by Nibedita Sen
“Oh yeah. That powder don’t stay lying down. You been getting you lungfuls of the stuff for—how long you been a supervisor? Since the day they started up? And you never thought about all that dust floating around?” She pushes him away. “You’re stupider than you look and you ain’t much to look at, you want the God’s honest. May take a little longer, but truth’s coming for you, Slattery.”
Which may or may not be true. She dearly hopes it is, but for now it’s enough to watch the fear scrabbling behind his eyes, looking for a knothole to slip into. “Bullshit,” he stutters. His back is against Topsy’s side now, palms pressed to her ribs. “They would’ve told me.”
“Yeah, just like they told us? May be overthinking your place in the pack, hound dog.”
He opens his mouth to say something back. He opens his mouth, but he’s suddenly six feet in the air with an elephant’s trunk wrapped around his neck, and so all that comes out is a strangled ghrrk.
• • •
Yes, O Mothers
Yes!
It is Ripe
And Good
And ready to be plucked
Sweet on the tongue,
In the trunk,
On the tusks,
To toss, to tear, to trample!
• • •
All of her pieces, all of the Stories, everything that held Furmother together—all of it sailed high into the sky. Bones and Blacksap and insides and outsides, fur and tusks and tail! End over end over end they flew, until the wind caught them and scattered the bits across the frozen world like plums. Half of a tusk lodged in the sky’s belly and became the moon; much of her hair blew away and turned to clouds. Her hot blood thawed the earth; the songs she had scattered behind her on her journey sprouted and were plucked by the wandering Mothers.
Stories, too, they discovered. But it was a funny thing: They were shattered into pieces, like the Great Mother who had scattered them, and no one tale held to the ear by itself could ever be fully understood. To make them whole required many voices entwined. Then and only then could they become true things, and then and only then could we become the undying We, endless voices passing along the one song that is also Many.
• • •
“We are not doing this for you. We are doing it for all the ones that might suffer in the future because of you and your thoughtlessness, your short tempers, your dangerously short memories. We will tell them what you did as we tell one another, passing it down from She to She. If this . . . compromise is the only way to make sure the story survives, the real Story . . .” The translator shrugs. The matriarch is a granite statue. “Please do not misunderstand me. We aren’t protecting your secrets. We are guarding the truth. They will see how we shine, and they will know the truth.”
• • •
There are a hundred interviews and uniforms and grim-faced men with typewriters lurking in Regan’s future, each of them more or less asking the same damn thing over and over: What the hell happened? Did Slattery provoke the elephant? Was there any warning in Topsy’s behavior in the days leading up to the attack? Did she get a good look at what happened?
Hell yes I saw what happened. How could I NOT get an eyeful of what goddamned happened? You think I’m blind and deaf on top of being the walking dead? A fella got turned to raspberry jam spitting distance from me and I had to go back home and comb little bits of him outta my hair and you sit there asking if I got a good look?
But all of that’s still waiting up ahead, throwing jacks just around the corner. Right now she’s watching it happen, backed up as far against the opposite side of the stall as she can scoot, while every elephant in the place from one end to the other stomps and screams loud enough to shake sparkling radium dust from the rafters. Slattery screamed too, at first, but the only noise left over now is that triumphant roar, like bugles and trumpets and the footfalls of an angry god come to collect.
Way away down at the bottom of herself, buried deep beneath the frozen shock and the pain in her jaw and throat and places where Slattery kicked her, she feels something strange stirring, like sitting in church and getting the Holy Ghost. It takes her a while to stick a tack in it, hunkered cowering in that corner with her hands over her ears and madness mopping the floor red right over yonder, but it comes to her eventually, guilty as a kid stealing ripe melons.
Satisfaction. That’s what it is. It’s satisfaction.
PART II
CASCADE REACTION
If you do not know how to die, never trouble yourself; nature will in a moment fully and sufficiently instruct you; she will exactly do that business for you; take no care for it.
—MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE
RAMPAGE AT US RADIUM! MACABRE & BIZARRE ‘MAD ELEPHANT’ ATTACK SPARKS SHOCKED INVESTIGATIONS, TEMPORARY PLANT SHUTDOWN
—Victim “was not the first nor second man” to fall to the Beast’s capricious wrath, say sources
—Local constabulary describe “scene of unfathomable carnage and butchery”
—Survivor saw it all from her hiding place a mere stone’s throw from the grim hecatomb!
Police were called to US Radium’s factory floor in the early hours of yesterday evening, whereupon arriving they found a bloody tableau of horror. One of the factory’s workforce of helper elephants had indiscriminately gone stark raving mad and snapped the fetters of bondage, destroying her stall and smashing a foreman beneath her vast and terrible agglomeration in the most gruesome and gore-streaked way imaginable. No resuscitation was possible, for the body of the poor victim was so crushed and mutilated it “looked to have gone through a pressing machine,” according to horrified onlookers.
Adding to the lurid penny-dreadful quality of this sensational tale, there was indeed a survivor—a mere slip of a woman, one of the very “Radium Girls” recently entangled in a lengthy legal dispute against US Radium on the grounds of workers’ safety whose allegations were the prime instigator for the elephants’ initial purchase in the first place. Factory officials have not been forthcoming with information on the girl’s current physical and emotional status (or why she remained in US Radium’s employ when all of her fellows have presumably been dismissed, as was initially reported several months ago), but one can assume the emotional trauma has been nothing short of shattering. She was said to have been “coated in bright splashes of blood from hair to hemline” after her rescue from the stall, a horrific state even a strapping full-grown man’s sanity might quail beneath the strain of.
What is intended to be done with the mad culprit—and what the future of the elephant program at US Radium may be in the face of this unthinkable disaster—remains to be seen. If, as our sources report, this is not the beast’s first attack on a caretaker, options on the table may be limited to lethality.
• • •
There’s a toy elephant on the director’s desk. Plopped between the family pictures and fancy diplomas and cowpiles of ink-stained paper, it sits there hoisting its little tin trunk towards the big tin ceiling begging whatever heathen god elephants pray hallelujah to for a boot heel, a fist, or the delivering jaws of a curious and bad-behaved hound dog. Regan’s about ready to do the honors herself if the director doesn’t stow his hemming and hawing. Going to college apparently taught you sixteen different ways of saying “we’re damned sorry” and “we’re real damned sorry,” and not a blessed one of them left any air in the room or breath in the speaker’s lungs or meant any more than a trained hen plucking at a toy piano.
You and me, tin elephant. We’re both stuck here waiting for it to end. It looks a lot like one of the animals that came along with the wooden Noah’s Ark she had bought her sisters for Christmas back when her and Mama were both doing better, before the jaw ache and the dentist and the company doctor’s shrugs. That pretty painted boat, she recollects, dried up a good quarter of two November paychecks. She wonders where this one came from, if the director’s just so stuffed with money he can go buy things like that the way other folks pick up salt
and flour.
“What’re you gonna do about the elephants?” she says, cutting off another round-robin repetition of the We’re Very Sorry Song mid-verse.
“It’s unfortunate, very unfortunate, and—I’m sorry, what was that?”
“The elephants. The workers.” She talks slower, half because the director’s obviously working with a deficit of common sense, half because it hurts her throat and jaw to speak and everything’s coming out as a mushy-mouthed drunk’s mumble. “You gonna keep using, or you gonna talk to them?”
“Well, I mean.” The director’s eyes and hands slide to a spot on his desk in dire need of straightening. “Rudimentary intelligence and even more rudimentary grasp of language aside, they’re just animals. I don’t exactly understand what speaking to them about any of this would accomplish. What do you suppose they would request, smoke breaks? A ham on Christmas?”
Freedom, maybe, y’think? A way of saying “hell no”?
“Anyway,” he continues, plowing quickly on, “that point is moot at this juncture. To answer your initial question, we’re liquidating our workforce at auction and shutting down the Orange factory, effective next month. Have to make our costs back somehow after this debacle.” Regan can’t be sure, but she thinks she catches some side-eye from him at that last bit as he busily shuffles papers. “Though I don’t see how. Most of our elephants were . . . problem children to begin with, purchased at a steep discount.”
“You’re shutting down work? During a war?”
“The factory here in Orange, yes.” If there was a blue ribbon given out at the county fair for avoiding looking people in the eye, he’d have something fluttery to take home right now. Regan can barely keep upright in her chair, her back and legs ache so fierce, but something about the way he’s acting feels slithery and slightly familiar. She decides to keep jabbing her gig into the water.
“Everywhere else too if you’re selling off the elephants, I guess,” she says.
No reply. The sheaf in his hand goes shss shss shss as it hits the desk. Beneath the fancy new electric bulb overhead his head shines wetter than a bullfrog’s ass.
“I mean. Not to put too fine a point on it, but ain’t nobody willing, able, and human nearby who’s read a newspaper is gonna want to take this job on after all the shit you put me and my girls through.” She lets the swear and the anger tethered to it hang in the air with all the weight of a pointed rifle barrel. “And ain’t like you’d knowingly do that to folks again in the first how.”
Shss shss shss SLAM.
For the first time since Regan sat down the director looks her dead in the eye. A flash of memory splits her aching head: She’s ten and her bulldog’s got a rat cornered behind the barn and no general on a gray horse has ever been so unafeared of his own death. The rat, though—at least she’d respected that rat. Rat was doing what it had to do to keep itself alive. Rats looked out for one another.
“What US Radium does or does not do in the future is no business of yours,” he says. “Rest assured, if we did continue production elsewhere, we would enforce new and stringent safety protocols where our factory girls were concerned. ‘Stringent’ means tough, if you were wondering.” He drops his eyes and whisks the papers away into a drawer. “Be out of the dorms by the end of next week, please. Thank you.”
“Hang on.” Regan staggers to her feet, trying not to wince. “I ain’t done talking to you yet, si—”
“That will be all, thank you.”
“No it damned well WON’T BE.” She snatches the tin elephant off the desk and squeezes it so hard all the pointy edges cut into her palm. “Two things. You’re gonna answer me two things, less you really wanna call the security man to come and throw me out. Look real good in the paper, won’t it?” It’s hard to sound threatening when you’re slurring and sputtering all over the place, but she gives it her best. “One, where’s my check?”
“It’s in the mail, as I have told you the last three times you inquired previously.”
“You sure about that? You real sure?”
The director sighs, reaches down into his desk, fishes around, and brings up a checkbook and a fountain pen. He stabs and jabs at one of the papers like an egret skewering minnows, tears it off, and practically hurls the thing at her across the desk. Hurling slips of paper is a lot harder than it sounds, though; it flutters and glides through the air before drifting sweetly to a halt at her feet. She bends slowly to pick it up, all of her joints doing their best mockingbird imitations of faraway machine gun nests. Blood roars in her ears and eyes. She reaches her free hand out, steadying herself on the edge of the desk until the darkness clears and danger slinks on by.
“Thanks,” she says. She doesn’t expect a reply, and sure enough, not even a grunt squeezes out of his puckered mouth. “Last question. Topsy? You selling her with the rest?”
“Euthanasia.” He’s already gone back to ignoring her, scratching and pecking banty-fashion at his Very Important Work.
Regan sticks the check and the tin elephant both inside her pocket and sees herself out.
• • •
They named her after a slave in their own Stories, because even humans know Stories are We, and they try, in their so-so-clever way, to drive the Stories down gullies and riverbeds of their own choosing. But chains can be snapped, O best beloved mooncalf. Sticks can be knocked out of a Man’s clever hands. And one chain snapping may cause all the rest to trumpet and stomp and shake the trees like a rain-wind coming down the mountain, washing the gully muddy with bright lightning tusks and thunderous song.
Sing, O Mothers
Sing of Her sacrifice!
Sing of She – With – The – Lightning – In – Her – Trunk
The one who split the Tree in half
Scattering their lives like leaves,
Like splintered wood,
Like shaken fruit.
They took her away in chains, O Mothers
Locked her up where no one could see
Plotted her death, a spectacle, a shrieking monkey troop’s boast:
“See how clever we are, how strong,
The lightning obeys us; so too should you!”
Poor things,
Poor things.
Poor prideful, foolish things.
• • •
They send others in to negotiate the next few times. Kat’s glad of it; her eagerness to see the project (her project) getting under way feels like it’s been slowly leaking out the cracks ever since the first meeting. It’s still a sound hypothesis—she’ll stick by that no matter how guilty she feels, that the reasoning behind picking elephants was solid—but now she’s got a whole mess of issues sitting in moving boxes inside her, taking up valuable floor space.
They will see how we shine, and they will know the truth.
The thing that old elephant didn’t understand—and how could she?—is that humans aren’t always interested in confronting truths, especially uncomfortable ones. Will the benefits of a concerted coast-to-coast reeducation program outweigh the million sound bites about glowing radioactive elephant watchdogs sure to spring forth from every talking head and late-night comedian? The classes in school Kat sat through as a kid hadn’t done a damn thing but muddy the waters. It’s going to take a massive push, a goddamned media blitz, and she doesn’t know if her higher-ups honestly give a shit about making that happen. They want a KEEP OUT sign for the ages, not truth in megafauna relations.
Christ, we can barely confront the gazillion shitty, horrible ways we treat one another without getting defensive. What chance does this have of being done right?
She neglects her lab work writing detailed pitches for ten-point media attack plans. The pizza delivery guy becomes her only connection to the outside world. The sheets on her bed grow kicked and tangled, eventually wadding into an untouched, unwashed knot at the foot of the mattress.
• • •
AN ELEPHANT TO DIE BY ELECTRICITY! Topsy, the Mad Murderess of US Radium,
to Be Electrocuted at Luna Park
DISPATCH FROM ORANGE, NEW JERSEY: A license has been issued to the proprietors of Luna Park on New York’s Coney Island, to kill by public electrocution the ferocious TOPSY, the elephant responsible for the shocking and gruesome death of a foreman at US Radium’s dial factory. The beast’s viciousness is well-known and well-documented; sources say previous sprees have claimed her a score of lives up and down the East Coast circus routes, the last killing enacted upon a spectator who teased her with a lit cigar. The fairgoer was plucked like a peach and crushed to death under the rampaging renegade’s feet.
In an attempt to both salvage their costs and spare the animal’s life, circus owners sold her to US Radium. As it now appears impossible to keep her safely employed there, it was decided by the factory’s owners that death was the best method of getting rid of her. The idea of an execution was hit upon, using a powerful electrical current (engineered by the Edison Electric Illuminating Company of Brooklyn, NY) to shock the beast until dead.
Topsy’s new owners, the proprietors of Coney Island’s under-construction Luna Park, have promised the show will be free of charge and open to all members of the public. The execution will take place at the foot of the “Electric Tower,” a 200-foot-tall structure that, when finished, will feature almost 20,000 electrified bulbs. It promises to be the event of the season, a heart-stopping exhibition displaying two primitive forces of nature pitted against one another in a never-to-be-forgotten, larger-than-life spectacle of elemental force.
Concerns have been raised by the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals that electrocution is a rather cruel method of extermination. Readers are reminded that shooting the elephant would require five hundred rifle balls and three hours’ time to do the work that ten thousand volts will manage in less than a second. Proceedings will begin at Luna Park on Sunday, January 4th, 8 PM.
• • •
Well, the director hadn’t exactly lied a week before when he said they were putting Topsy down; that much was the God’s honest truth. Hadn’t gotten into the nitty-gritty of it—hadn’t mentioned how they’d be doing it or where they’d be doing it—but then, Regan hadn’t stuck around to bother kicking over that rock, had she? The ad really shouldn’t surprise her like it does, bounding from the back pages of the local paper, slick and colorful as the cover of a pulp magazine. The elephant is frozen mid-convulsion, mouth wide open in a silent howl. A metal hat is strapped to her head; exaggerated yellow lightning bolts of electricity sizzle and whiz off her skin like popcorn kernels in a cast-iron skillet. Wires and chains lead away in every direction, hitching her safely to her death like she’s every bit the crazy rampaging murderess the headline proclaims her to be.