cutting scheme, and he gets called to Miami and comes, and now his boys are getting knocked off, too. What’s so important about chopping down trees that would make a Colombian drug baron leave his safe haven and travel to the U.S.? Okay, he’s laundering money through the Consuela company, we know that, but why the personal involvement? It suggests there’s something bigger going on than trees and money laundries. And in the middle of all this is the professor, who just happens to have a background in clandestine warfare. Who lost his wife because someone was illegally cutting down rain forests, indirectly, true, but maybe he doesn’t see it that way. Maybe, somehow, he made all this happen….”
Lola snuggled closer and kissed his neck. She slid her hand under his shirt. “That’s another reason why I love you. Your vivid imagination.”
“You don’t buy it?”
“There’s nothing to buy, dear. You’re just like Amy and her fish and Bob Zwick. Things happen, and other things happen as a consequence. If you try to find patterns in it you’ll go crazy. In fact, that’s one sure sign of crazy-finding patterns where there are none.”
“I thought that was the basis of scientific discovery.”
“The beginning maybe, but not the end. That’s why we have statistical models, to distinguish the causal from the merely contingent. I notice that you didn’t include your mystic Indian’s interest in Amy in your conspiracy theory.”
“No. I have no idea how that fits in.”
“Maybe it doesn’t. Maybe there’s no pattern at all, except in your head. Maybe it’s all just unconnected events pieced together by a former brilliant detective who’s bored stiff with being a cook. In any case, just now I don’t want to hear any more about it. It’s boring.” Now Lola shed her shirt, and her bra, and presented her fine breasts for his attention, which was given, after which more clothing fell to the patio paving. The candles gave their last light.
“This is a good way to shut down my brain,” said Paz. “If that’s what was intended.”
“To an extent,” said his wife, and so he let her, and she let him, but in the midst of this mindless exertion, Paz found that he could not stop thinking about Gabriel Hurtado and why he was in Miami. It was nearly as puzzling as the impossible jaguar.
Eighteen
The next day, Paz stayed late in bed, drifting in and out of a hypnopompic sleep in whose vapors lurked worry and discontent. Awake at last, he lay with his arms behind his head staring at the white ceiling, counting out the reasons why this should be so. Colombian pistoleros? Check. Huge magical jaguar after his little girl? Check. Oddly enough, he decided that these worries, however grim they might seem to an ordinary man, did not constitute the basis of his unease. It was deeper than that, existentially deep. Neither he nor his family had been troubled by nightmares since he’d brought back the Santeria charms from the little botanica. Which, despite the bravado he’d shown in dealing with his wife’s disbelief, he knew was impossible. Little bags of whatever should not have had any effect on their dreams, but they had, even though Amelia was a kid and Lola was a total skeptic. He no longer knew what he believed anymore, but he understood that this amphibian life he had been leading with respect to Santeria was breaking down; he would have to go in one direction or the other, toward the sunlit uplands of rationality inhabited by Bob Zwick, his wife, and all their pals, or down, into the soup, with Mom.
And since his social world was composed of people who were either believers or skeptics, there was no one who could give him any meaningful advice, or…as this thought crossed his mind he recalled that there was at least one other person who’d been in precisely the same bind, who had in fact introduced him to the possibility that there was in fact an unseen world. He reached for the bedside telephone and his address book and dialed an unlisted number with a Long Island area code.
A woman answered.
“Jane?” he said. “This is Jimmy Paz.”
A pause on the line. “From Miami?”
“Among your many Jimmy Pazes, I am in fact the one from Miami. How’re you doing, Jane? What is it, eight or nine years?”
“About that. Gosh, let me sit down. Well, this is a blast from the past.”
Some small talk here, which Paz encouraged, being a little nervous about broaching the point of this call. He learned how she was-daughter Luz, twelve and flourishing, Jane teaching anthropology at Columbia and running her family’s foundation. He told her about his own family.
“You’re still with the cops, I take it.”
“No, I’m running the restaurant with my mom. Why do you take it?”
“Oh, nothing…just that we had an intense twenty-four hours eight years ago but not what you could call a relationship, and suddenly you call. I assumed it was police business.”
“Actually, I guess you could call it that. Look, I’m in a…I don’t know what you’d call it, a kind of existential bind…”
She laughed, a deep chuckle that sent him back over that span of years. He brought her face up out of memory: Jane Doe, a handsome fine-boned woman with cropped yellow hair and a mad look in her pale eyes. Jane Doe from the famous Voodoo murders, a woman with whom he had shared the single most frightening experience of his life, actual zombies walking the streets of Miami and the gods of Africa breaking through to warp time and matter.
“Those’re the worst kind,” she said. “What’s the problem? More voudon?”
“Not really. Do you know anything about shape-shifting?”
“A little. Are we talking imitative, pseudomorphic, or physical?”
“What’s the difference?”
“It’s complicated.”
“If you have the time, I do.”
He heard her take a deep breath.
“Well, in general humans tend to be uncomfortable locked in the prison of the self. Our own identification with nations and sports teams is probably a relic of that, and on a higher level there’s religion, of course. Traditional peoples often identify with animals, and from this we get imitative magic. The shaman allows the spirit of the totemic animal to occupy his psyche. He becomes the animal, and not in a merely symbolic way. To him and the people participating heis the bison, or whatever. They see a bison.”
“You mean they hallucinate it.”
“No, I don’t mean that at all. ‘Hallucination’ is not a useful term in this kind of anthropology. It’s a mistake to assume that the psyches of traditional people are the same as ours. You might just as well say that the particle physicist hallucinates his data in accordance with a ritual called science. Anyway, that’s imitative shape-shifting, well established in anthro literature. In pseudomorphic shape-shifts, the shaman creates or summons a spiritual being which then has an observable reality. The observer hears scratching, sees a shape, smells the creature, and so on. Traditional people are mainly substance dualists, of course. The spirit is completely separate from the flesh, and the body it happens to occupy at the moment is not the only body it can occupy. Anthro tends to draw the line here because we don’t understand how it’s possible to do that, since we’re all supposed to be good little materialist monists. I’ve had personal experience with both types, if that helps.”
“What about physical shape-shifting?”
Another chuckle. “Oh, that. Ah, Jimmy, would you care to tell me what this is all about?”
He told her the whole thing: murders, evidence, dreams, the enkangues, the Indian, his conversations with Zwick. And the business with Amelia.
“So what do you think, Jane?” he asked at the end of it. “Hoax or what?”
“It sounds like you think it’s real.”
