by Lisa Mangum
The Professor’s sister Edith died younger than she should have. He grieved for her, and took much comfort in the fact that Nathalie never failed to visit him when she came to America. The last few times, she had brought a husband and two children with her—the youngest hugging a ragged but indomitable tiger named Charles under his arm. They most often swept him off for the evening; and it was on one such occasion, just after they had brought him home and said their good-byes, and their rented car had rounded the corner, that the mugging occurred.
Professor Gottesman was never quite sure himself about what actually took place. He remembered a light scuffle of footfalls, remembered a savage blow on the side of his head, then another impact as his cheek and forehead hit the ground. There were hands clawing through his pockets, low voices so distorted by obscene viciousness that he lost English completely, became for the first time in fifty years a terrified immigrant, once more unable to cry out for help in this new and dreadful country. A faceless figure billowed over him, grabbing his collar, pulling him close, mouthing words he could not understand. It was brandishing something menacingly in its free hand.
Then it vanished abruptly, as though blasted away by the sidewalk-shaking bellow of rage that was Professor Gottesman’s last clear memory until he woke in a strange bed, with Sally Lowry, Nathalie, and several policemen bending over him. The next day’s newspapers ran the marvelous story of a retired philosophy professor, properly frail and elderly, not only fighting off a pair of brutal muggers but beating them so badly that they had to be hospitalized themselves before they could be arraigned. Sally impishly kept the incident on the front pages for some days by confiding to reporters that Professor Gottesman was a practitioner of a long-forgotten martial-arts discipline, practiced only in ancient Sumer and Babylonia. “Plain childishness,” she said apologetically, after the fuss had died down. “Pure self-indulgence. I’m sorry, Gus.”
“Do not be,” the Professor replied. “If we were to tell them the truth, I would immediately be placed in an institution.” He looked sideways at his friend, who smiled and said, “What, about the rhinoceros rescuing you? I’ll never tell, I swear. They could pull out my fingernails.”
Professor Gottesman said, “Sally, those boys had been trampled, practically stamped flat. One of them had been gored, I saw him. Do you really think I could have done all that?”
“Remember, I’ve seen you in your wrath,” Sally answered lightly and untruthfully. What she had in fact seen was one of the ace-of-clubs footprints she remembered in crusted mud on the Professor’s front steps long ago. She said, “Gus. How old am I?”
The Professor’s response was off by a number of years, as it always was. Sally said, “You’ve frozen me at a certain age, because you don’t want me getting any older. Fine, I happen to be the same way about that rhinoceros of yours. There are one or two things I just don’t want to know about that damn rhinoceros, Gus. If that’s all right with you.”
“Yes, Sally,” Professor Gottesman answered. “That is all right.”
The rhinoceros itself had very little to say about the whole incident. “I chanced to be awake, watching a lecture about Bulgarian icons on the Learning Channel. I heard the noise outside.” Beyond that, it sidestepped all questions, pointedly concerning itself only with the Professor’s recuperation from his injuries and shock. In fact, he recovered much faster than might reasonably have been expected from a gentleman of his years. The doctor commented on it.
The occurrence made Professor Gottesman even more of an icon himself on campus; as a direct consequence, he spent even less time there than before, except when the rhinoceros requested a particular book. Nathalie, writing from Zurich, never stopped urging him to take in a housemate, for company and safety, but she would have been utterly dumbfounded if he had accepted her suggestion. “Something looks out for him,” she said to her husband. “I always knew that, I couldn’t tell you why. Uncle Gustave is somebody’s dear stuffed Charles.”
Sally Lowry did grow old, despite Professor Gottesman’s best efforts. The university gave her a retirement ceremony too, but she never showed up for it. “Too damn depressing,” she told Professor Gottesman, as he helped her into her coat for their regular Wednesday walk “It’s all right for you, Gus, you’ll be around forever. Me, I drink, I still smoke, I still eat all kinds of stuff they tell me not to eat—I don’t even floss, for God’s sake. My circulation works like the post office, and even my cholesterol has arthritis. Only reason I’ve lasted this long is I had this stupid job teaching beautiful, useless stuff to idiots. Now that’s it. Now I’m a goner.”
“Nonsense, nonsense, Sally,” Professor Gottesman assured her vigorously. “You have always told me you are too mean and spiteful to die. I am holding you to this.”
“Pickled in vinegar only lasts just so long,” Sally said. “One cheery note, anyway—it’ll be the heart that goes. Always is, in my family. That’s good, I couldn’t hack cancer. I’d be a shameless, screaming disgrace, absolutely no dignity at all. I’m really grateful it’ll be the heart.”
The Professor was very quiet while they walked all the way down to the little local park, and back again. They had reached the apartment complex where she lived, when he suddenly gripped her by the arms, looked straight into her face, and said loudly, “That is the best heart I ever knew, yours. I will not let anything happen to that heart.”
“Go home, Gus,” Sally told him harshly. “Get out of here, go home. Christ, the only sentimental Switzer in the whole world, and I get him. Wouldn’t you just know?”
Professor Gottesman actually awoke just before the telephone call came, as sometimes happens. He had dozed off in his favorite chair during a minor intellectual skirmish with the rhinoceros over Spinoza’s ethics. The rhinoceros itself was sprawled in its accustomed spot, snoring authoritatively, and the kitchen clock was still striking three when the phone rang. He picked it up slowly. Sally’s barely audible voice whispered, “Gus. The heart. Told you.” He heard the receiver fall from her hand.
Professor Gottesman had no memory of stumbling coatless out of the house, let alone finding his car parked on the street—he was just suddenly standing by it, his hands trembling so badly as he tried to unlock the door that he dropped his keys into the gutter. How long his frantic fumbling in the darkness went on, he could never say; but at some point he became aware of a deeper darkness over him, and looked up on hands and knees to see the rhinoceros.
“On my back,” it said, and no more. The Professor had barely scrambled up its warty, unyielding flanks and heaved himself precariously over the spine his legs could not straddle when there came a surge like the sea under him as the great beast leaped forward. He cried out in terror.
He would have expected, had he had wit enough at the moment to expect anything, that the rhinoceros would move at a ponderous trot, farting and rumbling, gradually building up a certain clumsy momentum. Instead, he felt himself flying, truly flying, as children know flying, flowing with the night sky, melting into the jeweled wind. If the rhinoceros’s huge, flat, three-toed feet touched the ground, he never felt it: nothing existed, or ever had existed, but the sky that he was and the bodiless power that he had become—he himself, the once and foolish old Professor Gustave Gottesman, his eyes full of the light of lost stars. He even forgot Sally Lowry, only for a moment, only for the least little time.
Then he was standing in the courtyard before her house, shouting and banging maniacally on the door, pressing every button under his hand. The rhinoceros was nowhere to be seen. The building door finally buzzed open, and the Professor leaped up the stairs like a young man, calling Sally’s name. Her own door was unlocked; she often left it so absentmindedly, no matter how much he scolded her about it. She was in her bedroom, half-wedged between the side of the bed and the night table, with the telephone receiver dangling by her head. Professor Gottesman touched her cheek and felt the fading warmth.
“Ah, Sally,” he said. “Sally, my dear.” She
was very heavy, but somehow it was easy for him to lift her back onto the bed and make a place for her among the books and papers that littered the quilt, as always. He found her harmonica on the floor, and closed her fingers around it. When there was nothing more for him to do, he sat beside her, still holding her hand, until the room began to grow light. At last he said aloud, “No, the sentimental Switzer will not cry, my dear Sally,” and picked up the telephone.
The rhinoceros did not return for many days after Sally Lowry’s death. Professor Gottesman missed it greatly when he thought about it at all, but it was a strange, confused time. He stayed at home, hardly eating, sleeping on his feet, opening books and closing them. He never answered the telephone, and he never changed his clothes. Sometimes he wandered endlessly upstairs and down through every room in his house; sometimes he stood in one place for an hour or more at a time, staring at nothing. Occasionally the doorbell rang, and worried voices outside called his name. It was late autumn, and then winter, and the house grew cold at night, because he had forgotten to turn on the furnace. Professor Gottesman was perfectly aware of this, and other things, somewhere.
One evening, or perhaps it was early one morning, he heard the sound of water running in the bathtub upstairs. He remembered the sound, and presently he moved to his living room chair to listen to it better. For the first time in some while, he fell asleep, and woke only when he felt the rhinoceros standing over him. In the darkness he saw it only as a huge, still shadow, but it smelled unmistakably like a rhinoceros that has just had a bath. The Professor said quietly, “I wondered where you had gone.”
“We unicorns mourn alone,” the rhinoceros replied. “I thought it might be the same for you.”
“Ah,” Professor Gottesman said. “Yes, most considerate. Thank you.”
He said nothing further, but sat staring into the shadow until it appeared to fold gently around him. The rhinoceros said, “We were speaking of Spinoza.”
Professor Gottesman did not answer. The rhinoceros went on, “I was very interested in the comparison you drew between Spinoza and Thomas Hobbes. I would enjoy continuing our discussion.”
“I do not think I can,” the Professor said at last. “I do not think I want to talk anymore.”
It seemed to him that the rhinoceros’s eyes had become larger and brighter in its own shadow, and its horn a trifle less hulking. But its stomach rumbled as majestically as ever as it said, “In that case, perhaps we should be on our way.”
“Where are we going?” Professor Gottesman asked. He was feeling oddly peaceful and disinclined to leave his chair. The rhinoceros moved closer, and for the first time that the Professor could remember its huge, hairy muzzle touched his shoulder, light as a butterfly.
“I have lived in your house for a long time,” it said. “We have talked together, days and nights on end, about ways of being in this world, ways of considering it, ways of imagining it as a part of some greater imagining. Now has come the time for silence. Now I think you should come and live with me.”
They were outside, on the sidewalk, in the night. Professor Gottesman had forgotten to take his coat, but he was not at all cold. He turned to look back at his house, watching it recede, its lights still burning, like a ship leaving him at his destination. He said to the rhinoceros, “What is your house like?”
“Comfortable,” the rhinoceros answered. “In honesty, I would not call the hot water as superbly lavish as yours, but there is rather more room to maneuver. Especially on the stairs.”
“You are walking a bit too rapidly for me,” said the Professor. “May I climb on your back once more?” The rhinoceros halted immediately, saying, “By all means, please do excuse me.” Professor Gottesman found it notably easier to mount this time, the massive sides having plainly grown somewhat trimmer and smoother during the rhinoceros’s absence, and easier to grip with his legs. It started on briskly when he was properly settled, though not at the rapturous pace that had once married the Professor to the night wind. For some while he could hear the clopping of cloven hooves far below him, but then they seemed to fade away. He leaned forward and said into the rhinoceros’s pointed silken ear, “I should tell you that I have long since come to the conclusion that you are not after all an Indian rhinoceros, but a hitherto unknown species, somehow misclassified. I hope this will not make a difference in our relationship.”
“No difference, good Professor,” came the gently laughing answer all around him. “No difference in the world.”
***
Red Roses
Todd McCaffrey
Padraig paused to wipe the sweat from his brow and then leaned back into the dirty job. She deserved better but an unmarked grave was all he could give her. She’d been so small, so fragile, so fair, so beautiful, but she’d lasted no longer than the rose she’d borne.
It was dark, it was raining, the winds causing the drops to sheet in on top of him. Fortunately, he’d managed to get the digger in and had hollowed open the grave with no effort. He hadn’t gone the whole depth, fearful that he’d uncover the casket, and he had no idea how he’d explain the digging or the fresh dirt when anyone came to ask.
But it was all she asked for in the end, and he had decided to give it to her, church and police be damned.
He had no box for her, of course. In the end, he’d hacked up some bracken and a bunch of roses. The bracken lined the bottom and the roses he put on top of her. He couldn’t bear the thought of piling dirt on her bare beautiful face, so he’d stripped off his shirt, jumped down into the hole, and had gently placed it over her, pausing only to kiss her impossibly white face one more time and say, “There, now you’re back on his lap.”
More dirt, another shovelful. The first had been the hardest. He’d thrown it on her feet even as he thought, Maybe she isn’t dead. Maybe she’s just sleeping or in some weird trance.
Maybe she was tricking him, he thought as he dropped a heavy load on her chest, hoping to startle some response from her under the bed of roses. He stopped then, thinking that perhaps she had moved but, after staring in the rain until he started shivering, he decided it had just been the dead roses settling.
He’d covered her head last, all the same. Even under his smelly shirt, he wanted to give her one last chance to be alive. He paused and waited, the rain battering him, mixing with his tears, but there was no movement, no single sign of life in the dirt below.
So he continued. And now, he was almost done. He thought back to how it had all started.
* * *
“Are you Padraig Murray?” the man had called as he trudged over the fields.
Padraig hadn’t seen him at first, he’d been too busy with the tractor. As soon as he did, he put the tractor in neutral and turned it off. Petrol—even diesel—was too dear to waste on nothing. Not that his farm or his crop were all that much. Padraig had been fighting a losing battle for the past decade to preserve the small patch of land that had been his family’s for countless generations.
“And what if I am?” Padraig had called back, scowling at the man in a neat suit bearing a smart leather briefcase. Back over the fences, Padraig could see a new Jaguar car parked in the drive, slightly dusty from the long way on the back roads, looking just as out of place as the man who shouted.
“I need to talk to you,” the man said, hefting his briefcase.
A moment of panic, followed by heated anger, flashed through Padraig. Dammit, he’d paid them the money!
“The loan’s paid off!” Padraig shouted. “Get off my land and don’t bother me at my work.”
“Loan?” the man said, looking confused. “I’m here about your great-uncle.”
* * *
In the small house, Padraig served the man tea and what biscuits weren’t stale.
“The only great-uncle I ever heard about was named Joseph and he disappeared back in the famine,” Padraig said as he slid milk and sugar toward the man.
“That’s the one,” the man said with a nod. “Jo
seph Murray.”
“Are you a historian, then?”
“No, I’m with the county council,” the man replied. He held out his hand. Padraig took it. “Gregory Paxton. I’m here to ask what you want to do about the remains.”
“What? You found his body?”
Mr. Paxton looked away. “Well, we think so. In fact, we were hoping that you’d provide us with some DNA so we can verify it.”
“Did he fall in a bog or something?” Padraig asked. He’d heard of bodies pulled out of the bog still well-preserved after thousands of years. There were no bogs within a hundred miles of here but perhaps his great-uncle had gone wandering or off to Galway hoping to get on one of the ships bound for America. That’s what the family had all thought. He remembered something about it: how everyone had been counting on him, how he’d left a family behind that mostly starved in his absence. In Padraig’s family, his memory was associated with traitors and blackguards. Perhaps he’d merely been unlucky.
“Bog?” Paxton repeated. “Near as the coroner can tell, he died of a blow to the head.”
“And after nearly two hundred years you’ve found his bones?”