Because I was a coward I skipped Dee’s funeral. I told myself I’d already sat in the pews and mourned too many children. I knew how these funerals went, how I went at them. Kayla, shot at a house party. The ambulance was too slow. Erick, shot at the bus stop his senior year. Damian, who was just a freshman. Four students shot and killed during my seven years teaching woodshop at Auburn Academy. Dee was the last.
At Dee’s funeral there would be wailing and crying and music and words, all of it insufficient, impotent, too late. Too many families, too many mothers I never met until that moment, and how do you introduce yourself, then? “I’m Mr. Orie; I taught Dee twice a week for his woodshop elective.” Past tense. His final project never finished.
I bought a somber plum tie for my first funeral—Kayla, in my second year of teaching. At the church, a freshman put a slender arm around my shoulder; I was crying so hard, so loudly, and so red-faced. I think the kid was embarrassed for me. I was one of the only white people there; I think all the white people were Auburn teachers. I was embarrassed for myself, to be taking up so much space, bringing attention to my own grief. Or perhaps I should have been louder, shouting and railing. We were supposed to protect children. As adults, as teachers, isn’t that our job? The contract: trust me, do what I say, and I will protect you and guide you and steward you into adulthood. You will have an adulthood. It will all make sense then.
That tie became my funeral tie. I never wanted to touch it again. I was more comfortable admiring the murals—the faces of the young but dead made massive, smiling, in electric colors and surrounded by flowers or other emblems of life and fragility. Always there, always young. I walked by them every day on our high school’s campus, before unlocking my classroom door and flicking on the fluorescent lights, usually before dawn.
It was fourteen years ago that I skipped Dee’s funeral, then ran away from teaching. Dee’s death had gotten to me more than the first three. Perhaps his death hit me harder because my son, Jacob, had come into my life, had begun walking and grabbing at the world around him. I’d known the other kids better, had grieved. Maybe if I’d known Dee better I would know where to put the rage. Or maybe it had just been one too many deaths, and I tapped out, uselessly.
It’s one thing to have the unthinkable happen once. It’s another to have it happen over and over, for it to become very thinkable, very familiar, to expect it. When text messages would arrive at unexpected hours, I began to go tense, not even wondering what had happened, just Who? Who is it this time?
Dove emojis, REST IN POWER on social posts. A twenty-year-old Auburn Academy grad posting This one surprised me. This one got me. “This one.” I know what he means.
The papers talked about the violence in that neighborhood as an epidemic. I worried Jacob might catch it, somehow, from me. Logically, I knew he was safe, but the grief felt big, sticky, sneaky. So I retreated. It was so easy to leave. Easy to leave that school, that neighborhood. My students and their families didn’t have that choice. But I did, and I took it. My wife Melissa was relieved when I resigned. Her income floated us a few months while I spent my days with Jacob and reoriented my life.
Now Jacob is a teenager. Tonight, he is out far too late, which means I am lying awake in bed. I have been thinking that every siren is for him. I think of Jacob’s pale belly peeking out of his too short t-shirts, as he grows too tall too fast. I am proud of how he is growing up. He is generally kind and clever. I know, logically, that he is not likely to be killed. I hate that I know this because he is white, he is middle class, he lives in a different zip code (just two over) from Auburn Academy. I am grateful for it, the safety. I am enraged by it, that he is safe when my Auburn kids were not. Jacob gets to be a little dumb. If Jacob died it would make the front page. Dee’s death didn’t.
Instead of waiting in the dark for Jacob to get home, I pick up my phone and I go looking for the tiger.
Dee had been found before dawn. The local news said two adolescents, maroon Ford, both unresponsive. The police statement said “death by gunshot.” There would be further investigation, but I didn’t have hope that any of the questions that mattered—Why? How could you? What could be worth it? Why Dee?—would be answered.
The day of Dee’s funeral, I washed my car instead. Slowly, meticulously. Layer after layer of soap, washing away. I sprayed the suds into the storm drain. My mind snagged on all the little wrongnesses—pollen on the windshield, mud splatters, paint scratches—in an effort to not confront the big wrong: the child gone.
A week after Dee’s funeral, I found myself driving half an hour out to the intersection where Dee’s body was found, Poplar Street and Nearwater Ave, to see the dedication of his memorial. I had left Melissa at home to watch Jacob. He was a toddler, still too young. Melissa only sighed when I left, which meant she was worried about me, but did not want to interfere. Other spots around town had wreaths or concrete Buddhas or helium balloons tied to chain-link fences, marking drive-by deaths with bits of color and affection: infusions of memory into the landscape. I figured grief might enter me more easily if I had some art piece to bounce my thoughts off of. Just me and the monument. But there was already a crowd gathered. “Virtual,” the social media graphic had said. “Alternate Reality.” “Interactive.”
I wasn’t sure what to expect. There was no physical marker, but a haphazard line of cars with their noses nestled into the levee hill made it obvious. Otherwise it was just open air. A kind of monument you’d only find if you knew to look for it.
At the intersection a scattering of people milled around in a rough circle. It wasn’t a busy intersection, but every so often a car honked its way through, the driver looking around confused. The crowd of mourners parted briefly, only to recollapse into each other when the way was cleared. Some other teachers at the edges nodded to each other. A handful of kids from school stood in a circle in matching memorial t-shirts—blue spray-paint swirls and angel’s wings. The teachers watched them to understand how to act, everything all muddled. How unfair to them, to have to teach us.
The kids pointed their phones toward the intersection, so we did, too. They stood on their tiptoes or ducked around each other to track something. One girl who looked about twelve waved an arm around in disbelief, trying to stroke something. Her other arm held her pink phone out to scope what she was reaching toward.
Through my phone’s camera it became visible: a yellow grassy hill sat where none was in reality, enveloping the intersection where Dee had been shot, where the SUV had skidded off the road, where the crime scene tape had already been put up and taken down. On the hill, eight or nine white tigers were lounging. Some were cubs; some had low swinging bellies. Some were standing, some reclining with amused eyes. They flicked their tales. They panted; they shook their massive necks.
A breeze that we didn’t feel pushed the savannah grasses of the tiger’s hill. It was a neat trick.
A kid about sixteen—Dee’s age—made like he was going to try to climb the hill. But when he got close enough, he was swallowed into it, disappearing from view. At least that’s how it looked on my screen. After a moment he wandered out on the other side of the intersection. I heard someone asking what he saw in there, but I was too far away to hear. And I didn’t want to get too close to the tigers.
One of the pack had begun to prowl, walking the border of the hill where it took a sharp bank down toward the ground. Pacing and showing his teeth—looking right into the eyeline of our phone cameras. He snarled at me. I stepped back. What a feat of artistic programming, to predict how people would behave, to manufacture an illusion of spontaneous interaction: to have the tigers seem to see us, react to us, maneuver around us. I wondered how long till the animation would loop.
A car sped by. I felt a metal sinking feeling. I froze; I flinched. I’d heard of people shooting up memorials here before. But the car just kept going, turned the corner, and someone shouted something illegible out the window, a burn or a tribute, impossible to say. No one else seemed to react. Another reminder: I was a coward.
A woman who looked to be about twenty, with long heavy braids, started singing, impromptu: Amazing Grace. Many people hummed along or swayed, some lowering their phones. Others continued to watch the tigers. The tigers didn’t seem to hear. They scratched behind their ears. They looked out at us.
A few days after visiting the memorial, I opened the camera app to photograph a lumber receipt. I cleared away Jacob’s stuffed animals and set the receipt against the oak kitchen table. I was met by a massive pair of dark, carnivore eyes.
“Shit!” I threw the phone at the threat. It bounced on the linoleum. Nothing was there. I took deep breaths. Everything was still, empty. Just kitchen.
I stooped to pick my phone back up. Melissa came over to see why I had yelled. With her looking over my shoulder, I reopened the camera. First, I pointed it away from the kitchen, toward our front door.
Nothing.
When I swiveled the camera back toward the receipt and the table, though, what had startled me was now clearer. Peeking over the table, toward us: flaring nostrils, the top half of a white tiger’s face. He was tall enough to look at us right over the tabletop. Through the table and chair legs we could see his mass, stretching and collapsing with breath, his muscular hindquarters.
“Jesus,” said Melissa, laughing and hesitant.
“Yeah.”
“Did he follow you home?” Melissa asked. I’d told her about the memorial, in our bed, in the dark. Just the concrete details. She’d wrapped her arms around me.
I smirked at this idea. “I guess?”
“How cool.”
At first I thought this was a laugh, maybe a glitch, a bug, if an intricate and beautiful one, like when my avatar in a videogame walks out onto the empty sky or gets trapped halfway into a wall.
But my tiger persisted.
I followed the tiger as it loped up our staircase. Another day I caught it rolling lazily on the carpet. The AR was more sophisticated than I had thought at first. The tiger explored our house and chose favorite spots. I could reliably find him lying flat under our coffee table, though he was so big that his paws and tail jutted out onto the carpet. Did everyone who went to Dee’s memorial come home with a tiger in their phone, projected into their home and daily routines? Did their tigers snarl at them, too?
In those first few months after Dee died, when I wasn’t sleeping much at night—my thoughts tumbling without insight, scrolling and lurking and laying one hand on the lump of Melissa, phone turned away so the light would not bother her—I sometimes got out of bed to look for the tiger.
I turned on the camera app in the dark; the world was a warm staticky red-gray. If the tiger were asleep he could be very hard to find. But I thought he was probably a nocturnal hunter. So he’d be awake too.
I pointed it at the foot of the bed, as if the tiger were a loyal pet. Of course, he was not there.
I wandered out of the bedroom and into the hall.
That’s where the camera caught his sentinel eyes, peering at me from behind the bookshelf full of melamine plates. His eyes were very still, gleaming like jewels in his dark silhouette, which was barely visible, just a pool of greater darkness.
He was motionless; only his nostrils flaring slightly. Tensed, about to pounce. I stood paralyzed, wanting to run, though I knew he could not hurt me. He’d spotted me. My breath was quick and shallow. I clicked the side of my phone to shut the camera off. I was alone in the empty hall. I leaned against the wall and breathed in deep.
Jacob took naturally to the tiger, figured it out quickly. Perhaps he was already used to friends and miracles appearing in the small periscope of my phone’s screen. He’d tug at my pocket and ask to take my phone out and go tiger hunting. He’d hold the phone as he ran forward or drop it and I’d have to go and wipe it clean of playground mulch, the camera app still on. Curious, I’d swing the phone around until I sighted the white tiger, laying under the swings, lazily batting just a little too slowly at the children and scrunching his nose as they swung just out of reach.
At our place, the tiger played hide and seek. He’d turn up impossibly in a kitchen cabinet, bisected by a plank of wood that his algorithm decided for some reason not to mind, or standing on his hind legs licking at the spot where water might have been running from a showerhead. Jacob would laugh and laugh and go stand in the empty shower too. “Found him!” he’d shriek.
There’s a photo I took of Jacob on one of our summer day trips out to Ship Island where the tiger is squeezed into the frame next to him, squinting into the sun, panting, with his fangs out. His fangs are as big as Jacob’s four-year-old hands. They are almost posing together: Jacob looking up at the camera because I’ve said his name, butt on the ground, digging for clams. Jacob’s face and the tiger’s face are almost touching, though they don’t see each other. Something in the tiger’s programming knows how to make him graze people, hover right next to them, keep the illusion up. It has perfected the use of negative space.
Those days, almost every time I opened my phone’s camera it was to point it at Jacob. Photos of him climbing oak trees featured the tiger, weightless, lounging on a branch above. A tiger swimming behind him in the neighborhood swimming pool. At Disney World, the tiger sniffing Goofy’s asshole, perplexed. Batting at fish in the Georgia Aquarium. I used to send my sister photos of Jacob constantly; to avoid her questions I began to crop the tiger out. The resulting photos had awkward slices of stripes, or muzzle, or tail, indistinguishable to most people but clear to me: the tiger stalking him, stalking me.
When Jacob won bronze at his third-grade science fair, the tiger sat behind him in the photo, massive, stern-faced, ears up. Like some cartoonish family portrait. I couldn’t tell if the tiger was guarding Jacob or menacing him. It irked me.
I just didn’t want a tiger in every photo of my kid. I had not asked for this. I’d left. I’d left Auburn Academy years ago, but the tiger had followed me, followed Jacob. That might be when I started thinking of ways to get rid of the tiger.
There seemed to be no way to turn it off. I tried powering the phone all the way down. I tried uninstalling and reinstalling the camera app. I brought it to the local stores and the clerk, who must have been about Dee’s age, looked at me in bafflement.
Sometimes I thought I had outwaited the tiger, that he had moved on. Then a few minutes later I would spot him, embedded in the back tangles of our overgrown garden, his massive form gently squatting to sniff the jasmine.
I decided to deposit the tiger back where I had found him. I said I was leaving for lunch, and I drove across town to the intersection of Poplar and Nearwater, where the levee and the road meet.
When I got there it was empty. A plastic bag drifted by. Cicadas thrummed, and the few cars that passed rolled by so fast that they tugged at the dense air around them. The sun was high, and the night’s dew was still radiating hot moisture off everything. My tires were loud on the gravel as I pulled over.
Once I parked I pulled out my phone and checked for my tiger. There he was. He loomed hilariously large in the backseat. If he had breath, he would be breathing on the back of my neck. The tiger was looking out the window, raising its nose to smell, but the windows were rolled up. Good, it seemed to want to get out of the car, like a dog at the park. Go, I thought, you’re released.
I had wondered whether the memorial would still be up. It was. The tigers were still on the hill, sunning themselves, unconcerned with me. They had not faded or dispersed, despite the lack of viewers.
I looked over the neighborhood around the intersection: small, hunched houses with short driveways, scraggly trees and persistent crabgrass, the trappings of a suburban neighborhood being overtaken by wilderness. Everything was green and wet. The tigers on their dry yellow hill stood out, alien.
They seemed to be sunning themselves, though it was quite cloudy and threatening rain. Whoever had programmed it had made no allowances for weather. The hill and the tigers were awash in otherworldly light; the grass of the hill was the yellow of the savannah, perpetually. It felt all wrong, foreign, fake.
This wasn’t about Dee at all, I thought. I imagined some young trendy artist, probably not from here, probably full of self-importance, playing with the death of a kid he’d never met as a way of flirting with seriousness, with gravity, trying to give heft to some preconceived concept he’d cooked up in Seattle or wherever. The bits of admiration I’d felt for the memorial turned sour. No art could make Dee’s death better, do enough to mark it. There was no meaning or beauty to be found in something so ugly, so wrong. It was wrong to try.
My tiger loped away from me, toward his comrades on the yellow sunlit hill. He opened his mouth wide in a roar; his neck vibrated with it, but I couldn’t hear anything.
Would Dee have liked the memorial? He liked big projects, big statements. He must have had a thing for tigers I never knew about. He was always doodling. I could picture Dee, never sitting still, clearing his work bench of pine-smelling shavings, his head engulfed in wide plastic safety goggles that made his dreads poke out mad-scientist style above the elastic. Dee’s eyes locked to the circular saw while the rest of him bopped and danced. Someone whispering something to Dee and him shaking his head and laughing, “Nah, breh, it’s not like that.” His puppyish tone, a love of being mocked, passing absurd ideas back and forth with classmates as he made a sloppy box that would never go on to hold anything at all.
Little bits of overheard conversation. Sometimes that’s all I got as a teacher. That and the pieces he made in class: his wooden bowl among the other bowls. His shelf had a drip of Ipswich Pine-colored stain marring it, where he’d applied it too thickly. He hadn’t listened to my warnings. But what did that matter now?
I wished my memories were more substantial, of some significant conversation or mentorship moment. I wish I’d known him better. Steady, I would tell Dee, No goofing with your hands so close to the saw. His hands looked tiny in the thick orange safety gloves, engulfed by them. I remember he would flop his gloves around, grinning at how cartoonish they looked.
Dee once showed me a sketch of something he wanted to make in class. I say “something” because it was not clear what it was. It was not functional: not furniture, or shelves, or a box. It was sculptural, perhaps. Composed of many curves. Maybe, if our school had a lathe, then maybe. I tried to explain to him what a lathe was, and that we couldn’t afford that. It was clear that Dee’s mind was working in a different medium. “Maybe take a pottery class, buddy,” I’d told him.
But Dee was stubborn about it and kept trying to build what his mind saw with our standard 2x4s and jigsaw and circular saw. “I saw a video of someone using a chainsaw. You got one of those?” he asked.
“No. And I wouldn’t let you touch it if I did.”
Dee just laughed at that. Went back to it.
My purview, my scope of time and space with Dee was small. 4th period, Tuesday and Thursday, 1:30 - 2:45 p.m. I didn’t know much, anything really, about Dee outside of the times in woodshop. I scolded Dee once for playing with the wood glue, smearing it on his hands to watch it dry before peeling and picking it away. I had warned him not to waste the lumber. What did I know of wastefulness? Dee should not have trusted me. I did nothing to protect him; I imparted no wisdom. He kept trying to use the circular saw to make his curves, and the way I taught him to do that safely was to relentlessly cut the corners off, over and over again, so that he created a curve compiled of many small straight lines. Quick, controlled, safe cuts. I wish I could see his piece, finished. After he died and I skipped his funeral, I tried once to write a letter to his mother. I’d wanted to give her that unfinished, untitled project. But I never did. Who am I? I thought. What would I have to share, to say?
I don’t even know what happened to it. I left it in the woodshop closet. I turned in my key. Probably it was tossed out into the dumpster with all the other student work that wasn’t brought home.
I hated that I didn’t know where Dee’s piece had gone, that it had been anonymously cast aside, unfinished, that I hadn’t even tried to hold onto it. I only ever saw the drawing, and I never could tell what he was going for. Maybe it didn’t translate into two dimensions very well. But Dee could see it.
I should have kept it. It wouldn’t have made any difference.
It wouldn’t be enough. I should have kept it.
That day at the memorial, Dee remained gone. His thoughts were inaccessible.
I realized I could not tell which tiger was mine. I felt nauseous, being so near the tigers but not able to tell which was the one that lived with us in our house, playing hide and seek with Jacob. Jacob; Jacob would be furious at me for losing him. I started walking quickly around the hill, holding my phone in front of me, waving it around.
The tigers on the hill looked placidly back at me, or past me, and licked their paws. I tried to compare them through my camera’s lens. Was there some familiar mannerism mine had adopted? Was he sticking nearer to me than those others? How could I not know him?
I tried a desperate experiment. I started to walk away from the hill. I went slow. I used the camera’s selfie mode to peer over my own shoulder, back at the memorial.
I hoped, and sure enough, one of the tigers watched me go. He stilled, then rose, descended the slope, leaving the gathering of his fellows and the warm unreality to pace after me at a distance of many yards. I was so grateful for his predatory stalk. I couldn’t be sure it was the same tiger, but why would it not be? Of course, he couldn’t be jettisoned so easily. He got in the car with me. I wanted to put the seat belt on him. But of course, I could not.
Now I routinely borrow Melissa’s phone to photograph finished dressers and consoles and tables, to avoid the befuddling white tigers in my marketing materials. My tiger has followed me across three new phones, syncing along with all my other data. Even when I do use my own phone camera to take a picture of something, I sometimes don’t even notice the tiger, at first. In the framed photos of our Belize caving trip, just curling into the edge of the photo, a striped black and white tail.
It is 1:38 a.m., and Jacob still hasn’t made it back yet. I check his bedroom: no tiger. I pace the hallways.
The tiger has to be here somewhere. I start to look outside. Maybe it is hunting. Exploring.
It is a warm August night. No wonder Jacob wants to be out in it. I push aside the banana plant leaves and look in our backyard. Nothing. I look under the house. I swing open our squeaky iron front gate.
I’m out front when a car pulls up. It is Jacob, home, getting dropped off. His eyes are bleary, his hair is mussy. He might be a little drunk. I wave at the kid who is in the driver’s seat.
I think of how the rules are so quickly changing. I used to be furious if Jacob would ever skip class. But now I find myself saying, clumsily: “It’s okay to take a day now and then.” What I want to tell him is “Do whatever you need to do to get away from what hurts you, to solve the puzzle of staying alive, to find a way.” The things that threaten him might be things I can’t even see. I worry about depression, drugs, heartache, car accidents. All the things I told Dee would keep him safe did not: the finger safeties on the spinning saw, the gloves, the goggles, the bells, the locks on the door. I was his teacher, the adult, and I could not keep him safe. I cannot keep anything safe.
I put my phone away to talk to my son, who is sorry, so sorry for making me wait up. He leans on me. I hug him. “We’ll talk later,” I tell him. I watch him go up the front steps, open the door, clumsily, but trying to keep quiet.
That’s when I see the tiger.
My white tiger is on the roof, framed by the power lines and moony clouds. He is like an absurdly large weathervane, or crowning gargoyle. Maybe he was waiting up, watching out for Jacob, too.
Or else he is just enjoying the warm night. He is hunched over, sitting in the company of the gray cat from next door, who is lifting her feet one by one and cleaning them. My tiger absent-mindedly mimics this behavior.
I watch them like that for a while, licking their paws in parallel play.
I watch a moment longer, until the gray cat pounces down nimbly onto a nearby fence, then out of sight. My tiger watches intently. He tenses, then lowers himself as if to jump down and follow the cat.
They say algorithms learn. Maybe my tiger is interpreting this feline outline, mimicking it, learning from the cat, learning how to be something else rather than a memorial, something wild.
I bet he sticks the landing and leaps over the fence and out. Jacob has gone to bed, but I wait up a little longer, for the tiger to make it back, too. I think his territory is growing. But I know he is not gone.
The first time it happens is at a grocery store, a few weeks after spotting the tiger on my roof. I feel a tap on my shoulder, tentative and polite.
“Excuse me,” says a man. I turn around. I am facing a Black man with a grocery basket full of yogurt. He is wearing bracelets that jangle up and down his wrists and a polo with the logo of the bank down the street. I’ve never seen him before, I don’t think, but he wants to show me something on his phone, is already reaching to hold its screen toward me.
Two tigers stalk the freezer aisle, batting at each other. Mine is the lankier one, by just a little, and has a closer pattern of stripes across his muzzle. Their tails are high as they circle each other, a mixture of wariness and fascination at having found each other.
“Is that yours?” the man asks. He is wary, unsure.
I hesitate.
I hold my phone up too, and sure enough, see the same scene.
“Yes,” I say. I turn my phone to show the man.
The tigers bound between the Push Pops and the toaster strudels. A woman unknowingly rushes her cart through them.
We are both smiling, first at the tigers, then at each other. We have a shared mystery, a different layer of reality we carry with us. I set down my basket. We step aside to let the other shoppers through. We watch the tigers until one follows the other around the corner and toward the cereal aisle.
He tells me his name is Bruce. He is the first to lower his phone and he asks me the same question I will ask others as our tigers keep finding each other in the years that come, the question that I will keep asking myself: “So, who was Dee to you?”
