This is because of that tusk, the boy said, his eyes watering. It was the tusk that did the damage. What if I return it? Can’t I reverse the curse?
Oh, my sweet stupid son, there is no reversing a curse, everyone knows that. But who says we cannot turn this curse into a blessing?
Gently at first, she urged him to try to remember the location of the elephant graveyard. She suggested that he return there, with a wheelbarrow in tow, and take what else he could. You will do the taking, the stepmother said, being that you are already cursed and also my back has been paining me lately, so I will stay home. Think of it, sugar lump! One trip and your poor stepmother would never have to work again. No more work for you either, only a lifetime of mangoes and bananas and rest, free to come and go as you please.
That night, the boy lay awake, sifting through his memories for the location of the elephant graveyard, not to fulfill his stepmother’s request but to return what he had thieved. He refused to believe his stepmother’s claims about curses. He was the hero of his story; he swore to decide his destiny, his end, no matter what happened to his body.
To this oath, his body answered full force.
Before the boy could cry out from the pain, his two long teeth dove and rose into tusks of molten white, so white they glowed in the dark. His spine buckled and rounded; his nose dropped heavy and thick, so much power pent up in each accordion fold. His toes merged, his soles grew soft and sensitive. There was a pleasant kind of twitching at his tailbone. He sneezed.
He rose, instantly falling onto all fours, and shouldered a hole in the roof. With two strikes of his head against the mud wall, he saw his way out into the yard, to the mulberry bush. He learned quickly how to wield his trunk, how to toss away the dirt, how to pinch an occasional berry for his own brief pleasure. At last he found the marvel, glowing against the velvet dirt. Just as he shook it clean, he smelled her on a breeze. Onion and sweat, tempered with gunmetal.
He turned to face his stepmother. She was aiming his father’s rifle at him. Her eyes were round and easy to read as they traveled over his tusks, her fear and revulsion sliced with greed.
Take me to the graveyard, she said.
There are wants that change from month to month, and then there are yearnings so permanent their power and shape remain hidden from us save for a rare but terrible moment. How much time he had wasted in pursuit of a mother’s love, how much effort given to the woman on the other end of that gun. Sorrow overcame him, sorrow and failure and fury, and he roared from every corner of his chest. He took a few charging steps toward his stepmother, and she did as he expected her to do — she fired into his chest.
With the pain came another flash of memory, a recollection that seemed both his and not his, to which his feet responded by thundering into the depths of the wood.
All night he wandered, feeling the life leak out from his chest, feeling his boy memories melt away from him, replaced by others. There were flying elephants, spinning and cresting against blue skies; there was the Sage and the pinch of fateful powder; there was the Rajah, the custard, the cage. All the while, his legs moved of some long-buried volition. A waterbird rode his back, though he saw no water in the vicinity. When his steps began to drag, the bird flew ahead, lone and white against the gold-stained dawn.
Hours passed, or maybe minutes; the elephant could not be sure. All he knew for certain was the smell, which greeted him before the graveyard did — the ghosts of older elephants. His eyes had weakened, but he could just make out the blue haze of lake and sky, the hard white ruins. He sipped from the water and went to lay himself down in the shade cast by the largest skull.
From the hollows of the skull came the All-Mother’s smell, ancient and mineral, swelling his lungs. The smell brought other memories: the seams in her trunk, the column of her leg, the leg he used to lean against. He could no longer tell if the light were fading from behind his eyes or from the sky beyond, but all that seemed unimportant now. He circled round a single thought: So this was what it was all about! Of course he had to end precisely here, surrounded by her smell and by white on all sides, white as the inside of an egg, as the beginning of another life.
The Filmmaker
On Tuesday, the day after dinner at Y2K, Ravi was called to the eastern side of the park for keeper training, leaving ample time for an argument with Teddy.
“When did you tell him about Shelly?” Teddy demanded.
We were walking back to our rooms after a lukewarm shoot of a keeper bottle-feeding a tiger cub. All morning, I’d been formulating an apology. As soon as I began, he cut me off. “When?”
“When I got sick, I guess, I don’t know. We spent a whole day together.” Teddy lengthened his stride, making it hard to keep up. “I shouldn’t have, I’m sorry.”
I followed him into his suite. Whatever room Teddy inhabited, he managed to suffuse it with an air of artistic struggle — the open Moleskine like a flattened bird on his desk, the cryptic note cards across his bed (example: VULTURE SEQUENCE — THEY HATE BEING CAGED), the Batara matchbox on the sill, next to the incense holder/toilet-paper tube that could have, at any given moment, fragrantly burned down the room. Within that chaos of strewn clothes and notes was one corner of order: the suitcase of mini-DV tapes, each of which he had cataloged and kept with persnickety care.
Teddy shoved some note cards aside and sat on his bed, detaching the lens. “Did Ravi tell you about that Shankar Timber stuff?”
I nodded. “I don’t think I was supposed to tell you.”
“So you two are buddy-buddy now, huh?”
“I guess, yeah.” I paused. “He’s comfortable with me.”
“For obvious reasons.”
“Because we’re friends.”
“I’m your friend. You never used to wear lip stuff around me.”
I was surprised, and dismayed, that he’d taken note of my tinted lip balm. “You’re being ridiculous. This is how it always happens — they get attached, we get attached.” Don’t get too close to the animals, Ravi had told me, taking gentle hold of my elbow while I stood by the elephant nursery. We don’t want them getting attached. “How’s he supposed to open up if he doesn’t trust us?”
“All I’m saying is be careful. You have a way of encouraging people. Whether you mean to or not.”
My cheeks went warm. I sensed that Teddy was verging on some sort of confession, something that would capsize our friendship entirely. Clichés ran like ticker tape through my head—need to be on my own … just don’t see you that way …
Teddy let out a sigh. “My dad’s cutting me off in two months.”
“From what?”
“He’s been sort of spotting me some cash here and there, when times were tough. But now he has Bev and her whole litter, so pretty soon, that’s it. No more loans. No more health insurance.”
I sat beside him. “So you’ll freelance. You’ll move to Greenpoint. You’ll eat at McDonald’s every Wednesday.” I’d been the one to inform him of Fifty-Cent Wednesday, when, for three dollars, you could buy a week’s worth of flaccid burgers. “You’ll get by like everyone else, until you can’t. And then you’ll tutor rich kids or whatever.”
He nodded, a sad little smirk on his face. “It’s just, I’ll never have time like this again. Uninterrupted. Financed. At least not anytime soon.”
“So?”
“So I need this film to count. This is our chance to make a name for ourselves. A film by Emma Lewis and Teddy Welsh.”