I Am an Executioner (3 page)

But the sleep was brief and fitful. On the backs of my eyelids, I saw again the image of Kitch bleeding and struggling on the ground; I saw the man with thick glasses and rubber gloves,
reaching those gloved hands toward me. I saw Maharaj and Saskia, staring at all this with strange glee on their faces. Finally, I heard the soft steps of the man with the rifle, and heard the sharp lightning of his gun, and I woke up with a start.

Was he really nearby, or had that been part of the dream? The wide, open vista which a few moments before had brought me a feeling of elation now seemed fraught with danger. I was too exposed here. That quiet man with his long gun was probably this moment lining me up in his sights.

The pool where I had drunk sat right behind a small house or building. I crept up to it and sniffed for any danger. It was hard to smell anything in this place, but an odor of humans seemed to linger in the air, like it did at the zoo, wafting from a distance; and this smell reminded me of the comfort of my home. I pushed and shoved at the glassy doors of the building until I found an access that gave at my pressure, and quietly, I stepped inside.

The house was shadowy and silent, and walking on the soft, furry floors, I came to a cavelike room, dark and quiet and cool, and here, for the first time, I fell asleep and slept so that I forgot myself, for a short time at least.

I woke up well rested, and eager to resume searching out some help for Kitch. But when I opened my eyes, I saw that the room was brightly lit, not dark, as it had been earlier. There were colored pictures on the wall: red-nosed clowns carrying motley balloons, just like I had seen some days in the zoo. On one side of the room was an open-topped cage raised on small stilts, and from inside the cage came the strangely calming sounds of a murmuring human cub—again, another sound I was well used to hearing in my home.

But before I noticed any of these things, of course, I noticed the woman standing across the room from me. She was a full-grown human, with brown curly hair and pink skin, like Kitch’s skin. Her back was against the wall and she was inching toward the cub’s cage with small sideways steps.

I lifted my head from my paws, my nose quivering with
excitement, my ears and the hair on my back rigid with attention. When she saw me perk up, the woman paused where she was standing, and took a sharp breath inward. Her arms were spread behind her, and her fingers were splayed backward with their tips resting against the wall. She seemed to force herself to breathe again, with great, trembling deliberation. Finally, she released the wall and began to walk once more, slowly, toward the cage.

A cat has an instinct for such situations, and my instinct quickly told me: this woman was mother to the crying cub. Normally, I would have thought that she’d be a threat to me only insofar as she would try to protect her young, but my recent experiences had warned me that humans were dangerously unpredictable, and I had better be careful of her regardless.

I rose and stepped, very slowly, in a direction opposite to the direction that the woman was walking—that is, I walked away from the cub’s cage—and the woman stalked carefully toward her cub, and like that we circled the room warily.

The baby human was murmuring in the softest, most innocent way, and in fact I wanted this mother to take it and care for it. Like most cats in the zoo, I considered myself an orphan. Where I came from, who my mother was, I have no recollection. But as I walked that strange duet with this cautious human mother, I had a brief and visceral flash of an older female tiger, a warm and orange-colored softness, a light and muscular embrace. I felt my legs quiver beneath me, and then I had another brief flash of memory: a strong blow to the face, like the blow that Kitch had given me; a fast run through the brush, a panic of voices.

Now I felt dizzy with strange emotion. And that human woman must have sensed my unsteadiness. She took the opportunity to move quickly toward her own cub, and with arms shaking terribly, she reached inside and pulled out the gurgling thing.

Her sudden movement brought me back to my senses. I turned swiftly, to keep a track on her actions; and when she saw
me move like that, the woman let out a terrifying shriek; and in her panic she allowed her little one to slip right from out of her hands.

What happened next happened so quickly I can barely describe it. I saw the fleshy child tumble toward the ground, and in one instinctive surge I lunged toward it.

The next thing I knew, the tiny human dangled, upside down and crying, from my mouth; I held it only by the crinkled piece of cloth it wore around its bottom.

The mother stood a few feet away from me, and she cried out now even more uncontrollably than her cub did, and her cheeks were flushed bright red. I had never seen a human so upset before; I had no idea how she would behave now.

I started to move forward, thinking I would return her offspring to her, but as soon as I lifted my paw to move, she yelled and quivered more alarmingly than before, so I stepped back again.

Now I really didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t move in any direction without sending the woman into further hysterics. I just stood there blankly.

When it began to seem that our terrible, nervous stalemate might last forever, this woman ended it in a totally surprising way. She slowly bent down and picked up a couple of wooden blocks, baby’s toys. She got up and flung them at me hard.

The blocks hit me sharply on the flank, and I backed off into a crouch. The woman seemed to gain her courage back when she saw me cower. She started to pick up anything she could get her hands on—plastic things on wheels, blocks of many colors, soft and furry shapes resembling bears and lions and people—and she rained these objects on me in a continuous, angry hail.

As soon as I got over my surprise, I began to realize that as hard as she threw these objects, they didn’t really hurt me. And more often than not, they hit wide of their mark, anyway. Frankly, I was more concerned that, with her wild arm, she
would hit her own cub—and in fact this happened: even as I tried to curl around and protect it, a high-flying train flew over my head and bounced off the piss-wet leg of the little one.

Now I was thoroughly annoyed. I let the cub drop onto the pillowy floor and turned around and roared at the mother with all the might of my hot and humid lungs. Then I stepped toward her and roared again as loud as I was able to.

As I said, humans are so unpredictable. As soon as I roared like this, the curly-haired lady collapsed as instantly and softly as a pile of feathers from a startled bird. She fell to the ground in a dead faint.

After a few seconds, I gathered the courage to approach her inert body. I bent down, sniffed her, licked her face, but she didn’t wake up.

Now what was I to do? The cub had begun roaring, wailing and crying, rolling this way and that on the floor. It didn’t seem right to leave it there so helpless, with its mother lying unconscious. I went back to the little one and sniffed it. I had thought that Maharaj was an ugly-smelling beast, but this human cub smelled terrible. I licked its pudgy, salty face, but this had no comforting effect. Finally, I picked it up again by its soiled cloth. I pushed my way back out the door through which I had entered the house. I went to the ice-blue pool where I had enjoyed such a refreshing drink a few hours previously, and I held the baby human’s face to the cool water, thinking perhaps it was thirsty.

But it didn’t reach for the water—in fact, it seemed a little frightened of it. So I took the liberty of dipping its face into the liquid, ever so gently. But now the little thing coughed and spat, and began crying all the louder.

With this loud crying, my pounding headache from earlier that morning began to creep back. I also worried that the loud noise would draw the attention of people in the neighboring buildings, or of the man with the rifle, who I was sure, even then, was stalking me. I thought to leave the little one there and
run away, but I couldn’t bear the thought of this helpless, undefended, motherless cub in the open. Really, something had to be done, and quickly, to quiet this confounding little human. I admit I don’t have the instincts of a mother, and for a long time I had no idea what to do.

Then I had a stroke of inspiration. I laid the cub down softly on the grassy lawn. I opened my mouth wide and took its whole head, gently, inside my own mouth, and in this way I picked it up again.

There! The sound of the cub’s crying was considerably muffled. My mouth also provided a kind of warm and comforting womb for it. And soon, in fact, the flailing arms and legs of the little one stopped moving, the cries in my mouth softened into comforted whimpers, then finally into silence as it drifted to sleep.

Only when I released the cub’s head, and laid him gently out on the grass again did I realize what I had done. Yes, the baby human had stopped crying, but it had stopped breathing, too! I had stupidly, inadvertently, recklessly suffocated it. Oh, God. I picked it up and shook it left and right. I dropped it down and roared at it and then picked it up and swung it about some more, hoping somehow to wake it.

By the time I finished, the cub was no more alive than it had been when I started, but its body was considerably worse for wear, with little rips here and there, dislocated joints, bruises spreading like lakes, and puncture marks everywhere, most upsettingly (for me) in its right eye, which dribbled a colorful syrup.

I felt sick to my stomach. How did I keep doing this, time after time—killing people unintentionally? What was wrong with me? Was I evil?

I picked the human up again by its filthy cloth, this limp little human whose head I had crushed, and carried it away with me, dangling from my teeth. Now I had two people to fix, and at
least I was comforted by this notion: If I could find someone to help me fix this cub (who was light, and easy to carry), then I would know there was hope for Kitch.

(And yes, I couldn’t help but taste the blood of this human; it tasted even sweeter than Kitch’s blood. But even though I had eaten nothing for a full day, the thought never crossed my mind to eat this child. To be precise, it crossed my mind once, but I quickly put the sick notion out of my head.)

I walked through the streets of that place, dangling that dead, dripping human baby before me like the night watchman in the zoo carried a lamp in the dark, and I saw no other creature. There was no one who could help.

I must have walked another quarter day until I reached a vast sea of resting vehicles, and a large building that was thronged with people. I walked toward this throng—and again, people screamed and ran away from me—but I was so inured by now to this reaction that I simply ignored it. I was looking for that one person who would see me, and stop, and know what to do—that person who would know how to help this cub and to help me and to help my friend—my love—Kitch.

I pushed my way into the building and people yelled and ran away from me in every direction, but I calmly walked forward. People carried bags of clothes, of toys, of devices and things, and they dropped and flung these bags everywhere as they saw me, but I simply and calmly walked.

When I reached the other end of the building, I stepped outside again into the sunlight. No one had helped me, and I wondered, really, did nobody care for a dead baby? Was there nobody in this world who cared?

By this point, the sun was sinking low in the sky, and I was depressed. I just wanted to lie down and forget everything, I wanted to unwind this day and let it disappear into nothing.

I found my way across another avenue—the vehicles screeched and crashed and almost hit me, but I didn’t care—and I found
a quiet corner beneath a large bridge or overpass. Above me I could hear those fast rolling things, but down here it was dark and cool and quiet. I set the human cub carefully down, and I lay down beside it. Far in the distance, I heard those wild howling sirens. The objects whooshed and whooshed overhead, and the bridge shivered and clanked with their weight. From somewhere in the sky came the cluttered drone of objects flying, and every sound in this world seemed ugly and new. In the distance, I thought I heard the loud report of a rifle, and I knew that the orange fire of that gun was near in my future. I wanted nothing else but to be back in my enclosure, and for the baby to be alive, and for Kitch to be okay again. But I knew it would never happen. I had been kidding myself—nothing in the world could bring Kitch back to life. Certain things can never be reversed. It would simply never happen.

I thought of Kitch’s pudgy face as it was a few days ago, bright and pink beneath his khaki cap, and a smile settled on my face. I remembered the cooing noises of the row-your-boat lady singing her sad song. It had annoyed me so, but now that noise seemed so lovely:

And the noise was so close and so real that I thought she could have been there right beside me, singing, and when I looked up, she was. It would have surprised me to see her there on any other day, but this day nothing surprised me anymore. She was sitting beneath the same bridge as I was, amid a nest of bags and garbage. She looked at me and sang, smiling through her broken teeth.

Then she got up and walked right up to me. “You came all the way here to see me, tiger?” she asked me.

I was too tired to get up, but I raised my head slightly. I was so happy to see her that tears were streaming from my eyes.

She saw the human baby lying next to me, and she shook her head. “Oh, tiger,” she said. “Oh, that’s a shame.” She bent down and stroked the top of the cub’s head. “Ming the merciless!” she whooped, and then she started to chuckle to herself, and that laugh was the strangest, sweetest sound I think I had ever heard.

I closed my eyes and saw the zoo and its miniature red-green forest, and it was full of tigers, just like me. And Saskia and Maharaj were there, and I had forgiven them and I ran and I played with them. And the baby’s curly-haired mother stood nearby, but she was my mother, too—she had been my mother all along. And in my dream, I had my own kids, baby tigers, playful little cubs, as small as I had been once, just as small as the human baby I had killed. The tiger babies tumbled over each other clumsily, so cute. I tried to lick them and play with them, but I saw that my tongue and my paws were rough and too powerful, and the slightest touch would have damaged those babies, so I stopped playing, and instead I stood guard and watched over them.