Tania James - The Tusk That Did the Damage

Enchanted with her silvery future, the stepmother barely heard the boy complain of an aching head. Early in the evening, the boy took to his bed. He touched his temple to find there a thin channel of fluid, stickier than sweat.

Over the next few days, other changes began to assert themselves. He could not draw a breath without tasting all its flavors, as if the air were rendered clear and specific, as if he could peel away its layers, as if he had lived his whole life with cotton up his nose and now, only now, were his nostrils flushed out. His stepmother was onion and sweat, tempered with fennel. His mother, he remembered, carried a glaze of burnt brown sugar.

And he began to receive flashes of memory, snapshots from a time of life so early no one would believe the memories were his. He remembered the first bewildering time he hiccuped in his mother’s womb. He remembered the watery glug of his mother’s heart, a slow bass to his frantic ticking, and the metallic scent that met him when he emerged into the world. He remembered her face, haggard and doting, with eyes the shifting hue of a stormy sky.

He shared these developments with his stepmother, who had little use for his tales. Quit stalling, she said, and take the ivory piece to my brother.

But the boy was frightened by his body and mind, how they seemed to be writhing outside their natural, known borders. The next morning, he dug up the tusk and tucked it under his arm. Across forest and field he walked in pursuit of the elephant graveyard. But the yellow-toothed witch had vanished, along with her directions, and he found himself wandering in circles.

Upon returning home, the boy buried the marvel in a place unknown to his stepmother, who retaliated by withholding his supper and calling him son-of-a-whoremonger. The boy had other concerns. There was his skin, which began to thicken and toughen in places, forming dark, leathery patches across his back, his legs, his forehead. There were his fingernails, growing into hard, yellowish tiles. And every night, there was the ache that pulsed from the roots of his top two canines. They felt strange to the tip of his tongue, a pair of ungainly impostors. In the mirror, they looked whiter than the rest.

Was he boy or elephant? he wondered. Could he be both things at once?

Don’t be silly, said his stepmother. No one can be two things at once. For now you are a boy, more or less. But obviously you are turning into an elephant.

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.

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.