I Am an Executioner (27 page)

ANIA:
What?

AMUTA:
Old Ania, I don’t want to seem like I have kept hidden from the herd something which of right belongs to the herd. I only this morning discovered it and have eaten none of it myself.

ANIA:
Either you are making a poor joke, Amuta, or you must tell us right now where you found it.

AMUTA:
Old Ania, there is not enough for us all, and that is the only reason I didn’t wish to disclose this in front of the herd. There is enough, I am afraid, only for you, and it is right that you alone should have it, because your survival is our survival. A body is nothing without its head.

ANIA:
Don’t worry about all that. Just tell us where you found it.

AMUTA:
In the small valley nearby that was once shaded by evergreens. Some new type of tree has grown there, some windblown seed from elsewhere has sprung up a drought-loving tree that needs no water. It gives bananas much sweeter than what you’ve just tasted—in my rush, I picked only the rotting fruit that littered the ground beneath it. But it also gives mangoes and jackfruits and figs.

ANIA:
All from one tree? It seems fantastic.

AMUTA:
It must be a reward, old Ania, for your wisdom and patience. Soon many trees just like it will spring up, and all our worries will end. But now there is only one. Go and find it and eat your fill.

ANIA:
This tree is too improbable, Amuta. It’s a hunger-borne mirage. I’m sure you’re mistaken.

AMUTA:
I, too, thought so, until I touched the tree and smelled its fruit. Was that banana you just enjoyed a mirage, Ania?

ANIA:
It was not. Then guide me to the tree. Right away, let’s go.

AMUTA:
No, Ania! The herd will grow confused and restless in your unexplained absence. I will go and feed them an excuse. You need only walk to the very center of the valley, raise up your trunk, and sniff the air. Try to detect a smell something like a tiger—one of the oddities of this wonderful tree is that it gives this most obnoxious scent. Be patient if you don’t see it at first. Wait there patiently and surely you will find it.

ANIA:
Very well. You are a bright young elephant and will go far. You have done a good thing. Be assured, you are acting on behalf of the herd.

Exit Ania
.

AMUTA:
Is it this easy? Has it always been this easy? With so little effort could I at any time have dispatched the unquestioned leader of our herd? Treachery in name alone is daunting. But her kind old eyes almost did make me doubt myself. Poor, befuddled cow! She is a slave to her stomach, and at her age she’d die if we didn’t feed her first. But isn’t this alone reason to replace her with a younger leader? Survival is not a gift for the frivolous or soft. I didn’t invent this law, and bear no responsibility for it.

Now I hear the tigress growling. She must have spotted old Ania. Those snarls make even my strong bones shiver. God allows only such animals as this tigress to thrive in a time of drought: animals whose hunger makes them not weak, but more fearsome—animals for whom lack itself is fuel. Hear that? Ania is trying to fight the beast. Ha? Can that be Ania’s war cry? Still so loud and violent, no fear in it? The tigress’s blood will go cold at the sound. My plan will be ruined! But no, listen—Ania’s cry is of no avail. The tigress also knows no fear, and she screams her attack. Ania is shouting for my help! Steady yourself and hold your ground. Don’t let old instinct lead you to her aid. Hear the anguish in Ania’s voice? Sounds of gnashing and of chewing, crunch of bone and gurgle of blood, unheard-of and unnatural elephant cries. Oh, close your ears! It is a gruesome, noisy death. But Ania’s gathered a dying wind, and slurs out a scream. What? “Treachery!” does she yell? Does she yell “treachery”? Does she realize, as she dies, that her death was by design? Oh, but why let it worry you, Amuta? What weight does an accusation carry that echoes in the empty air, and falls on the ear of no elephant but me? Now Ania’s words are garbled, her moans weaken. There remains only the sound of that ravenous tigress glutting herself on the meat of an elephant, an elephant like me, one of our beloved. Why, what is it I have done? And having done it, can I still call myself elephant? Or does this act show that my veins run with the cold blood of some other creature? I am alone in this, and afraid, for this is treachery that goes against nature! But then, treachery always does. Every leader must act alone, challenging her very nature that her nature may be realized. Go on now, wipe the distress from your eyes. Walk proudly back to the herd. You have done well by them. When Ania’s fate is found out, and her absence makes them feel the lack of strength and guidance that actually they lacked even in her presence, then they should look only to you for its fulfillment.
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17
Shanti’s precipitate excursion into our city occurred, of course, following her escape from the Silver Brothers Circus, the outfit which every year pitches its dirty tents in a distant borough of our city. The Silver Brothers Circus was founded in 1871 by Amar Selvaratnam, more commonly known as Amar Selva (or sometimes Silva or Selvar or Silvar), and even more popularly as Amos Silver. Selvaratnam/Selva/Silva/Selvar/Silvar/Silver was a dusky man of unknown origin, various versions of whose name began appearing in the inmate rolls of jails and prisons in cities as far-flung as San Francisco, California, and Chicago, Illinois, in the mid-1850s. From time to time, usually to escape creditors, Silver tried to pass himself off as his own twin brother, “Andy Silver” (thus, “Silver Brothers”). The existence of Andy Silver was never, of course, confirmed, and Andy was commonly assumed to be another one of Amos Silver’s many frauds and hoaxes, until Amos’s death in 1928. At that time, in a little-visited windowless car of the Silver Brothers’ traveling conveyance, hidden among a family of cruel and filthy chimpanzees, was found a narrow cage holding a withered, naked, and equally aggressive old man. He bared his teeth and threw his shit like a chimp; he beat his chest like a gorilla; and he clutched with one hand a seemingly inexhaustible erection, like a gibbon. The chimp family among whom the naked man lived seemed to regard him, alternately, as God, fiend, whipping boy, pampered child, idiot—a source of irritation and awe and hilarious entertainment.

The discovery of this unidentified and unidentifiable man was heralded (by the circus’s new management) as the discovery of the long-rumored “real” Andy, and he was quickly promoted as the star of the revamped and under-new-ownershiped circus. “Andy the Man Monkey” survived a scant fourteen months under the glare of the gas flares and flashbulbs, but it was a frenetic and productive fourteen months. He left behind a rumored legacy of twenty-seven children, all conceived during that hysterical time, born of various acrobats, contortionists, bearded ladies, soothsayers, midgets, and clowns, as well as (reportedly) the females of several nonhuman species (chimpanzee, yes; also giraffe, hippopotamus, alligator). These supposed, hybrid, half-human children would become, in turn, the stars of their own freak show attractions.
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18
AMUTA:
Thoosha, Great-Aunt, you are old, and may feel your age entitles you to some indulgence. But in fact it gives you greater responsibility. You have no right to delay the herd. Get up. Remember that I am leader now.

THOOSHA:
Yes you are, Amuta. Therefore lead your herd ahead. New journeys are not for me. I am tired. If I find strength, I will go back home and rest among familiar trees, and let my bones dry among the bones of my mothers. The old life is all I know and want to know; one generation of hardship is not enough to make me abandon our memories.

But now I am tired. I will wait for sleep, and I will find my way alone.

AMUTA:
Even if you make it back, Thoosha, three weeks’ journey alone, as you say, it will only be to die. And in dying you will again have left. Why do you welcome that unknown journey, but fear this one?

Now stop drawing attention to yourself and get up, old coward! We have no time for this. Baboon-livered mistake! Skinny, short-trunked, unlucky heap! I don’t ask you anymore, I order you. The herd itself is your only home, Thoosha. You seem to forget that the old place was full of pain.

THOOSHA
: It’s not an unknown journey. I see the way clearly. It’s a simple place, dark and cool. My body aches for it.

ELEPHANTS:
Is it so, Thoosha? Can you see the new place also? Amuta tells us it will be cool and green, not dry. There will be water and sweet grass.

THOOSHA:
Better than water and grass is absence of thirst and hunger. I’m headed for our only home. You’ll join me there, one by one.

AMUTA:
Leave her, elephants. If a lonely death is all she wants, she’ll get it. Let’s move.
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19
What? See also
footnote 14
supra
.

20
Not long past the age of eleven, your humble editor was a student at the Dolphin Cove Middle School, where he had certain experiences and conversations that may elucidate the claims made in
footnote 17
supra
, regarding the alleged hybrid progeny of “Andy Silver.”

The history of animal-human love (let us avoid the anthropocentric term
bestiality
, and the politically fraught
miscegenation
) is clouded by popular misconception and mythology. For instance, among children at the Dolphin Cove Middle School, it was widely believed that chickens were the most easily accessible, manageable, and therefore personally satisfying of animals with which to copulate. Although cows were also desirable and abundant, they were rather large for our boys’ frames, and known to kick at inopportune moments. Among the watery beasts, our mascot and namesake, the dolphin, was widely reputed to have the most human and snug-feeling of recesses, and moreover was considered so intelligent that you could maybe have a conversation with it afterward. But while there was much talk of arranging a nocturnal break-in at SeaWorld, the nearest one was six hundred miles away, and so, practically speaking, none of us knew how to get hold of the delightful fish. Little did we understand, reader, and less still could we have imagined.

Does such conversation disgust you? Keep in mind these were the lunchroom digressions of twelve-year-olds, and none of my acquaintances in that school ever actually copulated with any creature—chicken, cow, dolphin, or human—until several years later.

Which brings me to the subject of my penis—a subject, I daresay, similarly clouded by popular mythology and misconception. I still remember the first time I realized I was, shall we say, different—perhaps tragically, perhaps magically—different. As I stepped up to the urinal in the boys’ room at our Dolphin Cove school, and my friend Brian—in truth, not a friend, but one of the boys known in our class for his uncensored mouth framed by shapely lips, his pretty hair, and his consequent popularity with the little ladies of our hallways—this bold Brian stepped up to the urinal next to mine, unzipped his pants, and began to guide his tiny dolphin out of its little cove. As he was doing so, Brian turned to glance at my own boy’s bud. Then his eyes widened, his grin spread, and as I was about to set loose my stream, the shameless fellow grabbed me by the shoulder and swung me around to face him. “Your thing,” he said. “It looks like an
elephant’s trunk
!”

My face crimsoned. My ears pounded with the internal pulse of my own horrified heart. I then looked down at what I held in my hand and saw that it, too, was beating with its own pulse, and, like the pouting, pointing prick of evil Andy Silver, it was unaccountably and uncontrollably aroused.

And Brian was right. It looked like an elephant’s trunk. Not that it was especially large, but it had a particular cast and curl, wrinkled and narrow and (having been spared the knife) flaring somewhat at the end—perfect, you might think, for grasping a peanut.

But of course this message was obscured, and by the time I got to high school, I was routinely greeted in the hallways with mocking elephant noises, and referred to as “Dumbo,” the boy with the disgustingly deformed appendage. I was called, also, various other sexually aggressive epithets. I could never again piss, in that school, in peace. But perhaps this is neither here nor there.

To return to our subject, I have found historical evidence for the early and widespread occurrence, in our own country, of the love that dare not moo or trumpet its name.
The Autobiography of William Blacktusk Souldier, Esq., an Elephant Escaped from the American South, written by Himself
(a text not yet fully translated, and available only to a small group of scholars, namely myself) begins with an accounting of Blacktusk’s own heterogeneous parentage. Blacktusk makes the fantastic claim also that a human boy on his plantation, who grew up to become one of the preeminent members of Southern Society, who even held a Seat in Congress, is his own human Brother. William Blacktusk’s autobiography begins thus: