Antibiotics always make me ill, and the nurse warns I’ll get very sick from these. I’m nauseous almost immediately, stomach contracting like fists, so while my friend fills the prescription for more pills at the all-night pharmacy, I wait in the car and vomit into a plastic bag. It occurs to me to be afraid, alone in a dark corner of the parking garage in the middle of the night but I’m too sick, too beyond my own mind to move somewhere lit. I vomit several times before my friend returns, and several more times on the way home, each time my friend pulls over to the side of the road. By the time I get home there’s nothing left in my stomach, but I dry heave in the bathroom.
My friend brings the yellow comforter and down pillow from my bed, and I curl on the bathroom floor facing the toilet. Another friend who’s a professional muralist had helped paint mermaids on the bathroom wall, and now I look up at them from the floor, buoyed above me, floating on their painted sea. When the nausea passes, I brush my teeth. I’ve been awake for forty-two hours. I drag the comforter and pillow to bed where I sleep, deeply. My friend is next to me, my house is locked, I’m countries away from the jaguar man, there’s medicine in my body that will kill several forms of STDs, I won’t get pregnant, and I’m not alone. It’s 4:00 A.M., and I’ve done all I can do today.
FOURTEEN
MYTH. The jaguar man drives his van on the dirt road out of the village, pushes the gas pedal to the floor, and lurches forward. It’s dark, no streetlights. He has to get out of here, go far away, leave the country, he’ll never come back. He’ll get his son and take the boy with him. He’s not going to live without his son. He has American dollars now and his knife. He has momentum. He can take his son, he’ll crush whoever gets in his way if he has to, he’ll start over somewhere else, Guatemala, Honduras, he’ll put his cheek against the ground, plant himself like a seed, he’ll become a different man.
Where the hell is he going to go? Hide in the forest like it’s a holy shrine? Perch like a hawk in the treetops? He should never have trusted the tourist. The police are probably already on the road. He should have killed her, deboned her like a fish, at least left her back there so he could get a head start. What has he done?
He speeds, out of control on the snake bends of the road. There is only one way in and out of the village; he has to drive the reverse of what he has just driven with her. He was an outlaw before, now what is he, he wonders. He’s a dead man. He’ll die misunderstood, like a kiss, like the sun in hell. She can identify him, she knows his voice and face, he told her his name, the man in the hammock saw him, he was too nice to her, he should never have let her go.
He drives past Maya Beach, and the engine sputters, out of gas. Frantic, he gathers everything he owns, stuffs his pockets with his wallet, knife, lighter, and the crumpled traveler’s cheque the woman left behind. He doesn’t know how to get rid of her scent, her DNA, and his, their lives spilled and crisscrossed on the vinyl seats. He crushes fistfuls of dirt and leaves over the seats and doors, the places she touched. He stabs the seats with his knife, makes a violent mess. He makes things worse. He always makes things worse.
He runs along the edge of the road, foot, paw, foot, paw, dizzy with this new language of running. Even if he can’t see the road in the dark, he can feel the pocked dirt under his feet to guide him. When he’s out of breath, he slows to a walk, what else can he do? If this is his night to die, he’ll die. He should have hanged himself in the sanctuary on the tree, let Balam devour him later.
FACT. In trauma, mammals tremble and shake until they regain their balance and neutralize their response.
He senses someone behind him. He holds the handle of his knife and spins around. No one is there. He has to calm down. He needs a plan and a way out. Grow wings. Turn to liquid. Find an inner fold in his fucked-up life. He walks and hears footsteps behind him, step by step. He knows it’s the police. He has to make a choice. He can’t go to jail. Should he run or fight? The footsteps get closer. Footsteps in the dark are eerie. When he was little, Abu held his hand when they walked at night. He’s not little anymore. He’ll bite through the skull of fear and meet his fate. He turns again and sees the tourist. It’s her.
What is she doing on the road behind him? He lunges at her with his knife. He’ll get rid of her this time. He’s not taking any chances. He grabs her with his left hand, holds her arm. She doesn’t resist. He plunges his knife into her neck with his right hand, and the knife easily sinks in. She smiles at him, a look of pity. He sends the knife through her again, this time into her chest, her heart. Again and again and again, he’s a madman with his knife. She stands and gives him that half smile, a moon, a cradle. She never loses her footing. He grunts and spits saliva with the effort of his attack. She doesn’t bleed or cry or change expression. He backs away from her and runs, off the road, on the road, off the road, on the road, he zigzags a maniacal path. He turns and there she is, slow and calm. No matter how quickly he runs, she is right behind him.
His stomach heaves. He falls, his hands and knees on the ground, a churning deep in his gut. It seems as though everything he’s eaten since he was born comes up, milk, mangoes, tortillas, and fish, along with all his lost questions, whys and whens, his young loves that broke like shattered mirrors, the blue butterflies of his heart, the spider nests of his youth, the rebellions of his marriage, everything inside him pulled up from its fleshy roots. He gags and vomits and retches then curls on the side of the road next to his own waste and prays that this is death. She sits on a rock a short distance away and watches him purge.
FACT. Watching something happen changes the way it happens. The more you observe, the greater the effect.
He curls into a tighter ball, a pain in his head louder than the one in his stomach. When he can stand again, he stands. When he finds his balance again and can walk, he walks. She walks beside him.
A bar appears on the side of the road. The door opens. He enters, sits at a small table in the corner, and orders a Belikin and a shot. It burns his raw throat and the lining of his stomach. Another shot. Another Belikin. Another. She stands in the center of the bar and watches him drink. No police on the road. No one else in the bar. So this is his fate, he thinks. She’ll follow me wherever I go.
At some time during the night he passes out. He wakes up on the sand. How did he get here, he wonders? The sun is the blazing eye of the sky’s tender face. He sits up, checks his pockets. Empty. His wallet is gone, his knife is gone, even his lighter and the crumbled traveler’s cheque. He wipes his mouth on the back of his hand. Now what is he going to do? He knows he has done bad things. He knows bad things will keep happening to him in life and after death; it’s natural law.
He crawls, like a wild animal, to the shade of a palm tree, looks out toward the sea and there she is, in front of him, that expression of pity. As panic rises in his chest again, she slowly takes the form of Balam—multi-colored, shimmering with a gold underbelly, sleek, and strong. What did the jaguar man expect? Not this. Balam steps closer and looks down at the man with the saddest eyes. The man turns away. Balam scrapes the sand to mark he was there.
Six feet tail to nose, power and grace. The sight of Balam undoes him.
The wind picks up from the east. A storm brews, this time of year there’s always a storm, and the man braces himself against the tree. When the sky pummels him with rain, the man turns his face from the beating and cries. The rain pounds like ancient temple stones against his skull.
Balam stands under the tree with the man. Balam, his son, his wife who used to love him and who he still loves, the tourist, and what his life could have been. All under the tree with him in the rain.
This is real pain, he thinks, this sadness and regret. Nothing more horrible than the pain that comes from your own choices in life.
FIFTEEN
For the next forty-eight hours, I replay X many times. Why not? It’s not my fault. No shame. My friend sits beside me at my kitchen table while I make call after call. I think if I don’t tell p
eople right away it will be awkward later, for them or me, or both. I dread the phone calls but get a certain satisfaction being in control. I want order, authority, and no surprises. I become expert at telling the story, a short version for family, a slightly extended one for friends. I control the narrative, edit the details I think might upset people most, choosing my words carefully and insisting I got away unharmed. My parents, sisters, and brother converge at my home. They fly in from their respective cities so we can be together as a family. They hug me and reassure me (and themselves) that I’m okay. Everyone I tell—family, friends, colleagues—responds with kindness and concern, and discomfort. X becomes a one-conversation topic that isn’t brought up again, unless by me.
The diver reports X to the resort, and I’m relieved when he says someone will post warning signs.
I’m grateful, yes, but I feel no exuberance at being alive.
SOUVENIR SNAPSHOT. Jaguar piñata hanging from a tree. Beside it, a woman poised to bash it with a stick.
MYTH. The jaguar man creeps to his ex-wife’s house and shines a stolen flashlight through the window, a signal to his son. He waits in the weeds, a long time for nothing. All he wants is to see the boy. Goddamn, can’t he just see his boy?
I tell only select friends about the bus, how its lights appeared out of nowhere when the jaguar man was fiercest, how I silently prayed. I think about those lights over and over. What were they? A bus couldn’t come from the sea, that doesn’t make sense, and a bus never passed on the abandoned road. The lights melted into darkness as quickly as they appeared. What were the lights? It seemed odd then, but it’s baffling now.
What does he think they were?
And what about how I held the man’s hand, prayed over him, and wished him many blessings at the end of the night? Why did I do that? What part of me was in charge? Where is that part now? I prayed for an experience of love so big I’d have to change my life to comprehend it. Is this the awful answer to my prayer?
TRUTH. Compassion has impact but no physical mass. It’s hard to hold the air, the weightlessness, of it steady.
VOICE NUMBER 1. Why didn’t you report him?
Even as I recount the experience over and over, I can feel it slipping away, so I write down everything I remember as precisely as I can. But memory has limits. Already my memory is hazy about specific details. I’m sure the jaguar man had dark hair but I can’t describe his eyes or nose or mouth. I know he was wearing a red bandana.
Soon I will tell someone his bandana was blue, and it will sound vaguely wrong. I will go back to my notes and discover my mistake. I will find that some details are locked tight in my mind, and others are already riding the fluid, changing nature of memory. I spent all those hours with the jaguar man, just the two of us face to face, but I’m already an unreliable witness.
I’ve blocked so much out, yet I want to know more. I want to know his story, the parts before and after my encounter with him, which I wasn’t there to witness, thank God. He becomes territory for my imagination. What led him that day to me? What did he want? Not money, no. What did he really want, his deep-down cave-cold urge? What did he attempt to soothe in him by harming me?
I play detective with the clues he left for me. If I understand him, I might understand X. If I understand X, I might understand the nature of compassion. Compassion for the jaguar man saved my life, stilled his pounding, lowered his knife. Compassion rearranged my landscape, and his, like patterns in beads and broken glass. If I understand compassion, I might understand how getting caught in his pain could actually grow me in ways that I (say it) will appreciate.
So I keep looking at him from different angles and in tilted mirrors. He takes on peculiar new shapes, morphs into myth, and grows powerful legs and a sleek jaguar coat. My mind finds ways to make sense of things.
VOICE NUMBER 2. Why didn’t you report him?
There’s still one room in my house that needs a new floor. It becomes unbearable to live with the hideous tattered carpet in the small guest room. I want it fixed. Now. In a burst of energy, I tear out the carpet and underneath I discover hundreds of small nails bent in the painted wood.
I start pulling up nails, grab at them like rotten teeth with the pronged side of a miniature hammer. One by one, I yank them out until there are piles of old nails, so many they stack on top of each other and take the form of a man, starting from the feet and building up to the head, even the face, even his hair. A man made of rusty nails. Nails pulled from private places. Nails once sticking out of wood are now sticking out of him. Nails that are bent. Nails that were never hammered properly. The man is a skeleton of these old mangled mistakes. A man in the shape of a man, but who is not a man. A man made of stabbing, jabbing, and forcing things together—things that are meant to be apart. Nails for eyes. Nails for words. His breath hissing around its own sharp point. Nails that drove down deep where they never belonged, where they had no permission to go.
FACT. One in six women.
That’s the statistic in the United States today. What will it be tomorrow?
One in six women fights back or doesn’t fight back, screams or doesn’t scream, scratches a man’s eyes, kicks his groin, walks in the middle of the street under the light, runs, pleads, doesn’t drink alone in bars, or does, doesn’t dress provocatively, or does, goes to workshops, takes a self-defense course, doesn’t trust strangers, or does, feels confident, acts aware, holds her keys between her fingers, arms herself with mace, or locks doors behind her. And then what? None of that matters if he has a knife, an aggression, a demand, a pain, a sickness, a disconnection, a brutal need he, he, the man, he never learned to handle.
One in six. And less than half report it.
VOICE NUMBER 3. Why didn’t you report him?
Something’s obviously not working for women (and men). Women (and men) understandably don’t want to face the questioning (and blame) inherent in the reporting process. Women (and men) might not want the perpetrator, who they often know, to go to prison. Accountability, yes, but what are the options?
I think in these detached abstracts; the reel of my mind lets out a line. Experts say X is about power. I think of the jaguar man, and the statement seems incomplete. Power to do what? Connect? Get his son? Soothe his rage? Belong where he feels cut off? Force himself in?
Whatever it is, it’s an epidemic. These sick men could fill the hospitals of the world. They’re self-medicating through means of X. Do they recognize that what they inflict on others they also inflict on themselves? They need test tubes and research, a vaccination, a cure. Someone needs to discover the tsetse fly that carries their disease. They need to speak up and explain themselves.
Who is dealing with these men?
SOUVENIR SNAPSHOT. A jaguar pelt stretched between bamboo rods for sale on the side of the road.
MYTH. I’m in charge. I send a thousand of these sick men into the woods. Not to exact terror and revenge. Not to incite chaos and violence. No, these woods heal and shock. Oh, this is how it feels to be well. This is how it feels to be loved. This is how it feels to respect myself and others. I send a thousand of these men into the woods. I tell them, stay there and don’t come back until you have a plan for fixing other men like you.
My foot taps the floor. I’m cold and clinical. I can analyze but why can’t I feel? It happened years ago, in a faraway place, to someone else, a woman, a ghost floating nearby, hard to catch, not me, someone I know, a good friend, not me, not on Sunday, today’s Wednesday, not three days ago. I should still be on vacation with the diver, the one who lives in that hell paradise, the one who’s there and not here.
I get a referral for a psychologist, PhD, who specializes in trauma. My friend drives me to the appointment in a fancy building in a ritzy part of town. I immediately distrust her. She looks like a bleached Barbie doll—too much plastic surgery—a woman refusing to age. I follow her into her office where she’s required to lay prone in her leather chair because she’s had some sort of
sinus or back surgery (I wasn’t listening, I was distracted by her fake nose and breasts), and she’s uncomfortable if she sits straight up. She instructs me to tell her what happened. I do, in detail. I mention the bus, and she wheezes through her throat, which makes me think her problem is sinus. She listens dutifully and watches the clock. My story takes nearly an hour. At the end, I express concern that I can’t feel any emotion. She deepens her recline and suggests I wear an elastic band around my wrist, snap it whenever X seems unreal or far away. Snap myself out of it.
I hate this psychologist’s stupid advice, hate it even more when she tells me her fee, which is twice what I expected. I forgot to ask about money when I made the appointment and now I’m suddenly seething. I feel the urge to pull her bleached hair out of her Barbie head and pop her fake breasts with a crochet hook. I don’t have money to waste, which is what I did. She wants to make another appointment. I imagine if I snap an elastic band like a sling shot I can hit her tender sinus. I tell her I can’t afford her rates, and she offers to let her intern treat me for half the price. She’ll monitor the case, a special deal for me. Her voice whines from between her unnaturally plump lips.
A tiny speck of stillness inside me grabs hold. I politely tell her I’ll call if I change my mind. I politely see myself out. I leave a trail of polite anger as I walk down the hallway, relieved if I can’t feel emotion about X then I can at least feel disgust toward her.
The Jaguar Man Page 8
