One Horn to Rule Them All: A Purple Unicorn Anthology

by Lisa Mangum

  But the rhinoceros was not in front of the fireplace, where it had still been lying when the Professor came downstairs. He looked around for it increasingly frantic, saying over and over, “It was just here, it has been here all night. Wait, wait, Sally, I will show you. Wait only a moment.”

  For he had suddenly heard the unmistakable gurgle of water in the pipes overhead. He rushed up the narrow hairpin stairs (his house was, as the real-estate agent had put it, “an old charmer”) and burst into his bathroom, blinking through the clouds of steam to find the rhinoceros lolling blissfully in the tub, its nose barely above water and its hind legs awkwardly sticking straight up in the air. There were puddles all over the floor.

  “Good morning,” the rhinoceros greeted Professor Gottesman. “I could wish your facilities a bit larger, but the hot water is splendid, pure luxury. We never had hot baths at the zoo.”

  “Get out of my tub!” the Professor gabbled, coughing and wiping his face. “You will get out of my tub this instant!”

  The rhinoceros remained unruffled. “I am not sure I can. Not just like that. It’s rather a complicated affair.”

  “Get out exactly the way you got in!” shouted Professor Gottesman. “How did you get up here at all? I never heard you on the stairs.”

  “I tried not to disturb you,” the rhinoceros said meekly. “Unicorns can move very quietly when we need to.”

  “Out!” the Professor thundered. He had never thundered before, and it made his throat hurt. “Out of my bathtub, out of my house! And clean up that floor before you go!”

  He stormed back down the stairs to meet a slightly anxious Sally Lowry waiting at the bottom. “What was all that yelling about?” she wanted to know. “You’re absolutely pink—it’s sort of sweet, actually. Are you all right?”

  “Come up with me,” Professor Gottesman demanded. “Come right now.” He seized his friend by the wrist and practically dragged her into his bathroom, where there was no sign of the rhinoceros. The tub was empty and dry, the floor was spotlessly clean; the air smelled faintly of tile cleaner. Professor Gottesman stood gaping in the doorway, muttering over and over, “But it was here. It was in the tub.”

  “What was in the tub?” Sally asked. The Professor took a long, deep breath and turned to face her.

  “A rhinoceros,” he said. “It says it’s a unicorn, but it is nothing but an Indian rhinoceros.” Sally’s mouth opened, but no sound came out. Professor Gottesman said, “It followed me home.”

  Fortunately, Sally Lowry was not more concerned with the usual splutters of denial and disbelief than was the Professor himself. She closed her mouth, caught her own breath, and said, “Well, any rhinoceros that could handle those stairs, wedge itself into that skinny tub of yours, and tidy up afterwards would have to be a unicorn. Obvious. Gus, I don’t care what time it is, I think you need a drink.”

  Professor Gottesman recounted his visit to the zoo with Nathalie, and all that had happened thereafter, while Sally rummaged through his minimally stocked liquor cabinet and mixed what she called a “Lowry Land Mine.” It calmed the Professor only somewhat, but it did at least restore his coherency. He said earnestly, “Sally, I don’t know how it talks. I don’t know how it escaped from the zoo, or found its way here, or how it got into my house and my bathtub, and I am afraid to imagine where it is now. But the creature is an Indian rhinoceros, the sign said so. It is simply not possible—not possible—that it could be a unicorn.”

  “Sounds like Harvey,” Sally mused. Professor Gottesman stared at her. “You know, the play about the guy who’s buddies with an invisible white rabbit. A big white rabbit.”

  “But this one is not invisible!” the Professor cried. “People at the zoo, they saw it—Nathalie saw it. It bowed to her, quite courteously.”

  “Um,” Sally said. “Well, I haven’t seen it yet, but I live in hope. Meanwhile, you’ve got a class, and I’ve got office hours. Want me to make you another Land Mine?”

  Professor Gottesman shuddered slightly. “I think not. We are discussing today how Fichte and von Schelling’s work leads us to Hegel, and I need my wits about me. Thank you for coming to my house, Sally. You are a good friend. Perhaps I really am suffering from delusions, after all. I think I would almost prefer it so.”

  “Not me,” Sally said. “I’m getting a unicorn out of this, if it’s the last thing I do.” She patted his arm. “You’re more fun than a barrel of MFA candidates, Gus, and you’re also the only gentleman I’ve ever met. I don’t know what I’d do for company around here without you.”

  Professor Gottesman arrived early for his seminar on “The Heirs of Kant.” There was no one in the classroom when he entered, except for the rhinoceros. It had plainly already attempted to sit on one of the chairs, which lay in splinters on the floor. Now it was warily eyeing a ragged hassock near the coffee machine.

  “What are you doing here?” Professor Gottesman fairly screamed at it.

  “Only auditing,” the rhinoceros answered. “I thought it might be rewarding to see you at work. I promise not to say a word.”

  Professor Gottesman pointed to the door. He had opened his mouth to order the rhinoceros, once and for all, out of his life, when two of his students walked into the room. The Professor closed his mouth, gulped, greeted his students, and ostentatiously began to examine his lecture notes, mumbling professorial mumbles to himself, while the rhinoceros, unnoticed, negotiated a kind of armed truce with the hassock. True to its word, it listened in attentive silence all through the seminar, though Professor Gottesman had an uneasy moment when it seemed about to be drawn into a heated debate over the precise nature of von Schelling’s intellectual debt to the von Schlegel brothers. He was so desperately careful not to let the rhinoceros catch his eye that he never noticed until the last student had left that the beast was gone, too. None of the class had even once commented on its presence; except for the shattered chair, there was no indication that it had ever been there.

  Professor Gottesman drove slowly home in a disorderly state of mind. On the one hand, he wished devoutly never to see the rhinoceros again; on the other, he could not help wondering exactly when it had left the classroom. “Was it displeased with my summation of the Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature?” he said aloud in the car. “Or perhaps it was something I said during the argument about Die Weltalter. Granted, I have never been entirely comfortable with that book, but I do not recall saying anything exceptionable.” Hearing himself justifying his interpretations to a rhinoceros, he slapped his own cheek very hard and drove the rest of the way with the car radio tuned to the loudest, ugliest music he could find.

  The rhinoceros was dozing before the fireplace as before, but lumbered clumsily to a sitting position as soon as he entered the living room. “Bravo Professor!” it cried in plainly genuine enthusiasm. “You were absolutely splendid. It was an honor to be present at your seminar.”

  The Professor was furious to realize that he was blushing; yet it was impossible to respond to such praise with an eviction notice. There was nothing for him to do but reply, a trifle stiffly, “Thank you, most gratifying.” But the rhinoceros was clearly waiting for something more, and Professor Gottesman was, as his friend Sally had said, a gentleman. He went on, “You are welcome to audit the class again, if you like. We will be considering Rousseau next week, and then proceed through the romantic philosophers to Nietzsche and Schopenhauer.”

  “With a little time to spare for the American Transcendentalists, I should hope,” suggested the rhinoceros. Professor Gottesman, being some distance past surprise, nodded. The rhinoceros said reflectively, “I think I should prefer to hear you on Comte and John Stuart Mill. The romantics always struck me as fundamentally unsound.”

  This position agreed so much with the Professor’s own opinion that he found himself, despite himself, gradually warming toward the rhinoceros. Still formal, he asked, “May I perhaps offer you a drink? Some coffee or tea?”

  “Tea would be very nice,�
�� the rhinoceros answered, “if you should happen to have a bucket.” Professor Gottesman did not, and the rhinoceros told him not to worry about it. It settled back down before the fire, and the Professor drew up a rocking chair. The rhinoceros said, “I must admit, I do wish I could hear you speak on the scholastic philosophers. That’s really my period, after all.”

  “I will be giving such a course next year,” the Professor said, a little shyly. “It is to be a series of lectures on medieval Christian thought, beginning with St. Augustine and the Neoplatonists and ending with William of Occam. Possibly you could attend some of those talks.”

  The rhinoceros’s obvious pleasure at the invitation touched Professor Gottesman surprisingly deeply. Even Sally Lowry, who often dropped in on his classes unannounced, did so, as he knew, out of affection for him, and not from any serious interest in epistemology or the Milesian School. He was beginning to wonder whether there might be a way to permit the rhinoceros to sample the cream sherry he kept aside for company, when the creature added, with a wheezy chuckle, “Of course, Augustine and the rest never did quite come to terms with such pagan survivals as unicorns. The best they could do was associate us with the Virgin Mary, and to suggest that our horns somehow represented the unity of Christ and his church. Bernard of Trèves even went so far as to identify Christ directly with the unicorn, but it was never a comfortable union. Spiral peg in square hole, so to speak.”

  Professor Gottesman was no more at ease with the issue than St. Augustine had been. But he was an honest person—only among philosophers is this considered part of the job description—and so he felt it his duty to say, “While I respect your intelligence and your obvious intellectual curiosity, none of this yet persuades me that you are in fact a unicorn. I still must regard you as an exceedingly learned and well-mannered Indian rhinoceros.”

  The rhinoceros took this in good part, saying, “Well, well, we will agree to disagree on that point for the time being. Although I certainly hope that you will let me know if you should need your drinking water purified.” As before, and so often thereafter, Professor Gottesman could not be completely sure that the rhinoceros was joking. Dismissing the subject, it went on to ask, “But about the Scholastics—do you plan to discuss the later Thomist reformers at all? Saint Cajetan rather dominates the movement, to my mind; if he had any real equals, I’m afraid I can’t recall them.”

  “Ah,” said the Professor. They were up until five in the morning, and it was the rhinoceros who dozed off first. The question of the rhinoceros’s leaving Professor Gottesman’s house never came up again. It continued to sleep in the living room, for the most part, though on warm summer nights it had a fondness for the young willow tree that had been a Christmas present from Sally. Professor Gottesman never learned whether it was male or female, nor how it nourished its massive, noisy body, nor how it managed its toilet facilities—a reticent man himself, he respected reticence in others. As a houseguest, the rhinoceros’s only serious fault was a continuing predilection for hot baths (with Epsom salts, when it could get them.) But it always cleaned up after itself, and was extremely conscientious about not tracking mud into the house; and it can be safely said that none of the Professor’s visitors—even the rare ones who spent a night or two under his roof—ever remotely suspected that they were sharing living quarters with a rhinoceros. All in all, it proved to be a most discreet and modest beast.

  The Professor had few friends, apart from Sally, and none whom he would have called on in a moment of bewildering crisis, as he had called on her. He avoided whatever social or academic gatherings he could reasonably avoid; as a consequence his evenings had generally been lonely ones, though he might not have called them so. Even if he had admitted the term, he would surely have insisted that there was nothing necessarily wrong with loneliness, in and of itself. “I think,” he would have said—did often say, in fact, to Sally Lowry. “There are people, you know, for whom thinking is company, thinking is entertainment, parties, dancing even. The others, other people, they absolutely will not believe this.”

  “You’re right,” Sally said. “One thing about you, Gus, when you’re right you’re really right.”

  Now, however, the Professor could hardly wait for the time of day when, after a cursory dinner (he was an indifferent, impatient eater, and truly tasted little difference between a frozen dish and one that had taken half a day to prepare), he would pour himself a glass of wine and sit down in the living room to debate philosophy with a huge mortar-colored beast that always smelled vaguely incontinent, no matter how many baths it had taken that afternoon. Looking eagerly forward all day to anything was a new experience for him. It appeared to be the same for the rhinoceros.

  As the animal had foretold, there was never the slightest suggestion in the papers or on television that the local zoo was missing one of its larger odd-toed ungulates. The Professor went there once or twice in great trepidation, convinced that he would be recognized and accused immediately of conspiracy in the rhinoceros’s escape. But nothing of the sort happened. The yard where the rhinoceros had been kept was now occupied by a pair of despondent-looking African elephants; when Professor Gottesman made a timid inquiry of a guard, he was curtly informed that the zoo had never possessed a rhinoceros of any species. “Endangered species,” the guard told him. “Too much red tape you have to go through to get one these days. Just not worth the trouble, mean as they are.”

  Professor Gottesman grew placidly old with the rhinoceros—that is to say, the Professor grew old, while the rhinoceros never changed in any way that he could observe. Granted, he was not the most observant of men, nor the most sensitive to change, except when threatened by it. Nor was he in the least ambitious: promotions and pay raises happened, when they happened, somewhere in the same cloudily benign middle distance as did those departmental meetings that he actually had to sit through. The companionship of the rhinoceros, while increasingly his truest delight, also became as much of a cozily reassuring habit as his classes, his office hours, the occasional dinner and movie or museum excursion with Sally Lowry, and the books on French and German philosophy that he occasionally published through the university press over the years. They were indifferently reviewed, and sold poorly.

  “Which is undoubtedly as it should be,” Professor Gottesman frequently told Sally when dropping her off at her house, well across town from his own. “I think I am a good teacher—that, yes—but I am decidedly not an original thinker, and I was never much of a writer even in German. It does no harm to say that I am not an exceptional man, Sally. It does not hurt me.”

  “I don’t know what exceptional means to you or anyone else,” Sally would answer stubbornly. “To me it means being unique, one of a kind, and that’s definitely you, old Gus. I never thought you belonged in this town, or this university, or probably this century. But I’m surely glad you’ve been here.”

  Once in a while she might ask him casually how his unicorn was getting on these days. The Professor, who had long since accepted the fact that no one ever saw the rhinoceros unless it chose to be seen, invariably rose to the bait, saying, “It is no more a unicorn than it ever was, Sally, you know that.” He would sip his latte in mild indignation, and eventually add, “Well, we will clearly never see eye to eye on the Vienna Circle, or the logical positivists in general—it is a very conservative creature, in some ways. But we did come to a tentative agreement about Bergson, last Thursday it was, so I would have to say that we are going along quite amiably.”

  Sally rarely pressed him further. Sharp-tongued, solitary, and profoundly irreverent, only with Professor Gottesman did she bother to know when to leave things alone. Most often, she would take out her battered harmonica and play one or another of his favorite tunes”—“Sweet Georgia Brown” or “Hurry on Down.” He never sang along, but he always hummed and grunted and thumped his bony knees. Once he mentioned diffidently that the rhinoceros appeared to have a peculiar fondness for “Slow Boat to China.” Sally pre
tended not to hear him.

  In the appointed fullness of time, the university retired Professor Gottesman in a formal ceremony, attended by, among others, Sally Lowry, his sister Edith, all the way from Zurich, and the rhinoceros—the latter having spent all that day in the bathtub, in anxious preparation. Each of them assured him that he looked immensely distinguished as he was invested with the rank of emeritus, which allowed him to lecture as many as four times a year, and to be available to counsel promising graduate students when he chose. In addition, a special chair with his name on it was reserved exclusively for his use at the Faculty Club. He was quite proud of never once having sat in it.

  “Strange, I am like a movie star now,” he said to the rhinoceros. “You should see. Now I walk across the campus and the students line up, they line up to watch me totter past. I can hear their whispers—‘Here he comes!’ ‘There he goes!’ Exactly the same ones they are who used to cut my classes because I bored them so. Completely absurd.”

  “Enjoy it as your due,” the rhinoceros proposed. “You were entitled to their respect then—take pleasure in it now, however misplaced it may seem to you.” But the Professor shook his head, smiling wryly.

  “Do you know what kind of star I am really like?” he asked. “I am like the old, old star that died so long ago, so far away, that its last light is only reaching our eyes today. They fall in on themselves, you know, those dead stars, they go cold and invisible, even though we think we are seeing them in the night sky. That is just how I would be, if not for you. And for Sally, of course.”

  In fact, Professor Gottesman found little difficulty in making his peace with age and retirement. His needs were simple, his pension and savings adequate to meet them, and his health as sturdy as generations of Swiss peasant ancestors could make it. For the most part he continued to live as he always had, the one difference being that he now had more time for study, and could stay up as late as he chose arguing about structuralism with the rhinoceros, or listening to Sally Lowry reading her new translation of Calvalcanti or Frescobaldi. At first he attended every conference of philosophers to which he was invited, feeling a certain vague obligation to keep abreast of new thought in his field. This compulsion passed quickly, however, leaving him perfectly satisfied to have as little as possible to do with academic life, except when he needed to use the library. Sally once met him there for lunch to find him feverishly rifling the ten Loeb Classic volumes of Philo Judaeus. “We were debating the concept of the logos last night,” he explained to her, “and then the impossible beast rampaged off on a tangent involving Philo’s locating the roots of Greek philosophy in the Torah: Forgive me, Sally, but I may be here for awhile.” Sally lunched alone that day.