The Tusk That Did the Damage Read Online Free PDF Page B

guy who had renounced alcohol for religious reasons and embraced weed with equal fervor. In stoner mode, he was always making the sort of prickly asides (
Why don’t you guys make out already?… Get a room!
) that put his own loneliness on display.
    I set a pot of water on my hot plate. “I’d rather stick around here,” I said. “In case something happens.”
    “In case what happens?” He slipped the filter into its pouch, nestled the lens inside the camera bag. “We don’t need more elephant baths and feedings. It’s the human stories that’ll read on film.”
    “Well, and I also need a break from humans.”
    Teddy looked at me. “Which ones?”
    I took my time breaking a cake of ramen, neatly, delicately, into the water.
    Two weeks before, Teddy and I had been editing side by side, late into the night, when he leaned over and kissed me. I’d been saying something about the aspect ratio when the kiss cut me off midword, and I remember thinking, as it was happening, that contrary to every rom-com movie I’d ever seen, spontaneity was a poisoned dart to romance; in reality, the kissee needed warning, a questioning look or a leaning in. How weird to be friendsfor five years and then, in the space of a second, conjoined at the face.
    But then the weirdness gave way to an inviting familiarity. He smelled like summer, like sunblock, scents from home. It was comforting more than thrilling, which was what caused me to pull away. Teddy seemed hurt when I asked him to go, but the next day, he returned with a sheepish apology. He understood that this was the wrong place to start something between us, that it was important to maintain an air of professionalism at the Rescue Center. “But we should, you know, revisit this,” he said, looking only at his hands. “When we get back home.”
    I told him there was no need for apology, it was no big deal, hoping all the
no
’s would add up to a subliminal
never.
Whatever comfort I’d felt in that moment of indiscretion had shriveled to a sickening knot; I’d led him down the garden path, as my mother would’ve put it.
    Now, as I forked the wormy noodles apart, I could feel Teddy looking at me with dread, as if he sensed I was about to burn the garden to the ground.
    But I couldn’t do it. Not then and there. Not when he was my only friend.
    Instead I said I wanted to stay behind and log tapes. “See if there’s an Oppenheimer in there.”
    “Obenhaus,” he said, reluctantly releasing me from his gaze.
    After Teddy left, I planted myself behind my laptop, plugged in the camera, and watched the rescue. The calf was on the ground, waiting to be released from the harness. Teddy zoomed in on the needy eye, the pupil like a fly trapped in sap. That close, I foundthe eye haunting for reasons unclear: Because I saw something familiar inside, a consciousness I could recognize? Or because I couldn’t?
    For my fifteenth birthday, my father had bought me a parakeet. I loved Daisy, how her feathers gave off a powdery smell, how her feet embraced my finger with a lightness I took for trust, the shiny droplet of her eye. Sometimes I worried that Daisy was depressed, to which my father suggested I put Prozac in her feed, a joke that annoyed me. Why couldn’t Daisy be depressed? Why couldn’t she feel a host of emotions, some of them beyond our explanation? She could fly, so if her body were capable of acts beyond human limitation, couldn’t her mind be capable of emotions beyond our own, like Wing Boredom or Flock Joy or Plummet Buzz, things we couldn’t feel and, therefore, could never understand?
    “Maybe you’re the one who needs medication,” my father said.
    During preproduction, I had envisioned a film that would encompass my youthful questions, that would exhume the traumas sealed deep inside animal minds. Day by day, the film I’d imagined seemed to inch a bit farther from the footage we had, until now.
    Teddy had been right. The shot would hold its weight