I Am an Executioner (30 page)
So the more far-thinking of them began to consider things more broadly. Could self-elimination be accomplished while still, at least technically, living?
The answer: sort of. The sage Babhuvallavar was the first to try it. He sat perfectly still for forty-four years—almost like dying, but more boring, frankly.
Taking the concept further, an offshoot of the Beautiful Suicides prescribed a yet more elaborate route to self-abnegation. “Imitation is suicide,” said someone famous once, or was it me? Accordingly, the followers of this school set out, in a sense, to perfect and make intentional what the derivative Italians had stumbled upon unimaginatively. Recruited in their youth or early adulthood, they would each pattern their lives on another person’s, studying the other’s habits, adopting his behaviors, his clothes, his accent and manner of dress; then the imitator would go so far as to murder this other person, to clear the ground for the performance to begin (a difficult moment, as you can imagine—to eliminate the object of one’s utmost attention and care). The suicider then became, as far as possible, the other person—taking his job, sleeping in his bed, answering to his name—so that the suicider himself was nowhere, any longer, to be found. This form of “suicide” in its purest form consumed decades of incredible effort, and still butted up most profoundly against a central irony: when it was successful, it became invisible. Other people wouldn’t even know it was happening.
But it was seldom successful. In attempting this particular form of invisibility, the suicider achieved not exactly oblivion, but another kind of existence; by trying so minutely to inscribe his life upon another’s, the practitioner of living suicide found that he inevitably and repeatedly deviated, and each deviation, however minor, signified the particular and unique life of the actor. The very thing which he had sought to render invisible became highlighted, offset, more pronounced. The act of self-annihilation became a (rather weird) act of self-creation. In other words, no one was fooled.
Incidentally, please do not mistake any of this for a defense of suicide. The preceding sentence, while sincere, is also a paraphrase of my dear Charles Kinbote, in whose footnotes my own footsteps suicidally follow. For while imitation might aim toward suicide, it often begins as love.
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31
When the menageries of the Silver Brothers Circus enter the city, the first thing you sense is the rumble—not the familiar rumble of motoring vehicles, but a vibration of a slower, more deliberate frequency—through the soles of your shoes, into your tarsals and up through your heel, tickling your humeruses, until it is somewhere inside you. Through the darkness of Lincoln’s Tunnel, at the farthest end, there is a distant disk of light, a view, as it were, into another land. Suddenly, that light is blotted out, and one has only the sense that a large and inevitable blackness is approaching.
And then, when you have been lulled into a certain stupefied awe by this blackness and vibration, as if you had been tucked inside the world’s own body, from out of the darkness burst forth the bright and dark visages of all the world’s fauna. The tigers, ostriches, giraffes, and rhinoceri; the black bears and Koala bears and polar bears and grizzlies; the prong-horns and prairie dogs and parakeets and hawks on string; the snakes, turtles, crocodiles, and lizards; the orangutans and gorillas, the gibbons and monkeys (the tiniest of which were tethered to little chains, decorated with purple fedoras, and made to twirl and jump); and finally, bringing up the rear, what all deep-souled watchers were waiting for: the elephants on parade.
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32
“I don’t remember,” Shanti says, but surely what she means is that she remembers, instead, other things from that chaotic time. Whatever she doesn’t remember, she didn’t see in the first place. Cf.
footnote 19
supra
.
33
They came toward me, tail in trunk, tail in trunk, linked in that humiliating way circus elephants are always linked, each one moreover individually hobbled by a heavy chain leading from rear left to front right ankle. And I saw something distinct in the eyes of each one. Not just the watery sadness one finds in the eyes of all elephants in captivity, but something more specific, more familiar. And when she approached, I knew immediately that we, too, were linked; that somehow, across space and across time, my trunk was curled round her tail; that somewhere else, wherever I really came from, we had been kin. Once I saw her, I could not part myself from her, each year that the circus was in our city. How could I allow her to live in captivity? Her large ears flapped open, as if to say,
Speak to me!
Her truthful eyes spoke more directly, begging for
a way out
, yes, but more than that, for
freedom
.
34
Whose face is not seen, whose name is not mentioned? Which elephant was smart enough and had every motivation to lead Shanti and Amuta into this trap, to collaborate, as it were, with whomever dug this hole? Which elephant? Shanti doesn’t tell us, but we know.
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AMUTA:
(Aside)
I must loosen momentarily the ties of loyalty that keep these idiots from leaving.
(To the herd)
Fools! Imbeciles! Think of yourselves, and flee! Don’t just stand there! Morons! Iala—you suckled me as a child, but I am not a child anymore, so don’t stand there cowering! Weak old woman, a burden to this herd. No man wants you so you wish to bring the herd to the grave along with you? You would allow them to die as you let your own children once starve?
36
It is the “final stillness.” Amuta speaks quietly, coldly
.
AMUTA:
Why do you run close to me, Shanti? Hm?
(pause)
Why do you cling to me as if you were a baby?
(Amuta’s quiet rage is unmistakable.)
If you were not so attached to me, if you ran freely with the other elephants of your age, you would have been safe now.
(Shanti shakes her head. Tears stream from her eyes.)
AMUTA:
You are a coward and an infant, and so we will die together.
37
In the dark, quiet corral of the Silver Brothers Circus, a frequent visitor, enthusiastic volunteer, accused impostor peeks from behind a pile of hay: It is deep night; the circus murmurs only with the occasional snoring hippopotamus, or drunken midget weeping softly over an old loss. In the shadows, the visitor senses the rustle of the greatest of beasts, chained in their sleeping quarters, doubly chained by the fatigue of the day. Slowly, he makes out the quivering silhouette of one particular elephant, not asleep but swaying from side to side, tail twitching from anxious loneliness.
In the interloper’s backpack is a giant bottle of Gitranquizol (“elephant keeper’s friend”) pilfered from the house veterinarian’s poorly padlocked cabinet. The mysterious fellow mixes half of the powerful tranquilizer into a bottle of orange soda he has brought with him for this purpose. He edges toward the elephant, sits down near to her.
Shanti extends her trunk to sniff at his strange concoction.
Would you like some too?
he asks.
It is a way out
.
But she withdraws her trunk, detecting the drug’s unpleasant odor.
The man quaffs the bottle, emptying it entirely, and burps. Then he curls up at Shanti’s feet, awaiting the inevitable.
The man notices his toes and fingers begin to numb (indeed, his left foot will never again recover full feeling). His eyelids quiver. The ground feels cold; his tongue grows stiff; the world is filling with beautiful lights, a side effect of the medicine.
But just as his vision begins sprouting with impossible patterns, the precursor to death, he feels a nimble trunk opening his mouth, a stiff scrap of hay inserted into the back of his throat, tickling him there, until he is vomiting uncontrollably. And then the gentle press of an elephant’s foot upon his breast, massaging his heart back to action.
In the clouded midnight of my near death, she bends her face close to mine, pinches me awake with her trunk. I cough and splutter, returning to the world of living animals.
When I am finally able to speak, I ask her:
Why have you done this? Why have you brought me back to life?
In response, she speaks her first fully formed words of fluent Englaphant:
Why should you die alone on the ground
, she asks,
when you may die through me?
Then her trunk finds its way into my knapsack and discovers there an extra, untainted bottle of orange soda; tucking it into her mouth, she crushes it until it bursts, then flings the empty broken plastic onto the ground.
Orange is my favorite
, she adds—pausing to belch in stentorious elephant fashion. The man’s ears quiver, elephant-like, in surprise; his eyes widen in wonder at his understanding, before narrowing again with cunning.
That moment of mutual recognition puts me in mind of another such instance, again from the memoir of William Blacktusk, the famous (or soon to be) birth scene:
From the moment I spilled onto the blood sotted ground of this dimly lit world, I wanted only to crawl back inside the endless warmth I had left behind—the loving soft source of infinite benignity, the single memory of which today is all that remains to me of Mother. I tried to stand and fell; tried and fell. (And still do we try and fall.) There on the periphery, two individuals stood distinct even to my newborn’s eyes: one human figure casually stern, granted deferential berth by all those assembled; and on his shoulders a bouncing, excited, and awestruck toddler, whose face would become so familiar to me. These two stared with mute regard at the bloody wonders of nature, but would not touch me: I was wonderful but too grotesque. (Did they believe I had naught to do with them? Or did they recoil because they knew my wrinkled massive lump was flesh of their flesh?) But now comes the gnarled mahout, someone who in his old age had evidently earned my mother’s trust, and was allowed to touch and to bathe me, spilling cold waters into my mucus-clotted ears, my sticky eyes. I coughed and spat and out came the tube of soft white mess glutting my throat, and now I mewed and cried and heard my own voice calling. (The cold shock of that mahout’s brusque efficiencies notwithstanding, the sureness of his human touch was somehow fortifying, and my instinct tells me retrospectively that this was a man whose place of trust was well earned; but after that night, the silent old man disappeared as suddenly and irrevocably as my mother, whom he served.)
And long will I remember the little looking boy’s final exclamation. He had sat a long time in speechless wonder, straddling the strong shoulders of his father, staring in witness of the moving spectacle of my elephant birth, when finally the powerful emotions building up in him those silent minutes broke forth. His small face screwed up like a knot in a tree, and bursting into sobs, he squealed, “I love him! I do, I do!” Then he buried his face in the neck of the human who held him, his alarmed confession bringing a disquieting smile to the lips of this man, and sending a bristle of unease through all the elephants assembled round me.
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2319)
THE BODY IN QUESTION WAS IMPALED
on the branches of a calthus tree, where uncleared jungle abuts the grassy track of the via. The time was earliest morning, not yet third dawn. The lights of my hovering hearse illuminated the unfortunate scene: torn wings, sprawling feelers, several legs at impossible angles. The body had belonged to Eth, an acquaintance of mine, a janitor at the Heavenly Paradise Resort, whose son had been one year behind my daughter in academy.
Down below, on the flat track of the via, walked our human constable, Inspector Barhoeven, with his nervous underling Palmena, sullenly striping the vines and thickets edging the roadway with the bright beams of their lamps, bending to retrieve bits of plastic and chips of paint from the hundreds of scraps always caught on the floor of the via. The investigation, I felt sure, was largely a formality. A drunken hit-and-run, casualty one local resort worker, is considered less a crime here than a necessary collateral of life. Sure enough, as I exited my craft and flew down to him, the good inspector immediately began making his case.
“Sorry to call at such an odd hour, Thoren.”
“Not at all.”
Barhoeven swept his five-fingered hand upward, the badges looped to his neck clanking against his bony chest.
“Isn’t it a crying shame?” Barhoeven’s face had a stricken, pleading look, as if searching for divine explanation, as if he didn’t see such corpses along the via at the rate of one per month. “Oughtn’t she to have known better?”
“Sorry?”
“Flying in the middle of the via! I thought Eth was a smarter being than that.”
A smile came to me, but I stopped it from reaching my lips. Clever Inspector Barhoeven—blaming poor Eth peremptorily, thus saving himself the time and trouble of tracking down witnesses, of embarrassing our planet’s guests, of starting down that long and troublesome road.
“You see, Thoren, I calculated the speed and distance she was thrown based on the angle and extent of penetration of the bough through her back and abdomen. The craft must have been proceeding at a moderate speed, when she passed directly across its path.”
Was he sincere? I have never known how to understand humans such as Barhoeven, so earnestly analytical, so confident of themselves at close of day. Perhaps he really was the planet’s most ingenious detective. “She should have bought a craft,” he muttered now, rubbing his tiny eyes. “She’s too old to be flying by her own wings.” In the dim light, I was surprised to see liquid beginning to streak Barhoeven’s cheeks.
“Eth took the safety of our planet for granted, Inspector.”
“So it would seem. We live in a city, Thoren. Not the damn countryside.”
I fluttered back up to give Barhoeven time to gather himself, and to give myself the opportunity to appraise the work ahead. Eth’s head was swollen to the proportions of a misshapen charlie fruit; her skull, a palpation suggested, was shattered into half a dozen pieces; her proboscis was torn; and her incisors were
scattered into the grass or lost down her throat. And now it fell to me to take Eth’s battered body, drain it, cake it, plump it, paint it, prepare it for funeral; build it back more beautiful than it was in life. The people of my planet expected nothing less of me than miracles.
