I already told you. We must give him a name. In order to make him feel welcome. You know what happened last night . . . I know you won’t believe me. You were already in bed. Asleep. I was reading in my room when I heard this solid thumping noise. It must’ve been around midnight. I thought it must be from the radiators, cooling down. But then it happened again and this time it didn’t sound like a radiator at all. I got up, turned up the light and went straight to the Fellini room. It’s dark when the light is switched off. I can still see him from the landing, through the doorway some light streaking through the French door to the garden. Not last night. The darkness’s transparent pendant was blocked by something immensely alive. The immersion of the night, that nocturnal face of things was occupied by something breathing. The presence of this apparition seemed to swell to a fearful dimension. I reached for the light switch when my knuckles brushed on the rough overheated texture of distinct epiderma. I know it might sound ridiculous but maybe you can already guess what I saw under the diminished streaks of the wall lights. There he was. Our brand new porcelain elephant. Expanded into a life-size, not yet fully grown African elephant. The same seductively smooth porcelain form enlarged to the optimal scale that the room could handle. Huge, jade-green live content obediently standing on his massive fours slightly sunk into the dark blue and green striped thick carpet. For some reason his imposing presence didn’t make me nervous. Doubtlessly, his sharp hearing could detect your sleepful purring in the bedroom across the hall. I knew that even if he wanted to pay a visit to your room and express his considerable disappointment about your unwillingness to name him, he wouldn’t be able to do so. His size wouldn’t allow him to pass through the door in the first place and leave the Fellini room. But, what if the circumference of his body was a bit smaller, let’s say similar to that of a young bull. Then certainly he would have stormed your room and you’d have been quite shaken when he picked you up out of your bed and elevated you under the ceiling. What would you have told him, why have you neglected him for the entire four days after we found him there, not far from the vast river, abandoned among other scattered embodiments of gathered material data of time gone. Forms protected and oppressed by the predictable narrative of stingy minds. You saw him first and your cat-like eyes ceased to be easily fed with the vanishing voluptuousness of the departing autumn. The unobtrusive fragrance of past times, the raw radiance of color, the scent of childhood forever enclosed and snowed in in the crystal ball of your memories, divagating the valley of the green . . . where horse, skies and smells, sun bleached the milky streak of your chestnut hair, where the protective darkness of the mountains was your divine measure, majestic self-supporting pillars of unspoken truth and order . . .
You know, we took him home. Over the bridge . . . Over the silent red towers of unveiled autumn and the prey of golden shadows over the blooming colors of descending leaves, over the railroad of the languishing afternoon, upon the forgotten face of the rusty steamer next to the obliterated canal with swimming ducks, upstream against the unlit lampposts. We carried him with all his green secrets. Some say elephants are never reduced to forgetting, but the exitless orbit of time will reduce the two of us to the dusk of null passions. The moondial of our life together will preserve his precious green secret before death liberates the flesh of its sorrows. We must name him. Hand in hand . . . You see, the silhouettes of the turning world are oblivious to his indecipherable mystery. You can sense his presence is affirmed by the cool of his green. A captive of his porcelain greenness he beckons the invisible path, the green direction of unknown destination. He can carry the pangs of our love across his strong back. Jade green magic apparition, I know he wants to be named by us, so he can guide us through the evening’s marvels, redolent of astral copulations and multiplied tenderness. His vibrant green, abundant in inner motion will cool my eternal impatience and my esoteric concupiscence. While skin engloved by skin, we let the incarnation of our thoughts dominate the belle époque of youthful days, confined to the monumental scaffold of descending time. His green will be bemused, bemist negation to the darkest blue of our contemplations.
I know . . . It’s not an easy task to name an elephant. Shall we ever know how he’s lost his tusks? And . . . what if the name we . . . Isn’t a name going to be such a limiting feature to such a majestic creature? Isn’t the name going to deroot him from the sharpness of his green? We must decide that, my love. Tomorrow night . . .
Orlin G. Oroschakoff grew up in Sofia, Bulgaria and attended the Academy of Fine Arts in Sofia. Orlin defected from Bulgaria in 1983, escaping across three borders by train and taking refuge at a United Nations camp in Belgrade. Two months later, Orlin traveled to San Francisco with $5 in his pocket and no knowledge of English. Orlin taught himself English and supported himself through his artwork. Orlin now lives in the New York area.
ISSUE:
S U M M E R
2012
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