The Elephant Gate

A week later, Kevin was discharged. The strange brainwave patterns exhibited during the surgery, and the subsequent seizure activity, never returned after he regained consciousness, and, with the exception of his mode of speech, he was discharged as a full recovery with scheduled outpatient chemotherapy.

Kevin managed to hide the elephant tusk inside his stuffed animal through the hole where Kandula's ear used to be. A kindly nurse sewed the hole back up for him. He was now careful to grip it only in the middle of the body instead of the ear.

When his parents arrived, wheelchair in tow, he hopped off the bed and gave them a bow. They looked at each other uneasily. Kevin knew early on that almost no time has passed in his real world, even though two years had passed in Pra'dee. He knew he acted differently than before, but there was little he could do to change that now.

"Hi Mom. Hi Dad. I'm ready to go home." He was already dressed neatly, and had the rest of his clothes neatly folded in one of the hospital's paper bags. Mom stepped forward and hugged him, then picked up his things.

Kevin reached the wheelchair and gingerly sat down. "Thanks, Dad."

His father tousled his hair in reply, and Kevin's face clouded when he remember his dad Thadchai doing that just a short time ago.

"Do you hurt anywhere, baby?" His mom hurried over; she must have seen his expression. He smoothed his face over.

"I'm okay, Mom. Thank you. Let's go home."

* * *

His room seemed small and cluttered compared to the one he had for the last two years, and yet both rooms were overlaid in his mind, one blending into another.

He touched his baseball trophies that were lined up like soldiers across the top of his bookcase. His schoolbooks were on his desk. He picked one up; they seemed strange and alien to him after adapting to the writing of his adopted country.

He opened the lid on his laptop and booted it up. After the familiar logos flashed across and it settled into a steady hum, he stroked the keyboard. On impulse, he sat down and opened up his word processing program. Before, he had nothing but schoolwork assignments in there, but now, he started to slowly write about his experiences.

Soon, the familiarity of the keyboard came back, and his typing speed increased. The clarity in his mind expanded.

When he was in Pra'dee, this, his real world, quickly became a dim and hazy recollection. He was afraid it would happen again as the pressures of returning to his old life would push out those memories until he lost them.

His fingers began to cramp a little, unused to the steady movements as they danced across the keys.

When he stopped, he amazed at the amount that he had typed. Carefully saving the file, he started a new one specifically regarding his combat training.

His fingers faltered when he began writing of the elephants, already feeling the emptiness in his mind, that special place where he could hear the gentle animals, and they could hear him. He walked over to his hospital bag and pulled out his now-heavier stuffed elephant.

"I miss you, Kandi," he thought as he gave his beloved toy a squeeze.

* * *

Despite the short time he was actually gone, things changed more than just him.

Although his parents no longer argued out loud, there was still a coolness in the house. At first, all three would each dinner together, but gradually his father became more and more absent until Kevin rarely saw him at any time other than the mornings.

His schoolwork had suffered, perhaps more due to the language differences than anything else. Those variances were ascribed to his surgical procedure, and a tutor was hired to bring him back to the same level as his peers.

Whenever he felt overwhelming homesickness for his dad Thadchai or Suri or Kandi, he would pull out those stories and reread them. They would make him feel a little bit closer to them.

Gradually he stopped dreaming of that land, and the stories were relegated to desktop storage as his current life supplanted the old.

The stuffed elephant grew dusty as it crouched among the baseball memorabilia and the faded boutonniere from his middle school homecoming dance, and all the flotsam and jetsam that a normal teenage boy acc.u.mulates.

His parents divorced during his first year in college, Kevin's presence no longer an excuse to stay together. He stayed in his childhood home with his mother, and tried to maintain a relationship with his father through once-a-week meals and the occasional baseball-watching night.

After high school, his baseball trophies and childhood things were boxed away to the attic, but for some reason Kevin always kept that stuffed animal close by.

As his parent's relationship disintegrated, he found solace in his thoughts and words. He began writing a column in the college newspaper and gradually started a series of short fictional stories in serial form that became popular.

When he graduated with a BA in English Literature, his friends joked that it could be used to make a paper airplane. But he was lucky; a small job in the Editing Department in the local newspaper gave him the contacts to spin his fanciful stories into a viable career as a writer. Those long-forgotten stories he wrote down in his childhood turned into a best-selling young a.d.u.l.t fiction series.

Now, at 23 years old, he was comfortable, living on his own in the outskirts of Washington DC, and able to do pretty much anything he wanted.