Jaguar (4 page)

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 fabric. 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.

A rip in the fabric would spill the stuff of this universe into the anti-stuff of the other. A flurrying of molecules would form a wobbly hole in reality, a wobbling flutter of blue that flashed white and annihilated every particle of both universes as they came to touch. This profited no one. The Jaguar maintained a healthy respect for profit.

Profit, to The Jaguar, was not so much coin of the realm, but years. The Jaguar wanted to live forever, and knew now that he could master that trick if he played the dreamways right.

Dreaming on his own side of the fabric hurt him when he woke, but that pain was nothing like cracking the light-whip for the trip through it. On this side he was predator, sniffer of dream-trails. He followed fantasies to their dens and unraveled pathways between the neurons that formed those fantasies. Of course, he picked up a lot of facts on the way. People kept him alive and brought him back to consciousness in exchange for some of those facts.

The Jaguar called this “milking.” He squeezed information from his cattle like some farmers coaxed out milk. He rummaged around in brains, he woke up, he hurt. And every time he woke to face Max, who had a nasty squeeze all his own.

Being wrenched away from the other side was a grinding pain, not a slick, neat slash. Riding the dreamways aged him; he had to make the most of every trip. Forgetting his infirmity was expensive, and he always had to keep the tally of his physical being correct.

He would live forever, but not if he couldn’t free himself of his deteriorating baggage of a body. More of his precious reserves had been shifted to damage control. The body was failing, that was clear. Free of this body, he could own the universes on both sides of the fabric.

The Jaguar borrowed
here
, paid back
there
.

He kept ahead of a slow game while his cattle snuffled around him.

Cattle, yes, he had thought of them as cattle right from the first. He never set out to like any of them, he just needed information to pay blackmail to his government and to buy time to pay his dues for crossing the fabric as the Jaguar. He milked his cattle, or they dried up. If he milked them too often, they went loco, fast, and they died.

He recognized their symptoms: nightmare, weakness, fatigue and insanity. The wrinkles would come later. He was an infant of the dreamways, and learned the subtleties of mind-sculpture at the expense of many a headache of his own. Then, too, he faced the psychological challenge of knowing their dreams, their particular structures of thought.

Nightmares and fatigue made them afraid to dream; they got medicines to sleep a dreamless night and those medicines blocked him out. Some, in their inevitable madness, chose to switch off their lives. His supply of cattle dwindled.

The Jaguar countered by sculpting dreams to ward off their boredom. The ultimate exploration for him, now, was the textural variation in the tension between color and time. He took nightmare and unraveled it and recast it to beauty. He made his cattle want to sleep, beg to dream. Such effort had its price.

People talk of their dreams, particularly if those dreams change their lives. One nurse sought counseling and had to be removed. Another talked about her coma patient, the wonderful dreams she’d developed since working with him. He’d sculpted her a perfect memory, not as a gift so much as for fun. The Jaguar eventually ensured that her recall never be tested.

She brought the investigators down on him again, and they brought Max, and that even got a nibble from the KGB, so he scrambled her brains to protect himself. She was good practice.

The nurse woke suddenly from a nap in the nurses’ lounge, ran straight down the hallway and dove headfirst through the sixth-floor window. One witness, another student nurse who had set up a tryst with an intern, remembered vividly the wild-eyed terror of her classmate who shoved past in her desperate sprint down the hall.