Click. Click. There’s that sound again. Only these clicks are internal, and I literally feel them as physical sensation. Two clicks, one in my chest under my breastbone, then one in my gut. It’s the same sound as the van door locking, but this door is in me. Click. Click. It startles me though I don’t have time to ponder it now. Later I will realize the clicks were parts of me turning off, detaching.
The emotional body has its own way of taking care of itself. It’s engineered to withstand mounting pressure but push it past its limit—there are limits—and its circuits short. Fear sets off an automatic lockdown. The body orchestrates a new order. Every thought and emotion that isn’t absolutely necessary turns off, valves with no release. My fear never fully retreats, but the kind of terror that can get in the way of survival clicks, clicks down one notch, then two, until my teeth stop chattering and I go acutely still underneath my shaking body. I suddenly feel far away from myself, like I’ve been sucked through a vacuum hose.
Where does the terror go? It has to go somewhere. Mine is like a helium version of myself rising, rising on a Caribbean breeze until my hair gets caught in a tree and I’m stuck, overhead, watching my other part below, the part still listening to the jaguar man, the part still attached to the gristle and meat of my body. I become her, she, you. We’re fuzzy, opaque, confused people split in parts, hovering above and in the van. Not exactly someone else, but I’m not me. Not here with a knife pressed into her belly. She’s the balloon, or you’re the balloon. I’m the meat or she or you.
FACT. Watching something happen changes the way it happens. The more you observe, the greater the effect.
Now you can think. Your mind clears. You are singularly focused, more so than any other time in your life. Your mind becomes a chasm so empty that any tiny dot of thought is impossible not to notice. This works in your favor. You’re not distracted by the past or worried about the future. The only thoughts that enter your mind are ones that instruct you now.
Your first thought. Cooperate, don’t fight, don’t resist. Don’t let the jaguar man stab you.
Second thought. You remember a friend back home who was stabbed multiple times, how his body blew up twice its normal size, how it took a team of emergency doctors in a trauma hospital to keep him alive, how there’s no hospital here, no clinic, no nurse. You haven’t seen a car or person for miles. If the jaguar man cuts you, you will die. Don’t let him stab you. Do whatever it takes. Do whatever it takes.
Third thought. Dear God, please let me live.
You: Please don’t hurt me.
He: I’m not going to hurt you.
You: Please don’t hurt me.
He: I’m not going to hurt you.
That’s your call and response. You say it every chance you get. You want his reassurance. You want him to say his part over and over, I’m not going to hurt you, say it until it’s true. There’s a knife on your side. He’s not going to hurt you. Can both exist simultaneously?
Diving is like floating, the diver says. It’s an underwater space walk, no gravity, up, down, sideways, backward, roll over. It’s stress free, no effort. If it’s done properly the current will take you, easy and relaxed.
Words shift. The story shifts. You’re in the van with the jaguar man driving down an unlit road to God knows where. There are no people, no signs of life, no one to call for help. The diver is a world away. For a split second you see yourself unlocking the door and jumping out. The trees blur with the picture in your mind. His knife presses hard against your stomach, the knife tells you stay where you are, don’t move.
You can master staying in one place without moving up or down, the diver says. You can stay neutral by controlling your breath.
You barely breathe. You keep your hands on your knees. Information comes to you in flashes. You know the jaguar man will X. In your mind you agree to let him.
In my mind I agree to let him?
In your mind you agree to let him.
A knife in the jungle contracts its own terms. Some terms don’t make sense except in the moment. For you, there’s no questioning or angst, it’s not even a decision. It’s a split-second deep knowing: the jaguar man will X. X is not your life. X is the high holy offering you will make, the sacrificial goat with a flower in its mouth you will place at the jaguar man’s feet so he will decree that you live. This is a steep price, but you’re willing to exchange this for that. You give, you get. You tell yourself you’ll cope with X later, God willing, just don’t let the knife penetrate your skin.
Is it X if you let him?
It is unequivocally X, even if you let him.
SIX
Belize, beautiful Belize. On your first trip to Belize, you felt lucky to be solitary, the only person on a beach, your very own sand, water, hammocks, chairs. You took an embarrassing number of photographs of empty hardwood beach chairs, the sturdy kind that withstand constant exposure to the elements, slough off salt, rain, and the blistering sun. You called the photos your empty chair series. Your friends were annoyed. They wanted to see action shots of your excursions snorkeling and caving.
What do you mean you don’t have pictures of the diver?
Photo after photo you showed them chairs. Pink chairs, blue, green, yellow, orange, newly painted, faded and chipped, scratched and worn, so many empty chairs, most of them low to the ground, their seats hovering just over the sand, and a few tall barstools at the edge of the outdoor beach bar. Chairs the colors of the Caribbean, colors you could use in your house.
You didn’t position the chairs. You photographed them as you found them.
See, this one is facing the sea. This one is touching another, arm to arm. This one has its back to the circle of others.
Where are the people? your friends wanted to know.
Who cares? It was your beach! So many chairs to choose from! You imagined returning to these chairs. You imagined how the diver and you would find two chairs facing the sea and listen to the waves play the washboard of sand, play and recede, play and recede, a private, old-time band.
Back in Los Angeles, you prayed your prayer: God, give me an experience of love so big I’ll have to change my life to comprehend it.
MYTH. The jaguar man plunks his son on an outdoor barstool, orders a beer for himself and Coke for the boy. He scans the place, eyes a firm ass on a woman he doesn’t recognize. He’s trying to be good, win back his ex-wife. He’s sorry for his mistakes, he’ll change, she’ll forgive him if he can stay out of trouble. (His boy taps his arm, says Papa.) Plus he’s got the kid with him. But damn, he can’t help admiring that ass.
SEVEN
The jaguar man turns off the road onto a side road then takes a dirt path off that. The dirt path has a cluster of downed trees in front of it acting as a blockade. This path leads toward the sea. You wonder if the trees fell or if they were put there to keep people from driving down the path. He maneuvers the van around the log barricade, pulls the van into the thick tangle of tropical overgrowth, then backs out and reverses it so the van is facing toward the path. You think this is for an easier get-away. Is it possible he’s been here before? With other women? What is his plan?
He stops the engine, silence all around you.
Maybe he’s thinking about his next move, but you don’t anticipate anything past this moment. Maybe he’s aware of the movements of the forest, but your focus is intently on him.
The detached part of yourself is hovering above, holding the helium of your fear. Your body is in the van. One day you will reach back in your memory to when you were sitting in this van and you will be unsure how to describe it. You will remember specks of detail: a radio knob, a split seat, a cracked windshield, but even these memories will have question marks behind them. Memories are tired tricksters. They have to unwrap themselves, say drawn out goodbyes to their hiding places, and carve their own long, circuitous routes over an endless option of pathways to the mind. By the time they reach a place where you can grab them, who knows how much the
y’ve changed.
FACT. The van was parked in the jungle beside the sea.
FACT. The van was red or orange.
FACT. The van was a van or an SUV.
FACT. It had a backseat.
FACT. It had windows that were hard to see out of or it was dark or you didn’t turn your head.
FACT. The jaguar man sat beside you. You didn’t move until he told you to. But that doesn’t describe the van.
Try. If it had a smell it would be dark. The van would smell torn up. It would smell busted and dirty. It would smell old and angry, like stale beer, weed, and sex. It would smell like a tight grip on a small arm. It would smell like fear, like night descending fast, a blanket thrown over the horizon. Or it could, you suppose, smell backward, like reaching back in time to another place, maybe childhood, playing outside, killing ants on ant piles, birthday parties, apples, drugstore perfume. More likely it would smell like the scent rising from the dusty dirt road, pocked with ruts and stones. If it had a smell, which it did (you just can’t recall it), it would be tangy earth mixed with gasoline and seaweed. It would be the smell of a leak, a dial turned almost off, the fumes of yesterday’s shit, the sickly-sweet smell of underarms and sweat, fish fried in oil, the smell of a shiver down someone’s back, like another woman was trying to scream, was gurgling through the hose of her throat, seeing into her future, her head against the window, legs splayed on the seat.
The jaguar man says he’s not a bad person.
You say you believe him.
Sitting beside him in the van, you can tell he’s in pain, not physically but the deeper desperate suffering that drives people to madness. His pain is palpable. His pain. His, his.
QUESTION. How did X become a women’s issue?
He asks again how much money you have.
Wait. Go back. Let’s be clear about X. You know it’s coming, right? He’s predictable, right? Like so many other sick men all over the world, right? X belongs to him. X belongs to his anger and madness and deficiency. It belongs to the muscles he’s flexing to feel mighty. It belongs to his meagerness, fear, and confusion. It sits in the lap of his own self-loathing. It’s not personal to you. You did nothing wrong. The jaguar man will press against you, force you to carry some of his pain (and it will affect you profoundly), but X is not your issue.
Here, put on a mirrored armor and deflect X back to its source.
You politely tell him the same as before. $20 US and BZ$12. You remember the $50 traveler’s cheque and tell him he can have that, too. He gets out of the van and comes around to your side.
You hope once you give him the money he’ll leave you here. You want him to leave but you’re also scared to be left. You have no idea where you are or how to get back to the village.
He opens the door, tells you to take all your things. He’s going to leave you. Then he asks if you can drive.
Yes, you can drive.
But first, the money. He stands over you, blocking the door, his knife pointing at you while you sit in the passenger seat and shuffle through your backpack to find your money. You can’t find your money pouch. You’re desperately looking, panic growing. He gets fed up and turns on a light, a flashlight or the van light, you don’t know which, but there is light. Your pouch is sitting beside you on the seat. You take out all the money and the traveler’s cheque. You get a pen, you don’t know if it’s yours or his, but suddenly you’re holding a pen, and you sign the cheque. He tells you to put your passport number on it. You don’t know your number so you make up one. You write it on the front under your signature.
It goes on the back not the front, he growls. What are you trying to pull?
You rewrite your passport number on the back. You have to keep flipping the cheque over to duplicate the number you wrote on the front. You explain you’re just nervous, but he’s suspicious. He looks at your signature. Your hand was shaking so violently your signature is illegible, and he thinks you’re trying to trick him. He’s furious.
Are you trying to make your signature not match? It’s more accusation than question. He grabs the cheque and crumbles it.
Forget the damn cheque. Get out.
EIGHT
FACT. Jaguars travel along roads, on paths and trails in the forest, beside streams and creeks. Though they traverse with a light touch when hunting, other times jaguars make deep scrapes in the dirt and on trees, markings that signal where they’ve been.
SOUVENIR SNAPSHOT. Jaguar crossing a road.
SOUVENIR SNAPSHOT. Jaguar astride a tree branch.
SOUVENIR SNAPSHOT. Jaguar in a full-throated roar.
MYTH. Yesterday the jaguar man crept around the back of his ex-wife’s house. He crouched low, flattened a bed of tall grass, and waited to catch a sign of his son. His ex-wife may have tossed him out like dirty water, but she has no right to keep him from his boy. He planned to grab the boy, sneak off with him through the green darkness to the Maya ruins, and sit his son on the Jaguar Temple so his son could be initiated into the legacy of his people. His ex-wife didn’t bother with these things, and she can’t teach the boy to be a man. The jaguar man waited in the grass, long after his boy went to bed, until he saw his ex-wife cross in front of a window. She seemed to taunt him, the way she walked across the room, but he could tell there was no other man there, so he left.
SOUVENIR SNAPSHOT. Jaguar chasing a boar through the temple plaza.
You stand beside the van, surrounded by night. Even the moon behind steel-gray clouds seems to have spun away from you. The jaguar man says he’ll leave you here with the stolen van and let you be the hero for turning it in.
He says he’s not a bad person.
You say you believe him.
He says he has to tie you up so he has a head start.
Then he says he won’t leave the van. He’s changed his mind. He says he’ll leave you here, but you can’t report him.
You say everything you can think of to reassure him. You won’t report him. You promise. You have no one to tell. He gave you his word that he won’t hurt you, you can see he’s a man of his word, you can see he’s a good person, you’re true to your word, too. You won’t tell anyone. You promise. You won’t tell anyone. You promise. You won’t.
Your grandmother flashes through your mind, how her antidote to anger is love, how when your grandfather’s anger flared she put her hand on his arm and kissed his forehead.
FACT. Sap from a Poisonwood tree will cause a serious, painful rash. Relief comes from applying bark from a Gumbo Limbo tree, which grows near the Poisonwood. The root systems of the two trees nourish each other—the pain and the salve.
The jaguar man tells you to walk, through the palms and thorny vines. He follows you, his footprints overlapping yours. He holds the waistband of your shorts and the knife to your back. The only witnesses are the sea and sky. This isn’t a place people go to rob you. You think about women who are found cut up in pieces beside riverbanks, in ditches, in jungles and forests, or left on the side of the road. Will that be you?
You think of your parents. You think of the diver. You think it will be a very, very long time before anyone finds you on this deserted stretch of beach.
You think about the little boy in the book you’re reading who’s stranded in a lifeboat with a tiger. You read this afternoon through the scene where the boy has a change of heart. The boy stops imagining the ways the tiger can hurt him and starts believing he will survive. You tell yourself you’ll be okay.
I’ll be okay.
If it’s your first time, don’t go deeper than 15 feet, the diver says. A couple times later go no deeper than 40 feet. By the time you’re open water certified, 60 feet is your limit. If you become advanced certified, then you can go to 130 feet max. Most underwater life is in shallow areas so there’s no need to go deep other than for ego and curiosity. Diving has limits. If you go beyond that, it’s a risk.
You formulate a set of instructions. Some are the jaguar man’s exact commands. Some you
infer. Either way (for one, two, three hours, the tip of his six-inch silver blade constantly on your skin), what you’re to do is clear:
Talk in soft tones.
Keep your hands visible.
Don’t call him sir.
Don’t use that psychology on him.
Don’t forget his knife is in charge, and he’s ready to attack.
Don’t make a sudden move.
Don’t make him do what he’s thinking of doing. That’s how he says it. Don’t make me do what I’m thinking of doing.
The jaguar man tells you to sit on the ground. He says he’s going to tie your hands but not your feet. He doesn’t have rope though, what is his plan? He uses the knife to cut the leather strap off your straw hat. He tells you to take off your T-shirt. He uses the leather of your hat to tie your wrists then wraps the T-shirt around your wrists for reinforcement. He takes off the rest of your clothes so you’ll have to run naked into the street. You let him do these things. You don’t fight. He removes your clothes like you’re a child getting ready for a bath. You lift one foot, then the other.
Please don’t hurt me.
I’m not going to hurt you.
The moon and the clouds spin the way you spin. At times you’re in pitch darkness. At times there’s light. He demands you lie back so he can show you he’s a man. This is the first X tonight. Your body lurches. The part of you floating above lurches. Dark then light then dark, the energy of your fear reverberates in the moon and splinters into a thousand eyes of fire. As he presses his muscles against yours, you’re here and there. You and her. Far and near. One part of you watches. One part takes the hit. You look past him to the stars. The bright eyes of the sky watch you and the jaguar man in the tangle by the sea. It hurts to look back at stars, hurts to see anything beautiful.
Personally, the diver says, I’ve been to 260 feet on air, which is crazy because the oxygen becomes toxic at that depth. What you see is a lot of darkness. It’s eerie, like someone will attack you from the dark. You’re in territory where you don’t belong.
The Jaguar Man Page 4
