The Elephant Vanishes Read online

  I open my eyes to find the room aglow. The color of corridors at the Aquarium. The television is on. Outside, everything is dark. The TV screen is flickering in the gloom, static crackling. I sit up on the sofa, and press my temples with my fingertips. The flesh of my fingers is still soft; my mouth tastes like beer. I swallow. I’m dried out; the saliva catches in my throat. As always, the waking world pales after an all-too-real dream. But no, this is real. Nobody’s turned to stone. What time is it getting to be? I look for the clock on the floor. TRPP Q SCHAOUS TRPP Q SCHAOUS. A little before eight.

  Yet, just as in the dream, one of the TV People is on the television screen. The same guy I passed on the stairs to the office. No mistake. The one who first opened the door to the apartment. I’m 100% sure. He stands there—against a bright, fluorescent white background, the tail end of a dream infiltrating my conscious reality—staring at me. I shut, then reopen my eyes, hoping he’ll have slipped back to never-never land. But he doesn’t disappear. Far from it. He gets bigger. His face fills the whole screen, getting closer and closer.

  The next thing I know, he’s stepping through the screen. Hands gripping the frame, lifting himself up and over, one foot after the other, like climbing out of a window, leaving a white TV screen glowing behind him.

  He rubs his left hand in the palm of his right, slowly acclimating himself to the world outside the television. On and on, reduced right-hand fingers rubbing reduced left-hand fingers, no hurry. He has that all-the-time-in-the-world nonchalance. Like a veteran TV-show host. Then he looks me in the face.

  “We’re making an airplane,” says my TV People visitant. His voice has no perspective to it. A curious, paper-thin voice.

  He speaks, and the screen is all machinery. Very professional fade-in. Just like on the news. First, there’s an opening shot of a large factory interior, then it cuts to a close-up of the work space, camera center. Two TV People are hard at work on some machine, tightening bolts with wrenches, adjusting gauges. The picture of concentration. The machine, however, is unlike anything I’ve ever seen: an upright cylinder except that it narrows toward the top, with streamlined protrusions along its surface. Looks more like some kind of gigantic orange juicer than an airplane. No wings, no seats.

  “Doesn’t look like an airplane,” I say. Doesn’t sound like my voice, either. Strangely brittle, as if the nutrients had been strained out through a thick filter. Have I grown so old all of a sudden?

  “That’s probably because we haven’t painted it yet,” he says. “Tomorrow we’ll have it the right color. Then you’ll see it’s an airplane.”

  “The color’s not the problem. It’s the shape. That’s not an airplane.”

  “Well, if it’s not an airplane, what is it?” he asks me. If he doesn’t know, and I don’t know, then what is it? “So, that’s why it’s got to be the color.” The TV People rep puts it to me gently. “Paint it the right color, and it’ll be an airplane.”

  I don’t feel like arguing. What difference does it make? Orange juicer or airplane—flying orange juicer?—what do I care? Still, where’s the wife while all this is happening? Why doesn’t she come home? I massage my temples again. The clock ticks on. TRPP Q SCHAOUS TRPP Q SCHAOUS. The remote control lies on the table, and next to it the stack of women’s magazines. The telephone is silent, the room illuminated by the dim glow of the television.

  The two TV People on the screen keep working away. The image is much clearer than before. You can read the numbers on the dials, hear the faint rumble of machinery. TAABZHRAYBGG TAABZHRAYBGG ARP ARRP TAABZHRAYBGG. This bass line is punctuated periodically by a sharp, metallic grating. AREEEENBT AREEEENBT. And various other noises are interspersed through the remaining aural space; I can’t hear anything clearly over them. Still, the two TV People labor on for all they’re worth. That, apparently, is the subject of this program. I go on watching the two of them as they work on and on. Their colleague outside the TV set also looks on in silence. At them. At that thing—for the life of me, it does not look like an airplane—that insane machine all black and grimy, floating in a field of white light.

  The TV People rep speaks up. “Shame about your wife.”

  I look him in the face. Maybe I didn’t hear him right. Staring at him is like peering into the glowing tube itself.

  “Shame about your wife,” the TV People rep repeats in exactly the same absent tone.

  “How’s that?” I ask.

  “How’s that? It’s gone too far,” says the TV People rep in a voice like a plastic-card hotel key. Flat, uninflected, it slices into me as if it were sliding through a thin slit. “It’s gone too far: She’s out there.”

  “It’s gone too far: She’s out there,” I repeat in my head. Very plain, and without reality. I can’t grasp the context. Cause has effect by the tail and is about to swallow it whole. I get up and go to the kitchen. I open the refrigerator, take a deep breath, reach for a can of beer, and go back to the sofa. The TV People rep stands in place in front of the television, right elbow resting on the set, and watches me extract the pull-tab. I don’t really want to drink beer at this moment; I just need to do something. I drink one sip, but the beer doesn’t taste good. I hold the can in my hand dumbly until it becomes so heavy I have to set it down on the table.

  Then I think about the TV People rep’s revelation, about the wife’s failure to materialize. He’s saying she’s gone. That she isn’t coming home. I can’t bring myself to believe it’s over. Sure, we’re not the perfect couple. In four years, we’ve had our spats; we have our little problems. But we always talk them out. There are things we’ve resolved and things we haven’t. Most of what we couldn’t resolve we let ride. Okay, so we have our ups and downs as a couple. I admit it. But is this cause for despair? C’mon, show me a couple who don’t have problems. Besides, it’s only a little past eight. There must be some reason she can’t get to a phone. Any number of possible reasons. For instance… I can’t think of a single one. I’m hopelessly confused.

  I fall back deep into the sofa.

  How on earth is that airplane—if it is an airplane—supposed to fly? What propels it? Where are the windows? Which is the front, which is the back?

  I’m dead tired. Exhausted. I still have to write that letter, though, to beg off from my cousin’s invitation. My work schedule does not afford me the pleasure of attending. Regrettable. Congratulations, all the same.

  The two TV People in the television continue building their airplane, oblivious of me. They toil away; they don’t stop for anything. They have an infinite amount of work to get through before the machine is complete. No sooner have they finished one operation than they’re busy with another. They have no assembly instructions, no plans, but they know precisely what to do and what comes next. The camera ably follows their deft motions. Clear-cut, easy-to-follow camera work. Highly credible, convincing images. No doubt other TV People (Nos. 4 and 5?) are manning the camera and control panel.

  Strange as it may sound, the more I watch the flawless form of the TV People as they go about their work, the more the thing starts to look like an airplane. At least, it’d no longer surprise me if it actually flew. What does it matter which is front or back? With all the exacting detail work they’re putting in, it has to be an airplane. Even if it doesn’t appear so—to them, it’s an airplane. Just as the little guy said, “If it’s not an airplane, then what is it?”

  The TV People rep hasn’t so much as twitched in all this time. Right elbow still propped up on the TV set, he’s watching me. I’m being watched. The TV People factory crew keeps working. Busy, busy, busy. The clock ticks on. TRPP Q SCHAOUS TRPP Q SCHAOUS. The room has grown dark, stifling. Someone’s footsteps echo down the hall.

  Well, it suddenly occurs to me, maybe so. Maybe the wife is out there. She’s gone somewhere far away. By whatever means of transport, she’s gone somewhere far out of my reach. Maybe our relationship has suffered irreversible damage. Maybe it’s a total loss. Only I haven’t notice
d. All sorts of thoughts unravel inside me, then the frayed ends come together again. “Maybe so,” I say out loud. My voice echoes, hollow.

  “Tomorrow, when we paint it, you’ll see better,” he resumes. “All it needs is a touch of color to make it an airplane.”

  I look at the palms of my hands. They have shrunk slightly. Ever so slightly. Power of suggestion? Maybe the light’s playing tricks on me. Maybe my sense of perspective has been thrown off. Yet, my palms really do look shriveled. Hey now, wait just a minute! Let me speak. There’s something I should say. I must say. I’ll dry up and turn to stone if I don’t. Like the others.

  “The phone will ring soon,” the TV People rep says. Then, after a measured pause, he adds, “In another five minutes.”

  I look at the telephone; I think about the telephone cord. Endless lengths of phone cable linking one telephone to another. Maybe somewhere, at some terminal of that awesome megacir-cuit, is my wife. Far, far away, out of my reach. I can feel her pulse. Another five minutes, I tell myself. Which way is front, which way is back? I stand up and try to say something, but no sooner have I got to my feet than the words slip away.

  —translated by Alfred Birnbaum

  1.

  When did I meet my first Chinese?

  Just like that, my archaeologist begins sifting through the tell of my own past. Labeling all the artifacts, categorizing, analyzing.

  And so, when was that first encounter? As near as I can figure, it was 1959 or 1960. Whichever, whatever, what’s the difference? Precisely nothing. The years ’59 and ’60 stand there like gawky twins in matching nerd suits. Even if I hopped a time machine back to the period, I doubt I could tell the two apart.

  In spite of which, I persist with my labors. Doggedly expanding the dig, filling out the picture with every least new find. Shards of memory.

  Okay, I’m sure it was the year Johansson and Patterson fought for the world heavyweight title. Which means, all I have to do is go search through the sports section in old copies of The Year in News. That would settle everything.

  In the morning, I’m off on my bike to the local library. Next to the main entrance, for who knows what reason, there’s a tiny henhouse, in which five chickens are enjoying what is either a late breakfast or an early lunch. It’s a bright, clear day, so before going inside I sit down on the pavement next to the chickens and light up a cigarette. I watch the chickens pecking at their feedbox busily. Frenetically, in fact, so that they look like one of those old newsreels with too few frames per second.

  After my cigarette, something’s changed in me. Again, who knows why? But for what it’s worth, the new me—five chickens and a smoke away from what I was—now poses myself two questions:

  First, Who could possibly have any interest in the exact date when I met my first Chinese?

  And second, What exactly is there to be gained by spreading out those Year In Newses on a sunny reference-room desk?

  Good questions. I smoke another cigarette, then get back onto my bike and bid farewell to fowl and file copies. If birds in flight go unburdened by names, let my memories be free of dates.

  Granted, most of my memories don’t bear dates anyway. My recall is a damn sight short of total. It’s so unreliable that I sometimes think I’m trying to prove something by it. But what would I be proving? Especially since inexactness is not exactly the sort of thing you can prove with any accuracy.

  Anyway—or rather, that being the case—my memory can be impressively iffy. I get things the wrong way around, fabrication filters into fact, sometimes my own eyewitness account interchanges with somebody else’s. At which point, can you even call it memory anymore? Witness the sum of what I’m capable of dredging up from primary school (those pathetic six years of sunsets in the heyday of postwar democracy). Two events: this Chinese story, for one, and for another, a baseball game one afternoon during summer vacation. In that game, I was playing center field, and I blacked out in the bottom of the third. I mean, I didn’t just collapse out of nowhere. The reason I blacked out that day was that we were allowed only one small corner of the nearby high school’s athletic field, and so when I was running full speed after a pop fly I smashed head-on into the post of the backboard of the basketball court next to where we were playing.

  WHEN I CAME TO, I was lying on a bench under an arbor, it was late in the day, and the first things I noticed were the wet-and-dry smell of water that had been sprinkled over the baked earth and the musk of my brand-new leather glove, which they’d put under my head for a pillow. Then there was this dull pain in my temple. I guess I must have said something. I don’t really remember. Only later did a buddy of mine who’d been looking after me get around to telling. That what I apparently said was, That’s okay, brush off the dirt and you can still eat it.

  Now, where did that come from? To this day, I have no idea. I guess I was dreaming, probably about lunch. But two decades later the phrase is still there, kicking around in my head.

  That’s okay, brush off the dirt and you can still eat it.

  With these words, I find myself thinking about my ongoing existence as a human being and the path that lies ahead of me. Though of course these thoughts lead to but one place—death. Imagining death is, at least for me, an awfully hazy proposition. And death, for some reason, reminds me of the Chinese.

  2.

  THERE WAS AN ELEMENTARY school for Chinese up the hill from the harbor (forgive me, I’ve completely forgotten the name of the school, so I’ll just call it “the Chinese elementary school”), and I had to go there to take a standard aptitude test. Out of several test locations, the Chinese elementary school was the farthest away, and I was the only one in my class assigned there. A clerical mix-up, maybe? Everybody else was sent somewhere closer.

  Chinese elementary school?

  I asked everyone I knew if they knew anything about this Chinese elementary school. No one knew a thing, except that it was half an hour away by train. Now, back then I didn’t do much in the way of exploring, hardly ever rode around to places by myself, so for me this might as well have been the end of the earth.

  The Chinese elementary school at the edge of the world.

  SUNDAY MORNING two weeks later found me in a dark funk as I sharpened a dozen pencils, then packed my lunch and classroom slippers into my plastic schoolbag, as prescribed. It was a sunny day, maybe a little too warm for autumn, but my mother made me wear a sweater anyway. I boarded the train all by myself and stood by the door the whole way, looking out the window. I didn’t want to miss the stop.

  I spotted the Chinese elementary school even without looking at the map printed on the back of the registration form. All I had to do was follow a flock of kids with slippers and lunch boxes stuffed into their schoolbags. There were tens, maybe hundreds, of kids filing up the steep grade. A pretty remarkable sight. No one was kicking a ball, no one was pulling at a younger kid’s cap; everyone was just walking quietly. Like a demonstration of indeterminate perpetual motion. Climbing the hill, I started sweating under my heavy sweater.

  CONTRARY TO WHATEVER vague expectations I may have had, the Chinese elementary school did not look much different from my own school. In fact, it was cleaner. The long, dark corridors, the musty air…. All the images that had filled my head for two weeks proved totally unfounded. Passing through the fancy iron gates, I followed the gentle arc of a stone path between plantings to the main entrance, where a clear pond sparkled in the 9:00 A.M. sun. Along the facade stood a row of trees, each with a plaque identifying the tree in Chinese. Some characters I could read, some I couldn’t. The entrance opened onto an enclosed courtyard, in the corners of which were a bronze bust of somebody, a small white rain gage, and an exercise bar.

  I removed my shoes at the entrance as instructed, then went to the classroom assigned to me. It was bright, with forty fold-top desks neatly arranged in rows, each place affixed with a registration tag. My seat was in the very front row by the window; I guess I had the lowest number.


  The blackboard was a pristine deep green; the teacher’s place was set with a box of chalk and a vase bearing a single white chrysanthemum. Everything was spotless, a flawless picture of order. There were no drawings or compositions tacked up willy-nilly on the bulletin board. Maybe they’d been taken down so as not to distract us during the test. I took my seat, set out my pencil case and writing pad, propped up my chin, and closed my eyes.

  It was nearly fifteen minutes later when the proctor of the test came in, carrying the stack of exams under his arm. He didn’t look anything over forty, but he walked with a cane and dragged his left foot in a slight limp. The cane was made of cherry wood, sort of crudely, the kind of thing they sell as souvenirs at the summit of a hiking trail. The proctor’s limp was unaffected, so you noticed the cheap cane more. Forty pairs of eyes focused on this guy, or, rather, on the exams, and all was resounding silence.

  The proctor mounted the stand in front of the class, placed the exams on his desk, then plunked his cane down on the side. He checked that all the seats were filled, coughed, and glanced at his watch. Then, clamping both hands on the edges of the desk as if to hold himself down, he lifted his gaze straight to a corner of the ceiling.

  Silence.

  Fifteen seconds and not a sound. The kids all tensed and held their breath, staring at the stack of exams; the lame-legged proctor stared at the ceiling. He was wearing a light-gray suit with a white shirt and a tie of eminently forgettable color and pattern. He took off his glasses, wiped the lenses with a handkerchief, very deliberately, and put them back on.