Two nights before my postchemo scan I have a dream so imposing it displaces my reality for most of the following day.
I’m lying in a darkened ultrasound room, gooped up with ultrasound goop, my right side propped on the foam wedge, arm curled above my head, and the doctor is running the transducer across my chest and into my armpit like a little boy zooming his matchbox car. I look up at the screen where usually all you see is that strange universe of shadows and ghosts that is allegedly your insides, and instead I see two tigers pacing the perimeter of my chest wall.
It’s not a totally foreign image. We have two tigers of our own in Greensboro. Two startling four-hundred-pounders, part Bengal, part Siberian, rescued from somewhere—maybe the offspring of circus tigers—that live tucked in the woods that abut Lawndale Avenue at the Greensboro Science Center.
Beastie cats, one of the boys used to call them.
There are a number of fascinating but unnerving things about the tigers: the way they hyperfixate on stroller wheels and errant toddlers; the volume at which they both roar when the male mounts the female (not infrequently); how some suburban Greensboro subdivision practically backs up to their habitat, how the female keeps incessant watch from her rock lookout while the male naps in the shade, how in some spots there is basically just the equivalent of an elementary schoolyard baseball backstop between you and them.
But the most disconcerting thing about the beastie cats is how they pace. It’s that measured, obsessive, nervous stalking you might recognize from your dog during a thunderstorm or a restless night before a set of important scans.
The science center keepers say the reason the tigers pace is because they are craving human contact—they were bottle-fed as babies, and they miss being close to people, which is why they like the perimeter of the enclosure so much. It’s where the people are.
I don’t know. What is this, really? It reads a little more like madness to me. Decades before she was diagnosed with breast cancer, the poet Jorie Graham wrote this about the hot, dry scirocco wind in Italy:
Who is
the nervous spirit
of this world
that must go over and over
what it already knows
Maybe it’s not really madness though. Maybe it’s an entirely sane response to being denied human contact. Or to very many things—results and treatment protocols and the future.
So, the beastie cats are pacing the chest wall.
Yesterday morning—after a restorative, humanizing walk in the near-rain among many heart-stoppingly beautiful blooming gardens and yards with a good friend who lost both her parents in a year and whose dog just died—I was remembering the dream. Simultaneously nonplussed and not nonplussed, I was thinking: There are tigers in the woods here and they are a little off their rockers, but that’s the place where we live.