Jaguar

by Bill Ransom

  “Why don’t you come out to the kitchen and show your mother your new robe? I’ll set out a couple of traps for those mice.”

  She didn’t remember that they put her to bed, but she remembered being afraid in the dark at the thrash and cries from her mother’s bed across the hanging blanket.

  “When you touch me there,” her mother said once, “I feel a glow all the way out the ends of my fingers.”

  Echoes of her mother’s whispers came to her many years later, in the mountains with a boy named Eddie Reyes.

  Then a snap from the kitchen popped her eyelids open, and the three of them in that tiny room held their breaths and listened to a low hoarse hiss. Then, someone or something hammered at the kitchen cabinets.

  “What the hell is that?”

  Her father, whom she’d just met, jumped out of bed and dazzled them all with a sudden burst of light and his nakedness. His dark body thrust aside the saddle blanket that divided the two rooms, a sheen of sweat glistened on his bare shoulders.

  Her mother rustled through bedding for her nightie and her father snatched something from the top of their dresser.

  The thump-thump of cabinet doors and crash of garbage bucket continued from the kitchen, punctuated with that low hiss.

  Maryellen’s eyes adjusted to the glare and her father grasped an empty beer bottle by its neck. He pushed the blanket aside and steadied himself against the doorframe as he stepped across the threshold.

  Her mother missed a grab for Maryellen as she ran to the doorway behind her father. The sudden flare of the kitchen bulb illuminated a huge rat, brown and snarling, standing on its hind legs in the corner. It shook the mousetrap on its foreleg like a curse at her and at her father.

  At first she thought he would throw the bottle at it. But her father dropped to both knees and snarled back at the rat. The bottle in her father’s hand thumped the linoleum twice. Then he hit the rat so hard he broke the bottle. The top half of the rat exploded with the bottle into a dark mess against the cabinet. The rest of it twitched and spilled itself slowly over the linoleum. Her mother scooped her close inside her warm robe and she heard her father throwing up beside her. Someone banged at the front door. What she remembered best was the hot softness of her mother under her robe, the now-sour smell of whiskey from the floor and the metallic taste of fear far back on her tongue.

  Morning lit up the shade by the time they all got to sleep, and in her dream Maryellen saw for the second time the girl Afriqua Lee. She remembered the lingering dream was all mixed up with her memory of the earthquake: at the grocery store behind their house a wall split open with a ripping sound, like someone tore a huge skirt. Sand poured through the top of the wall to cover the vegetable display. Maryellen stood in the frozen stillness that nightmares bring while the sand dissolved in blue light at the tips of her new shoes. Blue sky shone through the crack in the wall and, high overhead, a pair of green eyes framed by curly dark hair peered back at her. Those eyes seemed very frightened, very wild.

  A name was called behind the girl, an older woman’s voice called her twice before the eyes disappeared and Maryellen woke with a start. The old woman called: “Afriqua! Afriqua Lee!”

  What frightened Maryellen a little, and what she didn’t tell her mother about, was the handful of sand at the foot of her bed. The air around it vibrated, flapped like a pair of wings and without a sound the sand and the dream vanished in a flash of blue light.

  Human beings are free except when humanity needs them.

  —Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game

  Rafferty was five years old and playing with a circle of stones in the sun. He sat inside the circle of shiny riverstones when a spring shower caught him and he heard the first dry rattle of wings rise with the heavy wet spatter of the drops. Thousands of huge, bronze-colored bugs seethed out of the ground and unfolded their brittle wings.

  None of the things attacked him, but they rasped out an unpleasant scrape against the air when they flew, and when they landed on Rafferty their stiff, stiltlike legs scratched his neck and hands. The neighbor lady screamed, and other screams echoed down the avenue of high, bright buildings.

  Verna Tekel, the neighbor, scooped him into the heavy folds of her body and grunted him to her house, praying under her breath all the way in all three of the languages that she spoke. Hers was the dark house of mystery, forbidden to him and to the other children. Dark-eyed strangers came and went at odd hours, happy people for such a dark house. They parked colorful trucks and huge house-vans right in the yard that separated her house from Rafferty’s place, right where the bugs now swarmed.

  They lived inside the vans, and the walls of the outsides rippled with colored pictures, advertisements and news. Strange music rode the breezes from Verna’s house at night, music that stirred something in Rafferty like the language she spoke stirred something. Other people made fun of it, always behind her back, but to Rafferty it sounded familiar. He usually knew what she meant.

  A design had been burned into the back of her freckled hand, the number “8” lying on its side. He had seen it on some of the people who visited her, people whose darkness contrasted her freckled, pale skin and light, close-cropped hair. When she had visitors, other neighbors stayed indoors and locked up. They hired these dark men to fix things or to invent things or to tell them news of the outside, beyond the city’s great walls.

  Sometimes the brown-eyed men brought him presents, like the mechanical parrot that walked and squawked or the wind-up lizard that skittered up the sidewalk. They always stood outside with their presents and waited on the sidewalk because his aunt wouldn’t allow them near the house. The house had been his parents’ house, and he overheard the grown-ups saying that if it weren’t for his parents these people wouldn’t be visiting the city at all. Sometimes they said it like a great thing. Other times, it sounded like a curse.

  When his aunt decided that they’d stood outside long enough, or when she realized that the dark-eyed ones were never going away, she would let him go outside and accept the gift. Each time, the men would say something to him quickly, softly, something kind about his parents whom they clearly had admired very much.

  The jaguar priests had taken them, they said, and he would not know for years that they had died horribly. All he knew at five, going on six, was what his mother’s sister told him, that they had gone to the southern highlands to teach these people and something bad had happened so they couldn’t get back.

  Verna muttered a chant in that sing-song language as she fastened the screen door and the old-fashioned glass door behind it. Rafferty was dazzled by the thousands of bronze wings that glinted in the after-shower sun.

  They pushed up out of gardens and gravel driveways, from grasses and from rocky hillsides. They unfolded their glittering wings and joined the bronze fog rolling across the valley. It was like watching fire disassemble a log. While Verna shrieked into her handset for help, Rafferty knelt at the living-room window and listened to the scrabble of hard little bodies against the walls outside.

  The things that pressed themselves against the glass had bodies bigger than a man’s biggest finger. Orange with yellow underbellies, they unfolded finely veined wings that stretched a half-meter from tip to tip. Each bug had four wings and six bristly legs.

  Rafferty couldn’t think of them one at a time when the walls, the gardens and streets, the air itself were already filled with them and with the dry rattle of their wings. The window was acrawl with them. He remembered for years his fascination with the bob and pulse of the thousands of yellow bellies flattened against the glass.

  Verna yanked him away from the window and activated the blinds. He noticed the inside of her house for the first time while she muttered in a tight voice and threw things into a bag. The house was nothing like he’d imagined.

  One huge room held couches along the walls and a large wooden table near the kitchen. Unlike the outside of the house, the inside was spotless. The walls were not walls, bu
t the same kinds of installations that decorated the sides of the vans: Pictures that could change, jungle pictures, and somewhere in the room a box broadcast jungle sounds.

  Bright-colored blankets with strange designs covered the walls and lots of blankets draped the couches. Rafferty stood on a red, blue and black rug woven with animals and big-nosed people with helmets and spears.

  When she finally took him out of the house he was rolled inside one of these blankets so that he could neither see nor hear. He felt her noiseless car swerve and lurch and slam hard when it hit holes. It stopped, backed up and turned. He couldn’t count how many times this happened and in spite of the wool itching his nose he got sleepy enough inside the blanket to doze.

  Then the car lurched hard his way and tipped, kept tipping, tipped all the way over. When the rolling stopped, Rafferty woke up squashed in place with the blanket over his head. He was pinned so tight his chest and back felt like they met. He could move his left arm and his head.

  He worked the blanket across his face and saw that he was lying on the ceiling of the car. His head was lower than the rest of him and the back seat had popped out to wedge him in. Gurgles and gasps came from the front seat. He called out but the noises only came farther apart and finally stopped. The roof of the car beneath him was littered with shards of broken glass, incense butts and pink plastic hair curlers.

  Rafferty could hardly breathe with the seat jamming him in so tight. He tried to shove it away but it wouldn’t budge. He panted tiny, burning breaths from the effort and a lot of small black spots in front of his eyes melted into one big one. He wasn’t really asleep, he hadn’t caught his breath yet, but he knew he wasn’t getting out of there.

  When he knew he couldn’t get out he had to go to the bathroom. He beat on the back of the seat but that made the spots come back so he started crying but that hurt, too. Outside, the familiar rasp and tick of those bright bugs played against the metal of the car. By the time Rafferty had wet himself, the inside of the car was crawling with them. They didn’t bite or sting, they just crawled over him with their stickery feet.

  He was wedged inside there with them for three nights before he ate the first one. It wouldn’t get out of his face and he could barely bat it away. He caught the bug by the root of its wings with his free hand, shook it once and popped it into his mouth. His lips were cracked, his tongue and throat swelled dry from thirst.

  What happened between Rafferty and the bug was purely some kind of reflex, Uncle explained that later. Rafferty kept hold of the wings and spat out the legs because they were long and skinny and they stuck in his throat. He lost count of the nights after that, and thought of the rest of the bugs that he ate as corn-dogs. A scattering of wings and legs tilted in the wind under his head, little bronze-petalled flowers with dark brown stalks. He learned not to smell the incredible stench that rolled in from the front seat, and he learned to live with the mice.

  Rafferty slept with the scuttle of feet across his face, learned that crying only made his throat worse, learned that sometimes there was no border between waking and dreams.

  He woke up crying in one dream because the boy in his dream was crying. Rafferty watched him climb up and down a ladder outside a ratty-looking building with vines choking its sides. In another dream, the boy called his name, and it was so clear that Rafferty woke up with a start and said, “Here. I’m here.” His voice was raspy and sore in his throat from his crying.

  He had a lot of dreams, but they were strange and felt like they belonged to somebody else. He always woke up exhausted, with a pounding headache and he would sleep then without dreaming for awhile.

  Out of a dream of drinking from the well behind the dream boy’s grandparents’ house, Rafferty heard the heavy crunch of footsteps and the clatter of gravel against the side of the car.

  “Verna!” a hoarse voice shouted, a male voice. “Verna?”

  Someone pulled glass out of one of the windows in front.

  “Oh, no,” the voice whispered. Then it coughed a couple of times, and gagged.

  When the man sat down outside the car and slumped against it, Rafferty listened to everything as though he perched on a tree limb above the whole broken scene.

  Rafferty knew this: if he didn’t speak, the man would leave and he would die there. He knew that without knowing much about death except for the brittle creatures that he snatched from the seat-back and stuffed into his mouth. That, and what his senses told him about Verna in the front seat.

  He remembered he wanted to say, “Thirsty,” but what his throat managed to hiss out was, “Hungry.” The word sounded like the struggle of dry wings against steel. He repeated it, louder.

  “Hungry.”

  Just as there is a solid geometry, so there should be a solid psychology

  for the cases where the calculations of plane psychology are not exact. . . .

  —Marcel Proust, Maxims

  The Jaguar didn’t think about his life before he tinkered in dreams. He didn’t want to, had no need to, refused. He was born to the dreamways by accident, and the unbridled wealth that he stumbled upon diverted him forever from the smelly mess that he had made of his life. His body anchored him to the world, but if all went well he could break that link without sacrificing his life in the process.

  The Jaguar couldn’t remember his own body—the body of Lieutenant Marco Reyes—without considerable effort. He lived on the cusp of coma. His room in the old soldier’s home that housed his body contained the standard-issue mirror, but he rarely had the opportunity to use it.

  The Jaguar recalled dark, wavy hair and narrow nose . . . no, the nose had been broken at his first debriefing . . . green eyes. Last time he saw a mirror, dark hollows surrounded those eyes. His face had been flaccid, like the rest of him, not like the ruggedness of his lean army days.

  People from real life wanted Lieutenant Reyes back in the world; they wanted what he could deliver. Marco Reyes had become the Jaguar to satisfy the people he’d met on the other side of dreams. The first dream he’d tracked across the curtain led to a jaguar priest desperate for a god, so Lieutenant Reyes crowned himself one. Now the Jaguar was infinitely greater than the GI that his small-minded world had committed to the Soldier’s Home. The high-level stuff he’d scooped from the dreamways got him off the petty charges that his body had racked up, but it also guaranteed that they would never let him leave the home alive.

  The Jaguar tracked dreams in his own world long before he ever discovered the other side. He had been the intelligence weapon who made the bomb happen for his own country while he single-handedly sabotaged certain resources in others. Those resources had been people, but that was not how the Jaguar saw them. They were a live drill to him, an opportunity to hone a skill from theory to practice. No one could prove this in any hearing in the world, since what he had done he had done through dreams.

  His military record certified him as both psychic and psychotic, and that suited the Jaguar. The brass kept off his tail except for the occasional ridiculous experiment.

  He kept a model of the world in his mind, even now, and checked off contacts as he’d made them to form an intricate webwork of light. Since he had nothing to do but explore his own mind and others, the Jaguar had no trouble recalling each of them. He stroked them with his mind, appreciative of such fine cattle. Milking them was no trick, now, though it had taken him years to learn.

  Once he realized that he dreamed in other peoples’ heads, the Jaguar took very little time to learn to explore those heads. Memories looked like tinker-toys to him, and he found that he could take them apart, rearrange them for fun. If he could recall the structure of a memory he could reproduce it within his own mind when he returned. He mined vast stores of data without ever turning a page.

  Manipulating emotions, the chemistry of the brain itself, and, eventually, the genetic makeup of the dreamer became elementary. The genetic experiments had a tendency to go wild, so he confined them to the other side of the fab
ric. Travelling the dreamways to the other side took a toll on him, so he set up a control by proxy and enlisted the jaguar priesthood as his primary tool.

  His subjects on this side disintegrated with alarming regularity, so he could not milk his local cattle too often.

  He discovered the fabric, the thin gauze that separated this universe from another, by accident, and by accident he survived the plunge through its shimmering weft. The other side of that nebulous fabric was all that interested him, now. He resented being called back to this one. Resented, and feared. He had almost forgotten pain.

  This side, that side . . . he’d wrestled many a bout with the fact that the fabric didn’t have sides. There never occurred to him a better way to describe it, and this side was what approached him now.

  Breathe.

  The Jaguar calmed himself.

  This side was too . . . sensitive. A screw-up here and they would unplug him, let his body die. Or worse, they would unplug him and make him live in the world. They knew him well enough to know that he wouldn’t settle for that. The Jaguar had not been born to die.

  He was God, streaming through the fabric of the universe, his albatross of a body caught in its net. If this body died, the Jaguar died. He had been working on that problem when he felt the prickle of awakening remind him that he had skin.

  The other side.

  Living free of his body was his primary desire. He had been experimenting with his cattle on the other side. If something didn’t break for him on this side soon, the Jaguar faced a share in the misery he’d created. He had had nearly ten years to figure it out. His mind might last through infinity.

  But . . . the body?

  Ventriloquist and dummy came to mind. Now the Jaguar lived at the end of a thin tether to his body, and that body had better stay alive.

  He had traveled too often from the same place. His cluster of perforations threatened the integrity of the balloon-skin of this universe, or of that dimension. The hospital wouldn’t move him again, that would be too risky. The jaguar priests had shown him other weak points on that side, but he didn’t know how he could get near them from this one. He couldn’t say anything about it, and he didn’t know how many trips he had to go before the whole universe burst in a great cancellation of matter.