"Tiger Dream"          by William Voelkle

    I woke up dead again in the wrong country.

    Consciousness trickled into my body like the first raindrops off a mossy roof, dripping liquid fear into every capillary. My blood pressure surged, then pounded out in paralyzing dread. For a instant's distraction I realized it was only ten days since Bangkok and Yelena's dappled garden.

    That was my official "last meal". We had cucumber and cheese sandwiches, dark pungent tea and rugalah stuffed with raspberry preserves and walnuts. I showed her my new Randall number 14 knife, telling her too much, and promised her I'd return. I could lie to anyone. The look in her eyes was deep with a mystery no young man could hope to understand.

    Teegur licked my neck playfully and purred right in my left ear. I froze with half a bite of sandwich in my mouth, then stuck the last wedge in Teegur's mouth on top of her big raspy tongue. Teegur doesn't chew, but she gulped it down and licked mayonnaise off her lips and smiled at me.

    I poured another cup of Lapsang Souchong, sipped it like creamy turpentine and reached out to cut another little sandwich in half.

"Put the big knife away, Andrei. Don't scare our little teegur."

    Yelena walked over, fluffed her dress with the sound only made by satin, and sat weightlessly beside me. She held my bicep with both hands, nuzzled up and began singing "Kalinka" softly in Russian:

"Под сосною под зеленою ( "Under the pine, under the green pine, )
Спать положите вы меня." ( Lay me down to sleep ..." )

    Teegur laid down by my left side, instantly falling into a catnap. It made no difference to me that she was a baby — she was almost as big as me. I was way too close to something with teeth bigger than mine. I sheathed the little Arkansas stone and the new Randall and laid it between my feet on the carpet of yellow and rust leaves of the maple and mugho fallen under darting hypnotic dapples of sunlight.

    Teegur purring, Yelena singing and now my last chance to force the mission from my mind. I let my breath out deliberately, my mind dissolving into the motionless internal night. It was a skill learned on another world, in another life. I have a mental dial I control like a thermostat.

    At "nine" I explode screaming into weapons and teeth, both danger and life forgotten. "Zero" would bring a simple coward's death. Yelena and Teegur, love and life, country and enemy, mathematics, music and magic were in the middle somewhere. I dialed in "one ..." and fell off the world into a deep jungle sleep.

    I woke up dead again in the wrong country.

( "How can they pretend they trained me for this?" )

    I was trained to sit in cafes, to look at everyone without using my eyes, to memorize blueprints and pages in a language I didn't understand, to wait for the unnoticed turn of phrase about the train station or the purple giraffe. The jungle stank.

    I tried to stop breathing until the little rivulets of feeling reached all the way out to my missing fingers, filling them with life and finding them on my heavy Randall knife. Unless it was there, I was really dead. The thick stagnant heat that slowly filled me was proof this was really hell, dead or not.

    My thumb extended to the warm brass hilt and living fingers closed on the handle and moved the blade out of the unlatched sheath an inch. I had power again. Whatever killed me now, I would surely take it with me to the other hell. I was certain of this.

    Waking is the last danger of the night. First comes feeling, then hearing darts back and forth vacuuming sounds and finding nothing, then suddenly tiny sounds of alarm race around the brain until a cacophony of unseen danger forces one eye open, very, very slowly.

    An occasional misapprehension of light came from behind the giant mango tree where I lay to play on the darkened mists of the jungle floor, wavering ghostlike and adding the terrors of vision without illuminating anything but ghosts. Of these ghosts, in this night, only I had power. I had no God to comfort me.

    Only the dream of Yelena in a fluffy satin dress.

    I sheathed the hyper-razor Randall slowly, relaxed my grip a little and looked at the radium dial of the watch on my dirty left wrist:

( "05 17" )

    An hour to daylight. I whistled to Khang across the clearing, in a fair mimic of the common bird song we had practiced:

"whee-to ... whee-to-to-to ..."

    He replied. Khang was an incredibly smart man. A Hmong tribesman who shared a common enemy. I didn't know we had been in North Vietnam for two days. His courage spared me even greater dread about the coming day.

    I exhaled slowly with great purpose and the dream took me back to Bangkok and little Teegur's golden stare. The first half of the tiger dream took me back and became one with my life forever.

( "Yelena's teegur ..." )

    There, just between the two small maples, ten feet away ... Teegur in golden white fur, black stripes making her invisible in halting images like an old movie as she stepped deliberately through the shadows. Yelena danced by her side in a green satin dress, her red hair blazing as she petted Teegur and smiled at me, my mind taking her in at super speed because I knew she too could become invisible if I blinked or if my mind wandered. I was stunned and hypnotized by her beauty and grace.

    The dream pulled me back into darkness.

( "Shouldn't be sleeping now ... )

( "Have to get up and go inside ... )

( "Yelena will have lunch ready soon ... )

( "Elle? )

( "Elle?? Let's go inside. Teegur is looking at me funny again." )

    Then Teegur's purring flooded my dream. No need to waken. Teegur weighed just over a hundred pounds. Elle had bottle fed the sickly beast for the zoo curator, and was now feeding her several pounds of real food. Real meat. Red meat. Meat like me.

    Like me, Teegur was growing strong in her youth. The little tiger's purring became very deliberate, very loud and steady. When I woke a moment later I could hear nothing else. There at my left, lying against my leg, Teegur purred and looked at me with her incredible deep golden eyes. I continued to rub her snout, sliding my fingers over her long polished teeth, feeling her stiff whiskers and gently touching her moist pink nose. She smiled again and forced her muzzle into my palm. I smiled at her like I smiled at Elle.

    I loved Teegur. She looked at me like Elle looked at me, with eyes full of a mystery I could not understand.

"Come in for lunch, silly, and don't bring Teegur.
She only likes you because you're a man. I'm jealous."

    Elle was in charge. That made me happy.

    That night we slept on the veranda. High fast clouds gave the garden a ghostly blinking under the midnight moon. Occasionally I would waken one eye, sometimes seeing the moonlight on Yelena's hair, sometimes seeing Teegur playing beneath the little mangos or the maples. Each time I touched my Randall under the thin Thai pillow, counted "three ... two ... one ..." and gave my whole heart back to the dream.

( "Teegur must be laying beside the bed now. )

( "I hear her purring, and reach out and rub her jaws, even in my deepest dream." )

"คุณมา ( Koj tuaj los! ) — You come!"

    Khang had squatted beside me in the first glow of dawn, his powerful hand over mine as I closed my fingers on the Randall, freezing my movement to unsheathe the heavy razor.

"คุณมา ( Koj tuaj los! ) — You come! It 0720 now. I watch you for an hour. You sleep with baby suea. Big mother suea sit watching three meters behind you. For an hour I cannot move, can hardly breathe. You are like a ghost spirit. You sleep with baby suea. You rub and touch the baby suea while you sleep. Mother suea not concerned. Not eat you. Suea just walk away when sunlight comes. We hurry. Three clicks now to bad man.

"Androu friend, you are 'phii' the ghost spirit.

"ผีศารทูลกะซวก ( Phii suea meet ) — คุณมา ( Koj tuaj los! ) — You come! Hurry now!"

    And we did hurry, with my question unspoken, my mission ahead of me, my dream forgotten. Nothing flowed inside me but the cold certainty of the Randall.

    Days later when the LRRP Long Range Patrol met us back in Laos we sat in the tall wet grass and I gave Khang my spare Randall knife. The guys had a radio — our mission was burning the airwaves, and the Cong were burning jungle and a lot of ammo to find us. We were in the wrong place, at the wrong time — on purpose. Seven brave men, and me.

    I sharpened Khang's Randall for an hour until he proclaimed that my full magic lived in the knife. Pretending I had the magic of the body spirits, I wiped our right thumbs with an alcohol prep, then used my Randall to make a slow deep cut down the pad of his right thumb. I handed him his Randall and he made a painful cut to the bone of my right thumb.

    We pressed our bleeding hands together and wrapped them tightly and painfully with the green paracord laces of our Randall knives and we sat with the others, right hands bound, exchanging blood. I looked at Khang with admiration and love: a god who walked me past death, back to the world, back to Yelena and Teegur. He smiled at the curious little spirit he had befriended in the jungle.

    A square bottle of Black made two slow trips around the circle.

    Khang and I became one in the blood, the ancient uncivilized way of violent men. Brothers forever.

"Whump — whump — whump — " in the distance.

    One guy radios "Louie Lime" and pops a stinking green smoke grenade and throws it right past my head.

    The radio crackles "Louie Lime" and moments later the tall wet grass whips us violently as the helicopters land.

    A week later in Bangkok Elle and I slept again on the veranda, the night black and moonless. I rolled fitfully in the second part of my dream, unsure of its meaning, deeply troubled by the flawless violence of my mission, dreading the airplane that was coming to take me forever from Yelena and her baby teegur.

    I woke up dead again in the wrong country.

"phii suea meet ... phii suea meet ..." I whispered as Yelena woke me.

    Her soft hand was over mine on the Randall I pulled from under the pillow. Her silent diaphanous gown was covered in embroidered flowers like those in the garden, made golden soft by the flickering candlelight. The vision electrified my senses and pulled me back from my dream.

"phii suea meet ... phii suea meet ..." I whispered again as Yelena wiped the tears from my eyes.

"Rest now, Andrei ...

... of course you are `phii suea meet', my silly boy!

Look at you — the ghost with the razor sharp knife who sleeps with tigers!

Now go back to your dream."