Hide the Lion, the Reagans are Coming

The other night, my brother came into my room and said, his voice quite emotionless, “Hide the lion, the Reagans are coming.” Then he left, and I went to sleep.

. . .

 My mom and I were walking home, along a nameless street bordering an empty park in an empty New York City. It was daylight, the sun low in the sky—maybe four o’clock. No one was around except for the lion that had been following us for a while now.

It took us a while to notice the lion, but upon seeing it we were a bit disconcerted—not, however, hysterical. My mom, who tends to panic, was unsettlingly and irrationally calm. As was I. I suppose we assumed the lion would not harm us. It just didn’t look malicious.

            We decided, anyway, to err on the side of caution and crossed over to the right side of street. The lion followed, about one hundred feet behind us, blending into the brownstone dreamscape on the left side of the street. It was a female lion—a majestic, sunset yellow/orange creature with no mane. (Lions, I have found, are, surprisingly, far less menacing without that goofy halo of a mane.)

The lion strolled down the Brooklyn street, keeping a watchful eye on my mom and I, checked for traffic, and crossed to our side. We started to run. And so did the lion. Strangely enough, it kept the same one hundred foot following distance, though it could have, theoretically, already caught up to—and proceeded to eat—us. But I truly wasn’t worried about being eaten; to me it seemed that I was merely playing tag with a lion. (Furthermore, if the lion had wanted a snack it could have easily gone to McDonalds and eaten some unfortunate fat man; it wouldn’t eat me…I’m too skinny and probably taste like plain pasta.)

Through the blurred compilation of trees to our right, we could see the sun beginning to set. Shadows and sunlight checkered the sidewalk across which we ran. We were almost home and the lion was catching up to us, but I was still unworried. In fact, I was laughing. I had never seen my mom run so fast.

Upon seeing our wonderful, and wonderfully out-of-place Victorian, I readied my keys to enter the house. My mom and I ran up the stairs two at a time and into the house. The lion, which at this point was right behind us, followed, gracefully leaping into the entryway, and, to my delight, spun around and looked up at me, expectedly. It sat down on the glistening wooden floor, panting delicately.

Because I was dreaming and could do whatever I wanted, I concluded that this lion was surely domesticated, so I kept it. And while our interactions were limited, I nonetheless grew quite fond of this bedazzling, silent creature. We had a sort of unspoken affection for one another. Which is really weird, if you think about it. But what isn’t?

One day, an insignificant and unknowable time after I decided to keep a pet lion in my room, my mom called to me from the kitchen, saying something like this: “Phin, the Reagans are coming over for dinner. Do something about that lion… and set the table.”

Yes, Ronald Reagan was coming over for dinner.

No, I don’t know why. And no, of course I did not approve of this travesty.

Furthermore, there were several things wrong with my mother’s quite reasonable (and at the same time, bizarre) requests to do something about my lion and set the table.

First: my room had no doors—only floor-to-ceiling, Technicolor, Hippie curtains—and I would have to relocate the lion to the attic, where she might be unhappy and/or escape. Both of these options seemed unpleasant to me, and I didn’t know whether I would prefer a grumpy lion or no lion at all.

Second: The table was already set, beautifully, I might add. Purple and gold light streamed into the once dull room from a collection of stained glass windows and a skylight. Cloth napkins sat, perfectly neatly folded, on top of polished plates. There was goldenware on the table and Baroque paintings on the walls. Where the money came from, I do not know. Where the incredibly posh house and table settings came from, I also do not know.

And third: my stowaway lion actually belonged to the Reagans. Having to return my lion to the Reagans would be the worst of three unpleasant options. The lion had most certainly been unhappy at the Reagan household, or else she wouldn’t have left. They had called her “Cindy.” What kind of insane person names his lion Cindy? It might as well be Prissy, Buttons, or Flowers. I thought of her as more of a Jaquanda, Pride, or Yosemite. But of course I didn’t call my lion by a name. That would be absurd.

So, I brought the lion upstairs, to the attic, from which it could escape; I don’t know how I persuaded it to follow me, it just did. When we reached the attic, I was struck by an incomprehensible sadness. I looked at the lion, it at me. The lion didn’t look upset, merely bemused. It gazed up at me uncertainly, as if to say: “So, I go now?” Yes. I knew it was time to let go of my lion. After giving it a pat on the back, I returned downstairs, contemplating the many ways a lion might escape from an attic.

That’s when Sam ran into my room, near breathless, shouting, “Phineas, hide the lion! The Reagans are coming.” But of course by that time, I had already put the lion in the attic, where I knew it was preparing its great escape. I ignored his enthusiastic attempts to save our friend. It was too late.

Logically, or illogically, my next move was to sit out on the porch and watch movies with my friends—let’s call them Esmerelda, Carolyn, and Clark. At some point, I looked away from the screen, up at the sky. The sky behind our house was painted a synthetic light blue and pink, but it was beautiful. Brooklyn had long since disappeared, the dreamscape shifting drastically. Now there was only wilderness, or at least the appearance of wilderness. We were in a solitary log cabin by a lake, or at least we appeared to be.

As I sat there, gazing into the depiction of wilderness, the light blue and pink, oil-painted sky, knowing that the lion was going to escape, was probably escaping at that very moment, I set to work mentally steeling myself for its departure. This way, it didn’t come as a surprise to me when I went up to the attic to find nothing other than a box of Lincoln Logs and a dusty window that wouldn’t open.

(What did come as slightly more of a surprise to me was that nobody invited me to dine with the Reagans. Apparently, my liberal agenda was unwelcome. Sorry, world, for not approving of the presidential policies of an ex-movie actor whose absurd defense spending almost doubled the national deficit.)

The next day, or some unknowable date in the near future, I organized a lion search party, consisting of Sam, Esmerelda, Carolyn, and Clark, who now for some reason all cared about my lion almost as much as I did. This collaboration seemed to be a logical step towards the relocation of my lion, except for the fact that we decided to look for the lion in a lake.

We set out with a decent amount of confidence, convinced that the lion could not have wandered off too far, which of course is a completely reasonable, or unreasonable, assumption. Unfortunately, our search party fell through in about five minutes, or some short period of dreamtime, because there was a nautical trampoline in the middle of the lake that just looked like too much fun to pass up.

Our party disbanded, and I found myself standing on the dock that had suddenly appeared below me, watching my friends and my sibling frolicking on a water trampoline in the middle of an imaginary lake. The sun was now beaming down, but I felt no sensation of heat. And I looked out into the forest, and I saw the lion, and (this is where the story gets weird) the lion winked at me, and I knew that it was happy, happy that it had enabled us kids to understand the benefits of collaboration and working towards a common goal, which of course was true, or untrue.

It was at this point that the sequence faded out, the water draining, the flora and fauna dying, my eyes watering, throat hurting, nose stuffy, the sensation of warmth returning to me. Suddenly, I was on my back on a mattress on the floor of my room in my dad’s house, sweating under a winter blanket in the middle of summer.