The Future Fixer

For an hour now, the man had watched the cartoon tiger pasted on the plate glass window. A child left it. The man had never learned his name. But it seemed the moment that the child disappeared, the rain had fallen cold and angry, and a strange lethargy crept over him as he looked out onto the shopping street. There were meetings he should go to. Reservations he must keep. And yet he’d sit there till the storm ended, protecting the tiger from the rain.

He’d loved tigers once upon a time. As a young boy in the early 90s, he’d read Calvin and Hobbes so obsessively that his father’s newspaper subscriptions had been planned around his need. And for a brief time in his early teens, that passion had transferred itself to an interest in wildlife biology: he’d been the odd duck out in high school, lugging copies of Rachel Carson, or The Beak of the Finch to class.

Then real life had taken over and he’d forgotten about animals. He’d had ten apartments in six cities and never owned a cat. He had a big house with a backyard now, without the dog or wife to fill it.

The man shook his head and leaned back. He checked his watch. He went to the counter and ordered an espresso. On second thought he ordered two, and a pastry from the pastry box, one of those flaky squares with integrated cheese. He tried but couldn’t recall the name, so in the end he jabbed a finger at his prey. A satisfying interaction, until he remembered his nutritionist.

Then he went back, and found his seat was taken. A pretty girl marred by headphones. He gestured and she took them off. They had a reasonable discussion, at the end of which she returned his seat, and the man returned to his tiger, which still clung on so admirably.

The tiger was, the man began to think, a triumph of modern engineering. Adhesive gummed onto a vinyl face stock, since the child applied it to the glass he’d only been able to see the backing, but dear god, what adhesive backing!

Rain lashed the window and tumbled down the street in sheets, but it was as if the tiger had the plate glass clamped between its teeth. The longer the man sat there, the more he thought the tiger had no need of his protection. In fact, he wanted to peel the tiger off himself and send it to a lab for testing. He was pretty sure his company manufactured stickers somewhere—Bangladesh, probably—but their adhesive was nothing like that. You could use it to fix broken tiles, or gum C-4 onto a building.

“UltraBond,” he muttered, demoing a couple names. “Hydro-Lock. The Future Fixer.”

Another customer glanced over, and the man stared back at him until he looked away.

Some time later, evening fell. People closed their laptops, and wrapped up their unruly wires. They queued up in the shops across the street to gaze out numbly at the rain. They tried on last minute hats or added more time to their parking. With everyone driving so much slower rush hour was sure to be extended, and so despite the green lights the only movement was the floe of trash the storm was buoying down the street.

And suddenly, as if the thunder booming overhead had cracked the vault of his subconscious memory, the man was reminded of the first and only time he’d ever left the country, for a week of turbulent meetings with his company’s suppliers in Bangladesh.

Dhaka and then Chittagong. A short jaunt inland from the bay. The cities had bounced off him after he learned he wasn’t in a Kipling poem, that Rangpur was somehow not Rangoon, or even all that close to Mandalay.

What the man remembered now was the one moment that he stole away. Offered an excursion by a local contact, he’d flown low over the Sundarbans, that shifting jungle region graduating into India.

There the Ganges bifurcated, meeting other rivers. The landscape shattered. Like fingers grasping from the bay, the rivers tore at the subcontinent. They blotted islands from the map and then reformed them elsewhere, impermanent as sand castles thrown up along a beach. Habitation was uncertain. Borders were disputed. Creatures extinct elsewhere found the needed space to breathe.

And tigers haunted the waterways, sometimes eating people.

For weeks after his return, the man had fallen asleep to BBC and National Geographic documentaries. The Mystic Mangrove. A Forest Unfolds. Man-Eating Tigers of the Sundarbans. At night in his apartment rising high above Chicago, Lakeshore East would disappear, and he’d turn his clocks back to childhood, to a time when rivers weren’t just arteries of trade, but were ecosystems and adventures. A charming era, if short-lived.

It was an inflection point? Possibly? His work had changed after that. He was promoted high enough that he never went back. And in a way, it was as if he’d buried his younger self in those few weeks. Treated the jungle like a precious jewel, polished and then put away.

The man leaned back in his chair again. Lightning exploded across the city, and he saw himself reflected in the window: the soft bulge of his stomach, the shapeless contour of his cheeks.

He shuddered. Looked around. The work-from-homers had all disappeared, and it was just some kids down from the local college, the girl who’d taken his seat. The man tried to smile at her, but she pretended not to see him. Was too busy staring at a painting of some stars above a murky creek.

He ordered a second pastry. He checked his phone, scrolling through the storm of headhunters and another day’s missed calls. He lingered over one job offer—the work sounded interesting, but of course the pay was shit—and when he looked back into the stormy street he checked the tiger and the rain.

He's survived, the man thought, astounded. Hours in a driving rainstorm, and the little tiger had survived. Call it UltraBond or Future Fixer, whatever it was, the sticker stuck. It was an adhesive miracle, and before the man had even decided on a name he already knew who had to market it, who he’d hire for the packaging. And maybe legal would decide they couldn’t use the stuff for stickers, but there were other possibilities. Nike might be interested, their own Dhaka shops were ravenous. Or R&D could take a look at it. It had been a good thought about the C-4.

With the storm finally winding down, the man headed out into the street. Crouching to the tiger’s level, he examined its striped fur and piercing eyes, and realized that it was not the cartoon he had remembered. A forgivable offense; it was a child’s, after all.

The man glanced over his shoulder. Feeling oddly guilty, he hooked a nail under the sticker’s edge and tried to peel the tiger off. There was a moment of resistance and then pain shot through his nail bed. The man gasped, and when he raised his finger to his eyes it was bloody, and the nail was gone.

There was a mild breeze, then. Gentle, compared to what had come before. It picked up scraps of errant trash and washed them down into the gutters. It disturbed the mirrored surface of the puddles all around. Strangely, this breeze was not cold. It was hot against his clammy skin, and stung like salt on contact with the man’s injured finger.

And when it brushed up against the tiger, the sticker began to peel itself off of the plate glass window.

With a low growl, the tiger stepped onto the street and padded towards the man. He didn’t know how big a tiger should be, but this one was bigger than he’d thought. Bigger than they’d seemed on the TV, or in those strips that featured Hobbes.

The man realized that the tiger was looking at his finger. He realized that its nose had wrinkled, as if it could scent him on the air. And he saw, reflected in its vinyl eyes, not an image of himself sprawling terrified at forty-three, but a child. The same child who'd applied the sticker. The child that he had been, waiting for his Sunday strip each week.

“Hydro-Lock or UltraBond?” the man asked, the only thing that he could think to say.

Then the tiger’s shadow covered him, and there was more blood, hot and sticky.