The Tiger In My Car

I knew she would take it the wrong way when she got here. She wasn’t a fan of most animals, but she’d always had a problem with cats. In theory, the bigger the cat, the bigger the problem. Mia would be apoplectic when she saw the tiger in my car.

I had to walk around all of my evo to see just how much tiger was wedged into it. It was much more tiger than should have been possible, and more tiger than I thought was actually attached to a tiger. As far as wild cats went, it was the largest I’d ever seen, and there was something primal to the build of it. This cat hadn’t weathered hunting seasons and greedy humans and global warming; this cat had weathered terraformation, ice flows, the birth of islands, wars and natural disasters. There was a chip in the tiger’s left ear. The ear flicked when I opened the driver’s side door and dropped into the seat. “Look, if you don’t get out now, my friend is going to be pissed when she gets back.”

The tiger didn’t have much space for adjusting positions. My car is small, but there’s only so much space that can be robbed by a tiny budget. And efficient tiger or large person would have been able to fit themselves in here. As it was, the tiger was draped over the reclining passenger seat and part of the tiny backseat. It growled and the car shook. Its eyes were not quite feline. They reminded me of the mosaic, earthen eyes of a crocodile. When it spoke, it sounded like the force of buffeting wind. “It was not my choice to get in, and it is not my choice about whether or not I will be getting out.”

“What?” I didn’t know how this answered my question. In what language would that answer my question? “You’re in my car by accident? Can’t you just-” I made a shoving motion with my hands, as blatant as I dared. I was very aware that it was a large jungle cat and I was a young woman with recent acquisition of her license.

The tiger tried to tilt its head. This was as much of an answer as I was getting, I supposed. I raked my hair away from my face. The city was too hot in the summer; sunshine bounced off every available surface. Tarmac, glass, steel; even in a residential area everything conspired to bake the residents. There was not much to do but wait. I turned on the air con. It sputtered to life a couple minutes before Mia got back.

Mia took it the wrong way immediately. She was good at that.

“Seriously?” she said. She was in the blouse she’d worn to some meeting that day in which she’d sat on the sidelines and waited for her employer to say something worth noting. She was essentially a net for all of the remarks that her employer missed and forgot. From the state of her notepad after these meetings, he looked pretty clumsy with remarks in general. I’d asked if he had a problem with memory or work ethic. This is why you should be grateful to work for Jonathan, she’d said. Mia glared at the tiger. “I told you to commit yourself to your job, Tara. Not to getting out of it. And the office party? I went to incredible lengths to get you an invite. If you didn’t want to go, you could just say so. Fine, maybe you’ll decide I’m worth your time when I get back.”

“Oh, come on,” I said. “I didn’t do this on purpose. I didn’t ask it to get in. Beside, why are we taking my car? You’ve got one. Just-”

Mia had perfected this to an art; turning away so quicly she looked less rude, and more as though she’d been pushed. There was something performance art about it, as though from a different angle, someone might interpret that I were the one pushing her away. She went to seize her own car, a prettier, German car that had seen more of the world than either of us.

I rounded on the tiger. “Fantastic.” This was not the tone to take with a tiger, but the tiger was not in the position to round on me. “We were going to get dinner too, before the party. You know what’s in the house now? Pasta. Leftover pasta. From the last three nights. Fuck this, we’re going to the store.”

The tiger didn’t protest. It would have been simple to leave the tiger there if not for the fact that there truly was nothing left among the apartment but dried out pasta. There is a tolerance threshold for all things, including pasta, no matter what shape I decided to buy. It was pretty suitable for a university student, but I was supposed to have surpassed that now. Mia’s cupboards were empty by virtue of not having eaten in the apartment for several days. She did have generous coworkers.

“Your tail,” I said. The tiger’s tail was wrapped around the gear shift, and was partly on my lap. It was heavier than a tail really had right to be. I’d read once that tigers use their tails to communicate with other tigers, and to balance when they made quick turns while running after prey. I would be more enthused about a giant, muscled tail on my lap if I thought the tiger was going to catch us dinner with it.

The tiger drew in its tail. I reversed out of the parking spot. About seventy percent of the reflections in my rear and side view mirrors was orange and black. I tried not to run over any lives while I backed out of the parking spot. Everything was still living when I left.

“Who was that?” the tiger asked in its windy, impact voice. It was the sort of androgenous voice that I thought thoughts in in my head. Asking the tiger what gender it considered itself sounded like a great way to get hurt.

“My roommate. Friend. Best friend. Except for right now, maybe,” I said. I pulled onto a main street and aimed for the highway. The car, I noticed, tipped a little toward the tiger’s side.

“Is that my fault?”

“Huh?” I switched lanes quickly and cut off a driver. I felt bad right up until he gave me the finger. It was like seeing a kitten try to menace you with their claws. I laughed and sped up. “She’ll get over it. She likes the idea of working with her best friend in the same office. She couldn’t do that anymore if we weren’t best friends.”

“Are we speeding?” the tiger wondered. It was strange that a tiger might have a concept of speeding. How quickly could a tiger run? This one might easily overtake the car at the speed we were going now. I pressed on the gas a little more, until I could feel the engine’s mini-seizures through the floor.

“Not… now,” I replied, pulling the car quickly off the interstate. There was a grocery store/supermarket here. It was the sort of place you came to buy fertilizer for your plants, diapers for your baby, fancy but disgusting cake for your racist mother-in-law. A teenager was probably smoking in the back somewhere. “You good?” I climbed out of the car and double-checked with the tiger. It had been locked in my car before I found it, but that hadn’t had anything to do with me. When the tiger nodded, I locked my car- for the safety of the tiger more than the safety of others; there were some crazy people in Maryland- and went to the door of the supermarket.

I imagined that some day I would be able to wring in a proper supper on a debit card instead of rifling for change for two small yogurts and a bakery bagel at the cash. There was a woman a little younger than me behind the counter, looking unimpressed with the entire exchange. I hoped the tiger didn’t expect something. I hadn’t seen any bloody carcasses in the store, and I really didn’t have the money for once anyway.

“If I had my credit card, I could have done some real shopping,” I said to the tiger. I put the bag with yogurt and bagel in the console between us. “Like, noodles or something. Pay day is in a week, though. Yeah, this is it for now. When did you last eat?”

The tiger thought for a moment. “Not too long ago. A day, two, perhaps. I am not hungry yet.”

“Hungry for what? Rabbits? Birds? Buskers?” I asked.

“Your roommate looked good,” the tiger said.

There was no expression to the tiger’s face; it was impossible to tell from its voice or face whether or not it was joking. Because there was no way I was letting it get at Mia, I decided the tiger was joking. “You’re welcome to her,” I said. “If you get hungry for someone’s terrible boss, let me know.”

On the way home, we pulled up next to a cop car at the red light of an intersection. The immediate result was that I had to pull over. The tiger was sitting right in front of the license and registration, which were in the folded up mirror in the passenger seat.

“It’s there.” I pointed.

The police officer followed my finger, then shifted a couple inches to the right, to the tiger’s muzzle. It was clean, but when you considered that the muzzle was easily as big as my palm, there were sudden, new, difficult dimensions involved.

“Can you get it out for me?” the cop said. I shrugged and leaned back. There was a perfect path through my window, to the opposite mirror. “It is your duty to get it out for me. Don’t make me ask again. The tiger can’t properly wear a seatbelt, can it?”

“Maybe.” But there was no way for the tiger to actually sit up in the seat with the seatbelt on in the position it was in now without cracking something spinal. The cop ticketed me for speeding, for the funny sound the engine made- the engine was always betraying me this way, and though I dearly loved the Evo, I was beginning to suspect it didn’t love me back- and for the tiger’s seat belt. I would add the ticket to pile of bills I could not pay. When we got back on the road, I worked my way up to a couple miles above the speed limit and very carefully did not go over. If I had been younger, I would have let the needle on the tach climb and climb. I would have kept going until cars with strobe lights stopped me. I wrestled the car straight as the tiger’s weight pulled it right and right again.

“IS this your job?” the tiger asked.

“My job?” I couldn’t be offended. What did the tiger know of the business world? “No. I actually do have a job. I’m an intern for a shareholder and business executive.” It sounded a lot better with long words tacked onto it.

“What does that entail?” the tiger asked. Then the tiger seemed to rethink the question, or to lose interest in my answer before I gave it. “What does that mean, actually? Interns do the same regardless of who they work for, to an extent, don’t they? Or are you shareholding and doing business? You could be an intern if your prime function is not being paid-”

“I was so unaware,” I said. “I did not realize I wasn’t getting paid. I didn’t know I was at the bottom of the food chain. Well, shit, there it all goes. How silly to invest in this. Just because it worked for Mia doesn’t mean it’s a viable path for me, oh no. Whatever you’re saying, it’s all right. Eventually I’ll actually be paid to do- basically what Mia’s doing.”

“And that’s what you want to do?”

“Isn’t that what everyone wants to do? Get paid to do something they love? Well, I like business.” I stopped rather abruptly because I realized I’d actually passed the turnoff for my neighbourhood. I was heading into an area that was alternately an imitation of the old Georgian homes of D.C. and an imitation of a post-apocalyptic ghetto. “And you like my car. Or you don’t. But you’re in it. Speaking of, when are you getting out? I doubt you’re really enjoying our talk that much.”

“I’m getting out when you let me out,” the tiger said “It’s not so bad.”

“What? Let you out?” I had to brake quickly again. The car behind me made a very showy screeching halt as the driver honked their horn. Everyone thought stop signs only needed to apply to the rest of the world. “I’m not keeping you in.”

“But the door is locked,” the tiger said.

I could see from here the tiger was lying. “It is not.”

The tiger nudged the roof with its head. “It is. I can’t get out.”

“Are. You. Serious?”

The tiger looked mournfully so.

I took the next exit to try to turn around. I’d come out in the kind of area that did not know that cars could look like my car looked. That is to say, that they looked like less than five figure cars. This area was probably pretty if you’ve grown up around cream baseboards and decorative paperweights. “That would require dismantling my one true love. I can’t do that to my Evo.”

“What about business?”

“What about it?” I snapped. I had no desire to be lost here. Already one of the natives had lowered their monocle to look at me. Possibly just their reading glasses. But you wouldn’t have seen reading glasses like those in my corner of Maryland.

“Do you not love business?”

“That is not the point at all. And yes. Would I be eating a plain bagel for dinner if I didn’t love business?”

The tiger flexed its paws. I’m sure there were claws somewhere in there, but as they weren’t in my line of vision and I was pissed, I couldn’t care at the moment. “Your friend made it sound lie you have a problem committing. Do you really? You seem committed.”

“Thank you!” But I wasn’t sure the tiger was saying it to agree with me. Taxpayers’ money hemmed us in on either side with groomed greenery and sculpted landscape. “You could tell Mia that. You know, if you were sticking around at all.” I slowed near a sign. I slowed some more to try to read it around the tiger. I slowed until I was almost sure I was going backward. The sign directed me toward squalor. I headed in that direction. “Anyway, did I ask you?”

“You didn’t have to. We were already having this conversation. This is what happens when you have a tiger in your car. It wouldn’t happen to me.”

“What? The tiger in my car is you!”

“Don’t yell at me,” the tiger said. Its whiskers twitched this time. I decided that maybe it did actually have an expression.

We doubled around near the interstate. There were a few miles of road to burn before I would reach a ramp. On the way there, the houses regressed. The degree of shittiness rose. The population of gas stations and corner stores increased. The number of completed houses declined. Several were under construction. One was still piled with tools outside of it, and a construction crane. “I’m not yelling. You are a tiger. In my car. Telling me- what, to get a life? Well, this is life. You do the things you don’t want to do to do the things you do want to do.”

“And business is what you want to do?” the tiger said. It didn’t have eyebrows, just long whisker-like hair over its eyes that rose when it asked the question.

“Who knows?” I said.

I pulled the car over sharply in front of the work-in-progress house. I drove over a wrench or a rock or a dug-up artifact. There was an auto garage across the street eyeing the tiger, and me, and the situation in general. “The thing is, tiger, I have this one plan. If I don’t have it, I’d have to make a whole new plan. You know how hard it is to start from scratch?”

The tiger blinked. One of its eyes was glowing phosphorescence under the street lamp. “Choices.”

I pointed at the windshield of the Evo. I said a silent prayer. “Do you think you’d be able to climb out through that?”

The tiger considered. Then it nodded.

I trudged through the yard, which looked more like a bombsight than the partially built house. I hefted a sledgehammer over my shoulder.

I queued up beside my windshield.

Inside the Evo, the tiger shut its eyes, preparing for impact. “Be gentle,” it advised.

“No point,” I said. I swung.

Art by Adam S. Doyle

Text by Lucie MacAulay