The Lion

“I don’t like to write stories anymore, because whenever I used to want to write them it was because I was reading stories by authors I loved and I would always end up writing stories by them too. In their words, their style; nothing I could recognize as mine. If I had just read Cormac McCarthy I would write a bonechilling, bloodspattered Cormac McCarthy tale. If I read Haruki Murakami I would churn out the most pristine Murakami you could imagine. Too bad there’s no black market for literature like there is for art. I could have made a fortune off those forgeries.”

We were sitting on the balcony of a cafe in the little seaside Mexican village where I lived at the time, sipping pineapple juice and waiting for our orders of chilaquiles. The waves crashing onto the beach below, often providing a gentle background static, today were loud and irregular, as if vying for attention.

“You don’t make art?” I asked.

“No,” she said. Her eyes were fiery and distant, seemingly intent on communicating something and not allowing me to distract her from her mission. “Everyone here is doing these 10-day silent retreats. I was once silent for a whole year, did you know that?”

I did not. I had seen this girl only in passing until today, at the yoga school that I had been a part of for some time and where she was a student in the first level. Since at that time I was only working in the communal kitchen, I was unsure why she had singled me out to request this one-on-one meeting, but sometimes a familiar face with an apron and serving spoon, most seen chopping vegetables and lugging around huge pots of rice, is more appealing than the airy creatures all dressed in white who taught her classes.

“It wasn’t a conscious choice. I didn’t know anything about mauna at the time, or meditation or spirituality at all. Something just happened that made me clam up and I couldn’t shake it for a whole year.

“I lived in New York City for a few years after graduating college. I had a fancy degree in literature and I moved to the city with a lot of big ideas, thinking I wanted a lot of things, but once I got there I found I didn’t want any of them. Which was good because I couldn’t get them, not even close, though I did try for a while.

“Soon enough I found a way of living just with what I had, like everyone does. I worked nights mostly at a hipstery little Japanese restaurant in Bushwick. It was a funny place. We were open to midnight, and up until maybe 10:30 our big-ticket items were pork ramen and this special sushi roll we had with tuna, cucumber and spicy mayo. I don’t know, people were into it.

But then after 10:30, everyone who came in just wanted eggs. Omelet, sunny-side up, egg sushi.

That one always drove the cooks nuts. It wasn’t on the menu, but still almost every night there was someone who came in asking for egg sushi, claiming they heard we had an amazing egg sushi. We easily could have just fried up some eggs and stuck them on sticky rice, but the chef wouldn’t have it. One step too far, I guess.

I didn’t want to eat pork or fish or even eggs, but I liked working there. The tips were good and I got to chat up the whole neighborhood. Besides, it gave me an easy way to avoid my housemate, who usually got home from her job after I left for my shift, and was long asleep by the time I came home.

The restaurant was only a few blocks from my apartment — a rarity in New York, big time — so once I got the job my world quickly shrank to the little labyrinth of streets between them. I didn’t go out much during the day. No reason to. Only sometimes I would go walking for hours, always towards the river, walking over the bridges into Manhattan and then crossing back or taking the L from Union Square if I was tired. Sometimes I would sit in a cafe in the Lower East Side and pretend to read while watching the people, or I would just walk, but either way I felt like I was carrying a big glass bubble around myself. Almost soundproof. I couldn’t make out other people’s conversations and felt like I needed to raise my voice to order a coffee.

These cafes are full of students and music but for me they were very quiet.

If I felt a need for human companionship, I used to go on Tinder and set a date with the first okay-looking guy who offered. We would meet and drink beer, which made me sick to the stomach, then go back to his apartment and make out for a while. I would then make some excuse to leave before having sex. Only once, I brought the man to my apartment and tried to have sex with him, but my vagina clamped shut like a… I don’t know, something that squeezes shut very tightly.

Sorry, maybe I’m going off a bit here. I’m trying to get to what happened.

It was on a night in November. No, December. I came home from work at the normal time, 1 or maybe 1:30 in the morning. I tried to come in without making noise, so not to wake my housemate, but I didn’t try that hard because she had been kind of a bitch to me and I held a grudge. I put my leftovers in the fridge for breakfast the next day and went into my room.

Even before I turned the key I knew there was something there. The doorknob felt hot, and as I turned it it occurred to me that this was the classic warning sign of a fire and I wasn’t supposed to open the door, I should get out immediately, but by the time this processed the door was already open and there was no fire inside.

I turned on the light. There was a lion in my room.

Huge. Golden. Languid. That’s the best word for a cat, right? “Lazy” and “fluid” at the same time. He was lying on my bed in that side-sprawled way you always see lions in National Geographic, tip of his tail tapping slowly up and down, clearly not caring at all that I was there. He squinted a little when I turned on the light, fixed me with his tawny eyes and then looked away again.

I closed the door and put down my bag. For some reason I wasn’t afraid at all, I wasn’t even really surprised. Not by the lion at least. I remember more being shocked by the obviousness of it all, like how I could have thought I would walk into my room that night and there wouldn’t be a lion there.

I went closer to him. I could feel my heart pounding, hear it thudding through the whole room, as I reached out and touched him on the cheek. Just to feel how soft his fur was, to run my fingers through the thick hair of his mane. He closed his eyes and started to purr, the sound seeming to come from the center of the earth.

Big cats only purr when they exhale. Did you know that? Small cats purr on both exhale and inhale. That’s the difference, according to science.

I ended up curling up to sleep with him that night, all tucked away into his huge arms and furry belly. Slept in my clothes; I don’t think I even brushed my teeth. It was the deepest and soundest I’ve ever slept, though I dreamed lion dreams. Stretching my body under the full sun, hot blood and bones cracking in my jaws, this sort of thing. Red sunrise and sunset. Changing phases of the moon.

Everything sounded like thunder in those dreams. My feet on the ground, the hoofbeats of running antelope and zebras, my voice.

There were lionesses too, each one known to me, and I loved them all so much.

I woke up cold and thirsty. The lion was still there, pacing back and forth. He stopped for a moment when he saw I was awake, gave me a look and continued walking. I thought immediately that he might be hungry, so after getting dressed I went out to the nearest market and bought several pounds of raw hamburger meat. That stuff is disgusting to me but I didn’t think twice. I brought it back and offered it to him right away. I’ll never forget the smell as he ate it, or the sound of his teeth or smacking lips. Something inside my stomach twisted violently, like plunging off the high drop of a roller coaster.

Of course I had to go to work again in the evening, but until then I stayed with him. I watched him. When he napped, I took his paws in my hands, to feel the weight of them, testing the sharp point of his claws concealed within the heavy velvet.

And this was my life for several weeks. Days spent sitting with the lion, feeding him hamburger meat that I paid for with my tips from the restaurant, stroking the gold in his mane. He let me touch him everywhere, even run my fingers around his eyes and over his closed lids. Sleeping with him as close as I could, wishing I could tuck myself into his ribs.

I loved him deeply and passionately. Not in a perverse way. Well, maybe a little in a perverse way. He made me tremble.

Then he was gone. I opened the door one night to find an empty room, stinking of raw meat and that was all. Only a burn mark charred into the floor, roughly in the shape of a sprawling lion.

I sat down on the floor next to that burn mark and went blank. It was like realizing everything at once, and the mind just, I don’t know, goes somewhere. Becomes different, rather, or it becomes the same. You probably know better than I do. I felt very quiet but then all around me was this unearthly howl, a God-awful scream that cracked the paint on the walls and blew out the speakers of my phone. My bones were buzzing like someone was trying to carve something into them. I realized gradually, only after maybe thirty seconds, that this sound was coming from me.

The next thing I knew it was morning and I was naked, covered in ash, lying in a pool of my own menstrual blood. I wasn’t even due for my period but there it was, enough for me to dip my palms in it and watch those thick red drops roll down my arms.

This was when I gave up speaking. My housemate called my parents to get me — I’d like to think she was being compassionate but probably she just didn’t want to go to the trouble of dealing with the police or mental hospital doctors for me — and they took me back home to upstate New York.

That year was actually quite normal, aside from the fact that I didn’t talk or communicate in any way, and therefore had no work or any sort of social life. I drank tea and looked out the windows for the rest of the winter. In the summer I grew tomatoes and squash, and a nice patch of herbs.

This was about three years ago. So you can understand why, when I was passing through here and I heard all about the silent retreats, I thought I would drop by and see what it was all about. A few weeks of yoga before didn’t seem like such a waste of time.”

Our chilaquiles had come about halfway through the story, and she had eaten hers while talking. Mine still sat half unfinished. I felt uncomfortable chewing while she spilled her heart, though clearly she didn’t feel the same way.

“How did you start talking again?” I asked. It seemed the obvious question, sitting awkwardly between us now that she apparently had finished talking.

She shrugged. “Everyone can talk. Even babies learn sooner or later.”

That was true, I had to concede.

Out on the beach, where she was staring, a small child was chasing a seagull. It took two or three hops, bearing its weight against the earth, and then took off and sailed out over the waves.