All the Way to the Tigers

by Mary Morris

  There is more noise, more grumbling. Then Larry gets off the phone. In the two decades I’ve been with my husband, I’ve never known him to lose his cool—except for once with my father, and that was also coming to my defense. With that one exception, I’ve never seen him raise his voice at anyone about anything, but he goes out the corridor and he yells at that nurse, “You could have made a phone call. One phone call. There’s a surgeon waiting for her right now.”

  The nurse glares at him, stony-faced, but says nothing as he uses the phone at her station to try and procure an ambulance to transport me to another hospital. But there is that blizzard and not a single ambulance, not even the Hasidic volunteer ambulance, available to transport me into the city, which is where our primary-care physician (who Larry manages to get on the phone at that hour) suggests we go. Larry returns and tells me that we have to stay here, at least until morning.

  A few minutes later the nurse comes in and tells Larry that he has to leave. “This is a women’s floor,” she says. She glances at the comatose woman in the bed beside me.

  “Then call security,” Larry replies. “I’m not leaving.” And he sits down in a vinyl chair and watches me all night.

  * * *

  —

  At four in the morning a swarthy young man in green scrubs walks in. In my bleariness I see him shake my husband’s hand. I gaze at the strong grip as Dr. Patel introduces himself. Later Larry tells me that he has a good handshake and that he trusted him right away. It is one of the things my father once said about Larry. He has a good handshake. In fact, I am lucky that night. Dr. Patel happens to be a highly trained trauma surgeon. He is furious with the nursing staff for not checking with him and for allowing me to eat. He tells me that he’ll operate first thing in the morning. Doing the math, I realize it’s already morning, but Dr. Patel looks as if he’s good for several more hours—which in fact he is. Later I will learn that he is a man who rarely sleeps.

  Meanwhile I drift in and out. Periodically opening my eyes, I see Larry sitting in a chair, holding my hand. I don’t think he ever closed his eyes. I don’t remember going in for surgery, but I remember waking up in the recovery room. Larry is there waiting, and he’s brought some books. My foot is neatly swathed—like a baby, I think. I’m wrapped in blankets and finally not cold. And I’m not in real pain so I pick up Paul Bowles’s The Spider’s House, which I’ve been reading in preparation for our trip to Morocco. I open to where I left off and am soon engrossed.

  I don’t notice when Dr. Patel walks in, and he looks stunned. “I’ve never seen a patient sitting up and reading after surgery,” he tells me.

  “It’s a good book,” I reply.

  “It’s not that,” he says. “You must be a very strong person.”

  I shrug. I don’t know. I don’t think so. I just want to read my book. But perhaps I am stronger than I think. Is he hoping that this is so? I’ve always been a good student. I know how to work hard. So, if I’m a good patient, if I follow orders, I’ll be all right. If I rest and do what he tells me, I’ll get better fast. “Can I go to Morocco in six weeks?”

  “Let’s see.” Dr. Patel shakes his head, still amazed that I’m sitting up in the recovery room, reading a book. His voice sounds optimistic. “Let’s see how it goes.” He tells me then that my fibula was shattered in seven places and that, for now, a four-inch steel plate holds it together. It is only much later that he will tell me that I had the worst fracture of the fibula he’d ever seen. He’s a trauma surgeon so obviously he’s seen a lot. A racehorse, he’ll tell me, is put down for less.

  31

  AT THE PALM BEACH ZOO in Florida a rare and nearly extinct Malaysian tiger mauls to death the female keeper, known as “the tiger whisperer,” who took care of him. No one has explained what she was doing in the tiger’s night enclosure. The zoo said that she was performing her normal tasks.

  At the Amsterdam Royal Zoo a man scales a wall, crosses a moat, and enters a tiger’s enclosure. Later, after the man dies, the Dutch police refer to this as suicide by tiger. And in the Bronx Zoo in New York a twenty-five-year-old man leaps from the monorail and scales a sixteen-foot fence, where a Siberian tiger named Bachuta more or less gnaws his foot off. The zookeepers in the Bronx were amazed that Bachuta didn’t kill the man. The public was pleased that the tiger wasn’t euthanized. “Bachuta did nothing wrong,” his keeper said.

  From his hospital bed the young man explained why he did this. “I wanted to be one with the tiger,” he said.

  32

  India, 2011

  THE WHITE TREE is known as the ghost tree. It does resemble a ghost. But among the drivers and guides it is also referred to as the Lady of the Jungle because she has big knots that resemble breasts. As Ajay and Sudhir manage to explain this to me by holding their hands in front of their chests, they are giggling like schoolboys. Then Ajay raises his finger, and we are silent. He turns to me in his halting English and asks, “Do you hear that?” I’m not sure what I hear. It sounds like a squeak that may be miles away. “That is sambar deer warning spotted deer. The tiger is near.”

  “The sambar deer warns the spotted deer?”

  But Ajay doesn’t have time to answer my question. Our jeep is speeding off to the right along the rutted roads. I know that they have heard an alarm call. Peacock call, wild chicken call, spotted deer, sambar deer, barking deer, monkey, even the jackal and the wild boar, each has his rutting call, call to assemble, lost mother call, alarm call, and who knows what else. Ajay has learned how to listen to them all. He can hear the difference between a call to roost and a mother calling to her offspring, between a time to eat and a time to sleep, and the cry when danger is near. I cannot distinguish between any of the sounds he hears. What I am waiting for is the big roar, then the nine feet, four hundred pounds of tiger, four-inch claws extended, to come bounding out of the brush.

  But Ajay can distinguish a bird by the flapping of its wings. The mother deer calling for her young. Amazed, I shake my head. It seems impossible but it’s true. And he does speak some English, though he prefers silence in any language and I am fine with that. We push on and I try to listen for the alarm calls. I hear nothing, but Ajay says something to Sudhir and Sudhir turns to me. “Do you hear it? Sambar deer alarm call. Sambar deer warning white-tailed deer.”

  “You mean one kind of deer warns the other?” I ask again.

  Now Ajay does his best to explain that the white-tailed deer makes an alarm call when it hears the tiger, but the sambar deer makes an alarm call only when it sees the tiger. “So if you hear the sambar call, then you know that the tiger is really there.” I guess being able to tell the difference between the sambar and the white-tailed deer alarm calls must have something to do with his being the best guide in India. I nod, ready to learn more.

  Ajay keeps his eyes to the ground. As he’s looking for pugmarks—the footprints a tiger leaves—a ball of dust is coming our way. Another jeep filled with tourists approaches and halts next to ours. It looks like a single family. An older man and woman, two teenagers. As they peer out from beneath their horsehair blankets, not one of them smiles. They all have miserable, dour faces. Clearly, they haven’t seen a tiger either. And their vacation is a bust.

  Ajay and Sudhir and their guides speak rapidly in Hindi, asking, I assume, if a tiger is near. The guides are also grumbling. They work very hard at finding the tiger. “No tiger, no tips” is their saying. There seems to be a consensus and their jeep takes off in another direction. I am feeling lucky. I could easily be riding in a jeep filled with those grumpy people, but because my hotel is empty, I have Sudhir and Ajay to myself.

  We sit in silence until I hear a distant, piercing shriek. “Is that it? Is that the alarm call?”

  Ajay shakes his head. “Spotted deer calling for his mother.” I’m still trying to understand how he hears such things. He is a sommelier of sound.
<
br />   We come to a large, open field known as Alikatta where there are some outbuildings that look like offices and washrooms. Off to the side four elephants stand, chained. On a large flat grill men are making giant flat breads, or chapatis, the size of truck tires that the elephants will eat like crackers. A single elephant will eat twelve of these at a sitting. Or, well, a standing. With enormous wooden spoons the men are stirring the meal, adding water by hand, then flattening the mixture and laying it on the grill. These men are the mahouts who tend the elephants. Others—guards, guides, and some tourists—have come to warm themselves at the grill.

  We are stooped, our hands near the flames, when suddenly the men at the small guard station start shouting. With their machine guns slung around their arms they are pointing. An alarm call has sounded. Ajay and Sudhir rush back to the jeep and I jump in behind them. We’re off. We race in one direction, then another. We are skirting the area as the alarm calls are sounded. I, however, hear nothing. The high-pitched shrieks that the men hear are lost on me.

  We pause. “You don’t look for the tiger,” Ajay tells me at one of our stops. “You will never find her. You look for signs of the tiger.”

  Then Ajay hears something, and we are off again.

  33

  AT TIMES I wonder why I need to see a real tiger in the wild. Why not just the tiger in my mind? The one I had once dreamed about. Certainly a zoo tiger won’t do, but what’s wrong with the one that I imagined so long ago? Pablo Picasso once told a friend that to him landscapes were foreign territories. “I never saw any. I’ve always lived inside myself. I have such interior landscapes that nature could never offer me ones as beautiful.” If I imagine the tiger—her symmetrical stripes, her yellow eyes, the giant paws, the way she crouches and slinks through the jungle—isn’t that enough? Why do I have to see the real thing when I can see her in my dreams?

  Many years after Marc Chagall fled his beloved Vitebsk, he was invited back. He was an old man and much of the turmoil of the years that forced him to flee Russia were over. Chagall pondered the invitation but in the end he refused. He was worried that if he saw the real place, he would lose the one that he had been imagining for so long.

  34

  India, 2011

  I GROW ACCUSTOMED to their rhythms. The silence, the stopping and listening, then starting up again. When Ajay is listening, his ears almost seem to perk up. If one of us speaks, he holds up his finger to silence us. He is like a concert master, listening for the viola that is out of tune. But still there is no tiger. “It is too cold for them,” Sudhir says and Ajay agrees. Tigers like the heat. No one expected this cold.

  Hours go by and we keep driving around. Every so often we run into the jeep, filled with that family of disgruntled tourists, wrapped in sweaters and blankets. Our guides stop and talk in Hindi. Where can the thirty-three tigers and twelve cubs that inhabit Pench be? But we are having good luck with woodpeckers.

  We stay out even as the sun begins slipping below the trees, and no one has seen a tiger. The game park closes in an hour, and we begin to see our breath. Sudhir asks if I am ready to return to the hotel, but I want to stay out as late as we can. I am not ready to give up the search. Ajay and Sudhir seem pleased with my decision. We’ve come to a fork in the road and Ajay points to the right. “We will go a different way now,” Sudhir says as we head off.

  At closing time, as we leave the game park, we are silent but in a different way. I sense their disappointment. “We have a few more days,” I say.

  Sudhir and Ajay exchange looks, and Sudhir explains: “Ajay is our guide only for today. Tomorrow we will have another. They are taken in order.” But I don’t want another guide. I want the man who can hear the flapping of wings and know the name of the bird.

  On our way we drop Ajay at his home in a nearby village. The road is dusty, and the houses are mostly made of mud. We pull up to a mud house. In front a young woman in a rose-colored sari is shaping dough. She is clearly with child. Ajay greets her, and then he goes inside. Given the odds of having the same guide tomorrow, I doubt that I will see him again.

  35

  I’M A RESTLESS CHILD. Flitting from place to place. My father nicknames me Pigeon because I never sit still. It is a name that sticks. (My mother just calls me “Mary, Mary, quite contrary.” This is her explanation for my behavior. I am, I suppose, a stubborn, headstrong child.) But what I want, if I can now put a word to it, is freedom. Something I still crave. Something that can be elusive now.

  I love butterflies, and at one point I have an extensive collection of them—fragile, beautiful creatures I capture with my net in the woods or later send for from a Latin American butterfly company. In high school I briefly contemplate a career as an entomologist. Flutterbyes, I call them as a child. And often just byebyes. I am not surprised when I learn that in Chinese the word for butterfly translates to “tiger ghost.” In the jungle of Pench I watch them. Tiger ghosts floating by.

  36

  Brooklyn, 2008

  “NON-WEIGHT-BEARING” is what Dr. Patel says. It’s a term I hadn’t heard before and will come to dread. He explains that I cannot put any weight on my foot until it is completely healed. At least two months and maybe three. And I can’t go home from the hospital until I’m able to get around on one leg with a walker and go up and down stairs. An occupational therapist comes into my room to explain this to me and to show me the basic principles of the walker. Over the next two days I’ll have a daily therapy session with her. “Then you can leave.”

  But I don’t want to stay in the hospital for two more days. The few days I’ve been here, flat on my back, seem like more than enough. And the sooner I leave, I reason, the sooner I’ll be on my feet again. Even one more day becomes unbearable to me—let alone to Larry, who has slept in a chair for the past three nights and has gone home only to shower and walk the dog. He is as exhausted as I am, but he refuses to leave me. Especially after the night when a nurse comes in, flicks on the lights, and gives me a pain injection. Then slips a bedpan under me and, without waiting for me to finish, walks out of the room. “I’m not leaving you,” he insists. Still he is so tired. I see it in the sunken look in his eyes.

  I’m anxious to return to my life and hungry for visitors, messages. News from the outside world. I am desperate to get out of the hospital. The nurses are surly and at times downright mean. If Larry wasn’t there, they’d ignore me for hours at a time. I can’t eat the food and just being in the hospital makes me feel vulnerable. I’ll never get well as long as I’m here.

  An hour before my occupational therapy session, I ring for my pain medication. Even though I don’t really need it yet, I want to be as numb as possible. I want to go smoothly through my drills and not reveal to the therapist the extent of my pain. The words of Dylan Thomas come into my mind: “Rage, rage against the dying of the light.” I fear she won’t let me go home. An orderly comes for me, and, when I get to the office, there is a small wait. A little bit of wheelchair gridlock. A man is in the room as well, waiting for his session. And two other people are in the treatment rooms, receiving instruction. I’ve hardly spoken to anyone in days and decide to make small talk. “So how long have you been here?” I ask.

  The man is relatively young and good-looking, with sandy brown hair and pale blue eyes. He has a warm smile, even though he clearly moves with great difficulty and a good deal of pain. I’m assuming he’s been laid up for at least a week or two. “Oh, I’ve been here on and off for the past three years.” He gives a little chuckle.

  I am stunned. And I’m complaining about a few days. “What do you mean?”

  He was a truck driver and, while unloading cargo, his truck was struck by another vehicle, and he was pinned—and virtually crushed—against a wall. He’s been in physical therapy of some sort ever since. “They told me that after three years I probably won’t get any better, so this is about it for me.” His eyes
well up.

  Three years. Surely I’ll be as good as new in three years. This will all be behind me, won’t it? A depressing but fading memory. But it is a number I won’t forget. Nor will I forget his sad eyes. I watch him, tears in my own eyes, until the therapist comes and puts me through my drills. I walk with the walker, moving it forward as I’ve been instructed, then hopping on one leg. I shimmy on my butt, up and down stairs. My therapist nods, obviously impressed. “Have you been practicing?” she jokes as she makes notes on her clipboard. She has no idea how desperate I am to get out of here.

  I remember my uncle Herman in the last months of his life. In his nursing home he cruised the corridors, speeding in his wheelchair all night long. Nothing could make him rest. He’s running away from death, one of the nurses said.

  “You can go home,” my therapist tells me as she signs my sheet. The doctor will sign off on it later. I give a wave to the man for whom every step is agony.

  He purses his lips, nodding at me. “You’ll be fine,” he says.

  * * *

  —

  Later that afternoon a peculiar young man shows up in my hospital room with an enormous wheelchair—big enough for two people. He stands by the side of my bed, babbling, staring up at the ceiling and pointing at the chair. I’m not sure who he is or what I am supposed to do. It seems as if there is some mistake. I’m not dressed yet. I haven’t been told when I’m being discharged. “I need to get dressed,” I tell the man, but he just stands there mumbling to himself. Larry, who is in my room, napping, wakes up. “I don’t know what he wants,” I say.