The Gone Rhinoceri and the Battle of Cancun, Book One, Chapter I
Book One
“You win some, you lose some.” — Anonymous
I.
The rhino was gone.
*
On a gunmetal gray New York City March morning, the lackluster gaze of subway riders and the tedious crowding through turnstiles, the tiny swish of the metropass card past the electronic eye of the card reader; the insipid coffee and the equally insipid newspaper purchased for a dollar and a quarter at the corner bodega; a lipless kiss from his wife of how many years, and no hug from the child, still asleep (work starts early at the zoo) – all of it added up, by the time Byron got to the darkened park to unlock the exhibits and begin feeding the animals, to a familiar listless brooding, like a mild but chronic and possibly infectious illness.
Byron, like so many in New York, in America, in the world, wore a sort of metaphysical undershirt that said, “Life is Elsewhere.” Little did Byron know – little do any of us – that there comes a day when what we advertise to ourselves in our private trembling guts becomes so frighteningly true that it carries us away as if on a flood of sewage.
*
Byron, a man of about 60, gray of hair, ruddy pink of face, and not destined to linger long in our story, had walked his usual morning route from the subway, two blocks down Boston Road alongside the vacant expanse of the Zoo parking lot and through Gate A (for Asia), to the cinderblock office. He hauled open the heavy grey steel door and slipped his time card from its slot and into the timeclock, an old cast iron piece of machinery that had hung there possibly for half a century. He felt with sickening assurance the familiar jolt when the machine bit the paper. He collected his keys and clipped them to his belt. He fastened his badge. He left the cinderblock shelter, let the heavy door swing to behind him, and strode, now that the coffee had kicked in and the badge had slightly boosted his sagging self-esteem, to the African Savannah.
*
High overhead a flock of glittering cranes spread their wings like blue glass against the pale winter sky, their whooping cry lost on the wind.
*
As Byron descended the slope toward the rhino’s pen, he sensed something. His eyes scanned the watery marsh inside the fence, left and right, up and down, and tried to pierce through the brown and dying stands of papyrus reeds in the dark water.
When he registered the problem, Byron’s listlessness evaporated.
The rhino was gone.
*
In Cleveland, about the same time, the same thing: rhino, gone. And in San Diego, and in Miami, and in Washington D.C., and Seattle, and St. Louis, and Dallas, and Denver. No rhino, anywhere.
*
Thelma Martin, the vet at the St. Louis Zoo, arrived at the large animal inspection lab that morning expecting to perform the rhino’s regular check-up. She’d received a memo the day before that Barabbas, the zoo’s lone black rhino, had been exhibiting signs of irritation; he’d eaten little for weeks, and angered easily, and spent hours rubbing his horn on the thorny acacia trees in his pen with an itch he couldn’t seem to scratch.
All the night before, Thelma had spent in research. She knew rhinos suffered periodic exfoliation of the bone on their horns, and that at such times rhinos show signs of antisocial behavior, even engaging in senseless acts of brutality against members of their own species. But Thelma knew too that animals held in captivity – especially the charismatic megafauna whose role in the wild is nothing less than to maintain the integrity of their ecosystems – sometimes succumbed to awkward, unfamiliar diseases: viral, bacterial, cancerous.
Thelma arrived that morning with every intention of deducing the cause of Barabbas’ strange behavior. But she couldn’t because, when she arrived at the animal inspection lab, Barabbas the rhino was gone.
*
All across Canada, the same thing: gone rhinoceri. In Ottowa, in Toronto, in Montreal, in Vancouver. Everywhere there’d been a rhino, it was gone.
*
In the Washington D.C. Zoo, when it dawned on Leo the zookeeper that Ravi, the two-ton Indian white rhino, had gone AWOL, he alerted Zoo Security, who alerted Homeland Security, who alerted the National Security Council and the Council on Foreign Relations. When the agencies protested that rhinos were beyond their jurisdiction, names were taken.
“You do know there’s a War on Terror going on, don’t you?” said someone to someone.
Would the rhino appear stalking the Mall or charging the Capitol? Would it turn up in Foggy Bottom, an armored biological threat to the Pentagon and the National Security Agency? No one could say, and anything was possible.
*
In Mexico City, there had never been a rhino, though a polar bear there had died some five years before, cause of death unknown.
There had, however, been a rhino further south, in Cancún, at the Casino del Conejito. Visitors to the Casino would remember el Ché, the Cancún rhino, as having been generally dejected, not to say, grief-stricken, and wanting for attention. Now, el Ché was gone.
Was el Ché better off freed from his long captivity? That’s not for us to say.
*
There also had not been any rhinos in Oakland, Houston, Baltimore, Fort Lauderdale (though there were dolphins and flamingoes there), Oklahoma City, Detroit, Las Vegas (believe it or not), Cincinnati, Jackson, Knoxville, Harrisburg, Providence, or anywhere else south of the Texas border, save Rio De Janeiro where there was a white rhino known as “Sparkles,” and possibly at the extravagant hacienda of a Colombian drug lord somewhere in the basalt and granite folds of the Northern Andean cordillera, where rumors of a rhino circulated, unconfirmed.
*
But everywhere there had been a rhino in captivity, that rhino was gone.
*
In San Francisco, the rhino was a favorite of a precocious five-year-old named Natasha and her doting father, Irving.
I’m Irving. And this is where our story begins.