The diver meets me after work. He hugs me and hugs me, and I know I’ve done the right thing coming here. The diver is sweet. I let myself fall in love exactly the way I wanted. I fall in love with the diver, the village, the air, the sea, the sand, and the sun and moon taking turns in the sky. I don’t think about her stranded only miles down the unpaved road. Nothing interrupts my focus.
FACT. When met with a poisonous snake in the rain forest, give it ample room. If you attempt to scare it, it could attack.
I return a second time to the tiny village to visit the diver. The first time he was sweet, but the second time I catch him in another lie. I discover a girlfriend from a European country visits him in the tiny village. I feel foolish, cliché. I try to be casual—what did I expect—he can see other people but please don’t lie. He swears I’m the only one he loves. He twists his story into an almost believable tale, and my head spins it into a story of how everything ends up the way I want. He tries to be sweet, and I try to let the days go by without extending the fight.
Walking back from the beach one day alone, I think I see the jaguar man on the sidewalk but I’m not sure. How can I not remember what he looks like? Try to remember. Nails pulled out of wood? No he doesn’t. An animal in the tropical forest, a jaguar, lean and fast? No he doesn’t. I remember a television show I saw about the ocean. There’s an eel in the show, long, thick, fanged. He looks like an eel. No he doesn’t. I’m fed up with my own resistance.
Does she remember?
SOUVENIR SNAPSHOT. An eel, its serpent head, teeth, and jaw, emerges from behind hard stony coral.
The man on the narrow sidewalk in the tiny village wears a blue bandana. My heart pounds. What color was the jaguar man’s bandana? It was red or blue, I can’t remember. I walk by, he calls out, Hey girl, you’ve been here before!
I say yes and walk faster. I tell the diver. He remembers what the jaguar man looks like, tells me not to worry; he’s not in this village. I feel better, but what if the diver is wrong, what if he’s lying about this, too? I get on the plane to go home and swear I’ll never return, not to the diver’s lies and a phantom jaguar man lurking on the sidewalk.
FACT. Even if you use a machete to slice a poisonous snake, the decapitated head can chase you and is capable of a venomous bite.
After the visit to Belize, there are phone calls and emails, and the diver is sweet again, making everything seem lovely. I return to the tiny village a third time to visit the diver, but I’m tired. This isn’t the kind of relationship I want. I keep an eye out for the jaguar man on the sidewalk. I fantasize that he apologizes, but I’m scared to see him. I don’t go to the jungle. I don’t want to find her.
FACT. Snakes may often remain in your path. (Retreat!)
I return to the tiny village four times to visit the diver. The fourth time he’s sweet, but there’s a shift in tone. We’re both tired. I want to explore the peninsula but I’m nervous to go far, so I swim and walk and wait for the diver to get off work. I consider looking for her. The diver refuses to go to the jungle with me; I’ll have to go alone. Where would I even begin? I put aside the thought and concentrate on swimming and snorkeling. The moon is full, and there’s no sign of the jaguar man on the narrow road.
I reflect on the changes in my life. So many blessings have appeared, without effort. My second round of medical results came back negative. My home is looking good. I meditate daily. The parts of my life I care about, but don’t obsess over, are flowing. The parts I’m determined to control don’t have the same ease. I want to include the diver more in my life. He says maybe. If it’s meant to be, it will be. Maybe he’ll join me in Los Angeles. Maybe I’ll move to the tiny village. He lets out a single thread of possibility, which I knit into my lifeline. I want his love to stabilize me, but it’s getting harder to fool myself. I have to work at it doubly hard, and I’m only half-heartedly committed to the illusion. I’m at odds with myself constantly. I leave the tiny village, go home, and negotiate with myself. The diver will have to visit me next. I’ll continue loving him but I’m finished going there.
FACT. Snakes are reptiles. Eels are fish. They’re both serpentine but they’re not related.
SOUVENIR SNAPSHOT. An eel’s twisting body caught in a net.
The diver gets a visa. I think finally. I downplay the fact that his main purpose is to visit family in Florida. Still, he says he’d like to see me so I make it happen. We have a brief vacation tucked away from family and friends. Our visit is strained. It’s glaringly obvious our lifestyles are too dissimilar to merge, and our relationship has run its course. I swing along a continuum of acceptance, indifference, and panic. He returns to Belize. I tell myself to let go of him and his country, but I’m not as strong as my word. I don’t realize yet that I’ve been spinning a web around him when I should be searching for her. The mixed-up part of me still hopes if I can grasp his love and force-feed it until it grows, then I can use his love, like cotton in an old rag doll, to fill the part of me she left empty. So I visit the diver in the tiny village a fifth time. There’s torrential rain. The diver drinks with buddies while I wait for him in my cabana. When he finally arrives, late in the night, the diver says he’s outgrown our visits. I want to be angry, humiliated, but even in my tears I’m relieved. Finally he won’t play along, and I have to stop.
I wake up early on my last day in the village, get dressed, and walk down the narrowest main street in the world. The diver is at work. We’ve already said goodbye. I might not return here for a long time, if ever, and my heart feels like a boat in a storm. I weave across the sand between houses on raised stilts until I reach the small building where I never thought I’d go.
I wait until the man on duty hangs up the phone. He motions for me to sit in the hard chair that faces his desk. He asks how he can help. I tell him I want to report X.
When did it happen? Why didn’t I report it immediately? Description of the man. Creole or Mestizo? If I can’t give a description, how will he be caught? Where was I? Where on the road? Does anyone else know? Was I traveling alone? The officer looks me in the eye. Am I traveling alone now?
He asks where I’m staying. I wonder why he wants to know where I’m staying and if I’m staying alone. He looks me up and down. I don’t trust this officer. He says he takes X very seriously, but in my mind I see him pounce. Fear breeds suspicion; what is he (what is any man) capable of? I begin to cry. I say I changed my mind. I’m not going to finish the report. I tell the officer I’ll think about it and maybe come back. But I already know I won’t. There’s no one in this tiny village to watch out for me, why would I tie a knot to this place now?
MYTH. The world is taking care of the jaguar man. However that plays out, dead or alive, he’s receiving his due. It’s natural law.
SOUVENIR SNAPSHOT. An old, emaciated jaguar with broken teeth lies on its side in tall grass.
MYTH. The story of X is underneath X. Maybe the jaguar man asks for help and help arrives. He makes amends. Has no victims or enemies. He grows beyond who he was when he was capable of X. Hugs his son, papa’s big boy. He’s a good father. He’s a good father. He’s a jaguar boxing paw to paw with his cub.
I step outside, and the sun stuns me.
I squint and walk across the sand. Behind me a voice says, Hey girl, you’ve been here before!
I spin around and face a smiling man. I don’t recognize him. I’ve never seen him.
You’ve been here before, he repeats.
He doesn’t look like the man who said it three visits ago, but maybe he is the same man. Yes, I say.
He says my name with a question mark. Right?
How do you know my name?
I met you before, he says.
I don’t know this man. I’ve never met him. I’m sure. This man is wearing a bandana; his hair is long dreadlocks. I stare at him, is this the jaguar man? The jaguar man had straight black hair, didn’t he? This man is Creole, the jaguar man wasn’t Creole, was he? How does he know m
y name?
When did I meet you? I ask.
I don’t remember, he says. I smoke a lot, but I didn’t forget your name.
He smiles. He has a dead front tooth. Something deep inside me recognizes the tooth. I don’t remember if the jaguar man had a dead tooth, but now that tooth reverberates through my body. He holds out his hand.
It’s good to see you again, he says.
I shake his hand. I know that hand. I recognize the feel of that hand. My flip-flops sink in quicksand. My fingers send electric shocks up my arm. My eyes squint in the sun. My mouth politely says, “It’s good to see you, too.” My brain says, “Get out of here now.” I back away, the man in the bandana smiles and laughs and carries a bucket through the sun-streaked blur of a wooden doorway.
I run straight to my cabana to catch my breath on the porch chair. I close my eyes and see the tooth. I go as far back into memory as I can, searching for the tooth, but I can’t find it hidden anywhere.
The jaguar man is still inside me. I can feel him in my right hip, like a clog in a passageway. I massage my hip but can’t release the pressure. I close my eyes and see the jungle. It’s two-dimensional, a paper jungle, origami animals, folded trees, a flat sky. I have to get her out of there. I may never return to this tiny village. It’s now or never, she needs me. It suddenly feels urgent. But how?
TRUTH. I don’t realize how simple (not easy) it is.
MISTAKE. I think she’s there and I’m here. I think there’s distance.
TRUTH. She isn’t in the jungle.
She isn’t in the jungle?
The jungle is in me.
The jungle is in me?
These thoughts come to me, fuzzy at first, like fog or clouds or the skin of a peach around its meat. I stare beyond the sea into my past and through my future until I circle back to now.
If I’m going to merge my two halves into a whole, I have to clear away the vines and roots. In me. I have to accept I know what she knows, feel what she feels, am who she is.
I feel what she feels? I am who she is?
TRUTH. I am who she is.
TRUTH. Circumstances don’t have to be different before I find my way. How it is is the way.
TRUTH. An elegant wholeness can come.
TWENTY-ONE
An elegant wholeness can come.
You start by sitting on the wooden cabana floor, folding paper into grasshoppers and trees and sand and waves. It’s confusing. Even as you do it, it’s hard for you to understand. You don’t know anything about origami, you fold without a plan or vision, and the first grasshopper comes out lopsided, like you. It’s a crumple of paper but it must know what you mean because when you place it on the ground it snaps its hind wings and makes a cry that sounds like crackling. It’s not a conscious decision to fold a grasshopper, you can’t explain why you’re doing it, except you feel pulled, like you’re a small dog and a great big leash is tight telling you go here, do this. But instead of the yank being around your neck, it’s around the empty space inside you, the space that emptied when you left her in the jungle. Fend for yourself. I don’t want you. You know you’ll have to keep going until you find her, even though you can’t imagine how big a job this folding is going to be.
You admit you left her on purpose, in a delirium of birdcalls, fish scales, branches, berries, sand flies, stench, snake eyes, jellyfish, feathered tails, and hollowness. You took the physical brunt of the jaguar man while she held the fear. You admit you didn’t try to comfort her. You didn’t like her anymore.
That may or may not be true. Maybe you like her, maybe you don’t. Either way . . . she knows too much. She knows his knife pressed on her stomach, its sweep across her breast, its pointed play with the strings of her bikini; she knows the smell of his hair, his nauseating breath stuck to the lining of her throat; she knows him pounding her, a hammer to a nail; she knows sharp, insistent, metal, bile. She knows too much. She knows the neutrality of nature, grasshoppers flitting in clumps of tall grass by her knees, the agonizing repetition of the sea reaching forward and pulling back; she knows ugly; she knows acquiescence and commands; she knows the urge to turn the tables, plunge his knife into his chest, carve him like a turkey, slow and steady, then pick his carcass clean. If you’re going to accept her, you’ll have to accept what she knows.
After the first grasshopper you can’t stop folding, and every grasshopper you place on the floor seems to cry out in fear. Fear hopping. Fear rubbing its long hind legs. Fear breathing through spiracles. One fold follows another. You fold and crease and shape grasshoppers, trees, seaweed, and the waxing moon, shimmering on the deserted surface of the sea. You fold a multitude of forms and you don’t know where they’re coming from, except maybe they’re what she remembers too.
You recreate the jungle with folded thorns, poisonous weeds, sand and shells, and moss as thick and heavy as a cluster of sleeping butterflies. Some of your creations look natural, some take on a new form. You don’t think about it and fold according to the pull that keeps pulling you—fold, fold, fold.
You fold the jaguar man into a jaguar, sharp teeth and powerful jaws, a commander of the night. If you could avoid folding him you would, but you need him to find her. You fold his rusted van until it’s so small it fits on your fingertip, and the seat in the front is the size of a seed. You fold the road into a snake, then fold the diagonal log barricade he pushed aside. You fold the jaguar man’s knife, transform it into a frond of a palm tree, still sharp but not a knife. You fold the darkness of that night into shapes without names, shapes you can’t repeat. You fold the jaguar man’s anger into lizards that catch grasshoppers in their teeth when you place them on the growing jungle floor.
FACT. Nature has an intricate way of folding and unfolding itself in perfect balance.
Your jungle grows so alarmingly big you know it will consume you soon and you’ll come face to face with her. You try to stop folding, but the leash . . .
The jungle becomes saturated. The folded water takes on the scent of salt, and the ground dampens with dew. You fold so many vines that they creep uninhibited up the jungle walls and hang down from the canopy like a curtain on a strange stage. Vines wrap around your legs. It feels as if the vines invade you, filling the space between your muscles and bones with little mediocre thoughts of how you escaped without her. The jaguar man’s musk ripens and thickens into a solid paper mass at the base of a gnarled tree.
The jaguar man begins to take over the origami jungle with the same force he took over that night. His breath rises out of the sea like steam. He scuttles along the sand on crab legs. He buzzes his insect wings. He becomes many and all, letter and number, word and thought, high and low. You know if you keep folding he will lead you to her; he will sniff her out. You wonder where she’s hiding, what she’s been eating, if she’s adapted to being alone, if she’s wrinkled by water and changed by time, if she’s grown scales and thousands of legs, built a fortress, had nightmares of nonsense, forgotten her childhood, or pierced the gods with needle and string.
You wonder if she hates you like you hate her. That’s not true. You hate that you left her. You’re ashamed. You protected yourself at her expense. You don’t want to see what the jaguar man did to her and what she’s become. You do, but you don’t.
The jungle grows and grows like an elaborate excuse. It seems hard to imagine, but your fingertips take on the properties of vines, slippery in the dampness, and it becomes hard to fold with any certainty. Shapes fall into folded chaos, and you swear you hear a flutter of butterflies waking up and beating the sorrowful air with forgiving wings.
Then for the first time the leash stops tugging you from folding, that task paused. You lean back against a rough-skinned tree and feel the layers of jungle shudder. You can sense she’s near which means the jaguar man is near too, ready. You’re afraid of them both. You listen for his deep chesty cough. You know what she’s in for, and your mind can’t wrap around the possibility of living through it twice. Doe
s she want you to watch, like she had to watch?
FACT. Watching something happen changes the way it happens. The more you observe, the greater the effect.
You let your mind click. Click. Your mind drifts away from her and meanders until it catches on an article you read once about a girl and lions in Ethiopia. The girl was twelve and a man wanted to marry her. The girl didn’t want to, of course, she was twelve, so the man got six friends and they kidnapped her, took her to a forest and beat her to make her agree to marry him, which is exactly the kind of low-level plan that forges an incredible sense of cosmic grief. Then three growling lions appeared, chased off the men, and surrounded the crying girl whose call for help clearly translated across species. When the police finally found the girl, the lions didn’t attack the policemen, instead they walked away into the forest, their job done, and the police took the girl home. Some people, especially scientists, don’t believe the story is true.
You’ve always wanted to be a true believer, the kind who lives by the glad surprise and has faith that in every bad situation there’s an inherent fold in reality and logic big enough for a lion to pass through. Still, the girl in Ethiopia paid a price too high.
Leaning against a tree’s shoulder, you look for your own opening. You can no longer make sense of place and space. It occurs to you that if she has already found an escape then you’re here by mistake. You stand up. A rustle in the leaves. You turn around. The musk of the man. Things change from this to that. The tree becomes the leather strap he used to wrap your wrists. A dragonfly sprouts beetle legs that will not run. A fish takes on a tail of a bird that looks like the curve of the hat you wore.
The Jaguar Man Page 11