Larger Than Life Read online

  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 fo