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The Elephant in the Room

Kathryn Lipari

    Sinead’s own heartbeat wakes her. Displaced, she stares into the cave of her mind, then flips over and looks at the bedside clock display: Hello Sinead, it’s 2:00 am. Ocean sounds may help you go back to sleep–touch here.
    She turns away, extends her leg and encounters nothing beside the cool sheets.
    “I’ll be up in a bit,” Matthew had said three hours earlier when she dropped a kiss on the back of his head. “Just a few more dig-images to send.”
    She imagines him in the office below, still bent over the slight glow of the screen. She strains her mind as if she can will the screen pictured in her head to replicate the one he is looking at: oiled blonds with open mouths? A long chain of exchanges with a married woman up late in some other slumbering city? A quivery flirtation with a friend of both of theirs on Picktyou? Her heart accelerates. She listens with her entire tense body, but can hear nothing from downstairs. Not the creak of a floorboard.
    After she has watched the clock parade a half an hour of numbers, and each has wound her body tighter, she gets up. She pads past the children’s bedrooms and lowers herself precisely down the wooden stairs. The pounding of her heart grows to fill her ears.
    The living room and kitchen are dark and calm, embellished with the small pulses of waiting electronic devices. The door to the office is cracked, greenish light spilling out. She approaches, one small footstep at a time, and pauses–looking in.
    Matthew sits just as she left him, just as she pictured him–listing towards the screen of his computer, perched like a bird of prey.
    She edges into the room, trying to look past him to the screen, but his torso is blocking it. She tiptoes closer, holding her breath. She can make out jerky movement, something streaming. She realizes she is hearing shouts or moans. Her guts churn, she thinks to spin and run from the room before she sees any more. Pulled in two directions, her body spasms, arms flapping, and Matthew spins around.
    “What are you watching?” Her voice cracks.
    He twitches too, as if the tension has arced from her to him. “Nothing. Nothing. I was just about to come up.” He darts out his hand to snap shut the computer closed.
    “Let me see.” She steps forward and stops his hand.
    “You don’t need to...”
    “Let me see! It’s two in the morning.”
    Matthew shrugs and wilts down into his chair. “You don’t want to see this.”
    Sinead pushes the screen back and looks down to it. The picture is erratic and blurred, skipping and then reviving. There are splashes of dark green and brown. She frowns and looks harder.
    “Baby.” Matthew’s voice is soft. “Don’t.”
    Then Sinead notices the words running across the bottom of the picture: Elephant Cam. Steaming Live. Day 693, Maya’s Final Battle?. She slowly turns to Matthew. “You are not. watching this?”
    He pushes up from his chair. “Let’s go to bed.”
    She looks back to the screen and squints. The splotches translate themselves into foliage: broad leaves, snatches of dried grass, the view of something running fast through a tangle of strange plants. “What’s the camera on?”
    “A drone, a robot? I don’t know. Come on, let’s go to bed.”
    She feels him stand up behind her.
    “They can spend the money on a robot and they can’t save the last elephant!” There’s a crack and the camera moves faster. “What were the noises? I heard something–shouting.”
    Matthew’s hands close on her waist, he tugs her sideways.
    “What were the noises?” She turns to him.
    He looks away. “They shot her... She went crazy, ran. The camera is following the hunters.”
    “They shot her? But we just voted on her name; I liked Maya, you and Will picked that African goddess.”
    “The poachers have been tracking her for a while, I guess. She’s worth a fortune.”
    “You guess? Is that what you’ve been doing down here? Watching this? How could you? When we’ve seen all those pictures.”
    They have been in the e-news, one after another, a flood of elephant corpses: huge, withered, like the wrecks of proud sea vessels crumpled into the ocean floor. “What about Will?” She starts to cry on the name of their son, who had stood in their kitchen weeks before with a steadfast light in his round eyes and a plastic sword in his fist. “I’m going to go protect Maya,” he had said. “As soon as I am big enough.”
    “How could you just watch this happen?”
    Matthew shakes his head. “It’s horrible, honey, but it’s...it’s real.”
    Sinead’s hands fly up to frame the computer screen, mirror it. “But it’s not. This is not real.”
    A stream of voices erupts and they both look to the screen. The camera breaks through leaves and into a clearing filled with human forms moving spastically. Men in drab clothes with bandanas, and guns protruding like extra limbs. They are gesturing and shouting and then they all turn in the same direction and there are crashing noises and an enormous form comes into the picture. She is so big, so much bigger than the men; Sinead thinks that she ought be able to crush them like the underbrush with her wide legs, toss them aside with her long tusks. And it seems like this is what she intends, she lumbers towards the men, shaking her head, but they have a lethal way to close the space between them and her. They raise their long, complicated guns. There are cracks and shouts and then a horrible, low keening. She keeps coming at them, but her front legs are buckling and as she plows ahead her heavy head gets lower and lower.
    The falling elephant is replaced by a face. One of the hunters has fronted the camera. His eyes are round and white, and he is yelling. His mouth is wide; Sinead can almost feel hot spittle on her face. He yells and shouts. Sinead cannot understand the emotion driving his words: elation, fear, triumph?
    He moves aside and now the elephant is not moving, as if an implacable stone monolith has suddenly appeared in the picture. The hunters swarm her. Sinead and Matthew watch as her tusks are removed, the shouts and wild movement replaced by stern efficiency. Armed Wild Elephant Coalition Officers approx. three minutes away. Tusks currently valued at $1,000,000 each,. run the words across the screen. And then the men climb, hooting, into a jeep that Sinead had not noticed. It screeches away and the screen is still and silent.
    Behind her Matthew makes a shuddering noise and Sinead feels his breath hot on the back of her neck. He presses his fingers against her waist; he is trying to guide her around and into his chest. “Come here baby. It’s all over.”
    Sinead does not turn. She stares at the wrinkled hulk on the screen. Something red flashes across the top?–a bird?
    “Come on, let’s go up to bed. It’s late. There’s nothing we can do.”
    Sinead grabs his hands and peels them off her hips. “Let go of me.”
    Matthew eels his fingers back around hers, holding them tight. “What’s the matter with you? Huh? I’m trying to help.”
    “I know. I know you are. I’m sorry. It’s just so upsetting, you know?”
    “I know it is, babe. Come on, let’s go upstairs, I’ll make you feel better.”
    Matthew pushes against her hands, leading her clumsily out of the room from behind. Sinead lets herself be propelled, all the while thinking that she should protest, should not climb back up the stairs, while at the same time wondering why.

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