Larger Than Life (Novella) (5 page)

I remember because it was the only time my mother ever visited me in the lab. She
came in white-faced and shaking at the end of the day, when I was the only person
in
in the room with a group of cages filled with tiny preadolescent macaques. One, which
I’d named Hawkeye because of his inadvertent Mohawk hairdo, had a reputation as a
difficult animal because he’d struck out at other scientists, who in turn would be
more punishing when they worked with him to keep him under control. I took another
approach—rewarding good behavior with food instead of penalizing him for an infraction
he hadn’t yet committed. Hawkeye and I got along just fine.

I saw my mother enter the lab just as I opened the door of Hawkeye’s home cage to
jump him into it. I nodded at her, trying to mime that I’d be able to talk in a minute,
but she was having none of it. She walked into the room, where no one but research
personnel was supposed to be.

“I could get fired if someone sees you in here!” I hissed, locking the latch on Hawkeye’s
home cage.

“That’s an empty threat,” my mother said, “given that you’ve already quit.”

The little monkey rattled the metal bars. Home cage meant food, and I was being delinquent.
“Who called?”

“Dr. Yunque. She couldn’t reach you at your apartment so she tried my house. She asked
me to try to convince you to change your mind.” My mother was staring at the macaques
with a strange expression, as if she were seeing a scene from what should have been
her own life. “How come this is the first I’m hearing about your consuming passion
for studying elephants?”

“I’ve
always
wanted to study elephants, Mom. Since I was a kid. You know that. And I can’t study
them at Harvard.”

“But you
could
be a professor at the most prestigious Ivy League university in this country, Alice.
And it’s not like you can’t keep doing research.”

“With monkeys,” I sighed. I didn’t tell her that I had hit a wall last week, when
I had to euthanize yet another infant macaque just to examine its brain at a certain
stage. I couldn’t tell her that monkeys were selfish and petty, that for all the DNA
we shared with rhesus macaques, I believed our brains had more in common with those
of elephants, who exhibited communication, problem-solving skills, and empathy—all
clear signs of cognition.

What I truly wanted to study was the memory of elephants. That old adage about
an elephant never forgetting was not a myth, but it was only just beginning to get
traction as a scientific fact. I’d read a paper recently published by scientists from
Amboseli that proved elephants could identify and differentiate between over a hundred
voices—including those of elephants they had not heard for decades. I had devoured
research from a 1981 drought in Namibia, during which 85 percent of herbivores in
the area succumbed to starvation, but not a single elephant did—because the matriarchs
led their herds to distant watering holes they had not visited in years.

I believed there was a biological basis to this skill that lay somewhere in an elephant’s
enlarged hippocampus and cerebral cortex. We already knew that animals with relatively
larger brain-to-body ratios had a greater ability to learn, and a stronger memory.
The question was: Did those parts of the brain grow large because they were exercised
frequently, or were they exercised frequently because they were so relatively large?
What did elephants choose to remember, and why? In science, we called these sorts
of queries low-hanging fruit. When so little work had been done on a question or a
species (although there was compelling reason to do so), the scientist was bound to
learn
something
meaningful just by putting in the time and effort.

Exploring that question excited me in a way I had not been excited for years studying
macaques. And wasn’t that what science was supposed to be? Not just preparing slides
for the sake of getting the next research grant but pushing the envelope and broadening
one’s own leading edge? It was even possible that the research I would do in Africa
would be transferable, offering critical information about memory that could be applied
to Alzheimer’s or traumatic brain injury in humans.

My mother was still in the room, exuding palpable waves of disappointment. The macaques
jumped nervously in their cages, as if the tension between us was a fire being stoked
beneath their feet. “I have a PhD from Harvard. Isn’t that good enough?”

Through the bars of his cage, Hawkeye pulled my hair, and I plucked him away from
my ponytail.

“Exactly. No one goes from Harvard to the University of KwaZulu-Natal.”

“I’m going to
South Africa
. But the program in KwaZulu-Natal is willing to sponsor my research.” By now the
animals were rattling their cages, jumping up and down, doing head threats—jutting
their faces forward with their teeth bared. “You’re
getting the monkeys agitated. Can’t we discuss this later?” Hawkeye swatted the top
of my head. “Stop,” I said, wheeling around to smack the macaque’s hand away.

My mother stood her ground. “You shouldn’t go.”

I met her gaze for only a breath, a heartbeat. But it was enough time for Hawkeye
to grab the leather of the glove I wore and twist hard enough to pull it off. Ignoring
the sting of pain, I rounded on my mother. “How can you, of
all
people, tell me not to study what I want to study? After you made sure that lesson
was drilled into me every fucking day?”

My mother blanched, her lips pressed tight together, and I felt a surge of triumph
that I had finally rendered her speechless.

Then she swallowed. “Alice,” she said, “you’re bleeding.”

I looked down. There was blood on the floor, on my lab coat, on my jeans. It had been
spraying in an arc as I gestured to hammer home my point. When Hawkeye twisted my
leather glove, he’d managed to grab a good chunk of my skin with it.

The macaques were howling, slamming against the bars of their cages. “Get out,” I
yelled at her. “Just get
out
!’

My mother slipped into the anteroom of the lab. I stripped off my lab coat and wrapped
it around my hand, a makeshift bandage.

One of the first things I was taught when I came to the lab was that if I got hurt,
it was
my
mistake—never the monkey’s. Most humans treat animals the way too many tourists treat
the rest of the world—uninterested in learning the local language and culture. Like
those travelers, they usually end up the worse for it. As a scientist, I was responsible
for understanding the animal’s communication, not the other way around. If I didn’t
pay attention, something about my own behavior might trigger the monkey to act out,
fearful of being injured.

To Hawkeye, I was now just another asshole who had mistreated him.

I stepped into the anteroom, closing the door behind me, cleanly cutting off the chatter
and screams of the monkeys. My mother was sitting on a chair, her hands folded in
her lap. I noticed for the first time how narrow her shoulders were. How deep lines
bracketed her mouth, like parenthetical whispers.

“I’m going to Africa,” I told her. “Whether or not you think it’s a good idea.”

She glanced up. “Alice, it’s a mistake.”

I thought of Hawkeye ripping off the skin from the back of my hand when I let down
my guard.
If you get hurt, it’s always your own fault
. “Maybe. But it’s still mine to make.”

My mother took a step forward, firmly putting one hand on my elbow and unwrapping
the cotton of my lab coat from my hand to get a closer look. “You need stitches,”
she said. Her fingers were cool and efficient as she probed the flap of hanging skin
and blotted the pool of blood.

Suddenly I felt dizzy, and the room buzzed. I swayed forward and found myself caught
in her arms. “You’re fine,” she said, as if that was all it would take to heal me.
She pivoted so I could sit down before I fell.

I thought of skinned knees, of tipped bicycles. Of being hoisted onto the kitchen
counter for a spray of Bactine and a Band-Aid.

Over my mother’s shoulder, I looked at the macaques.

A mistreated monkey was biologically programmed to avoid situations where he might
be put in danger again, or to lash out before it could happen. That was the whole
point of encoded memory. We could literally see the places in the brain where the
past was etched, to encourage caution in a similar circumstance.

And yet, 99 percent of the time, the monkey did
not
lash out. Somehow, although he did not forget the last time he was hurt, he still
managed to forgive.

The elephant calf drank liters and liters of the powdered milk I’d mixed up. She drank
until she fell asleep from the effort of sucking, the rubber glove nipple slipping
out of her mouth. But then she woke, tossing and turning, and everything she’d eaten
passed through her in a green liquid stool.

My clothes are spattered. I am covered in shit.

I’ve tried to clean it up. I’ve poured so much bleach on the floor and walls of my
cottage that I am afraid of asphyxiating from the fumes. There is a knock on my door
just after 7:00
P.M.
, when the vehicles come back from their day in the field. “Alice?” Anya
calls softly. “I brought you some soup.”

The elephant picks that moment to squeal.

“What the hell?” Anya says.

“I’m listening to audiotapes!” I lie. “Trying to get at least a little work done.”
Glaring at the calf, I will her to be quiet.

“Do I smell
bleach
 …?”

The knob turns, and my heart hammers. We don’t have locks here; there is no way for
me to keep Anya out. “Don’t come in,” I moan. “You don’t want to catch this, believe
me. I’m sterilizing every surface I touch.”

“But you have to eat …”

“Honestly, I still can’t keep anything down.”

There is a silence as Anya weighs the responsibilities of friendship against the symptoms
of this plague. “Well,” she says. “You’ll yell if you need anything, right?”

I listen for her retreating footsteps as she leaves my porch. She will join the other
researchers for cards and wine, and she’ll tell them I feel like hell. The tourists
will be getting ready for dinner in the
boma
. The rangers will go to sleep. My secret is safe, for the moment.

I lie down beside the calf on the floor. I look at the smooth slope of her forehead,
the long lashes framing her eyes. Her cheeks are sunken, her skin the color of ash.
As I trace the road map of blue veins in her ear, she lifts her trunk and tries to
curl it around my wrist like a bracelet.

She’s getting weaker. I have spent the day mixing up the powdered milk in various
strengths, trying to find the magic recipe that will settle in the calf’s stomach.
But so far, any type of nutrition I attempt to provide runs through her like water.
I can see the light dimming in her eyes just as surely as she can see the hope fading
in mine.

I won’t let myself think about what will happen after she dies. How I’ll remove a
250-hundred-pound carcass from the floor of my cottage without anyone knowing.

I reach for a stack of research papers beside my bed that I haven’t had time to read.
I’m looking for something—anything—that might give me the answer to saving her life.
I find a mention about the similarities between human breast milk and elephant milk—how
they both contain high concentrations of oligosaccharides, which may have
something to do with infant brain development and resistance to infection. The authors
make the claim that this is why breast-fed babies have an edge in IQ and immune system
health, and why elephants have such extraordinary memories. After I read this, I realize
that Neo had not handed me that baby formula as a joke, or to make fun of me. In fact,
I am convinced he knows exactly what I’ve been hiding in my cottage.

I am just opening the formula he gave me when there is a soft knock at the door again.
“Anya,” I say. “I’m trying to sleep.”

But the door opens and Neo steps inside. He takes one look at the tin of powdered
milk on the counter and shakes his head. “Why didn’t you feed her what I gave you?
A newborn can’t drink cow’s milk,” he mutters. “Don’t you know anything?”

Anger flares in my belly. He’s not a bush vet or a zoologist; who is he to judge me?
“I know a
lot
,” I fire back. “But I guess I was absent the day my Harvard neurobiology prof covered
how to raise a goddamned baby elephant.”

Ignoring me, Neo kneels to stroke the calf’s brow. “Where did you find her?”

“Near the mopane tree, past the bend in the river where the wildebeest cross.”

“She was with the five that were poached?”

I nod. “I couldn’t leave her behind.”

He doesn’t comment, just scrutinizes the calf. “She’s dehydrated,” Neo pronounces.
“Her cheeks should be plump, like a toddler’s.” He reaches for the bottle I’ve improvised.
I can tell he is impressed by the engineering as he pulls the rubber glove off the
top and rinses out the glass container. “Please tell me you didn’t give her the cabernet.”