“The tiger has many stripes” -The Sea Lion
The largely sea lion looking Herve Burton first met the lovely eyed Loretta Lonely Legs after being virtually introduced to her mother, Margaret Winters, a handsome, capable woman who was supposed to be good for him.
Herve would never have met Loretta if it wasn’t for his so-snoopy friends, Berceuse and Ostinato, who told him that he was beginning to blubber up. The transformation from the handsome, lionhearted young man that they once knew in undergraduate school into the big, old sea lion of mid-life was not yet complete. They advised him to turn the television off, vacate the couch and start dating again. There was still time to save himself, they said.
Herve disagreed, though he understood their point of view. If Herve was one of them, he’d bounce back without question. But he was not. Herve was Herve, and even more so since Karen, his wife of twenty years, left him, saying that she and Herve had grown apart.
“You’re wrong,” Herve remembered saying when Karen told him how she felt. “The truth is we’ve grown too much together. We know what to expect from each other, and when to expect it. But don’t you think that that’s the way it’s supposed to be? We should leave the drama to the millennials. Who needs it? I don’t and neither should you.”
“But I do need it, Herve,” Karen declared haughtily. “I need the drama to know that I’m alive. With you I feel pre-dead. The rigor mortis just hasn’t set in yet.”
The next day Karen was gone, and Herve found himself alone in his downtown Jersey City apartment. He was surprised to find that there really wasn’t that much difference in being on his own. He ate much less healthfully. Salmon, spinach and broccoli gave way to fried chicken, pizza, and potato chips, which he consumed at an alarming rate. He increased his intake of chocolate-covered treats, especially peanut clusters as they went particularly well with beer.
His nights were, otherwise, about the same. He watched TV until he got tired, then he went to bed. The hard part came with those first few uncomfortable minutes lying alone in the darkness. But he was asleep soon enough. The next day he got up early, as usual. He got ready, and walked to the Grove Street PATH station to catch the train into lower Manhattan, on his way to Humbert & Humbert, the financial agency where he’d worked as an accountant for the past twenty years.
One night when the television was particularly bad, Herve picked his smart phone up from where it had been resting in Karen’s now vacant spot beside him on the coach. He started skimming through emails. There was nothing very interesting. Mostly ads from Joseph A. Bank, Capital One, Chase Freedom and Hotels.Com. So he went to Facebook where his friends had been busy posting adorable pictures of their grandchildren, friendly looking dogs, and cuddly cute kittens.
“Nothing,” he said to himself, sighing deeply.
He went to the People You May Know section. Who are these people, he wondered. He didn’t recognize any of them. Like who is this Craig Farmington, he asked himself. He tapped on the picture of the randomly selected nondescript face. He saw then that Craig went to NYU where Herve had gotten his Masters in business. Still he did not recognize him, so he scrolled down to check out Craig’s friends to see if there were any familiar faces there. He zeroed in on a photo of a woman with big blue eyes and wavy brown hair. Without thinking, he tapped on the photo. A picture of the woman in a hot pink string bikini popped up. If Herve’s remarkably large rear end had not been so firmly planted in the sagging cushion of the brown leather coach, he’d have fallen off his seat. He looked at her name. Gloria Funshine.
“That’s made up,” he said to himself with a little chuckle.
He scrolled down and saw several more photos of the woman posing in different outfits. Then he looked at her friends. They were mostly men, but there was one photo of a pretty woman with shiny black hair. Herve clicked on the picture. There were more eye-catching pictures, and interesting friends. He kept clicking on the photos, each one like a window looking in on another life. Each friend’s face was another window. Windows within windows, he thought, lives within lives.
Great name for a cyber soap opera, he mused, as he continued to click on face after face. There were old men in cowboy hats, young body builders showing off their muscles. Fashonistas dripped in jewels and high fashion. A microbiologist posed with his microscope.
A woman dressed up like a zombie in another picture. There were a plethora of happy looking couples. A number of people had posted pictures of their pets instead of themselves. Betty Sorenson was a floppy eared cocker spaniel. Joe White was a gold fish.
Herve opened up so many profile pictures that he forgot which was the original that had led him through the cyber stream of faces. He began to suspect that it really didn’t matter, that clicking on any one of them would eventually lead him to see all faces. All of humanity, he concluded, could be found behind any one face.
That was the beginning of Herve’s new life. From there it was a short trip to an electronic universe where life, for Herve, was anything but boring. He no longer felt bound by his blubbering body or mediocre personality. Herve no longer felt like Herve.
He continued to compulsively scroll through profile pictures, occasionally pausing on the particularly attractive, expressive or grotesque. There were faces of all ages, genders and ethnicities. The face of a swarthy middle-aged man with bushy black hair, thickly browed dark eyes, and a scruffy goatee popped up. The ruddy complected face hovered over the image of a leaping tiger with a bright blue body, and jet black stripes. As he continued his random cyber crawl, he noticed that the Blue Tiger kept turning up in the friend section on the timelines of pretty, young women.
Blue Tiger seemed to be following the same women that, before he knew it, Herve found himself following. He clicked on the photo of Blue Tiger but there was no information listed so Herve had no clues as to what kind of a person he might be. Later, he got a notice saying that Blue Tiger had accepted his friendship.
“Damn,” Herve thought, “I must have inadvertently hit the Add button.”
He started getting notices about people that Blue Tiger had friended. He clicked on the photos. They were all beautiful women. Just for the hell of it, Herve friended a few of them. When, to his surprise, they all accepted his friendship, he friended a few more. Before he knew what happened he had a hundred new friends.
As he streamed through the People You May Know pictures one evening, he was suddenly stopped dead in his tracks as the photo of the radiant girl who called herself Loretta Lonely Legs jumped out at him. He clicked on the fetching image, and her page popped up. He scrolled through lean, green-eyed pictures of the slightly dressed long blonde beauty. He clicked the add button in the same way that he might have selected a must-have item to place in his Amazon shopping cart. Scrolling though her featured friends, Herve saw Blue Tiger, and felt a sudden disgust. Was he turning into what he was beginning to understand Blue Tiger to be? Was he, too, now, becoming some kind of freaky cyber predator?
He turned off his smart phone, and clicked on the television. He went back to his old routine. Everything seemed okay until one night when he could not fall asleep. He looked at the time on his phone. One AM. He opened Facebook. A big smile spread across his face as he saw that Loretta had accepted his friend request.
A week later, his old college friend, Ostinato, virtually introduced him to Margaret Winters. As Herve scrolled through Margaret’s friends, he was stunned to see a picture of the beautiful Loretta Lonely Legs dressed in a below-the-knees conservative skirt and long-sleeved blouse. He tapped on the photo and saw a profile page for Loretta Winters.
There was a resemblance between Margaret and Loretta that Herve noticed immediately. The heart-shaped face, the bright green eyes and the long blonde hair were the same. He was, therefore, not surprised to learn from posts on Margaret’s timeline that Loretta was her daughter.
“Nice to virtually meet you,” Herve private messaged Margaret. “Ozzy tells me you went to Clark in the nineties?”
Yes,” Margaret messaged back. “That’s where I met him, and Bercy, too, of course.”
“Me too,” Herve replied. “I’m surprised we never met. What was your major?”
“Psychology,” Margaret messaged, “with a minor in Comparative Literature. How ‘bout you?”
“English Literature with a minor in Philosophy,” Herve wrote.
‘Ii’s strange we never ran into each other in English House,” Margaret replied.
“It is at that,” Herve agreed.
The two went on to text about the classes that they took, their favorite professors, and what writers and thinkers.they liked the best. They made their way from Herman Melville to Herman Hess, William Shakespeare to William Faulkner, Toni Morrison to Virginia Woolf, Gabriel Garcia Marquez to Jorge Luis Borges. They mentioned Socrates and Descartes, Hobbs and Heidegger, Kierkegaard and Niche. When the virtual dialogue finally arrived at Carl Jung, Herve mustered the courage to ask Margaret out.
“I would love to meet you in reality, that most glorious of all imaginary worlds,” he wrote in the floweriest language that he thought that he could get away with in an electronic message.
“Ha, ha,” Margaret wrote back. “I’ve heard a lot about reality. I’ve always wanted to visit there one day.”
“Really?” said Herve, keeping the joke alive. “I was born there.”
“Were you?” Margaret messaged. “So you’re a real person?”
“Well, I was at one time,” Herve texted. “Of course I’m mostly virtual now.”
“I understand,” Margaret said. “It’s hard keeping it real these days.”
“It is” Herve replied. “While I might not be real anymore, I’m sure that reality hasn’t changed all that much since I left it. If you want, I could show you around the old neighborhood.”
“I don’t know,” Margaret messaged. “That seems like a big step. What about we start with dinner and work our way up from there?”
“Perfect,” Herve said. “I know just the place. The food is fantastic, the atmosphere ethereal.”
“Sounds just right,” said Margaret.
So that Friday, they went to dinner at The Garden of Forks and Knives, a whimsical TriBeCa eatery that resembled a magical, moonlit garden. The charming establishment was replete with glowing cellophane flowers growing from glittering plastic bushes.
Margaret and Herve followed a paving stone path to an iron table, its pink and green legs wrought in the shape of a blooming rose bush. Knives and forks were placed in a vase at the center of the table. They found the French Vietnamese cuisine to be just as magical as the atmosphere, and the Chablis that they drank with it heavenly.
“Fantastic and ethereal,” Margaret exclaimed, “just as you promised!”
“I never lie,” Herve said. “Except in reality.”
“Well, then, I’m glad we aren’t going there tonight,” Margaret remarked.
“Me too,” Herve agreed.
“I can imagine,” Margaret said. “What in the world would an English slash philosophy major do in reality anyway?”
“He’d go to business school,” Herve said with a sigh.
“So. in reality, you’re a businessman?” Margaret asked.
“Nope,” said Herve. “I’m an accountant.”
“Oh,” Margaret exclaimed, “how did that happen?”
“I’m never sure just exactly how anything happens in reality,” Herve answered honestly.
“I know what you mean,” Margaret replied. “I’m a psychology major who somehow ended up working at a bank.”
“Yes, reality is a strange place” Herve remarked, shaking his head.
“Sure is!” said Margaret, raising up her glass of Chablis in a toast. “Here’s to a totally unrealistic evening!”
“To the unreal” Herve toasted, clinking his glass against Margaret’s.
As they finished eating dinner, their conversation continued to float delightfully up above the real world. At the end of the evening, they agreed to meet again, sealing the deal with a goodnight kiss at the PATH station where Herve caught the train back to Jersey City.
On their second date, Margaret invited Herve back to her home, a quaint little red colonial in Dobbs Ferry, a short Metro North train ride up from the city where, after sharing a glass of 18 year old MacAllen, they made love. It was wonderful, not just because Herve had not had sex in the year and a half since Karen left him. There was something about the way that they moved together that seemed not only natural but somehow inevitable. He and Margaret, whose spouse had also recently divorced her, had made a deep connection.
“Is this reality?” Margaret asked with a satisfied smile as she stretched and yawned.
“This is magical reality,“ Herve replied, running his fingers through Margaret’s long, yellow hair.
“It is dreamlike” Margaret admitted, giving Herve one more kiss before the two curled up close and fell asleep.
Herve opened his eyes a few hours later, feeling wide awake. He got up, and went to the bathroom. On his way back to bed, she appeared like a dream of pure beauty come to life right there in the hallway at the top of the stairs.
The lovely eyed Loretta Lonely Legs, wearing a pair of pink pajamas that were embroidered with a pattern of furry blue kittens batting around a ball of black yarn, stood there blinking at the paralyzed pre-sea lion. Now that he saw her in the real world, Herve thought that she looked much younger than her profile picture suggested. He felt ashamed.
“Loretta Lonely Legs,” he stammered, before he could stop himself.
“What?” Loretta said, turning up her nose to make a ferociously fussy face as she sent a swift knee slamming into Herve’s testicles.
“Shit!” Herve cried, grabbing his crotch as he fell to the floor in agony.
Loretta stepped over him with icy, defiant ease, as if she’d done this sort of thing a million times before. Herve dragged himself off the floor and went back to bed. He stayed awake the rest of the night, feeling guilty, wrestling with the idea of confessing to Margaret, before finally deciding against it.
“After all,” he told himself, “I’ve done nothing wrong.”
In the morning he unfriended Loretta. His relationship with Margaret went on without disruption. They began spending most of their time together at Margaret’s place in Dobbs Ferry. Loretta was seldom home, and when she was, she stayed in her room with the door closed. In time, she got used to the idea of having Herve around, though, and began coming downstairs once in a while to watch television with her mother and her mother’s somewhat sea lion-like new friend. Herve settled in to a very comfortable routine. Finally, he had the deep feeling of belonging that he’d always imagined came with a family of one’s own.
Then, without warning, Loretta disappeared.
Margaret contacted the police and an investigation ensued. They could find no clues as to the whereabouts of Loretta, but Herve knew where to look. Later that night, after Margaret was asleep, he picked up his smart phone, went to Facebook, and clicked on her page. Nothing had changed. There were no new messages, no new photos. He sighed, and began clicking on the faces of her friends. Nothing led to nothing until he clicked on Blue Tiger’s face. And there she was posing in a cheap-looking motel room. She was wearing a tiger stripped bra. Standing beside her, dressed all in black, was the pudgy, gloating old fucker himself.
I should report this, thought Herve, closing out of Facebook, clicking on the phone symbol, and dialing 911. He hesitated before hitting the send button. What logical explanation could he give for knowing Blue Tiger? There isn’t any, he thought, putting down the phone, and going back to bed where he experienced another sleepless night.
In the morning, they appeared in another post. This time Loretta was wearing a leopard skin mini skirt. Blue Tiger was, again, dressed in black. They were standing at the top of Montmartre near Sacre-Coeur. All of Paris stretched out behind them.
He isn’t even trying to hide, Herve thought, shaking his head as he private messaged Blue Tiger.
“You know what you’re doing isn’t right, don’t you?”
“Ya, sure,” Blue Tiger commented back. “If it was, I wouldn’t do it. Of course it will all fuck up in the end, but that’s just part of the fun. Without death, life would be a total drag.”
“She’s just a child,” Herve messaged back.
“We were all children once,” Blue Tiger mocked.
“If you’ve got a shred of decency, you’ll let het go,” Herve wrote.
“Oh, she can go anytime she wants,” Blue Tiger messaged. “Now are you going to calm down or should I defriend you?”
“Don’t do that, friend,” Herve wrote, afraid that he would lose the only thread that might lead him to Loretta, “I’m good.”
“No, you’re not good!” Blue Tiger messaged. “You’re as bad as I am. You’re just jealous it isn’t you!”
“Sure,” Herve replied, playing along.
“So just relax and enjoy the show!” Blue Tiger wrote.
“Ok,” Herve texted.
Over the next several weeks, Herve tracked a whirlwind of posts from Blue Tiger. In one, they appeared to be standing in front of the Kremlin in Moscow. Loretta was wearing a pink polka dot dress. Blue Tiger was dressed in black. In another, they were somewhere in the middle east. Loretta was dressed in a long white gown with blue sparkly flowers. Blue Tiger was dressed in black.
Finally, he saw that they were in Morocco. He recognized the Hotel Erfoud le Riad where he and Karen had stayed on a trip that they had taken to North Africa in 2000.
Herve knew what he had to do. He had plenty of vacation time saved up, not having taken any time off since Karen left him. So, telling Margaret that he had to go on a business trip to the firm’s North African branch, while telling his employers that he had a family emergency, Herve scheduled vacation time, and headed for Morocco.
He rented a green Renault at the Casablanca airport and began driving south, past Rabat, through miles of olive groves, rolling hills and grassy plains. Up into green valleys where nomadic Berbers pitched black sheep skin tents between rocky peaks of the Middle Atlas Mountains. He swerved south, down twisty mountain roads to low stony hills. He arrived in the desert just as the sun began to set over the blazing Sahara. Driving into the town of Erfoud at dusk, he caught a sudden glimpse of Loretta, her radiance outshining the spectacular desert sunset.
Parking the car across the street from the little outdoor cafe where she was sitting, sipping tea with Blue Tiger, Herve sat and watched. He followed them when they left in a gray Peugeot that Blue Tiger drove down the dusty road leading out of town to the Erfoud le Riad, a huge palace of a hotel set out in the desert.
A few minutes after watching them go in, Herve booked a room at the hotel, where he planned to wait for a chance to get Loretta alone so that he could persuade her to come back with him without having to confront Blue Tiger. It wasn’t that he was afraid of the paunchy little devil. He just found physical conflict unsavory and embarrassing. And he didn’t care to end up in a Moroccan prison should things get out of hand.
The bell hop, a middle-aged man with very serious eyes that made him look far too intelligent to be a mere bell hop, escorted Herve through the great halls of the hotel. The motion activated lighting clicked on as they passed through the dark recesses of the palatial estate, revealing colorful rugs and elaborate tapestries. Once the bell hop left him in his modest accommodation, Herve, realizing, that he had not slept in two days collapsed on the comfortable bed and immediately fell asleep.
He dreamt about a blue tiger with black stripes walking slowly toward him across the stony desert. When the tiger stopped a few inches from Herve’s face, and roared, Herve woke with a start. He didn’t know what time it was. Hot got up, grabbed his room key off the table by the window. As he stepped out of his room, the light in the hallway immediately clicked on. He walked down to the end of the hall, then down another hall, lights clicking on as he made his way, clicking off behind him, a few seconds after he passed.
There seemed to be no one in the whole place. Finally he came across a room way on the other side of the hotel where a sliver of light escaped from under the door. He noted that the room number was 235. Herve later learned from a skinny young man at the front desk that a pair of American tourists, a father and his daughter, who the clerk described with a big smile as a beautiful gazelle, were the only other guests of the hotel.
So Herve waited in the lobby every day, for Loretta and Blue Tiger to show themselves. On the third day, he saw them walk out of the hotel. He followed them as they drove the Peugeot down a road that was no more than a series of tire tracks in the sand. They ended up at the Kasbah Hotel, a modest facility made to look like an old stucco fortress that stood near the spectacular sand dunes of Erg Chebbi, a vast, phantom world of smooth orange sand rolling off into the ever-receding horizon.
Blue Tiger parked. He and Loretta got out of the car, and went into the hotel. Herve parked at a distance, facing the car towards the hotel entrance so that he could see when Loretta and Blue Tiger came out. As he waited, a full moon rose, painting the dunes bright blue. Enchanted, Herve got out of the car and climbed into the indigo dunes, noting the wind-carved ripples that looked like black tiger stripes in the blue powdery sand. He sat down on the side of a dune that gave him a decent vantage on the Kasbah. An hour or so later, he heard Loretta’s voice. Then he saw her walking with Blue Tiger, and a small group of men and women, up into the dunes. They were carrying a cooler and several folding chairs. Blue Tiger said something to them in French, and they all laughed.
Herve followed from what he considered a safe distance. He watched from the top of a high dune as they walked to a deep cove in between a pair of ultra tall dunes. They dropped the cooler, unfolded their chairs, and sat down. Herve watched as they drank champagne that they poured into red cups, and dined on various delicacies that they removed from the cooler, and placed on paper plates.
A shadow passed over him as he crouched in the sand. When he turned to see what was causing it, he saw the ghostly apparition of an old Arabic gentleman with a long white beard walking slowly towards him in the blue moonlight. He was dressed in a flowing white burnoose, and seemed to be talking to the dunes as if they could understand him.
“They are listening,” he said, looking at Herve with big, sad eyes.
“Who is listening?” Herve asked. “The dunes?”
“No,” the old man said, as he reached down to caress the smooth powder as if it was the soft cheek of a beautiful woman. “The people who are buried beneath them.”
“Who are they?” Herve asked before he could stop himself.
“Those who live, have lived or will live,” the old man said cryptically. “Time is the teeth in the face behind all faces.”
“Well, thank you for that, but I’ve got some thinking to do right now and I always think best when I’m alone,” Herve said in a futile attempt to rid himself of the lunatic. “So if you don’t mind…”
Completely ignoring Herve’s less than subtle brush off, the old man cleared his throat, and launched into a story about the dunes being created by an angry god who had buried a group of wealthy families beneath them. It seems that the well off inhabitants of the region had ignited the wrath of this god by refusing to provide shelter to a poor, homeless woman wandering through the desert with her small son.
After telling the tale, the old man asked for bakshish, a small payment, which Herve gladly paid so that he could be done with him, and get back to his surveillance.
“Chokran, sidi” the old man said, bowing slightly before walking slowly away into the dunes.
Herve returned his gaze to the revelers below, who were now smoking a pipe that they passed between them. Herve could smell the sweet, noxious fragrance of hashish drifting on a slight breeze. He watched as they drank more champagne, this time directly from bottles that, like the pipe, they passed between them.
Eventually, they got up and started walking. Herve followed as they stumbled through the sand dunes, laughing, under the brilliant blue sky, which started to turn pink at the edges as the moon began to set. A few minutes later, the sun appeared red faced as if embarrassed to interrupt the magnificent night. Flamboyantly waving goodnight to the others just after sunrise, Blue Tiger grabbed Loretta’s hand, pulling her into the Peugeot. One of their moon party pals, a slim, dark haired young woman who was so stoned that she could barely walk, hopped in beside them. Herve followed as they drove back to the le Riad. The three staggered in each other’s arms, laughing and singing their way up to room 235.
It was around noon the next day that Herve, keeping watch in the lobby, saw Loretta leaving the hotel. Her head was bowed as she slid past the front desk and out into the bright day. Herve got up immediately and went after her.
“Loretta!” he cried as he watched her cross the street into the desert. She ignored him, and kept walking at a brisk pace. Herve crossed the street, and followed her into the desert. Given his pre-sea lion status, however, he was unable to keep up with Loretta who was swiftly disappearing from his view.
“Wait!” he shouted as he watched her vanish over the distant horizon, her long blonde hair blending with the sun and the dunes until it seemed that she was a part of them. Any evidence of her ever having existed, then, was completely gone. She might have been just a cyber dream now returned to that other, ethereal space.
If I don’t stop her from walking off alone into the desert, Herve thought, she won’t survive, and I’ll be no better than the wealthy people from the old man’s story who wouldn’t help the wandering, homeless woman and her son.
“I’m here to save you!” he cried to the empty horizon, but even he didn’t believe that it was true. He just wanted to prove to himself that there was a girl named Loretta and a man who called himself Blue Tiger, that it wasn’t just something he’d dreamt up while browsing through profile pictures on Facebook.
So he hurried back to le Riad, got into his rental car, and drove off road, into the desert. In a few minutes, the wheels got stuck in the deep yellow sand, and he had to walk back to the hotel to get help. The very serious looking bell hop who seemed to work twenty-four hours a day and the skinny, still smiling front desk clerk followed him into the desert, and pushed his car out of the sand.
“Chokran,” he said, giving them each baksish.
“No more desert surfing for you, sidi!” the very serious looking bell hop said.
“No,” Herve replied, allowing his rescuers to think that he was driving in the sand for the sport of it, since he had no idea how they would react if he told them the truth. The three of them got in the car and Herve drove back to the hotel.
Leaving the bell hop and clerk at the front desk, Herve took the stairs up to the second floor. He walked down the hall to room 235, took a deep breath, then tried the door, which he was a little surprised to find unlocked. He pushed it open, and went in.
There was Blue Tiger, sitting naked, slouched over, his head on his flabby chest, his hands folded over his paunchy belly.
He really is blue, Herve thought, noting the sickly tone of Blue Tiger’s skin. And yet he looks nothing like a tiger. Why would Loretta go off with someone like this, he wondered. What’s the attraction?
Though it was perhaps not the answer, he got an answer of a kind when turning, he saw a bloody syringe sticking out of the arm of the French girl who, lying naked on the bed, was also tinged blue. Herve felt her wrist. Cold.
He walked across the room to check Blue Tiger’s pulse. The moment he touched him, Blue Tiger lurched forward, his mouth gaping, his eyes opening wide in terror. It was only a few seconds, though, before he collapsed back in the chair, his face frozen in a silent scream. Herve let go of the dead man’s hand.
It occurred to him, in that instant, that, although he had known him online for some time, until that morning, he had never met Blue Tiger in the flesh. He didn’t even know his real name. The reality of his death seemed somehow diminished by this fact.
Herve did not recall leaving the hotel or driving all the way to Casablanca. The next thing that he knew he was on a plane heading back to the states. When he got home, Margaret told him that the police wanted to ask him a few more questions.
Herve became a little concerned when they asked him to accompany them to the police station. Was he a suspect?
They asked him to tell them again about his relationship with Margaret and Loretta, and went on, then, to inquire about his business trip. Herve blurted out the truth, telling them everything up to Erfoud where he said that he lost Loretta’s trail, and so returned home. The police, who immediately contacted the authorities in Morocco to check on Herve’s story, learned about the two dead bodies in the room at the le Riad.
“We don’t want you to jump to conclusions,” one of the officer’s, a tall man with bloodshot eyes that had a look of perpetual worry to them, as if they’d seen too much to ever expect anything but the worst, told Margaret. “But I think you should know that one of the bodies they found belonged to a young woman about Loretta’s age.”
Margaret, who, of course, immediately jumped to conclusions, was relieved to learn that the dead girl in the hotel room was a French national. The skinny desk clerk and serious looking bell hop at the le Riad reported seeing the beautiful gazelle walk out of the hotel room one morning and never coming back. No one seemed to have seen Loretta anywhere after that.
“You lied to me,” Margaret said, confronting Herve after the police told her about his online friendship with her daughter.
“No,” Herve replied in a voice shaken by the realization that his world was about to fall apart. “I withheld a painful truth. I’m sorry.”
“Get out of my house,” Margaret commanded.
“I know it was wrong, but I was just…” Herve started trying to account for his behavior, which he really didn’t understand himself.
“Get out!” Margaret cried before Herve could finish his sentence.
So Herve went back to his Jersey City apartment. Once again, his evenings were spent alone, sitting on the couch, with his iPhone beside him, watching TV.
It was ok until he went to bed, and found himself alone, again, in the darkness. After Karen left him, he was able to escape the lonely feeling that came over him at bed time by simply drifting off to sleep, but sleep no longer offered solace. He had a nightmare every night that started the moment that he closed his eyes, and lasted until he opened them again the next morning. The nightmare was always the same.
It consisted of a blue tiger with black stripes walking slowly towards him through what seemed an infinite darkness. Each time the tiger’s yellow glowing eyes met his, they lit up, in his mind, the bright idea to count its stripes, and arrive at an exact number.
“Nothing is more frightening than the unknown,” he said to himself. “But there is a mathematical solution to all mysteries.”
So armed with numeracy, he set out to account for the tiger. He was convinced that assigning an exact numeric value to its inventory of stripes would tame and restrain its wild nature. The closer the tiger got to him, however, the less well-defined its stripes became. They spread across its back, its tail, its face and its legs until it became not a tiger at all, but the shadow of a tiger. Herve saw as the shadow merged into the general darkness, that its eyes were not eyes but stars in the cold distance of the night sky.
The nightmare continued to recur each evening until one night when he dreamt those eyes that were stars falling over the edge of the horizon.
The next morning, he rolled out of bed, got ready and went to work. On the way home, he stopped at a Seven Eleven, and bought a big box of chocolate covered donuts. When he got home, he changed into his bathrobe, plopped himself down on the couch, and turned on the TV. Opening the box of donuts, he began to slowly devour the delectable treats.
It wasn’t long after that that Herve became addicted to donuts, which he ate by the dozen, washing them down with glasses of ice cold vodka. Soon his transformation into a sea lion was complete. He didn’t mind, though. He was glad to be back to his old self. He even changed his Facebook profile picture to an actual sea lion.
About a year later, Herve was scrolling through Facebook when he saw a picture of Loretta. He dropped his donut on the floor. Pauline, a mutual friend, posted a picture of herself with Loretta standing in the desert between two dark-skinned men with long beards who were dressed all in black. The men had assault rifles. Loretta was also holding a gun.
“My God, she poisoned them!” Herve cried as it occurred to him that Loretta was not the innocent victim of a kidnapping, but the devious perpetrator of a murder.
It was only then that he understood the meaning of his dream. The tiger was not the one to be feared. It was the shadow of the tiger that was the real monster. And Loretta was the shadow.
Herve took a sip of his vodka. He told himself that in the morning, when he sobered up, he would call the police. But the morning came and went, and Herve did not call the police.
He was up to two dozen donuts a night by the time he saw a picture of Loretta and Pauline again. They were posing with two other men with long beards and assault rifles. This time they were white men wearing jeans and plaid shirts. A confederate flag was hung on the wall behind them.
Six years passed before he saw another picture of Loretta. He didn’t recognize her at first. She had put on some weight in this picture, and was standing alone, holding a new born baby in her arms. She looked beautiful, but it was a laid back, homey kind of beauty. The edgy, alluring creature that Herve had known in years past was gone.
“The fires of youth have dwindled,” Herve said to himself. ”But what the hell, she looks happy.”
Convinced that it was better to live virtually from the comfort of his couch, Herve, who had switched, a few years back, from donuts to banana cream pies, eating five to six pies in a sitting, told himself that he was satisfied with his life. He was glad that he had stopped drinking vodka, and gone back to beer. Beer made him happy. He was happy.
END
“Dan Belanger has had stories published in Tigershark, Dark Matter, Home Planet News, Mobius, The Milo Review, Bellowing Ark, City Primeval, Lynx Eye, RE:AL and the Art Times. He leads a quality improvement program aimed at improving HIV healthcare and ending the HIV epidemic in NYS. He has an MSW degree from Hunter College and a Bachelor’s Degree in English Literature from Clark Univeesity.”
