Larger Than Life (Novella) Page 6

  I don’t ask Neo how he found my stash; he knows this cottage as well as I do after nearly a month of practically living here. He takes juice glasses from the dish rack and pours two fingers of alcohol in each one. When he sits down at the table with the drinks, I join him. “Ever had tequila?” I ask.

  He shakes his head, lifts the glass, and downs it in one swallow.

  I do the same, wincing at the fire that races along my throat and makes my teeth ache. “There was a calf,” I confess, as Neo pours us each another shot. “He was attacked by his own mother.”

  Neo’s eyebrows raise. “I’ve never seen that happen.”

  “Well, Madikwe wasn’t like here. The South African government thought they could manage the elephant population by killing entire herds and putting the babies together on reserves like Madikwe. But those juveniles, they didn’t behave the way they would have if the older matriarchs had been there to keep them in line. And this one elephant, she trampled her newborn.” I look up at Neo. “It wasn’t her fault that there was no one around to teach her how to be a mother.” My voice gets hard, bitter. “It was ours. That calf was just collateral damage.”

  “You left because you couldn’t save him?”

  I shake my head and toss back my second drink. By now, the room is starting to swim at the edges. “I wasn’t the same, after he died. I hated not being allowed to intervene. Then about a month later, a group of rangers driving to check on a water pump found themselves surrounded by a herd of young bulls. One of the juveniles attacked the four-by-four, charging it over and over, spearing the doors with his tusks. Well, the rangers knew they had to get out and run. One of them was tusked by the elephant.” I watch Neo finish his drink, rattled by the reality of the dangers of his work. “The rule in the reserve was that if an elephant was an instigator or had killed a person, it had to be shot. During the attack, that particular elephant had opened up a cut on his forehead, so he was very recognizable within the bull herd. But every time the game warden went out with a gun to kill the elephant, the bull herd would surround him and move off. It was as if they realized he was in trouble, and they were protecting him.”

  I lean forward, my head resting on my hand. “This went on for months. The wound healed, and no one could recognize the bull anymore. No one except me, that is, because I had cataloged all the elephants at Madikwe as part of my doctoral research. The head of the reserve ordered me to locate that bull, so that he could be shot,” I say. “And I refused.”

  “Did you know which bull they wanted to find?” Neo asks.

  “Yes. He had a sprinkling of freckles behind his right ear. That’s how I had identified him, before the scar on his forehead, anyway.” I shrug. “But that bull might not have been so aggressive if there had been older males in his herd to teach him how to behave. He didn’t deserve to die because humans had fucked up in the first place.” I tuck my hair behind my ear. “I broke the rules. The game warden knew it. My colleagues knew it. The rangers, hell, they refused to drive into the bush with me, since to them it looked like I was standing up for an animal that had killed one of their own. And a month later that same bull killed a bush vet and was shot by the ranger who’d been driving him. After that, my boss suggested—firmly—that I might be more welcome at a different reserve.” I finish my third drink, and set the glass down so hard it rings against the table. “So yes, Neo, I should have known better.”

  He stares at me, but his eyes are unreadable. I do not know if he thinks that at Madikwe, by taking a stand, I was wearing the white hat of a hero or the black one of the villain. “Do you know of Pilanesberg?” he asks.

  Of course I do. I even did some of my doctoral research there. It is—like Madikwe—a reserve for the juvenile elephants that were spared in the South African culls to control the overpopulation of elephants, which was threatening biodiversity. And just like at Madikwe, they have had their fair share of behavioral problems at Pilanesberg. “I heard a story about the young bulls that were sent there after the culls,” Neo says. “They were herded into a boma, one surrounded by a fence with fifty-nine electrified poles. The sixtieth pole, that’s where the wires were joined, so that one wasn’t electrified. The idea was to keep the elephants overnight, so that they could be released into the reserve officially with the press watching. That way the government would look heroic, for successfully dealing with the elephant population problem. But the next morning, the bulls went straight to the one pole that wasn’t hot-wired, and in three minutes knocked it over and disappeared into the reserve before the press even had a chance to arrive.”

  “The moral of this story is that male elephants don’t like photo ops?”

  “No. The moral of the story is that if a rule is flimsy enough to be broken, perhaps it was meant to be.” Neo reaches across the table, lifts my hand, turns it over. I think of those electrified poles, of the shocks that the elephants would have received that long night when they tested each one. Neo keeps his eyes on mine as he presses a kiss into the center of my palm.

  My fingers curl, as if I might be able to hold on to it.

  I straddle Neo’s lap and touch the planes of his face, the muscles of his shoulders, the question on his lips. We tumble hard onto the floor, skinning my knee as he rolls me beneath him. His shirt comes off and then mine; my legs tangle with his as we push away the stiff canvas of our shorts. We are a family, and this is what has been missing.

  I cannot stop staring at the seam between our skin, silhouette and shadow. As Neo moves in me, I look out the window, at the stars sewn like sequins on velvet. I think about the moon, which is always in the sky, but only comes to life when she is wrapped in the arms of the night.

  The Hindi word for intoxicated is musth. This is also the term used to describe the heightened sexual state a bull elephant comes into once a year for an average of three months. During this period, the bull is driving by hormones, not brains. He doesn’t think. He acts—and then reacts—when he realizes what he’s done.

  When I was working on my doctorate in South Africa, there was an elephant-back safari at a game reserve not far from Madikwe. Each of the elephants was trained and ridden by a mahout, a person who had grown up with and worked with that particular animal for years. They had one young bull in the group who came into premature musth. During one of the bush walks with the elephants, the mahout must have done something to set the animal off. The previously placid bull went wild, grabbing the mahout with his trunk and smacking the man against the ground as if he weighed no more than a twig. He did not stop until the mahout’s spine was shattered. The female elephants knew immediately that something was grievously wrong. By the time the bull could control himself, and looked down to see the dead body at his feet, the females were dusting the mahout. They covered him with broken branches. They stood guard over him till the owners of the elephant-back safari arrived to find the mahout who had never returned to camp.

  When it comes to musth behavior, a male elephant is like a guy who wakes up in Vegas with no recollection of the previous night, looking down at the lipstick on his collar and the tattoo on his arm and the Mardi Gras beads around his neck as if to say, What the hell happened?

  The female elephants would never find themselves in that situation—they know better, all along.

  I wake up to the sound of scratching.

  Leaping out of bed, I throw open the door to find Lesego shuffling on the porch. The gash on her forehead is still raw and red, but it is no longer bleeding. And as she reaches out her trunk to touch my face, I stroke her trunk. “I won’t leave you behind,” I promise, thinking of the wide hips of Mpho as she swayed over the hill, her herd in tow. From what I have gleaned of the memory of elephants, I know that Lesego can recall those bulls charging her. The question is: Will it make her shy away from attempting to blend with any other herd, or will it be buried so deep that she forgets it ever happened?

  “Neo,” I say over my shoulder. “She’s up.” Just the taste of his name in my t
hroat feels like I have swallowed sunlight. I turn when he doesn’t respond and realize that the narrow bed is empty. At some point, while I slept, he abandoned me.

  Better get used to it.

  The thought hits me like a sucker punch, and then another bursts into my mind: He thinks this was a mistake.

  A third fear blooms, like a Hydra: He is afraid he will lose his job.

  And a fourth: He thinks I’ll be embarrassed.

  Shaking my head to clear it, I force myself to focus like a scientist would, instead of relying on gut instinct. It is possible that Neo did not leave me. That perhaps he only went to get coffee or to shower and is returning. It is possible that Neo is waiting for me to make the first move, out of courtesy.

  When I weigh all these other possibilities, I feel much less threatened. I look at Lesego and smile. “Come on,” I say. “Let’s go find him.”

  The calf lags behind me, dragging a stick through the dirt as if she is leaving a trail to find our way back home. It is a truly beautiful day—warm without being too humid, the sky a startling electric blue. Walking toward the rangers’ village, I feel the way I did the first time I looked at a slide beneath a microscope—as if I had been blind, until now.

  I will find Neo and tell him that I have no regrets. That if it makes him more comfortable I will tell Grant I instigated this relationship. I will repeat to Neo the secrets he whispered against my throat and my belly last night, passwords in a language no one else can speak. I will slip my hand into his and I will not let go.

  But all of my plans scatter when I hear children playing in the courtyard. This is startling, because it’s so rare. Then I realize it is Saturday, the day when the families of the rangers may come to visit. One of the boys—all angles and arms and legs—kicks a soccer ball that smacks me in the thigh. “Tshwarelo,” he says. Sorry.

  He looks terrified, as if he expects me to punish him. I smile instead. “Dumêla,” I say. Hello.

  I don’t know a lot of the Setswana language yet, but you have to pick up some words here and there when you spend all day with rangers. The boy’s little brother is staring at Lesego, his mouth a perfect O, the soccer game forgotten. “O mang?” I ask his name, crouching down to his level, as Lesego curls her trunk over my shoulder.

  “Leina la me ke Khumo,” the toddler says. My name is Khumo.

  Suddenly there is a flurry of activity, and a woman comes out of one of the huts, balancing a baby on her hip. Like many other Tswana women, she is beautiful—tall and willowy, with bone structure usually found on the pages of fashion magazines. Her hair is wrapped in a colorful scarf that makes me think of a sunset. I wonder if she is the woman who left behind the coconut oil that saved Lesego from starving.

  She rattles off a stream of Tswana so fast and furious that I cannot follow along, but I can tell from the slope of the boys’ shoulders and the way they are drawn to her, as if to a magnetic pole, that they are being reprimanded for hitting the white woman with the soccer ball. “No,” I say, trying to make her understand that the boys have done nothing wrong. “Go siame,” I tell her. It’s fine. Then I point to the little girl she is holding. “Bontle,” I say, the only word I know in her language for beautiful.

  The little boys peek from behind their mother, chattering about Lesego—or so I assume from the way they are pantomiming her trunk and her ears. “Do you speak English?” I ask. “I am trying to find Neo.”

  Before she can respond, Neo steps through the doorway and freezes.

  I am trying to make sense of the picture in front of my eyes when the littlest boy wraps his arms around Neo’s leg, as if it is a tree to climb.

  It is family visiting day in the rangers’ village, and this is Neo’s family.

  My body feels like a block of ice. “I … I have to go,” I force out, and I run down the path that leads from the rangers’ village, with the calf hurrying behind me.

  Neo catches up to me when I can just see the open door of my cottage, the bed inside where we made love the night before, when I did not know that he was married. “Alice,” he calls out. “Stop.”

  I turn on him, shoving so hard at his shoulders that he stumbles backward. “You didn’t tell me,” I yell. I am angry at him for hiding this. I am angrier at myself for not asking.

  The truth is, I didn’t look closely enough. Neo had been there when I needed him; he had told me what I wanted to hear; he had touched me like a match strikes wood. I was the fool for burning.

  Sensing that something isn’t right, Lesego roars. Neo grasps me by the wrist, a shackle. “You don’t understand,” he says softly.

  But he is wrong. I hadn’t wanted to. There’s a difference.

  As I pull away from Neo, as I walk to my hut, I can feel his eyes on me. I start counting the steps. Fifty, and I will be okay. Forty-nine, until I close the door behind me. Forty-eight. Forty-seven.

  “Alice.”

  The sound of my name being called cracks the shell of my composure. I look up to find Grant waiting on the front steps of my hut. Seeing Lesego, he purses his lips. “She’s bounced back fast.”

  I nod, and he hands me a piece of paper. I hesitate, expecting another yellow slip from Western Union, but this is a piece of camp stationery with a name scrawled across it. “Who’s Karen Trendler?” I ask.

  “She runs a sanctuary in South Africa. She’s very active in the fight against poaching elephants and rhinos.” He hesitates. “Your girl isn’t ever going back to the bush,” Grant says. “I think you and I both know that.”

  I had expected my mother to come to the party Dr. Yunque threw for me at Harvard to wish me well as I left for South Africa, but she didn’t show up. I thought maybe she would call instead and wish me a bon voyage. Yet in the month that had passed since our fight in the lab, my mother had not reached out to me. Apparently, if I was going to ruin my life, I was going to do it alone.

  I packed up my apartment in Cambridge without her help. I rented a storage unit instead of asking for space in her garage. And I tried to think like a scientist, not a daughter—making lists of all the times she had slighted me, all the things she had never said. Objectively—biologically—I knew I was an adult, that I could survive without her approval or attention. There was no reason she had to be part of my life, now that I was grown and independent. But love, you know, isn’t science. My mother was prickly, mercurial, maddening, demanding, infuriating—but she was still my mother. Somewhere behind the mask of dissatisfaction was the woman who had built a laboratory in my bedroom when I was seven. And so in one last-ditch attempt at reconciliation, the day before I flew to South Africa, I left my mother a voice mail, telling her what flight I was on, and when it was departing.

  I got to the airport early, lugging my one big suitcase to the ticket counter and checking in hours before my flight. But I didn’t go through the security checkpoint. I sat at a chair near the British Airways counter, scanning the features of every person who stepped through the sliding glass doors.

  Here was the great paradox that Darwin himself could not explain away: In spite of the fact that excising my mother’s negative influence from my life would probably make me happier, healthier, and therefore more evolutionarily viable, I couldn’t. True, my mother could make me feel smaller than a mustard seed; a single glance from her could make me question my every action and thought; and I could spend my entire life running and never catch up to her grand expectations for what I should have been or could have been—but she also had the power to make me feel like everything was going to work out, simply by breathing the words. She was a part of me, and if you carved away a part of yourself, you bled to death.

  I waited in the ticket lounge for British Airways until my name was called over the loudspeaker, a warning that the flight was going to leave without me.

  My mother did not come to say goodbye.

  In order to find Lesego a new home, I have to sneak out of the one we share. Grant has given me leave for a week to travel to Karin Trendle
r’s sanctuary to see if she will take the calf, and then to the necessary government departments to obtain the permits to make it happen. But Lesego cannot go with me, which means that the last person I have to encounter before leaving camp is Neo.

  He knocks on the door, and when I open it, I am careful not to make eye contact. “The bottle’s on the counter,” I instruct, as if I am giving orders to a nanny. “She was a little gassy last night, but I think it’s just the aftereffects of the sedatives. And feel free to eat the mangoes. They’re just going to go bad in this heat—”

  “Alice,” he interrupts. “Are we going to talk?”

  I look him in the eye. “We are talking,” I say evenly.

  “I didn’t plan to love you. And by the time I knew I did, I couldn’t tell you what you deserved to know.” He hesitates, his face shuttered. “I never wanted to hurt you.”

  I gather the blanket from my bed. “There’s a lot of that going around, lately.”

  Neo steps in front of me, blocking my path. “Sethunye grew up in my village. I’ve known her my whole life. She’s what was expected of me.”

  “Then what am I?”

  His voice breaks. “You’re everything I dreamed,” he says. He reaches for me, and my body sways into his. Neo’s eyes are closed, his forehead pressed to mine. “Please. If you have any feelings for me, you’ll tell me what to say. What to do.”

  “If you have any feelings for me,” I whisper, “you’ll let me go.”

  As if my words are a key, his grasp on me unlocks. I push the blanket at Neo so that he will not see the tears in my eyes. Then I step onto the porch, where Lesego is dozing under the canopy. She gets up, logy, when she sees me.

  “On three,” I say, the shorthand we’ve developed for this process where we cover the calf with a blanket so I can make a clean getaway. “One, two …” I turn, to make sure Neo is ready, but he is not holding out the blanket like a matador’s red flag. He has buried his face in the cotton, surrounding himself with my scent, the same way Lesego does when I disappear.