Tiger, Tiger

by Johanna Skibsrud

  —

  On the first day of his fourth week of writing, Gil drank four cups of coffee and gazed for two uninterrupted hours at his own thought process on the screen. Toward the end of the second hour, it occurred to him that the tremendous frustration he was feeling—as he strained against a limit he could not actually conceive—must have been precisely the frustration felt by primitive organisms, just before something shifted inside of them and they became the first forms of life.

  Maybe this, he considered (as he created a new thought bubble on his screen and hurriedly typed the idea inside), was why human beings are still stuck in a veritable dark age of both empathy and reason, and have not been able to make any real advances for at least four thousand years. (PREHISTORY, Gil wrote underneath his previous thought.) They didn’t know they had not yet evolved, and were still dependent on—and for the most part content within—the limits and stubborn inadequacies of their own pre-evolutionary forms. If he could just somehow manage to access again what he had, very briefly, riding home on his bike one exceedingly wet but otherwise ordinary afternoon…And then find some way to express whatever it was that he had discovered then: the way that (what was it?) everything happened tangentially and all at once…

  (SIMULTANEITY, Gil wrote, then immediately deleted it.)

  No, that wasn’t it. That wasn’t the word!

  Gil’s mind began to reel, his eyes burned. He opened a new file and, for the forty-five minutes remaining to him, stared nearly thoughtlessly at a blank screen, which—it is not an exaggeration to say—quite literally glared at him.

  * * *

  —

  Inevitably, after a writing session such as this one, Gil would be distracted; would find himself inserting long digressions on the creative process in a classroom discussion of basic metabolic functions, for example, or reflecting whimsically on the role of metaphor in the middle of his introductory lecture, “The Evolution of Life.”

  On this particular afternoon—after having acknowledged, for the first time, that he had absolutely no idea how to proceed with his novel, or why he had even begun—he found himself inexplicably inspired to suggest to his students that, when you got right down to it, abiogenesis was “just another word for love.”

  The air conditioner hummed. A few chairs squeaked. The more attractive students examined their wrists in the sunlight that streamed in through the broken blinds.

  “Ab-i-o-genesis,” Gil said again, hunting for a marker on the whiteboard ledge. “The process by which life arises from non-living matter, such as simple organic compounds. Is that not,” he asked—giving up on the marker and turning back to the class—“also the definition of love?”

  He had to watch it with this sort of thing, he knew that; and his teacher feedback forms agreed. His students all said things like, “I think I’d learn more if we could stick to the point,” or “Much of the material covered was not actually on the exam.” At the suggestion of his teaching mentor he had attempted to (her words) tone it down a little in the classroom—an effort that depressed him, and bored his students, but that had indeed led to better, or at least more consistent, evaluations, which (his tenure still pending) was what he needed right now.

  At last, Gil found a marker, clicked off the top, and attempted to write the word on the board. The marker was dull, however, its tip frayed and nearly inkless, so he clicked the lid back in place and stepped over to the desk to hunt for another pen there. “Yes, if you are ever at a loss for the technical word…” Gil said as he shuffled around in the top drawer, “just remember…” A green marker came into view and he seized it, scrawled “Abiogenesis” in slanted green letters across the board.

  “Yes, love!” he exclaimed as he turned to meet his students’ alternately quizzical, amused, or disapproving stares. “It’s not just a song from Carnival!, you know! It really does make the world go round.”

  He didn’t exactly sing these last words, but the way he spoke them while bobbing his head slightly, implied—even to those students who had never heard of Carnival!—that they were intended to be sung.

  Very shortly after that the minute hand collided with the hour hand at the top of the clock, and the students bolted from their seats. Gil found himself—still wielding the green whiteboard marker—facing an empty classroom, and feeling enormously depressed.

  Well, it wasn’t his fault, he thought, if life itself wasn’t interesting. If even “love” could not be relied upon these days to catch a teenager’s attention…

  At one time, Gil thought—becoming angry—knowledge was something you had to actually seek out; something you had to work for, grasp after, struggle to uncover, and understand. At one time, “information” had not been enough, and there had been a sense, within the arts as well as the sciences, of things actually mattering.

  For a few puzzling moments Gil felt so terrifically angry he wished a student would come wandering back into the room, as they sometimes did—having forgotten to ask for a grade revision, a letter of reference, or about an upcoming exam. He would have liked to really have it out. Wanted badly to confess; to complain; to argue a little—even come to blows. All quite ridiculous, of course, and (after the moment had passed, Gil excused himself) more like a nervous impulse than a proper desire.

  Imagine. He—Gil—who had been the correct combination of likeable, mild, and willing to compromise all his life so that he had never gotten into a serious conflict with anyone. Not even with Alice. Even when things had been rough—as they certainly had been sometimes.

  As they were right now.

  Yes, Gil admitted. That is exactly what you would call it. What he and Alice were going through. A “rough patch.” And yet—he had nothing to show for it. No bruises, not even really of the spirit. Just the inevitable steady wear, impossible to insure against. Yes, they were both worn out, that was obvious. But there wasn’t, and never had been, any real break—and it was entirely possible that nothing was even wrong at all. That Alice, who had never been anything but supportive—a model mother, a perfect wife—had nothing to do with it. That Gil himself was the rough patch; that he had only himself to blame. And that the sudden disgust he had felt a moment ago for an entire generation had been merely a sad, middle-aged attempt at excusing himself and his own inadequacies—as a teacher, a father, a husband, a would-be novelist, and a human being. Bemoaning the systemic apathies of Late Capitalism and the demise of knowledge was, after all, a whole lot easier than amending his approach to parenting, partnership, or classroom teaching. Perhaps, Gil thought, “the yawning void” (his current favourite nickname for the Westmoreland College student body he faced every day) had become more literal than he’d supposed, and he was—as Alice had rather tolerantly put it the other day over breakfast—beginning to crack up a bit.

  Gil moved to the window and twisted the curtain rod so that the slats on the blinds closed with a snap. He picked up his pannier and his helmet and glanced quickly about to make sure he hadn’t forgotten anything. He stepped out into the hall and closed the door firmly behind him. What happened next is difficult to describe, because it happened for only a few brief moments and—the result of a minor hallucination—only in Gil’s mind.

  Upon exiting the classroom Gil turned left, as usual, toward the set of double doors that opened onto the quad, but instead of the (at a rough guess) no more than fifty feet between himself and the doors, the hall stretched out nearly endlessly. The double doors—which he could just barely make out in the distance—appeared, rather than to mark any end, to suggest the beginning of still vaster and less traversable distances.

  Gil’s heart began to pound, then to flutter irregularly.

  Was he having a heart attack?

  He had heard that people who had them tended to complain, not of pain, exactly, but of feeling disoriented, not quite themselves…

  Gil was certainly feeling both of these things now. Even the question “Was he having a heart attack?” seemed to have very little to do wi
th his own life. It was as though he was reading the question aloud from the pages of Plant and Animal Physiology—the standard textbook he assigned to his introductory classes. As though it came complete with various sub-questions and categories for discussion, all of which then began to occur to him sequentially, and in the following order: A) Was it possible to die like this, in the middle of the hall, and for no apparent reason other than being unable to see a more or less literal “way out”? B) If it was possible, and Gil really was about to die, had his final words really been an unsung phrase from Carnival!—the actual tune of which he had never properly known? C) If he was not about to die, as now (his heart beginning to pound more regularly) seemed more probable, was thinking he was going to die—and this experience, whatever it was—standing in for death in a way that, if he could find a way to pay attention, he might parse? What did it mean on a personal level—in other words, Gil wondered—to walk into a hall one day and see only infinite space stretching around you, on every side?

  It meant (he understood suddenly) that he had become a known quantity—a finite figure in the tremendous, unthinkable, and ultimately unbalanced equation that was his own life.

  Where, that is, as a child he had extended indefinitely, all the way out to the farthest elliptical edge of the universe, and even as a young man had never been able to clearly distinguish between himself and everything that existed beyond, he had, in middle age, begun to exist simply as himself. A simple line segment, a ray—extending between two known, or at least easily foreseeable, points.

  Gil shook his head to clear it. The hallway tilted and then righted itself. He looked left toward the double doors. Then right. Then left again. As though there really was more than one way to go.

  When there wasn’t. Only the doors to his left led outside to the quad, where he had locked his bike to a post earlier that day. He had no other choice but to move in that direction. To open the door, retrieve the bike, and make his way across the quad. He had no other choice but to hang a left at the end of the street and head across the park toward home.

  It was a short ride—fifteen minutes at most. The kids would be home already, having let themselves in. Alice would be on her way. He could almost guarantee that any moment his pocket would buzz and it would be a text from her saying she was stuck in traffic and would he put the dinner on? That pretty soon he would be standing in the kitchen gazing into the white light of the refrigerator wondering what he might possibly retrieve from its depths.

  He’d yell “Stir-fry or fish?” to the kids, who would, by then, be lounging on the couch in the other room, waiting impatiently for their hour of screen time. It was possible that one or both of them might look up and frown at whatever he said. And it was possible that, as they did so, it would occur to him how strange and unfamiliar his children were to him these days. It would almost break Gil’s heart to realize, in that moment, that his children—his perfect children, who had been delivered into the world as all children are, by a miracle—were beginning to enter the semi-dormant stage of adolescence. That he was going to have to take it on simple faith for a little while that it would all begin again, somehow…

  One simply had to choose, Gil told himself, as he began—at first unsteadily—down the hall. That was all there was to it. How could you write a novel if you couldn’t, in the first place, simply choose a story—then write it down?

  So what, he thought as he stepped under the red glow of the Exit sign, if in writing it, it became “just another story”? If he did not, in the end, discover a new form of life, but just another way of describing the one that he had?

  That (he instructed himself as he pushed open a heavy door and was hit by a sudden draft of late-September air) was all that he was capable of, and therefore (he realized as he unlocked his bicycle, attached his pannier to the rack, and fastened his helmet under his chin) was all that he wanted. To have his story—whatever it was, or was going to be—be just another story among all possible stories.

  Pedalling home, he repeated this resolution to himself several times, until the phrase began to run through his mind almost mechanically. Until the words, and their rhythms, became like the movements of his muscles as he pedalled downhill. Or (because he didn’t need to exert himself very much at all in the last five to ten minutes of the ride) of the pedals themselves. Until he didn’t have to think of them at all, and instead they, like his body, were propelled only by gravity, by a simple inertia, and—his mind utterly blank—he was filled only with the supreme desire that he would not die. That death was not, after all, and as it so far appeared, inevitable.

  For the first time since he was a child, Gil prayed.

  He knew it was preposterous. That to ask for, to expect, the universe to answer to his own, very particular, needs and desires was unreasonable at best—but that is what he did. He pedalled slowly, mechanically, without resistance, downhill, and he prayed for the preservation and safekeeping of himself and of his wife, Alice, whom he had once loved so much that the entire world had, it would be only a small exaggeration to say, shifted, and for his children; and then—to ease his conscience, and because, very briefly, he did not understand the difference—for all living creatures on earth.

  THE ARCHIVE WAS INDEFENSIBLE and security breaches were at an all-time high when a girl (six years old, and in every other respect quite ordinary—living with her extended family somewhere in the banlieues) was discovered with what could only be described as a virtually limitless power of recall. With two hundred thousand years of accumulated knowledge at stake, there seemed no better solution than to rely, once again, upon the faculties of the human mind.

  Of course, they had to admit from the outset the idea was flawed. That it was, at best, a “temporary measure.” But it was generally agreed—even by those scientists, historians, administrators, and policy makers who (all bent on arriving, respectively, at a more sustainable solution) did not generally agree upon anything—that if properly educated, this remarkable young girl might buy them all a little valuable time.

  A rigorous and fully funded education program was quickly provided by the state, employing a team of researchers from every imaginable field. The Masters, as the team of thirty-seven came to be known, instructed the girl in every stage of the development of human thought, covering every topic, every method, every (often conflicting) angle and approach to science, art, technology, trade, and history itself over the past two hundred thousand years. The girl’s appetite for knowledge proved so voracious that by the time she was nine years old her “memory” extended back to the beginnings of human life on earth. By eleven, she could remember rising from the mud; by twelve—with a reflexive shudder—the moment the first unicellular structure divided into two; by fourteen (and in not only accurate but moving detail) she could describe the conflicting pressures of gravity and time that caused the earth to strain and shift, that set the continents adrift and gave birth to mountain ranges, ocean beds, polar ice, and magnetic fields.

  The fact that the girl was—aside from her extraordinary memory—really quite ordinary was not at first considered a disadvantage. She’d been removed from her extended family shortly after her genius was discovered—her only influences the thirty-seven Masters since the age of six—but she continued to demonstrate the usual range of human emotion, both delighting and confounding her Masters with bursts of frank affection, unreasonable anger, and unexplained joy.

  The program had been named Whirlwind III, after the first real-time computer system to benefit from the invention of core memory, but not only (the Masters boasted) did the girl already possess more core memory than any computer operating system that had been designed, she was also adaptable, fiercely loyal, and unusually empathetic—three things that had so far eluded every other system of record-keeping, including the most advanced forms of AI.

  As the girl grew older, however, her passions became less predictable, as well as less easy to temper. During an especially volatile moment at age fourt
een, she even threatened to end her own life. (“What do I care?” she’d shrieked at the Masters. “They’re your memories—not mine!”) The Masters did what they could to hush up the incident, but, inevitably, word got out—and the backlash was fierce. Until this point, the program had received wide and popular support; millions had happily followed the education and development of the bright-eyed, red-cheeked “Rememberer” in the tabloids and the weekly news. But now nearly everyone began to complain. It was obvious, many early critics of the program warned, that the burden of two hundred thousand years of accumulated knowledge was too much for any human being. It was inhumane—another especially vocal group argued—to invest the full range of human experience in a single child precisely because it prevented her from actually participating in the full range of human experience. No wonder the girl was increasingly troubled by insomnia, and alternated between fits of rage and despair! No wonder she had threatened to end her own life—and with it every possibility of establishing a more permanent record! No wonder that, shortly after, at the age of sixteen, she began to suffer inexplicable flashes of “darkness”! (Petit mal seizures, the neurologists called them, but upon further examination, no physical or biochemical cause could be found for the episodes, and it was concluded that nothing was wrong.)

  The Masters fought among themselves, each one blaming another for the girl’s emotional volatility and her “absences,” which (despite the doctors’ diagnosis) continued with increasing frequency. Each time they occurred—without explanation or warning—the girl would be unable to speak, and for several terrifying seconds her face would go blank. Each time, two hundred thousand years of accumulated knowledge would flash horribly before the Masters’ eyes.

  And it was no wonder. Ten years had passed since the program began, but still those (scientists, historians, administrators, and policy makers alike) dedicated to arriving at a more permanent solution were no closer to finding one. The girl remained their only hope…and yet the situation was hopeless. The public still spoke out from time to time, but as they began to lose interest, it was the girl herself who became the program’s toughest critic, describing its limitations as insurmountable and systemic—uniquely tied to the limits and vagaries not only of her education but also of her own mind.