she recalled, and it ran into the shaft she had dug and disappeared and she knew it had found the way out and she yearned to follow it. Please, Kevin, please, she called to the dream boy…

“Please what?” said Kevin.

“Nothing,” she said and realized she had spoken aloud. She felt so sorry for him now. He had nothing, really, but his stupid revolution, and sex, and his attitude. She felt a wave of compassion and understood at some level below words that this was what Professor Cooksey felt for her. She had learned it from him. And maybe if she stayed with Kevin she could work the same sort of transformation. Maybe she owed it to him, because for sure she never would have ended up in this place had it not been for Kevin dragging her into it. She rose and faced him and put on a smile, only half faked. “So,” she said, “if we’re going, let’s go.”

Ten

This isn’t the way to the beach,” Jenny said.

“Yeah, I know, I just want to cruise by this place in the Gables for a second.”

She didn’t ask why, nor was she hurt or disappointed, as she might have been a few weeks ago. Kevin always had something else going on when he was with her, and whereas before she had taken this as a personal slight, now she saw it as a taxonomic indicator of the genusKevin, as:

always has another deal going on when with girlfriend…Kevin sp.

never has another deal going on when with girlfriend…see 14

Jennifer had never got to that part of the taxonomic key but thought it would be nice to find one of those someday, a true 14, or whatever. She knew they existed, because Cooksey was one. Out of habit, she half blamed herself. Had she been more interesting, she might have occasioned more interest. She looked out past Kevin at the house he seemed to be more interested in than in her. It looked vaguely familiar, a big two-story Gables mansion, glowing pale pink in the moonlight, but she was not inspired to ask what was so special about it. Instead she was thinking about Cooksey and Cooksey’s dead wife, about what his conversation had suggested regarding the nature of their relationship. She wondered if it were true, that people could love each other that much, or if it was just a fantasy that Cooksey had concocted, like the fantasies of love on TV or in the movies. She had certainly never seen such a love in real life, and she now understood that what she thought she’d felt for Kevin was as unsubstantial as the images on a flickering screen. How strange to have thoughts like this, she thought, wrenching and horrible in a way but also how totally cool, almost like she was in charge of her own life, like it had a steering wheel.