They sit at a table, and the Firehair Woman brings food that tastes like clay and hot brown water. He is not hungry at all but takes a little so that the gods of this place are not offended. The Angry Woman talks about the death of the man of the Consuela whom the Monkey Boy screamed at the day before in the house the size of a mountain that you go to in a little hut with no windows that hums in a way you can feel in the belly. The Monkey Boy is happy he is dead, but the others are confused. Who has killed him? they wonder. Moie says in his own language that it is Jaguar, and they all look at him strangely. They are silent for a moment. Then Cooksey asks, “Moie, did you kill this man yourself?” And Moie answers, “Perhaps I would have, if he came to my country, but here I have no power. No, it was Jaguar alone who did this. He is angry at the men who want to destroy his country, and if they don’t say they will stop, I think he will kill others, too.” He sees that they are amazed, but they say nothing more about it at this time.

The wailing dragged Paz out of the dream, brought him onto his feet stumbling as the dream paralysis passed from his limbs. He struggled into a robe. His wife, now awakened herself, cried, “What is it?”

“Amy’s having a nightmare.”

“Oh, Christ, not again! What time is it?”

“Four-thirty. Go back to sleep,” said Paz, walking quickly from the room. Entering his daughter’s bedroom, he saw by the glow of the Tweety Bird night-light that Amelia was sitting up in bed weeping and clutching her old pink blanket to her face. She stretched out her arms to him, and he sat on the side of the bed and held her to his body, cooing and stroking her hair. This was the fourth one in the last couple of weeks.

“What was it, baby, did you have a bad dream? Tell Daddy, what was it? Did you see a monster?”

Gasping, the child said, “It was a aminal.”

“An animal, huh? What kind of animal?”

“I don’t know. It was yellow and it had big teeth and it was going to eat me all up.”

At this, Paz felt a shock of fear shoot through him. It was at this moment that he understood that he had come to the end of the seven years of peace. What he always referred to as “weird shit” had now officially returned. He wanted to join Amelia in tears but instead took a deep steadying breath and asked hopefully, “You mean like a dog?”

“No, it was a little like a dinosaur and a little like a kitty cat.”

“Boy, that sounds scary,” Paz said, terrified himself. “But it’s all gone now. It can’t get you, okay? Dreams are just in your head, you know? Animals in dreams can’t really bite and scratch you. We talked about this before, you remember.”

“Yes, but, Daddy, I waked up…I waked up and the aminal was still here. I was all waked up and it was still here.”

She had slipped a little back into her baby talk, not a good sign. He said, “I don’t know, baby, sometimes it’s hard to tell exactly when you’re all waked up, especially if you’re having a bad nightmare. Anyway, it was just a dream. It wasn’t real.”

“Abuela says dreamsare real.”

Paz took a deep breath and uttered an inward malediction. “I don’t think that’s what Abuela meant, baby. I think she meant that sometimes dreams tell us things about ourselves that might be hard to find out otherwise.”

“Uh-uh! She saysbrujos 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 calledAnimals 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 reallyis crying and I wake up.”