Larger Than Life (Novella) Read online

  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