The Elephants in My Backyard

by Rajiv Surendra

  Back at the house, Donald was stomping on the wooden floor, shouting, “We’ve got to get him out! We’ve got to scare him out!” Donald had opened up a trap door in the floor, about two feet by three feet, something else that I had never noticed before.

  “Stop, Donald!” I whispered frantically, “stop stomping; I called the Wildlife Center and they said not to scare it! And there’s no way for him to get out; we need to put something down that hole!” I ran out of the house to look for something. The orchard where the sheep grazed was surrounded by fencing that was made up of split logs and I was able to pry one loose. I stuck it down the hole. It hit the floor of the cellar and then projected above the opening of the floor about a foot.

  “Good thinking,” Donald said, walking out of the house. “Well, then, there’s nothing more we can do. Just lock the building up and he’ll come back up.”

  “And what’s he going to do once he’s up, in a locked building overnight? Huh? We can’t just leave him in here all night!” I followed him outside, trying to keep my voice down.

  “There’s nothing more we can do; he’ll be fine until the morning,” he said, turning his back to me and leaving. “I’ve got to get home.”

  I was trembling and drenched in sweat. I moved cautiously as I walked back into the house, ripped apart the loaf of bread, and jabbed a piece of it onto the pointed end of the wooden fence post. Every now and then I heard a faint scampering sound below me and wondered whether the groundhog was attempting to dig itself out.

  Now Wendy was at the door; I guided her out of the house, telling her it needed to be quiet, and then I filled her in on what was going on.

  “Well, Donald says that we need to close the building,” she said, sighing. She was wearing her potato sack dress again.

  “Donald’s an idiot. We need to wait here for it to come out or we need to call the Wildlife Center to come and help.”

  “We’re closed, and Donald’s going home, Rajiv,” Wendy said, impatiently. “He’s my boss, and those are his instructions.”

  She pressed her lips together and was looking at me challengingly.

  “Well, I’m not leaving.”

  “He’s my boss,” she repeated slowly, through gritted teeth, “and I’m your boss, and you have to listen to me!”

  “I’m not leaving here until that animal is safely out of the house.”

  Wendy had her hands at her side, balled into tight fists. I had never seen her so mad. She fumbled around for something to say and finally blurted out, at the top of her lungs, “You can’t always get what you want!”

  What? Was that her best retort? That I couldn’t just get what I wanted? Oh, hell, no.

  “Watch me,” I said flatly, turning away from her and sitting down on the ground outside the house.

  She fumed for a few seconds before she abruptly turned on her heels, creating a cloud of dust from the dry sandy gravel, and headed toward the main building.

  “Cunt,” I said aloud to myself. Laura was right, it was a good word.

  I sat with my head in my hands for about ten minutes, sad that I might have put my little furry friend’s life in danger. I was exhausted and weary.

  Today is the day I get fired, I thought. Look around, this is probably the last time you’ll be seeing these buildings, the huge black walnut trees beside Second House, the sheep grazing in the apple orchard.

  My thoughts turned to Life of Pi. I couldn’t help it; I thought about the movie every day, but with the project being in limbo, I tried my best to push it out of my mind and be patient.

  “Yes, and while you’re being patient, you can do something,” one voice in my head started up.

  “Like what?” the other voice retorted.

  “Like swimming . . .” the first voice said, in a challenging tone.

  “No! Scary!”

  “They’ve got three pools on campus at U of T . . . and you’d make Ma happy, working on getting that stupid degree. Go back to school.”

  Fine, I decided, I would man up and conquer my fear. While chipping away at a degree in art history and classics, I’d fill all my spare time with lessons at the university’s three swimming pools to continue my Pi research. Just thinking about swimming made me short of breath. “Scary,” the voice in my head repeated. “This is a good thing,” the other voice said, “Push yourself. Grow.”

  And then, there at the door of the cabin, was a little furry face. I couldn’t have been happier if it had been the Blessed Virgin herself. The groundhog twitched his big black nose and turned his head, his tiny, beady eyes looking from side to side. He had two buckteeth that stuck out over his bottom lip. I was far enough away from the door to not be a threat, I felt. Then the little ball of fatty fur plopped down out of the house. I noticed his paws were bloody and my stomach turned. He stood there tentatively for a brief moment and then bolted off around the cabin into a wooded area, just as I caught sight of Wendy returning with the head of all of Black Creek, a short woman with a boy’s haircut named Marty who was wearing an outdated, oversized ’80s-style blazer.

  The two of them made their way down to me by the front door of the cabin.

  “Well,” Marty said in a fake, sweet tone, smiling, “was that the problem, the one that we just noticed running off?”

  “Yeah,” I replied, in an equally fake, sweet way, “that was him.”

  “Great!” Marty exclaimed, lifting her palms up to the sky and casually shrugging her shoulders in Vana White fashion, “problem solved.”

  “Yeah,” I repeated, looking at Wendy, who now had a fake smile on her face, as well, “problem solved.”

  I was surprised I hadn’t gotten fired.

  Back in the house, I wrapped the rest of the bread in a piece of linen.

  “This is all your fault!” I reprimanded the loaf and put it in the dark cupboard. I closed the four sets of double-hung windows, gathered my things, and pulled the big red door of the cabin closed behind me. My response to Wendy sprouted in my mind as I put the giant metal key into the old iron box lock and turned it counterclockwise, hearing a loud, satisfying click.

  I can get what I want. And I will.

  From: yann_martel1963@yahoo.com

  To: rajivsca@yahoo.ca

  Subject: Pourriez-vous m’aider, encore, un fois . . .

  Date: Mon, 17 Oct 2005 01:54:01

  Dear Rajiv,

  Yes, it’s true. A long, torturous process has finally delivered the best possible scenario: Jean-Pierre Jeunet. I’m delighted. I love his style and his lightness of touch. And he’s clearly matured as a director and screenwriter. I’m very curious to see what he will do.

  Hope you’re well.

  Yann

  8.

  THE TALL, BLOND, SHIRTLESS GUYS strutting their stuff as they sauntered by, chugging protein shakes or emerging from the showers after an intense session of water polo, seemed sort of unreal, like Norse gods looking down their noses at this waiflike, troglodytic creature (me) lurking in the shadows. Almost everyone in Scarborough, the neighborhood where I grew up, was an Indian, Chinese, or Caribbean immigrant, and it was extremely rare to see a real, bona fide white person in the flesh. One was more likely to see a pack of thirteen Arctic wolves that escaped from the zoo convening at the main intersection near my house (yes, this did really happen once) than the bodies that passed me in the men’s locker room of the University of Toronto Athletic Center.

  This was the very first swimming lesson of my life, Swimming Basics, and as if learning how to swim wasn’t going to be hard enough, I started hyperventilating as I pulled off my shirt and lifted my feet out of my jeans, catching glimpses of the glowing, alabasterlike bodies in tiny Speedos that were the living and breathing versions of the classical Greek and Roman statuary that filled the art history textbooks in my backpack.

  A giant maze of bright yellow lockers, the color of a school bus, all edged with rows of wooden benches, knee high, served as the garish backdrop for my new venture. As I stripped down,
my anxiety was exacerbated by the boisterous, jockish sounds of guys roughhousing—the words “dude” or “bro” plaguing every sentence that was drawled out in these deep, bass voices.

  These guys were cool. I was not cool. I tried not to stare at their perfect, blemish-free, hairless skin, pulled taut over their muscular frames. Any single one of them could have been used in an anatomy lesson to illustrate every body part in its ideal form. These male, teenage sex icons exuded the very essence of lustful youth, extracted, boiled, and concentrated into this one room in its most meaty, fleshy, physical form, no mindful sentiment attached to it—pure wantonness based on that which could be seen, touched, caressed, and groped. I was now treading on new ground, in a world where I felt unwelcome.

  I anchored the nubby, white gym towel to my chest using my chin, covering pecs to knees, as I pulled on my swimming trunks. I wanted to hide every part of me, the bumpy and inflamed skin on the back of my thin arms, my bony shoulders, and my chicken legs covered in a carpet of hair—sick. God forbid my towel slip off and anyone catch a glimpse of Willy the Anteater—he was uncircumcised, with just a little too much foreskin, you see. The one consolation to poor little Willy was that he looked exactly like the one on Michelangelo’s David and I had recently read, in my textbook on Greek sculpture, that the ancient Greek aesthetic actually preferred discreet genitals, small in size—this was considered true elegance. Hmm. The ancient Greeks would have loved my penis. Sadly, I wasn’t learning to swim two thousand years ago in the palaestra behind the temple of Artemis; this was Toronto in the twenty-first century, and I was being stopped on a daily basis by kids at school asking me whether I was “really Kevin G.,” the last thing I wanted was to shatter their image of the rapping mathlete/badass MC by searing an image of Anteater Willy into their minds.

  As I emerged from my towel cocoon, wearing my long, billowy swim trunks, and made my way, shirtless, from the locker room to the pool, that first day I felt as though I was walking the gauntlet—scrawny-ass ribs visible, pancake chested. I mustered up all the courage in me to slowly tiptoe over to the shallow end of the pool and, holding on to the metal hand rails, descend into the liquid world. As the water crept up over me, I felt as though it were physically pushing all the air out of my lungs, until all I had left were a few tiny mouthfuls.

  In that very first swimming class, Meghan, the instructor, told us all to hold a flutter board and kick while she assessed our level of comfort. The water, at its shallowest, was up to my collarbone, and I kept one hand on the edge of the pool the whole time, knuckles white from my firm grip, fearing that I’d lose my balance and drown. Meghan had to gently coax me into letting go of the wall and taking hold of the flutter board with both hands, and eventually, as I gasped and wheezed and flailed my legs about frantically, my long and billowy trunks completely slipped off, exposing my brown bum to the other seven non-swimmer losers in the class, with Anteater Willy having a clear view of the bottom of the pool! The horror washed over me and everything went blurry as I stood up, crouched deeper into the water, and pulled my shorts back on, before jumping out of the pool and running back to the changing room. My first lesson was over in fifteen minutes.

  I returned to class the following day wearing a new pair of Speedos jammers, knee-length shorts that were sinfully tight, with no chance in hell of slipping off. And, thus prepared, I tried to pull myself together and get back in the water. This wasn’t going to be as easy as Yann Martel laid it out in the novel when describing Pi’s melding with the water, calling it “liquid light.” Don’t fight it, become one with it.

  “Now, I want you all to take a deep breath, bend your knees, and put your head under the water, then come back up, like this,” Meghan demonstrated. I did as she asked. “Great! So, no one here is afraid of putting their head in the water, great! Now I want you all to take a deep breath and just float on your stomach, like this.” She effortlessly lifted her legs up, stretched her arms out in front of her, and lay motionless at the surface of the water. The six other people in class followed suit, but I just stood there. And I could feel my chest tightening. The long beams of late-morning sunshine that streamed in through a row of windows disappeared as a cloud passed over the sun.

  “What’s the matter, Rajiv?” Meghan asked, turning to me. She was my age, a second-year student, which made things feel relaxed, but I didn’t quite know what the problem was—I just couldn’t do it. “I don’t understand how to take my feet off the floor of the pool—it just won’t happen. When I lift up my feet, where do they go? They’ll just land on the floor of the pool and I’ll be standing again.”

  Meghan laughed lightly. “No, they won’t; trust me,” she assured. “You just . . . just spread yourself out and float, like this.” And she demonstrated again.

  In my attempt to really try to do it, I lifted my feet off the ground and spread my arms out, face in the water, and my feet instinctively searched for firm ground, quickly finding their safe place on the small white tiles of the pool’s floor. “Nope, I can’t do it.”

  Meghan turned to the other students, who were standing in the pool silently, waiting. “Okay, I want you all to just keep floating and try staying in for as long as is comfortable.” Meghan took me over to a corner of the pool. She hopped out, grabbed a flutter board, and said, “Hold this. Spread your arms out, take a deep breath, put your face in the water, and you’ll float.” And I did it. And then she took the flutter board away from me. “Good, now do exactly the same thing, but without the board.”

  But I couldn’t do it. “I need the board. The board was what made me float, I just can’t do it on my own!”

  My swimming lessons found a way of slyly following me home and making their way into my dreams at night. I had repeated nightmares where I was facedown in the beautifully blue water, pulling one slow stroke after another, feet kicking slowly, calmly, everything going smoothly, with only the sound of the water plugging my ears, muffling all other noise. Then, all of a sudden the floor of the pool would vanish and the depth of the water became endless, and I’d gasp, but there was no air. I couldn’t breathe. Frantic, I’d be trying to grab the edge of the pool, but it wasn’t there—and then I’d be jolted awake.

  I pushed myself, three times a week, to get back into that pool. I developed a ritual of mental motivation as I pulled up my trunks. “This is what you need to do to become Pi,” I’d remind myself as I’d climb the concrete steps from the basement where the changing room was to the pool on the second floor. “You just need to let go,” I recited as I pulled my swimming goggles down over my eyes and pulled the rubber elastic tight. But then I’d cautiously slip into the water, and as the other beginners swam entire lengths of the pool and I was the only one still in the corner, monopolizing the instructor’s attention, I would feel defeated, embarrassed with the pace of my progress, which was painfully slow. Meghan was never impatient, but I could tell that not being able to get me to float was becoming a personal challenge for her—she seemed to be disappointed, not in me, but in herself for not being able to figure out a way to get me to just do it, and I was beginning to see that these lessons were a sort of collaboration. We were each dealing with a personal issue, an obstacle that we were frustratingly seeking to overcome; I needed to learn how to float and she needed to teach me how to do it.

  “Okay, do you trust me?” she asked me one day, just as I was starting to think that there was no hope for me. She had sent the rest of the students off into the deep end to practice treading, so the two of us had the entire shallow end to ourselves. “I’m not going to ask you to do anything that’s dangerous or scary, okay? I just want you to trust me, okay?”

  “Yes!” I shouted enthusiastically, determined to snap myself out of the mental rut I was in.

  “Take a really deep breath and lie on the floor of the pool, like this,” Meghan said as she inhaled, went under the water and lay on the bottom of the pool, spreading her limbs out completely. She stayed there for a few seconds before she
resurfaced. “Do you think you could just do that? It’s easy . . .” she said casually. I promised I would give it my best effort, then pulled my swimming goggles over my eyes, took a deep breath and bent my knees, submerging my head below the surface of the pool and spotting a stream of small bubbles rising up from the air pockets in my swim trunks—glug, glug, glug—the world of water all around me. The locks of my long, curly hair seemed to transform into a lifelike creature with a mind of its own, a swaying wave of black seaweedlike tentacles, occasionally blurring my vision. I could see Meghan’s pale legs standing nearby. Everything moved slowly and without sound under the water. I began to push my arms and legs out, stretching completely, trying my hardest to get to the bottom of the pool, my face grimacing as I refused to be defeated. I struggled. I fought the water. I failed.

  I bobbed up, out of the water, pushing aside the clump of hair that was plastered to the front of my face.

  “What’s wrong?” Meghan asked in her good-natured tone, smiling.

  “I can’t do it . . .” I panted, disappointed with myself.

  “Why, what’s happening?” she remained calm and patient.

  “I just keep floating.” And as I finished saying the word, a cheeky grin spread across Meghan’s face.

  “Ohhhhh . . .” she teased, “ . . . you’re floating, eh? I thought you said you couldn’t float.” Her wet palm patted my bare back. “Good work, Rajiv.”

  “No!” I countered back. “Good, work Meghan.”

  My swimming progress was slow. Like, snail’s pace slow. The dread of stripping off all my clothes (especially during the frigid Toronto winters) and jumping into the cold swimming pool eventually became routine—something that I never fully came to enjoy, but rather a task that I came to terms with.