Larger Than Life (Novella) Read online

  She shakes her head, her ears standing out like great pink radar dishes.

  “Wallow like you mean it,” Neo suggests, smiling broadly.

  “Oh, like this?” I ask, and I grab a handful of mud and throw it squarely at his chest.

  He’s so surprised that he staggers backward, losing his footing. He lands on his bottom as mud splashes up, splattering his face.

  Lesego, watching, trumpets with delight before splashing into the puddle beside him. She sucks muddy water into her trunk and sprays it at Neo’s back.

  Our calf is having a grand old time now that she has a friend to play with. I give up trying to hide my snickering as Neo scowls. “Give me a hand,” he says, reaching out so that I can help him up.

  His fingers curl around my wrist. But instead of using me for leverage, Neo kicks out with his foot so that I trip and fall forward, facedown into the mud.

  I come up sputtering, wiping my eyes, dirt gritted between my teeth. Immediately I think of the telegram in my pocket that I haven’t read yet, that I won’t read now. Maybe it is better that way.

  “You’re going to pay for that.” I dive, trying to push Neo under. We wrestle as the mud plasters our clothes to our bodies and Lesego splashes behind us.

  Neo is stronger than I am, but I am determined. I struggle and push against him until he is lying beneath me, my arm braced over his chest, my weight pinning him. In my free hand I hold a heaping scoop of sludge, which I let drip slowly onto his forehead. I realize that my skin is as brown as his is now. That we match.

  “Say uncle,” I urge.

  He grins. “You wouldn’t.”

  “Try me,” I suggest.

  And he does. His arms come around my waist and he knocks me completely off balance, not with brute strength or sheer force but with a kiss.

  His hands are in my matted hair and his mouth presses against mine, a validation as sacred as the seal of a king. And then suddenly a wall of water sprays me in the face. We spring away from each other, guilty. Lesego’s fountain separates us like a river that carves through a continent, leaving the landscape irrevocably changed.

  One day when I was seven I came home from school to find that my mother had redecorated my bedroom. My shelf of stuffed animals was gone, replaced with all the books on math and science she had used in college. The small table where I had tea parties for my dolls had likewise been cleared, and was now a laboratory—covered with a broken toaster, the guts of an old desk phone, a screwdriver, a wrench. But the jewel in the crown was a microscope, complete with preprepared slides. There was fiber and blood and cork. Salt crystals.

  “Take a look,” my mother said, showing me how to peer into the microscope. She slipped a slide into place—the small brown fleck that was onion skin, stained with iodine.

  I gasped and jumped back from the eyepiece. Up close, that little sliver of nothing became a wall, each brick a cell surrounded by others. “What do you see?” my mother asked, her voice falling like a secret into my ear.

  “It looks like cars,” I told her. “Stuck in traffic.”

  She laughed. “Does each car have a driver?”

  “Yes, a brown dot.”

  “That’s the nucleus,” she told me. “It’s like the command center for the cell. And it’s floating in fluid called cytoplasm. And the cell membrane, that’s the brown circle around each one.” She watched me marvel over each slide and then, abruptly, said it was time to set the table for dinner. “Make sure you put everything away neatly,” she told me. “That way it will last.”

  But I didn’t, because I was using the microscope every free moment I had. Magnification was a miracle to me. I wondered what I was missing with my eyes, just going about my day; I couldn’t believe that some scientist or doctor hadn’t invented contact lenses or glasses that allowed us to look at our surroundings as if they were underneath a microscope at all times. I began to regard the world differently. Simply because I couldn’t see something didn’t mean it wasn’t there. I had dreams where I opened my eyes and saw everything larger than life—magnified ten times, a hundred times, a thousand times. I could look at any organism and know what made it behave the way it did, because I could scrutinize what lay hidden to ordinary people. I imagined this was what it felt like to be psychic.

  About a week after I got my microscope, I was itching to see more than the slides that had come with it. I ran into my bedroom after school to find my mother reshelving all the books I’d left open specifically to the pages of organisms that I hadn’t yet seen under a microscope—mold and strawberries and hair cells. “This room is a disaster,” she said, frowning. “Didn’t I tell you to clean up?”

  “Please,” I begged, taking the books out of her arms, hoping to tamp down her anger. “Can you teach me how to make more slides?”

  I thought for a moment she was going to walk away. But then she rolled up the sleeves of her meter maid uniform and knelt on the carpet beside me. She reached into the back of the little hinged wooden box that held the prepared slides for a blank slice of glass. “How would you like to see,” she said, “what you look like under a microscope?”

  My mother began to organize her surroundings, making order of my chaos, with the same practiced efficiency I saw when she diced vegetables or made hospital corners while changing the bedsheets. She handed me a tiny bottle of sodium chloride solution. “Just a drop,” she said, gesturing to the slide. She told me that we had to use the saline because pure water would make the cells we were going to study burst from pressure.

  She gave me a toothpick and demonstrated how to rub the inside of my cheek to gather epithelial cells. These were swirled into the drop of solution on the slide and then—because the cells were transparent—she had me add two drops of methylene blue stain.

  My mother came up behind me, guiding my hand with her own. “Hold the cover slip at a right angle,” she whispered. “And let it … just … drop.”

  The slide looked like a little rectangular Band-Aid with a blue center; it was disappointing. Unlike the preprepared slides, which had at least a tiny chunk or nugget or sliver visible to the naked eye that blossomed into a universe under magnification, this was nothing more than a blue blot. But as soon as my mother slipped it under the microscope clips, I was mesmerized.

  The cells of my cheek were small, uneven circles, fried eggs with cerulean yolks. They moved and wiggled. They clumped together like the cool girls at school, as if they couldn’t bear to stand alone.

  My mother was not particularly affectionate; she tucked me in without kissing me good night; when we watched TV at night, we did not cuddle but instead sat on opposite sides of the couch. But in this moment, with her body so near that I could feel the warmth from her skin and this beautiful bubble of science surrounding us, I slipped my arm through hers, burrowing closer. “Do you want a turn?” I asked shyly.

  She bent her head over the scope so that her hair became a curtain, screening her face. “It’s so easy to forget,” she murmured, “how underneath, we’re all exactly the same.”

  Two weeks later, I came home from school to find all of it missing: the books, the slides, the microscope. Back were my stuffed animals and my dolls, although I didn’t want to play with them anymore. I felt like the scientific samples that had been stained, that couldn’t go back to being transparent.

  I looked up to find my mother leaning against the frame of the door, her features impassive. “I told you if you didn’t clean up this mess, then I would.” She walked away, leaving me hungry for a knowledge I couldn’t name.

  As I grew older I learned that not being able to observe a magnified world was not an evolutionary design flaw after all. In fact, it was a means of protection. What we could not see clearly, we didn’t have to pretend to understand.

  As Lesego gets bigger and bolder, she begins to test her limits. In the wild, this would lead to a sharp rebuke from her mother or the matriarch. In the wild there would be so many aunties and older sisters around taking
care of her that no matter what mischief she wanted to get into, she would never get very far. But because there is only one of me, there’s nothing for me to do but run after Lesego one afternoon when she bolts away from the porch and toward the tourists’ camp.

  The guests who come on safari are warned that this is not Disneyland; that we do not cue the lions and that the hippos are not animatronic. For this reason they are escorted to and from their plush accommodations after dark, and they are told to keep an eye out for an errant bushbuck that may bolt across the path. But I am pretty sure that the last thing the Dutch businessman and his family expect to encounter on their way back to their rooms after tea is a small, determined charging elephant calf.

  Lesego stumbles when she first sees them, which gives me enough time to catch up to her. The Dutch family is delighted, their little girl clapping her hands at the baby elephant’s arrival. “Don’t move,” I warn. Lesego is too small to do much damage, but she is nearly three hundred pounds and curious.

  Lesego shakes her head in a weak display of intimidation. She tries to roar, but it sounds more like the toot of a clown’s horn. She rushes forward, skidding to a stop, a mock charge.

  The family thinks it’s hilarious. “Picture?” the businessman asks in broken English, holding up his camera.

  I hesitate. The reason Neo and I have avoided bringing Lesego here is that the more domesticated she becomes, the harder it will be to return her to the wild. It is already unorthodox for her to be almost exclusively in the company of two humans.

  Before I can tell him no, the wife and daughter scoot into place beside me and the man takes a photograph. As I return to the researchers’ camp with Lesego in tow, I mull how much trouble I will be in when Grant hears from the guests that she was the star attraction today. If word gets out—if that photo gets out—our whole research operation could be compromised, and punished by the wildlife department.

  I am so deep in thought that I do not hear Neo calling my name until he is virtually standing in front of me. Lesego, delighted to see him, trumpets and reaches for his hat. “Karabo’s herd,” Neo says, breathless—only then do I realize he’s been running to find me. “It’s being led by Mpho now.”

  Karabo was the matriarch who was killed by poachers, along with four other females in her herd—one of which was Lesego’s mother. But herds had ten or fifteen members; presumably the other cows and juvenile bulls had run off at the gunshots. They had not been seen for weeks, probably because they were avoiding the site of previous danger. Now, according to Neo, they are nearby, and they have a new leader.

  He stares at me, his chest still heaving, and I know what he’s saying: It’s time.

  If Lesego were in the wild, she’d have a herd to protect her. Her mother would teach her how to use her trunk to eat, how to threaten a predator. She’d learn from her grandmother where to find water and food, and which places are dangerous because of poachers. She’d have an aunt to show her how to practice her mothering skills, and younger cousins and siblings to test them on. I may have helped Lesego survive, but I am not equipped to teach her how to truly live. If Lesego has any chance of being reintroduced to the wild, this is her best shot: to be among those who are biologically related. Neo is right.

  We head into the bush to the spot where he’s seen Mpho and her herd. Three weeks of memories swell in my throat, making it hard to breathe: Lesego overturning the card table where Neo and I are playing Spit; Lesego’s ear fluttering over me like a butterfly wing as she leans close to my face; the urgent tug of her suckling on my elbow, my foot, the tail of my shirt; the designs she traces with a stick in the dirt outside the cottage, symbols in a secret code I haven’t yet deciphered.

  I walk with Lesego, my hand riding lightly on her spine. Behind us Neo drives the four-by-four, puttering along at a safe distance. It takes us an hour to cover the two miles of terrain between the camp and Mpho’s herd, and it is Lesego who senses them first.

  Her trunk rises into the air, and she wrinkles it, sniffing. She lifts her rear foot so that it hovers over the dusty ground.

  Suddenly, there is a rumble in the distance that I would guess was thunder if not for the drought.

  Lesego breaks into a run. I start after her, but Neo pulls up beside me in the vehicle. “Jump in,” he says, and we bounce up the hill after her.

  When we see the herd, they are in a valley, all pointed in the direction of the crest where Lesego waits and watches them, every fiber of her body vibrating with excitement. Loose-limbed and light-footed, she races toward the giants. From our position on the hill, we watch the other elephants immediately form a circle around her. “I can’t see her anymore,” I say, panicking.

  Neo points. “There. See the one with the single tusk? That’s Mpho. She’s got Lesego under her belly.”

  Another elephant shifts, and then I see it—the matriarch using her trunk to pull Lesego close.

  I have heard of elephants who think kindly of humans, who will come to the camp for help if they are tangled in a snare or barbed wire. Maybe it will be that way for Lesego. Maybe she won’t forget me.

  I don’t realize I am crying until I feel Neo’s warm hand cover mine where it rests on my lap. “Let’s just go,” I force out, because I don’t think I can stand to watch Lesego walk away.

  “Not yet,” Neo murmurs.

  Mpho suddenly takes her trunk and shoves Lesego away. The matriarch rumbles, Let’s go, and the herd begins to walk north. When Lesego scampers to follow, one of the other large females roughly pushes her back.

  “They won’t take her,” I say, realizing what I am seeing.

  “Maybe,” Neo says. “She stinks of human.”

  Suddenly I realize the great disservice I’ve done to Lesego. I might have always planned to set her back in the wild, but I have tainted her with salvation. Lesego smells of cookies and soaps and laundry detergent and the hundred other man-made items with which she’s been in contact. A herd that is terrified of humans—that associates those smells with death—will naturally reject her.

  Confused, Lesego turns to the only elephants that haven’t moved off with the matriarch yet—the young bulls that are too juvenile to live apart from the herd but too old to hang out with their mothers. They begin to charge Lesego, who is so surprised she doesn’t even feint to avoid the blow. They knock her over, and she struggles to her feet again. One bull crunches into Lesego with an audible crack; I see blood well up where his tusk has sliced open her forehead. Lesego lets out a distress call, but in this social experiment of my own creation, none of the mature females come to her aid as they would have in the wild.

  I stand up in the Land Rover. “Stop them,” I shriek. “They’re hurting her!”

  “Alice—”

  “I said stop them!” Without a second thought, I leap out of the vehicle and start running into the pack of juvenile bulls—a stupid move, but all I want to do is help Lesego. Neo immediately revs the engine, flying by me in the Land Rover to drive the bulls away. It takes him three tries before they jog off up the hill, a delinquent pack of teenagers, rumbling as if they are already embellishing the story for the telling.

  Dazed and stumbling, Lesego tries to join them.

  It’s not that she’s a glutton for punishment. It’s not that she’s not terrified. It’s that she wants a family, even if they don’t want her.

  With strength I didn’t know I had, I run after Lesego, rugby-tackling her with all my weight so that she tumbles to the ground. She trumpets, another cry for help, as I pull her ears over her eyes so that she cannot watch her cousins leave her behind.

  I don’t know what Neo says to convince Grant to call the bush vet, but he is summoned. Lesego is given two milligrams of etorphine and twenty milligrams of azaperone—sedatives to calm her while the gash on her forehead is treated. Neo and I stand shoulder to shoulder behind the vet and Grant, watching in silent misery. At one point our hands brush. My pinkie hooks tight to his, hidden in the folds of my cargo sh
irt, where no one will see.

  “I suggest,” the vet says to me when he finishes, “that you get some rest.” He is tight-lipped about the very obvious fact that we are harboring a baby elephant in the game reserve, which leads me to believe Grant has made an excuse for me. The two men leave so that Grant can take the vet to the airstrip.

  Although I should be exhausted after the day, I am coiled tight as a spring. I can’t imagine sleeping anytime soon. I start pacing in my hut, peeking out the door to make sure Lesego is still unconscious. “She’ll be out all night,” Neo says.

  “I know.”

  He sticks his hands in his pockets. “I ought to go.”

  I should nod, but I don’t. He should leave, but he doesn’t.

  I take a deep breath and confess the fear I’ve buried inside for the past three hours, ever since the debacle of watching Lesego be rejected by her herd. “Neo,” I whisper. “I made things worse.”

  I am thinking of what sort of life might be possible for an elephant in captivity: a circus, where she would be forever on display. A zoo, where her world would shrink to the size of a cage and enclosure. Was it really worth saving her from starvation for that limited existence?

  “You didn’t know,” Neo says.

  I round on him. “But I should have. The last time I—” I break off, realizing what I am about to reveal.

  Neo stands on the ground, and I am one step up on the porch, so our faces are level. “Tell me why you left Madikwe.”

  I glance away. “I was strongly encouraged to transfer to a new game reserve.”

  “Did you try to save an orphan there, too?”

  I think about the trampled calf that died on my watch, because I had played by the rules. “No,” I say, swallowing.

  Neo strides past me into the hut, to the cupboard where I keep my laundry supplies and—in the far reaches—my emergency alcohol. It’s a bottle of tequila I have cracked open only twice. Once when the calf died at Madikwe. And once just before I found Lesego and her slaughtered family.