My Tiger

My tiger has the kind of eyes that follow you around the room. If you stare into them, you can see fantasies reflected dimly back—white teeth sinking through striated layers of quivering muscle, high pitched yelping, hot blood erupting skyward from torn arteries.

He’s crouched low, his haunches screwed down in the grass, ready to pounce. I can't help but feel sorry for his prey, until, of course, I realize his prey would only be me. It's me he’s looking at with those cold eyes. I'm the only one standing here, after all.

I'm almost always alone inside my apartment.

Luckily my tiger can't fulfill his destiny. He can't kill me because he isn't made of meat or fur or bone. He's made of paint. Fields in Africa are not made of paint and neither are tigers, but my tiger doesn't live in Africa. My tiger lives in Binghamton, New York, on the wall in my bedroom. I hung him there with my own two hands, I gave him a place to live and now he stares at me with those hungry eyes as though I were a zebra.

It used to be my grandfather's tiger. He had it painted for his second wife about thirty years ago. She was into tigers for a short time, then she got sick of it and the thing was put into storage.

When I moved into my apartment, I needed things to put on the walls. This is how the tiger came to be mine. My grandfather, a WWII Veteran, a successful businessman and owner of three homes—is dead. My father, the son of my grandfather's first marriage, Vietnam Veteran and successful lawyer—wants nothing to do with the tiger. I resurrected the tiger from storage, me, the twenty-something, the cryptographer—veteran of nothing.

Now my tiger and I are like business associates. I use him on the rare occasion that I bring a girl back from the bars. It's a two-way deal. He helps me get her in the bedroom, and I give him someone new to look at—some food for those hungry eyes of his. I guess you could call him a pervert, my tiger.

This is how it usually plays out: We're drunk, back from the bars, this stranger and I, sitting sloppily on the living room couch, watching something on the TV I wouldn't watch if I were alone.

My living room—a decompression chamber between the front door and the dark bedroom down the hall, a halfway point between strangers and whatever comes next. We attempt small talk, decompressing.

An old Saturday Night Live rerun is on Comedy Central—Adam Sandler sits at a desk, riding mindless waves of laughter. He's squealing and gesturing a lot. A famous millionaire, dear to the hearts of millions—this is someone who brings joy into people's lives. If I was sober, I'd be objecting to this, objecting to people who applaud Adam Sandler. But not now, now I'm content and drunk. I just smile and think about this girl sitting next to me. I feel the warmth radiating off her body.

I put my arm around her shoulder. I wonder what she's thinking. Above all I'm just glad she decided to be here with me. I look at her and hope that tomorrow I can remember the details of her face.

I love Adam Sandler, she says. He's just so…crazy. You know? Don't you think?

Crazy? I slip, lose my train of thought. Crazy? I smile at her.

Yeah, I say, trying to maintain equilibrium. He's insane.

It's then I realize there's really nothing for us to learn about each other tonight, this girl and I. Forget about who we are. It's all known already or doesn't matter. All stuff we'd learn with time. Come to terms with or not. Forget.

We just need to press together right now, just for right now. I need to hold onto her, to feel close to her. I'm desperate for the reassurance of her warm body against mine. This could be my only chance for who knows how long.

But it's too bright in this room. It cannot happen here. I need to say something to get us moving.

What's left to say after thousands of years of this? Thousands of years of people needing someone else for themselves. You have nice eyes? You're so pretty? There's nothing left to say.

I lay my hand on her leg. We kiss.

Even though I'm drunk I'm aware of what's to come. The next morning I'll feel her heart beating next to me, her pumping lungs. I'll smell her scent. I'll shrink from the reality of her in my bed. I'll retreat into myself and she'll leave. She'll just pick up her things and leave and that will be the end—an end without any real beginning.

How many endings like that does it take before the lights go out for good, before a person walls themselves off completely? How many times can a person be orphaned and abandoned before they simply stop feeling?

But at this moment, pressing against her on the couch, I can't change my need. My need has almost nothing to do with sex. My need has to do with pressing together, and hiding with her for just a little while. While I'm drunk I can look her in the eyes and maintain contact. That's what this is about, contact.

I tell her I have a tiger. It’s probably unlike any tiger she's even seen. Would she like to come look at it?

We stumble into the bedroom.

I show it to her.

Kitchen Sink

I come home from a long day at the office where tiers of depthless faces stare at me, gesture at me, talk at me. They imply things, demand things. They wear suits. I wear a suit. It's usually too tight around the neck. I become distracted while fidgeting with it. It presses ruthlessly against my Adam's apple.

I stare into my computer screen. I hide in the screen. My job is hiding in a computer screen. I'm extremely good at my job.

I write encryption. I work at a company called Defense-Link, a big sprawling mall of a building in the hills just outside Binghamton. Defense-Link handles many of the government's defense contracts.

My job is writing code, an encrypted language meant for only a few to understand. I hate being at work because of the other people there, but I love the actual work I do. It's the one thing I’m good at.

But lately I've felt like something else is happening too. The more code I write, the further I slip into the depths of this almost unintelligible means of communication, the further away I feel like I’m getting from everything else. It's a strange feeling. At first it bothered me, but now it's starting to feel normal. Sometimes when I come home to my apartment the only things that seem real are the possessions I've accumulated over the years, the actual things I can lay my two hands.

I do this sometimes. I lay my hands on the things in my apartment, like an old photo for instance, and wait for it to mean something.

Sometimes it takes a little while and I get nervous. If I were to lose my things would I forget who I was? Would I suffer some sort of permanent amnesia? And then my boss is there, Mr. Gaskill, hovering over me at my desk.

Excuse me, he says. May I ask what it is exactly that you’re doing?

Sometimes he’s an angry father, sometimes a worried mother. The question bounces back and forth like Pong in my scull.

Code, I say. I'm thinking about code.

These days go on and on, on and on. I come home from the office or the gym where again I was unable to approach the brunette I've been thinking about for the past two months. I observe her from afar as she uses elliptical machines, Nautilus machines—Gravitrons. I think about the things I'd like to say to her. I think about our children we'll never have, the gentle, assured way I'll never hold her hand.

In the end all I do is steal glances. My life is spent observing from afar. My life is spent impaling myself with fantasies that I'll never allow to come true. Sometimes I think it would be better if I could just keep my eyes closed, rub mortar into them maybe.

I come home from the office or the gym or the video store where I hold my breath as strangers walk past me. That's something I always do. You know that gush of air that comes about one second after someone walks past you? That disgusts me, that warm gush. I’m always holding my breath when people walk past me in public places. It's as if I were afraid I was going to somehow be infected with something. But when an attractive woman walks by I breath in deeply—I'll admit that. But they rarely walk by. They're rare here where I live.

Usually it's just a strange looking person, someone who looks like they'd do unspeakable, torturous things to me if they could, a stricken disease-carrier of some kind. I hold my breath.

I come home from the office or the gym or the video store and the dishes and glasses and silverware sit there in the kitchen sink. Stewing. Stinking. An exclamation point on my day.

TV

"The Real World" is my favorite show. Each season’s cast is like a new set of friends. Not that there’s anything wrong with my real friends. It's just that they’re gone. After college it seems like everyone leaves a town like Binghamton. My friends are scattered all over the country now, chasing the perfect job. Boom! I'm at the bottom of a very deep, very dark crater. "The Real World" is the light that helps me remember.

I click them on and off. Off and on. My TV's like a human fish-tank in my living room. Funny, they always seem to have nice fish-tanks in "The Real World" houses. A fish-tank in a fish-tank in a

Click. Click. Clickclickclick.

This week Arissa is having trust issues, but it’s all worked out by the end of the show. It ends in a big group hug. I retreat from this image, sit back in my chair.

The idea of a group hug is disgusting to me, completely obscene. I've always hated being forced to hug people. I worry where to put my hands, my face, how tight to pull in. It makes me feel fake and empty and I can't help wondering how the other person feels.

To me a hug just feels like lying. That's what a group hug is to me, a ridiculous and unnecessary lie. It's what I hate about Thanksgiving and Christmas. Having to open my arms and embrace relatives I haven't seen in so long, looking them in the eyes, barely knowing who they are, and lying to them before I even get a chance to speak a word.

Toilet

I’m looking at pictures of beautiful women in Vogue while I sit on the toilet.

I flip through and find Gisele posing in Roberto Cavalli.

This magazine is full of beautiful girls, I can't help but buy it. It smells expensive. Designer colognes and perfumes drift up to me. The smell reminds me of my mother when I was a little boy, the way she smelled when she and my father got dressed up to go out on a Saturday night. She’d bend down kiss me goodnight before leaving me with a sitter. She always smelled so good and I loved watching her go. I miss my mother.

Reading Vogue always makes me dream. It makes me want things. Things, things, things!

I want to make my father proud, I think about that as I sit here. I want to make my dead grandfather proud. This means I somehow have to be rich, but I will never be rich. On the toilet, shitting, Vogueing, I am a failure. I realize this as I study Gisele’s magnificent bone structure. She's superior to me. It's obvious.

I wipe and absently sniff the toilet paper. I repeat with each wipe. Inspecting? Why do this? Why? Does Gisele do this? I bet she does.

Is this a reassurance of something? If so what? A rewind, that's what it is. I can still smell the hints of the spinach I had two days ago. Spinach. I Wonder about the changes it's endured.

My body changes things. That's what it takes to sustain life. Life changes things—all of us.

Glossy photos of beautiful women, they give me hope. Doctored photos. Changed.

Life changes things the phrase looms like the stink in the air.

Doctored photos undo what life has done. Spinach makes shit darker than usual. Still smells a little like spinach. Identifiable. I can remember the meal I had. Rice, spinach and tuna. I was watching "The Real World" while I ate it. I remember the workout that night at the gym. The girl who was working the front desk. Susanne. The blue Old Navy sweatshirt she wore and her bored face, the blemish on it. I remember wondering why someone who works at a gym would allow themselves to be so overweight.

Spinach shit has this effect. It ties me back to myself, to what happened. It sits there, alone and submerged in the bowl. A reminder that life changes things, eats at them and digests. Time makes things mean something, things like the scent of a peel-out perfume add that tie you back to your Mother, things like photos of your dog that stick in some dark, submerged place—anchoring you, pulling you down after them into the stagnant water at the bottom.

I toss Vogue aside, flush.

Walls

Too white. Institutional white.

That's all I can think when I look at them. Institutional white walls. Insane asylum white. The color didn't seem so oppressive when I picked it out. But how can you tell at the paint store? You’ve got this big book of thumb-sized samples, some pushy paint salesman looking over your shoulder.

How was I supposed to know? It looked fine in that book of samples. Now it's all over the place. Big. Unfurled. Tusk-white walls. Vampire-tooth white.

The hallway in my apartment is too narrow. It squeezes at me. My apartment is a walled-off quarter in a house that was meant to be a home. I’m sure it was home to a happy family at some point in its history. Sometimes I can almost feel their ghosts slipping along these white walls.

The hallways were never meant to be this narrow, that wasn’t part of the original plan. But someone drew up new plans and put up new walls. The house has been quartered. Re-drawn and quartered.

I don’t even know what my neighbors look like. I walk by their mailboxes each day but I don’t even know their names. Are their walls bone-white like mine? Straight-jacketed-and-slamming-your-forehead-against-the-wall white. Bite-your-own-tongue-off white.

During these winter days the light ricochets around these rooms like a stray bullet. Bright as hell in here, bright as hell and cold.

Computer

If my TV’s a fish-tank then my computer’s a shark-tank. I can't help exploring the worst of it. It's something to shock me back to life after getting home from work. It's the first thing I do. It's just routine. Time to do it. Do it.

So many minutes spent staring. Waiting for downloads. Hours slip by unnoticed. I'm always searching, scanning for the ultimate scene. The ultimate fantasy compressed into a ten-second movie clip. I feel predatory, like an animal. My own eyes are cold and greedy as I scan the images.

Five minutes waiting here. There. Again. Searching.

Add it up. So many hours spent waiting for these images that I simultaneously hate and need.

The room is cold. White walls behind the computer. Nothing walls. Not even a crack to explore with the eyes. I'm staring at seamless white, seeing its nothingness.

Finally the women on the screen jump to life, delivering an electric shock to the groin. For at least a few moments I’m excited and distracted. And excitement is so rare, so precious. For a moment I'm just pulsing meat and reflexes—an animal.

The images all run into one gurgling river of skin and hair and foam—a river of human lust and misery that sinks through me and spurts up again, out of me. And then I'm sitting, stewing, stinking like the damn plates and silverware in my kitchen sink.

And afterward it's so different. The electricity drains from my body. I look at the frozen images of these women on the screen, I look at my own reflection there on the screen. Then I look at the white walls, I search for something blank and clean.

Telephone

People call and leave messages. I rarely answer my telephone.

They always need things, or want them. They keep calling to make requests or promises, to tell jokes or stories. They want to talk. To hear themselves. To have me hear.

Listening? Let's talk. About what? Things that happened. What did you do last night? How are things? How are you?

Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Will you come visit me in Albany? I miss you. Do you miss me? What did you do today?

Shut up! Just stop! Listen to you. Fucking me in the ear with your Blah, blah, blah, your Boo-hoo-hoo, your Ha Ha Ha. I cringe as your voice squirts out at my ear. Hear me?!

Mindlessly mouth-fucking the telephone. Fucking your phone like a pocket pussy. Trying to make me swallow. Why don’t you just buy a pocket pussy and get it over with?

I saw a middle-aged man buy one at a porn shop when I was in college. He carried it home in a plastic bag. A little rubber pussy with fake hair, plastic hair. Pocket sized. Skin tone. He bought lube to squirt into it. Sold separately. It was molded from a porn star. Jenna Jameson Pocket Pussy. Her autograph was on the box. Look at it. Buy her pussy.

Just like talking on the phone. Take it home. Hide it from your girlfriend, boyfriend, wife, father, mother, brother, sister, son, daughter. Sneak it out when they're not around. Fuck it. Don't worry, she'll catch your mess, (won't get pregnant either. Ha Ha Ha). Squeeze her out over the toilet when you're done, (the poor girl’s bulimic. Boo-hoo-hoo.)

Now hurry. Put her back in the Nike box with those dirty magazines and kick her under the bed before your daughter walks into the room!

Just like your daily regurgitations of nothingness over the telephone. Squirt squirt. Blah, blah, blah!

Dialing franticly, weaving your human web, trying to pull us all together into one great big group hug. A plastic, fabricated fuck-around. I pull away.

HAHAHA!

Plastic. A nothing. A store-bought void inducing bursts of human euphoria.

Look at them together. Let’s watch them fuck. A lovely couple. They fit perfectly. Ladies and gentlemen we are proud to present Mr. and Mrs. Thing. Theyve been married for five years and have never had a fight. The perfect loving couple. Notice the way they almost look alike. That happens with couples after enough time. Theyre truly remarkable ladies and gentlemen, a model for us all to emulate. Look at the beautiful love they make!

Shrupshrupshrupshrupshrup..ahhhhhh…shrupshrupshrup…ahahAAAHHH.

When hes done Mr. Thing drops his wife in the Nike box and kicks her under the bed. He tucks his shirt back in. Washes his hands. Makes a call to somebody out there, ends it with I love you.

I dont think that relationship is fair, Mrs. Thing locked away like that. Caged. Its a shame. If I had a pocket pussy I would treat it right. Give it a seat at the table. Cook for it. Chicken Marsalla. I would feed it.

Eat up dear. Don’t drool. How was your day? How are you? I missed you. Did you miss me? Are you sad? You look sad. Will you come visit me in Albany? How do you feel? Tell me how you feel. I want to know. I need to.

Bed

Lying there alone in the dark—these are my weakest moments. I'm absolutely alone. I've retreated as far as I can inside this dark place.

I'm a grown man, 26 years old. I leave the kitchen light on when I go to sleep at night. A nightlight. Fucking adorable. What am I afraid of?

My apartment is completely still around me. It feels dead.

I'm afraid I'll die here tonight when I close my eyes, just fade out into the emptiness that surrounds me. I feel sorry for myself, boo-hoo sad as I lay here alone.

I imagine Arissa from "The Real World" stepping out of the screen and laying here with me. She would hold onto me. I can almost feel the warmth of her hands. I promise myself I wouldn't shrink away from her, not from Arissa.

I hold my hand over my heart. Could it stop beating? Sometimes my arms and legs fall asleep. I can't move them. Bad circulation? Bad heart? Something could go wrong. People die like this everyday. Alone.

I think of my work. I think about the code I write and what it means. I am one of the only people who will ever make any sense of it, yet I can't make sense of the things that seem to bother almost no one else.

Eyes close and he starts to drool. Breath falls into a rhythm and he’s falling too, softy, silently…

In the dream the room is dark. It shimmers with dim purple light. In the center of the room there's a table. His laptop is on the table, open. Naked human images flicker across the screen.

The room around him is huge, almost limitless. There are people around the perimeter—faces from the past. Old friends and family, people who he hasn't hugged in years.

These faces aren't real to him now, but the computer is.

He drops his pants to the floor and inserts himself into an orifice in his computer screen.

It feels real. Wet and warm. He's thrusting into it.

The women inside the screen are moaning. They're encouraging him. He grips the top of the monitor to gain leverage.

It feels so real.

He knows he must look ridiculous to everyone else, but he doesn't care, he's past caring now.

Slowly, the faces retreat. They fade into dusty old portraits of themselves. The edges of these portraits curl as though fast-forwarded through time. They burst into flames.

He is frenzied—thrusting.

The women inside the screen make noises—grunts of pleasure or pain?

He doesn't know if he cares. The computer is smacking against his pelvis. He's looking off into the distance of the room. It's bright now, the portraits burning like torches on the walls.

The orifice in the screen is drying out. It doesn't feel right anymore. The women shriek liked trapped animals.

The light gets brighter and brighter, almost blinding him, until he realizes that the room isn't a room at all anymore. It's a field. The heat that was burning photos is now the sun. It looms huge overhead, the sun of a different continent. Long grass sways slowly in the breeze. He can feel the breeze on his face. He can smell the scent of animals.

Then he hears something—a deep, almost seismic sound—a growl. He looks down and there, moving through the grass is the tiger, his tiger. It moves silkily and steadily, staring up at him with those cold familiar eyes. He sees himself in their reflection, his mouth wide open. He's shaking like his dog shook, right before the end.

It leaps. There’s one quiet moment while the tiger is airborne, this moment seems to last far too long, and then the tiger is tearing his groin from his collapsing, writhing frame. Teeth sink to bone. The tiger twists its head and blood erupting skyward. The pelvic bone snaps with a sickening, hollow, pop. The tiger tears down with his jaws and across with his claws, almost cleanly separating crotch from torso.

There is no pain. He sees the tiger licking its red lips, tearing flesh from entrails and ligaments. He always knew, always knew it would come to this…

And then the field is fading out, the grass and the sun and the tiger—he’s falling away from all that, falling into the darkness. A big, dark wave is building. It breaks and washes over him, twirling him endlessly in its undertow.

There's a dim light out there somewhere. He can see it faintly. White light. He thinks of endless white walls and feels calm. He welcomes the whiteness. It feels like nothing and nothing is such a relief after all this.

He slowly opens his eyes.

He's awake, looking around his bedroom which is now bright with morning light. He hears the sounds of melting ice and snow sliding down off the rooftop. He feels the cold of the room and lays immobile for many minutes.

He does not move except for the blinking of his own damp eyelids. He's staring into the ceiling, the white ceiling.

Finally, he lifts himself from bed and makes his way down the hall to the shower.

Garbage Can

There’s a brown, plastic garbage can in the kitchen, standing snug against the white wall. I's got a green plastic garbage bag in it, the kind the city makes him buy.

He pulls the photos out of the mirror above his dresser. He brings them to the garbage can and drops them in.

There's cleaning up to do. He's going to stop thinking about all these things in his apartment, these things that wire him to the outside world, to his past.

He's come to a realization. Hell isn’t being contained inside his apartment. Hell is this code of human contact he can't understand, it's everything that's outside these white walls. Hell is a voice on the phone. It's a tiger on the wall, a tiger that's been handed down through the generations—an inanimate thing that wants to rip your flesh from your bones. Hell is living vicariously through the strangers on your television—the perfume scent from Vogue that reminds you of your mother. Hell is a naked woman on your computer screen. It's all the things inside his apartment that let the outside in.

He's done. There will be no more of it.

Windows

The weather changes outside. Snow. Ice. Wind. Tap-tap of rain. He can hear the weather through the windows. The blinds stay down so neighbors can't see in. The buildings are close together, it's a fishbowl if you don't keep the blinds closed.

If he left his blinds open you'd see him moving slowly around his apartment. You'd see him taking a painting of a tiger off his wall and putting it away. You’d see him organizing, arranging—throwing things out. You'd watch him running his hands along the walls.

But you don't see this. You can't.

On the other side he's there, observing the effects of the light through the blinds. It creeps in through the slats, glowing like ice—blue and white. At night the light retreats like water down a drain, the slats damned up black.

He walks to the window, fingers a slat and looks outside. The street is empty and gray. He slips his hand into the cool space between the blind and window to check the lock.