"Pacing Tigers" By Charley Burlock
 

On Christmas Day, I dreamt of tigers.

Tatiana, the three-hundred-pound Siberian tiger, paced from wall to white wall. I watched the slow saunter of her shoulder blades cutting through the impossible mass of skin and muscle and stripes just as I had so many times when I was smaller and awake. The air smelled of eucalyptus and dust and like being close to the ocean. I’ve read that this is impossible. An inability to smell is one of the markers of lost consciousness. It’s what lucid dream Internet quacks call a “reality check.” Other reality checks include the inconsistency of your own reflection in a mirror and time failing to pass as it should.

I had been out of time for some time. I was losing track of days, misplacing whole weeks, and finding myself older than I remembered. I didn’t own any mirrors.

 

On Christmas Day 2007, Carlos Eduardo Sousa Jr., Paul Dhaliwal, and Kulbir Dhaliwal visited the San Francisco Zoo. Other zoo-goers told the police and the newspapers, after the fact, that the three drank vodka from the bottle and shouted too loud and climbed on things they shouldn’t have. They watched Tatiana’s shoulder blades sway under her skin, just as I had. Only Tatiana watched back. The rest of the story is pieced together backwards and in silence. We trace the blood back to the empty exhibit. We find the claw marks in the asphalt leading to the Leaping Lemur Café. We find the body of the seventeen-year-old—who all the newspapers called a man—abandoned.

I remember watching the news coverage on our little kitchen television before school. I was ten years old and dazzled, as I was by all things grisly and inexplicable. With early internet access and dubious supervision, I devoured articles and maps and police reports and schematic diagrams illustrating the enclosure and escape. It wasn’t long until I found what I was looking for because it was the same thing everyone else was looking for: the sticks and pinecones that were “foreign to the enclosure,” the half-empty pint of vodka in one of the victims’ cars, the marijuana in all of their systems.

“I want it to be a dream.” That’s what Carlos Sousa Jr.’s father told the newspaper two days after his son was mauled to death in broad Californian daylight.

 

On Christmas Day, I dreamt of tigers. I was seventeen years old. A few Christmases before that, my brother and I drank vodka from the bottle and it left an astringent aftertaste like the strings of a banana peel and made my teeth go loose and warm in my mouth. It felt new and glamorous, but I tried not to let it show. We shouted too loud and climbed on things we shouldn’t have. No one told the newspapers or the police. We chased each other through the padded dirt of the Presidio, our hair going damp with the condensation from eucalyptus trees, planted because they grow faster than anything else and could hide the significant portion of the city that was once a military base. We felt invisible. I felt invisible. I don’t know how he felt.

The two boys that didn’t die in the tiger attack were brothers.

My brother could do a backflip from standing on flat ground and land on both of his feet (most of the time). I was too scared to try but I watched him as he taunted gravity again and again and again. It dazzled me.

He showed me how to rub the eucalyptus leaves between my fingers so that our mom wouldn’t smell the cigarettes on us at dinner. We were making her a beef brisket. “People think that it’s hair and clothes that hold the smoke, but really it’s your fingers,” he said. We had tired ourselves out from running and his flipping and our laughing at the fat men standing naked toward the ocean in forty-degree weather. With sand in our sneakers and sweat cooling around our salty hair we heaved our way up through the woods, ignoring the stairs some forty feet to our right. Immigrant Point, usually scattered with tourists and joggers trying to capture the full expanse of the Golden Gate, was abandoned save for two figures passing a forty back and forth and staring out at the impenetrable grayness. I recognized one of them as a senior boy in my high school and the other as one of those kids who showed up at all the best parties but never stayed long. We made eye contact and smiled with our mouths: an uncomfortable communion. Ben and I were silent on the drive home and stayed that way until we opened our back door to the sound of “The Little Drummer Boy.”

And yet we had all cheered for the tiger. She was a martyr for freedom. We cheered for her even as her pelt was studded with seven SFPD bullets, the final one landing squarely between her eyes. We identified with her and not with the hooting teenagers who were alone and together and drunk on Christmas Day. Tatiana jumped thirteen feet to escape her enclosure. I’ve read that this is impossible. My brother fell thirteen feet to his death. Every news story I’ve found has referenced the alcohol in his blood. I want it to be a dream. My brother had been gone one month when I dreamt of tigers. I don’t remember much about that Christmas beyond the dream, and I don’t remember much about the dream beyond Tatiana’s swaying shoulders. I don’t even know if it was her I was dreaming about. I couldn’t distinguish her from any other tiger I’ve seen in movies or zoos. There’s a sculpture in her honor on the steps up to Coit Tower. There’s a bench with my brother’s name on it at Immigrant Point. There’s the alcohol and the pinecones to explain how both of them turned to stone. Pushing through solid objects is another reality check.

 

Supposedly, the wall of the tiger enclosure was four feet below code. Supposedly, the railing in my brother’s sophomore dorm building was eighteen inches too short. I don’t know that these measurements make my world feel any realer, safer, or more livable than the measurements of alcohol in my brother’s blood or the measurement of how far the pinecones traveled to reach Tatiana’s enclosure. These calculations feel puny and desperate against young, pointless, violent death. My mother successfully lobbied my brother’s college to raise the railings after his fall. Even so, six years later, another boy, exactly my brother’s age, fell from the exact same spot, hitting his head and dying on the pavement that was—at that point—part of the Ben Burlock Memorial Garden. Do I need to tell you that repetition of past events is another reality check? Do I need to tell you to be sure you recognize your own hands?

 

They determined that she had hoisted herself over the final barrier by examining the concrete chips they dug out of her rear paw. I’ve been living with a piece of Geary Boulevard embedded in my palm for half a decade, wreckage from a drunken fall chasing the last bus of a Saturday night, a night, like so many others, that is both forgettable and blameless because I survived it. I’ve tried to point out the black shard in the meat of my upturned hand many times and by this point no one else can see it. But I can, and with clarity. If I wanted to, I could dig it out. Allow me a needle burned black under a Bic or my own teeth and I’ll show you how this city has shaped me.