Tiger, Tiger

by Johanna Skibsrud

  The thought troubled him. Again, he thought of Rebecca. She’d be hurt, of course; realize that her entire life to date had been a lie, and she would blame them for it. As well as for whatever complex constellation of personal issues she was confronted with then. Whatever those issues were, or were going to be, it was absolutely clear to Fred that every single one of them would eventually be traced back either to the bloodless war he was currently waging with his wife, or to his mother’s madness. Rebecca was now blissfully unaware of both. How was she to know yet—or to care—where one story ended and the other began? Or what was true and what was false, and why it mattered?

  Fred knew all of this and he also knew that there was nothing, in the face of it, any one of them would—or could—do. Because amidst it all, she was there. Rebecca. Perfect, and unsuspecting. The one true thing among all those lies.

  Rebecca had just always made sense to Fred in a way that nothing else in his life ever had, and not only that, she made other things make sense, too—simply because she existed. So that if he ever regretted anything, or thought about changing his life, he was always brought up short because everything that had happened to him so far—all of the good things, as well as, or especially, the bad—had in some way, more or less directly, led to Rebecca. There was no way, therefore, to pick at the knot. No way of even wanting to pick at it, or to unravel anything.

  * * *

  —

  And yet despite this—despite “instinct,” intention, and every desire—things continued to unravel. Afterward, it would have been as impossible to isolate the exact moment in which things finally came undone as it would have been to determine the exact combination of circumstances that led to the fortuitous arrival of Rebecca into their lives, but years later Bea would insist that such a moment had existed. It was the moment Fred sent away for the DNA testing kit he’d seen advertised online.

  Bea had always been quietly tolerant of Fred’s interest in genetics—an interest (as he often joked) he’d inherited from his father. But after Rebecca arrived, and though it was another thing that was always left unspoken between them, she couldn’t help but see Fred’s continued attention to the subject as a personal affront.

  “You realize it’s a bunch of Mormons,” she said when Fred showed her the advertisement. “You’d be giving your DNA away to a bunch of Mormons, you know that.”

  Fred shrugged. “I’d consider it a bonus,” he said, “if, on top of everything else, there’s even a slight chance of a retroactive conversion.” He grinned at her. “Who knows? You might be looking at the future proprietor of an entire small planet!”

  Bea had been about to put the dinner on and was holding a can of organic chickpeas in one hand and a can opener in the other. Very deliberately, she put the chickpeas down on the counter, then turned toward Fred. She held the can opener between them like a knife.

  “How dare you,” she hissed.

  Fred’s grin vanished. He looked perplexed—but said nothing. They could hear strains of Rebecca’s favourite TV show drifting in from the next room.

  “How. Dare. You,” Bea said again, louder. Then she dropped the can opener and left the room. Shortly after, she apologized. She had no idea, she said, what had come over her. And it was not until much later—long after she and Rebecca had moved back to the city, Mavie had been transferred to an assisted living home, and Fred had fatally shot himself through the mouth—that she realized what had made her so unspeakably angry in that moment. She had understood something. For the first time—as Fred shrugged at her and grinned—she had realized it was not a joke, but instead perfectly true: Fred, if given the least opportunity, would leave behind not only her and Rebecca but the entire human race, for the mere whiff of a chance at his own far planet.

  Meanwhile, Fred ordered Thai food to replace the dinner that never got made and sent a vial of his saliva away in the mail. Six weeks after that, he received a pie graph indicating that his genetic makeup was 99.9% Western European with the remaining .1% coming from somewhere in the Middle East. He must have stared for a full minute at the big blue circle in the centre of the page with its single sliver of orange before he could make any sense of what he saw.

  The name Doyle, as Fred already knew well, came from the pre-tenth-century Gaelic Dhubhghall, or “dark stranger.” The just barely visible sliver of orange on his chart was, at the very least, confirmation that a certain dark stranger had at some point prior to the tenth century wandered west.

  Fred continued to stand there, looking at the pie graph and flipping through the five accompanying pages he’d been sent without entirely admitting to himself what he was looking for—or why he was surprised. Had he not spent his entire life—at least since the age of ten or eleven—doubting the origin and authenticity of his grandfather’s “feather hat”? Had he not informed everyone—shamelessly, in front of his mother—that she was prone, at the very least, to “exaggeration”?

  And yet, somehow, all this time (he realized it only now, as he leafed once more through six pages of printed material, no part of which offered him anything more than what he’d already glimpsed on the first page), he’d believed. If not exactly in the stories his mother told, then in the fact that they were based on something and so still were—in some fundamental, if unverifiable, and finally nearly irrelevant way—“true.”

  But—no. There was not a shred of truth to his mother’s stories, he realized now. He was the genetic by-product of a slew of Western Europeans and a single dark stranger. He tried to feel okay about that. He folded the printout and slipped it back into its envelope, then walked the length of the yard to Mavie’s unit at the back of the house. He raised his hand at the door—hesitated a moment. Knocked. The door was not closed, and in another moment, without waiting for a reply, he pushed it open and stepped inside. Mavie was sitting in her chair by the window, talking to the birds. They flocked to the yard because she regularly spilled birdseed and the remains of her own meals for them to peck at out there. Directly ahead of him sat Major Stokes, his wooden face stoic and inexpressive, betraying nothing.

  “Mom,” Fred said, staring hard at the Indian.

  Mavie looked up.

  Mavie was always delighted to see Fred, and this occasion was no different. “Fred!” she said as he entered—but then she saw the look on his face. “What is it, Fred?” she said. “Is anything wrong?”

  Fred was still staring hard at Major Stokes but his mother’s voice interrupted him and—strangely embarrassed for some reason—he dropped his gaze.

  “No,” he told his mother. “No, nothing.” He sat down stiffly in a chair across from Mavie, but felt distracted, annoyed. He wondered what Bea and Rebecca were doing back at the house; the thought of them caused him to half-start from his chair.

  “Fred,” Mavie said. “Are you sure you’re all right?”

  “Of course,” Fred said. But a few minutes later he excused himself and headed hurriedly across the short lawn.

  He plunged into the house as though it were on fire. “Bea?” he called. “Rebecca?” There was no answer and, since it was Wednesday and the cleaning lady had just come, there was no indication that the house was lived in at all.

  “Bea!” Fred called again. “Bea! Rebecca!” He headed toward the stairs and took them two at a time.

  At the landing, he paused. His face was hot by now, and streaming with tears—but he didn’t feel sad. He felt only the terrific force of his blood as it beat in his throat, the panic of sudden joy in his chest as Rebecca’s voice rang out in reply.

  AT EIGHT O’CLOCK, when Gil sat down to his desk with his first cup of coffee, the kids would still be out in the hall—pulling on their shoes and wrestling into their coats. Alice would be yelling reminders to them from the kitchen: not to forget their lunches, or be late, or stop anywhere on the way home. Then the kids and Alice would hustle out the door and the door would shut firmly. Gil would be left alone—plunged suddenly into near-perfect silence.

 
He had recently sent away for a computer program that allowed him to diagram his thought process onscreen, and he now had an elaborate map linking various prompts (FLASHBACK SEQUENCE, MISE EN ABYME), a series of quotations culled from a set of inspirational texts he kept within easy reach on his desk (Plato’s Sophist, H. Charlton Bastian’s Evolution and Origin of Life), and every half-thought or petty observation he imagined might become somehow relevant once things began to fall into place.

  It was a decent enough system, he told Alice over dinner one night, except that it was limited to two dimensions. His best thoughts never occurred to him singly, after all, but seemed to take place one on top of the other, as if all at once. When he was forced to isolate them, he explained—write them down—they always appeared as if they existed discretely, suggesting an order and a logical causality he could in no way attribute to the actual functioning of his own mind.

  In addition (Gil complained to Alice), he’d managed to fill up an entire screen in a single week and would now be obliged to scroll either up or down in order to see how his thoughts either connected to one another or failed to. Only a week in, he lamented, and he was right back to where he’d started, because observing certain, select connections in his thought process was pretty much what he’d always been capable of—with or without a computer program.

  * * *

  —

  At 10:45—after spending precisely two and half hours staring at, and attempting to retrace, his thoughts on the screen—he would get up and make himself a cheese sandwich. He would eat it hastily, rinsing his mouth out afterward over the sink. Then, after grabbing his pannier and bike helmet from their peg by the front door, he would head off to the local community college where he’d taught introductory science and biology to freshmen for the last six years. Incoming nursing students mainly. To whom his classes were a practical necessity; to whom his passionate explications of membrane transport were just a way of getting into BIO309. They were certainly not moved to tears—as he sometimes was—by his re-enactments of cellular respiration, photosynthesis, alleles, polarities, and simple mutations.

  There would, very occasionally, be a student within whom he detected a glimmer of light. Someone who exhibited more than the common classroom desire to appear “engaged”—to whom the subject matter at hand actually felt real. But these occasions were rare, and becoming rarer.

  “It’s extraordinary,” he told his colleague Beth-Ann one day when their paths crossed, as they often did on Tuesday afternoons—when Beth-Ann was making her way from LB477 to LB323 and he was making his way from ML540 to LB475—“that here I am elucidating the very mysteries that allow them to exist at all, and they look right past me, this glassy look on their face, just hoping I’ll give them an A.”

  But it was really no wonder it was so difficult for his students to focus on the mystery of life. They were too busy making eyes at the ceiling, flirting with the exposed rafters or with the slats between the broken blinds. They were too busy conducting electrical currents between themselves and everything else in the room: the pencils they twirled, the light that slanted in from the semi-opened blinds—even (though he barely noticed, and never would have acknowledged it) with Gil himself.

  This was a limitation rather than an indication of any moral superiority on Gil’s part. He was hardly aware of himself in front of women his own age these days, and it certainly didn’t register with him that his broad-shouldered, slightly haggard look (chin beginning to sag, hair thinning) was not in itself unattractive. And that there was even something about him (a palpable disinterest in the fact of his own physical existence, perhaps—even as he instructed them on haploids and mitosis) that was, to nearly everyone who met him, at the very least, interesting.

  In any case, it had been three weeks since Gil had announced to Alice, over dinner, that he was writing a novel.

  Not really “announced”—that was too grand. “Suggested” was really more like it. Even though just hours before, the idea had more than “announced” itself to him; it had shot through him like a bolt of lightning. He would not merely “write” a novel, he’d thought as he rode his bike home after work one day in the pouring rain. He would discover it. He was a scientist, after all—not an artist. But science, Gil thought—as he merged from the campus bike path onto the main route—had for some time now been headed in the wrong direction. No, the secret of life was not—it occurred to him suddenly—in breaking things down into their component parts, but in seeing, instead, the way that everything existed together, in constant tension and relation, and yet at the same time analogously: the particular, for example, standing in for the whole, the whole for the part, and so on. It lay in seeing the way that everything repeated itself, existed in endless recombination, and yet at the same time was always unfamiliar, unknown, perpetually new.

  Without realizing it, he put on his brakes—causing the rubber tire of his bike wheel to swerve and skid on the wet road. A car behind him swerved, too, blaring its horn—the driver glowering at him through a rain-streaked window.

  It was as if Gil had confused his idea, as it had first occurred to him, with an actual physical direction he could move in. But the road continued to extend itself in only two directions. And the rain, too: it continued to pour down on him. Drenching him through a raincoat that had long ago outlived its waterproofing. Revelation or no, there was nowhere for Gil to go that he wasn’t already going. And nothing for him to do except to stand there, sputtering; to blow rain off his top lip, taste snot, and shake his head in wonder and amazement at the way that everything had suddenly both fallen into place and stayed stubbornly the same.

  By the time he got home and put the supper on, and a half-hour later or so Alice arrived, his enthusiasm for the idea had waned. Standing there in the rain, it had all seemed so natural, inevitable—his role in the whole thing effortlessly clear—but when he announced his intention to Alice over dinner—“I’m thinking about writing a novel”—it sounded more like a question than a firm resolve.

  Alice had raised an eyebrow. If it wasn’t for that, Gil would have assumed she hadn’t heard. It was not at all uncommon between them these days that one or the other of them would just fail to hear.

  Alice said, “Josephine, put the book down.” (Gil realized only now that his daughter had been reading a book under the table.)

  Josephine looked up suddenly, feigning shock. “What? Why? What’s going on?”

  “Your father’s having a mid-life crisis,” Alice said.

  Josephine nodded and went back to her book.

  “Is that what it’s called?” Gil asked. He helped himself to more salad, scraping the wooden tongs along the bottom of the bowl. “Is that what this is?”

  Alice rolled her eyes. But then she got up and ruffled his hair and kissed him on the top of his head. Their affections were like this now. Somewhere along the way, the line between how they behaved toward their children and one another had blurred. But to tell the truth, he didn’t really mind. It was nice to have his hair ruffled, to be kissed on the top of his head. Who in their right mind would complain about that?

  He knew that Alice was patronizing him, of course—but that was part of the pleasure. For both of them. Even when they were young, just starting out, it had been obvious that detecting some sort of weakness in Gil had caused Alice a small but noticeable surge of pleasure. She loved being able to give him that look—that single raised eyebrow. A look that confirmed for both of them that, whatever it was now, she had certainly seen coming.

  Gil caught himself. He was being ungenerous, and quite honestly had no idea if any of the thoughts that had just occurred to him about himself and Alice were even true. He tried to scratch them from his mind—to actually delete them. There must be another explanation for her shift in mood. Like: why not, for example, that she loved him? That he still, after all these years, managed to please, and amuse, her? That she felt, if not passion for him, a genuine tenderness? Just as he did for her, most of t
he time.

  Alice had been his first—his only.

  POW! It had happened like that. Like the comic books he used to read. A simple splash of colour across the page. No—there had been no “before” to Alice. There had just been one frame, and then the next. It had been that clear, that out of his control. There had been just: Yes. And then again yes. The surety of physical action and reaction. So that if it was true what Mr. Einstein said—that gravitation cannot be held responsible for people falling in love—another system, more powerful than gravity, had been in charge. There was no other way of explaining the way that he had felt then—at twenty-three years old, on the last summer vacation he ever spent at home, when he first met Alice.

  Everything before that time, he realized much later, not just his own measly existence but the whole world and everything in it, had, before Alice, been mere organic compound: inert, and lifeless, without either obvious meaning or form. Yes, it was only in the moment that (after dinner at the only restaurant in town that stayed open past eight o’clock) Alice had paused in the street, reached out, and taken Gil’s hand that life had truly begun. This, he remembered thinking a moment later, as he leaned in and his lips touched hers, is the beginning; this is the first true thing.

  But then four years later Josephine was born and life had begun all over again. He’d watched the crown of Josephine’s head appear, and then—somewhere in the midst of the nurse’s chatter and Alice’s groans—he’d heard a new voice emerge, and had felt…

  But it was impossible to describe because it was a feeling he’d never felt before, or since.

  Except when, three years later, Felix was born, and life began, for the third time, all over again.

  * * *