“This is a good way to shut down my brain,” said Paz. “If that’s what was intended.”

“To an extent,” said his wife, and so he let her, and she let him, but in the midst of this mindless exertion, Paz found that he could not stop thinking about Gabriel Hurtado and why he was in Miami. It was nearly as puzzling as the impossible jaguar.

Eighteen

The next day, Paz stayed late in bed, drifting in and out of a hypnopompic sleep in whose vapors lurked worry and discontent. Awake at last, he lay with his arms behind his head staring at the white ceiling, counting out the reasons why this should be so. Colombianpistoleros? Check. Huge magical jaguar after his little girl? Check. Oddly enough, he decided that these worries, however grim they might seem to an ordinary man, did not constitute the basis of his unease. It was deeper than that, existentially deep. Neither he nor his family had been troubled by nightmares since he’d brought back the Santería charms from the littlebotánica. Which, despite the bravado he’d shown in dealing with his wife’s disbelief, he knew was impossible. Little bags of whatever should not have had any effect on their dreams, but they had, even though Amelia was a kid and Lola was a total skeptic. He no longer knew what he believed anymore, but he understood that this amphibian life he had been leading with respect to Santería was breaking down; he would have to go in one direction or the other, toward the sunlit uplands of rationality inhabited by Bob Zwick, his wife, and all their pals, or down, into the soup, with Mom.

And since his social world was composed of people who were either believers or skeptics, there was no one who could give him any meaningful advice, or…as this thought crossed his mind he recalled that there was at least one other person who’d been in precisely the same bind, who had in fact introduced him to the possibility that there was in fact an unseen world. He reached for the bedside telephone and his address book and dialed an unlisted number with a Long Island area code.

A woman answered.

“Jane?” he said. “This is Jimmy Paz.”

A pause on the line. “From Miami?”

“Among your many Jimmy Pazes, I am in fact the one from Miami. How’re you doing, Jane? What is it, eight or nine years?”

“About that. Gosh, let me sit down. Well, this is a blast from the past.”

Some small talk here, which Paz encouraged, being a little nervous about broaching the point of this call. He learned how she was-daughter Luz, twelve and flourishing, Jane teaching anthropology at Columbia and running her family’s foundation. He told her about his own family.

“You’re still with the cops, I take it.”

“No, I’m running the restaurant with my mom. Why do you take it?”

“Oh, nothing…just that we had an intense twenty-four hours eight years ago but not what you could call a relationship, and suddenly you call. I assumed it was police business.”

“Actually, I guess you could call it that. Look, I’m in a…I don’t know what you’d call it, a kind of existential bind…”

She laughed, a deep chuckle that sent him back over that span of years. He brought her face up out of memory: Jane Doe, a handsome fine-boned woman with cropped yellow hair and a mad look in her pale eyes. Jane Doe from the famous Voodoo murders, a woman with whom he had shared the single most frightening experience of his life, actual zombies walking the streets of Miami and the gods of Africa breaking through to warp time and matter.

“Those’re the worst kind,” she said. “What’s the problem? Morevoudon?”

“Not really. Do you know anything about shape-shifting?”

“A little. Are we talking imitative, pseudomorphic, or physical?”

“What’s the difference?”

“It’s complicated.”

“If you have the time, I do.”

He heard her take a deep breath.

“Well, in general humans tend to be uncomfortable locked in the prison of the self. Our own identification with nations and sports teams is probably a relic of that, and on a higher level there’s religion, of course. Traditional peoples often identify with animals, and from this we get imitative magic. The shaman allows the spirit of the totemic animal to occupy his psyche. He becomes the animal, and not in a merely symbolic way. To him and the people participating heis the bison, or whatever. They see a bison.”

“You mean they hallucinate it.”

“No, I don’t mean that at all. ‘Hallucination’ is not a useful term in this kind of anthropology. It’s a mistake to assume that the psyches of traditional people are the same as ours. You might just as well say that the particle physicist hallucinates his data in accordance with a ritual called science. Anyway, that’s imitative shape-shifting, well established in anthro literature. In pseudomorphic shape-shifts, the shaman creates or summons a spiritual being which then has an observable reality. The observer hears scratching, sees a shape, smells the creature, and so on. Traditional people are mainly substance dualists, of course. The spirit is completely separate from the flesh, and the body it happens to occupy at the moment is not the only body it can occupy. Anthro tends to draw the line here because we don’t understand how it’s possible to do that, since we’re all supposed to be good little materialist monists. I’ve had personal experience with both types, if that helps.”

“What about physical shape-shifting?”

Another chuckle. “Oh, that. Ah, Jimmy, would you care to tell me what this is all about?”

He told her the whole thing: murders, evidence, dreams, theenkangues, the Indian, his conversations with Zwick. And the business with Amelia.

“So what do you think, Jane?” he asked at the end of it. “Hoax or what?”

“It sounds like you think it’s real.”

“I don’t know what to think. That’s why I’m talking to you.”

“Okay, then: physical shifting. I’ve never seen it, but there’s a lot of anecdotal evidence. There’s a whole book on it calledHuman Animals by a guy named Hamel. Makes interesting reading. Obviously, if factual, just like your smart friend says, we have no idea of how it’s done. Had I not seen what you and I saw that time, I’d be prepared to discount it, too, but having seen it, I conclude that the world is not what it appears to the senses and is wider than what can fit in a lab. Why do you think it’s after your kid?”

“I have no idea. It doesn’t make any sense.”

“Not to you, maybe, but traditional people think on wavelengths that are closed to us high-tech folks. Your mom still around?”

“Yeah, she is. Why?”

“What does she think of all this?”

“I haven’t filled her in.”

“Why not?”

“I was hoping you’d say I should load with silver bullets and it’d be cool. Or garlic.”

“Yeah, well, a being who can manipulate the fabric of space and matter is unlikely to be swattable by a bullet made of any particular element. You’re still afraid to take the plunge, aren’t you? I recall you were reluctant to go the whole way back then. Your precious ontological cherry.”

A nervous laugh from Paz. It was cool in the bedroom, but he felt the sweat start on his forehead and flanks. “Guilty. I’m not designed for this shit. I just want everything to be regular, as my kid says. Why me? I whine.”

“Yeah, the great question. You’re not religious, are you?”

“Not if I can help it. Why?”

“Because it answers the ‘why me’ question pretty good. And the religious can pray their way past a lot of this unseen-world stuff. My advice is, talk to your mom.”

“Yeah, I’m on that already, as a matter of fact.”

“And…?”

“I don’t know, Jane. I guess I’m…I guess I’ve been unwilling to totally, you know, accept the reality of…”

“You’re scared shitless.”

He could not restrain a laugh but was successful in keeping it from blossoming into full hysterics. “Yeah, you could put it like that.”