The Tiger Catcher

“Which way to the Transit Circle?” Julian asked the cashier behind the table.

The pretty girl smoothed out her hair. “George Airy’s Transit Circle? Right through there. I can take you, if you like. Will it be just one ticket for you?” She smiled.

“Yes,” he said. “And no, that’s fine, I’ll find it. Do you sell pocket watches?”

“Yes, in our gift shop. Do you need a compass, too? Maybe a tour guide?” She tilted her head.

“No, thank you.” He wouldn’t look up, wouldn’t meet her gaze.

With the girl hovering nearby, Julian bought a watch in an unopened box. She wanted to test it to make sure it worked, but he said no. He didn’t want her touching it, imprinting his brand-new timekeeper with her own spirit.

“You won’t be able to return it if something’s wrong with it,” she said.

“That’s all right,” he said. “I’m not coming back this way.” Whatever happened, he wouldn’t be coming back.

“That’s a shame.” She smiled. “Where are you going?” When he didn’t answer, she shrugged, a friendly girl marking time. “Look around,” she said. “Take your time.”

Julian had almost nothing left from his fifty. He hid the remaining pound coins in a souvenir vase along with his Oyster card. Was that wrong, to hedge his bets? No, he decided. Even people who sought out miracles were allowed to be cautious. That was him—a cautious man seeking out a miracle. He had some time to kill so he wandered around killing it. It was only eleven o’clock. He tried to remember all the things the cook told him, but there had been so many. “At noon, the sun will pass through a pinhole in the glass crosshairs overhead,” the cook said. “A beam of light will strike the quartz in your hands. The blue chasm will open. You must hurry. The rest of your life awaits.”

It sounds difficult and complicated, Julian said. The cook stepped back from the grill and judged him up and down, a cleaver in his hands. “You think this part is complicated? Do you have any idea what you’re about to do?”

No. Julian had no idea. He knew what he had been doing. Lately, nothing. But way back when, he did things, like mark time with his baby down the road from his Hollywood dreams. Sun beating down on palm trees and lovers, Volvos parked in secluded corners. Windows open. Joy flying in, like wind. Julian wasn’t a skeptic then. Well, like he always said, there was a time for everything.

“Where’s the Prime Meridian?” Julian asked a gruff older guard inside one of the rooms in the pavilion.

“You’re on it, mate,” the guard replied. His name tag said Sweeney. He pointed to an enormous black telescope. “You’re in the Transit Room. And that’s the Transit Circle, right on the meridian line.” Over nine feet long, Airy’s telescope looked like a field gun aimed at the stars. It was flanked by a set of glossy black stairs, their base set into a square well slightly below the main floor.

Through the open door, pale sunlight. The brass line marking 0.0 longitude was riveted into the cobblestones in the courtyard. Julian watched the tourists hamming it up on the line, one foot in the east, one foot in the west, standing on each other’s shoulders, taking pictures, posing, laughing. He checked his new watch.

11:45.

His hands trembled. To steady himself, he grabbed the low iron railing that separated him from the telescope, the retractable roof open, the patchy sky above him.

He was so utterly alone.

A strange, vast, rainy, foreign city. London like another country unto itself. Julian glanced back at the guard. The portly man sat on a stool, an elbow on the wood table, indifferent to Julian, as was the whole universe. There was a window behind Sweeney, a glimpse of taupe leafless trees blowing about in the sharp wind. It had been so gusty in London the last few days, like an eyewall of a hurricane passing through.

11:56.

Reaching into his shirt, Julian pulled out the stone that hung on a leather rope around his neck. Leaving it in its silver webbing, he laid it into his shaking hand. In the gray light, the crystal didn’t sparkle or shimmer. Silent and cool, it lay in his open palm. Once the stone had been in her hands. There was sun then, a sparkling mist of dreamlike bliss, the beginning, not the end—or so he thought.

Was this the end?

Or was it the beginning?

“The crystal oscillates a million times a second,” the cook told him—a cook, a magician, a warlock, a wizard. “And you oscillate with it. You are the oscillator. You are the chain reaction, the chemical ignition, the voltage soaring through your own life. Go, Julian. The time has come for you to act.”

There is no other time.

Until the end of time.

Running out of time.

11:59.

Julian gripped the crystal. His vision blurred. The memory of pain is what causes the fear of death. The heart grows numb. There’s a sense of suffocation. As the lungs become paralyzed, the heart cannot breathe.

So it is with the memory of love.

O my soul and all that’s within me, the beggar cried, raising his palm to the sky.

Ladies and gentlemen, it’s showtime!

In the picosecond before the clock struck noon, in the blink he still had between what was and what was yet to be, Julian asked himself what he was most afraid of.

That the inexpressible thing being offered to him was possible?

Or that it wasn’t?

There’ll be another time for you and me.

There’ll never be another time for you and me.

As the sun moved into the crosshairs at noon, he knew. He would do anything, sacrifice everything to see her again.

Help me.

Please.

I should’ve kissed you.

Part One

The Ghost of God and Dreams

“Like a ghost she glimmers on to me.And all thy heart lies open unto me.”

Alfred, Lord Tennyson

“I love acting. It is so much more real than life.”

Oscar Wilde

1 (#ulink_abb67b12-82d4-56f1-bf01-d4111f96bc06)

The Invention of Love (#ulink_abb67b12-82d4-56f1-bf01-d4111f96bc06)

“I’M DEAD, THEN. GOOD.” THOSE WERE THE FIRST WORDS SHE said to him.