LA PETITE MORT by Ryan Habermeyer
Every morning, the elephant masturbator lures the elephant into the cage by humming Bach. The elephant, blind and tuskless, lumbers slowly onto the hay, kneeling like a prince, obviously in love with the low, languid melody.
* * *
The elephant masturbator continues humming as she administers the sedative, stares into the elephant’s wet, glossy eyes as it slips into wherever it is elephants go when they dream. She rubs his trunk. She counts: three, two, one.
* * *
As the elephant masturbator gently arouses the elephant she traces the wrinkles on its skin. Here is a scar from fleeing the poachers. Here a reddish patch that may or may not be an infection. Here are the freckles she’s named Larry, Curly, Moe.
* * *
By the time the elephant awakens the elephant masturbator has scavenged a meal of twigs, roots, leaves, and the last two yellow flower petals in this part of the world. Watching the elephant eat, the elephant masturbator tells the elephant about Hanno, the elephant of the Pope. And Surus, who crossed the Alps with Hannibal. And a nameless pachyderm, knighted by Henry III, who died drinking too much red wine while consoling the king.
* * *
Once home, the elephant masturbator pours herself a glass of sour wine and sits on her balcony, staring at the haze of neon lights and listening to sirens echo, wondering why she stays in this desert, in this city like the edge of a map torn off that nobody bothered to tape back together. She listens to Bach. She prefers the fugues in D minor. She drinks more wine.
* * *
At dawn, the elephant masturbator arouses the elephant after which they go for a walk.
* * *
In the evening, the elephant masturbator arouses the elephant after which they go for a walk.
* * *
At the restaurant, the elephant masturbator eats mealworms sautéed in a kind of yellow pesto with a side of fried crickets. The man sitting across from her talks about trying to save the last butterflies from extinction. He rubs his thumb on the white tablecloth until it leaves a greasy stain. It’s important work we’re doing, he says. You have a cricket leg in your teeth, she says.
* * *
After her date, the elephant masturbator visits the elephant and pushes fruit rinds buzzing with flies through the cage bars. She rubs his trunk and tells him about the man with the comb over. The elephant leans against the cage, sighs, like he wants to be touched.
* * *
Mwisho, she calls him, which in Swahili means the end.
* * *
The elephant masturbator sponges water over Mwisho’s ears, legs, stomach. She’s careful around his eyes. She knows how this will end. Alone, floating towards her petite mort, she imagines the shriveled elephant carcass carried away by devoted ants until there’s just a keyboard of bones in the dust. It’d be nice, she thinks, if she was also a sacrament.
* * *
Most of the time when the elephant climaxes there’s just a noise. Poof. Like air let out of a tire. On a good day, the elephant masturbator collects the sperm in a plastic container. It looks cloudy, like a root beer float.
* * *
The elephant masturbator bottles and seals the container. Scribbles descriptions on the label. Sometimes includes a note. We’re still here. Ships them at the post office to the scientists she’s not sure even exist. She sits on her porch steps and waits for mail that never comes.
* * *
The elephant masturbator closes her eyes on the bed and thinks of Mwisho from the inside out. Organs to skeleton to skin. She feels oddly happy at the inexplicableness of it all.
* * *
Leaving the restaurant, the comb over man takes her hand as they walk through what was once the Great Salt Lake, dried up like a bowl licked clean by a greedy toddler. Kids with red scaly patches around their eyes scare away gulls from the debris. The simmering, arsenic haze steams yellow. The elephant masturbator’s eyes sting, her nostrils burn. She wonders what people used to do for foreplay.
* * *
The elephant masturbator powders Mwisho with dust. She shoos away flies. Steals pillows from the abandoned hotels and spreads them on the cage floor. Removes lice. Pedicures debris between his toes. Brushes teeth. When the teeth gleam ghoulish it’s time to start over and powder him with dust.
* * *
The elephant masturbator keeps coins in her pocket. As they walk the coins make a metallic swish. The elephant likes to filch the coins with his trunk. Sometimes the elephant masturbator will do a magic trick her mother taught her and make a coin disappear then reappear behind the elephant’s floppy ear. The elephant smiles but does not laugh.
* * *
The elephant masturbator sponges the elephant and rubs away dead skin, counting the moles on the elephant’s flank. Larry, Curly, Moe. She’s been trying to get the elephant to laugh. The chimps are gone. Foxes, dolphins, cows – all gone. All the laughing things extinct. Even the butterflies, which never laughed, are almost gone, says the comb over man at the restaurant trying to save them. She pulls faces for the elephant, falls off the stool, tries to get him to mimic her: nyuk nyuk nyuk.
* * *
The elephant masturbator saves a butterfly caught in a spider’s web on the windowsill. Its wing is broken. She squishes it between her fingers, its juices stickying her skin for days.
* * *
They walk and walk and walk. Out of nowhere the desert opens into a canyon. The elephant masturbator leans over the edge. Who knows how long it had been there, this earthy mouth swallowing up secrets and sighs, the scar of some geological castration.
* * *
The elephant masturbator doesn’t tell Mwisho her name. She doesn’t tell Mwisho about her scars. She doesn’t tell him about the things that make her laugh. She doesn’t tell him how in the old war the Germans dropped elephants out of planes when they ran out of bombs. She doesn’t tell Mwisho how after her father died in Afghanistan she started sleeping on the stairs, anxious to twist herself into something else, disappointed that she is still flesh and bone.
* * *
Mwisho scuffs his foot in the dirt. The elephant masturbator stomps her foot in response, knowing Mwisho will not call her unlucky or needy or unlovable.
* * *
There are so many kinds of laughter, the elephant masturbator tells Mwisho as she traces a finger over Larry, Curly, and Moe. Funny laugh. Mean laugh. Sad laugh. Nervous laugh. Sick laugh. Laughing to keep from crying. Laughing to forget. Dying laughter. Laughing to remember. Which kind of laughter do you want to be?
* * *
The elephant masturbator’s hands do not shake as she steadies the syringe and empties the sedative into the elephant. But they always tremble when she reaches for the glass of wine at the restaurant. It’s just nerves, she smiles. I promise not to bite, the man smiles. She stares out the window at the desert. Hidden beneath the dust she imagines the skeletons of creeping things fossilized in radioactive prayer.
* * *
Sometimes the sedative frightens the elephant. It gives him bad dreams. He twitches, groans, cries, shakes the cage until it feels like it might collapse. He must be coaxed into romance. At first, she had to reach her arm up his rectum, elbow deep, and finger a golf ballsized. gland until the long grey shaft emerged. But now she knows Mwisho prefers she rub his foot. Elephants speak through their feet, talking and listening through vibrations. So, she rubs his foot that doubles as a tongue and ear, surprised to discover Mwisho has no interest in sex. He wants a lover. He wants words.
* * *
Still, it’s a precarious moment. She’s been careless before. One wrong touch and the jumbo organ whips back and forth like an errant fire hose, slapping her right below the eye. Sperm bubbles in the dirt. Fool, she tells herself, her ears still ringing hours later. She waits for the wound to bleed but it never does. At night she looks in the mirror as the skin welts and swells and the bruise goes from purple to yellow to grey. She tries to collect other bruises to show the elephant, to hold her skin up to its blind eyes to say, See?
* * *
You speak of this elephant as a lover, the man smiles. Her insides knot hearing love spoken of with such quiet malice. Love is a strong word, she says, playing with her fork. The moon doesn’t exist for the tide, the man tells her. What tides? she says.
* * *
The elephant masturbator yawns. The elephant yawns too.
* * *
We’re lucky, the elephant masturbator says, stroking Mwisho. Some survive and some vanish and some never exist at all.
* * *
There’s nobody left at the zoo. Nobody who knows she’s here all day, masturbating an elephant, last of his kind. You have nice hands, her mother told her when she was a girl. When she saw the graffiti downtown, laugh of a lifesick elephant in neon letters, she went to the zoo thinking this was nicest thing to do with her hands. There was no advertisement. No application, no interview. No training, no internship, no exams on the history and scholarship surrounding pachyderm arousal methodologies. But somebody did it before her. For decades, it seems. All the equipment is here. The illustrated notebooks, the vials, the syringes, the lotions, the aprons, the goggles, the electro- ejaculators. But the elephant masturbator uses none of these. Just one skin to another. And Bach. Always Bach.
* * *
The elephant masturbator bathes Mwisho. His favorite is when she lathers him in mud, but it’s getting harder and harder to find water these days. The lakes have dried up. Rivers too. Most nights the elephant masturbator can hear the neighbors singing hymns in the chapel. A graveyard of prayers.
* * *
You’re very mysterious, the man says, tracing a finger over her wrinkled navel. I’m nobody, the elephant masturbator says, just a girl from Panguitch.
* * *
The elephant masturbator is tired of all this desert. Sand in your hair, your ears, under your nails, little grains stuck between your teeth. It’s like for centuries people whacked off God until there was nothing left of him and now everyone is just waiting in his hot mute dust.
* * *
This isn’t living, the elephant masturbator thinks. But it’s not dying either.
* * *
Lately, when the elephant masturbator hums Bach Mwisho pretends to hide. His blind eyes forlorn. As if he knows something is being stolen from him.
* * *
Lately, Mwisho stares into the bucket as if wishing he was no longer blind and could see his reflection. She wonders if blindness is something light or heavy. She wonders if Mwisho is happy or sad to be blind. She wonders if she keeps giving away her happiness will it boomerang back eventually like a slap in the face?
* * *
Mwisho sprays her with his trunk. He smiles but does not laugh.
* * *
They wander the enclosures together, the elephant foraging here and there or playfully swatting her with his trunk. The grass used to be so green, she apologizes.
* * *
The elephant masturbator knows she can give up whenever she wants. Nothing is keeping her here masturbating this elephant day after day after day. She is not waiting for a thank you. She is not looking for anything to fill the void of existence now that the curtain is falling on this thing called ecology. She does not believe this will change the course of the universe. She has no babies of her own and wants only to stare into the elephant’s wet, blind eyes so together they can be unorphaned.
* * *
Later, there is just a puff of air. The elephant masturbator sighs.
* * *
In the man’s apartment, the elephant masturbator listens to the man play the piano. The ivory keys are brightly polished. Do you like Bach? Yes, the elephant masturbator says. Later, as his tongue traces the constellation of moles and scars on her stomach she wonders if he is thinking about cunnilingus on a butterfly and whether he knows she is thinking about masturbating the elephant.
* * *
Mwisho is easy, she tells herself. Bach. Bath. Syringe. Bach. Men are simple too, but also not so simple.
* * *
The elephant yawns. The elephant masturbator yawns too.
* * *
The elephant masturbator stands in the desert at dusk. She wants to be moon, but she knows she is water waiting for the tide.
* * *
The man knocks on the elephant masturbator’s door. She doesn’t answer. She presses against the door and listens. She waits for him to knock again, waits to decode the vibrations of his desire.
* * *
The elephant masturbator grinds her foot in the dust. She stomps. Mwisho stomps his feet in the dust. There was a time when the elephant masturbator believed he was calling out to a lover, but she knows he knows he’s the last of his kind. The elephant masturbator knows he’s calling out to his mother, the keeper of elephant lore, asking her for the generational wisdom that vanished with the poacher’s bullet. The elephant masturbator feels the ground tremble. The tickling crawls down her spine until it feels like a little death. The vibrations neither bitter nor melancholic. Strangely joyful. Part of her wants to believe he’s trying to teach her his language. Beyond the snorts, grunts, roars, and cries. Beyond those low, dull rumbles the human ear cannot hear. The grinding, scuffing vibrations of the elephant foot. The foot that doubles as tongue and ear.
Ryan Habermeyer is the author of The Science of Lost Futures (BOA Editions, 2018). His stories and essays have appeared in The Massachusetts Review, Copper Nickel, The Cincinnati Review, Puerto del Sol, and Fugue.