I Am an Executioner (26 page)
I was in pain and felt the weight of something large upon me. It was dark and there was nothing I could see. I smelled my mother and there was another there, and the world was gone.
My mother stood up now, tall (and as she rose, I heard the cracking of bones—not hers but those of the body on which she was lying). I felt my way with my trunk, seeking to cower beneath her, but she swung her body in frantic movements
and did not recognize my form, and her seeming confusion terrified me.
As the light returned to my eyes, I saw that there were three of us here, myself, my mother, and my youngest brother (he lay still on the ground, his eyes rolled up in his head). My mother calmed down and recognized me now, and arched her trunk to sniff the air. The sky had risen high above us, a small blue circle in the middle of darkness.
We heard the rumble of the returning herd in the earth and blackness that surrounded us, coming toward us from all around.
31
And then we saw their faces in the space of sky above, looking down at us, bewildered. They kneeled on the ground and reached with their trunks but they could not nearly touch us. Iala wept and thrashed the ground. Others ran off to pull down branches and came back and held them down to us, hoping somehow to pull us up. And my mother pawed up the
walls, unclimbably steep, only to slip back onto her haunches. One of my frantic little sisters tried to leap into the hole to join us, but another caught her by the tail, just barely.
I don’t remember how long we stayed here, what other efforts the herd made in trying to rescue us.
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After some time (hours? days?), all returned to quiet. I slept, and awoke in a delirium, hungry. In the circumscribed space of sky above us, my family members continued to gaze down, despairing.
And in the quiet, my mother spoke.
She gave the others an order. She told them to go away and leave us to our fate. She ordered them to leave.
The elephants responded by scratching the ground uncertainly. They looked about as if dumb, as if they hadn’t heard; because what they heard would require them to do what could not be countenanced.
Go away without me, Mother told them again; you must survive now on your own. She knew that whoever set this trap would surely return. The only thing to do was to leave, and leave immediately. Mother was already as good as dead; and for the herd to remain with her to the end would mean the herd’s end as well. To drive home her point, Mother rammed the side of the hole with her head, sending the ground above into shivers, bringing a shower of dirt on our own backs.
But the elephants only exchanged frightened glances. They looked down at us
33
and bellowed incoherently, and then looked to each other again. And still they did nothing.
Perhaps they did not know how to move, how to translate even the simple command from head to legs, to turn around and walk away, without Amuta physically there to guide them. Their confused faces ringed the circle of blue. My cousins, playful youngsters and graceful young women; my stately aunts, strong and imposing, reduced now to an extreme of helplessness and agitation; my younger brothers and sisters pawed the ground madly and shook their heads, calling out to us, tears streaking their faces.
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My mother was resolute. She understood the situation perfectly. She bellowed to them and spoke clearly, she tried to persuade them in a hundred ways, but they would not listen.
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For Mother
was
the herd. Without her, they could not function.
Did they finally leave? I didn’t know. Their sad, beautiful faces receded from view, away from the circle. I was thirsty. My brother, my unnamed infant brother, lay still, barely breathing.
My mother sat on her haunches in the darkness as the quiet of night set upon us.
We would never see the herd together, alive, again.
In the final stillness, Mother was quiet, making noises only on occasion. It was a hopeless time, and Mother, so powerless, could only try to comfort me.
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She believed we would all die; she no longer resisted it. Her despair had become quieter but also more total. Our chance for choice was over, our fates clear, our actions fit for judgment; and it was obvious to her that she had failed. I feared her hopelessness more than I feared my own personal doom; I feared her grief, her final, unassailable sorrow, palpable even in its silence, in the darkness of that hole during those last hours.
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The light came in the morning, and the sounds were like the morning sounds. And as we did in the morning, I emptied my bladder, moved my bowels, there on the ground where we stood, on the body even of my dying brother. I could not help myself.
The cries of alarm came first, then the pounding of our sisters’ feet vibrating through the earth. These sounds told us they had not traveled far during the night, had not really traveled at all.
Confused, chaotic gallops. And then came the screams. From a distance and close by: terrified, pained screams. We could not, of course, see what was happening, what the danger was, who was dying. We could only imagine.
For seeming hours it lasted, their horrible, helpless cries. These were the most terrifying moments of my life; I was more frightened than I am even now. Mother stared down, her eyes bearing a terrible intensity, fully attuned to the destruction of her herd and her own inability to stop it.
When the screams finally quieted, we heard indecipherable noises, footsteps of elephants or of other animals, calls and cries of beasts unknown to us.
Rough vines were thrown down into our hole, maneuvered with sticks around my body and my mother’s. The vines were hoisted about us and pulled tight, cutting sharply into our hides, and we were lifted bodily upward until we rested on our hind legs alone, our front feet dangling helplessly. Then a rain of dirt came down on us, great heapfuls, from all directions, on us and around us, covering my brother’s body even as he slept. For hours the dirt fell until the ground filled up to the level of our feet, and we were able to stand squarely again. And then the vines again were tightened, and again we were lifted painfully up, and again the dirt began to fall.
For days this process repeated itself, until the dirt in our hole had filled up nearly level with the ground. I was famished and delirious, almost too exhausted to be afraid, to be curious any longer about what was happening and who was doing this. But when we could glimpse finally over the lip of our hole, I was excited and comforted to see that the world was filled again with elephants. Not our family, no one we could recognize. Elephants fitted out in strange coverings, pulling at the vines that lifted us, accompanied by strange gibbering animals. But the world was filled again with elephants.
1
My discovery of this document establishes, despite your most vehement protests, the existence of Englaphant, that strange tongue native to all places of elephant-human contact, which I understand now intuitively, having spent most waking hours for the past twenty-three years in conversation with elephants in captivity. My translation—of which eventually there will be thirty parts—is therefore precise, placing Shanti in a long line of great Englaphant writers, starting with the master Ganesha, who wrote the entire Ramayana in an Indo-European precusor of Englaphant, with the ink-dipped, broken-off tip of his right tusk.
2
Unless one is well grounded in Shanti’s main tale, this bottom text might seem bumptious. I suggest you stop reading these footnotes, and instead give the above story a read, straight through. On your second run, allow yourself a lot of time. Better prepared to appreciate them, let your eyes wander down to these elucidating asides.
3
The obvious? We will never forget the images of the magnificent beast, seated on her haunches in the middle of our great park, her head bent intently down, seemingly oblivious to the commotion she was causing. In the middle of the park she sat! Nothing could have been more “obvious,” or at the same time more incomprehensible. It is indeed the obvious that merits our most intense scrutiny. Shanti knew this, and so, despite this alarming disclaimer, she does not dispense with that which is most important to her narrative, which is to say that which is in the center, which is to say that which is right before our eyes and which yet we cannot see. And so at the outset already we know one thing which we saw and yet did not see, the answer to the question: What was Shanti doing there for so long, calmly, in the middle of a meadow meant for sheep, while all around the world people watched transfixed, while all around her crumbled a city she had inadvertently reduced to chaos? The authorities have been afraid to share it with us, this simple yet amazing truth: she was writing.
4
And guns, Shanti!
5
“Jumbo on the Run,” quipped the
News
. “Rampage!” screamed the front page of the alarmist
Post
. “Had an elephant escaped?” worried the foolish Bengal Ming, remembering.
6
“Rampage!” screamed the
Post
, see
footnote 5
supra
, beneath a full-page picture of Shanti’s enormous self. To capture his dramatic snap, the photographer from the
Post
dashed into Seventy-second Street just inches from her feet, looking up and clicking, clicking, clicking, clicking. Alas—that lump under your feet, Shanti, that squirming, screaming, unexpected, far-beneath-you thing—did you feel it? Reading this we have to assume, sweet unassuming creature, that you didn’t.
7
It is hard to get comfortable, because my left foot always feels like it’s asleep. Elephant tranquilizers are not to be trifled with.
8
I hope you hadn’t forgotten, Shanti, the least of those people, who had observed you from the very beginning; who cared for you and loved you when you were at the most hopeless point on your hopeless journey. Why couldn’t you have mentioned him here by name?
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But will her story be a singular and bizarre anomaly, a blip in the stream of popular culture, a moment of pure novelty? Or will her tale bear a meaning beyond its facts? Will it become a culture-shifting event, a watershed in the conjoined histories of our two species?
10
“Break free” suggests incorrectly that freedom can be found simply by escaping captivity—Shanti sadly stands corrected. Neither is it true (as she also should have known) that all circus workers and zookeepers are intent on enslavement. There are some who work within that world in order only to subvert it. At any rate, have others “broken free”? The recent evidence:
- In Houston, this past October, a 700-pound Balinese wild boar unlatched the door of an improperly locked zoo vehicle with its tusk. It roamed the finer residential districts, entered a large, air-conditioned shopping mall, slid across the mall’s indoor ice-skating rink (scattering skaters but harming no one), exited through the ladies’ department at Saks, and disappeared for four days, until it was shot and killed while snacking on a stray dog behind a 7-Eleven.
- A gibbon in Cincinnati stole keys from its sleepy keeper, escaping its enclosure only to take up residence in the glass well of the popcorn maker at the zoo concession stand. It was captured and returned to its confines; the popcorn was discarded.
- An ostrich in San Diego disappeared without explanation; it was found three days later hiding in the back of an automotive store, having garlanded itself evidently in a stack of radials.
- A Galápagos-style Komodo dragon turned up in a swimming pool in Los Angeles. The owner of the pool failed to report the wonderful lizard, hoping to keep it as a pet. Sanitation workers discovered it in the trash weeks later. It had died of what was later determined to be a vitamin D deficiency attributable to the sudden absence of rodents from its diet. The owner of the pool had attempted to raise the dragon as a vegan.
- Recall, again, that infamous tiger, Ming, who terrorized another city for days. Man-eater and murderer, he ruled that city as his kind has always thought was its right, until he was, like all the others, tranquilized. He lay on the asphalt, tongue lolling, black lips pried back into a mock snarl for gums to be examined, the deadly ivory of his daggered teeth as vital now as unhammered nails, tapped and tugged by emboldened, human fingers; the very killing room of his mouth mute and empty, and violated by a plastic tongue depressor; his insensate, soggy mattress of a body, lifeless, unwieldy, shoveled finally onto a caged truck; and, dull eyes blinking, head pounding, awoke—sad groggy hungover Ming, erstwhile king—right back where you started, in the zoo again.
There is more anecdotal evidence (see Jason Hribal,
Fear of the Animal Planet: The Hidden History of Animal Resistance
, Counter Punch and AK Press, 2010). But did any of these animals, Shanti, achieve
freedom
? I have found not one example of an elephant escaping to live happily and with dignity in the city. Disregarding isolated instances, ill-conceived experiments, and unsubstantiated rumors, dear Shanti, your dream remains pending.
Back
11
See above. What did you expect, Shanti? That people wouldn’t bat an eye to see a tusker careening down Broadway? That the city would build elephant lanes on the West Side Highway, double-wide, for your slow-moving sisters? That your calves would study with our children side by side in the same schools, and play with them? That they would be popular in the playground, your elephant children, tossing balls with their trunks, spraying water of a summer’s day at their bipedal friends? Did you ever fear, Shanti, that they would instead feel, for the first time, fat, naked, ugly, and odd? That they might fortify themselves in angry elephant enclaves? That they would stand in corners and cower, instead of flapping their ears against the city air and trumpeting out their freedom?
12
Elephants never forget. I’m sure you’ve heard this phrase. Here we see that, for good or ill, it’s true. Everything Shanti has seen, heard, tasted, and smelled, she remembers. It is a burden. In this city, dogs wander the streets noting the smell of every beast who has been there before them, treading a landscape invisible to the rest of us, a landscape whose urine-marked boundaries we will never comprehend. Similarly, for Shanti every inch of life, every color or shape, bears a unique and pulsing resonance. Show her a face, say a name, make a sound, name a thing, and she could name you another that preceded it, whose memory rises unbidden in her mind, to press up against the present thing with its own painful force and reality. Every corner of the world she turns reveals to her a new vista haunted by an old one; every door opens into a new house whose furnishings seem stolen from a long-ago home. Elephants don’t enjoy those simple Freudian-type luxuries humans take for granted: aphasia, repression, sublimation, omission. Memory for them is an edifice, a fixed and growing thing, enlarging itself brick by brick with each passing hour. It is a burden. In writing this, Shanti shares her burden, for a spell, with us.
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Rushing underfoot, clumsy but eloquent in her own way, now straying from, now returning to the herd, in contrapuntal gallop with those above—an intuitive anticipation, dare we say, of her future editor’s trotting underfootnotes?
14
Hm!
15
The language of
words
would come only later—when she needed to communicate with humans. (Shanti’s somewhat romantic faith in language—both elephant and Englaphant—must be distinguished from the attitudes of other literate beasts, particularly the German-speaking ape Red Peter [1883–1924], brutal truth-teller, joyless [though not humorless] genius, gifted imitator of humans, altogether remarkable creature, who started off his speaking career with a hoarse “Hallo!” not because of an idealistic desire for interprimate communication; not because, in conjoined existence with people, he perceived new possibilities of freedom [Red Peter mocked the idea of freedom]; but only and merely because, held captive by humans and at the end of his short rope, he needed
“einen Ausweg”
[“a way out”]. Language released him from a cage—nothing more.)
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Elephants are a complex species. Their herding instincts are counterbalanced, if not contradicted, by the deep-running passions of their individual psychologies. For example, pachyderms may harbor personal grudges for years, remembering the beatings inflicted by a particular mahout, or the pokes and thrown pebbles of a mischievous young circus visitor; and on encountering the person by chance years, yea decades later, kill him.
A narrative, to be completely true, must plumb these dark depths. But keep in mind that Shanti, for all her perspicacity and eloquence, is at heart an innocent, as reluctant to suspect malice in her relatives as in the kindest of her captors. And she was short on time. Wouldn’t she be regretful if the one person most intimate with her life and her tale, well studied in elephant culture and psychology, a writer not untalented in his own right, and who moreover enjoys exclusive access to her text, did not fill in for her those voices and details that she would have felt, on further and deeper reflection, were crucial? While the editor’s job is normally to clarify, when duty calls, he must not shy from the role of a sort of
Shamspeare in love
. I humbly comply. Imagine, if you will, a scene, exterior, a jungle, daytime. Enter Shanti’s mother, Amuta, a spry, keen-eyed young woman.
AMUTA:
The herd trusts her implicitly, respects her fundamentally. But don’t let misplaced respect and false sentiment cool your purpose. When the young among us are dying, there is no time to indulge fond old age.
Enter Ania, an old elephant, ears frayed from many battles, eyes rheumy with wisdom, kindness, or fatigue
.
AMUTA:
(Aside)
Here she comes. Steady yourself. See how fat she is? For too long we have indulged her with portions of our grass while our own calves have gone hungry. If that ponderous cow had to seek her own food, she would starve. She lived her youth in fuller times, but since I was born we’ve had only lack. See her eyes? She was the sharpest among us once, the lithest and most fearsome. This is how we become when we live too much of our lives in prosperity, dull and clouded, susceptible (just watch!) to truism and flattery. How sad to see a bright star go dim. Better to put it out entirely. This morning I heard a tigress stalking a nearby valley. (Even the tigress has more logic than Ania—seeing the drought, she has left her home and invaded ours in search of meat.) I’ll give Ania one more chance to change her mind and take the herd away from this dead land. If she stubbornly refuses (as I’m sure she will), then I’ll lure her with this bit of fruit I found, buried in the den of a long-dead ape. I’ll send Ania to pasture in the tigress’s valley, and let her learn the jungle’s logic. By herself, the fat old dam stands no chance. I’ll flatter Ania and feed her. I’ll play on her greed to seal her downfall!
ANIA:
We are here. Why have you called us?
AMUTA:
(To Ania)
Have I made you walk far, Ania? I apologize. Rest under the shade of this tree. Here is some fruit I found and saved for you.
ANIA:
Fruit? How rare, how delightful.
AMUTA:
It’s not so fresh.
ANIA:
Don’t be silly. These rotting bits might seem foul. These might be the undigested pieces picked from some far wandering monkey’s shit. No matter. In times like this, such bits are as refreshing as heavy rain and a roll in the mud. We don’t see fruit these days much anymore.
AMUTA:
No, we don’t. This season has been a poor one yet again. We have not had the rain we’d hoped for.
ANIA:
Yes, but there is always next spring. We have lived through many more seasons than you, Amuta. Some are dry, but others are wet.
AMUTA:
Your experience has made you wise. But surely this drought is unlike any you have seen before. Some in our position might consider seeking out a new grazing land.
ANIA:
Leave? This is our home. There is no way to leave, no sense in the thought.
AMUTA:
(Aside)
That was your last chance, old dam. You’ve lived a full life, so there’s nothing to regret. I’ll not allow you to kill us out of respect for your empty years.
(To Ania)
Your years have served you well, old Ania, and under your leadership we can only hope for fullness and increase. Have you enjoyed the fruit?
ANIA:
Yes, young one. There is only one thing, they say, better than a bull on your back, and that’s a banana in your mouth. You seem brighter than your cousins. We have enjoyed the fruit very much.
AMUTA:
I know where you can find more of it.