Tania James - The Tusk That Did the Damage

With an X-Acto knife, Ravi sliced away a square of dermis, thick as a house mat, and peeled it back. Beneath was a shiny layer of fat and muscle, marbled with pink, and in the center, the burn hole like a black star that had bored its way through the flesh, spiraling, widening a contrail as it went. Teddy and I stepped closer. The stench of pus filled my mouth.

They took a saw to the animal’s side, the sound like a zipper going up and down. With pliers, they pinched and sheared the muscle beneath in great, gleaming swaths, blood pooling up. They cut around the huge wet balloons of organs, searched the medusal knots of the small intestine, cauliflowers of calcified fat.

Hours passed, and still no bullet.

By four o’clock, the heat had baked the stench to new heights. Teddy and I stepped away from the carcass, taking a break to switch out tapes, when Ms. Hakim came striding down a narrow berm, a handkerchief held to her mouth, followed by a forest officer with glinting badges and a mustache thin as the swipe of a knife. She surveyed the scene — carcass, Ravi, Bobin, guards — until her colorless gaze came to rest on us. I waved. She ignored me.

Putting a hold on the postmortem, Ms. Hakim summoned Ravi aside. She conferred with him quietly, and he nodded in response until something she said made him stop nodding. He scanned her face, then the ground, seemingly at a loss for words. They hung there, suspended, no longer a scene but a freeze-frame of something vital, something we would miss entirely if Teddy didn’t hurry with the tape.

As soon as we rose to join them, the conference was over. Ms. Hakim and Ravi parted ways, him to the carcass, her to us.

“Teddy. Emma.” She stuck a peremptory smile on her face. “You must be tired. Let me take you back to the center.”

I glanced at Teddy, both of us reluctant. “Oh — well, we’d prefer to stay until they’ve wrapped things up.”

“They are wrapping things up, I told them.”

“Then we’ll just get a ride with the team,” I said.

“No, they must drop off the tissue samples at the lab and then they must meet with me.”

“We could film that,” Teddy suggested. “The meeting would be an opportunity—”

“No,” Ms. Hakim said, adding a kindly grimace, as though it pained her to cut him off. “No filming in the meeting.”

“So that’s it then?” I said. “No bullet? We’re giving up?”

Ms. Hakim nodded, oddly at peace with the outcome.

I looked at Ravi, perched atop a stepladder, arms sleeved to the elbow in slush. He paused, called out: “Go ahead. I will see you at the center.”

On camera, we got Ms. Hakim to tell us that the bullet had not been recovered, that the carcass would be guarded overnight and burned tomorrow. As soon as Teddy turned off the camera, she motioned us to follow. “Now come, please come. The smell is too much.”

Less than a quarter mile from the elephant, Teddy insisted we stop the jeep so he could set up the tripod for one final shot — the raw, violet surge of mountains, the hill of dead elephant in the foreground. The rest of the way, he tried to bait Ms. Hakim with questions, which she met with a face flat as a wall. I kept quiet, simmering with the sense that we were missing a crucial piece of the story and that Ms. Hakim would be the last person to disclose it.

The next morning at the center, Ravi was nowhere to be found. I left him four text messages that began cool and curious, then spiraled into urgency. I skipped breakfast and logged tapes, just to keep myself busy.

Teddy ambled in and flung himself across my bed, poorly suppressing a belch. “Bobin’s mom made cutlets for us.”

I tapped the space bar, freezing on a frame of Ravi midsentence, lips pursed. Normally I would have leaped at the possibility of cutlet: crisp breaded shell, warm minced meat. But today my stomach was knotted up, all nerves. “I can’t eat right now.”

“Would you relax?”

“I am relaxed.”

“Your leg is having a seizure.”

I stilled my knee. “What do you think he’s hiding?”

“Something good, I hope. What’re you so wound up about?”

“It would be nice to know he’s being honest with us.”

“Maybe he’s not an honest guy. Maybe that’s what makes him an interesting character.”

But to me he was more than a character. And I felt I deserved the truth; his honesty was a measure of his respect for me, proof that I wasn’t some forgettable chick he’d bagged during a lull at work.

“Emma. You okay?”

I blinked at the screen. “This shot’s a little under. Little dark.”

Teddy rolled onto his side, squinting. “Yeah. Damn. All that white wall in the background. I should’ve cropped some of that out.”

“This bit is gold.” I tapped the space bar, and Ravi came to life.

… so the animal that primitive man most feared was the tusker with the broken tooth. These were the angriest, most irritated creatures, most prone to very violent episodes. So why do you think primitive man chose to worship Ganesh, an elephant with a broken tooth? Because fear and worship are two sides of one coin.

§

Around noon: the rusty squeal of the gates. Teddy sprang from the bed, where he’d been daydreaming behind Documentary in the Digital Age, not a single page turned in the last half hour. We grabbed our equipment, hustled out the door.

“Exam room,” said Teddy. Before I could suggest we meet Ravi at the jeep, Teddy was off.

The exam room was empty when we set up in the corner, farthest from the entrance. “He always stops here first,” Teddy whispered.

“We should tell him we’re filming.”

“It’ll be good to catch him in a private moment.”

“But it’s kind of an ambush—”

Teddy shushed me like a schoolmarm and told me to keep the boom low.

We waited, and I thought of Helen Levitt, snapping her way around New York, armed with the winkelsucher that allowed her to peer over other people’s shoulders. Usually the small, frail shoulders of children.

Ravi didn’t see us immediately. He dropped his bag on the counter. He fell into a chair against the wall, elbows on knees, hands limp. His stare seemed to go on for miles, minutes, unblinking. Out of the corner of my eye, I caught Teddy adjusting the zoom, zeroing in, a gesture that induced in me a small spasm of loyalty. I cleared my throat.

Ravi’s eyes snapped up and caught us. There’s one Levitt photo I can recall in which a child seems to resist Levitt’s attention. A frowning girl of maybe fourteen, rings under her eyes, a stitch of contempt between her brows. She meets Levitt’s gaze, distrusts and detests it. This was precisely the gaze that Ravi was giving us. “What the hell are you doing there?”

“We wanted to film you coming in,” I said, avoiding Teddy’s glare. “We thought it might be more authentic this way. Without you knowing we’re here.”

Ravi went to the sink. “Turn it off. I don’t want that on me right now.”

Ting! and the camera closed its ogling eye.

Teddy and I stood there, bereft of purpose, a pair of sheepish wallflowers. Ignoring us, Ravi unzipped the duffel bag and removed a burrito roll of blades, which he spread across the counter beside the sink. Dull silver on scarlet felt. I looked closer; some of the blades were laced with blood.

“Wait,” I said, though Ravi kept moving, turning on the faucet, adjusting the water to a soft patter on steel. “Did you just get back from the postmortem?”

“Yes. We found the bullet this morning.”

“The postmortem you were wrapping up yesterday ?”

He ran a bar of soap through his hands and nodded.

“But Samina said you were disposing of the carcass this morning.”