Between the Eyes

I get fired by text when I am almost sober again.  The animals that were, in my intoxicated gaze, leaning from the shapes on the ceiling begin to solidify into their everyday plaster swirls, the crack in the seam at the top of the wall no longer an opening to a miniature cartoon world.

I see the remnants of the tiger’s face by the light fixture.  Just the nose.  Only hours ago his mouth was open, tail twitching with impatience.  I am drawn to tigers.  The striking, undeniable beauty, the poise and danger.  I often retell something I read, about the last tiger in Singapore.  Having absconded from a circus in 1902, he swam in the ocean, before sneaking into Raffles Hotel where he was found asleep under the pool table.  Mostly people say they feel bad for the tiger, as he ended up shot between the eyes.  I don’t feel that way at all.  He escaped being beaten and paraded for dumb children and dumber parents, he swam in the moonlit vastness of the purple Pacific and then chose the most famous hotel in the east for his final sleep.  He elbowed his way into history.  That tiger is strength and grace and spirit and agency.

My uncle said he wished my mother had died in the fire.  I think about that a lot.  I wish I’d asked him, “Do you mean because that’s what she intended, or because she was half dead afterwards anyway, or because then she wouldn’t have to know I left?”

I lie on top of my duvet, pulling it around me.  I love The Day After.  I love the slant feeling, where having missed a night’s sleep intersects with the residual chemicals in my veins and I have the glorious warm nothingness in my body and brain.  Most of all, I have license to remain in the void between day and night.  The Day After is the best.  The opposite of Christmas, where the thrill of the anticipation threatens to topple the actual day’s ability to deliver.

My phone vibrates.  A text from my boyfriend.

-Dinner tonight? Meet at the store?  Where were you yesterday?

-Not at work today.

The phone rings.

“I quit.”

“Awesome,” he whispers, so as not to disturb his Very Important Architect Colleagues.  “You’re taking Rob up on the job offer?”

“Nope.”  I can’t see the tiger.

“Why quit your shitty job if you aren’t taking the decent one?”

I shrug but I don’t answer.

“I don’t get it,” he continues.   “You wanted to move in.”

“The decent job is a pre-requisite to moving in?”

“You need to fucking grow up.”

“Split infinitive.”

“For fuck’s sake.”  I hear a file or book slam.  “It’s fucking scary, how much you’ve changed.”

“It’s fucking scary you think that’s an insult.”

I hang up.

I often appropriate stories, just harmless stuff.  Like my friend Mandy’s mom who grew up next to an asylum for the criminally insane.  Every Monday there was a siren that bellowed out through the village as a test.  Sometimes an inmate would escape, and the air would be full of the siren and fear and excitement.  Children would be pulled behind doors, bolted shut.  Police would search cars and sheds and churches.  I felt that story, so I sometimes tell it as if it were my own mom’s.  I don’t worry I’ll be found out; no one really remembers things people say.  I don’t tell mom’s real story.  I don’t tell that she tucked brandy behind the plastic bags under the sink or that she forgot that kids should go to the dentist.  I don’t tell that we hid from landlords and I lived in sixteen apartments and trailers.  I don’t tell that when she lit the last trailer on fire she meant to kill herself, and that she used to say that the singer got it right, that it’s better to burn out than fade away.  I don’t say that she could never remember if it was Neil Young or Neil Diamond.  I don’t say that when I heard that song in a bar outside Houston, I threw up down my legs, vomit splattering the brown loafers of the man next to me.

Another text.

-We need to decide what we’re doing. I’ll come over tonight.

I only saw her once after the fire.  She was in a psychiatric ward.  At the nurses’ station, a patient with short red hair and messy pearlescent lipstick screamed, “It’s Elvis!  In the flesh, it’s Elvis!” and two nurses held her back from me.  They smiled and said not to mind her.  I thought that must be nice, to be locked in a different realm, but cared for all the same.  My mother was in a room on her own, sitting by a large window overlooking the parking lot.  I didn’t stay long.  I don’t know if it was the medication or the illness, but she was a shell, rotted out from inside, sinking into herself.  I don’t tell that story.  I don’t tell how I realized it isn’t grief or anger that keeps me from finding her brother in Portland.  It’s a rough-edged calcification from not going to see her again.  I don’t tell that she died alone within a month of her release.  I don’t tell that I know I need to work that all loose somehow.

-Not tonight.

-What the hell is wrong with you?  You think I’m hanging around until you get your act together? 

Scrunching my eyes, I can just make out the tiger’s muzzle.  I look through to the living room.  The broken blinds let light fall in strange lines and angles on the oversized sofa, the scuffed parquet flooring littered with sushi trays, the remote control, the myriad brightly colored ads shoved under my door, a Coke bottle.

-You’re right.

-??

-I’m going to find my uncle.

-What uncle?

– Don’t you hear the alarm?

__________

Originally from England, Jo Varnish now lives outside New York City.  She is the creative nonfiction editor at X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine.  Her short stories and cnf have recently appeared, or are forthcoming, in Jellyfish Review, Pithead Chapel, JMWW Journal, and others.  Jo is a Pushcart Prize nominee, has been a writer in residence at L’Atelier Writers for two years, and is studying for her MFA.  She can be found on twitter @jovarnish1.