Night of the Jaguar

by Michael Gruber

  “No, it was a little like a dinosaur and a little like a kitty cat.”

  “Boy, that sounds scary,” Paz said, terrified himself. “But it’s all gone now. It can’t get you, okay? Dreams are just in your head, you know? Animals in dreams can’t really bite and scratch you. We talked about this before, you remember.”

  “Yes, but, Daddy, I waked up…I waked up and the aminal was still here. I was all waked up and it was still here.”

  She had slipped a little back into her baby talk, not a good sign. He said, “I don’t know, baby, sometimes it’s hard to tell exactly when you’re all waked up, especially if you’re having a bad nightmare. Anyway, it was just a dream. It wasn’t real.”

  “Abuela says dreams are real.”

  Paz took a deep breath and uttered an inward malediction. “I don’t think that’s what Abuela meant, baby. I think she meant that sometimes dreams tell us things about ourselves that might be hard to find out otherwise.”

  “Uh-uh! She says brujos can send you bad dreams and they can choke you for real.”

  “But the dream you had wasn’t like that,” said Paz with authority. “It was just a dream. Now, it’s the middle of the night and I want you to try to get back to sleep.”

  “I want to read first.”

  “Oh, honey, it’s the middle of the night…,” he whined, but the child had already leaped light as a fairy to her bookcase and brought back a large-format volume called Animals Everywhere, and Paz had to leaf from Aardvark through the beasts of field and forest, ocean and stream, one for each letter, reading each caption, and not missing out on a word, for the child had the whole thing nearly by heart.

  “That’s the animal that was in my bad dream,” she declared, pointing her small finger at the page.

  “Uh-huh,” said Paz nonchalantly. The smart move here was not to get excited and move on quickly to the harmless Kangaroo. She was out by the Opossum. He shelved the book, tucked her in with a kiss, and left, but not back to bed.

  In the kitchen, he found his wife wrapped in a pink chenille robe, in the act of placing a large, blackened, hourglass espresso maker on the burner.

  “How is she?”

  Paz said, “Fine, just a dream. You’re going to stay up.” He gestured to the coffeepot and took a seat at the counter.

  “Yeah, I have some case notes I have to write up that I fell asleep over last night.”

  “It’s still last night now.”

  “Yeah, right. And before I forget, speaking about tonight, I mean twelve hours from now, don’t forget the food for Bob Zwick and whoever.”

  “That’s tonight?”

  “I knew you’d forget.”

  “I’m a bad husband. Can’t I talk you back into bed? We could fool around.”

  She looked at him, eyebrows up, a half smile on her lips. She was still a handsome woman, he thought, pushing forty and seven years into a pretty good marriage. She’d stopped obsessing about her weight and was a little lusher than she had been, but she carried it well on her substantial frame. A Marilyn type, blond, generously breasted and hipped, although the face did not go with the 1950s pinup body, being sharp-featured and intelligent, sometimes neurotically so. She had been Lorna Wise, Ph.D., when wed, and was now Lola C. Wise Paz, M.D., Ph.D.; like her name, a handful.

  “You tempt me, but I really have to get those notes done, or I’ll be fucked all day.”

  “Choosing the figurative over the literal, so to speak.”

  She laughed. “Guilty.”

  “That being the case, since you’re being so professional, can I have a consult?”

  The coffeepot hissed, and she attended to it, pouring herself a large cup of tarry black, offering by gesture the pot to him. He shook his head. “No, I’m going to try to get a couple more hours.”

  She sat across from him, took a couple of sips. He’d addicted her to this kind of coffee early in their relationship, and it had helped carry her through what she always referred to as medical-motherhood school. “So consult. The doctor is in.”

  “Okay, just before Amy started yelling I was having a dream, vivid, clear, like I don’t usually have anymore. I’m sitting in our living room, but instead of our couch I’m leaning against a kind of fur wall, like a leopard skin fur wall, and I’m waiting for something, I forget what, just a sense of anticipation. And then I realize that the fur is moving in and out, and that it’s a living animal. I’m actually leaning against an animal, yellow with those little circular black dots on it, like a leopard. This is all incredibly clear. It’s a leopard the size of a horse, huge, maybe bigger than a horse. And I’m not scared or anything, it just seems natural, and then we have this weird conversation. It says something like, ‘You know the world is dying,’ and I say, ‘Oh, right, war, pollution, global warming,’ all that shit, and it says, I don’t know, ‘You could stop it if you wanted to,’ and I get all pumped up, I’m like, ‘I’ll do anything, whatever you say,’ and it says, ‘You have to let me eat your daughter.’”

  “Good God, Jimmy!”

  “Yeah, but in the dream it made perfect sense, and what I was thinking about then, was how would I explain it to you, why it made sense, you know? That crazy dream logic? And the leopard gets up and stretches, and it’s like something on a flag, you know…from mythology? And I want to fall down and worship it, even though it’s going to eat Amy. So I hear her crying, and I want to say to her, hey, it’s okay, it won’t hurt, it’s part of what has to happen to save the world, but then it penetrates that she really is crying and I wake up.”

  “That’s quite a dream. Try half a milligram of Xanax before retiring.”

  “But what does it mean, Doc?”

  “It means there’s static in there during REM sleep while your brain transfers material from short-term into long-term memory and your cortex interprets the static into factitious incident. It’s like hearing music in the hum of a fan or seeing pictures in clouds. The brain is a pattern-making organ. The patterns don’t have to have any meaning.”

  “I know, that’s what you always say, but get this: okay, I go to see what’s up with Amy. She tells me she had a nightmare about an animal trying to eat her, the bad kind where you think you woke up but you’re still in the dream. So I calm her down a little and she goes for her animal book and makes me read it to her and she picks out the animal. From her dream.”

  “You’re going to say it was a leopard, right?”

  “A jaguar. What do you think of that?”

  “A coincidence.”

  “That’s your professional medical opinion? A coincidence?”

  Lola did a little eye rolling here. “Yes, of course! What else could it be, mind travel?”

  “Or something. I always forget you have this weirdness-deficit thing.”

  “It’s called reason, Jimmy. The rational faculty of mankind. What are you doing?”

  “Interfering with you. Running my hands inside your pathetic stained chenille bathrobe. Checking to see if it’s still there. Oh, yes. What do you think of that, Doctor?”

  Lola closed her eyes and sagged against him. She said, “This is so mean of you when I have to work.”

  “A quickie. Get up on the counter.”

  “What about Amy?”

  “I gave her powerful drugs,” he said, “barbiturates, brown heroin,” and lifted her onto the Formica.

  She said, “This is what I get for marrying a Cuban.”

  “What, Jews don’t fuck on the kitchen counter?”

  “I don’t know, but I’ll ask around,” she said as his mouth closed down on hers. For a while she forgot about her pile of work, and he forgot about dreams.

  Lola Wise Paz was at this period a resident in neuropsychiatry at South Miami Hospital, a short bicycle ride from her home. She’d owned a doctorate in clinical psychology when she and Jimmy Paz hooked up, and she’d borne the child, and then, in something of a panic about time’s wingéd chariot hurrying near, she had decided to go to medical school at ag
e thirty-four. Paz had backed her play in this, and the two of them had worked like cart horses to make a living, clear time for study, and do the endless tasks of parenthood, helped in this last by the mighty Margarita Paz, the Abuela of Doom. Now, as on most mornings, after Lola had pedaled off, Paz got the kid dressed and fed, delivered her to the first grade at Providence Day School, went to the restaurant, prepped lunch, and cooked much of it. Meanwhile, the Abuela picked up Amelia and brought her to the restaurant Guantanamera. Grandmotherly affections, it appeared, proved even stronger than the desire to exert total control over her restaurant during every single minute it was open. When the lunch rush had declined to a trickle of orders, Paz found his offspring trying on a cook’s apron that the grandmother had apparently altered to fit her. Paz looked the tiny prep cook over with a professional eye. To his mother he said, “She looks good. Why don’t we let her handle the lunch tomorrow? We wouldn’t have to pay her because she’s just a little kid.”

  “I do too get paid!” Amelia protested. “Abuela gave me a dollar.”

  “Okay, but lay off the booze and cigarettes unless you want to be three feet tall your whole life. And ticklish.”

  After the shrieks had subsided, Paz set her up with a pan of radishes to be carved into roses. When she was settled, he went to talk to his mother. Margarita Paz was a black peasant from Guantánamo and still bore as she closed in on sixty the marks of that origin: strong arms, wide hips, a bosom like a shelf, and a hard, calculating stare. She dressed in bright colors and lipsticks and nail polishes that set off her shiny chocolate skin; a turban was often on her head, as now. Paz had always been a little afraid of her; he knew no one who was not, except his daughter.

  “The produce was garbage today,” she said when he came into her little box of an office. “Talk to Moreno, and tell him we’re definitely going to switch to Torres Brothers if it happens again. Tell him his father never treated us like Americans.”

  “I’ll take care of it, Mamí,” said Paz, although the produce was prime as always. Complaining and snapping orders was her way of showing affection. “Look, I wanted to ask you…Amelia’s been having nightmares, and she wakes up screaming at night, and when I tell her not to worry, that the monsters in the dreams aren’t real, what do I get? Abuela says they are real. I wish you wouldn’t tell her stuff like that, okay?”

  “You want me to lie to my granddaughter?”

  “It upsets her. She’s too young to be worrying about all that.”

  “And what about you? Are you also too young?”

  Paz took a deep breath. “I don’t want to start with this now, Mamí. Santería is your thing, we’re not going to get involved in it. Not me, and definitely not Amelia.”

  “What kind of dreams?” asked his mother, ignoring this last, as she did any statement she chose not to hear.

  “That’s not important. We don’t want you telling her stuff like that.”

  She shot him a sharp look; it was that “we.” Mrs. Paz had always imagined that when her son finally brought home a daughter-in-law, she would be a girl amenable to direction, as was only right. Instead, she got an American doctor with insane ideas about child rearing. A doctor! The man should be the doctor, and the woman should take care of the children, emphasis on the plural, and listen to her suegra with respect, or else how was society to continue? But this daughter-in-law had been so bold as to state, on more than one occasion, that if Margarita insisted on inducting the girl into “your cult” she would have to reconsider letting her spend so much time with her grandmother, and all because a few little charms, an ide for her small wrist, the sacrifice of a few birds in order to cast the child’s future and protect her from danger…absurd, and especially after all she had done for them. It did not occur to her to wonder why her son had chosen a woman precisely as stubborn and hardheaded as his mother.

  She sighed dramatically and threw up her hands. “All right! What can I do, I’m just an old woman, it’s perfectly all right to ignore me. I never expected after the life I’ve lived, to end up being despised like this, but let it be! I won’t say another word to the child, ever. Take her away!” Here she removed a bright silk hankie from her sleeve and dabbed at her eyes.

  “Come on, Mamí, don’t make me crazy. It’s not like that and you know it….”

  “But,” she said, and now fixed him with her terrible eye, “but there is something.” Here a gesture, hands like birds, conjuring the unseen.

  “What something?”

  “Something”—darkly—“there is something moving in the orun, I don’t know what it is, but something very powerful, and it has to do with you, my son, and with her. Yes, you think I’m stupid, but I know what I know.”

  There seemed to be nothing to say to that, so Paz kissed his mother on the cheek and went out.

  “That’s a good rose,” he said to his daughter, “but you need to slice the petals thinner so they’ll flop over and be more like a real flower. Look, watch me.” With which he picked up a parer and an icy, crisp radish from the pan and in eight seconds whipped it into a blossom.

  Amelia looked coldly at the proffered garnish. “I prefer it the way I do it,” she said, showing yet again how close to the tree fell the fruit among the tribe of Paz.

  Some hours later, Paz was again sweating over a grill, but now he had taken on a load of his own banana daiquiri and was feeling pretty fine. The grill stood on his own patio, and on it sizzled and smoked several racks of Cuban-style barbecued pork ribs, marinated in lime juice, cumin, oregano, and sherry. Amelia had set the picnic table for five, a seafood and endive salad had been prepped and was now cooling in the refrigerator, in company with two magnums of fairly drinkable Spanish white and a dozen little pots of flan. He had a tape going, guajira music, Arsenio Rodriguez, that floated out through the windows of the Florida room and mixed with the sweet smoke from the grill. Paz before marriage had hardly ever cooked at home, and his social life had consisted of presex activities only. Lola had become more social since the M.D. came through, and they had people over almost every week. He didn’t mind cooking for these events, nor did he mind Lola’s friends. She did not hang out with people apt to patronize him. Before his marriage, Paz had acquired virtually all his knowledge of the intellectual world from pillow talk. He dated bright women only, showed them a good time, provided plenty of athletic sex, and afterward sucked out their brains, for although he was natively bright, he had no patience for sitting in a classroom listening to the professorial drone, or for poring over texts, or for being tested. He had an extraordinarily retentive memory, which was fed only via the audio channel, and could produce, during these dinner parties, remarks that were surprising from the mouth of a high school grad cook and former cop. He was inordinately pleased when this occurred, as was his wife, the intellectual snob. At such times he could see it on her face: look, he’s not just a stud.

  He heard the clicking of a coasting bicycle, and Lola rolled into view in the driveway. Amelia came shouting up to show off the garland of yellow allamanda blossoms she had constructed and also the dollar earned at the restaurant. Then a kiss for Paz. She looked around, sniffed luxuriously.

  “That smells great. You’re being the perfect husband again.”

  “Not perfect. I grabbed Yolanda’s butt in the reefer before lunch.”

  “Oh, I totally understand about that,” she said. “I know how men are—you haven’t had a piece of ass in what, seven hours?”

  “Seven hours and thirty-two minutes,” said Paz, “but who’s counting?” She laughed and went off to shower and change her clothes. Paz drank some more daiquiri and painted more sauce on his meat.

  Bob Zwick was a blocky, confident man with a Jewish Afro of some length and an unrepentant New York accent that in social situations he rarely let rest. He had graduated from MIT at sixteen and thereafter had spent five years working on M-theory with Edward Witten at Princeton. Having plumbed the secrets of subatomic structure as far as he wanted, he had surpr
ised everyone by switching fields to molecular biology, had picked up another Ph.D. (Stanford) in that, and then, feeling the need for a little break, had come down to Miami to work on his tan and get an M.D. at the university. There he had met Lola, had hit on her instantly, as he did on very nearly every woman who crossed his path, been laughingly rejected, and become her friend. Zwick, it had to be said, neither pressed his suit beyond the first no, nor held a grudge. Paz would not have picked him off a menu as a pal, but he got along with him, had even taken him out on the boat to fish a time or two. He found Zwick entertaining in a headachy sort of way, like daiquiris.

  Dressed this evening in shorts, sandals, and a T-shirt that said PRINCETON COSMOLOGICAL CO. INC. CUSTOM UNIVERSES, WE DELIVER, he strode in, embraced and kissed the hostess, snatched up Amelia and whirled her around to the giggle point, shook hands with Paz, and introduced his current girl, a leggy blonde with a bony sardonic face. She was wearing a sleeveless top and a long skirt of some nubbly clinging stuff, in lavender. Paz felt a little flutter in his belly, but she didn’t bat an eye.

  “Beth Morgensen,” she said, extending a cool hand. “You must be Jimmy Paz.”

  “I am,” he said and wondered if she had told Zwick, and more important, whether she would let it out this evening.

  “What is that, a banana daiquiri?” said Zwick. “I want one. Beth, this guy makes the best banana daiquiris in the galaxy. These are galactic-level daiquiris.”

  “So I’ve heard,” said Morgensen, who had, in fact, consumed any number of them during the months eight years ago when she had been one of Jimmy Paz’s many girlfriends. He produced the drinks, along with a salver of boiled shrimps with small pots of various sauces, and avoided her gaze.

  They drank around the picnic table and talked, their shoulders swaying helplessly, their fingers tapping to the music, and Paz rose several times to replenish the blender, helped by Amelia, who liked squeezing limes and breaking bananas into the beaker. On the last of these trips, he ran into Beth Morgensen, coming from the bathroom. Paz sent Amelia out with a full blender. Morgensen watched her trot off.