Richard Dik-dik: Chapter 2
Grandma Dik-dik returned to the territory less than forty-eight hours later with her new mate, Raj. His real name was Faraji, which means consolation in Swahili: he had one working eye and a large bald patch on his hind quarters which was either a nasty parasite or a skin infection. Grandma found him curled in the middle of a trail, napping in a shallow puddle of East African rain, the mosquitos impregnating the water with a million tiny larvae. It was April now, and the wilderness was wild again, the new rains forcing the tourists to retreat until it was telephoto lens and white linen season again. One day, the world will run out of water. Until then, humans will cover their heads and run from it.
It was fate, Grandma thought, stumbling onto Faraji: God had given her this man to nurture back to strength, to love and be loved until death do him part a few weeks or months from now. Love is mostly willpower anyway, she thought. Plus, she was too tired to carry on much further. Wasn’t a consolation prize better than no prize at all?
She nudged him gently, pushing her head against his, but nothing. She nudged him again, and then once more, no longer sure if she was attempting to awaken him or resuscitate him. Finally, an eyelid fluttered, a nostril flared. She nudged him again, and a leg jerked straight outward, parting the flies in their wake. “He’s alive,” Grandma thought, and that was enough for her. She had found her man.
It was a brief and impersonal introduction. Sparks did not fly, or cupid’s arrows, or any other aerial displays of infatuation. This was not love at first sight: it was just a match and nothing more, like two old rubber boots, or a dull pencil and a worn sharpener, or one shaker of salt and one of pepper. Sometimes, in looking for bliss, we end up settling for utility.
Raj yawned, readjusted his hind quarters, tried to remember the last time he could feel all his legs. Failing that, he tried to remember anything at all, closing his eyes and reflecting just long enough to fall back asleep.
Grandma scavenged a meal for them of grass seeds and assorted shrubbery, returning to Raj just as he snored himself awake again. He had obstructive sleep apnea, and this was the brush land: there were no nasal strips, no dental appliances or CPAP machines. True nature is uninsured.
They ate in as much silence as an ungulate can eat, saying very little beyond a brief bible verse Grandma recited, one she found in the torn pages of a leaflet she had managed to memorize. It was entirely inappropriate for mealtime, but she didn’t know that. She bowed her head, touched her hoof gently to Raj’s, and spoke:
But as for the cowardly, the faithless, the detestable, as for murderers, the sexually immoral, sorcerers, idolaters, and all liars, their portion will be in the lake that burns with fire and sulfur, which is the second death. — Revelation 21:8
She sprinkled an “Amen” on the end just for good measure, and urged Raj to repeat it. His hunger now quenched and the sleep finally worn from his eyes, Grandma asked Raj to accept Jesus Christ as his Lord and Savior, and then if he would be her mate. He said yes to both unequivocally, despite not knowing who or what a Jesus was. But that was good enough for Grandma. She likely didn’t know either. Nobody probably does.
That night, they strolled back to the camp with all the lack of vigor you would expect from a fifth marriage, plus mild dehydration. They copulated quickly and dispassionately before retiring for a few hours of sleep before it was time to forage again, still protected by the moonlight.
Grandma was far too excited to sleep, though. Her first husband had taken three weeks and fifty miles to find. Her second took over a month and a near-death moonlight encounter with a waterhole, the type that elephants bore in dry river beds long after the rainy season passes. They use their trunks like South Texas oil rigs, plunging them deep into the dirt and dust and siphoning out the cool, sandy water by the gallon full. For elephants, the holes are life sustaining. For Dik-diks, they are broken legs in the night. Tonight, though, Grandma was elated: finding Raj was her masterpiece of efficiency. She hoped she should be so lucky with mates six and seven.
Richard was the only one to see the happy couple return home, kept awake by the hollow, dull reverberation that grief makes throughout your bones. Absence is a wall of sound that reflects off every contraction of your chest, every memory you can recall. The monitor lizards had left no bones to bury. There were no words said for Grandpa, no memorial or remembrance: just Grandma packing up a few of her favorite pamphlets and hitting the trail to find someone new.
That night, as Raj dead-legged his way onto the territory with what looked like a permanently locked knee, reality sank in: Richard’s deceased Grandpa wasn’t his grandfather after all, just the disposable replacement of a replacement, like a mail-order razor or a plastic drinking straw or a good-old-fashioned American first marriage. He was just Grandma’s fourth mate, known to everyone else as simply Charles. For all their lessons, Richard’s parents had forgotten to teach him not to love.
And so he did, deeply. He cried himself to sleep, his tears a mess of sticky pre-orbital glandular fluid. Inside, he quaked tremors of terror that cracked at his inner fault lines. Humans call it anxiety, then either ignore or bury it in snifters of scotch and overtime. For Richard, there was no relief. You get little empathy in this world for pain others can’t see.
Raj could see it, though, or at least tried. He waited three days to approach Richard, spent them carefully thinking and forgetting and thinking again of the kindest words possible to ease the awkwardness of the moment. He approached Richard at breakfast, his own neck clearly immobile, so that combined with his bum leg, he had to perform a stilted hobble to reposition himself to see Richard from his one good eye. Raj introduced himself: “I’m Faraji, but you can call me Raj if you like, or even better, Grandpa.” He moved forward to nuzzle Richard.
Richard recoiled, then felt guilty, and then didn’t. He couldn’t call Faraji his grandpa. He couldn’t call anyone Grandpa ever again. Grandpa’s snuck you extra berries after dinner, played chase, and let you cry without scolding you to man up. Then they died violently and turned out to just be another Charles. He would pass on having a new one. “If it’s all the same to you, I’ll just call you Raj,” Richard replied.
His neck entirely out of order, Raj nodded his entire body in response, buckling about like a wooden thumb-push-puppet.
“Raj it is.”
There is a cleansing that only water can bring, long months of drought broken by an afternoon rain that dilutes the diesel fumes, sends the safari-goers scrambling for their tents to book flights home, file grievances with the travel agencies, swear off eco-tourism altogether. Later that summer, they will flock to the Italian Riviera and relish in the rejuvenating qualities of the sea, the resort saltwater pool, the hydrating seaweed masks and mud baths and hot stone massages. But they will never tolerate involuntary nature.
It’s in these hours each day, these steamy blankets of rain, that lions are free to be ferocious again, or simply nap with impunity. Nature breathes a concerted sigh of relief, the opening of the sky a collective Xanax that washes away the fear of Land Rovers, flash lenses, tranquilizer guns, pickled-drunk humans in novelty pith hats.
The lowest spots of brush turn to murky drinking holes for wild dogs, storks, wildebeests, newborn buffalo, zebra, leopards, hyenas, and anything with the unquenchable, instinctual thirst to try to live another season. The spoonbills and cormorants and swamp hens splash like toddlers in a baby pool, four months of dust and dander dripping from the tips of their wings. The first few hours of rain are an unspoken truce among species: even wars and food chains can stop for a few cool sips of water. After that, bellies full and cells hydrated, all bets are off again. A cheetah and a kudu walk into a bar together. Only the cheetah walks out.
But Dik-diks don’t drink. They get all their hydration from eating — half-an-ounce from the dew of the morning berries, another half from a mouthful of fallen leaves. It’s twice during this rainy season — once at the beginning and once at the end — that female Dik-diks give birth to their offspring. They’re born nose first, with their forelegs tucked tightly towards their backs like holiday turkeys. Only half will survive.
It had been nearly seven months since Richard was born, and six since his Grandfather was eaten. His mother was nearly bedridden now, taking the animal kingdom’s equivalent of maternity leave: hiding under a makeshift pile of rocks and thatch, on twenty-four-hour alert for deadly predators, the pangs of labor, or just as likely, both at the same time.
Richard was long overdue to be run off the family land, but he had discovered the secret to staying with your parents longer than society’s mores dictate: make yourself useful so your father doesn’t have to. Richard foraged, marked territory, stood watch, and generally served as the surrogate head of the family so his dad could sleep more, watch less, and do whatever it is men do while they pretend not to see what they should be doing.
In his free time, he warmed up to Raj. Grandma had grown tired of Raj’s medical needs, and Raj of her incessant Jesus and Mary this and that, her favorite sleeping spot so full of religious artifacts that there was no room for anyone else. They would never choose to part ways, though: Dik-diks mate for life, remain completely monogamous, and only take a new lover when their partners die. They are everything humans vow to be but can’t.
Instead, Raj spent his days with Richard, hobbling a few steps behind him, resting together under shrubs, scratching at the ground furiously to find bulbs to snack on, and defecating atop the assorted dung piles of elephants and rhinos and antelopes. To scientists, it looked like run of the mill field data, behaviors and diagnoses to form a thesis, satisfy a grant. To Richard and Raj, it was bonding. They hid stealthily from a cast of assorted minor predators. They licked the cool morning dew from their noses, panted together and held speed-breathing contests on the hottest afternoons. Raj always won: he could pant at up to 642 breaths a minute, cooling his blood and his brain using just his nose. Richard barely topped 550.
They spent hour upon hour together beneath the canopy of a Njora rahisi, a flat-crowned tree whose small, feathery leaflets are often the only green breaking up miles of singed grass the color of dried wheat. The tree’s narrow black shadow is the perfect place for two Dik-diks to chew their cud together in quiet company, breaking the silence every hour or two with a joke, a trifling thought, a rare profundity.
“I need you to know something, Richard,” Raj said one morning beneath their favorite tree, its scoliotic trunk and moppy crown like gangly teenaged bedhead. Richard nodded, took a few steps and stooped a bit to establish eye contact with Raj’s tilted, permanently bent head. “It takes two Dik-diks to make one glove,” Raj declared. And with that, the silence resumed.
It was wisdom, Richard was sure, but not of how. He had heard of gloves, and of cities, and of the glove factories in cities, but he was unclear on what to do with this tidbit. More than anything, it made him curious about owning a pair of gloves of his own, something soft that was his to touch whenever he wanted to, that didn’t leave him or want him gone. He spent the next hour daydreaming of gloves, of being touched. The finger cutouts would be useless, he thought. He was unsure how he would put them on or take them off. He would need a pair not made of Dik-diks, of course — perhaps lizard, he chuckled to himself. Monitor lizard gloves. He would own a pair or two someday.
A few hours stretched into most of the day, the two friends alternately napping and chewing. By early evening, a gentle breeze blew a rain of white flowers down from the Njora rahisi tree, with them falling a handful of brown seed pods to crack open and snack upon. Something felt wrong in Richard’s third stomach. He had four total, like all even-toed ungulates, but a sense of unease and anxiousness cast over his third. It wasn’t much longer before Raj spoke again, this time pivoting away from Richard, his eyes pointed far into the distant grasslands.
“Your sister was born this morning, Richard.”
Richard paused, imagined a world in which he could stay and grow up with a sister. “What did they name her?”
“Maureen,” Raj answered. “They named her Maureen.” He looked even further into the distance, bowed his head with an audible clicking of his neck joints. “But she didn’t make it, Richard. Do you know what that means?”
Of course Richard did. His entire existence was predicated on not making it, or barely making it, or making it just one more hour or day. Not making it at all seemed easier. A dull pang took over his heart, a sympathy and longing for his mother that he would learn to smother. She would be pregnant again in a few weeks or months, this time with Kenneth or Immah or Benard or Mercy, half of whom would live, then be chased away. He regurgitated a bit more food, chewed it for a while in silence, then swallowed it. Raj sat with him, silently contemplating his own life and inevitable death, the losses he had endured, his rheumatoid arthritis. The moon arose, tucking itself behind a weighted blanket of clouds that turned the prairie a shade beyond black. They slept in the open that night, Richard and Raj. It felt dangerous. It felt reckless. It felt alive.
Read Chapter 3 here:
https://medium.com/@joshuamerritt/richard-dik-dik-chapter-3-35261bbe0bdd
Missed Chapter 1? It’s here:
https://medium.com/@joshuamerritt/richard-dik-dik-14ab34a6220a
