Another one that was wrong! Jenny rubbed her eyes and peered again through the objectives of the binocular microscope. She used the needle to nudge the tiny specimen so that the light struck it at a slightly different angle. She would have said it was aPegoscapus gemellus, except that the pattern of its radial and costal wing veins was more like that ofP. insularis. Only it couldn’t beinsularis because it lacked the characteristic leg segment proportions and recurved ovipositor that marked that species. The ovipositor was long but almost straight; there was nothing like this combination of features on the key chart. Sighing, she removed the oddball fig wasp from the microscope stage and put her in a vial with half a dozen others that were similarly screwed up. The next one was a goodgemellus, and she dropped it into a labeled vial and made a notation of its specimen number in the notebook.
She was not pleased when a wrong one turned up, for in the week or so that she had been keying out for the professor she had come to expect that the little wasps would behave themselves and fall properly into either one of the two species they were studying. Finding ringers offended her sense of order, which was as strong as it was recent, perhaps strongbecause recent. Prior to this, Jennifer had not devoted three brain cells to any contemplation of nature’s diversity more complex than the one expounded in “Old MacDonald Had a Farm.”
Along with her knowledge about the taxonomy of the fig wasps, she had absorbed the faith thatevery living thing had to fit neatly into the immense ragged bush-structure of life-phylum, class, order, superfamily, family, genus, species-all connected by evolution. It boggled her mind; in fact, it was her very first boggle. So every living thing had to go somewhere, and the odd little wasps displeased her for that reason. She understood that her preliminary sorting would be confirmed by mitochondrial sequencing in the lab later on (not that she had any clear idea what that was), but she wanted to get it right, to please Cooksey. That was something new as well. Although she had always tried to please-given her background, she would hardly have survived otherwise-pleasing Cooksey was different. Cooksey did not seem to be pleased because what she did was good for Cooksey as much as because doing something well was good for her and also good for…here she was uncertain, because she lacked the concepts, but she sensed that for Cooksey doing things right was a form of worship. God is in the details, my dear, something he said often. It was her very first contact with true parenting, and it went to her head like crank.
On the other hand, she had begun to comprehend the difference between what she was doing and what real biologists did, going into the field and being surrounded by millions of species and figuring out what went where and the pattern of relationship, how the substance of life poured through the depths of time in an unending and ever-varying stream. That kind of understanding would be forever beyond her, she knew, but the mere idea that there were such people (and Cooksey was one of them) made her feel better about herself than she ever had before. It was like being the worst player on a world championship team: still pretty great.
And she had discovered she could lose herself in the microscope as well as she had in the fishpond. As now: therefore, she did not hear Geli Vargos come in, did not register her greeting, did not respond until a hand touched her shoulder, when she yelped and jumped and nearly toppled the stool.
“Wow, you must have been deep in it,” said Geli.
“Yeah, I was. Anyway, where’ve you been? I haven’t seen you for I don’t know how long.”
“Oh, you know, family stuff. My cousin’s getting married. My grandfather’s going crazy. The usualCubano twenty-four-seven nonsense.” This was said in a tone that did not suggest a willingness to go into detail, which Jenny thought a little funny, because Geli was usually delighted to expatiate on the doings of her family, and she had in Jenny, whose own life was void in this area, a devout listener. Geli pointed to the microscope setup. “What’re you doing with the mike?”
“I’m keying out species of Agaonidae for Cooksey.”
“You’rewhat?”
“What I said. It’s for his work on the evolution of mutualism and precision of adaptation. He showed me how to do it.”
“Uh-huh. Well, this is a step up from making breakfast. How did all this happen?”
“I don’t know. They were going to kick me out on account of I lost Moie, and Cooksey said I could work for him and I’m doing it. I’m a research assistant, how about that? And I still make breakfast.”
“I’m impressed,” said Geli, although Jennifer detected something in her tone that was not pleased, was a little put off, in fact, and she wondered why.
“Can I see what you’re doing?”
“Sure,” said Jenny, and set her friend up at the other eyepiece while she tweezed a tiny wasp onto the stage and keyed it, and then another, bothP. insularis, explaining the differences, proudly using the technical terms, like a real person.
“So does Cooksey check on your work?” Geli asked after this demonstration.
“He did when I was starting up, but not anymore. He says I can do it as good as him, almost.”
“Well, good.” A pause, and then, “I guess this means you won’t be going out on runs with me anymore.”
“I don’t know. You’d have to speak to Luna about that. Kevin and Scotty’ve been doing it while you were gone and since I started all this.”
“Oh, that’s an effective team! Scotty mumbling and Kevin fomenting the revolution. What does Kevin think about all this?” She gestured to the microscope and specimen boxes.
“I don’t know. I moved out on him after he gave me grief about it. We haven’t talked much, since then. He, like,mopes at me.” She fiddled with the focus knob and swiveled on her stool. “I still sort of love him, though. We were together like a long time, almost two years. And I get lonely at night, you know?”
Geli actually did not know, but she was not about to reveal this to Jennifer. Nor did she comment on the semibreak with Kevin, which Jenny thought was also a little strange, since she used to go on so about it.
“I’ve got to go talk to Luna,” Geli said. “Will I see you at lunch?”
“If you don’t, there won’t be any,” replied Jenny cheerfully, and returned to her specimens.
She worked steadily for the next two hours and was surprised and delighted to discover that she had come to the end of the series, which was a sample of one hatch from trees of two different species ofFicus. She put the last vials back in their specimen boxes, and these back on their shelves, all except the vial of wasps she couldn’t identify from the key. Then she stretched her stiff back muscles and went into the kitchen to help Scotty make tuna salad for lunch. Tuna salad at La Casita was made with fresh tuna. Jenny had not realized before coming to the Forest Planet Alliance that tuna was an actual fish that you could buy in fish stores and cook. She thought it was a made-up substance that, like Spam, only came in cans. Nor had she understood that mayonnaise could be manufactured in a kitchen out of eggs and oil, instead of being something that was elemental, like gasoline, that you had to buy retail. She made the mayonnaise as she had been taught, and hardboiled half a dozen eggs while Scotty washed the greens and peeled avocados and then seared the tuna. They worked together almost silently but well, not getting in each other’s way. It used to bother her that Scotty never talked to her, but now that she had a little something in her own head, she didn’t mind it that much, she was less bothered by the absence of chatter. Also, she had Cooksey.
Talking with Cooksey was different from talking to the rest of them, different indeed from talking to anyone else she had ever met. Geli, for instance, was always willing to tell you stuff, about science and politics, but it was like she was the teacher and you were the pupil and you had to sort of be admiring and oh, wow, I didn’t know that, how smart you are! But it never occurred to Cooksey that everyone didn’t know everything he did and so he just zoomed on, assuming she would understand, like she’d been to college in England, too, and when he would pause and say “Eh?” to see if she had understood, she would say right out she hadn’t. At which a peculiar expression would come over his face, as if she reallydid understand, say, sex allocation theory or whatever and was pretending not to as a joke, and then he would demonstrate, by means of skillful questions, that she reallydid understand the stuff. There is no idea in all science that can’t be grasped by the persistent application of the second-rate mind, said Cooksey, quoting Whitehead. He quoted Whitehead a lot, also Yeats, and a bunch of other people Jenny had never heard of. Not, he said on that occasion, thatyou have a second-rate mind, my dear, for since it is almost perfectly empty, we have not had a chance to rate it at all. And you are in any case persistent, as I have often observed.
They had a large colorful platter shaped like a fish, which the household invariably used to serve fish. Rupert liked it so. Scotty piled the creamy smooth salad in it and added chopped scallion, lettuce leaves, capers, radishes, and other garnishes in such a way that it looked like a Japanese painting of a real fish. Jenny picked up the warmed bread and a chilled bottle of chardonnay and followed Scotty and the tuna platter out to the terrace.
Jenny didn’t know whether the changes she had observed recently in the group owed more to her new status or if something else was going on. She was not, as she told Geli often, all that good at figuring stuff out, but she wasreal good at vibing when something was off, and here there was. She recalled well that before Moie disappeared, Rupert would usually talk to Luna and Cooksey, and Luna would talk to Rupert and Scotty, and Scotty would talk to Luna and Kevin, and Kevin would only occasionally talk to her, mainly to slip a snide comment sideways under his breath. When Geli came to lunch, she always sat next to Jennifer and talked to her and to Luna. Now everything seemed turned around. Geli and Luna were sitting on either side of Rupert. Kevin was right up there on the good end of the table with them, and now the Professor and Scotty were sitting on either side of Jennifer, at what Kevin always used to call the peasant end of the table. No one commented on these changes. When she sat down, Jenny told Cooksey that she had finished the series. “Really? That’s wonderful, my dear. We’ll have to find you something else to do.” And then he launched into a discussion of orchid pollinators with Scotty, pausing every so often to include Jennifer in the conversation, and after a while, Scotty began to do the same. Normally as silent as a cat, he could talk a blue streak about plants and fish, although he had never done so with Jennifer before this. It sort of made up for Kevin treating her like she was invisible. And what was all this with Kevin and Luna? They hated each other, but here they were, chatting away like nobody’s business. It was very strange; even stranger, Jenny didn’t mind it one bit.
After lunch, Jenny came back from cleaning up in the kitchen to find Cooksey perched on a stool near the microscope station checking through the lab notebook.
“Did you record all of them on this page?” he asked. “These columns seem to show different numbers.”
“Yeah, but there were some that didn’t fit. I must’ve screwed up some way. Sorry. The ones I couldn’t figure out’re in here.” She held up the vial and Cooksey peered at the indeterminate black mass within. “‘Didn’t fit’ meaning that you couldn’t classify them as eithergemellus orinsularis?”
“Yeah. And I couldn’t find them in the key, either.”
“That’s odd. Well, let’s have a look, shall we?”
He sat at the microscope and placed a wasp on the stage. He peered for some time and then examined another and a third, muttering to himself. He rose and pulled a reprint file down and studied several reprints. He consulted the key, looked in the microscope, checked another reprint. Mutter, mutter, and then, “Well, I’ll be blowed!”
“What? Did I make a mistake?”
He looked her in the face, and she saw that his eyes were shining. He was beaming like a two-year-old with a fresh cookie. “Oh, not at all. Oh, no! I believe you’ve discovered a new species ofPegoscapus. ”
“Is that good?”
“Good? It’s splendid! Epochal! I myself have been studying these little blighters for over twenty years and I’ve only discovered one new species.”
It had never occurred to Jenny, having only recently learned about species and that they each had a name, to imagine that there were animals that didn’t have one. It made her feel peculiar, and she asked, “But, um, what do we call it? I mean, in the notebook.”
“Whatever we bloody well please!” crowed Cooksey.
“Really? You mean just make something up?”
“Indeed. Of course there are certain traditions. Species are usually named for some aspect of the organism, like its shape or habit, or its native heath, or to honor someone in the trade. InPegoscapus alone, as you know, we find Hoffmeyer and Herre so distinguished. I myself named myTetrapus after my late wife.”
At this, something seemed to deflate in Cooksey, the light that had just shone from his eyes dimmed, and he appeared to shrink a little. Jenny observed this and found it dreadful.
Into the silence now she blurted, “What was her name?”
“Portia,” said Cooksey dully.
“Like the sports car?” asked Jennifer. She was startled to see the look on his face after she’d said this, a stunned expression akin to one following a blow to the base of the skull, and she began to worry that maybe she had said something insulting, because you could never tell with English people, they thought a lot of weird stuff, and now he looked like he was going to have a heart attack, his face going pink and strange sounds issuing from deep in his chest. She was about to say something when the first unmistakable laugh burst forth. This was even more startling because she had never heard such a sound from Cooksey before, a dry chuckle was more his style, and she knew that he was not really laughing at her, so it was all right, if a little strange.
She watched him as the laughter poured out, tears squirted from his eyes, and his knees wobbled. “Oh God Oh Christ,” he expostulated at intervals, and after a while she started laughing, too, just to join in and for happiness and delight that her own dumb remark (because, although she had known a girl named Chrysler once, obviously a high-class guy like Cooksey wouldn’t have married a girl named after a car) could have caused such a gush of exhilaration.
Cooksey was still in the paroxysm, eyes tight shut and completely out of control now (Oh Christ Oh God); he bounced off the microscope table and would have collapsed on the floor had she not caught him in her arms. She sank down with him under the table, cradling his upper body. He smelled of tobacco and guy. Jennifer’s laughter slowed, then stopped, because what was coming out of Cooksey wasn’t laughter, or not entirely laughter anymore.
After some time and a few long whooping breaths, he opened his eyes and looked at her. His cheeks were slick with tears. “Oh, God,” he said. “How utterly disgraceful. Please forgive me.”
“It’s cool. I guess it was pretty funny to you. And, like, not just funny.”
“No. It was a sort of private joke and it just…I suppose it rather unleashed some…things. It’s hard to explain. I imagine one had to be there.” He made no move to rise but continued, “We were at a conference in Bellagio; it’s a lovely place in Italy, with a palace they use as a conference center. And one of the participants was a young woman named Maserati. I think she actually might have been related to the famous automobile dynasty, but in any case, she was quite pretty in an Italian way, and she appeared to set her cap for me, I can’t imagine why, and of course I was flattered. I’m such a fool at that sort of thing. There’s a good deal of naughtiness that goes on at such affairs, and Portia and I hadn’t been together all that long. Well, Portia was mad with jealousy and being Portia she made no bones about how she felt and we had a row, and in the midst of it, all I could think of to say was ‘How could anyone who has a Portia desire a Maserati,’ and it just stopped her cold, and then I said ‘and she probably leaks oil as well,’ and we both went absolutely mad with laughter. I imagine it was the tension breaking, because it was a very poor sort of joke. Anyway, every time we saw the wretched woman after that, we were positively weak with it, spurting wine through our noses and so on.”
A long sigh and a brief silence ensued. “I suppose I’ve been half dead myself since she died. And then when you said that, it just took me over. I hope I didn’t frighten you with that display.”
“No, it’s totally cool. How did she die?”
He laughed, his usual short bark. “Asks the American girl. You all fly your sorrows like flags, don’t you? And expect everyone else to do the same. Perhaps you’re right. Keeping it all packed away hasn’t done me much good. Well, since you ask, she was bitten by a fer-de-lance.”
“What’s that?”
“A snake.Bothrops atrox. The deadliest reptile in the American tropics. We were in Colombia desperately collecting from a stand of forest scheduled to be clear-cut, a lovely little valley full of the usual richness, and of course since the edge of the cut was advancing, the place was full of refugee creatures, including snakes. We were working too hard at it, exhausted, becoming a trifle careless, which is something one must never do down there, but it was so vital, there might have been dozens, hundreds of species that lived nowhere else and the swine were going to extinguish them to make furniture and to let some peasants grow a few pathetic crops before the soil was exhausted. One evening, far too late, she ran off to check her traps one last time. She failed to return, and I took a torch and went to look for her, and found her lying on a trail a few hundred yards from our camp. It was perfectly clear what had happened. We’d both seen it before. The ants and beetles were already on her. I haven’t been back to the forest since.”
“Oh, that’s awful,” Jenny said.
“Yes. She had hair much like yours, that red-gold color, although she wore it short.” He curled a loop of her hair around his finger. She thought he was going to kiss her then and wondered what it would be like to be kissed by an old guy, but instead he closed his eyes for a moment and a shudder passed through his long frame. Then he cleared his throat and clambered to his feet and was regular Professor Cooksey again. As if nothing important had happened, he began to fuss with the insects, placing the tiny things carefully back into their vial. “We’ll have to publish, of course, and it’s up to the international nomenclature people to confirm it, but I don’t expect much of a problem. Now, as for the name-I proposeP. jenniferi. How does that sound?”
“You meanme?”
“Of course you! They’re your fig wasps. You have achieved immortality, my dear. Your name will live forever, or at least until the last dying twitches of our scientific civilization, and graduate students yet unborn will bear your name on their lips. What do you think of that?”
“Holy shit,” said Jennifer.
“A grand sentiment and calls for champagne,” said Cooksey. “Let’s go see what Rupert has in his extensive cellars, shall we?”
Houses in Florida didn’t have cellars, Jenny knew that much, but she waited to see what would happen next on this strange and wonderful day. Cooksey returned shortly with two large bottles and a childlike grin on his face. He had brought a pair of Rupert’s fancy crystal glasses, too, that got brought out only for important dinners. Jenny had seen champagne served in movies but had never consumed any. Before she came to the property, her experience of wine had been limited to the cheap fortified swill homeless people used to keep away the cold. Since then, she’d had the opportunity to taste real wine, mainly that left over from Rupert’s rich-people parties, swiped from the kitchen by Kevin, but that experience had been flavored by Kevin’s pleasure in getting away with something. Kevin discussed wine mainly by mocking the pretensions associated with drinking the good stuff, reading the labels to her with his version of some rich guy’s elevated accent. Jenny went along with this, but she liked what the wine did in her mouth. It produced tastes she had not known were possible, sensations she did not have words for. It was one of the things that gave her the notion that regular people had a physical life that tramps like her were missing, and in this it was like listening to conversations among people who used words she didn’t understand.
She imagined it was like when the fish swam around her, how she must seem to them, something utterly alien living a life in a different medium, a higher kind of life. These thoughts swam around in her mind at times and made her vaguely discontented, but she did not have any substantial ideas upon which they could settle and become articulate. Kevin divided the world into “rich shitheads in the power structure” and “the people,” and she supposed she was in the latter class, but she also thought it couldn’t be as simple as that, when she thought about it at all, which was hardly ever. Still, she remained open to physical pleasure-fishpond, flowers, Château Margaux-and understood at some basic level that in this she was different from both Kevin and the dull or bitter Iowa farmwives who had raised her on behalf of the state.
The champagne tasted like a kind of flavored air, hardly a drink at all. Cooksey was pouring it down his throat like water in the desert, however, and keeping her glass full as well. He put a CD into the stereo in his bedroom, and the music drifted out. It wasn’t bad, she thought, not like what he usually played, which didn’t have any words at all, or else kind of screechy singing in Spanish or some language she couldn’t understand. This was a woman singing in English, with just a piano playing, and you could understand the words like you could in country songs, and there weren’t any curse words in it.
“Cleo Laine,” said Cooksey, although she hadn’t asked, and then he filled his glass again and began to talk. Delicious wine, and comparisons with other brands; champagne on other occasions; exploding champagne at his sister’s wedding; his home near Cambridge, the countryside, the flora and fauna thereof; his mother’s kindness and wit; his father taking him bird and bug watching in Norfolk as a boy; the fens, their similarity to the Everglades, the differences, his affection for low, flat, damp country, the oddness of his spending so much of his life in rain forest; tales of jungle adventure, narrow escapes, strange customs of the natives, stranger customs of fellow biologists; the awesome beauty of the great trees, laden with vines, decked with flowers, coated with scurrying, flying, crawling life. With Portia by his side; not a lot about her directly, but she was in nearly every jungle story, the touchstone of experience, nothing quite real until shared with her.
“Did you ever go to where Moie comes from?” she asked.
He paused before replying. “In a manner of speaking. I’ve been close to there, to the Puxto, and I knew someone who knew the region very well indeed. Why, we’re quite empty. Piggy us!”
Another bottle popped. Now he drew her out, her miserable life, but somehow not miserable told here drinking this wine: the missing father, the teenaged mother dead in a car wreck; no kin, so off to the mercies of the state; the discovery of the epilepsy, so no adopting families for her, the failure in school, the early stupid sex, the abortion, the flight into homeless drifting. She found herself talking easily about things she had not told anyone, even Kevin: the rape, or rapes, if you counted guys she knew already: the scary guys who got her to mule dope for them; arrest and jail.
It was back and forth: he said something, she said something, he took what she said and considered it and added something, an idea, a joke, an anecdote about a similar experience. She was conscious of wanting to say things that she didn’t have the language for, and self-conscious about her speech in a way she’d never been. Why did she saylike every other word, oryou know? Cooksey didn’t. He spoke more like a book, and with that voice of his it was like being on television, but in real life. She voiced this, and he laughed. “Yes, we’re having a civilized conversation, oiled by champagne. Why Madame makes the wine.” At her puzzled look he picked up the bottle and showed her the label.
“Veeve Clipot?”
He pronounced it correctly and added, “It means the Widow Clicquot. Interesting you read theq as ap. Do you always do that?”
Embarrassed, she admitted, “Yeah, I don’t read all that good.”
“And no wonder. You’re dyslexic.” He explained what that was and added, “You’re in good company. Sir Richard Branson is, and any number of other billionaires. Plus Cher, I believe. And my mother, who was a quite well-known anthropologist. It’s a bit of a bother but by no means the end of the world. No one’s ever told you this before?”
“No. They just thought I was, like, retarded.”
“Retarded? Odd word. Well, you were, I suppose. But now you’re apparently advancing once more. I’ll help you if you like. More wine?”
She held out her glass, speechless, thinking of Cher.
He lifted his glass and held the golden contents up to the fading light from the window. “I always imagine brain cells winking out under the influence of this, like tiny bubbles. Charming. Now, intelligence is rather more complex than people imagine. With us, it’s the ability to manipulate abstract symbols. That’s what we prize above all else, nearly to the exclusion of all else, with the result that we often put in charge of our civilization people who have absolutely no concrete intelligence at all, who are in fact entirely cut off from real life-economists and such. The greatest virtue of real science, in contrast, is that it constantly throws nature into your face, messy, solid, and complex nature, which often makes a nonsense of all one’s airy-fairy abstractions. Obviously, real education would draw out the particular intelligence of every individual, but we don’t do that. We think we need abstract symbol manipulators, and so we try to produce them en masse, and fail, and toss the failures into the dustbin. Like you, for example. And of course there are modes of intelligence, broadly defined, of which our culture knows absolutely nothing. My mum was always going on about that, the truly remarkable range of what different peoples choose to do with their brains. I wonder what she would have made of Moie.”
“Oh, Moie!” she said. “God, I wonder what happened to him. Do you think he’s okay?”
“Perfectly fine, I should think. Aren’t you, Moie?” As he said this, he looked over his shoulder into the shadows in the corner of the room by the door. She followed his glance and saw the Indian squatting there. The sight startled her, and she spilled some of her champagne.
“Jesus! Where didhe come from? I didn’t even hear the door open.”
“No. Moie is only seen when he wants to be. One example of his particular mode of intelligence, perhaps.” In Quechua, Cooksey said, “I’m happy to see you. How are you getting on in your tree?”
“Well. It’s a good tree, although no one has spoken to it in a long time. And are you well, and her?”
“We are both exceedingly fine. Would you care for some champagne?” He dangled the bottle, and Moie stood and came closer. “What is this?” he asked, sniffing it.
“It’s similar to pisco, but with water added to it, and also air.”
“Then thank you, but I must not. Jaguar is back in the sky tonight.”
“And can you not take pisco when the moon is full?”
“No. He doesn’t like it, and he may need me tonight or the next day or the next. After that I will be happy to drink your pisco with you.”
“What will he do with you? If he comes.”
“Anything he wishes to do, of course. You shouldn’t ask foolish questions, for you are not entirely a fool.” He turned his attention to Jenny, who smiled at him and said, “Hey, Moie, what’s up?”
He ignored this and said to Cooksey, “The Firehair Girl seems happier than she was before. I see she has drunk a lot of your pisco-with-air, but also there is something else. She’s found something she lost, I think.”
“Yes, that’s a way to say it.”
“Yes, and I can see the shadow of her death, almost as if she were a live person. She wishes to dopuwis with you, Cooksey.”
“Surely not!”
“Yes, because I have seen it in her dreams. And also in your dreams. Will you take her into your hammock?”
“It’s not our custom, Moie.”
“I believe you, for I see the women come to take their children from under my tree, and they all have only one child, or sometimes two. Yet you have so much food. Each should have ten, and all fat ones, too. Thewai’ichuranan have forgotten how to do it, I think.”
“No, it’s all they think about. A great deal ofpuwis is done among thewai’ichuranan, I can assure you.”
“No, I meant they have forgotten how to draw the spirits of children from the sun into the bodies of their women. Anyway, you will pull her into your hammock, or perhaps she will pull you into hers, as I have heard is also done among you. She has broad hips and heavy breasts and will bear many healthy sons for the clan of Cooksey. But I came to ask you if you have heard anything about the Puxto, if they have stopped the cutting and the road.”
“They have not stopped, Moie. They will not, I fear.”
Moie was silent for a while, then made a peculiar gesture that was like a shrug and also like a despairing slump. “That’s too bad,” he said in Quechua and then added something in his own language that Cooksey didn’t understand. Without another word he went out the door. Cooksey and Jennifer followed him into the garden. Moie had his head back, staring at the full moon, now tangled in the upper boughs of one of the tall casuarinas that edged the property.
“What will you do now, Moie?” Cooksey asked.
“I will go back to my tree and wait,” said the Indian, and he turned away to go. But then he paused and addressed Cooksey again. “There is one thing I have discovered. There arewai’ichuranan who can calltichiri. Did you know that?”
“I don’t know whattichiri is, Moie.”
“I will explain. There is the world below the moon and the world above the moon. Below the moon we men have our lives, and above the moon are the dead ones and the spirits and demons, and so on. Wejampirinan can travel between these worlds, and also theaysiri, the sorcerers, and when you sleep the paths are open, too, and from that comes dreaming. Everyone knows this. But what only a few know is that a guardian can be called, and tied into at’naicu ”-here he touched the little bundle that hung from his neck-“so that the dreams of the one who wears it can’t be entered, or not entered easily. This guardian is called thetichiri. ”
“And you found one of these guarding one of us?”
“I did. A little girl. We would think it was a waste to guard a little girl so strongly. Who cares what a girl dreams? But this is an unusual girl, I think. Jaguar has her in his mind for some reason. So, tell me, can you call atichiri and make at’naicu in this way?”
“I can’t,” said Cooksey. “But many parents pray that their children will have sweet dreams. Perhaps that’s what you found.”
“Pray? You mean to Jan’ichupitaolik? No, this was something else. I will have to think about this more.” With that he trotted silently into the shadows.
“What was allthat about?” Jenny asked.
“Oh, you know, just a chat,” said Cooksey lightly.
“It didn’t sound like a chat,” said Jennifer. The champagne had made her bold. “It sounded serious. Where’s he been living since he ran off?”
“In a tree. He seems very content. And yes, it was serious. I think he’s going to kill someone tonight.”
“Oh, God! Who is he going to?”
“I imagine one of the men he thinks is responsible for cutting down his forest.”
“Can’t you stop him?”
“Not I. In any case, he doesn’t think he’s doing it himself. He thinks the man in the moon does it, or Jaguar, as he calls his god.” Cooksey looked up at the sky. “I suppose it does look rather like a jaguar, depending on what you bring to it. Some people say it’s an old woman with a sack on her back. In some parts of Europe it’s a loaded wagon, Charles’s Wain, the treasure of Charlemagne.”
“But that’s just, you know, imaginary. Isn’t it?”
“That would depend on what you meant by imaginary. Or imagination, for that matter. You and I were just speaking of intelligence, and there you have a good example. Our imagination works with our particular kind of intelligence to produce televisions and nuclear bombs. His works to allow visits to other people’s dreams and the manipulation of mass and energy in entirely different ways to how we do it. You remember his footprint? My mother always swore she’d seen a shaman walk flat-footed up the side of a vertical tree as if he were walking on a street, and she was not, I can assure you, an easy person to fool. Moie imagines, so to speak, that he can turn himself into a jaguar, and perhaps in some strange way he can.”
Jennifer felt a sickish laugh bubble out of her throat. “That’s wack,” she said, and then recalled what had happened at the jaguar cage in the zoo and was silent.
He drained his glass and said, “I think there’s a bit more left in the bottle. Would you like some?”
“No, thanks. I’m pretty dizzy as it is.”
He nodded. “Well, then, I’ll say good night. I’m a bit unsteady myself, and I want to get some reading done before I pass out. I’ll leave the workroom light on for you.”
When he had gone, Jennifer went down the path to the pool and sat on the low stone bench placed at the foot of the pond. The moon had topped the tree, she saw. It wobbled brightly on the surface of the dark water and turned the little waterfall into a stream of silver. She stared at the moonlit ripples, feeling strange, and it wasn’t just the wine. She reached for an explanation and found that she hadn’t the words, but…it was just that she couldn’t simply let go and sink into the thoughtless depths as she had her whole life, there wasstuff in her head now: that wasp and the business of naming it after her, and Cooksey’s whole story and his wife and the idea of a mode of life she had not imagined existed. No, that was wrong: she knew it existed, had seen it all on the TV, but now she had been invited into it in Real Life, and she found herself quaking in the doorway. Flowers and fish were not going to be enough after today, and she found herself racked with longing for what she had been and at the same time with yearning for another and still terrifying life. But I’m too dumb, she thought vainly: her hidey-hole now too small.
She wept then, silently as she had learned to do long ago in strange houses where they didn’t like whiny kids, her face distorted into a tragic mask, hugging herself, rocking back and forth on the smooth stone, while from her throat came the tiniest mewling sound, like a kitten lost. It was strange to her to be doing this in the open air, and not in a broom closet, shut up on account of messing herself during a fit, or hiding from taunting children in a girls’ room stall at school. She thought this, however, after it was over. A new kind of thought, a reflection on her life. Cooksey had just demonstrated to her how to do that, to look at a life from outside, like it was a movie. But while she wept, she thought nothing at all.
Now she coughed because her throat always hurt after these cries, and her face, too, because of being so scrunched up. She knelt at the edge of the pond and splashed water on her face, and stood and wiped her face with the bottom of her T-shirt. She heard a screen door slam and then steps on gravel, and here was Kevin.
He stopped and looked her over. “Planning a little moonlight swim?” he asked in a stoned drawl. She could smell the marijuana on him. His face was slack with the drug, something she’d never really noticed before.
“No, just sitting.”
He handed her his bandanna. After a tiny hesitation she took it and wiped her face.
“Want to go for a drive?”
“Where?”
“Maybe the beach. It’s a nice night.”
Two weeks ago Kevin being this sweet would have lit up her whole day, but now she saw that he was counting on just that-she actually saw behind the mask of his face to the being within, the empty desperate sadness of that being. She saw also the nature of their deal, that she wanted someone to think for her and take care of her because she was stupid and a spaz, and he wanted someone to admire him and be subject to him because he was a useless piece of shit. This is just like my dream, she thought, and at that moment recalled it to mind, and that she had dreamed it not just last night but for many. She was a child locked in a storm cellar. She’d been bad, and the foster parent was going to do something awful to her, the man would when he got home and she had to get out. There was another child locked in with her, and in a strange dream-way she knew this was Kevin. They were both kids but also themselves. The walls of the cellar were earth, and she started to dig. The substance she dug was not real earth, but soft and slimy like Jell-O and came away in great chunks. She tried to get Kevin to dig, but he wouldn’t. Instead, he was taking the chunks of Jell-O and arranging them neatly against the wall. He said he didn’t want to get in trouble with the parents. She was torn now, desperate to get free but also fascinated by the construct Kevin was building from the quaking blocks. There was a yellow cat there, too, she recalled, and it ran into the shaft she had dug and disappeared and she knew it had found the way out and she yearned to follow it. Please, Kevin, please, she called to the dream boy…
“Please what?” said Kevin.
“Nothing,” she said and realized she had spoken aloud. She felt so sorry for him now. He had nothing, really, but his stupid revolution, and sex, and his attitude. She felt a wave of compassion and understood at some level below words that this was what Professor Cooksey felt for her. She had learned it from him. And maybe if she stayed with Kevin she could work the same sort of transformation. Maybe she owed it to him, because for sure she never would have ended up in this place had it not been for Kevin dragging her into it. She rose and faced him and put on a smile, only half faked. “So,” she said, “if we’re going, let’s go.”