The hot air turned ice cold.
In the next instant, space coagulated elastic again and shivered over the demon banker’s form, and some kind of war spasm seized him, seized it, and made him into a hideous and shapeless unheard-of monster of a thing. He stretched tall and wide, and his shanks and his joints, every knuckle and angle and organ from head to foot shook like a tree in a flood. His body made a furious twist in his skin so that his feet and shins switched to the rear and his heels and calves switched to the front... On his head the temple-sinews stretched to the nape of his neck, each mighty, immense, measureless knob as big as the head of a month-old child... he sucked the dead black eye so deep into his head that a wild crane couldn't probe out of the depths; the green eye fell out along his cheek. His mouth became weirdly distorted: his cheek peeled back from his jaws until the gullet appeared, his lungs and his liver flapped in his mouth and throat and fiery flames large as a filing cabinet reached his mouth from his throat... His hair burned and twisted like a tangle of red thornbush; if a royal apple tree with all its fruit were shaken above him, each apple would be spiked on a bristle of his hair as it stood up on his scalp.
And in another moment the horrible demonic form shook and the almost-man-sized Zoellick reappeared, now in the business suit.
“Yes, yes,” the demon explained, “I bought these animals, Irving. Just as your little Natasha says I did. I began, slowly, as anyone would, by killing them off, one by one: the moa, the stag-moose, the saber-toothed salmon, the mastodon, the passenger pigeon, the auk. But they reproduced, the vermin. Just like the humans, they kept at it. And so I determined to do away with the animals the same way we do away with the humans – not by the brute means of killing them with blade and axe, but by the most sophisticated means we have yet designed… One by one, what I could not kill, I purchased.”
“My dominance, your misery,” he said.
He took a step toward us.
“But every so often, my friends, you come upon a creature that, for reasons as complex as history itself, cannot be bought.”
The air phased in and out around him, his face suddenly distorted into a mask with the sunken black eye and the electronic green eye twitching like a bulb on a socket, then back to the face of a banker, pale and normal.
“And when something, or someone, cannot be bought outright,” he said, “It must be dealt with in other ways.”
*
The plant quivered and let off a high-pitched, keening note. Zoellick moved his hand through the air and in it there suddenly appeared a cutlass, black as cast iron and mottled with rust, but with a gleaming edge of white steel. He drew back his arm to slash at the plant but before he could, its tendrils jetted out and wrapped his arm, now his entire body, in its green fuse, and held him still. The demon banker howled in fury.
Natasha reached into her rucksack and pulled out her stuffed baby jaguar. In one hand she raised it above her head and hollered, “Jag-jag! Your hour has come ‘round at last!”
“Natasha, what – ?”
Natasha cast a beatific smile at me and said, “Dad. This is the moment we’ve been waiting for. The moment baby jaguar and all the others have been waiting for. Remember Beatrix? ‘The seed of your devotion will blossom in the flames of the desert?’ That’s the plant! And, ‘always remember that life does not begin with tears of grief and rage, but with the sweetly melodious cry, a slight whistle of wind through the dry reeds at the water’s edge…”
“I see, but, I….”
“Watch, dadda – it’s only when there’s a portal opened between the dimensions that we can do this…The demon’s shape-shifting has opened the portal…And with him pinned down like this…It’s our only chance!”
With her right hand, Natasha grasped the clay ocarina on its leather cord around her neck and, with the stuffed jaguar raised high in her left hand, she put the instrument to her lips and blew…. Out of it came a high, piercing note, a trill and then a whooping sound like a crane warbling on the wind. The notes were echoed by the keening of the plant, whose arms were wrapped in vegetal blood-lust around the demon, yowling under its barbs.
And then a curious thing happened.
Natasha tossed the jaguar, and in mid flight it transformed – its body lengthened and its head grew and its limbs slashed at the air, and its mouth grew gleaming white fangs and from its belly issued forth a blood-curdling roar. Cast loose, the newly incarnated beast landed with all four paws on the demon’s vine-wrapped body pushing the demon to the earth where he landed with a coughing thud. His face became a contorted mask of terror as Natasha’s Jag-jag bared her fangs and snarled, inches from the demon’s face. The demon closed its eyes
*
And then a second curious thing happened.
Natasha blew on the ocarina for a second time –
“Summer is a-comin’ in,” and said, “Jag-jag, return!”
In an instant, the jaguar’s motion ceased and it shrank to the size of a stuffed toy.
The demon Zoellick, prone on the ground, opened his eyes and saw on his chest a pint-sized synthetic toy jaguar. He looked up at Natasha, dazed.
*
And then a third curious thing happened.
Natasha knelt and took the demon’s hand in hers and smiled at him with her eyes, and said, “Uncle, what is it that troubles you?”
The green hail from the sky fell harder now, as if a burst of it had been unleashed when Natasha expressed sympathy for the iffrit.
The words floated a moment on the air, and the demon Zoellick craned his neck to look Natasha in the eyes. He opened his mouth to speak, but no words came. His eyes moved from Natasha’s to Irving’s, to the sky and the hail of green that fell to the diminutive plush stuffed animal balanced on his chest, and back to Natasha.
“Uncle…”
*
The vine held tight drilling its barbs into his flesh, but even so the demon’s suffering seemed to ease.
“It was myself I had vanquished, wasn’t it?” the demon asked in a pained voice.
“No, Zoellick,” Natasha answered. “You had vanquished all of us. You surely had. You vanquished, yourself, yes, but the rest of us too. Including the two-leggeds, including the four-leggeds, including those that crawl, swim, and fly. You may recover, old demon, but you must not lose the memory. You must never lose the memory.”
The demon looked at the burnt earth where the ashes of an entire forest swirled and eddied in dust devils drawn on an updraft into the humid air.
“I remember,” he said, seeing into some faraway place. “First tragedy, then farce, then tragedy, then farce, then more tragedy…”
His voice drifted off.
“You very nearly did us all in this time,” Natasha said. “Didn’t he, dad?”
I looked at Natasha – her dark hair long and tangled in a rat’s nest, her freckles drawn like constellations on her ruddy cheeks, the sparkle in her eyes as she spoke.
“Yes,” I said. “He did.”
I laid my eyes on the demon, wrapped in the vine, the stuffed Jag-jag balanced on his breast.
The Iffrit’s one eye fell on me, and the cheek that had been puckered into a dark black eyehole seemed to swell and grow full and vital, while the neon green eye that had blinked like a thousand calculators now faded to a more human color. Then the demon banker fell into a profound silence and the taught ivory skin of his face seemed to grow less clammy. A luster of flowers came over his skin.
The sensation was of a man, a mortal man, who had been ill but now was being made well again. A river kindling dead roots; blooms of scented jasmine from the blank mud.
*
In the sky low over Sumatra, the world’s beauty was now a mere breath, and Ophelia’s, and Queequeg’s and Childe Harold’s and Virgil’s and mine and Natasha’s. It was a beauty such as had been in all beings since birth, since before birth. But no beauty was equal to that which settled around the banker demon Zoellick as he emerged from sickness.
Natasha and I watched in wonder as the hot air around the demon quivered and seemed to swell and contract in waves. Around us the sky seemed suddenly infested with all kinds of bats and flying reptiles and feathered birds. Natasha put her ocarina urgently to her lips and played a tune that tamed the strange flocks and calmed the air even as it tamed my pounding blood.
I felt that somewhere off in the sea dragons and monsters were slouching by, and around us on the earth serpents and wild things lashed themselves to the springing surface of the world.
As space convulsed, the Iffrit spoke:
“It’s such a wonder,” he said, in a voice now calm as glass, “how the great green world in all her fiery brilliance has shone such favor on your sorry race of humans. Some days you reward the world’s animus with wit and wisdom. Other days you throw a bad joke back against the birthright you were given, squandering it like so much single-use plastic.”
“Is he talking to us?” I wondered, his eyes now full and vital but tuned into some other channel. “Or to himself?”
Natasha played her pipe as creatures seemed to swirl around us. He went on:
“How does She allow those of privileged birth to follow their bent, how grant them fulfillment and a feast of riches to command in every country on earth? How does She let him lord it over so many until, in his unthinkingness he forgets that his wealth and title could ever end? How does She let him indulge his desires, his mind untroubled by the thought of all he has destroyed. The whole world conforms to his will while the soul’s sentry drowses, grown numb and distracted? How?”
He looked at Natasha, laying like a drugged philosopher on the earth. “Darling Natasha, all you need to do is return me to the bottle and ten thousand years of stony sleep will be mine again. I go willingly.”
“The bottle?” Natasha said, holding down her ocarina.
“The queen canteen,” said the demon. “Don’t you know? It’s where I live, where I have always lived, until summoned. They let me out when they gave it to you.”
That bottle, mirror-bright and bathed in shifting vapors, lay in the sand at Natasha’s feet.
“Well that was a mistake,” Natasha said.
“Yes,” said the demon banker, now become almost a charming little man in a dark draped toga that covered him like blankets. “Yes it was.”
*
From the sky of Sumatra, green stones rained down. Where they landed blossoms jumped up.
“When you, Natasha, bid me return to that soundless gallery, you will be released from your enchantment. You shall be a normal girl – albeit a tad neuro-divergent. If you only wish it so, Natasha, before long, my spirit will spin free from this body to rest a bit. And yours will do the same. That is, your body will be returned to the spirit of an ordinary little human.”
Natasha cocked her head and peered up at me, her eyes alight. She considered, and then decided with a nod.
The demon smiled and his body began to grow translucent, to glow and fade and turn to vapor all at once. The prickly vine relaxed her grip, and what there was to grip grew suddenly intangible. From a funny smiling man with red hair and a squirrely mustache and a drapery about his body, Zoellick became a gaseous cloud pulsing with light, and then a winding dust devil of cloud, and soon was spinning toward the Queen Canteen. The green she-vine danced herself into a question mark.
Natasha picked up the bottle and unscrewed the lid, and as soon as she had the lid off, the vaporous cloud was sucked into the bottle as if by a vacuum. As the last wisp of cloud crawled over the lip of the bottle, the demon’s voice boomed out, filling the air in surround-sound.
“I almost forgot…!” it said. “Let the wild rumpus start!”
*
No sooner had the queen canteen been sealed with the djinn inside than the blossoms that formed as each green stone hit the earth began to explode in bright incendiary bursts. All around us flowers burst from the soil, and from the flowers burst powdery forms that crackled in the air. Each blossoming explosion formed into a cloudy shape, grew solid, and spun off away from us. The first ones were tiny flea-sized fathomless shapes that left a trail of smoke as they whizzed off. But they quickly grew larger until we could make out with each powdery burst the shape of an insect or an animal or a bird.
Natasha and I stood and watched the spectacle. She cradled the pearly queen canteen in one arm and held the stuffed jaguar squeezed in the other. The rucksack was on her back and her hair was wild and dirty in the powdered, smoky air. Beside us the she-plant danced wildly, throwing her spiked, gangly limbs about in furious celebration.
The blossoms threw up cloudy shapes of birds that grew recognizable before they flapped their wings and flew off: a meadowlark, a turtledove, a whole flock of sparrows, a crane, a peahen, a pelican, a golden eagle throwing its wingspan wide and wider and launching itself into the open Sumatran sky. Then animals appeared, reptiles at first, serpents and sea snakes, and then terrestrial mammals born out of the blossoming clouds, and as each one burst into the air it hit the ground and scampered or trotted or ambled off: a long parade of rodents, voles, muskrats, marmots, and they grew larger as if evolutionary millennia were passing before us in moments, a civet cat and a peccary, dogs and goats and deer and then horses, elk, the animals bursting out of nowhere and the air thick with strange vapors that began to smell like…well, to be honest, began to smell like the Bronx zoo.
Natasha and I sat in the dirt and watched, overcome, overawed, our eyes peeled raw as onions as the great beasts of the African savannah emerged, the strange wild baboons and bonobo apes and the gorillas, so human in their apish ambling, forepaws knuckling the ground as they scampered off into the fog-bound distance, and the white Asian elephant and the camels of Arabia and the great cats, leaping forth from some dimensionless place onto their haunches on this dusty earth that wordlessly welcomed them home.
At the end of the line, came the rhino.
The horn emerged first, as if chipping its way out of an egg of air. I could feel Natasha’s body, grown long and lean, lighting up with glee as the head appeared, and then its body, plated in slate-gray impregnable knobby carbuncled armor: the rhino, that unimaginable beast. Without a glance at us from his stony little eyes that sat deep in his horny head, he stomped off after the others and quickly disappeared.
*
And then the blossoms went quiet and the air began to clear.
Natasha sat down in the sand, threw her arms around her knees, buried her head, and whimpered, then wept, and then started to bawl uncontrollably.
I sat by her side and pressed her head and touched her shoulder. Around us, the last green thing had begun to spread juicy tendrils over the ground.
“Sweetie,” I said. “You must be so tired.”
She lifted her head and glared at me.
“I’m not tired!” she screeched.
Well, I’d never heard that tone of voice from her before and I was, effectively silenced. She dropped her head again and whimpered.
Then she lifted her head and looked up at me with big round moist komiku eyes.
“Dad, can we go home now? I miss my mama.”
***
FIN
*
Thank you for reading The Gone Rhinoceri and the Battle of Cancun. You may have surmised as you read, occasional references to other works of literature…some borrowing here and there, some parody, some outright, well, borrowing. As the demon Zoellick would say, mediocre bankers borrow, but great bankers steal. And so, a particular nod is due the following works of literature (in no particular order…)
Gilgamesh, Trans. Stephen Mitchell
Beowulf, Trans. Seamus Heaney
Wolfram von Eschenbach, Parzival
Dante Alighieri, The Inferno
Hermann Melville, Moby Dick, or The Whale
Friedrich Neitzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra
Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
Rudyard Kipling, Just So Stories
James Joyce, Ulysses; Finnegan’s Wake
Andre Malraux, Man’s Fate
Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita
Isaac Bashevis Singer, The Gentleman from Cracow
Crockett Johnson, Harold and the Purple Crayon
Antoine de St. Exupery, The Little Prince
Roald Dahl, James and the Giant Peach
Eugene Ionesco, Rhinoceros
Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism
Leo Leonni, It’s Mine
Jean Merrill, The Pushcart War
Julio Cortazar, Fantomas contra los vampiros multinacionales
Ishmael Reed, Mumbo Jumbo
John Barth, Chimera
Douglas Adams, A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
Thomas Wolfe, Look Homeward, Angel
Dee Brown, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee
William Blake, Auguries of Innocence
Lord Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage; Darkness
William Wordsworth, The Prelude
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Rime of the Ancient Mariner
John Keats, Ode on a Grecian Urn
Arthur Rimbaud, The Drunken Boat
Charles Baudelaire, Correspondences
T.S. Eliot, The Wasteland
William Butler Yeats, The Second Coming
Edward Lear, The Owl and the Pussycat
Martín Prechtel, Collected Works
Maurice Sendak, Where the Wild Things Are
Jagger/Richards, Sympathy for the Devil
Ecclesiastes
All those oral tales of Coyote and Oshun and everyone that no one takes credit for, and which …still… make us human