After being Jaguar, it is necessary for Moie to wash himself, to submerge fully in running water. At home he would naturally use the river, and although he knows there is a river in Miami, he does not like its smell, so here he uses the water of the bay. He is up to his neck off Peacock Park amid the little skiffs and tenders of the marina, with the bright face of Jaguar shining down on him. He licks his lips and laughs. He is still not used to the fact that salt is present in infinite quantities in the land of the dead. It is the single weirdest thing about being here. Where he comes from, cakes of salt are used to buy brides.

He finishes the ritual chanting and emerges from the water. He brushes the drops from his skin and pulls on the priest’s clothes. He feels his belly full of meat, and he both knows and does not know what the meat is. He once tried to explain this mental state to Father Tim (although not discussing the origin of the meat in that case), but it was an unsatisfactory conversation. Anotherontological confusion, but Father Tim did not seem disturbed by this. He always seemed delighted by things he couldn’t understand about the Runiya and their ways. It didn’t make his head hurt that way Moie’s head hurt when Father Tim talked to him about theology and the ways of thewai’ichuranan. So Moie learned a new word at that time:ineffable.

Eleven

Paz got the news in the morning. He came up out of sleep in a hurry and the sort of mild panic we experience when we become aware that someone is watching us as we sleep. Here it was his wife, the normally earlier riser, and she was sitting at the foot of their bed, with theMiami Herald in her hand and a troubled expression on her face, although not exactly the troubled expression she had worn for what Paz felt to be months. Time itself had become funny around the house, it seemed; he thought it might have something to do with having variants of the same dream nearly every night. That could throw your calendar off a little. Lola’s look now was not one of interior pain, as before (with “No, I can’t talk about it” being the response when asked, “What’s wrong?”), but a gentler and more accessible expression, suggesting that the problem was exterior to herself.

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

“Bad news. Or maybe you’ll think it’s good, I don’t know.”

With that she handed the paper to him. TheHerald had run it above the fold, on the right margin: Developer Slain in Coral Gables, was the headline, and the subhead read: Second Killing of a Prominent Cuban-American Businessman Strikes Fear. He read it and felt a strange pang, as if he had been clutching something alive to his vitals without knowing it, and it had just died with a sigh.

He felt her watching him. “I’m sorry,” she said. “It must be a shock.”

“A little,” he agreed.

“Any feelings?”

He shrugged. “I guess. Surprising feelings of…not loss, because I never had anything from the guy, but…something. You know I never think about the bastard from one year to the next, and then a couple of weeks ago Major Oliphant drops by the place and asked me do I know him, and as usual I say no, which is the truth, and now this. The only reason he’s my father is because my mother screwed him to get a small-business loan, and we had exactly one conversation my whole life, in which he told me he’d kill me if I ever came around him again. My position was nobody outside the family needs to know any of that shit.”

Paz stared at the paper for a while here, until the black letters in the murder story ceased to have any semantic content. He took a deep breath and let it gush out.

“Did I have some little pathetic hope that he was going to have a change of heart and…and what, take me to a Dolphins game, introduce me to all his pals? Guys, I want you to meet my nigger bastard son, Jimmy Paz. I don’t think so. I don’t know, you read these stories about women, refugees or whatever, they’re carrying this baby in their arms, ducking bullets, starving, bleeding, and then they arrive at the refugee camp and the doctor takes a look and the baby’s been dead for a week. How does she feel? I mean she had to have known it, but she talked herself out of it. And now it hits her. Does that make any sense?”

“Yes, in a strange way. What will you do?”

“I don’t know, Lola. You think I should send a wreath?”

At this sarcasm, she started to rise from the bed, her face closing again, but he grabbed her hand and pulled her back down.

“I’m sorry. It’s a little hard to take first thing in the morning.” He stroked her hand. “More important, when are you going to tell me what’s going on?”

“Nothing’s going on. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“You do. You’re nervous and crabby-that fight we had, it wasn’t right, it wasn’t just a fight. You come back from work and you’re all glassy-eyed, like you’ve been taking dope.” He paused and craned his neck elaborately, trying to catch her eye. She dropped her head, refusing this. “Areyou taking dope?” he asked.

“Of course not! I’m under a lot of strain. Working neuropsych in an ER is no picnic. I take an occasional Valium.”

This was a lie. Lola has been stuffing herself with buspirone, alprazolam, chlordiazepoxide, diazepam, and halazepam in varying combinations and dosages for weeks, ever since the dreams started, the same dream every night. She’s a psychiatrist, for God’s sake, she knew the signs of incipient breakdown. She also knew that there was no shame involved in mental disease; still shefelt shame at her condition and would not speak about it to her husband. She has mentioned obsessive dreaming to her training therapist. They have talked about it. They have discussed what it means to dream obsessively about your husband giving your child to a jaguar to be carried off and eaten. What does it mean that, in the dream, you wish for it to happen? That your husband is dressed in furry skins and carrying a bow and arrow in one hand, and in the other hand a little model of a jail? You think that he’s a savage perhaps, a little unconscious racism here? Or that you feel trapped in the marriage? A little jail? It’s a common thing. And what about the woman in blue and white who stands behind the husband: your mother, perhaps? And the seven arrows your husband shoots in the dream, do they hit the daughter or the beast? Ambiguous, a source of anxiety, yes? What would it mean if they hit the beast? What do the arrows symbolize? Why seven? It might be sexual, yes, fears of rivalry with the daughter, sexual aggression by the husband against the daughter feared and repressed? What does the jaguar symbolize?

Nothing, Doctor, they symbolize nothing. That’s what she always says, a failure at her own game when it strikes so close to home. Sometimes a jaguar is only a jaguar. What she has not told the doctor is that her husband has also dreamed of great spotted golden beasts and also her daughter, all dreaming of the same thing, which is impossible, it’s not happening, mere coincidence. If she told him that, they’d look at her sympathetically and put her on theother side of the locked wards. The requirement for absolute materialism is the great unspoken given of her profession; spooks, messages from beyond, visions, are allsymbols of something else, some repression, some trauma in the meat. Not to believe thatis to be crazy.

She knew that her husband did not buy into that at some level, believed that the unseen world might be as real as fire hydrants and mangoes. He denied it in public, but it is why he took the child to that ritual. And the mother-in-law, a true believer, and they would turn her girl against her, and she would be alone…

“Howoccasional is that, Lo?” asked Paz, and unconsciously, a little of the old cop tone insinuated itself into his voice. He heard it, she heard it: it was how you talked to junkies.