The Gone Rhinoceri, Book Eight, Chapter 1
Where have all the rhinos gone?
“…and the almond tree shall not flourish, and the grasshopper shall be a burden, and desire shall fail in time…
and ever the silver chord be loosed,
and the golden bowl be broken,
and the pitcher be broken at the fountain,
and the wheel broken at the cistern.
and in time all persons will go to his long home.
Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was,
toute chose detuit…”
Or not.
I
I woke curled on a sandspit, my body curved around my sleeping little girl. The reflection of dawn was turning rosy red at the tideline below. I rubbed my eyes and stretched and lifted my body to look around.
I was sitting at the edge of a tidal salt estuary, a low grubby lagoon. Wavelets pushed shoreward carrying bits of flotsam – seacress and feathers and eroded fish parts and crab chitin mixed in random sets with degraded six-pack rings and glass bottles and twisted piles of industrial waste.
Low clouds heavily massed, torn in places, left the last stars visible now only in the blue-black rifts of dark matter that shredded the blank sky. The movement of the clouds animated the darkness, now lighter and more intense as if immense shadows had come in a fit to intensify the night. The moon emerged from a tattered bank of dead clouds and was slowly drifting into an immense, dark, transparent hole like an ocean with its depths full of winking, gleaming animal eyes. Its light, growing more intense, gave to the completely deserted surroundings the appearance of extra-terrestrial life, as if the moon’s atmosphere had come and settled in the great sudden silence of the world.
Behind us, a black basalt cliff rose toward the sky, and for a halting moment its double appeared in the dark water of a nearby tidal pool like the black rectangles of Cancún hotels. But as the light inhaled large segments of the night, the cliff’s shadow grew shorter and became mere earth again. It was a mass of trees standing in the distance. A jungle.
What was this place?
What did it matter? It was earth. Somewhere, it hardly mattered where, on the ever loving surface of the Holy earth.
My eyes fell on Natasha. Her body was limp as a rag, her little chest rising and falling with the slow breaths of sleep. Her dark hair hung in bangs across her face and crescent pools of shadow gathered beneath her olive eyes. Her Jag-jag was captured in her arms and her rucksack still on her back, as she lay like a renaissance pietá in my arms. She was so beautiful. So peaceful.
I fell back into a deep sleep.
*
I had a dream, which was not all a dream.
The bright sun was extinguished, and the stars
Wandered darkling in eternal space,
Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth
Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air;
Morning came and went and came and brought no day
And everyone forgot their passions in the dread
Of this, their desolation; and all hearts
Were chilled into a selfish prayer for light:
And they all lived by watch fires—and the thrones,
The palaces of kings—the huts and
habitations of all things that dwell,
Were burnt as beacons; cities were consumed,
And men were gathered round their blazing homes
To look once more into each other's face;
Happiest were those who dwelt within the eye
Of the volcanos, and their mountain-torch:
A fearful hope was all the world contained;
Forests were set on fire—but hour by hour
They fell and faded—and the crackling trunks
Extinguished with a crash—and all was black.
Peoples’ faces in the despairing light
Wore an unearthly aspect, as by fits
The flashes fell upon them; some lay down
And hid their eyes and wept; while some would rest
Their chins on their clenched hands, and smile;
And others hurried here and there, and fed
Their funeral piles with fuel, and looked up
With mad disquietude at the dull sky,
The pall of a past world; and then again
With curses cast them down upon the dust,
And gnashed their teeth and howled: the wild birds shrieked
And, terrified, they fluttered on the ground,
And flapped their useless wings; the wildest beasts
Came tame and tremulous; and vipers crawled
And twined themselves among the multitude,
Hissing, but stingless— and they were slain for food.
And War, which for a moment was no more,
Came to glut himself again: a meal was bought
With blood, and each sat sullenly apart
Gorging himself in gloom: no love was left;
All earth was but one thought—and that was death
Immediate and inglorious; and the pang
Of famine fed upon all entrails—people
Died, and their bones were tombless as their flesh;
The meager by the humble were devoured,
Even dogs assailed their masters, all but one,
And he was faithful to the last and kept
The birds and beasts and zombie’d men at bay,
Till hunger stung them, or their dropping dead
Lured their lank jaws; this pet sought out no food,
But with a piteous and perpetual moan,
And a quick desolate cry, licking the hand
Which answered with no caress—he died.
The crowd was famished by degrees; but two
Of an enormous city did survive,
And they were enemies: they met beside
The dying embers of an altar-place
Where a mass of holy things was heaped
For some unholy usage; they raked up,
And shivering scraped with their cold skeleton hands
The feeble ashes, and their feeble breath
Blew for a little life, and made a flame
Which was a mockery; then they lifted up
Their eyes as it grew lighter, and beheld
Each other's aspects—saw, and shrieked, and died—
Even of their mutual hideousness they died,
Unknowing who he was upon whose brow
Famine had written “Fiend!” The world was void,
The populous and the powerful was a lump,
Seasonless, herbless, treeless, manless, lifeless—
A lump of death—a chaos of hard clay.
The rivers, lakes and ocean all stood still,
And nothing stirred within their silent depths;
Ships lay sailorless, rotting on the sea,
And their masts fell down piecemeal: as they dropped
They slept on the abyss without a surge—
The waves were dead; the tides were in their grave,
The moon, their mistress, had expired before;
The winds were withered in the stagnant air,
And the clouds perished; Darkness had no need
Of aid from them—She was the Universe.
*
While Natasha slept, I stood and saw below me on the beach a tangle of timber wrapped in seaweed and bright shreds of plastic. I walked to it and searched among it for something to tell me where I was, where we were, what was happening. In the unspooled mass of fishing line and scraps of bottles and rags and bent metal and nylon waste I found no particular clue – but I thought of something.
I collected a sea-bleached stick and sharpened its end on a stone, and I tore off some shreds of fishing line, and then I collected two stones as big as I could carry in my open hands. I walked back and checked on Natasha, still asleep and quietly breathing in the sand. I walked further down the beach toward the sea, which was calm now in the dawn, and I put down the stones and the line, and with the stick I began digging a pit on the shore, just where the waves lick the sand.
I dug and dug, downward, throwing the wet sand out with my hands as I dug. I dug downward into the floor of the sea-edge, and I determined to keep digging until I’d got under the water, until I’d dug an entrance to the great deep. I didn’t know my own strength, and before I knew it, I’d left only a thick wall of earth between the waters and myself.
I then collected up the two heavy stones and sat in the sand and tied them to my feet with plastic twine, and I sat myself in the pit, and with the stick I broke the wall of earth. When the water rushed in it took hold of me, and pulled me swiftly and strongly down into its depths. The stones took me feet-first, to the bottom.
The water was murky, but soon cleared, and looking about I saw at first only the sea around me. I held my breath, and the water felt good. And then I saw it – the only living thing in sight on the seafloor, just an arm’s length away. It was a small stub of a plant, iridescent green, waving in the undersea current, a spiny, orphaned bush. I approached it waving my arms through the water and dragging my weighted feet, and I reached through the water and grasped it.
The plant’s barbs tore through my fingers and an electric pain scorched my body. In the warm seawater my nerves flared like bulbs on a wire, and my fingers bled, sending clouds of red into the air of the great deep around me. The barbs were like hot iron but I held onto the plant with bleeding fingers. With my free hand I loosed the twine holding the stones to my feet and my body shot up to the surface, and I plunged my head above water and drew a hearty breath. Then the waves grasped me and cast me back, gasping, onto the beach.
*
Natasha was sitting up when I returned, and smiling.
“Dadda!”
“Sweetie, you’re awake.”
“Dadda…Look around! We’re at the beach!”
“Yes we are lovebug. The beach. I think we may be in Sumatra.”
“Sumatra,” she said thoughtfully. “Where’s that?”
“Well, it’s right here,” I said. “And that’s about all we need to know for now. It’s where Childe Harold said we’d end up.”
“Childe Harold,” she said, her face falling into wistfulness. “Do you think he…”
The poor kid. What can it be like for a five year-old to know death?
“Sweetie,” I said. “I do think he…I do think we lost him.”
Natasha stood up and looked at the sea and looked back at me and kicked the sand. “That motherfucking devil,” she hissed. “We gotta get him. I mean REALLY get him.”
Then she noticed the barbed and drooping plant I cradled in my bleeding hand.
“What’s that?”
“It’s the plant, the one that Beatrix told us to get.”
“DAD, you got it!” she hollered.
“I did, sweetie. What we’re supposed to do with it, that’s a whole other kettle of frogs.”
“Here, put her in the sand,” Natasha suggested. I set the plant down and it drooped toward the dry earth, no roots to set it straight.
Natasha had used her rucksack for a pillow, and now she righted it and unbuckled it and took out the queen canteen. The daylight was solid now, a white sheen across the sand and sky and distant trees, and the opalescent container gleamed in abalone rainbows in her hands. She shook the canteen, said a few words under her breath, blew on it, and unscrewed the lid. A cool breeze seemed to rise from the bottle, and she put it to her lips and drank.
“Ahhhh. Now, dad, pour some on your hand…”
She handed it to me and I did as she said. Instantly, the blood washed off and the sparks of pain that moments before tingled up my arm faded to a memory. Then I took a drink – what good water! A few small sips and we both seemed to feel utterly refreshed.
Natasha poured a capful of the cooling water onto the spiky little plant. In an instant it perked up, and in another instant shot forth a set of white rhizomes, little fibers that reached out and poked into the sand, loosely rooting it to the earth.
Natasha looked satisfied.
“Dad?”
“Yeah?”
“About the rhinos.”
“What?”
“Listen, dad, think for a minute.”
She’d never called me dad before, always dadda.
“In James and the Giant Peach,” she said, “what happened to James’ parents?”
I shrugged. I’d read her the story once, when Ophelia was away for a long rainy weekend, but I hardly remembered it. And Natasha being barely three at the time, I didn’t expect that she’d gotten much of the story either.
“According to Mister Roald Dahl, James’s parents were killed by rhinos escaped from the zoo.”
She shook her head and gave me a stern look, her lips pursed together as if slurping milk.
“Allegedly,” she added.
“And Durer’s rhino,” she said matter of factly. “The animal, not the image of the animal that exerted such influence on the arts? Do you know what became of it?”
I wore my ignorance on my face.
“It was given, as a gift,” Natasha said.
“In 1515, the King of Portugal purchased the rhino and sent it sent to Pope Leo X as a present. But its ship was wrecked in a storm off the coast of Italy, and it died. Durer had drawn it and pulled prints of his drawing, and he continued earning income from his prints for decades after. But the animal itself, the real flesh and blood beast? Condemned to an undignified drowning death. An utter oblivion.”
“It was the first rhino ever traded,” Natasha pointed out. “That’s significant.”
“And what was it traded for, dad? For status. That’s just messed up.”
Natasha wagged her head seriously. She was on a roll.
“And, In Ionesco’s justly famous play,” Natasha demanded, “what do the rhinos represent?”
Again, I pled ignorance. I’d read the play once, in high school and I hardly recalled what Mister Bennett, my seventh grade drama teacher, would have called “the potent symbolism.”
“Nazis, dadda, Nazis. Don’t you see? Rhinos have been given a bad name. They’ve been essentially ridiculed into the dustbin of history and then eliminated altogether by savage capitalism. By that demon banker and his sorry ilk.”
Natasha took another sip from the canteen, offered me a drink, screwed the lid on lefty-tighty and tucked it back into her rucksack. Her mouse-brown hair was wild as seaweed in the wind. She shouldered her rucksack and looked toward the jungle that sat like a mirage on the horizon.
“Come on dad,” she said. “Let’s go.”
“Go? Where?”
“To get that demon banker. That’s what we’re here for, right?”
*
I took my blue batik-colored suit jacket and wrapped the barbed plant in it, with a plug of soil clinging to it at the roots, and carried it in front of me in my two hands as we started walking. The sun rose high above us and we tried to make sense of things.
“Dad?” Natasha said as we moved over the sand. “Are we in a story?”
“Are we in a story? Now that’s a really fine question,” I said. “I’d say, we are and we aren’t. What is a story anyway? Story making is a craft, like cobbling, or caning, or weaving, and a story is, well, it’s a shoe, or a chair, or a shawl. It’s something you live in, live with, wear around, and maybe wear out. It’s a piece of hard work, with a beginning and an end, and a long middle.”
Natasha had taken out her clay whistle and put it to her mouth and played a little whistling tune as we walked.
“But a story is also a service to your tribe,” I said. “The old Irish bards and the Persians and the Occitanian joglars invented tales that, while they may have been mere fantasy, persuaded their listeners that they were moral beings; tales of their long heroic lineages, tales of grief and praise and grace and want. The idea was to make people believe you by giving them something worth believing in, something that mattered.”
“Then we must be in a story,” said Natasha. “Because I feel like this thing we’re doing really matters.”
“That, plus the fact that there are orcs and iffrits and talking frogs,” I said.