The Formula by John Olson

Alfred Egmont was in a bad mood. It was 5:00 in the morning and still dark. Rain was falling heavily and he and his wife Linda were driving south on I-5 to Sea-Tac to catch a plane for San Francisco. They were flying to San Francisco to see an exhibit at the de Young museum, a collection of Baroque art including Tiger Hunt by Peter Paul Rubens and The Maids of Honor by Diego Velázquez.

Alfred had anticipated little traffic, but was surprised to find the freeway already bustling with trucks and taxis and buses and shuttles, all moving at perplexingly high speeds. Each time a truck or Escalade or Hummer sliced through the rain the leviathans created a rooster-tail which compromised all visibility. Alfred was tense. He was having difficulty making out the lanes. He repeated a phrase: a boy, a cat, a lifeboat. A boy, a cat, a life-boat. A boy, a cat, a lifeboat. He turned it round and round in his mind like marmalade, a gooey mantra of soothing translucence. The phrase had been coined by a friend as an example of literary prescription, a formula for generating stories. Stories about boys and tigers. Stories about religion and survival. Stories about God and water. When Alfred’s mood began to darken in bile, or his level of stress rose from truculent to screaming, he ran the phrase through his brain as a counterweight, a bromidic equation whose arrangement had a certain buoyancy to it.

The source of Alfred’s bad mood, in part, was an incident that had taken place the day before. A crew of landscapers were working on the yard of the house being remodeled next to their apartment building. They had parked two trucks in the easement leading to their parking lot. Alfred had gone out to drive down to the store where Linda worked and pick her up but was blocked. He asked if they could move their trucks. The workers looked up and gave him a look of sour confusion. A man dropped his shovel, shouted something in a foreign language at one of the other men, and the trucks were moved. But when Alfred and Linda returned home, the easement was blocked with the trucks again. He was going to park in the street, but then Linda suggested she go and ask them to move their trucks. She worried about their car being stolen, or getting whacked by a negligent motorist as it had been clobbered already several times when it had been parked on a city street, and the perpetrators had not left a note. Why would they? Why give a shit, if it’s not your car?

Alfred could not figure out why the landscapers had parked in the easement. Neither of the trucks were in use. They were simply parked there. Once more, shovels were dropped, looks were exchanged, and the trucks were moved. But one of the trucks had chosen to occupy the spot that Alfred normally used to get their car turned around. He was forced to back in to their slot in a manner to which he was unaccustomed, and as he tried to maneuver the car around, the front end of their car knocked the dumpster. There was a kawhack, followed by the groan of metal rolling back on stubborn little wheels. He felt foolish. He got out to take a look and saw some dents and scrapes near their front fender. Had those already been there? He could not tell if they were old or if he just now caused them by knocking into the dumpster. This bugged him. He could not get the dents out of his head.

He repeated his mantra, anointing his rancor with his inner marmalade: a boy, a cat, a lifeboat. A boy, a cat, a lifeboat.

But why a cat, Alfred reflected. The story in question concerned a tiger. Perhaps it was a matter of inclusion. Cat was more general. Tiger was very specific. That weighted the mantra. It lost its buoyancy. Cat preserved a certain level of abstraction. Abstraction equaled lightness. Imponderability.

One thing was certain: as of Christmas, 2007, boys would begin taking tigers more seriously. Don’t taunt them, for instance.

Christmas Day, 2007, is the day Tatiana, a 350-pound Siberian tiger, leaped from her grotto at the San Francisco Zoo and killed a seventeen-year old boy and mauled two slightly older brothers. This story was in many ways more interesting than the story of the boy in the lifeboat with the tiger. A book which he, Alfred Egmont, had not yet read, but had only read about, and could not, therefore, pass judgment. Nevertheless, when fiction came up against reality, reality usually won.

What had those boys done to get the tiger so riled? The consensus among the experts, such as tiger trainer Rick Glassey, whose tiger Jake starred in 'Dr. Doolittle', was that it would take a lot more than yelling or urinating or throwing things to get a tiger so mad it would crawl up a 12.5 foot wall and go on the attack. Was that even possible? The evidence was there. Concrete chips had been discovered in the dead tiger’s paws. The tiger’s rage must have been astronomically intense.

What in the world had happened that night? Was it simply the misbehavior of three stoned kids taunting a notoriously cunning predator, or a combination of things, things that exceeded the range of human thought, human experience, things that could only be understand by a feline, a Panthera tigris, a 350-pound tiger confined to a San Francisco grotto? What emotions had been vulcanizing in the tiger for possibly some time, days, months, years? Had the constant spectacle of tourists and their loud behavior chafed against the animal’s sensibility? Animal intelligence--feline intelligence in particular--was a mystery. No less a figure than Michel de Montaigne was sure of a keen intelligence among cats.

The zoo was not on their itinerary, but the tragedy that had so freshly occurred seemed to have colored or imbued Alfred’s perception of the city, which had only just celebrated the 40th anniversary of the Summer of Love a few months ago. Each time he saw someone go by talking on a cell phone with a look of vacant self-satisfaction, or heard the tinny, abrasive singing from a Disney store pour into the street from a loudspeaker, he bristled. Did he and the tiger share a similar rage? A rage against what? Loudness, vulgarity, boorishness? This, of course, was silly. How could a tiger pacing back and forth all day in a zoo grotto have a sense of a fallen world? Was indignation within the purview of a tiger?

Before boarding their plane, Alfred had spent a few minutes browsing a bookstore at the airport. It was there that he had come upon Yann Martel’s book Life of Pi. He was tempted to buy it, but he was already immersed in a novel by Claude Simon called, simply, Histoire. He liked this book for its exquisite details, although he didn’t have a clue as to what was going on. The book was all details. There were characters, but the external features of the characters had not yet been described. So far it was a world of hyper-detail, but a world in which no one’s actions or motivations had yet become plain or intelligible. Which Alfred liked. It was writing about writing rather than plot or character development. He enjoyed its stream-of-consciousness dissonances and absorptions, its churn of energetic associations, its agility and focus. There was nothing tame or predictable in it. The writing was unrestricted. Immoderate and wild. Which is not to say the writing was undisciplined. Quite the contrary. It was as vigilant and alert as any animal on the hunt. This was the way writing had to be if it hoped in any way to say the unsayable.

It interested Alfred to see what books were selling. It was comforting to think that enough people still read and enjoyed books to merit the presence of a bookstore at an airport. Each time he entered a Starbucks or Tullys he died a little inside to see everyone sitting at their table gazing into the pixels of a laptop computer. People seemed to know more and more about less and less. This disturbed him. There had once been a time, he thought, in which people like Jean Paul Sartre, Simon de Beauvoir and Susan Sontag made the news. Now it was people like Paris Hilton and Britney Spears. It takes critical thinking to keep a democracy together. No wonder the country had a dunce for president.

Alfred and Linda got checked into their hotel and took the elevator to their room. It was a small but tastefully appointed room with pictures of ferns whose fronds had been gracefully rendered, a spacious closet with a courtesy umbrella, and little bottles of soap and lotion in the bathroom.

They had requested a quiet room and the hotel had complied by putting them on the topmost 15TH floor. At home, they were frequently awakened by their neighbors who stomped around in the kitchen sometimes as late as three in the morning. The couple, still in their twenties, liked to go out partying. For reasons that utterly baffled Alfred, the couple would return home at one or two in the morning, slam the front door, stomp up the hallways steps, and head straight for their kitchen, which was directly over his and Linda’s bedroom. Thump, thump, thump. Bang, crash, bang.

Why the kitchen? What is so enticing about a kitchen when one comes home from a party, ostensibly drunk or stoned? Wouldn’t bed be a more attractive destination? Alfred had spoken to them directly about this problem, explaining that the floor was so hollow that he and Linda could hear their microwave ding, but when they continued to make their usual noise Alfred had resorted to using a broom, whacking the ceiling hard enough to leave dents. This did no good either. The symphony continued: Thump, thump, thump. Bang, crash, bang. Their stay at the hotel would be a welcome relief.

But shortly after midnight he and Linda were awaken by loud voices. Someone was partying in the room next to theirs.

Alfred got out of bed.

'What are you going to do?' Linda asked.

'I don’t know,' said Alfred.

'Well I wish you’d stop pacing,' said Linda. 'You’re making me nervous. You look like some animal in a cage.'

Alfred dug some ear plugs out of their bag. He gave two to Linda, and stuck two in his ears. He felt the sounds diminish as the cotton wadding expanded in his ears. A boy, a cat, a lifeboat, the phrase returned. The lapping of water, the slop of the silly sea, and a tiger curled up for warmth at the far end of an inflatable raft.

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John Olson is the author of The Night I Dropped Shakespeare on the Cat, Oxbow Kazoo, Free Stream Velocity, Echo Regime, Logo Lagoon, and Eggs & Mirrors. Backscatter, a collection of new and selected work, is just out from Black Widow Press. His work (essays, articles, stories, prose poems, and verbal aquariums) have appeared in numerous magazines and journals, including American Letters & Commentary, New American Writing, First Intensity, Talisman, Bewildering Stories, The Raven Chronicles, and The Absinthe Literary Review). He lives in Seattle with his wife (and poet) Roberta Olson and their cat Toby.