The Tiger Catcher

by Paullina Simons

  “So you know how to garden?”

  “No,” Julian said, “just how to tell plants apart.”

  “What good is that?” Devi sounded deflated.

  “What do you mean? You’re wandering around and see a green thing, you’ll know what it is.”

  “Why is that a skill anyone would want?”

  “You wouldn’t want to know what a flame tree is called, or the different grasses, or when strawberries are in season, or whether you can eat the poison berries off a yew tree?”

  “No,” Devi said. “And you won’t either. To plant something in the ground, now that would be worthwhile.”

  “You got the wrong guy for that.”

  “It’s not me who’s got the wrong guy,” Devi muttered, pulling out a stack of journals and peering into pages of copious notes in a tiny exacting hand. “Do you know about horses?”

  “A little.”

  “Let me rephrase,” Devi said. “I don’t want to know if you can tell an Arabian from an Andalusian. I want to know if you can dress a horse or ride a horse.”

  “Um, no, Devi, why in the world . . . Also, I know we’re supposed to be talking about my strengths,” Julian said, “but I confess I’m a little afraid of horses. What I mean by that is—they scare the shit out of me.”

  Devi allowed himself a look of judgmental frustration. “No horses and no caves. Got it. Do you know how to build a platform, a simple box?”

  “Build? Like with a hammer and nails?”

  “Do you know how to paint?”

  “Pictures?”

  “Houses.”

  “No. To both.”

  “I know you don’t know how to cook. Do you know how to count money?”

  “I kept Ashton’s books at the Treasure Box. So yes.”

  “On a computer?”

  “Yes.”

  Devi sighed. “Would you know how to count money on paper or an abacus?”

  Julian’s entire skillset was being called into question!

  “So the answer is no,” said Devi. “And you can’t fence. So you can’t be a knight. You can’t fence and you can’t ride. Can you carve up a whale or a seal?”

  Julian nearly retched.

  “Have you ever been inside a church?”

  “Devi! Of course. My dad’s family was from the old country, devout Catholics.”

  “You yourself seem to have shallow theological knowledge at best,” Devi said. “So you can’t work for a monastery.”

  “Why do I have to pretend to be something else? Why can’t I be myself?”

  “And what is that?” Devi closed his journals and folded his hands. “Unless all of Josephine’s incarnations are clustered into the twentieth century for your convenience, you’ll likely be heading into a time and place where there are no cars and no computers and possibly even no iPhone.”

  “I told you I wasn’t ready,” Julian said, filled with alarm and self-doubt. “You’re the only one who’s surprised.”

  “Were you a history major in college at least?”

  “Ashton was.”

  “Is Ashton coming with you?”

  “English, okay,” Julian said. “I was a double major. With Phys Ed.”

  “Why, so you could be a gym teacher?”

  Beat. “Among other things.”

  Devi groaned.

  “What? I received a well-rounded liberal arts education.”

  “Good for nothing. I was half-joking earlier, but do you actually know how to row a boat?”

  Julian didn’t answer. How hard could that be?

  Devi threw up his hands. “Why,” he said, “tell me, why didn’t you learn at least one thing, one thing you could do except write ridiculous news headlines? You were Mr. Know-it-All. And yet you don’t know how to do anything. Can you sing?”

  “I can be paid not to sing.”

  “I know you’re not funny,” Devi said, “so you can’t be a court jester.”

  “I can be funny!”

  “Not on purpose.”

  “Well, you better think of something, smart guy,” Julian said, “because in your grand plan, I have twelve hours to learn to be funny.”

  “It’s not me who has to think of something,” Devi said. “I’m going nowhere.” He said that almost regretfully.

  Am I going somewhere? Julian wanted to ask. Am I really? He chewed his lip. “When I was a kid,” he said, “I used to play a naker, a small kettle drum.”

  “Now nothing can hold you back.”

  Julian struggled. To reveal other things about himself or not to reveal? He had put them so far away. He hadn’t spoken about them to anyone, not even Josephine. He took a pained breath. He was probably never going to see Devi again, either way, no matter how this turned out. “In my other life, I used to be a boxer,” Julian said. There it was. The unvarnished truth.

  The little man wasn’t surprised by much, but he was surprised by this. “You were?” He put his cleaver down.

  “Yes.” Julian didn’t meet Devi’s gaze. “Super middleweight. I was an undefeated amateur. Thirty-four knockouts. I was headed for the qualifiers for the Sydney Olympics before I changed my mind and decided to go pro. I was undefeated then, too. Had my nose busted twice, one split decision, but never lost a fight. I was pretty good.” Julian smiled with soft pride at the memory of himself the way he used to be. “Until—” He stopped. He hated talking about it. Since he was eight and watched a video of Muhammad Ali defeating George Foreman in Zaire, a boxer was the only thing Julian wanted to be. Boxing was his high-wire, his passion, his stage. It was a crushing, embittering body blow to him when he was forced to stop. He returned to school for his masters, but his heart wasn’t in it. His heart wasn’t in anything. He substitute taught—scrambling to find a substitute life. Eventually he found whatever. It was nothing but consolation. Boxing was all there was.

  Devi nudged him. “Until what?”

  “Until life intervened,” Julian said. “Just to fuck with me and my small dreams. I suffered a traumatic head injury. I had to have a craniotomy, and then they put me into an induced coma. I was never the same after. I partially lost vision in my left eye. It affected my balance, my ability to see right hooks. Oh, I tried to keep at it. I retrained myself to fight southpaw, but it was no use. I kept getting creamed. I lost some fights—like all of them. I had to retire before I got permanently retired.”

  “Was the brain injury from a fight?”

  “No. It was from half a mountain falling on my head.” Julian really didn’t want to talk about it. To this day there was much about what happened he didn’t understand.

  Devi stared at him, a storm swirling in his usually emotionless eyes. “Ah, the looming talus cave,” was all Devi said and remained quiet for many minutes. “Well, it’s great that you used to fight. But so what? You can’t fight today.” His tone was considerably gentler than before.

  “I didn’t say I couldn’t fight,” Julian said. “Just not professionally. You said I’m going into the past, right? Why can’t I go into the past when I can still fight?”

  “Are you even pretending to listen to me?” Devi said. “You’re not going into your past. You’re going into hers. And you’re bringing your feeble body with you, with all its head wounds and blind spots and drug addictions.”

  Julian reached up to rub the long, ridged scar on his skull. “How will I know it’s her?” he asked. He sounded so sad. “How will I recognize her, what will her name be? Will she look the same, be the same?”

  “Relax, Julian, practice control over yourself like I just taught you. Inhale, clench, exhale, release. Even if you don’t know the name for a tiger, you still know it’s a tiger, don’t you?”

  “Not if it doesn’t have stripes.”

  “Nothing will change the tiger’s essential nature,” Devi said. “And nothing will change hers.”

  “What do I do when I find her?”

  “Do you really need my advice on what to do when it’s your turn in the fi
eld with the goddess?” Devi asked. “Do what you like. I’m giving you a shot, that’s all. And I’m promising you nothing. You may have another Fario Rima to deal with. She may be lying in a bed of thorns. She may be stained with blood.”

  “She’s already soaked in blood,” Julian said, falling silent, afraid to ask the real question.

  “I’m saying the return of your girl might not heal the very real loss of your girl,” Devi said. “You should be prepared for that. You should prepare yourself for a lot.”

  “But will she love me?” Julian whispered.

  Devi sighed, and then took mercy on him. “Does she love you in your dream?”

  Julian admitted it felt as if she did.

  “There you go. Often you can answer your own questions. You should try that more often.”

  It was time to go.

  “The girl is the gravitational irregularity around which your own timespace has formed,” Devi said. “She is the planetary mass through which you must travel if you are to live again.”

  They were both speaking quietly. All outward anguish had leeched out of Quatrang.

  Tomorrow was a new day.

  “God. I wish I had even another week,” Julian said.

  “You have it,” said Devi. “You have another year.”

  Julian rolled his eyes.

  Devi patted his shoulder. “A week isn’t a scientific measurement,” he said. “A week is the only time unit that doesn’t spring from astronomy. It comes to you straight from the Bible.”

  “That makes me feel better about not having another week,” said Julian.

  “I’m saying you don’t need a week. Don’t get hung up on time. Get hung up on action. We talked about this. Time is a secondary feature of our existence, not a primary one. Time is a mystery, like much else in our world. We measure it, but we don’t understand it. It’s an elusive thing, yet a concrete thing. You can’t see it, you can’t feel it, you can’t use your senses to explain it. It flies against reason. And yet you know it exists. Ten to fifteen billion years, the age of the universe. Five thousand years, the span of recorded human history. Two thousand years since a new dimension was introduced into the life of man. Forty-five minutes in a boxing match. Three minutes per round,” Devi said. “And one second, the average time between the beats of a human heart.”

  Not hers. “Do you know how fast a bullet travels?” Julian said. “Three thousand two hundred feet a second. And Fario Rima was thirty feet from her when he shot her.”

  Devi’s hand remained on Julian’s shoulder. “I don’t know how to vanquish death,” the shaman said. “If I knew, trust me, I wouldn’t be standing here, yakking to you. But I do know how to give you that leap second back.”

  The clocks chimed in midnight. Soon the tube would stop running.

  Julian clutched her red beret in his pocket.

  “Be not afraid,” Devi said. “Remember the boy called Wart.”

  Julian squinted. How did this mystifying man know so much? Wart, an average boy with average skills, pulled the sword from the stone and became King Arthur. “I’m no king,” Julian said. “I’m a beggar.” Which is why he was in Quatrang, which is why he was going to Greenwich. Because he had nothing to lose, or so he thought.

  “The portal won’t open unless your soul is aflame,” Devi said. “Do you have the power to pull out the sword? I don’t know. Your friend Ashton doesn’t know. Your dead lover doesn’t know. Even you yourself don’t know. It’s your future. By definition, it’s unknowable. But if you get to the Transit Circle in time and wait for the sun to cross the meridian and open up the infinities of your cynical heart, then you might get to see what you’re made of. We should all be so lucky as to discover who we are.”

  Julian stood at the door. Was he really not going to see this man again, this life again? Like matter contemplating its own extinction, it was impossible to accept.

  “The day of the cave is upon you,” Devi said. “This is your one chance. Make it count.”

  They shook hands.

  “Don’t let go of her things. You can’t get to her without them. And keep them on you, even if you think you don’t need them. And for the love of God, do not be Orpheus. Do not disobey the rules of the universe.”

  “I don’t know what those are.”

  “You’ll learn.” Devi unlocked the door. “When you were a kid, who did you think you’d grow up to be? Besides a boxer. A hero in your own story, right?”

  “Nah.” Julian buttoned his coat. It was blistering cold outside. And windy. “Back then I loved the movies. I wanted to grow up and work on a movie set.”

  “There is real magic out there, not just movie magic,” Devi said. “Godspeed, Julian. Go catch that tiger.”

  33

  Dumbshow

  THE NEXT MORNING, A WARY, ANXIOUS, AND SLEEP DEPRIVED Julian alighted in Greenwich, England. Before he left his room, he left a note for Ashton on his dresser. “Please forgive me,” it said. “I know you’ll be all right. I wish I weren’t leaving you behind.”

  He jumped off the train, and then was barely able to put a foot forward. He limped down the station stairs, through a short alley, and stumbled out onto a busy high street at morning rush hour. Uncertain which way to go, Julian picked a direction and started toward it. He didn’t know what he expected. He didn’t expect Greenwich to be such a large bustling town, but he didn’t want to stop and ask for directions. He wished to be invisible.

  Before he could become invisible, when he was just plain ridiculous in his black clothes like he was about to perpetrate a bank heist, someone asked him for directions! A man and his daughter stopped him on the street; with a heavy foreign accent the man said, “Excuse me—”

  Julian tried to walk on.

  “Excuse me,” the burly bloke repeated, blocking his path. “We’re trying to find the Observatory and the Prime Meridian—”

  Julian opened his hands. “I know nothing.”

  “Ah,” the father said, nodding vigorously as soon as he heard Julian’s American accent. “Of course. An American.”

  Before Julian could become offended, the man and his child vanished.

  Or did Julian vanish?

  Past a bookshop and a hotel, past everything with green awnings (not gold from his dream), up ahead on Nevada Street was a Rose and Crown pub, advertising the best fish and chips since the 1800s. Beyond it, Julian glimpsed some park-like greenery and lost his nerve. He decided to duck into the Rose and Crown, Devi’s warnings about food notwithstanding.

  Though High Street had been teeming, the Rose and Crown was quiet and empty except for the barman, and one patron who soon left. The barman greeted Julian with a peculiar hello. “How are you today?” the man said.

  That was odd. How was he today? It was as if the barkeep had spoken to Ashton about how to properly address the bereaved.

  When he approached Julian’s table, he said, “What will you be having?”

  “Do you have any plain chicken and rice?”

  “Of course. As always.”

  Julian ordered coffee and an ale. Both came at a temperature called room. He drank neither.

  He sat in the farthest corner, near the fireplace, with his back to the wall. Red heavy-cloth curtains lined the windows. Red leather benches, dark wood tables, a mahogany bar. “I Want to Marry you,” by Train pulsed through the overhead speakers. Someone wanted to marry another someone.

  The chicken was bland and unsalted. Julian chewed it without enthusiasm. He spent a while with the food as if he didn’t want to part with it, as if he didn’t want to walk toward the next inconceivable step of his life.

  He had told Devi the truth. He didn’t like caves. The feeling of suffocating under rocks was always with him.

  But an insistent voice in his head was telling him that all his dreams were but a kiss away.

  Was it true? It seemed so unlikely.

  All your dreams are a meridian away.

  One hundred and two meters to th
e east away.

  All your dreams are a moon away.

  Julian sat for over an hour, maybe longer, staring out the window. No one else came in. Finally, he paid in cash and left.

  Go find your blue chance, he said to himself as he walked out into the cold windy sunshine. Stand under it. Fall into it. Swing off your one blue chance.

  Let’s try it one more time.

  All your dreams, a Great Eastern Road away.

  A continent away.

  A sea away.

  A bullet on Normandie away.

  The River Styx away.

  All your dreams, a death away.

  All your dreams, away away away.

  I should’ve kissed you.

  ***

  In the Royal Observatory, in the Transit Room at noon, the light of the cloud-covered sun passed through the crosshairs of the circular golden dial, and a magnified ray of light struck the crystal in the trembling palm of Julian’s outstretched hand.

  Nothing happened.

  He waited for the phantasmagoria of color that had washed over him in the Santa Monica Mountains with her by his side to wash over him now.

  That didn’t happen.

  The stairs flanking the telescope stayed black-painted metal, the telescope remained as it was. The crowd of foreigners outside continued to gambol on the brass line bolted to the cobblestones. Sweeney, the impassive rotund guard, sat as he was, at the table behind Julian.

  But something was different. All sound had gone. Julian was in a dumbshow, a pantomime without words. He couldn’t even hear the whoosh of his inhale.

  A few feet away from him, by the base of the telescope, beyond the short iron gate, at the bottom of the black spiral staircase appeared a swirling electric blue hole, vivid like the borealis streaking across the sky.

  The adrenaline flood of Oh my God and the pressure-cooker of the clock paralyzed Julian. He couldn’t tell if a second had passed or thirty. Quickly he hopped over the railing, stepped down into the well and put one foot over the blue light. He couldn’t feel the floor under his foot. He didn’t wait another moment. His arms by his sides, he straightened out, made himself into a human projectile sliding down a water flume, took one tiny step, one enormous step, and leapt into the blue vortex.