back?”
“Because I thought you knew everything,” said Paz. “Who could imagine that the world’s smartest man would tromp on a catfish? We’re almost at the channel. Do you want me to take you to Jackson?”
“Hell, no!” said Zwick. “I might get touched by one of my students. No, let’s go to South Miami, it’s closer anyway.”
Seventeen
I fail to see why everyone sort of turns away and giggles when I tell them what happened to me,” said Zwick to Lola Wise. His tone was aggrieved, but she was hard-pressed not to giggle herself.
“It’s nothing to be ashamed of,” said Lola. “I heard that Sir Francis Crick once stuck his tongue in a light socket.”
“You’re giggling, too! You’ll probably be laughing your ass off when I get permanent brain damage from this operation.”
“It’s a local, Zwick. They have to clean out the puncture. You don’t get permanent brain damage from a local anesthetic. You’re a doctor, you know this. I can’t believe you’re being such a baby.”
Lola felt a tug and leaned over to receive a whisper from her daughter. “Amy says you can get Dove bars in the cafeteria. She says she always gets one when she has to get shots and wishes to know if the same will make you stop whining.”
“Thanks, Amy,” said Zwick. “Throughout this you’ve been the only person who hasn’t made me feel like a jerk. Tell me, Amy, this is something you learn in kindergarten here? The colors, the alphabet, and catfish have poisonous dorsal spines-that’s in the curriculum?”
Before Amelia could consider this question, a nurse came in, giggling, and whisked Zwick off on a gurney.
“Where’s Daddy?” Lola asked.
“Around. Mommy, is it my fault that Bob got stuck? It was my catfish.”
“No, of course not, sugar. It was an accident. He didn’t know it was dangerous to step on it.”
“But,technically, if I hadn’t’ve caught this fish, he wouldn’t be hurt.”
Lola bent down and gave the girl a hug and a tickle. “Oh, stop it!Technically, if I hadn’t met your father and got married and had you, you wouldn’t be there and wouldn’t have caught the fish. You can’t string contingencies out that far; you’d go nuts.”
“What’s contingencies?”
“Stuff that happens because of other stuff. The point is, contingency is morally neutral. Responsibility follows intent. You didn’t intend to hurt Bob’s foot, did you? No? Then you’re off the hook.”
“Like the catfish,” said Paz, catching this last as he entered. He caressed his daughter and wife simultaneously. “We have a serious pescadora here,” he said, nuzzling the girl. “She landed that monster all by herself, two pounds three ounces, a major fish.”
“Yes,” said his wife, “we were just discussing the tangled web of contingency and how while she was responsible for the fish being there she was not responsible for Bob getting stuck.”
“True enough, but on the other hand, you might say that Zwick needed to be punctured a little. A lot of people think that what happens was meant to happen.”
“It’s a point of view,” said Lola, in a tone that indicated she did not share it. “Anyway, I have to go check on a patient.”
“Busy day? I was surprised to see you working.”
“I’m not meant to lounge, as you know. I was going batty in the house and I figured I’d ease back in on a slow shift. This is a strange one, by the way, this patient. A couple of Good Samaritans found her wandering up Dixie Highway, naked. They thought she’d been drugged and assaulted.”
“Was she?”
“Hard to say. No drugs in the blood work. Sexually active, but she hadn’t been raped, not recently anyway. On the other hand, she had been tied up with tape, hands and feet. I can’t get anything out of her-mute and flaccid. And an epileptic. She seized just after she got here.”
“Uh-huh. This person’s about nineteen, a tallish good-looking redhead?”
Lola stared at him, dumbfounded. “Yes. How did you know?”
“Her name’s Jennifer Simpson and the cops are looking for her. She was snatched off the street a couple of nights ago by a Colombian gang. I need to call Tito on this.”
“My God! Are you sure it’s the right girl?”
“Unless there’s another redheaded teenaged epileptic who’s recently been tied hand and foot wandering around Miami. The other thing is…well, the bad guys are going to be looking for her.”
“But nobody but us knows she’s here.”
“Not at this second, but they’ll think of hospitals right away and put some money on the street. Hospitals are full of low-wage Latinos. It won’t take long. Let’s take a peek at Jennifer now-maybe she’ll talk if we show her we know who she is.”
They went down the hall to one of the small rooms where they kept ER patients, with Amelia trailing behind them, temporarily unregarded.
The girl was in bed with the covers pulled up high and her red-gold hair spread wide on the pillow, like a dead girl in a Victorian painting. Lola stood over her and said, “Jennifer? Is that your name? Jennifer Simpson?”
Jenny opened her eyes. She saw a pale blond woman in a white lab coat over green scrubs, and a dark man. They were looking at her with concern, and saying a name, which was strange at first, just nonsense syllables, and then the sounds popped the little switches in her empty mind and she knew it was her own. Memories returned, first trickling in, then a flood as she reoccupied herself,all the memories, including the recent ones from the garage. Another face appeared, lower down in her field of view, a little girl, dark-haired, with skin colored a tone just halfway between those of the two adults. These people were covered in sparkly lights like sequins. Waves of color burst from their heads and fell with slow grace to the floor, and the cool waves rolled down from the region of her heart to her groin, really quite delicious this time, and she was gone from there.
When she could see again she found herself not in the hospital room but in a gray place with no horizon lit by a cool light that seemed to come from nowhere at all. The only real color came from the bright-feathered cape and headdress worn by her companion, who was Moie. For some reason none of this surprised her.
“Hey, Moie,” she said. “What’s up?”
He answered in a language she did not know, yet the meaning of his words was perfectly clear to her. “Jaguar has taken you to the other side of the moon,” he said, “where the dead have their being. I mean the real dead, not the wai’ichuranan. This is a great thing, because I don’t think that he has ever let one of you here. I think it’s possible because you have the unquayuvmaikat, the falling gift. It’s how the god reaches you, even though you have no training at all.”
Jenny accepted this as reasonable and wondered for a moment why she had never thought of it before.
“He breathed in my face.”
“Yes. This is another thing that has never been done to one of you. I have no idea of what it means.”
“Me neither. Maybe I’ll be able to turn into a jaguar, too.”
“Possibly, but, you know, it’s not a turning into. It’s hard to explain. You know how animals mark their territory?”
“Like dogs peeing on trees?”
“Yes, and in other ways. So, those who serve Jaguar are his marks in this world. He can smell them as he passes through the ajampik, the spirit world, and then he makes a door through and changes places with the jampiri, me. Then I am here until he calls me back again.”
“Is he going to do that with me now?”
“All things are possible, but it usually takes a lot of training and practice to walk through the worlds, and you
