As the movie ends on television, I’m still sitting in that musty motel room on Christmas Day. But the outside world isn’t the same world. The snow…even the sky is a new sky.
This world is a world where anything can happen. Downtown Spokane isn’t just Spokane, not anymore. And I wander in the maze of these empty, icy streets marveling at the explosion of what’s suddenly possible.
Soon after the death of my father, but just before answering machines and disposable cardboard cameras began to disappear, I flew to London. I went on tour for something, some book, making the rounds of radio interviews with different programs on the BBC. In cabs, in the Underground, escorting me was my assigned publicist, Sue. Beautiful Sue, men whistled at her from construction scaffolding. And maybe people stared at Sue, but she was on the lookout for the elephant.
The Sultan’s Elephant, it was a piece of street theater. Part robot, part puppet, it was performance art hired by the city. Beginning one morning with what appeared to be a wooden spacecraft crashed into a steaming crater on Pall Mall, the performance was to last seven days. As per rumors, this gigantic robotic elephant would ramble through central London.
No one we met had actually laid eyes on the elephant. Oh, we saw the traffic jams. In every cab we hailed, the driver was cursing the elephant. We’d sit in gridlock, hearing how the elephant was on Gower Street or in Soho Square, always around the next corner, always just out of sight. We heard the car horns honking. The week was dwindling. The Sultan’s Elephant would be gone soon. Sue and I were hopeful, but we had a book to promote.
On the elephant’s last day in London, we went to the Waterstones bookstore on Piccadilly. A city-block-size building all glass on the outside that booksellers called the Crystal Palace. We shook hands with another writer and spoke to an audience of book buyers in an upper-floor conference room. People ate box lunches. Everyone present kept sneaking looks out the windows. We listened for any chorus of angry honking that might herald the elephant’s arrival.
What did we discuss? Was the sun shining? Does it matter?
As we left the building, walking down a concrete stairway to a metal fire exit door, we heard it. Music echoed between the cornices and caryatids, the very wedding cake curlicue pediments and carved-stone Palladian windows of the Charles Dickens office buildings. Sitar music and flutes and drums floated toward us. Cars along the one-way street disappeared as if something beyond the next curve was blocking the flow of traffic. People on the sidewalks forgot to go anywhere. Businessmen wearing hats, carrying umbrellas and briefcases. People pushing strollers. Police officers, beautiful Sue and me, we all stood and watched to see what would appear from around the far bend in the road.
Bankers in pin-striped suits. The stylish yuppies, people in those days used to call Sloane Rangers. The street turned into a still photograph of everybody holding their breath.
A dozen books later, I’d tell this same story at a dinner party. My version of seeing the elephant. I’d be sitting at one end of a long table. At the far end a woman I didn’t know, hadn’t met, she’d begin to cry. The attention would swing to her and she’d explain between sobs that she’d also been in London that week. She’d seen the elephant and ever since had been trying to tell people the tale. “No one believed me,” she would say, struggling for a breath. “No one could understand how it changed me…” She’d begun to doubt her own memory of the event.
Hearing me had confirmed that she wasn’t deranged. She hadn’t been exaggerating.
There first appeared a team of men wearing turbans and billowing pants, walking in the center of the street. Behind them rose and fell huge gray feet, legs as tall as the buildings, a waving trunk, tusks, and high atop the elephant’s back, a temple filled with topless female dancers. More men walked beside the huge feet and trailed behind it. Pent up behind them was the stalled traffic.
The veiled, bare-breasted dancers danced. The musicians played. Crowded faces stared from high-rise windows eye-level with the elephant’s jeweled head and the Arabian Nights temple fluttering with banners and streamers.
The elephant’s trunk swung and let loose with a geyser of water. With the blast of a fire hose it sprayed the crowds. Cold water. People screamed, pushing to find shelter in doorways. Paper shopping bags burst. Screams turned to laughter, everyone’s shoes skidding on wet pavement.
Above us, a young man stepped out an open window. He wore a dark-blue shirt of some shiny, satiny fabric and stepped onto the ledge of a gingerbread cornice. Above the elephant’s head, he stood suicide-high above the street, using both hands to hold a cardboard camera. He squinted through the viewfinder, clicking pictures, when the trunk swung in his direction. A blast of water struck him, and he dropped the camera. The drums and flutes went quiet. The horns stopped honking.
The group stare of so many people followed that falling camera, down past windows, our eyes tracked it past windows, windows, windows, past staring-out faces until it shattered on the concrete. The young man slipped as well, in his dark-blue shirt and his slick leather shoes, shuffling fast on the wet cornice sloped to shed rain. His hands grabbing at air. No one’s scream was their own and mine joined Sue’s and our scream blared with the screams of lawyers and topless dancers and screaming cabdrivers as we all saw the man fall.
People turned away. People who’d closed their eyes, they wouldn’t look. They were so sure he was smashed dead at our feet.
The moment after which everything is different.
Did I forget to mention the flagpole within grabbing distance? If so, I didn’t mention it because the flagpole wasn’t there. It
