The Tiger Catcher

by Paullina Simons

  A hundred times.

  And then a hundred more.

  He wanted the running and the counting to be committed to memory, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen—jump.

  He grew exhausted of running and from running. He curled up in the corner, closed his eyes, and slept, or only thought he closed his eyes, only thought he slept. Blackout. He couldn’t even feel himself blinking.

  How many chimes of the hour will you let pass before you stand up and take the wheel of your life?

  The time has come for you to act.

  Julian stood up, stood straight.

  One last time, he shined the Maglite across the floor of the cave, stared at the cold beam of light skirting the ground, ending in blackness, and resuming across the divide at the silver shimmering moongate. He put away the flashlight, felt for her necklace above his hammering heart, for her beret in his pocket, crossed himself. It was for her. For her. Why are you afraid, ye of so little faith. Help me, save me, carry me. He ran.

  1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15—

  Julian leapt into the black air.

  35

  White Lava

  WOULD HE KNOW IF HE WAS HURTLING THROUGH SPACE?

  Without sight or sound or light or time, or gravity, how would he know?

  He opened his eyes. Darkness. But solid ground underneath him. He wasn’t flying but lying on his side. There was a liquid pain in his calf. He must’ve landed on a sharp rock. He fumbled for the light. His hands were weak from fear, and it took him a few tries to click it on. He lay in front of the moongate, the edge of the black canyon barely behind him. If he shifted his body, he’d roll right into it.

  Crawling away and sitting up, Julian shined the light over the maw. Did he really make that otherworldly leap? He marveled at it briefly, his body too sick from an overload of adrenaline to feel genuine relief.

  He was across, that was the important thing. The hard part was over. Now to find the river. Pressing down on the wound on his calf, his fingers smudged with blood, he decided he was well enough to get going. He dusted himself off, wobbling on spindly legs like a fawn, and stepped through the moongate.

  Julian didn’t know what he expected. Marigolds and sunflowers, troubadours and minstrels? None of that happened.

  But past the quartz and limestone gateway, things were different. The hanging speleothems vanished, the ground became hard and smooth, the off-white walls of the passage circular and ropy. It also got colder. On the one hand, the bleeding cut in his leg coagulated. On the other hand—fucking cold.

  Zipping up his jacket, he limped on. The tunnel made a sharp right turn and then narrowed so much that Julian could no longer walk it. He had to get on his knees and crawl it. He almost smiled. Crawl on his knees like he was searching for Klonopin. Then, as now, with the same goal.

  The tube became moist, then wet, then had standing water in it. What he needed was a headlamp. Damn Devi. Julian was forced to hold the flashlight between his teeth to see ahead as he crawled through cold water.

  When the cylindrical walls around him widened, he felt a momentary relief, like maybe he could stand up soon, stretch his legs. He should’ve known by now that widening caves spelled nothing but trouble. The passage ended abruptly, high above another chamber of horrors.

  Two stories below him was a grotto of swirling water.

  In disbelief he put his head in his knees.

  Was the water below deep or shallow? Oh, what did it matter. If it was shallow he would die jumping in. If it was deep, he’d be swallowed up by the undercurrent. There was no shore, just cave walls and water. The walls were striated but free of mineral deposits, nothing for Julian to hold on to, to attempt a controlled descent. At the far end of the grotto, the water streamed into a black tunnel, as if the grotto was the headwaters of an underground river.

  Was this the river? The river of death, the river of life, of mystical rings, of black magic things, of sorrow, of fire, of heroes and thieves, was it the River Styx? Would he become invincible like Achilles? Or would he drown like a sinner? Would he ferry across to where she might be, waiting for him on the banks, his very own Persephone?

  Shivering, his shoulders hunched, Julian tugged on the leather rope around his neck to make sure the crystal was secure and zipped tight the pocket with the red beret. Was it too late to point out how much he hated detested loathed being wet in his clothes? Another fall, another letting go. He could stand still and die. Or he could dive to where she might be.

  Julian was rootless and stripped of his life. If he were a poem he’d be the blank space between the lines. If he wasn’t living inside her death, he’d be nowhere.

  And she’d be nowhere, too.

  He sat with his back against the wall a moment or two longer.

  He couldn’t remember if he ever told her how much he loved her. There was so much he never told her. They ran out of time.

  One more second, one more chime. He took a deep breath and let go.

  36

  Black River

  BETWEEN HIM AND HER WAS A COLD WIND WORLD. A COLD wind world made of whirling ice.

  Julian swirled round and round, through rocks and rings and crater moons, pieces of this world and another floating by as he bumped into hard things he couldn’t see.

  Starlings, cutwaters, flotsam, all hazard for the wherryman. What if he was the flotsam? A discarded marginalized thing tumbling without any hope of stopping, floating until the river propelled its debris to a jetty, where he would get stuck with the rest of the discards.

  The air was heavy like he was under water. Oh, that’s because he was under water. He was in a cold fog and shivering and then in a fire and burning up. He preferred to be part of the hot sky fever, it was better than the piercing crystals of frost. Some of it was bright red, but most of it was inky black, with air so heavy it felt solid, like glass or trees, the sound of his own labored breathing above the aqueous rush.

  When he hit the water, he was shocked by how cold it was, like a slice of a shiv. He knew what that felt like: he had angered a mislabeled bantamweight once by a knocking him out in the fifth, and the dude was waiting for him in the alley, swollen eyes and all, brandishing a knife instead of his gloved ineffectual fists. Let’s see who’s the champ now, champ, he said. Before Julian could counsel the boy against punching above his weight, he stabbed Julian in the upper left shoulder. The knife still lodged in his arm, Julian got to knock the kid out one more time.

  That’s what it felt like now, the stabbing, except all over his body.

  In the madness, the lanyard came loose, and Julian was thrown into blackness, the beam of light vanishing underwater. It probably wouldn’t have worked for long anyway. Like him, the Maglite was water resistant, not waterproof. How long had he been gasping for breath? Crashing into a cutwater, he grabbed onto one of the things stuck there, a ragged barge of corrugated wood, a log. Julian climbed on top of it. It wobbled but didn’t sink. Keeping his arms and legs as far away as he could from the cold water, Julian lay face down on the makeshift raft and let the river carry him away.

  It was unquiet. The noise of the cold wind, the shrieking in darkness of colliding metal things, churning through the heavy air, solid things in the void crashing into each other and dragging one another down river. He heard piercing shrieks in the distance but not a far enough distance, and the wind carried other things spinning past him, other animate desperate starving grieving things like him, all trying to get to somewhere else. It felt bottomless and vast and fast, like skydiving at night without light, seeing nothing, but fearing that his mortal body might crash against stronger atoms than him. The enormous terrifying things out there that he couldn’t see made him feel like grit in the eye of the universe. How could he drift like wood and not know where he was flowing? How could he go and not know where he was going? There could be a beheading where was he headed. That’s how the wind screamed, like a scorned lov
er witnessing the death of his loveless queen. Is this what he sounded like the day she died? The merciless shrieking, was that him? The bled-out memory was at his hooded lids, bright like day, white like noon, shrill like the guillotine. They had to pull him away, cover him with a blanket, turn him away from her, lay him down, administer alms to him.

  She wasn’t the only one who died.

  She died, but he was the one who could remember nothing. And without memory what was he but a smudge, barely alive. How he left the street, how he got home. Ashton and he flew east where her mother lived, where she was buried. Julian knew this only intellectually. He didn’t remember flying, not then and not even now when there was nothing in front of him or behind him except the things he had lived through, his immovable regret about losing her, about losing a life with her he had yet to live, squeezed in like boulders between his shoulder blades.

  Dreams of purple minivans, kids playing patty cake, Andromeda naked in his satin sheets, all gone, and then chaos. Julian was no one on a river of nothing on the way to nowhere, all because a Hmong shaman said, you want to see her again? Then this is what you must do. You have a second and a spit to leap. To run, to jump, to crawl, to shiver in rivers, you have much less time than you think. An eternity in icy suffering, a picosecond in bliss.

  London, the city of art, the city of poverty. The city of rain, of wealth, of poetry. London, the city of souls. A few hundred years ago, a woman was murdered by her boarder, a painter from Switzerland, a country not normally known to produce coldblooded butchers. The little man cut up her body, threw the guts into a swamp, and carried the rest of her in parcels, out and about on the London streets. The bloodshed and terror were downwind from Julian’s floating dinghy. After he died, the Swiss painter hid in hell from his landlady, and the shrieks Julian heard was her finding him and dragging him out. That’s what it sounded like. The murderous artist preferred to remain in hell rather than face the dead woman’s vengeance.

  37

  Dead Queen, Take One

  HE HEARS CHURCH BELLS RINGING, NEAR AND AFAR.

  Julian lifts his head off the sandy slope. He must have passed out after his log ran aground. It’s warm and murky and smells like a swamp. Light filters in from somewhere. Sitting up in the pebbly grit, he examines himself. His clothes are damp but not soaking wet. How long has he been out? He touches his calf. Oddly it doesn’t hurt. Has he had time to heal—or has the River Styx healed him? His body is not sore, nothing hurts, as if he had not just been inside a dank nightmare with bats and black holes and screaming souls.

  He looks for an exit to his small enclosure, following the diffused beam of sunlight filtering through the rocks. He hates how familiar it feels—the confined space, the lightseeker in a half-panicked daze. Climbing up a slope, Julian finally crawls out of the hole into fresh air in a small wood. For a few minutes he sits, getting his breath and his bearings.

  Past the trees and the brook, there’s green open land. Julian stops at the crossroads of two unpaved rural roads. In every direction, he sees rolling fields and gentle hills, sees low stone walls dividing properties and hedges between the knolls. He doesn’t recognize it, but he doesn’t not recognize it. It’s not familiar, but it’s not unfamiliar either. The fields and hills are colored with the greenest grass. The damp weather is certainly familiar, as is the mottled sky.

  The thing that’s uniquely different is the sound of the relentless bells. They’ve been ringing non-stop, from a sea of belfries.

  Julian doesn’t know where to go. What if he starts walking in the wrong direction? Crippled by indecision, but also relieved to be out of the darkness, Julian folds and unfolds her beret in his hands, kneads the red leather, inhales the leafy air, tries to figure out what to do next. Where is he? The river and the cave clearly took him somewhere. He is no longer at the Greenwich Observatory. Something has worked, but what? Julian wishes Devi were here to answer his questions. He presses the beret to his chest.

  Behind him he hears the steady clopping of horseshoes. He turns just in time to leap out of the way of a horse and wagon. The driver nearly runs him over.

  “Hey!”

  “Hey, yourself, move yer arse,” retorts the man behind the reins. “Don’t stand in the middle of the bloody road.”

  Definitely England. But where? And when . . . ?

  Warily, he and the driver eyeball each other. Julian doesn’t know what to say. The horse scares him. Horses kick people in the head. They throw people off their backs. They don’t come when called. The horse and an open wagon is odd. But the bearded driver is looking at him as if Julian is the one who is odd.

  “Where am I?” Julian says.

  “Every man must answer that question for himself, mate,” the driver says. “What you looking for?”

  How do you answer that question?

  “Are you seeking a position?” the driver asks impatiently.

  A position? “You mean work?” Julian finally says.

  The driver cracks the whip. “Farewell, fool.”

  “Wait!” Julian takes a careful step forward. “Yes,” he says. “I’m looking for a . . . position.” He pauses as he chews his lip. “I heard they were hiring . . . nearby.”

  “Yes, it’s easy to get lost ‘round here,” the man says. “Well, hop on, then. I know where they be hiring. Got a farthing to pay me with?”

  A farthing? Who talks like that? “No, sorry,” Julian says. “But if I get work, I’ll pay you. Do you live around here?”

  “Oh, just climb on! I ain’t got all day.”

  Julian scrambles into the open wagon with the dirty straw, and they’re off.

  He is pitched from side to side. Not all the hay is dry, and it stinks of rot. The horseshoes clop rhythmically, the church bells ring, and the dogs bark.

  “Why are the bells going off like that?” Julian asks.

  “Where you been?” the man says. “Them bells is ringing because the Queen is dead.”

  “Oh, no,” Julian says. “Queen Elizabeth is dead?”

  “That’s right, mate.” The man cracks the whip. The horse jolts forward.

  “What happened?”

  “She died, that’s all. She was old.”

  Peeking over the side of the rocking wagon Julian sees a street lined with tall narrow thatched-roof tenements that look like—odd that he would know this—whorehouses. They all have white walls, and he’s read somewhere that per London ordinance, all houses of bawd had to be painted white to be clearly marked in every neighborhood. It made them so much easier to find. They’re shuttered because it’s day—or maybe because the Queen is dead—but regardless, every tavern, ale house, and dicing house on a street marked Turnbull is white-limed. Does London have brothels in the present day? Julian hasn’t seen them, not that he’s been looking.

  They pass an obligatory church adjacent to the dissolute quarter, take a right, and make their way up another meandering street.

  The geographical windings of the streets are oddly recognizable, like a dream version of something Julian already knows.

  Now that they’ve left degenerate row, the houses become better kept and more sparse. Every half field sports a stone manor or a stately Tudor. A pub stands on a corner of a hilly dirt-road intersection. Julian squints, struggling to remember. It’s so familiar. At the moment, it’s called the Spotted Pig, but it sure is shaped like the narrow corner pub he’s walked past a hundred times at the bottom of Islington Green where Essex Road splits off from Upper Street.

  If he’s right, there will soon be a large monastery on the left-hand side. Right on cue, the imposing rectangular structure appears. It’s Clerkenwell! Julian is keenly disappointed in his location. He didn’t travel very far, did he? Mrs. Pallaver’s terraced building on Hermit Street is just south of where they are.

  But if this is Clerkenwell, it’s Clerkenwell as Julian’s never seen it. There are no streetlights or bistro pubs or beautifully appointed terraced homes with black doors, no green posh sq
uares, no universities. They hadn’t passed a Hermit Street because it doesn’t exist. None of the roads are paved, and next to his chugging wagon women walk wearing hooped skirts that scrape the ground and carrying pails of water that hang from the yokes on their shoulders. One pulls an obstinate pig. Another an obstinate child. It’s as if he’s landed in a museum village, laid out like Clerkenwell from the old days. Is it really the past? It’s hard to believe.

  “Excuse me,” Julian calls to the driver, “that church we passed a while back, was that . . . was that St. Mary’s?”

  “St. Mary’s? Are you daft? The nunnery hasn’t been called St. Mary’s since the Dissolution. That was St. James.”

  Julian stops speaking. He can’t remember what the Dissolution is. He tries again. “The street we were just on, was that St. John’s?” Because that would be unbearable. He lives off St. John’s Street.

  “It was.” The man stops the horse. “Off you go. This is where they’re looking to hire.”

  Reluctantly, Julian jumps down into the road. He’s in front of a long country lane at the end of which stands a solemn gray manor. “Who lives there?”

  “It’s Collins House.”

  Collins? As in . . . Josephine? The adrenaline rushes in. “What’s the date?”

  “I believe it’s a Monday.”

  “No . . . what year is it?”

  “Oh, God’s teeth! I regret ever letting ya get in me wagon. Lady Collins’ll hang me.” The man cracks his whip. “Anno Domini 1603,” he says, driving off.

  1603!

  But didn’t the man say Queen Elizabeth had just died?

  Oh my God—he meant Elizabeth I.

  A stunned Julian stands in the middle of the road, his mouth open. He puts his hand on his chest to quiet his heart, to feel for her beret in his jacket pocket.

  He’s in 1603!

  The church down the road is called St. James to this day. He walks past it when he takes the Thameslink train at Farringdon. Why did he call it St. Mary’s? And what does he know about Clerkenwell in 1603?