The Elephant Graveyard

“If civilization had been left in female hands, we would still be living in grass huts.” — Camille Paglia

* * *

It is odd how the ionized air of the cold desert night refracts the moonlight, which crackles with the spirits of sojourners past. They seem to still inhabit these barren dunes, trying to speak—the whispers of their urgent warning to the living just out of reach. And the bold moon itself, a dead and lifeless desert, is pockmarked with the evidence of a violent past.

This shouldn’t be here. African bush elephants. Desert-dwelling elephants. Those are rare enough. But an elephant graveyard? This is supposed to be nothing more than a myth. The Ivory Coast of West Africa gets its name from these beasts. But their natural habitats have been eradicated. Their remains are living fossils fading steadily into myth. Isolated. Segregated. These giants of the animal kingdom who once reigned supreme have been supplanted and now face extinction—like men.

A legitimate elephant graveyard! My stars! I never dreamed I would see such a sight, let alone in my final days, so close to death. But here we are. Me and Eve (as I have come to call her). Standing here among the disembodied tusks, in the land of ivory, in a mythical Stonehenge made of bone. A nightscape enchanted by past rulers, whose remains are scattered in a pattern resembling a crown—as if to say—we once ruled supreme—heed our warning. But I am getting ahead of myself. I tend the fire. I look at her, my prisoner, with ironic affection.

If you are reading this, I’ve either died of my ailments or have had a miraculous recovery. Either way, by the time you read this I am dead. If I survived, and if was then captured, I suspect, I cheated them out of an execution. But I am getting ahead of myself. First, how I got here. It all started last Tuesday.

* * *

It is Tuesday. I am driving down the sodden ready-crete roads that lead to the Ivory Coast. Two hours ago, I stole an incoming Peterbilt truck parked at the loading dock of the PVC P-TECH plant. A truck that was waiting to haul a shipment of one million five hundred thousand odd vinyl credit cards each 3.375 inches tall and 2.2125 inches long. That is a lot of vinyl, equal at least to the daily death count in Africa, a continent as crowded today with live bodies as the morgues of antiquity would be with the dead in plague time.

My body has become a vessel of death. Over the past weeks, I’ve noticed a rash surfacing on my chest. It is about as big as an eyeglass now. It is the chunky white of spoiled milk with flecks of violet that bleed out into a circular outline. There is another symptom. My fifty-two-year-old skin which has grown somewhat slack and has started to hug tightly to my body, to itch, and I can feel the deeper internal walls hardening. All of this suggests the worst. It suggests the symptoms customary to those multi-syllabic diseases which are voluminously described in our OSHA manuals at the plant. Scleroderma. Cholangiocarcinoma. Angiosarcoma.

That’s the funny thing about words, signified phonemes—their creators—and by that, I mean men (the progenitors of language being largely male)—acted as if making medical words unintelligible made them less real. It won’t do. Diseases should read like morbid Surgeon General’s Warnings: YOUR SORRY-ASS INHALED TOO MANY CHLORINE FUMES—YOU WILL BE CHECKING OUT SHORTLY—P.S. SMOKE ‘EM IF YOU GOT ‘EM, AND LEAVE THE TOWELS, YOU CAN’T TAKE ‘EM WITH YOU. That is, after all, what those words really mean.

I imagine a voice-programmed warning message such as the ALERT! Messages that stream through the speakers in the plant when chemicals are spilled, and we are required to file out like grade school children pointlessly practicing pre-rehearsed fire drills.

It goes something like this: “Alert, Alert, Your immune system is under attack; repeat: adrenal glands and organ tissue comporo-mised. Please be advised, please be Ad-vised – normal metabolic function stop-ping. All parasitic micro-organisms proceed to the nearest exit in a single-file line. Alerta, alarma, su Sistema immune ha parado el fucnionamiento…” The cancers caused by polyvinyl chloride are not hereditary; there, at least, I am safe. But I have never been with a woman voluntarily. And now I am dying.

I can hear her panting in the cab, then banging against the wall with a balled fist—her screams echoing against the walls. Do not think I am cruel or perverse. I know that she can’t be as old as fifteen, and fear she is younger. She was a stray. There is nothing more to it than that. She was bound for a far worse fate than accompanying me on my final journey. She was an afterthought. All I wanted was to escape captivity and die in peace.

Besides, females have no business lurking outside of chemical plants where the last remaining males toil over vats of noxious poison. Especially homeless girls. There is also the fact that I don’t understand her language. That was an inducement. Her muffled pleas for pity cannot reach me.

When I saw her peering through the open doors of the ventilation bay leading to the vat floor, an idea struck. No, an impulse. Those pesky impulsive thoughts have led to the subjugation of my violent race. An inversion. Kidnapping one of them – one of our oppressors. It was too tempting to pass up.

Polyvinyl chloride is a fascinating commodity. It loses shape and becomes volatile when heated but hardens as it cools. Like aging women, full of conflicting and violent emotions in their youth—vessels that thirst to be filled with experience—but in their old age, which cool and harden into fixed shapes and routines—the scaffolding of communities and institutions.

Twenty Billion Cell Phone Toting Africanas Can’t Be Wrong. The obsession with polymers (that is to say large molecules that may be fashioned into pocket-sized transmission devices) was an unexpected death sentence. These are, of course, the very same molecules that bind to our normal cells and deform them, like a digital virus creating an epidemic of pop-up messages in our DNA that all say “Die.”

As was destined to occur, the plants of the polyvinyl chloride industry extended to the farthest reaches of Africa, where man heaved himself off the gangplank and collided with the last of those elephant graveyards, hitherto resigned to myth.

I ask myself; how did our cities evolve from wooden structures that stood for a century at their best to indestructible plastic towers? Who started the movement to plastics, with the plasticizers that have resigned most of the world’s children to a state of asthmatic paranoia?

What scientist first looked into a lens and saw those weaves of overlapping tensile grids, like tangled spaghetti, and said, “Ah yes, this will be a garden hose?” Then, I have to ask myself, what started this movement that led to a society devoid of male influence, where we have become just as outdated, unnecessary, and burdensome as those wooden homes, perishable by fire, flood, and storm—that became obsolete sometime in the last century—replaced by durable molecules that can be printed by 3D printing droids?

I must confess, I am amused by the way she kicks and thrashes. How insolent. Doesn’t she know that I have the power and propensity to do her violence? She is, after all, one of them. The dominant sex, who have resigned us to drones in this brave new world. Drones. Worker bees toiling over poisonous recesses, hauled out for periodic fertility meetings, receiving our electronic orders like our ancestors who were called by telegram to serve as jurors.

The overpopulation problem had been a joke—then wasn't. Fodder that conspiracy geeks and seminar philosophy professors employed to take a go at unhinging young minds. “If there’s a lifeboat that only holds so many and you come across a few stragglers—do you let those stragglers in and risk the crew—or keep them out to ensure the survival of those already on board?”

Leave them for the sharks.

Our plastics were molded into cell phones, servers, hand-held devices, and finally into intravenous bags and tubes that now await all of us—a final hermetic send-off from the vinyl that we created, carried in our pockets and wallets, and which have destroyed us.

The planet could not house all of us, it was argued. And even with strict laws, man (not in the plural sense of our kind, but in the specific sense of my gender) left to his own devices, could not help but go forth and ravish nature until the ecosystem was tipped out of balance. We just kept procreating.

The verdict was rendered. The sentence was handed down. Men were to be isolated to work camps and at length eliminated—an unnecessary vestige of an abandoned natural order. As with all viruses and bio-toxins. Nature’s mistake.

Don’t get me wrong, plastic is safe enough. If it is waterproof, it doesn’t rust, and won’t foster bacteria. Miraculous.

But, we took shortcuts. We bastardized manufacturing inputs, substituted subpar materials, and when we ran low on raw materials, resorted to questionable recycling practices.

The recyclers came in and reformulated discarded and corrupted material. They disposed and cleansed non-reclaimable dross.

You see, it is the incineration of plastic for reuse that spurs the dioxins that strip the human body every bit as efficiently as a team of locusts strips a plant of its greenery in one of their orgies of consumption.

Plague, famine, and death followed.

* * *

It is Wednesday.

I was forced to stop late Monday night to steal some food for the girl from a convenience store dumpster.

Naturally, I brought enough diesel in barrels for the entire trip and took periodic stops to refuel.

All of this is because I can’t be seen out of my work camp sector, or I will be detained on the spot.

What a world. Weapons of mass destruction were eradicated; all diseases but cancer resigned to a chronic state needing only a pill for maintenance.

But the male penis – that vile weapon emerged finally as the seed of all destruction. Cage the beast, lest we smother in the fruit of our fecundity, lest overpopulation suffocate the masses.

She tried to escape when I opened the doors to refuel. She stabbed me in the shoulder with a shard of cracked vinyl that had remained on the bay floor. It was superficial, but it still sent me into a rage. I shoved her as hard as I’ve ever pushed anyone. She fell and cracked her head.

For a time, she cowered in the corner. But, sure enough, at the next fuel stop she attacked me again, this time feebly rolling an oil drum at me, as if, I suppose, it would flatten me like a cartoon Wiley Coyote receiving an Acme Anvil from the Road Runner. They just won’t stop until they’ve killed you. Women that is.

She refused to eat the food I so graciously got for her. It sat there in the corner, as a banner of her independence. Fine. Starve, you cantankerous tyrant. She’ll learn. We all learn. Hunger has a way of humbling us.

Late Wednesday night we stopped at a campground that I had read about, which had been set up as an underground haven for renegades and fugitives. There were stolen vehicles, makeshift tents, and a utopia of bare existence.

Men! In their primal glory. Drinking around fires from tin cups filled with whiskey. Playing cards. Singing. Gathering canned foods and preserved meats for cookouts. A campsite redolent of war, with regalia, the comfort of assorted firearms, and the peace of great amounts of tobacco and revelry.

Best of all, there was a corral fashioned from barbed wire where an assortment of the enemy were separated into cages, an impromptu prison camp. Imagine our mercy. There was even a tarp spread above to keep out the rain. And gutters – gutters no less! To ensure they stay dry. Lest they should be humiliated by having to scramble in the mud. Lest they should catch a cold.

My condition has worsened. I can feel cramping in my liver and kidneys. There are also frequent prolapses where my mind wanders off into waking dreams. I know well that such mental symptoms are the work of the disease which has by this time weakened the glands that secrete the chemicals which run my brain, leaving me sluggish in thought.

We stay for three days at the camp, and I enjoy the company, replete with stories of where the men escaped from the African continent and their different hopes for their ultimate destinations. I even release the girl and let her sit by the fire with the men to eat her supper. She finally relents and eats. Hunger has a way of humbling even the most stubborn.

From a traveler who had been a surveyor, I am shown a map to an area of desert near the coast, by a few hundred acres of untouched forest—a patch of nature in the midst of the polluted hellscape.

He tells me of a group of men that had traveled to this area known as the Elephant’s Reserve to live out their days in peace. It is two day's journey. I imagine myself luxuriating in my cab until the time comes.

But I will need directions and a way out of this world.

From the man, I trade for the map.

From another, I buy a rifle.

And restraints for the girl, in case I need them.

* * *

It is Sunday.

Now she has begun eating little packets of reconstituted food I bought at the campsite. It is a mixture of pathetic reconstituted plastic mush and multisyllabic chemical compounds masquerading as sustenance.

In addition to the rations, I buy personal care items, napkins, jugs of water, and liquor.

She is drinking great quantities of water now and even whiskey.

There is a smell coming from the cab. She has made a toilet out of one area in the corner of the cab.

It takes all afternoon to clean the cab and excise the stench.

I leave her tied to a tree.

Afterward, I leave hygiene products in the cab for her and a bucket for her refuse.

I had been saving the personal care items for myself, to tend my wounds.

But necessity commands.

* * *

We’re almost to the area marked on the map.

Maybe an afternoon of travel left.

I have to stop two or three times a day now to rest.

I find driving continuously too strenuous.

I go around back and let her out for some fresh air, and she talks in her snappy, indecipherable screeches as if her earnest and high-pitched monologues will suddenly become comprehensible to me.

This will be our last stop.

When I lock her back in the cab, she is shaking.

I can smell her. Dirty. Sweaty. Broken.

It is almost time for me to rest.

* * *

It is Monday evening.

As we enter the desert, I see the abandoned vehicles left at the end of the dirt roadway.

There are antiquated cars, trucks like mine, and even, fascinatingly, a motorcycle. The others abandoned their vehicles at this stage of the journey, before entering the enveloping sands.

I do the same.

All morning, as we walk the desert sands, I have been struggling with a sack I have been toting behind me on a hand-fashioned leash, which carves a small groove through the sands.

All morning I have been trying to figure out where I left the rifle.

By now, my mind is all but gone. I fear that when I go to my rest, she will join some local tribe that has sprung up in the desert. Some aboriginal people. Savages who I imagine will trade her among the men as a commodity.

It saddens me to think I have left her to this fate. Or maybe she will find her way back to the cab, take the truck, and escape. Maybe she will find a mate in the hinterlands of the bush. Maybe there will be a natural birth. Maybe she will restart society.

As I prepare to finish my journal, I wonder if anyone will read this. These types of journals tend to be saved, so I think it is likely. I wonder what the new world will be like. Will you care, reader? Or will the age of men be looked back on with horror and disdain?

I look at the trucks in the yard, just at the edge of the desert. Abandoned steel. Backos. Eighteen wheelers. Carriers of vinyl. The relics of metal which carried man to extinction. They are rusted. Bodies that cannot withstand too much oxygen. A graveyard of machines.

I venture out into the sands, and she accompanies me.

At nightfall, I build a campfire. We eat together in silence, enjoying the steaks that I procured at the camp. We eat them with our bare hands like savages. And we drink wine from jugs. Carlo Rossi Red Sangria. She even looks at me and laughs. She knows I don’t have long.

I accompany her back to the cab.

It is time to release my prisoner.

I will write more when I have let her go.

Where is my gun?

[Note: This text was found in the cab of a Peterbilt truck along with the skeleton of a man. One of the last of his species. No one knows to this day what happened afterward, as none of it is recorded. No provisions and no rifle were found with the body. No evidence of gunshot wounds was discovered.]

--This is the End of Historical Archive 175672, Smithsonian Exhibit on the Extinct Species of Man.