Larger Than Life (Novella) (7 page)

One morning, when Lesego and I are outside kicking a soccer ball back and forth, she
punts it over my head, toward the rangers’ village. Groaning, I jog to the rolling
ball and scoop it into my arms, and then I see Grant. “Telegram,” he announces, handing
me the envelope before he walks back to the guest camp.

I stare at the Western Union logo, the folded yellow paper. Crumpling it up, I stuff
it into my pocket.

The entire encounter with Grant takes less than thirty seconds, but that is all the
time Lesego needs to disappear.

It is not as hard as you’d think to lose an elephant. I am panicked. How fast could
she wander away? We don’t have an actual fence separating us from the wildlife; and
even if she doesn’t encounter a predator, there are ravines and water holes that she
can easily tumble into. I am paralyzed, unsure which way to run first. “Lesego,” I
yell, as if she might come when called.

I am about to sprint to the far end of our village, to see if she’s stormed her way
into the office, when I hear the crash inside my hut. I push open the door, my terror
congealing into a hot nugget of fury. Lesego is buried in the closet, draped in half
the clothing I own. The remainder has been flung around the room. “You’ve got to be
kidding
,” I cry, and her head snaps up, dislodging a ripped gypsy skirt that is tangled around
her neck like an Elizabethan ruff. “You know better!”

The tone of my voice stops Lesego in her tracks. She is so soft-shelled that even
a harsh reprimand is enough to make her back away with her ears drooping, or go hide
behind the cottage for a few moments before she gets the courage to peek out at me
again. If I don’t follow up with a cuddle, she will sulk, her trunk hanging slack,
until I
remind her that she is loved.

Neo bursts through the door, his obsidian skin gleaming with sweat, his eyes wild.
“I heard the yelling. What’s the matter?” he asks, looking from me to the calf. “Is
she hurt?”

Suddenly I feel silly and small. “She ripped my only skirt,” I mutter.

He laughs, in the way that I have come to admire—as if there are no fences holding
him back, as if pure glee could paint all the walls of the world in a single coat.
“I think maybe you both need a little cooling off,” he says. “Come with me.”

We have settled into a routine, Neo and I. Although we are Lesego’s de facto family,
and although Grant has cleared Neo to take care of the calf with me, when the moon
rises at night he bids us both a polite farewell before returning to his own bed to
sleep. When I awaken in the morning, he is already outside with Lesego, feeding her
a bottle—a proper one that we have borrowed from a bush vet. It is as if we are playing
house, but we both know our boundaries.

I get nervous when Neo leads us through the rangers’ village, into the bush beyond.
I have intentionally not taken Lesego for walks out here yet. She’s still so tiny.
Part of me is afraid we might run into an elephant herd that rejects her. Part of
me is afraid we won’t. But Neo doesn’t walk very far before making an abrupt turn
toward the bank of the tributary that feeds into the man-made watering hole in the
tourist part of camp, where guests on safari can take their breakfast and lunch while
watching giraffes and impalas and even elephants stop for a drink. He has hacked away
the tall reeds on the edge of the bank with a machete, and has stabbed a shovel into
the soft earth. In the center, in what had been marsh ground, is his man-made mud
pit.

“It is … how do you call it?” Neo asks. “A playpen?”

“Yes, I can see that.” I turn to Lesego, who stands beside me, unsure of what to make
of this. “Go on, then.”

The elephant uproots a cattail with her trunk. She delicately dips it into the mud
like a paintbrush and waves it in the air.

“I don’t think she knows what to do,” I say.

“Well, in the wild she would have playmates to imitate.” He grins. “I
do
remember the boss saying she was your responsibility.”

Rolling my eyes, I strip off my boots and socks. In my cargo shorts, I wade knee deep
in the mud, and scoop some up with my hand. I rub it on Lesego’s back. “See?” I say.
“Fun.”

She shakes her head, her ears standing out like great pink radar dishes.

“Wallow like you
mean
it,” Neo suggests, smiling broadly.

“Oh, like this?” I ask, and I grab a handful of mud and throw it squarely at his chest.

He’s so surprised that he staggers backward, losing his footing. He lands on his bottom
as mud splashes up, splattering his face.

Lesego, watching, trumpets with delight before splashing into the puddle beside him.
She sucks muddy water into her trunk and sprays it at Neo’s back.

Our calf is having a grand old time now that she has a friend to play with. I give
up trying to hide my snickering as Neo scowls. “Give me a hand,” he says, reaching
out so that I can help him up.

His fingers curl around my wrist. But instead of using me for leverage, Neo kicks
out with his foot so that I trip and fall forward, facedown into the mud.

I come up sputtering, wiping my eyes, dirt gritted between my teeth. Immediately I
think of the telegram in my pocket that I haven’t read yet, that I
won’t
read now. Maybe it is better that way.

“You’re going to pay for that.” I dive, trying to push Neo under. We wrestle as the
mud plasters our clothes to our bodies and Lesego splashes behind us.

Neo is stronger than I am, but I am determined. I struggle and push against him until
he is lying beneath me, my arm braced over his chest, my weight pinning him. In my
free hand I hold a heaping scoop of sludge, which I let drip slowly onto his forehead.
I realize that my skin is as brown as his is now. That we match.

“Say uncle,” I urge.

He grins. “You wouldn’t.”

“Try me,” I suggest.

And he does. His arms come around my waist and he knocks me completely off balance,
not with brute strength or sheer force but with a kiss.

His hands are in my matted hair and his mouth presses against mine, a validation
as sacred as the seal of a king. And then suddenly a wall of water sprays me in the
face. We spring away from each other, guilty. Lesego’s fountain separates us like
a river that carves through a continent, leaving the landscape irrevocably changed.

One day when I was seven I came home from school to find that my mother had redecorated
my bedroom. My shelf of stuffed animals was gone, replaced with all the books on math
and science she had used in college. The small table where I had tea parties for my
dolls had likewise been cleared, and was now a laboratory—covered with a broken toaster,
the guts of an old desk phone, a screwdriver, a wrench. But the jewel in the crown
was a microscope, complete with preprepared slides. There was fiber and blood and
cork. Salt crystals.

“Take a look,” my mother said, showing me how to peer into the microscope. She slipped
a slide into place—the small brown fleck that was onion skin, stained with iodine.

I gasped and jumped back from the eyepiece. Up close, that little sliver of nothing
became a wall, each brick a cell surrounded by others. “What do you see?” my mother
asked, her voice falling like a secret into my ear.

“It looks like cars,” I told her. “Stuck in traffic.”

She laughed. “Does each car have a driver?”

“Yes, a brown dot.”

“That’s the nucleus,” she told me. “It’s like the command center for the cell. And
it’s floating in fluid called cytoplasm. And the cell membrane, that’s the brown circle
around each one.” She watched me marvel over each slide and then, abruptly, said it
was time to set the table for dinner. “Make sure you put everything away neatly,”
she told me. “That way it will last.”

But I didn’t, because I was using the microscope every free moment I had. Magnification
was a miracle to me. I wondered what I was missing with my eyes, just going about
my day; I couldn’t believe that some scientist or doctor hadn’t invented contact lenses
or glasses that allowed us to look at our surroundings as if they were underneath
a microscope at all times. I began to regard the world differently. Simply
because I couldn’t see something didn’t mean it wasn’t there. I had dreams where I
opened my eyes and saw everything larger than life—magnified ten times, a hundred
times, a thousand times. I could look at any organism and know what made it behave
the way it did, because I could scrutinize what lay hidden to ordinary people. I imagined
this was what it felt like to be psychic.

About a week after I got my microscope, I was itching to see more than the slides
that had come with it. I ran into my bedroom after school to find my mother reshelving
all the books I’d left open specifically to the pages of organisms that I hadn’t yet
seen under a microscope—mold and strawberries and hair cells. “This room is a disaster,”
she said, frowning. “Didn’t I tell you to clean up?”

“Please,” I begged, taking the books out of her arms, hoping to tamp down her anger.
“Can you teach me how to make more slides?”

I thought for a moment she was going to walk away. But then she rolled up the sleeves
of her meter maid uniform and knelt on the carpet beside me. She reached into the
back of the little hinged wooden box that held the prepared slides for a blank slice
of glass. “How would you like to see,” she said, “what
you
look like under a microscope?”

My mother began to organize her surroundings, making order of my chaos, with the same
practiced efficiency I saw when she diced vegetables or made hospital corners while
changing the bedsheets. She handed me a tiny bottle of sodium chloride solution. “Just
a drop,” she said, gesturing to the slide. She told me that we had to use the saline
because pure water would make the cells we were going to study burst from pressure.

She gave me a toothpick and demonstrated how to rub the inside of my cheek to gather
epithelial cells. These were swirled into the drop of solution on the slide and then—because
the cells were transparent—she had me add two drops of methylene blue stain.

My mother came up behind me, guiding my hand with her own. “Hold the cover slip at
a right angle,” she whispered. “And let it … just … drop.”

The slide looked like a little rectangular Band-Aid with a blue center; it was disappointing.
Unlike the preprepared slides, which had at least a tiny chunk or nugget or sliver
visible to the naked eye that blossomed into a universe under magnification, this
was nothing more than a blue blot. But as soon as my mother slipped it under the
microscope clips, I was mesmerized.

The cells of my cheek were small, uneven circles, fried eggs with cerulean yolks.
They moved and wiggled. They clumped together like the cool girls at school, as if
they couldn’t bear to stand alone.

My mother was not particularly affectionate; she tucked me in without kissing me good
night; when we watched TV at night, we did not cuddle but instead sat on opposite
sides of the couch. But in this moment, with her body so near that I could feel the
warmth from her skin and this beautiful bubble of science surrounding us, I slipped
my arm through hers, burrowing closer. “Do you want a turn?” I asked shyly.

She bent her head over the scope so that her hair became a curtain, screening her
face. “It’s so easy to forget,” she murmured, “how underneath, we’re all exactly the
same.”

Two weeks later, I came home from school to find all of it missing: the books, the
slides, the microscope. Back were my stuffed animals and my dolls, although I didn’t
want to play with them anymore. I felt like the scientific samples that had been stained,
that couldn’t go back to being transparent.

I looked up to find my mother leaning against the frame of the door, her features
impassive. “I told you if
you
didn’t clean up this mess, then I
would
.” She walked away, leaving me hungry for a knowledge I couldn’t name.

As I grew older I learned that not being able to observe a magnified world was not
an evolutionary design flaw after all. In fact, it was a means of protection. What
we could not see clearly, we didn’t have to pretend to understand.