Night of the Jaguar jp-3

by Michael Gruber

  “I believe you’re right, but that doesn’t matter. I doubt that they’ll catch you, however. Listen, Moie, thechinitxi have killed the Monkey Boy and have stolen the Firehair Woman. Can you find them and bring her back to me?”

  “I can find them, yes. They are south of here and not far. Perhaps I can free her, too. But where she goes after that, I can’t say. She is on her own path, that one.”

  “That’s true. Well, go now and do the best you can. And I thank you.”

  Cooksey felt the air move against his face and he knew he was alone again in the dark. He removed a flashlight and some equipment from his bag and set to work. Within minutes strong beams of light penetrated the root forest, and Cooksey found himself grabbed, braced against the tree trunk, and frisked by two strong policemen.

  “Where’s the Indian?” one demanded.

  “I didn’t see any Indian,” said Cooksey, with perfect honesty.

  “What are you doing here, then?” the cop asked.

  “I am collecting nocturnal insects. This is a fig tree, and I study fig wasps.” Cooksey knew he was a bad liar and so tried always to tell nothing but the truth, although quite often not the entire truth.

  Moie has a map in his head showing where to go, but it was not an ordinary map, not a picture of the earth’s surface seen from above, drawn to scale. This map he had made at night, while he flew through the dreams of the dead people. Its landmarks were dread and desire, lust and hatred, love and harmony, and while it is difficult to do, he can generate within his own being a concordance between this world and the streets and buildings where the wai’ichuranan dwell. He trots south at a steady pace along the delightfully smooth rock paths they have in this land. He is naked except for his loincloth, dream pouch, and woven bag. People see him pass down U.S. 1, but when they look to confirm this surprising sight, he is always gone. I thought I saw an Indian running down the highway, they may remark to one another, if there is another, but the second one never saw what the first one had; and if someone alone catches sight of Moie, they tend to forget it very quickly. Every cop in Miami is on the lookout for a lone Indian, but not one of the several officers he passes on his way south pursues him or calls in the sighting.

  He finds the building then, with little trouble. Two of the chinitxi are inside it and one is standing in front, in the shadows of a doorway, smoking a cigar and looking around. Moie can also feel the girl within the building. He slips around the back to see if there is a way in.

  At the back of the building there is a door that will not open. Moie has observed this of the doors in this land. Sometimes they open and sometimes not, and he has wondered why this is so. It may be, he thinks, that the wai’ichuranan are as bad at making doors as they are at hunting. Near the door are heaps of useful things that the wai’ichuranan have left out for anyone to take: metal, glass, paper, and high stacks of tires. Moie has observed that this was something they like to do: each morning great trucks drive through the streets and the men on them take away bags and baskets of food and other good things, perhaps to give to other people who did not have enough, or perhaps this is how the food gets into their machines. He does not spend much time considering these mysteries, however, but instead scrambles lightly up the stack of tires to the roof. There he walks toward a little house made of glass. He spits on his hand and wipes the dirt away from a pane and sees what he seeks lying below.

  In the garage office, Dario Rascon awoke from a troubled dream to the sound of breaking glass. He rose lightly from the cracked leather couch on which he had been sleeping, drew his pistol, and, without bothering to wake the snoring Iglesias, went through the door to the garage bay. After waiting a few moments in the dark, ears straining at silence, he snapped on the lights. Of the eight fluorescent tubes in the pair of hanging fixtures only three came on, but there was enough light to see the Indian, a small brown man, nearly naked, with facial tattoos and a bowl haircut. He was standing under the dark skylight, with sparkling shards of glass all around him.

  Rascon pointed his pistol and ordered the man to approach with his hands up, but the Indian, with a movement too swift for any response, vanished behind a workbench. It was dark at that end of the garage, but Rascon was not afraid of Indians. He had shot lots of Indians at home. He moved forward confidently. The Indian was not behind the workbench. Rascon moved farther into the darkness, pointing his pistol here and there like a snake striking.

  Ararah. Ararararh.

  He jumped at the sound and whirled. Some kind of motor starting up, he thought, the little pendejo must have tripped a switch. Then, amazingly, he was on his face on the concrete, the gun gone skittering across the floor. He felt, as his last earthly sensation, a hot breath on his neck.

  Jenny was positioned in the right place to see the whole thing. She saw Moie go dark and vague and his form thicken and grow and then the thing was standing there lashing its tail. She saw what it did to the man. Then another man appeared in the garage and shouted out something, and she saw a speckled blur fly through the air and heard a thump, then a strangled human cry and, after a moment, liquid gnashing sounds. These stopped. Then came the slighter noise of claws clicking on concrete and the beast’s head was near her own, inches away. She looked into the golden merciless eyes. Through chattering teeth she managed to say, “Moie, don’t kill me.” Jaguar opened his mouth. She saw the red blood spattered on its muzzle, the long yellow fangs. A breath issued from its mouth, smelling of fresh meat, coppery and rank, and of something else, some sweeter scent, an overwhelming perfume. She gasped and took it into her body. Then she felt the aura, the familiar cool feeling in her center and slipped, rather gratefully this time, into the seizure.

  When she awoke her bonds had been cut. She found a water spigot and took a drink and washed her face and her hands. Urine had dried on her legs, and she washed this off, too. It was perfectly quiet in the garage, save for the usual hum a city makes. She did not look at what was on the floor. A merciful amnesia had descended on her mind, which now resembled a vast dusty warehouse in which only a few motes of thought floated, the chief of which was LEAVE NOW. She obeyed this and walked out of the repair bay quite nude, pausing only to switch off the lights, having been firmly trained from an early age always to switch off the lights when leaving a room.

  Even in Miami, a city void of dress codes, it is hard for a naked woman to go far on a major thoroughfare without someone noticing. Within a quarter mile of where she started, Jenny was fortunate enough to meet a couple of social workers coming home from a movie. Both of them were women and both of them had plenty of experience with drug intoxication among teenagers. They grabbed her, wrapped her in a blanket, and took her to the nearest emergency room, which was at South Miami Hospital.

  Prudencio Rivera Martinez, after finishing his cigar, had walked a block to a taco joint and used the toilet. Returning to the garage office, he was surprised to see his two companions gone. He went into the repair bay and shouted their names several times. Hearing no reply, he took another few steps and slipped on something, landing painfully on his knee and hand. Standing again, he looked at his hand and found it covered with blood. After he turned the light on, he discovered that what he had slipped on was a piece of Santiago Iglesias’s liver. The donor of this morsel was lying a few yards away. In the distance, he could just make out a little mound in the center of a large dark pool, and he concluded that this was Rascon. The girl was gone. He took out his cell phone and was about to push the buttons, when a novel thought entered his mind. He placed the cell phone on a tool cabinet and considered his situation: he had several thousand in cash and a new van and a gun and a small personal stash of very pure cocaine. It was more than enough to make a start in New York. Hurtado might come looking for him, or El Silencio, but they would first have to deal with whatever had silently taken out two extremely experienced and tough Colombian gangsters, or three, counting Rafael in Calderon’s house, and he thought that they might have a difficult time doing that
. In any case, he was himself no longer willing to participate in this fregada. He got into the van and, like so many of his countrymen, immigrated to America.

  Paz’s boat was a locally made plywood craft, ugly as the devil and painted peeling pink. It had been called Marta, but one of the stick-on metallic letters had fallen into the sea and so it was Mata now, which Paz had liked as being suitable for a homicide dick and had left it so. It was damp and uncomfortable and ran like blazes on its planing hull in front of twin Mercury Optimax 200s. Just now it was anchored in Florida Bay over a hole Paz had been fishing for years. They had been out since just past dawn and caught two fat snook (Paz) and a small permit (Zwick) and now it was eleven and the fish had stopped biting. The only person still fishing seriously was Amelia, who was methodically feeding live shrimp to the crabs on the bottom with her hook.

  The two men were sitting on a padded locker, working on their second six-pack. Zwick had been talking about his work, a subject he was never reluctant to pursue, but Paz had been encouraging. As a result he had learned a good deal about Penrose’s theory that consciousness was in some sense a quantum phenomenon lodged in the exquisitely fine microtubules of neurons, and Edelman’s theory that the brain is a set of maps, with sheets of neurons having systematic relationships to sheets of receptor cells wired to the whole sensorium. In this theory, sensory experience essentially constructs consciousness. It was Zwick’s idea that the real key lay in a concordance of the two theories: Edelman’s notion of reentry mapping explained the way the brain built a picture of the world and of the self within it; Penrose explained, as far as Paz could understand the jargon, why minds were not like machines, why human minds could think up new stuff, something no computer had ever done. Paz listened, asked questions, received detailed answers, some of which he even understood, and waited patiently for Zwick to get drunk enough to deal with Paz’s less orthodox queries. He thought it was a lot harder absorbing information from Zwick than from a naked woman in bed, which had been for many years Paz’s almost exclusive tutelary venue. Did sex make the neural sheets more receptive? Or did the spray of testosterone that Zwick emitted when making a point have the opposite effect? A good doctoral thesis, Paz thought, but one unlikely ever to be written.

  “So what about hallucinations, Doctor?” he asked now. “It can’t be a mapping thing because by definition it doesn’t exist to be picked up by the senses. But it seems real.”

  Zwick waved his hands dismissively. “It’s all bad connections, neurotransmitter imbalances in the midbrain. We can produce any type of hallucination we want by electrical stimulation, magnetic fields, chemicals…it’s not a particularly interesting field of study.”

  “Unless you’re having them. What about a hallucination that leaves physical evidence behind it?”

  “Then by definition it’s not a hallucination.”

  “Unless the evidence is also hallucinatory. Where do you draw the line?”

  “Through your dick. What are you talking about, Paz? More spooky shit?”

  “Spooky indeed. Are you drunk enough to give me a scientific opinion?”

  “Barely. Why isn’t this vessel equipped with daiquiris? Isn’t that a Coast Guard requirement?”

  “Only in international waters. What do you think of shape-shifting? Speaking as a renowned physicist and drunk?”

  “What do you mean, ‘shape-shifting’?”

  “I mean that it’s universally accepted among shamanic peoples that certain highly trained people can turn themselves into animals.”

  “Oh, that. I thought they only thought that the spirit of the great lion, or whatever, was taking them over and they growled and imagined they were chasing zebras.”

  “Yeah, they have that, but I meant for real, assuming there’s such a thing as real. What it is, I was called in recently to consult on a Miami PD case. A couple of citizens got killed, and all the evidence says it was done by a large animal, a cat of some kind. We got footprints, we got claw marks, the wounds are consistent with teeth and claws. They even figured out how much it weighs, a little over four-fifty. Needless to say, no one has reported such an animal in the area. We also have this little Indian running around town, comes from the jungles in South America, got a grudge against the victims, and also claims to be able to change into a jaguar, more or less. We also have some anecdotal evidence this guy has the ability to, let’s say, modify his appearance. What do you make of all that?”

  “Of that I make horseshit,” said Zwick. “Technically, we in science are not allowed to say that anything’s impossible, just that some things are so improbable as to be not worth thinking about, and this falls in that category. I mean organic forms do change shape, obviously, but as growth over time, and via evolution over humongous ranges of time. They don’t just change shape like in fairy tales, not in real life.”

  “Okay, but look at it another way. If you were God, and making a world in which something like that could happen, how would you do it?”

  “Oh, well, that’s the way to my heart, letting me play God.” Zwick laughed and finished his beer, tossing the can over his shoulder into the bay. “Although among the many improvements I’d make, that one would probably not be high on the list. Let’s see now….” Zwick leaned back against the rail and opened another can. His eyes lost focus as he raised his head to the sky, seeming to seek counsel from the current deity. Paz observed him with interest, as a phenomenon of nature. Watching Robert Zwick cogitate was less fascinating than watching Nolan Ryan pitch or Michael Jordan shoot baskets, but it was the same sort of thing, a thing regular people couldn’t hope to do.

  “Right,” said Zwick after several minutes of this. “We all have in us a neural map of our bodies. No one knows how detailed it is, but let’s say for the sake of argument that it descends to the molecular level. So your shape-shifter would have to have a duplicate image of the selected animal in there somewhere. How it’s instantiated we don’t know, but it’s not through any strictly biological process. On the other hand, we’re constantly discovering biological processes we never suspected, so call that a gimme. We observe in nature the caterpillar turning into a butterfly, a completely different creature, over a fairly short time. Let’s say it’s the same kind of thing, but faster. Okay, we need energy. Well, there are humongous reserves of energy in the universe, the so-called dark energy for one thing, and ordinarily we have no access to it. But suppose Penrose is correct, that consciousness is partly a quantum phenomenon, and suppose our little guy has solved the dualism problem, don’t ask me how…”

  “Sorry, what problem?”

  “We talked about this before, remember? Substance dualism, the idea that consciousness is its own thing and exists independently of the material brain, as Descartes believed. It satisfies all the problems of consciousness by explaining them away-the ghost in the machine, as they call it, or rather all problems except one, and that’s the killer: how do you imagine any gearing or connection between the material and the immaterial? How does an immaterial mind cause a material event, say, the firing of neurons in the motor cortex that move your arms? Which is why it’s bullshit, and also why there’s no God.”

  “Except you.”

  “Of course. But never mind that for the moment. Substance dualism implies conscious immaterial beings that are nevertheless capable of influencing matter, so that takes care of a lot of your energy concerns. This putative being moves the molecules into the right place according to the alternate body plan he keeps in his head. Animal flesh is just air and water and a few minerals, easily obtained from ordinary dirt, if you have godlike powers. So that’s one solution. Alternatively, we could posit that there are other universes intimately connected with our own, the unseen world of superstition. We think that our four dimensions are generated by vibrations of the strings wrapped up in the Calabi-Yau geometry, but for the math to work there have to be seven other dimensions tangled up in there, of which we know zip and probably never will. Again, the central que
stion is, What is consciousness? Maybe it can get in there and arrange for the passage of mystic beings. Maybe that’d be a simpler solution than assembling your jaguar from molecules on order. The thing just steps through, and the little Indian goes back the other way, like a revolving door. The energy cost would be huge, but who’s counting?”

  Paz nodded. He had some experience both with beings appearing from nowhere and with uncanny geometries. “I like that one. So you think it’s possible.”

  “Not the right question. Like I said, anything’s possible, but almost everything except what we observe is ridiculously improbable. On the other hand, we don’t know shit about either consciousness on the fine grain, or about the probability set associated with dimensions other than the familiar ones.” He regarded the present beer can, found it empty, flung it away. “There, that solves the physical problem, but it leaves the sociopolitical one, which I think is the most telling.”

  “Which is what?”

  “Which is that if these little guys, these shamans, can do all that subtle moving of energies with their minds, how come they don’t rule the world now? How come scientific technology totally destroys any competing worldview? I mean, destroys it physically? The Indians are all on reservations, if you notice, and all the indigenous people, so called, are flocking into cities, dying to sew underwear and get a TV.”

  “Mozart,” said Paz.

  “Say what?”

  “A woman I once knew, an anthropologist, said that magic was like a creative art. There were geniuses that could do things that no one else could, just like Mozart, but that they couldn’t package what they did so that the whole culture could do it, too. But any asshole can use science packaged as technology, so the primitives get killed off everywhere, like you said.”