Finding the Beast

Down on Bourbon Street as a young artist, I once walked into a gallery, where, from the floor, the size of a small refrigerator, a colossal bone leered at me, proof of the extinct race of cyclops, or so Roman soldiers had thought, when they first encountered elephant skulls, with their enormous single ocular hole.

Much as I detested the idea of this elephant's death, doubtless by arrangement of paid poaching, I coveted that skull, the way Georgia O'Keeffe loved collecting bones. "Not for sale," said the owner, swaying his silver elephant earring.

Years later, during a dangerous time of conflict on the island of Sri Lanka, a nervous driver had led me to the ancient cities of Polonnaruwa and Anuradhapura, to see the stony remains of ruined dagobas. The driver was uneasy to begin with:  the road was remote, ambushes were not unlikely, and I had lingered with the time-pocked Buddhas, so he was tortured to be leaving late, and agitated when I suddenly insisted, along a lonely isolated stretch, that we STOP!

He must have thought I had to use the bathroom, but no, I had spotted something, an inscrutable mound, which looked like a crumpled dinosaur, some unidentifiable beast, fifteen yards off the road. And despite the foolishness of stepping into Sri Lankan undergrowth, I did. I had to see what this prehistoric thing was.

I found a dead elephant.

She had not been a tusker, and she did not seem to have been hit by bullets. I don't know how she died.

"Please! Madame!" My driver urged that we return to the car before harm could come to us. But I circled the giant carcass.

She was decomposing like all things under the tropical sun. Her trunk had dehydrated and fallen to the side like an old grey whip. Her face was now the messy beginning of a cyclops head. And I wanted her skull.

Flies the size of strawberries hummed in oblong orbits like flying transistors. The birds of dusk, with resonator bills, and the black-faced langurs, started to call. The driver insisted.

I tried to picture taking the rotting skull. We would somehow detach it, somehow heft it, and tie it to the car.

I tried to imagine overruling my frightened driver.

But everything about my wish to take the head of the dead elephant repulsed me.

I could not defile her body. I touched what had been the side of her wild face, and we returned silently to the car. My terrified driver sped us away and turned on his headlights only when we reached a village.

That night, under my mosquito net, I thought still of the fallen elephant and her impossible skull. I imagined cleaning, bleaching, drying it, and then covering it with gauze and plaster, and forming it into a modernist chair, painting it in garish colors, foxing the customs agents, and sending the jungle head home, where I would have unwrapped it like a mummy, chiseled away the subterfuge, and cleverly had my elephant skull, like the man in New Orleans.

And then I shrank from my own coveting.

I observed this tide in my own being, that night, the low tide and the high tide of my desire and will.

I do collect. I cherish, treasure, and deeply love. But I do not want, and could not hunt, and know, by my heart's navigation, what is not mine.

How about you, Jesse Matthew? I don't believe God gave me a compass and refused one for you.

What's wrong with your system? How could you, as a habit, take what was not yours? You were born as a human being; you were a child once. You must have laughed and played.

How does a child become a predator, red in tooth and claw?

How does a man become a lawless monster? And how does a practiced monster still look like a man?

And, finally, when you are identified, and your murders are known, and a jury convicts you, and your capture and judgment are front-page news, will you see the enormity of your beastly sins?

Or only the smallness of your cage?

Jane Lillian Vance