Jessica Winter - Break in Case of Emergency

That following Monday, Jim mailed to me a beautiful replica of the illuminated manuscript of William Blake’s “The Tyger,” with this hilariously laconic note about “enjoying our time together,” and I felt out of breath to be looking at this gift and thinking about what the gift meant and thinking about the thought that had been poured into the gift. So then I mailed to him a print of a lithograph by Paul Ranson, a French painter who died young, called “Tiger dans les jungles.” And tigers and Tiger Mountain, however we were defining it, became the central metaphor or inside joke or whatever of our relationship. That was our courtship — trading postcards of tigers through the mail, like we were exchanging handwritten love letters on parchment bundled in ribbon via furtive horseback messenger. I mean, that wasn’t all of our courtship — we also had sex all the time, in fact, we had sex the night of our first date, and we had all three kinds of sex on our second date (or all four, depending on how you’re counting) — which was a Saturday, so we also had breakfast the next day, eventually, around four p.m. — and by the third date we were skipping the date part and just having sex. I had it in my head that it wasn’t going anywhere, that he was this wayward grad student with a shitty apartment and an impressive comic-book collection who couldn’t possibly present a viable long-term “practical” option, and pretty soon the physical attraction would fade and I could go back to the real world and Meg could set me up with a banker-who-doesn’t-act-like-a-banker and for now I could just enjoy this sex-and-tigers bubble before it burst. In fact, I remember our friend Lauren saying to me something like “Get out of the bubble, make sure to spend time outside the bubble”—like a warning, like she could see what was happening, like if I kept fucking this guy eventually the bubble would seal itself over with bodily fluids and force of habit. But I never did that thing that would happen sometimes with friends in college, where they’d become infatuated with someone and just fall off the grid for a while. I introduced Jim to Meg and Pam and Lauren right away. We did stuff together, even though sometimes we were late to whatever we were doing, because we were having sex. Everyone liked him a lot, except Lauren. Lauren thought Jim was “sketchy.” I never see her anymore.

The tiger thing really stuck. We’d go to Prospect Park Zoo to look at the red pandas and be like “Look at all the tigers on the mountain!” Or he’d send me a text to ask me how a presentation went at work, and I’d text back TIGER MOUNTAIN I AM IN YOU, which would mean it went well. And then when I started working at LIFt, or, rather, when I realized that my job at LIFt was a total fucking farce, my job became Tiger Canyon, which was the exact opposite of the triumphant majesty of Tiger Mountain — Tiger Canyon was this arid, rocky depression with no tree shade or reliable sources of clean water, where wild animals stalked and disemboweled their prey. Jim would start getting texts from me when I was crying in the bathroom like MAULED BY TIGERS and TAKING TIGER CANYON (BY STRANGULATION).

Maybe all this sounds like precious gibberish, the language of twins. No one should ever attempt marital exegesis. It’s like opening the door on a darkroom — better just to let this stuff slosh around in obscurity.

But maybe all the explaining and accommodating and apologizing I do — to my friends, to my colleagues, to this empty box — is a way of proving I’m real. I exist in three dimensions. I know that sounds weird. I can try to explain. So sometimes with Leora and Karina and people like that, I get the sense that their big problem is that they don’t think of other people as real — not everyone, but younger people, people outside their class or income bracket, people who don’t “inspire” them somehow. And even the people who “inspire” them are abstractions — they exist as boxes to be ticked on their checklist of personal growth. I have the opposite problem. My close friends, my real friends, become unknowable to me, paradoxically, because I know them well enough that their lives seem real and mine seems — not fake or imaginary, I don’t mean it like that, but like a bluff, and that’s the moment a fissure opens — and I actually don’t think I’ve ever used the word fissure out loud, or exegesis, for that matter, which I guess means this email is a conversation I’m too embarrassed to have out loud with anyone or anything more consequential than an empty box — but anyway, a fissure opens in the friendship because I start to feel sheepish and back away from this nice person who is just being nice and everything becomes awkward.

I think that’s why — stay with me here, this is connected — my heart drops into my stomach every time I find out that one of my friends has harvested from the Garden of Earthly Delights. It’s never because I myself want to have a hypothetical tiny future boarder (although I do) or don’t want to have a hypothetical tiny future boarder (although sometimes I think I shouldn’t) or don’t not want to have a hypothetical tiny future boarder (although that may be most accurate). It’s because my friend has it together enough to have — to create and bake and provide for in all senses — a hypothetical tiny future boarder, and I do not. For whatever reason, I don’t. It’s like a metaphor, or a metonym, or symptomatic of a comprehensive incompetence: biological, psychological, financial, marital, “spiritual.” It’s gotten to the point that on the way to work in the mornings I look around at all the people crammed into the train car and think, How did all these people come to be? How did their parents time it out just right like that? How did they become alive? What do they know that I don’t? Why won’t anyone just tell me? And I conclude that it’s because whatever they’re doing and however fucked-up their lives might be, at least they’re not pretending. At least they’re not faking that they’re real people. That they’re verified as authentic. Leora loves that word, authentic. Maybe if you raise the hem of their shirt you’ll see a little gold seal stamped to the base of their spine, certifying their authenticity.

It’s weird because the realest thing I’ve ever done — and I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I can trust you, empty box — is fall in love with Jim. It was undeniable and more or less instantaneous and I didn’t have to do anything or figure anything out or strategize or hire experts to advise or intervene. It was not a choice. I did not choose him. I don’t know if that is wonderful or terrible. Maybe a stronger person — a more pragmatic person, a person who doesn’t bluff and fake her way through life, who thinks ahead and whose future is as formed as her present and who keeps a ledger of accounts — would have turned away from Jim, would have turned away from that love. She would have broken the love in two, because she was strong, not weak. Or her strength would have prevented the thing from forming that she’d have to break. She never would have wanted it so badly and continued to want it so badly endlessly forever and always with every

Jen stopped and sat back. Her lips were dry and her bladder was full and her head was full of ungulate children.

She pressed the delete key and watched the entry rewind on itself, first letter by letter, then word by word, then entire lines evaporating in one backward swipe. She made a mental note to ask LIFt’s web developer to put character limits on TTC posts. She quit the browser, shut the laptop, and curled up on the couch without taking off her clothes, brushing her teeth, emptying her bladder, or switching off the lights. The dented tub of ice cream on the coffee table sagged and melted throughout what remained of the night. In the morning, the dried streak of ice cream had crusted over the back of Jen’s hand. It looked like a blister, the remains of a burn that might not leave a scar.