by Brady Hammes
He wasn’t particularly close with his sister, but he had hoped this impromptu rendezvous might change that. He attributed their distance to the five-year age difference, but the truth was that they didn’t have that much in common. When he was in high school, Sam was his annoying kid sister. And when she did get to the age when they could enjoy a beer together, she was caught in the winds of the dance world while he was mired in academia. It was different with his older brother, Gavin. There were only four years separating them; they’d been best friends as kids. But even now it was hard to find anything to talk about with his brother. The older they got, the more their personalities seated themselves at opposite ends of the room. Gavin and Sam had grown closer over the years, and Jonah was a little jealous of their bond. They could talk for hours about art and obscure movies and bands Jonah had never heard of, only looping him into the conversation out of courtesy. His mother used to say they were the artists and he was the scientist, which Jonah always took as a slight, though he wasn’t sure why. He had more advanced degrees than either of them, Gavin having graduated from a small liberal arts college in Illinois and Sam having forsaken higher education for dance, but he still felt as if his life were only half as interesting as theirs. Gavin was acting in TV shows out in L.A. and Sam was dancing in Moscow and he was living by himself in the forest, drinking too much and accomplishing very little.
But still, he thought, the idea of home stirring his heart. It’ll be nice to see them, my family.
* * *
—
JONAH FIRED UP THE butane camp stove and set water to boil. He emptied a package of noodles into the pot and watched the last bit of color drain from the sky. He had expected this extended bout of solitary living to result in some kind of enlightenment, but most of his thoughts were occupied by images of nude women doing dirty things. He’d kept a journal for the first month, but abandoned the idea when he finally got around to reading what he’d written. It was mostly a lot of uninspired musings about how distant everything seemed, how disconnected he felt. He was certainly no writer and looking back at those old entries made him cringe at the teenage drama and hyperbole. No shit, he thought, of course you feel disconnected, of course everything seems distant. You live alone in the forest.
His camp was six kilometers from Franceville, the closest thing to a proper town. The train ride from Franceville to Libreville, the capital and location of the only international airport, was somewhere between ten and sixteen hours, depending on the condition of the track and the mood of the conductor. To say that he lived in a remote part of Gabon was inaccurate. It was more like camping on the moon.
He removed the noodles from the heat and strained them into a small plastic bowl, then added soy sauce and settled in for the only dinner he knew. His diet had been reduced to that which didn’t perish: lots of pasta and oatmeal and dried fruit. On trips to town he’d sometimes treat himself to meat—smoked fish or Laurent’s famous poulet nyembwe—but the longer he lived without it, the harder it became to stomach. He’d grown up backpacking with his father and was used to living for days in the wild, subsisting on trail mix and protein bars, but life here was a prolonged version of that, without the daily change in scenery and the calming assurance that a warm shower was only a few days away. Now he bathed in the stream if he bathed at all. He worked alone, ate alone, slept alone. He’d always assumed he was built for a life of solitary scientific inquiry, but now he wasn’t so sure.
At thirty-one years old, Jonah had spent the past twelve years in academia, rarely venturing outside the confines of campus. His time in Gabon was the longest he’d spent away from libraries and lecture halls, and though he was loathe to admit it, he was beginning to suspect this expedition was an effort to shirk the responsibilities of graduation. His dissertation—“The Grieving Patterns of West African Forest Elephants”—was due in two months and he had very little besides a title and fourteen hundred hours of raw data. For the past few months, he’d been observing an elephant calf named Kibo, whose mother, Jonah worried, had been killed by poachers, and he planned to compare the sounds Kibo made when alone to those he’d produced when accompanied by his mother. He suspected the elephant was mourning.
During his time in the forest, Jonah had become interested in the phenomenon known as emotional contagion, where a calf mimics the emotional state of a fellow distressed elephant. He’d witnessed instances of an elephant placing a trunk in another’s mouth, a soothing gesture that suggested they were capable of radical empathy. Demonstrations such as these were rare among animals—the behavior, until now, witnessed only in apes—and Jonah hoped to prove that elephants possessed similarly complex cognitive abilities. It was good, important work he was doing, but it was also lonely work, the kind that drove a man to drink more than he should and talk to birds and forget the batteries for his electronic devices. He’d arrived in Gabon with a clarity of purpose and, although he’d lost some of that focus in the past few weeks, his commitment to the elephants was steadfast. He resolved to do better in the new year.
* * *
—
AFTER DINNER, HE GRABBED his water purifier and walked to the stream to pump drinking water. The trail was well worn and even with only a splinter of moon, he made his way easily, as if walking half-asleep to the bathroom of his childhood home. With the sun down, the jungle orchestra began firing up: the hooting owls and burping frogs and the guttural, orgasmic moan of the tree hyraxes. It was a place where life was heard more than seen, a chorus of disembodied sounds raining down from the forest canopy. For all the discomfort of his lifestyle, he’d become rather attached to this small part of the forest and would miss it once he was gone. His plan was to return to Chicago for Christmas, treat himself to a couple weeks of easy American living, then return refreshed and ready for work. But with Marcus no longer in the field, the grant money was in question and there was the very real possibility that his departure would be permanent.
When he reached the stream, he pumped two bottles full of clean water and began hiking back to camp. As he approached his tent, he heard what sounded like footsteps. He stopped, set the water down, turned off his headlamp, and crouched in the leafy growth of a maidenhair fern. It was quiet for a moment, then he heard it again, unmistakably footsteps. He grabbed a stick and approached camp, unsure what kind of damage he could inflict but certain he would find a way if that’s what it came to. As he got closer, he heard the sound again, but the footsteps were quicker now, fading into the forest. He scanned the tent with his light and noticed that his camera was gone. “Motherfucker,” he muttered.
He circled the perimeter of the camp, but the thief had vanished. Poachers, he guessed. After discovering a battlefield’s worth of massacred elephants last year, the president of Gabon dispatched a military unit to make periodic sweeps through the parks, hoping their presence might slow what had recently become an epidemic. Jonah was skeptical. While the poaching in the forests around his camp did subside, he suspected they’d just been chased to other corners of the country. The ivory trade had been raging for years, and Jonah held no illusions about the government’s ability to eradicate it, so his goal was to protect, by whatever means necessary, his own small jurisdiction. Marcus had given him a Beretta 9mm before he’d left, but Jonah, thinking the danger had subsided, traded it for beer and groceries with a man in town, an exceptionally shortsighted decision he now regretted.
He crawled inside his tent, slid into his sleeping bag, and tried not to think about the possibility of the poachers returning to cut his throat. He tried not to think about what that would feel like, all that blood pouring forth, the days and weeks his corpse would lie undiscovered while jackals snacked on his decomposing body. He tried to think of more pleasant things, like single malt scotch and breakfast burritos, but his mind kept circling back to the image of his lifeless corpse seen from above, by a helicopter or a bird of prey or the eye of God. Realizing this w
as an unhealthy kind of thinking, he grabbed his notebook and headlamp and began drafting a letter that he hoped would shepherd his thoughts into sunnier pastures. He tried to think of someone to write, but there were few options besides his colleagues (who were busy with their own research) and his mother (who was better left in the dark, particularly involving matters such as the one this evening). He decided to compose a letter to Sam that he would then translate to email when he returned to town.
Dear Sam,
This place is everything and nothing like I expected. In terms of my research on elephant communication, I’ve accomplished very little. In terms of drinking too much and feeling sorry for myself, I’ve been wildly successful. Today, I hiked six kilometers into town to recharge my camera batteries, then returned to camp without the batteries. An hour later my camera was stolen, which made my earlier failure irrelevant. Needless to say, this new development will make future research difficult. And by difficult, I mean impossible.
I work with a nice man named Laurent, who also happens to be my only friend. He’s originally from the Bantu tribe, which is a group of indigenous people who have been friendly, if not a little skeptical as to the reason for my visit. They often ask me why I traveled so far to listen to elephants, and sometimes, particularly as of late, I have wondered the same.
How are things in Russia? Do you still want to meet up in Paris? I have a twelve-hour layover, which seems like enough time to drink a bottle of wine at a café and snap a few pics of the Eiffel Tower. Let me know if you think it might work out. If not, I’ll probably just sleep on the floor at the airport because I’ll be exhausted and Paris intimidates me.
Love,
Jonah
GAVIN
HIS DAY BEGAN WITH AN earthquake, a sharp jolt that catapulted him out of bed like a spooked drunk, swatting at floor lamps and stubbing his toe on the coffee table. He threw open the front door and stepped into his yard, looking for signs of life but finding only the fuzzy shapes of his neighbors’ houses. The shaking had now settled and everything seemed strangely tranquil. The birds were yelling at the dogs and the dogs were yelling at the sprinklers and the world appeared as it should, which made Gavin wonder if he’d imagined the whole thing, if what he felt was just a physical extension of a bad dream, his body kicking itself awake. He went back inside to get his glasses, then did a quick pass through the house. Everything was in its proper place until he reached the kitchen, where he discovered a cabinet’s worth of dinnerware lying in small pieces on the floor. He’d anticipated a shit week, and in the four minutes he’d been awake, it had exceeded expectations. When life rains shit, go umbrella shopping. That was something his grandfather once told him and it seemed like solid, actionable advice. Last night, he slept alone for the first time in a year, which coincided with the first significant earthquake in the same amount of time, and he was certain those two things were related, but the elusive how remained a goddamned mystery.
Renee, his girlfriend, had left the day before after an argument over his unwillingness to support her activism. She’d recently been spending a good portion of her time wading through the social media sewer, subsisting on the intoxicating cocktail of hyperbole and self-righteousness. She’d begun hosting Twitter Meetups at their house, where she and her fellow activists strategized ways to manifest their outrage, which was alternately vague and bottomless. Two of her friends—unwashed men who traveled around the country in a minivan—had spent the previous three nights sleeping on the floor of their living room. Renee had assured Gavin it was a temporary situation—just some fellow comrades in need of a place to lay their heads—but in addition to their insufferable body odor, they’d also eaten most of the food in the house. For people with such a strong distaste for the capitalist machinery, they had a real soft spot for single-origin coffee and eleven-dollar juices. So when Gavin returned home to find three more strangers drinking his beer and Photoshopping memes on their laptops, he pulled Renee aside and suggested it was time her friends found a new home. The argument escalated from there. Renee accused him of being a politically apathetic yuppie, and Gavin accused her of promoting a toothless brand of activism, at which point Renee rounded up the group and left the house. When Gavin asked what time she’d be home, she slammed the front door and yelled something that sounded like maybe never.
He cleaned up the mess of broken dishes, then went for a jog around the lake, passing the street fruit vendors, the homeless sleeping off hangovers, the ducks fighting over French rolls. It was a sharp, smog-free day, a rarity in the city, and he could see the San Gabriel Mountains very clearly, the snowcapped peak of Mount Baldy glowing in the distance. As a thirty-five-year-old actor on a fledgling television series, Gavin found himself with an extraordinary amount of free time and nothing constructive with which to fill it. His show was in its last week of production before hiatus, which meant that his only responsibility was to be in Burbank for a 3:00 P.M. wardrobe fitting. The show—a half-hour abomination on a second-tier cable network—filmed five days a week, but he was usually only required for two or three of those days, typically for no more than six hours at a time. There were certainly people who deserved a hiatus, people who did actual work—the grips and electricians and baby-faced PAs running around like caffeinated squirrels—but Gavin was not one of those people. He’d always felt guilty about how the industry delineated between those above and below the line, the way the term work shifted between verb and noun depending on one’s role in the production ecosystem.
He was no stranger to hard work. At fourteen he got his first job detasseling corn, waking before dawn to board a school bus that hauled him to the fields of rural Illinois, where he spent mindless, soul-crushing summer days ripping tassels from the stalks of sweet corn for five bucks an hour. After three weeks, his hands were stripped raw and his face so badly sunburned that his mother demanded he find a less punishing line of work. But he made six hundred dollars in those three weeks, and he used the money to buy the Trek mountain bike he’d been eyeing for months. He remembered it as a transformative experience; the supreme gratification of knowing that his suffering had been rewarded with something he wanted very badly. The next summer, he graduated to air-conditioned work, scrubbing dishes at a local diner alongside men twice his age, making only slightly more than he did as a field hand, but still feeling that same exhaustion after a long day of work, the thrum in his heels, the sweet relief of being granted permission to sit. But that was a long time ago; he was a kid then.
When he returned home from his jog, he checked his email and found a note from Renee.
To: [email protected]
From: [email protected]
Subject: Xmas
I don’t think I’m going to Chicago with you after all. I don’t like where things stand with us right now, and I don’t think spending time with your family is a very good idea until we decide if we have a future together. I’m going camping for a few days in Joshua Tree with some friends. They’re picking me up tonight. I’m sorry to disappoint your parents, but you sort of did this to yourself, so you can explain what happened. I’ll be home later this afternoon to pack. Maybe I’ll see you then.
—R
Gavin’s parents had recently moved to downtown Chicago from the quiet northwest suburb in which he’d been raised. They’d spent the past thirty years in the same house before deciding, somewhat spontaneously, to see how they felt about urban living. They bought a small condo at State and Jackson, under the watchful eye of the gargoyles perched atop the Harold Washington Library, and for the first time ever he and his family had planned to spend the holidays in the city by the lake. Gavin had purchased round-trip tickets for Renee and himself, but now she’d decided she might prefer the company of revolutionaries to her boyfriend’s family. It seemed that whatever had transpired between them last night was significantly more serious than he’d imagined. For her to abandon a
trip they’d been planning for months meant that he’d really screwed up.
He began composing a response, but it came out angry and combative, so he deleted it and searched for a better approach. When nothing came, he scrapped the idea, thinking he’d try to smooth things over when he got home that evening. Instead, he took a quick shower and left for his fitting. He took the 101 North, which the Audi’s GPS assured him was moving. It was mid-December, sunny and seventy-two, twelve days before Christmas. He stepped on the gas and blew past a small pickup stuffed full of lawnmowers. Five minutes later, he was at the studio gate, showing his ID to a man who didn’t recognize him. People rarely recognized him.
“Always late,” Daphne said. “And not even a little late. Always fifteen, twenty minutes late. Why?” Daphne was a costume designer from Prague, a dinosaur in the industry, but not the kind that garnered any respect.
“Traffic,” Gavin said.
“No matter, anyway,” she replied, steering a wardrobe rack. “Shooting got pushed.”
“Till when?”