But most of humanity was dead, and the survivors couldn’t have babies, and the elephants were spontaneously combusting.
“You know this was your idea, you can’t pretend that it wasn’t,” James said. “Every time, I tell you that you shouldn’t do it, that it’s too dangerous, that you could die. Every time you ignore me.”
“I don’t ignore you,” Liyana said quietly. But she knew she did. “This is too important to stop. I could have a baby. Humanity could keep going.”
James shook his head. They’d had the argument so many times before, Liyana could predict each beat of it. Now would come the part about how they didn’t know that people couldn’t have babies, that it could just be them. It was too dangerous to really travel anymore; they never heard from anywhere more than a hundred miles away; maybe there were pockets in the world that weren’t as twisted and ruined as Amboseli.
Liyana wouldn’t say, but would think that James needed the delusional belief in those safe havens, needed to imagine that his wife—his love, lost when the war began while he was in Kenya with the Elephant Preservation Project—and children were safe. She wouldn’t say, but would think that San Francisco was surely gone completely. Like Mombasa, like Durban, where her parents had lived. She wouldn’t say, but would think that she wasn’t forcing James to be with her, after all, hadn’t forced him into sleeping with her. That she was the pregnant one. That all the risk was hers.
Instead, she said, “I can do both. I’m just watching the elephants, and now that I know where they go, I can get a spot farther away, somewhere comfortable.”
Sighing, rubbing his fists into his eyes, James said, “Fine. But I’m coming with you.”
Liyana knew that James was well aware he couldn’t make demands of her, that no one could. But just the fact that he knew that, the hitch in his voice when he said he would come along, softened her stance. She nodded.
There was affection between them, she thought, if not outright love. And he would make a good father, if anyone in the world became parents again. Four pregnancies, nothing to show but bloody and miscarried fetuses. Other women had gotten pregnant as well, but none with the determination of Liyana. She hadn’t seen any evidence that animals of any kind were breeding. The world was winding down, but she would bring it back. If need be, thrashing and squalling and fighting her the whole way.
Liyana’s cousin Nandi had been the first girl Liyana knew to have a baby. As Liyana held her cousin’s month-old daughter in her arms, cooing and making faces at her, she talked to Nandi about her upcoming trip to Kenya, her first time visiting Amboseli, a research trip for grad school, tracking elephants. She supported the baby’s head while chattering away about elephant social structures, the importance of the matriarch.
“That’s what you’re talking about?” Nandi asked. “Elephants? Look at the baby, Liyana. Pretty little Inyoni. You can’t say you don’t want one for yourself.”
“Sure, sure,” Liyana said. “Someday. But I have so much to do now. I can’t be tied down by a baby.” Immediately, she stumbled over her apology, but Nandi laughed it off.
“You’re too funny,” Nandi said. “Give it time.”
Inyoni began crying then, and Liyana handed her back to her cousin, her fingers lingering on the soft skin of the baby’s neck.
Durban was gone now. Nandi and Inyoni and everyone else, gone or warped beyond recognition by forces Liyana could never understand. But the elephants remained, at least for now. And Liyana’s baby was past what would have been the dangerous time before. But now, there was no longer any time that was safe. Not in this world.
As they watched fourteen elephants silently burn to death, their massive bodies hissing and crackling as flames leapt into the sky above them, James cried.
“There’s only fifty-three left now,” he whispered. “There were almost a hundred in the bond group when we started. They’re just dwindling away.”
“Just like us,” Liyana said, and he shot her a horrified look. “It’s true,” she protested. “When’s the last time you saw a baby elephant?”
Weeks earlier, when Liyana had told the others back at the lodge that she was going to find out what was happening to the elephants, where they were disappearing to, they’d joked that she was off to find the fabled elephants’ graveyard. Half the people there had been part of the Elephant Preservation Project; they knew that was a myth. And yet here she was. The same spot as a month ago, and almost weekly more elephants came, in groups of twos and threes and larger, and caught fire.
The fires burned out, leaving behind nothing but piles of gray ash. On their second time out together, James had noticed that the elephants touched their trunks to the ash before they began singing, each animal in the circle lowering its trunk to each ash pile, then touching the tip of their trunk to their forehead. Remembering the dead.
Now, with the elephants gone, he and Liyana walked down. No, she thought. James walked, Liyana waddled. Twenty-two weeks. Her stomach bulged under her t-shirt like she was trying to shoplift a melon.
They circled the ashes, still steaming in the afternoon heat. Each time they inspected the ashes, and each time gleaned no new information. If this had been before the war, before the great change to the world, they could have brought the ashes to a laboratory, had someone analyze them for bacteria, viruses, some evidence of what could be causing the elephants to combust. Of course, if it were before the change, the elephants wouldn’t be combusting in the first place.
“They come to the same spot every time,” James said. “Does that mean something? With the touching the ashes beforehand? Like how they’ll stand watch over their dead relatives?”
The ashes smelled of char and copper and something almost sweet. The combination made Liyana think of old candy, a caramel that had been forgotten between the seats of a car, left to rot in the sun. Bile rose in her throat and she spit it onto the ground next to the ashes. Spitting directly into the ashes seemed disrespectful. The elephants surely knew that these ashes were the remains of their family members, their friends. Smart animals, they understood death, understood the cycle of growth and decay.
“We’re in the wrong place,” she said.
“What? You think they have more than one spot?”
“No, no.” Liyana shook her head, looking in the direction the elephants had come from. “We’re seeing them die. If we want to know what’s causing this, we need to see them live.”
Her whole life, Liyana rarely cried, and never in front of people. As a little girl, she fell off her bike riding around the neighborhood with some cousins, and as the pain traveled from her bloody knee to her eyes, she swallowed it back, rushed into her house, up to the bathroom, and shut the door behind her before she finally allowed a whimper to escape.
When she lost her first pregnancy, she didn’t cry. She knew it was coming, knew academically that she wouldn’t be the woman to miraculously carry a pregnancy to term when no one else could. But she felt hollow afterward nonetheless, emotionally scooped out like a pumpkin.
That night, she and James lay in bed, turned on their sides, back to back. Liyana couldn’t sleep. She listened to birds calling in the night, insects chirruping in the bush. She tried to clear her head, to think of nothing at all.
The mattress wobbled. A new sound joined those filtering in from outside. Breathy sobs, sniffling. James, her man, lamenting the loss of the baby. Lamenting the loss of his family, his wife and children, the whole world. He shook the bed and gulped air. He snorted and wiped away mucus.