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and where I eat and sleep and pee. They know all they want to know of me, and I want nothing at all from them, so . . .
    So I followed him anyway, feeling my hand in his, the firm kind grasp, the springy rolling rhythm of his walk. I knew that he could keep walking forever on those legs. He led me to the new elephant, the one he had arrived with. He bade me stand there as the trunk took samples of my scent for tasting, as one great eye looked down on me, the all-seeing eye. Not a word did I say. Not a question did I ask.
    Until I felt the thrumming, strong now, so powerful that it took my breath away, it shook my chest so strongly.
    “Did you hear him, Father?” asked my son.
    I nodded.
    “But did you understand?”
    I shook my head.
    “He says you understand,” said Arek, puzzled. “But you say that you don’t.”
    At last I spoke: I understand nothing.
    The elephant thrummed out again.
    “You understand but do not know you understand,” said Arek. “You’re not a prophet.”
    The elephant had made me tremble, but it was Arek’s word that made me stumble. Not a prophet. And you
are
, my son?
    “I am,” said Arek, “because I hear what he says and can turn it into language for the rest of you. I thought you could understand him, too, because he said you could.”
    The elephant was right. I did understand. My mad guesses wereright, or somewhat right, or at least not utterly wrong. But I said nothing of this to Arek.
    “But now I see you do understand,” said Arek, nodding, content.
    His temporal glands were dripping, the fluid falling onto his naked chest. He wore trousers, though. Old polyester ones, the kind that cannot rot or fade, the kind that will outlast the end of the universe. He saw me looking, and again supposed that I had understood something.
    “You’re right,” he said. “I’ve had it before. Only lightly, though. And it did me no good.” He smiled ruefully. “I’ve seen the world, but none like me.”
    Had
what
before?
    “The dripping time. The madness.”
    Musth, I said.
    “Yes,” he answered. He touched the stream of fluid on his cheek, then streaked it on my cheek. “It takes a special woman to bear my child.”
    What if there isn’t one?
    “There is,” he said. “That’s why I came here.”
    There’s no one here like you.
    “Not yet,” he said. “And besides, I had this gift to give you.”
    What gift?
    He gestured, as if I should have understood all along. The building that the elephants were pushing at. “You always told me how much you hated this building. How ugly it was. I wanted to give you something when I came again, but I couldn’t think of anything I could do for you. Except for this.”
    At his words, the elephants grunted and bellowed, and now it was clear that all their pushing before had been preliminary to this, as they braced themselves and rammed, all at once, again and again. Now the building shuddered. Now the façade cracked. Now the walls buckled.
    Quickly Arek drew me back, out of danger. The elephants, too, retreated, as the walls caved in, the roof collapsed. Dust blew out of the place like smoke, blinding me for a moment, till tears could clear my vision.
    No silence now, no infrasound. The bulls gave voice, a great triumphant fanfare.
    And now the families came: the matriarch, the other females, theirbabies, their children. Into the square, now unobstructed except for the rubble pile, they came by the dozens. There must be three clans here, I thought. Four. Five. Trumpeting. Triumphant.
    All this, because they knocked down a building?
    No. The fall of the building was the gift to the father. It was the signal for the real festivities to begin.
    “I made them bring her here,” said Arek. “You’re my family, and these are my friends.” He indicated the people leaning out of the windows over the square. “Isn’t that what weddings are for?”
    The elephants made way for one last arrival. An Indian elephant lumbered into the square, trunk