otherwise.”
“Uh-uh! She says brujos can send you bad dreams and they can choke you forreal.”
“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 winged chariot hurrying near, she had decided to go to medical school at age 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.”
