Burning Bright
By Anjali Parasnis-Samar

 

I looked into the snarling yellow eyes of the creature sitting before me and knew a little of what it felt like to be a primitive man, long before the time when we had guns to shoot these things and zoos to cage them. Beneath longwhiskers, its lips were cleaved into a menacing smile that left no doubt about how far it was prepared to go to get what it wanted. But what did it want?

“I want fur,” it told me, in a deep but distinctly feminine growl. “Everywhere.”

I lowered my gaze to the paperclip I was flicking back and forth on my desk. “That would be a difficult procedure.”

“I know,” it said.

“This kind of surgery has been legal only for a few years, and it’s never been done before over the whole body.”

“I know,” it said.
           
“It would be painful, and I don’t know how long it would take to heal or if it’s even possible.”
           
“I know,” it said.
           
For a few moments, the only sound was the slight rattle of the paperclip on the table. And then the creature said in a gently resonating voice, “I’ve heard about your research using synthetic fibers to create hair on people. Can’t you adapt it to this?”
           
I forced myself to look it in the eyes, even though the black and orange stripes ornamenting its face distracted and disturbed me. “Yes. But this will be very expensive, you know. And there may be legal difficulties.”
           
The eyes and mouth made a graceful gesture of dismissal. “I have money,” it said. “Enough to pay you and all the lawyers I need.”
           
That was true enough. I knew it had money, or it never would have made it into my office. And I’d known something of what it wanted, too, before it came in the door. The only real reason for this conversation was to buy me time. I hadn’t decided what I wanted to do yet. Sure, it was a strange request, but there was something poetic about the Tigress. And besides, I’d gotten plenty of strange requests in my time. A woman had walked into my office one day with a baby doll and said, “Make my face look like this.” I had no idea why a woman would want to look like a baby, but I’d done it and it had made her happy, or so she said.

Would this make the Tigress happy? The Tigress was no kid out trying to make a statement. It was nearly fifty, an experienced and self-confident—woman. Yes, it was a woman, though it was hard for me to think of it having a gender. I tried to imagine it—her—as a mother, a daughter, a wife, a girlfriend, but I just couldn’t see it. The thought of the Tigress at a parent-teacher conference made me suppress a smile, and then a shudder.

No, it was—she was—a woman, a human, and I would see her as a person. I would empathize. That was my job, and that was the only way I was going to be able to decide what I wanted to do.

The operation was well within my grasp, and would probably get me a lot of publicity, which was never a bad thing. But what if I gave the Tigress what she wanted and then she found out she didn’t want it? Like that kid Cheetah Boy who’d been all over the news a few years back.

Cheetah Boy had gone to another surgeon with what he said was his innermost wish, to have fur on his face. He was something of a cult phenomenon, and he always traveled somewhere with one or two buddies with spotted markings on their faces, though never as many as on his. He was the charismatic son of rich and troubled parents, and a beacon of self-expression for misunderstood youth everywhere. Charmed by his bizarre, impulsive idea, the doctor had adapted some research similar to what I was doing and figured out how to give him fur. Of course, the doctor had questioned him extensively, but in the end, Cheetah Boy had gotten his wish.

Then Cheetah Boy went home with his newly applied fur and found his girlfriend wasn’t able to sleep next to him at night. She wouldn’t even kiss him. He’d always liked being stared at in the street but there was something different about the stares he received now, something hostile and frightening. He found he had crossed an invisible line between weird and unacceptable. His gaggle of teenage followers began to drop off. Eventually, even Cheetah Boy couldn’t look at himself in a mirror without several different drugs in him. He’d been in and out of rehab facilities ever since. I heard the doctor had retired shortly after the operation, unable to deal with the media’s attacks on his integrity.

What if I did the procedure and then the Tigress found she’d crossed the same line, and what if she didn’t like it? And what would that mean for me?

I took a breath but let it out without saying anything. Instead, I picked up a pen and tapped it against the pad of paper in front of me. I fixed my gaze on her pointed ears. I knew the man who had reshaped them, and I assumed she had gotten my name from him. “Tell me about the work you’ve had done already,” I finally said.

In response, she smiled, and purred, “I’ll show you.” She stood and took a few steps back, and I kicked my rolling chair away from my desk so that I could see her full body. She was wearing a skintight tiger print leotard, and she spread out her arms and lifted her chin so I could see how the orange and black tattoos on her legs, arms, and neck passed seamlessly into the striped cloth. “It was made to perfectly match the tattoos underneath,” she explained. “Ninety-nine percent of my body is tattooed.” She turned slowly to show me the animatronic tail which had been surgically attached to her tailbone. She shifted her weight and the tail began to twitch.

I was used to women displaying their bodies to me with a measure of embarrassment, even reluctance, one undesirable segment at a time. A little disconcerted by her easy exhibitionism, I tapped my foot awkwardly. Seized by a moment of playfulness, or perhaps because she’d spent so many years as a performer that showing off had become instinctual, she crouched on all fours and stalked my tapping foot. Her front legs—no, her arms—stepped gracefully over each other until she was ideally positioned. Then she arched her back to bring her face closer to the ground. Her eyes locked on my black shoe in an alert, unblinking stare. I immediately stopped tapping it and laughed nervously, unsure what to do. I felt distinctly uncomfortable. Her whiskers twitched slightly, like an involuntary movement of anticipation, and she flicked an ear forward as if listening. I could see her tail swishing from side to side in concentration, and I suddenly felt unaccountably alarmed by this creature on my office floor. It was hard to remember that everything she was doing was calculated to produce an effect—it was all so seamless that it was almost as if she had been born knowing how to hunt.

Some deeply hidden instinctual terror of the predator took over and I yanked my foot back, knowing as I did it that I had just given her the signal to pounce. She lunged forward and grabbed my foot, letting out a deep guttural roar that set my heart pounding. In that moment, despite all evidence to the contrary, I believed she was a tiger. Paws—no, hands­—on my feet, she snapped her triumphant face upward to look me in the eye. I knew she had seen the horror and revulsion that had passed over my expression before I was able to hide it, but she did not react and I couldn’t help thinking that she’d been expecting it, hoping for it. From this close, I could see tiny scars where silicone implants had been inserted into her cheeks and forehead to reshape them into a more feline facial structure. Whoever did it, did it well. Her lips were slightly parted, and underneath the upper lip, which had been split in the middle to create a triangular shape, I could see where she had replaced her canines with fangs.

We stayed like that for just a moment, me looking down at her face, trying to make medical sense of what I was seeing. Then I laughed again nervously and she smiled and resumed her seat in front of my desk. I was torn between wanting to throw her out and feeling silly for falling for her act. Rolling my chair back to its original place, I compromised by pretending it hadn’t happened. My voice was almost steady as I asked, “Do the whiskers come off?”

“Oh, yes,” she said, drawing out the “yes” in a satisfied hiss, “They screw into metal sockets that have been surgically implanted into my upper lip.”

“And now you want fur,” I said, and she nodded, even though it wasn’t really a question.

The question I really wanted to ask, of course, was why? Why have you done this to yourself? The circus is dead; it’s been replaced by Hollywood. You can turn yourself into a Barbie or a princess, like the other women who come to my office. Why on earth would you turn yourself into a freak?

But it was not my place to judge. Human being, I reminded myself again. As long as I could determine that she was sane, and that this was what she really wanted, my services were at her disposal. So instead of asking why, I asked, “Are you sure you’re committed to this? It will be difficult to reverse the procedure.”

She flicked her eyebrows at me in disdain. “I’ve been changing myself for more than twenty years. Would I be here if I weren’t committed? Fur is the only thing left. It’s all I need.”

I cleared my throat and tried again. Thinking of Cheetah Boy’s girlfriend, I said, “Do you have a husband, a boyfriend? It’s just that if you do, he may find it—difficult to cope with your new appearance. Tattoos are one thing. Full body fur—”

“I’ve had enough boyfriends,” she said, rolling the R and lingering on the S. “And enough girlfriends. It seems everyone is attracted to cats. I’m finished with all that.”

“All the same,” I insisted, “You may find that people will react very negatively to your choice. Are you sure you’re prepared to—”

She cut me off again, and this time her voice was harsher, impatient. “I’m not Cheetah Boy, if that’s what you’re worried about. What do you think I’m going to do, hurt your reputation by going crazy? Do I seem like I would do that?”

I considered. “No. You don’t. But how can I know for sure?”

“Because,” she said, “I’m retiring. I’ve had enough of human society. I’m a bit—different from most people.” She acknowledged my slight smile but continued, “It can be fun to be around people and perform and be watched. But I’ve never really needed people. They only make me feel more alone. The only place I don’t feel lonely is in nature.”

Keeping my voice neutral, I asked, “So you’re going to go live in the jungle with the other tigers, where you belong?” I tried to ask the question as if I was just curious about her plans, not trying to find out if she was delusional, but I didn’t quite succeed.

She bristled, and I stopped talking, startled. I could have sworn she’d just become larger, like my daughter’s cat, Popcorn, did when he was offended by something. The Tigress snapped, “You don’t know me. You think I’m one of those crazy too rich women who come to your office because they think their appearance is just another thing they can buy and return and exchange until they get it just right. I don’t need a community. All I need—” and she stretched out the syllables in 'need', “—is fur.”

“Don’t get upset,” I said, refusing to look like I could be intimidated, though her single-mindedness was beginning to wear me down. “It was just a question.”

She sat back and pulled her legs up in front of her, laying her arms across her knees in a dignified and nonchalant manner. Any moment, I expected her to start licking her paws, but maybe she only did that when she was alone, because she finally uncurled herself and said calmly, “I am not going to try to join a community of tigers. I have no illusions that they would accept me. I’ve bought a cabin in the woods—I won’t tell you where, I’m not telling anyone where—and I plan to live there and provide for myself.”

I believed her. And somehow, I believed she could do it. Everyone knew that The Tigress sometimes disappeared on camping trips for months at a time, presumably sustaining herself by hunting and gathering. As she sat there practically baring her fangs it occurred to me to wonder if she used a gun or hunted with her bare claws—bare hands. No, I thought—bare claws. This was not like Cheetah Boy’s situation—something about this was—well, if not right, not wrong.

“I am a tiger.” The Tigress leaned forward, like she, no—like it—was going in for the kill. “You have the power to make me look like what I really am. Please. I never say please, but please. Make me a tiger.”

Its face was only a foot away from mine now and I couldn’t look away from its bright yellow eyes. They watched me with the kind of frozen attentiveness that Popcorn sometimes bestowed on me, when I felt like that cat was trying to stare through my head into my brain. The Tigress kept its eyes fixed open until I started to blink enough for the both of us, wondering how long it had taken to perfect whatever frighteningly effective art it was practicing on me. Empathize, I thought distractedly.

“Please,” it said again, and I rubbed my stinging eyes, trying to think. It was crazy, but it wasn’t. Who was I to judge? This was what the creature wanted.

The yellow eyes, still burning bright, blinked once, ever so slowly, and I said, finally, “Yes. Yes, I’ll give you fur. Make an appointment with my secretary. We’ll get started right away.”

“Thank you.” It smiled widely and for just a second, I saw the beauty of its fangs. I could imagine looking in the mirror and being proud to see such powerful teeth jutting out of my own mouth. Then it stood and walked toward the door. It moved with an elegance and a confidence perfected by few human beings. The last thing I glimpsed as it closed the door behind it was a lively orange tail swishing out of sight.