Fiction

 

 

The Game Farm
Mitch Levenberg

There were two elephants. They were trained but I didn't train them. The guy who did train them left me with them with me about an hour ago; he said something like can you watch my elephants and I foolishly said yes and now, one hour later he still hasn't come back. My family is at the amusement park. My wife said don't stand behind them or in front of them. That's all she said. Both elephants can lift their legs (one at a time) quite high and in unison and I found that as soon as I stopped humming "Mack the Knife," they dropped their legs again, in unison. It was "Mack the Knife" all the time. I was humming it all the time, not realizing it was the elephant's training song, a song which somehow triggered inside their brains the necessity to raise their legs, in unison. They were playing it over the loudspeaker during the performance. I personally associated it with sharks and gangsters, not elephants. Others may have had a different point of view on that. Others may not have seen it as animal abuse or elephant abuse. Others may have seen it as this amazing ability of elephants to appreciate popular music. I had never really wondered what went on in an elephant's head until now.

Then, a funny thing started to happen. People started filling the seats as if the show were about to begin again. It was something about me and the elephants. It looked like the show was about to begin again.

Earlier, a couple of lawyers came around to ask me if those were my elephants.

"Yes and No," I told them. This seemed to exasperate them right away.

"Are they or aren't they?" one of them asked. "You must know whether or not these are your elephants," he said. "I mean," he said. "I mean it's a pretty hard thing not to know …" he said.

"…whether or not they're your elephants," the other one added.

I looked at the elephants for some help and both of them were shaking their trunks at me.

"Oh, these elephants," I said. "No. I'm watching them for someone."

"And that someone would be?" one of them asked.

"The trainer," I said. "He's the guy that makes their legs go up and down whenever "Mack the Knife" comes on."

"Isn't that something?" the other one said. "And the owner? Any idea where the owner might be?"

"I wouldn't know," I told him.

"What do you mean you wouldn't know?" he asked.

"Because I wouldn't," I said.

I could feel the elephants getting restless now behind me. This is something you start to know after a while when you've been with elephants even if it's for a short time.

"How could you be taking care of two elephants and not know who the owner is?" one of them wanted to know.

"I don't know anything about the owner," I said. "Now the trainer is a different story. If you want to know who the trainer is then maybe I can help you out," I said.

"Now you wouldn't be the owner, would you?" the other one asked.

"Me?" I said. "The owner?"

"Yeah, you," the first one said. "Sometimes people don't like to admit they're owners, especially of elephants, until they see what the deal is, until they see what kind of trouble they're in."

"Is the owner in trouble?" I asked.

"Quite the contrary," said the second one handing me a business card. It said "Bragg and Bragg, Attys. at Law."

"Are you brothers?" I asked.

"Yes," they said in unison, lifting their knees just slightly. "The Bragg brothers." Then the lawyer who did not give me his card said, "The clients we represent would like to buy your elephants and whatever other animals you got for sale." He was definitely talking to me now like I was the owner, so I said, "Not interested," and they both looked at me very hard like I was some part of a document they were having trouble figuring out.

"So you are the owner," they both said pointing their fingers straight in the air as if having just made a final indisputable point.

"No," I said. "I'm not."

"Well, if you're not, how come you said you weren't interested?" said the one who had not given me his card.

"Yeah," the one who did give me his card said. "Only the owner would say he wasn't interested."

"Okay," I said. "Then I am."

"That's not the point," the lawyer who had not given me his card said. Then he gave me his card, which was the same card the other one had given me and they both left.

A short while later the trainer came back stinking of alcohol. "Lost time track think," he said. The elephants raised their trunks in horror. "Thank shoe," he said to me, and then he took a cassette player out of his pocket, and as the cool jazzy sounds of "Beyond the Sea" began to play the elephants turned to jelly before my eyes, both of them rolling on the ground in ecstasy, rolling back and forth to the tinny grainy crackling rhythm of the music, and when I turned back to the trainer, he was gone.

I wondered where my wife and daughter might be. Our friends were somewhere too, but we couldn't find them all day. It's things like that which causes things like this, I thought. You look all over for someone, finally give up and then get stuck with elephants. Sometimes you tend to get nervous if you can't find someone at a zoo. Then we were thinking: were we supposed to find them? We had been together for most of the day but mostly circled each other, as if one or the other of us might make some kind of move, to suddenly disappear, leaving the other couple lost, abandoned, spinning out of control, no longer within the gravitational pull of the other. We were never quite sure our friends ever wanted to come here in the first place. First they said no, and then we insisted, and then they said, "Sure that would be fine," and then they came. We took separate cars and left after them. When we finally arrived, we noticed them drifting. They hadn't even bought any crackers yet to feed the animals. They seemed uncomfortable, nervous almost.

We never talked about it, though once in a while our orbits came very close and we were able to shout things to each other like,

"Did you get crackers?"

"Yes, we got crackers. Did you know the place is closing down for good tomorrow?"

"Yes, we saw the sign at the ticket booth."

"The thing is," my friend said, "there's no place to put these crackers. I've got crumbs all over my pockets."

Then we would drift apart again and I would find myself calling out to them as if from huge atmosphere-less distances, "We're going to the Lions!" my voice sounding fake, pre-recorded. I don't think they heard me anyway. They were light years away. It would be centuries before my voice reached them.

And now they were gone.

And so was my family.

And so was the elephant trainer.

It felt like deception in the air. There were looks of desperation on the animals' faces. They were hungry, no question about it. For example, the giraffes seemed the reverse of what they should have been with their necks scraping the ground, desperately gnawing at broken crackers. There was nowhere for them to go but down. The trees had no leaves, at least nothing to speak of. They seemed uncomfortable in their own bodies. When I was a child I always envied giraffes more than any other animal. They commanded a view of the world no one else could. They seemed to know things and see things we didn't and never could. And now they seemed to envy me. Never would I believe that a giraffe would rather be me than itself.

The lioness was another story. While the giraffe suffered from desperation, general depression, and species envy, the lion was just mad as hell. She paced along the front of her cage, back and forth, like that was all she was meant to do, this moment, this day and forever. She seemed to have death on her mind. Not necessarily hers but ours and people like us. We wouldn't dare feed her crackers. Maybe the giraffes would lower themselves to eat that stuff, but not the lion. She'd rather eat the giraffes. I understood really for the first time the expression, "I'm starting to feel like a caged animal."

This whole place was beginning to feel like the end of something, but not the beginning of something else. Just the end. Trees, dirt, people, animals, all on the verge of annihilation, but in a subtle way, not with a bang or even with a whimper, but something else, like once it was gone it would be as if it all never existed in the first place, not a grain of dirt, not a single cracker crumb would remain.

Sensing this and yet at the same time trying to have a good time, my family and I huddled close together. From time to time, we would see our friends, though at an uncomfortable, illusory distance so that they looked like they might have been our friends though one could not say for sure. It was sad. Was this our fault or theirs? We had not asked them to come here. Game farms are not for everyone, even under the best of conditions.

The night before we came here, we all sat together in the living room of a house we rented together. There were a bunch of magazines, mostly travel magazines lying around and I happened to pick one up and on the cover was a photo of the game farm. "What's that?" my friend asked. "What's what?" I asked him back. Then he pointed to the cover, unable to speak because he was in the middle of swallowing some wine, and I said, "Looks like a game farm," and he laughed and said, "Looks pretty gamey to me," and his wife said, "Oh, Frederick," like she thought he was making fun of me which I didn't think at all until the way she said, "Oh, Frederick," like please forgive him he gets like that when he drinks, and then I started to get defensive and said, "Yeah, right," just ready to drop the whole thing until my daughter yelled out, "I want to see animals!" to which my friend's daughter responded in an unusually formal way for a small child, "It is said that animals smell," to which her father answered, "You mean that animals stink," and then my wife said, "So do humans!" careful not to make eye contact with anyone. Then there was a long moment of silence when no one made eye contact with anyone.

I started to think about why we were all here in the first place. I mean we hardly knew each other. My friend wasn't really my friend but my friend from work and one day we decided to share a house up in the country in order to save money. Otherwise we had little else in common. For example, one night we talked about how, that is in what way, we'd all like to be buried and when we said we didn't want to be buried at all but cremated they just sat there with their tongues hanging out. They were into the whole embalming, viewing, coffin, funeral, shoveling dirt into the earth kind of thing. The whole nine yards or better yet, the whole six feet. I mean that was okay with us but our being cremated didn't seem to sit well with them.

Even though we set out about the same time to the game farm, we did not follow them in our car and they did not follow us in their car. My friend said he did not have the patience to follow me and as far as me following him, he said I might not be able to keep up and he did not have the patience to slow up or pull over to the side of the road to wait for me to catch up. In general, my friend was a restless man. He could not sit still for very long and he would pace constantly. He brought the family dog, a rather tightly wound dachshund, and he would walk her several times a day even when she didn't seem to want to be walked. On the other hand, I was rather lazy and could sit still for hours at a time and often had to be pushed into action. Whenever we met at work, I always expected him to be off somewhere. He'd always start our conversations, "Hey, I really have to go but …" or maybe we'd exchange greetings and then he'd say, "Well, let me go," like I was keeping him there, like I physically stopped him on his way somewhere else and made him talk to me.

It was like that for a long time. Until our daughters met. My daughter was short and a little stocky, his tall and thin. My daughter was quiet and circumspect; she usually held back from entering a new situation until she felt it was safe. On the other hand, my friend's daughter usually, according to him, but after a few days, I could see what he meant, usually flung herself headlong into things. She too was shy in the sense that she didn't like to talk to people, but nevertheless she might stare them in the face regardless, look at them with a look of dismissal or of indifference. My daughter usually looked in an entirely different direction, wishing herself to be at some distant point beyond where she was standing at the moment. My friend's daughter always wanted to get a good look at friend and enemy alike and then run off. This way she'd always recognize them if she had to. My daughter, having always avoided her eyes, would therefore have more problems recognizing people she had met before. However, once she did recognize them, she knew right away how to handle them. The two daughters complimented each other very well.

When we got to the game farm my friend and his family were already there. We had gotten lost, taken some detours. My wife saw an antique shop in a small town on the other side of the river and wanted to stop. Things like that. We took our time. We let the roads take us wherever they wanted to, and when we finally got there you could see my friend and his wife already looked like they had seen enough.

"Animals," my friend must have thought. "What could they do for me? What could I do for them?" Or perhaps, my friend might have been thinking all along, how might I understand them in the context of a conscious world, a world in which reason and ethos informed everything? And besides, these animals, the goats in particular, stink very badly and so how does that enter into the equation? Why must I endure the reality of a smelly goat when that goat has not done one thing to justify its existence, let alone its smell? I mean you can't even walk a goat, not really, I mean you really don't need to, or better yet, shouldn't, and only animals that you can walk or have to walk are excusable because they allow us to walk as well, somewhat aimlessly and alone and to think about things that are both unthinkable and thinkable but certainly things one must, in the long run, think about.

Yes, that is what I thought my friend might be thinking. I didn't really know but what I did know was the way he thought about things in general, his method you might say of thinking and perhaps the animals, the whole damn stinking lot of them, and the fact that certain animals, like the goats, ran free, no doubt interfered with his thinking, that linear, logical progression of thought kind of thinking which heads in one direction and one direction only and which cannot brook obstruction or detour, yes, I understood now, just as he would avoid detours (such as, most likely, in his very journey to the game farm) or perhaps just denying their existence so that a detour was never a detour, as such, but a separate entity of travel, not a forced way of going someplace different than how you originally expected to go, but just a different route entirely. That is, when is a detour not a detour? When you say it's not, when you cannot possibly allow the very concept to enter your conscious mind. However, for my friend, no matter how he resisted, it did enter his unconscious mind, and as a result, no doubt, he was in a bad mood, felt the animals were probably responsible for this, and so kept out of their way. What else could explain it, I thought to myself as he and his family, the extension of his conscious mind, lingered lost among the fallen seeds and crackers.

Frederick's daughter was a different story entirely. She was like a comet that streaked across their darkened sky. She impersonated happiness and reckless abandon. Her parents, from time to time called out to her, but she was too wild, untamed to listen. At one point she went straight up to a goat, grabbed it by its ears and said to it, quite emphatically, "Who are you? What do you want? I don't care if you are a smelly goat. You are very beautiful to me!" My daughter screamed with laughter. This was the moment for me that through their daughter's light, our friends were redeemed.

So our daughters became the center around which we revolved. We looked towards them for forgetfulness. What did they know about death, let alone the slow, painful, calculating, arbitrariness of it? What did they know yet about feelings of impending doom? Could they even feel it yet? We felt it, but maybe we felt it because we knew it. I was convinced watching them play that we are not born with the sense of impending doom but have it thrust upon us. And when I saw those people sitting patiently under a blazing hot sun, waiting for the elephant show to begin, as if they had nothing better to do in their lives but to see nature go against itself, to be manipulated, strangulated to relieve our collective boredom and anxiety, I wanted to let the elephants go, to undo their shackles and let them run wild among the crowd.

I had to remember —despite what Bragg and Bragg might have believed— that I didn't own them. I was just watching them. More and more people began to gather, sit on benches, stand under trees, lie on the sloping hills in the distance. I noticed that many in the audience were Hasidic Jews sitting restlessly on metallic chairs, under a relentless sun, purposefully overdressed in their long black coats and bright white shirts. Their children, coatless, danced wildly around them, their little strings swinging wildly, their shirts falling out from inside their pants. Some of the women grabbed their children, tried to get them to sit, but they would struggle, then pull away, toppling over one chair after another. I worried how the elephants might react to this. I looked at their shackles, for how their shackles went so went the elephants. The shackles led to the wall behind them. There was a long chain that led from their ankles to a distant wall behind them so that they could still lift their legs freely. There was the illusion of freedom within their imprisonment, much like the animals in general.

I could see the lawyers out there. Oh, yeah, they weren't hard to pick out in their dark blue suits, their yellow baseball caps and blood red shades. I started to mumble something, to myself, like I was rehearsing something in my head, like what it would be like if I really had to get in front of an audience with two shackled elephants behind me. I mean, what would I say? What would be my purpose, my motivation. Whom would I want to push forward really into the light of day? Me or the elephants? "Ladies and gentleman, children of all ages," I mumbled to myself. There was a smattering of applause. They heard me. The microphone was on. People scurried around to find seats. Even the Hasidic children stopped for a moment and looked towards the stage. "Ladies and Gentleman," I repeated. "Children of all ages!" I shouted. This gave me great confidence, yet I needed to feel it from the elephants as well. After all, we were connected now, we were in this together. When I turned to look at them I noticed they were wearing giant sunglasses and red baggy shorts. Yes, they were ready, I thought. But what about me?

The audience was quiet now, waiting for my next words, but I was out of words. Instead, I raised my left leg, then my right. Many in the audience booed. Not everyone. For example, the Hasidim sat patiently now, even the children, as if they were thinking, whatever happens will happen. Either the elephants will perform or they will not. It is God's will. If God doesn't want it to happen, it won't. If He does it will. In the meantime, we have seats. Others are standing, fidgeting, anxious and uncertain. We are calm because if there's one thing we are certain of it is uncertainty.

And then came a great crackling sound in the sky. An airplane? Thunder? Fireworks? Gunshots? No, it was "Mack the Knife!"

Oh, the shark, babe has such teeth, dear
And it shows them pearly white …

And the elephants, sounding their siren of deep jungle satisfaction, of thick urban gloom, raised their trunks to show their teeth, rotting and yellow. Still, the audience, didn't care; to them, to every last one of them, those teeth were "pearly white," and they cheered and roared and blew out faux elephant sounds from their lips.

Just a jackknife has old MacHeath, babe
And he keeps it … ah … out of sight.

Now the elephants turned to the audience, and there hanging from their tails was a large jackknife glistening in the sun.

Ya know when that shark bites, with his teeth, babe
Scarlet billows start to spread …

Suddenly the elephants squared off, entangled their trunks, and when they separated, a red liquid began to ooze and then both of them, raising their trunks in triumph, sprayed the bloody liquid over the audience.

Now on the sidewalk … uuh, huh …whoo …sunny mornin' … uuh, huh
Lies a body just oozin' life … eek!

A scream, a sharp, shrill scream streaked across the crowd as a body, flung from some hidden corner flopped onto the stage, its faceless torso stained in blood.

And someone's sneakin' 'round the corner
Could that someone be Mack the Knife?

A man who looked very much like the trainer, except wearing a very thick black mustache and a black cape, stumbled back onto the stage, wielding a large dagger. Then, staggering towards me, his bloody hands raised the dagger above his head and he let it fly. I stood completely frozen as it whizzed past me, missing me by inches, bouncing several times on the stage and landing somewhere in the audience. "I got it! I got it!" someone cried out. "No! I've got it! I've got it!" someone else cried out. "No one's got it!" another cried. "Arrrrggghhhh!" cried still another. It was the trainer collapsing at my feet.

A-there's a tugboat … huh, huh, huh …down by the river don'tcha know …
Where a cement bag's just a 'droopin' on down …

A cement bag dropped from the sky inches from the audience, suspended by a rope. More screams, the elephants roared with delight and confidence. The audience oohed and aahed wondering where that bag could have come from since the only ceiling one can see was the sky. The song, not quite finished began to crackle and then fade. The trainer, lying at my feet, picked up his head and said to me, "bake a tow, rake a cow," so I turned to the audience, took a bow and then pointed to the elephants, like I'd been doing it for years, and who upon my signal, raised their trunks in some empty ritual of appreciation. The audience continued to applaud, screaming, "Encore! Encore!"

Suddenly the elephants, as if this were the encore they'd been waiting for, pulled hard against their shackles, pulled and pulled until they exploded out of the back wall. They raised their legs again high in the air, their shackles glistened in the sun and they began to move forward. The crowd, somewhat uncertain whether this was an encore or if the elephants were actually escaping, moved tentatively backwards, a questioning kind of urgency as if something might be wrong, not natural or else something quite wonderful, magical depending of course on one's point of view.

The elephants jumped off the stage and continued to move towards the crowd. "Get up! Get up!" I cried at the trainer, but he was out cold; I saw a bucket of water in the corner, some corner, suddenly it seemed as if there were more corners than should be in a geometrically correct area. I lifted the bucket and tossed its contents towards the trainer's head. Rather than soaking him awake, I buried his head in sawdust. I forget this is the circus or at least circus-like things are happening and I can't expect things to be what they're supposed to be or act the way they're supposed to act. For example, suddenly, as if sawdust had taken on the quality of water, the trainer raised his head, shook it like a dog and said, "Take a bow! Take a bow!"

"To hell with that!" I told him. "The elephants are escaping!"

Oh, them," he said, limply waving his hand towards the rampaging elephants, towards the crowd screaming, moving now in all directions. "It seems like a fairly orderly rampage, your basic elephant rampage. Don't worry," he said, "they always come back. This is where the peanuts are, ya know."

"Not this time!" I yelled at him. "They know! They know!"

They don't know nothing!" he shouted. "They are trained to know nothing!"

What do you know?" I asked him.

"Nothing!" he said. "That's why we get along so well!"

Not believing a word, I jumped off the stage. I found my family huddled in a corner, far from the rampaging elephants. My friend's family was huddled there too. My God, I thought, if it takes an elephant stampede to bring us all together again, then so be it.

"You were very good up there," my friend said to me.

"Thanks," I told him, "but …"

"As far as the elephants are concerned," he went on. "But that song … It's not meant to be sung like that—it's a slow, German ballad of murder and despair. It's about the Weimar Republic for God's sake!"

"Yes, you were really very good," my friend's wife said.

"You smell like elephants!" my friend's daughter said.

"Sophia!" her mother said.

"The elephants seemed to like the song," I told my friend.

"Of course," he said. "They're elephants!"

"Oh, Frederick!" his wife said. "He didn't pick the song."

"Daddy!" my daughter cried. "There's magic dust in your hair!"

"I mean look at them!" my friend said pointing to the elephants way in the distance now, spreading mayhem and destruction everywhere, crushing fences, knocking down cages, sending animals running in every direction.

"They're free!" I told him. "Look at them, they're free!"

For how long?" he asked. "They'll just round them up again and sell them for slaughter or just shoot them now. It's over! Over!"

"Oh, Frederick, don't be so negative," his wife said.

"I'm just being realistic," he said.

"Daddy, could we keep the elephants?" Sophia asked my friend.

"Daddy, could we, could we? Please!!!" my daughter asked me.

"Don't be ridiculous," my friend said to his daughter.

"Where would we put an elephant?" my wife asked my daughter.

"It could have my room," she said.

"Are you sure?" I asked my wife, "because we could add on another wing, I mean…"

"Yeah, I mean," my friend added, "we could always start our own game farm."

And then just like that we all started laughing. All of us. We hadn't all laughed together since we got here. This was really a very special moment. It's hard to describe but before this all we did was kind of swim around each other in this fluid like tension, not knowing when something, a comment, a gesture, something would blow this trip apart, would make us not want to see each other ever again. But now amidst the shouts and screams of people trampling each other, among the broken bones and internal injuries, we were able to bond, if even just for that one moment, in the pure selfless innocence of our children.

Then, just as our laughing started to wind down, we heard a different kind of shouting, not of terror or panic, or even hopelessness or despair, but of joy, of surprise and even elation, that is those people who hadn't been whisked away by ambulances because of fainting fits or panic attacks or crushed bones or skulls, or heat prostration or amnesia or sundry psychosomatic related illnesses, or those for whom the thrill was not, for some inexplicable reason, completely gone, were beginning to feel part of some greater act, that having survived they were meant to survive, that their parts in this theatrical representation of life was to live, to experience the very heights and depths of their emotions in direct accordance with a couple of loose elephants, that somehow more was to be played out before they were to go home, that having been carried along this far, they wanted more, a last act. It was these the people who began to saunter back to their seats. It was these people who wanted to see more elephants. It was these people who expected — what else could they expect in a world that threatened to dissolve in the blink of an eye — that there would be more elephants waiting backstage; although clearly, as far as the eye could see, there were no more elephants. There wasn't even a backstage.

As for the departed elephants, perhaps there was the hope as well that they would shortly return, that the mayhem they had caused was planned mayhem, all part of the act, the rampaging, the screams of terror, the traumas, real and imagined, the ambulances, the police, all part of the same act, this last great act the game farm might ever put on again. And let's say it wasn't all an act. Let's say the elephants did run away, wasn't it reasonable to expect that once they've tasted freedom, with all its uncertainty and unknown terrors, they would opt to come back to what was familiar, to the endless supply of peanuts, to the applause and adulation of the masses, religious and secular alike, might it not be better, far more pleasurable for them to return to their shackles?

I did not believe that. In the short time I knew those elephants I knew they wanted out and out for good, pleasure or no pleasure, and now, as far as the trainer was concerned, he was out cold yet again and lay prostrate upon a stage filled with broken shackles, streams of fake blood mixed with saw dust.

But really, more than anything, it was the music. Because really, once the jazzy cool sounds of "Beyond the Sea" began to play over the speakers, people once again began to fill the seats. For if "Beyond the Sea" was playing, could "Mack the Knife" be far behind?

Slowly, very slowly, the trainer began to rise. First came his eyes. You could see his eyes begin to widen, to swell beyond normal size as if they were looking at the world for the first time, in all its wondrous capacity to be exploited, brought to its knees before his enormous power and talent. Yes, and then he rose to his knees, then his legs, first his left, then his right, slowly, as if he himself were performing some out of species trick that no one had ever seen before. And when, at last, he was standing, though unsteadily at first which only highlighted the difficulty of the trick, the audience roared.

Then, to the music of "Mack the Knife," the trainer began to lift one leg, then the other, back and forth, up and down, unsteadily, of course which always gave his performance a dangerous edge to it as if he were performing this on a tightrope extended across a thousand foot drop. It was a marvel to behold as if the trainer had somehow hypnotized the crowd or better yet seized their collective imagination, manipulated it with amazing subtlety and aplomb. Even we were drawn to it; our daughters were in the crowd now dancing wildly around the metal chairs with the Hasidic children. My friend and I looked at each other and I could swear there was for the first time on this trip a smile on his face that was somewhat un-mocking, non-dismissive, less ironic, as if there were the slightest possibility, for the first time in days, of unconditional, if not joy, then perhaps some sort of burgeoning satisfaction, that is with the world outside of him, of both human and animal existence and interaction as opposed to some internal fleeting pleasure.

So the trainer went on, first lifting one leg, then the other, tottering more and more each time. At one point our daughters returned to us and implored us to look out beyond the crowd. "The elephants!" The elephants!" they cried and when we looked we saw them, the two elephants standing on a hill in direct view of the stage and of their trainer and we could see how they mirrored him, lifting each leg as he lifted his, higher and higher each time. The only thing was it seemed the elephants would lift their legs just slightly higher each time than the trainer who would then try to match them by lifting his leg even higher and so on and so forth so that it seemed that the trainer was mirroring the elephants and not the other way around.

After several hundred leg lifts, the trainer finally collapsed in exhaustion. I looked at the elephants, but they did not collapse. Obviously, there was no need to collapse. They did what they could; they hung around, but it was all over. The crowd sat silent, waited out the customary few seconds for the trainer to rise again, for the music, which by this time had faded away, to start again, for the elephants to make their triumphant return but seconds went by, minutes, and nothing happened. Several men, most likely game farm officials, surrounded the elephants now in the distance; a great cry rose up from the dust that now obscured our vision and when the dust cleared we saw them, the two elephants, re-shackled and being led away and leading the way were the two lawyers from Bragg and Bragg. "My God," my friend said, "Why did they stay? If they weren't going to do the show, why did they stay?"

It seemed my friend might have been seeing these elephants now more in the scheme of things, as if there were some greater scheme and the elephants were now part of it. We could see our daughters now too way in the distance. My friend's daughter running headlong into the elephants' path, causing those pulling them, including the lawyers from Bragg and Bragg to detour, to swerve off the path and into a deep ravine. We could see them all drop inside the ravine. My daughter was laughing too, but she had stayed back a little at first, assessing the situation, to see if it would be safe to create the necessary chaos the girls had devised. Apparently it was. The elephants rose majestically from the ravine leaving their handlers and lawyers behind. The girls sat upon the elephants' trunks and the elephants raised the girls high into the air, finally placing them gently on their backs.

Then I looked at my friend and suddenly he was right in my face. It was like I was a planet and my friend was a meteor having entered the Earth's gravitational pull and now within seconds of crashing into me. Meanwhile the trainer had collapsed on stage, perhaps for the last time. The audience waited and waited but he wouldn't get up. The song was stuck on the same line, "the line forms on the right babe … the line forms on the right babe . .." and so on and so forth … until finally, a very tall Hasidic man in a long black coat very contrite looking really the way his head bent down for several seconds as if what he was about to do or say was to be done beneath the eyes of the Lord, before he suddenly lifted it to the sky as if he were about to shout some soulful prayer to the almighty and sang, so beautiful it seemed the world stood still for that single moment, when he raised his head and then from out of his mouth so beautiful, so haunting, so much like it was always meant to be, as if he sang of the joys and the wonders and the suffering and torment and revelations of the great patriarchs and matriarchs and all of their children and their children's children and all of the generations to follow and still to come, that brought a rare smile on my friend's face, that ended, for the moment all birds chirping for miles, and so he sang, with a kind of sweet Talmudic splendor, he sang, "Now that … Nooow that… Now that Mack . .eeees baaaaack in towwwwwn!"

And yet, after all that, the trainer did not get up. But the skies did. And it rained. It rained harder than I had ever seen it rain. "This is a real country rain!" my friend shouted as we ran towards the parking lot. "No!" I shouted. "It's God's! It's God's rain!" And it was so beautiful, so chaotic, the dust swirling, then blackening into mud before our eyes. We ran but we were so wet we began to lose our original shapes; we could no longer recognize each other. I screamed something to my wife and then realized it was not my wife. We all looked the same like the very mud from whence we came. Then, with as much suddenness the rain stopped. We were drenched and felt as heavy as elephants.

The first day back at work, my friend and I had coffee together. He talked about himself for a while. There were things I wanted to mention about myself but the longer he talked the more I kept forgetting what they were. He talked mostly about how difficult life had become with an elephant in the house.

"You keep it in the house?"

"Yes," he said. "My backyard isn't as big as yours." It was true we had been keeping our elephant in the backyard.

"It's almost the same size," I argued. "You just have this giant pool in the middle of it."

"Which is good," he said.

"For the elephant?" I asked.

"And my daughter," he said. "He fills up his trunk and then sprays her. In fact, he sprays all of us."

"He does?" I asked, sounding slightly envious.

"All day," he said. "What about yours?"

"We don't see him much. He and my daughter play video games all day. She still beats him, but he's getting better."

"They're not stupid," my friend added.

"No," I said. "I've done some research."

"I started a memoir!" my friend said.

"You too!" I said.

"Maybe in the fall we can get together," he said.

"All of us?" I asked.

"Yes, the elephants too," he said.

"I think they'd like that." I said.

"Well, let me go," he said.

So I let him go. After all, he was always free to go. But he always came back. That was the thing about him. He might take a few detours, but he always came back.

 

Mitch Levenberg has published essays and short fiction in such journals as The Common Review, Fiction, The New Delta Review, Fine Madness, The Saint Ann's Review, Confluence, The Assisi Journal, and others. His collection of stories, Principles of Uncertainty and Other Constants was published in March 2006. He has won two Honorable Mention Awards (2004, 2009) for his essays on his father's experiences in the Philippines during the Second World War. One of these essays, "Butterflies and Lepers," was published in the anthology Pain and Memory (2009) edited by Gregory Tague. Another of his essays, "The Plain Brown Envelope," was published in the anthology Common Boundary: Stories of Immigration also edited by Gregory Tague. Two of his stories The Pen and The Line will be appearing in the forthcoming issue of The Same Press magazine. He teaches writing and literature at St. Francis College and lives in Brooklyn with his wife, daughter and four dogs.