Published in Gulf Coast 33.2 Summer/Fall 2021: http://gulfcoastmag.org/journal/33.2-summer/fall-2021
Our milestones are no longer marked by American flags—
This was how the newsreader put it, which made it more opinion than news, or maybe propaganda, but the distinction had long ago ceased to mean anything. In any case, it was hardly an insight. First, the landing on the dark side of the moon, then the cloning of humans, and now this, livestreamed from the resurrection laboratory in Hangzhou: the birth of ten female mastodon calves. This, said the newsreader, is the true dawn of the Chinese century. All we could do was watch in silence and consider the meaning of de-extinction.
We felt that morning that our concerns had become small, our jobs insignificant, in the new scheme of things. But, since everything had changed and also nothing had changed, we got into our cars and went to work anyway. We had imagined a different world for an event like this—hyperloops and sexbots and flying cars, at least—but the endless traffic jams that inched along the Southern California freeways were exactly the same as those of our grandparents. The drones that stirred the blade-loud skies were only there to deliver our purchases, monitor the wildfires, and track the narrow orbit of our movements.
Later, after work, once the children were in bed, we made what sense of it we could. What did it mean that there would be mastodons walking the Earth again? Was it a return of the past or an augur of the future? Ten-thousand years had elapsed since their kind had last strode across a colder planet, lumbering among earlier versions of us, the creatures that would both exterminate and one day re-animate them. This, we couldn’t grasp. Why had this happened? Turning our uncomprehending faces to one another, we asked: Why did we do this? To solve the problem of human aging, it was said. To address the changes in the climate, it was said. To cure disease. We couldn’t see how mastodons would do any of these things, because we were still struggling to remember the difference between them and woolly mammoths and we almost had it, but then we didn’t.
Perched on our couches and barstools, in our cubicles and cars, we tried to understand what it meant that the DNA had been harvested from pristine mummies chipped out of Siberian permafrost. We tried to understand that the Hangzhou resurrection scientists had begun the de- extinction by using Crispr/Cas9 to edit the genes and splice mastodon DNA into the Asian elephant genome; that they developed hybrid embryos, ten in all, in artificial uteruses until the embryos were ready for implantation into Asian elephants who roamed a grassland habitat built just for them in the Donghu Subdistrict; that it had all been done in secret until now, when the blood-slicked, reddish-brown calves were extracted by doctors in sunshine-yellow biohazard suits. When the weekly power cut came and there was no more news to take in, we were grateful to sit, eating breakfasts in the hush of unvoiced thought. We were silhouettes against a furious, bloodstained sky. The ashfall struck the windows like soft, black snow.
In the daytime dark we found ourselves wondering: What did the elephant mothers think when they looked into the ancient eyes of the alien daughters they had birthed? But no one ever mentioned the mothers again. We forget and we forget and we forget.
By the time the power came back on, the mastodon calves were a global phenomenon. It was a show now, like everything, but this one was new and better. Always streaming, watchable at all power-on hours, it took us away from our cares. Our mouths eased back into childhood smiles to see those downy russet ears, the candy-white nubs of their tiny tusks, the shyly entwined trunks in sisterly embrace.
Who wouldn’t feel a renewed sense of possibility? Who wouldn’t dream of all the other things that might be restored? It hardly seemed to matter that it was China who got there first. The mastodons were for us all: the answer to a question we hadn’t dared to imagine asking. They were such a gift, we hardly knew what we had done to deserve their return.
They were given one of those fanciful collective nouns: a thunder. Hence the name of the show, a joint Chinese-Russian venture: A Thunder of Mastodons. It was a chronicle of life among the calves once they had been relocated to what was to be their permanent home, a vast stretch of Siberian tundra north of the taiga belt. This was how we came to know them by their Chinese names, all of which translated to poetic words for memory and hope and dreams, and so forth.
We were delighted by the quirks of their prehistoric personalities, so like our own. We recognized something of ourselves in them and through them we saw the world anew, in all its strange and terrible beauty. Our children were captivated by their antics, as were we. They frolicked and bumbled; they bassoon-bellowed their long forgotten music. We watched them drink synthetic elephant milk from comically giant bottles. We binged the show and asked for more, and so came the mastodon cartoon and the breakfast cereal; the plushies, the pajamas and lunchboxes, the home gene-splicers. Even the handlers charged with the calves’ care became celebrities. We watched through night vision cameras as they slept among the animals, and we marveled when they introduced the adorable monsters to what the world had become since they had last looked upon it.
In the midst of our fires, between our augmented reality shows and our individually narrowcast ads, we yearned for their frozen world. Whenever the power was on, we watched the live feed for glimpses. As the calves grew bigger and began to wander, there was mostly nothing to see, only that horizonless white ground, punctuated by scattered tents and atmosphere-recording instruments, but we would watch for hours anyway, mesmerized. No traffic, no gas stations, no light pollution, no buildings, no flames. Just windswept snow and jutting pines, cloudless azure sky. The sound of the arctic winds drowned out the blare of our flame-lit rush hour. And now and then, the unaccountable joy of seeing a bit of movement: a scientist adjusting a tentpole, a distant mastodon stamping the permafrost in search of food. In our long, snaking lines for provisions and fuel, we felt we understood their sense of urgency. In our work-life spaces we sometimes lay our heads down on our desks and fell asleep to the sound of crystalline air moving through the boreal forest as the mastodons expelled their primeval cries into the whiteness.
There came discoveries. The mastodons were highly intelligent. They seemed to have a sense of themselves, and they were teachable. They learned to count and distinguish simple shapes. Painted looping abstractions in primary colors and developed a complex language of sounds their elephant descendants had never learned to make. When they were trained by their handlers to trumpet in unison, trunks stretched to the sky, we listened to their eerie chorus on our satellite radios as omnivorous flames licked the remnants of Malibu and Silicon Beach. For a time, they restored our sense of wonder. For a time, we loved them for this, loved them with all our hearts. Until we didn’t. Adorable as toddlers, the mastodons grew alien and strange in their unlovely adolescence. They aged rapidly. Their burnt-orange peach fuzz coarsened into unruly tangles that hung off them like Spanish moss and then began to fall out in great clumps. They were left looking ravaged and raw. Their tusks became pitted and chipped; some protruded to fearsome proportions with abnormal curvatures that prevented the animals from foraging for themselves; some broke off entirely. The creatures grew enormous and hideous, gaunt, sickening on the food that we gave them. Their youthful playfulness turned to irritability, then to rage. Although the resurrection scientists assured us otherwise, it was obvious that something had gone wrong, some error deep in the code. And so we had to look away. There was only so much we could take in.
This is what our Morning Shows called compassion fatigue. We were already so exhausted—what could we do for them, so far away as we were, so helpless to attend to our own calamities? Arthritic, their bones unexpectedly porous, the mastodons plodded along gracelessly on their brittle frames, teetering like beetle-eaten redwoods. Deranged by hormonal signals we could not interpret and aggressions older than civilization, they tore at the ground and leveled the trees and turned against one another so viciously that they had to be chained in separate pens and given tranquilizers that made the luster vanish from their obsidian eyes. The pain or loneliness—we couldn’t tell which—made them bellow and screech.
There were protests and condemnations. Soon the livestreams were transmitted without sound. Shortly after that, the show was quietly cancelled, most of the cameras were shut off, and few aside from the reanimation rights activists spoke of the mastodons anymore. In our lifetimes, we had seen so many others go extinct: the polar bears and chimpanzees, gone. The snow leopards, mountain gorillas, and orangutans. Gone. The giant pandas and rhinos. All of them gone, reconstituted only in augmented reality overlays of things that used to be here. Our own numbers have dwindled, too, although we are still too many by far. But in all this time only the mastodons had been brought back, and now they were dying too, once again.
Our children, though long weary of their mastodon toys and the animals on which they had been modeled, would sometimes tell us that one of the thunder had died. The first to go, Xīwàng, consumed by a prehistoric form of tuberculosis, made it to the top of our social networks. Her corpse was given a state funeral and incinerated on a towering pyre. Conspiracy sites insisted the Chinese had kept samples of the pathogen for nefarious purposes.
It was different for the next two, Mènghuàn and Mèngxiăng. They did one another in, when Mènghuàn broke loose from her enclosure and gored her sister through the eye, receiving a fatal kick to the skull in return. There was no ceremony to mark their end. Deaths four through eight were merely depressing and inevitable rather than spectacular; unlucky creatures who succumbed to wasting diseases, neuropathies, fatty livers, heart failure, cancers of blood and brain. Their disappearances, like the winking out of impossibly distant stars, barely registered on our datastreams.
The ninth, though, was another matter. This was the baby, the last born, Fúxiăo, who had developed dementia and rampaged, killing her handler and two members of a Chinese television crew that had been filming for a doomed reboot of the show. Fúxiăo’s end caught our atrophied attention because it was trillionaire Yevgeny Rodchenko, the Russian-American CEO of BioMarket GenEquities, who put her down himself. The newsreaders said he paid a cool billion for the license to do the job the old way—stone ax and spear, the whole paleo bit—and the rights to her remains. The euthanizing was livestreamed, and it drew as many viewers as had once witnessed the births. There was the predictable controversy from GND party candidates, but, in the end, it got little traction with a scandal-numbed electorate and didn’t keep Rodchenko from taking the White House. Polling even suggested the mastodon hunt was decisive in the Heartland. This was the newsreader’s opinion and so it was ours as well.
Our new president gave the preserved body of Fúxiăo back to the Chinese government as a gesture of friendship, a new era of transpacific partnership. It stands there still at the Hangzhou De-Extinction Institute, a monument of human achievement that we saw again when the resurrection scientists, in partnership with President Rodchenko’s BioMarket Laboratories, announced they had brought back the sabre-toothed tiger. We aren’t supposed to call them tigers, because that’s not accurate, but good luck making us say Smilodons instead. No, these are tigers, savage and superb.
Our wearied hearts surged with forgotten pride when we first saw them, a whole streak of the reanimated beasts, and we thought, despite ourselves: Maybe they got it right this time. All the force of life itself coiled in the muscles beneath the tigers’ glistening coats. Their roars full-throated, audible from a mile away. The sabre-tooths are a wonder to look at, streamed to our new windshield displays, tackling caribou. A welcome distraction, after all, from our skeletal automobiles lining the freeway, our movie stars’ mansions carbonized on the smoldering hills.
So, can we really be blamed for mostly forgetting that Jíyí, the last surviving mastodon, lives on still? Is it our fault that we barely noticed when she was released from captivity, let to wander the northernmost reaches of the tundra to live out what remains of her unnatural life? We have the fires to worry about, and the question of potable water, and the adjustment to our insect proteins. We can only feel so deeply about a fraction of the world at any given time, our neuroscientists tell us. The sabre-tooths command what little we can spare of our precious batteries and bandwidth. We agree that the tigers are a more fitting remedy for our national mood than the mastodons ever were. That they mirror our surviving hopes. That their freedom from fear inspires us as we migrate through this endless coil of dying engines to the unburnt sections of our cities. To watch them is an act of solidarity, a statement of faith in our remarkable ingenuity. And when the lights go out, there are only a few of us who still sit in our darkened spaces, gazing into dimming devices to watch Jíyí as she shambles, solitary, across the whitened wastes, looking for another one like herself. If our children find us, see our eyes filming over and ask us what’s wrong, we say, “Nothing, sweetheart, don’t you worry,” though we really mean that we, too, know what it feels like to be the last of something.
jared green 