The Elephant Vanishes: Stories Read online

  Twice we encountered patrol cars. One was huddled at the side of the road, trying to look inconspicuous. The other slowly overtook us and crept past, finally moving off into the distance. Both times I grew damp under the arms, but my wife’s concentration never faltered. She was looking for that bakery. Every time she shifted the angle of her body, the shotgun shells in her pocket rustled like buckwheat husks in an old-fashioned pillow.

  “Let’s forget it,” I said. “There aren’t any bakeries open at this time of night. You’ve got to plan for this kind of thing or else—”

  “Stop the car!”

  I slammed on the brakes.

  “This is the place,” she said.

  The shops along the street had their shutters rolled down, forming dark, silent walls on either side. A barbershop sign hung in the dark like a twisted, chilling glass eye. There was a bright McDonald’s hamburger sign some two hundred yards ahead, but nothing else.

  “I don’t see any bakery,” I said.

  Without a word, she opened the glove compartment and pulled out a roll of cloth-backed tape. Holding this, she stepped out of the car. I got out my side. Kneeling at the front end, she tore off a length of tape and covered the numbers on the license plate. Then she went around to the back and did the same. There was a practiced efficiency to her movements. I stood on the curb staring at her.

  “We’re going to take that McDonald’s,” she said, as coolly as if she were announcing what we would have for dinner.

  “McDonald’s is not a bakery,” I pointed out to her.

  “It’s like a bakery,” she said. “Sometimes you have to compromise. Let’s go.”

  I drove to the McDonald’s and parked in the lot. She handed me the blanket-wrapped shotgun.

  “I’ve never fired a gun in my life,” I protested.

  “You don’t have to fire it. Just hold it. Okay? Do as I say. We walk right in, and as soon as they say ‘Welcome to McDonald’s,’ we slip on our masks. Got that?”

  “Sure, but—”

  “Then you shove the gun in their faces and make all the workers and customers get together. Fast. I’ll do the rest.”

  “But—”

  “How many hamburgers do you think we’ll need? Thirty?”

  “I guess so.” With a sigh, I took the shotgun and rolled back the blanket a little. The thing was as heavy as a sandbag and as black as a dark night.

  “Do we really have to do this?” I asked, half to her and half to myself.

  “Of course we do.”

  Wearing a McDonald’s hat, the girl behind the counter flashed me a McDonald’s smile and said, “Welcome to McDonald’s.” I hadn’t thought that girls would work at McDonald’s late at night, so the sight of her confused me for a second. But only for a second. I caught myself and pulled on the mask. Confronted with this suddenly masked duo, the girl gaped at us.

  Obviously, the McDonald’s hospitality manual said nothing about how to deal with a situation like this. She had been starting to form the phrase that comes after “Welcome to McDonald’s,” but her mouth seemed to stiffen and the words wouldn’t come out. Even so, like a crescent moon in the dawn sky, the hint of a professional smile lingered at the edges of her lips.

  As quickly as I could manage, I unwrapped the shotgun and aimed it in the direction of the tables, but the only customers there were a young couple—students, probably—and they were facedown on the plastic table, sound asleep. Their two heads and two strawberry-milk-shake cups were aligned on the table like an avant-garde sculpture. They slept the sleep of the dead. They didn’t look likely to obstruct our operation, so I swung my shotgun back toward the counter.

  All together, there were three McDonald’s workers. The girl at the counter, the manager—a guy with a pale, egg-shaped face, probably in his late twenties—and a student type in the kitchen—a thin shadow of a guy with nothing on his face that you could read as an expression. They stood together behind the register, staring into the muzzle of my shotgun like tourists peering down an Incan well. No one screamed, and no one made a threatening move. The gun was so heavy I had to rest the barrel on top of the cash register, my finger on the trigger.

  “I’ll give you the money,” said the manager, his voice hoarse. “They collected it at eleven, so we don’t have too much, but you can have everything. We’re insured.”

  “Lower the front shutter and turn off the sign,” said my wife.

  “Wait a minute,” said the manager. “I can’t do that. I’ll be held responsible if I close up without permission.”

  My wife repeated her order, slowly. He seemed torn.

  “You’d better do what she says,” I warned him.

  He looked at the muzzle of the gun atop the register, then at my wife, and then back at the gun. He finally resigned himself to the inevitable. He turned off the sign and hit a switch on an electrical panel that lowered the shutter. I kept my eye on him, worried that he might hit a burglar alarm, but apparently McDonald’s don’t have burglar alarms. Maybe it had never occurred to anybody to attack one.

  The front shutter made a huge racket when it closed, like an empty bucket being smashed with a baseball bat, but the couple sleeping at their table was still out cold. Talk about a sound sleep: I hadn’t seen anything like that in years.

  “Thirty Big Macs. For takeout,” said my wife.

  “Let me just give you the money,” pleaded the manager. “I’ll give you more than you need. You can go buy food somewhere else. This is going to mess up my accounts and—”

  “You’d better do what she says,” I said again.

  The three of them went into the kitchen area together and started making the thirty Big Macs. The student grilled the burgers, the manager put them in buns, and the girl wrapped them up. Nobody said a word.

  I leaned against a big refrigerator, aiming the gun toward the griddle. The meat patties were lined up on the griddle like brown polka dots, sizzling. The sweet smell of grilling meat burrowed into every pore of my body like a swarm of microscopic bugs, dissolving into my blood and circulating to the farthest corners, then massing together inside my hermetically sealed hunger cavern, clinging to its pink walls.

  A pile of white-wrapped burgers was growing nearby. I wanted to grab and tear into them, but I could not be certain that such an act would be consistent with our objective. I had to wait. In the hot kitchen area, I started sweating under my ski mask.

  The McDonald’s people sneaked glances at the muzzle of the shotgun. I scratched my ears with the little finger of my left hand. My ears always get itchy when I’m nervous. Jabbing my finger into an ear through the wool, I was making the gun barrel wobble up and down, which seemed to bother them. It couldn’t have gone off accidentally, because I had the safety on, but they didn’t know that and I wasn’t about to tell them.

  My wife counted the finished hamburgers and put them into two small shopping bags, fifteen burgers to a bag.

  “Why do you have to do this?” the girl asked me. “Why don’t you just take the money and buy something you like? What’s the good of eating thirty Big Macs?”

  I shook my head.

  My wife explained, “We’re sorry, really. But there weren’t any bakeries open. If there had been, we would have attacked a bakery.”

  That seemed to satisfy them. At least they didn’t ask any more questions. Then my wife ordered two large Cokes from the girl and paid for them.

  “We’re stealing bread, nothing else,” she said. The girl responded with a complicated head movement, sort of like nodding and sort of like shaking. She was probably trying to do both at the same time. I thought I had some idea how she felt.

  My wife then pulled a ball of twine from her pocket—she came equipped—and tied the three to a post as expertly as if she were sewing on buttons. She asked if the cord hurt, or if anyone wanted to go to the toilet, but no one said a word. I wrapped the gun in the blanket, she picked up the shopping bags, and out we went. The customers at the table were still
asleep, like a couple of deep-sea fish. What would it have taken to rouse them from a sleep so deep?

  We drove for a half hour, found an empty parking lot by a building, and pulled in. There we ate hamburgers and drank our Cokes. I sent six Big Macs down to the cavern of my stomach, and she ate four. That left twenty Big Macs in the back seat. Our hunger—that hunger that had felt as if it could go on forever—vanished as the dawn was breaking. The first light of the sun dyed the building’s filthy walls purple and made a giant SONY BETA ad tower glow with painful intensity. Soon the whine of highway truck tires was joined by the chirping of birds. The American Armed Forces radio was playing cowboy music. We shared a cigarette. Afterward, she rested her head on my shoulder.

  “Still, was it really necessary for us to do this?” I asked.

  “Of course it was!” With one deep sigh, she fell asleep against me. She felt as soft and as light as a kitten.

  Alone now, I leaned over the edge of my boat and looked down to the bottom of the sea. The volcano was gone. The water’s calm surface reflected the blue of the sky. Little waves—like silk pajamas fluttering in a breeze—lapped against the side of the boat. There was nothing else.

  I stretched out in the bottom of the boat and closed my eyes, waiting for the rising tide to carry me where I belonged.

  —translated by Jay Rubin

  SAY HEY, how’s tricks?

  This morning, I paid a call on the kangaroos at the local zoo. Not your biggest zoo, but it’s got the standard animals. Everything from gorillas to elephants. Although if your taste runs to llamas and anteaters, don’t go out of your way. There, you’ll find neither llama nor anteater. No impala or hyena, either. Not even a leopard.

  Instead, there are four kangaroos.

  One, an infant, born just two months ago. And a male and two females. I can’t for the life of me figure out how they get along as a family.

  Every time I set eyes on a kangaroo, it all seems so improbable to me: I mean, what on earth would it feel like to be a kangaroo? For what possible reason do they go hopping around in such an ungodly place as Australia? Just to get killed by some clunky stick of a boomerang?

  I can’t figure it out.

  Though, really, that’s neither here nor there. No major issue.

  Anyway, looking at these kangaroos, I got the urge to send you a letter.

  Maybe that strikes you as odd. You ask yourself, Why should looking at kangaroos make me want to send you a letter? And just what is the connection between these kangaroos and me? Well, you can stop thinking those thoughts right now. Makes no nevermind. Kangaroos are kangaroos, you are you.

  In other words, it’s like this:

  Thirty-six intricate procedural steps, followed one by one in just the right order, led me from the kangaroos to you—that’s it. To attempt to explain each and every one of these steps would surely try your powers of comprehension, but more than that, I doubt I can even remember them all.

  There were thirty-six of them, after all!

  If but one of these stages had gotten screwed up, I guess I wouldn’t be sending you this letter. Who knows? I might have ended up somewhere in the Antarctic Ocean careening about on the back of a sperm whale. Or maybe I’d have torched the local cigarette stand.

  Yet somehow, guided by this seemingly random convergence of thirty-six coincidences, I find myself communicating with you.

  Strange, isn’t it?

  OKAY, THEN, allow me to introduce myself.

  I AM TWENTY-SIX years old and work in the product-control section of a department store. The job—as I’m sure you can easily imagine—is terribly boring. First of all, I check the merchandise that the purchasing section has decided to stock and make sure that there aren’t any problems with the products. This is supposed to prevent collusion between the purchasing section and the suppliers, but actually, it’s a pretty loose operation. A few tugs at shoe buckles while chatting, a nibble or two at sample sweets—that’s about it. So much for product control.

  Then we come to another ask, the real heart of our work, which is responding to customer complaints. Say, for instance, two pairs of stockings just purchased developed runs one after the other, or the wind-up bear fell off the table and stopped working, or a bathrobe shrank by one fourth the first time through the machine—those kind of complaints.

  Well, let me tell you, the number of complaints—the sheer number—is enough to dampen anyone’s spirits. Enough to keep four staffers racing around like crazy, day in and day out. These complaints include both clear-cut cases and totally unreasonable requests. Then there are those we have to puzzle over. For convenience sake, we’ve classified these into three categories: A, B, and C. And in the middle of the office we’ve got three boxes, marked A, B, and C, respectively, where we toss the letters. An operation we call “Trilevel Rationality Evaluation.” In-house joke. Forget I mentioned it.

  Anyway, to explain these three categories, we have:

  Reasonable complaints. Cases where we are obliged to assume responsibility. We visit the customers’ homes bearing oxes of sweets and exchange the merchandise in question.

  Borderline cases. When in doubt, we play safe. Even where here is no moral obligation or business precedent or legal iability, we offer some appropriate gesture so as not to compromise the image of the department store and to avoid unnecessary trouble.

  Customer negligence. When clearly the customer’s fault, we ffer an explanation of the situation and leave it at that.

  Now, as to your complaint of a few days back, we gave the matter serious consideration and ultimately arrived at the conclusion that your complaint was of a nature that could only be classified as belonging to category C. The reasons for this were—ready? listen carefully!—we cannot exchange (1) a record once purchased (2) one whole week later (3) without a receipt. Nowhere in the world can you do this.

  Do you get what I’m saying?

  End of explanation of the situation. Your complaint has been duly processed.

  NONETHELESS, professional viewpoint aside—and actually, I leave it aside a lot—my personal reaction to your plight—having mistakenly bought Mahler, not Brahms—is one of heartfelt sympathy. I kid you not. So it is I send you not your run-of-the-mill form letter but this in some sense more intimate message.

  ACTUALLY, I started to write you a letter any number of times last week. “We regret to inform you that our policy prohibits the exchange of records, although your letter did in some small way move me to personally … blah, blah, blah.” A letter like that. Nothing I wrote, however, came out right. And it’s not as though I’m no good at writing letters. It’s just that each time I set my mind on writing you, I drew a blank, and the words that did come were consistently off base. Strangest thing.

  So I decided not to respond at all. I mean, why send out a botched attempt at a letter? Better to send nothing at all, right? At least, that’s what I think: A message imperfectly communicated does about as much good as a screwed-up timetable.

  As fate would have it, though, this morning, standing before the kangaroo cage, I hit upon the exact permutation of those thirty-six coincidences and came up with this inspiration. To wit, the principle we shall call the Nobility of Imperfection. Now, what is this Nobility of Imperfection?, you may ask—who wouldn’t ask? Well, simply put, the Nobility of Imperfection might mean nothing so much as the proposition that someone in effect forgives someone else. I forgive the kangaroos, the kangaroos forgive you, you forgive me—to cite but one example.

  Uh-huh.

  This cycle, however, is not perpetual. At some point, the kangaroos might take it into their heads not to forgive you. Please don’t get angry at the kangaroos just because of that, though. It’s not the kangaroos’ fault and it’s not your fault. Nor, for that matter, is it my fault. The kangaroos have their own pressing circumstances. And I ask you, what kind of person is it who can blame a kangaroo?

  So we seize the moment. That’s all we can do. Capture the moment in a s
napshot. Front and center, in a row left to right: you, the kangaroos, me.

  Enough of trying to write this all down. It’s going nowhere. Say I write the word “coincidence.” What you read in the word “coincidence” could be utterly different—even opposite—from what the very same word means to me. This is unfair, if I may say so. Here I am, stripped to my underpants, while you’ve only undone three buttons of your blouse. An unfair turn of events if there ever was one.

  Hence I bought myself a cassette tape, having decided to directly record my letter to you.

  [Whistling—eight bars of the “Colonel Bogey” march]

  TESTING, can you hear me?

  I DON’T REALLY KNOW how you will take to receiving this letter—that is, this tape—I really can’t imagine. I suppose you might even get quite upset by it all. Why? … Because it’s highly unusual for a product-control clerk of a department store to reply to a customer complaint by cassette tape—with a personalized message, too, mind you! You could even, if you were so inclined, say the whole thing was downright bizarre. And say, were you to get so upset that you sent this tape back to my boss, my standing within the organization would be placed in a terribly delicate balance indeed.

  But if that is what you want to do, please do so.

  If it comes to that, I will not get mad or hold a grudge against you.

  Clear enough? We are on 100% equal terms: I have the right to send you a letter and you have the right to threaten my livelihood.

  Isn’t that right?

  We’re even Stephen. Just remember that.

  COME TO THINK OF IT, I forgot to mention that I’m calling this letter The Kangaroo Communiqué.

  I mean, everything needs a name, right?

  Suppose, for instance, you keep a diary. Instead of writing this long-drawn-out entry, “Department-store product-control clerk’s reply re complaint arrives,” you could simply write “Kangaroo Communiqué arrives” and be done with it. And such a catchy name, too, don’t you think? The Kangaroo Communiqué: Makes you think of kangaroos bounding off across the vast plains, pouches stuffed full of mail, doesn’t it?