Platypus Pentathlon

No species names or classification info, though of course platypuses are mammals.
No map showing that platypuses live in Australia.
No mention of the fact that platypuses are forest-, grassland-, and freshwater-dwelling predators.
No humorous quote by Mark Twain about platypuses.

Tall Tales

s a hatchling, they told me my species was immortal. Grand tales I heard of mammoth-sized platypuses in Patagonia, duckbilled crusaders charging across Gondwana, brave pioneering monotremes forging the straight into Tasmania, stories without end. Hour after hour I sat mesmerized as I heard of mountain-climbing platypuses, ocean-going platypuses, platypuses with burrows the size of caverns, platypuses who caught live fish and swallowed them whole—a whole host of fables, fantastic enough to hold me spellbound. Every night I shouted to my mother, “Let’s hear about the platypus from Botany Bay!” or, “Tell me about Mickey, the kangaroo-riding platypus!” It was always exciting to hear the new stories, and always a comfort to hear the old ones.
       But then the tales took on a new twist. Less and less, as time went on, were they about platypuses, and more and more about a new species of mammal: “humans,” they were called, or “people,” or “men.” The first time my mother described them, I didn’t know if she was serious or joking. Could there really be such a creature—six feet tall, yet not a foot from front to back; mammalian, yet totally bald except on its head; and in possession of four good limbs, and yet without more than two feet to walk on? If there were such an creature, it would have to be a supreme paradox of a beast—defying logic, defying rules, defying nature. Could there be such a beast? No, impossible. But I didn’t say that to my mother. She would have had a conniption and kicked me out of the burrow. And, anyway, it made for a good story, so I shrugged and went along with it.
       But then she didn’t stop. Soon my mother was telling me that these humans not only existed, but performed all kinds of madcap stunts. To offset their ridiculous baldness, they wore all sorts of equally ridiculous garments—“clothes,” they were called. And they used the most outlandish devices: “stoves,” for example, and “running water,” and “artificial light,” to make things hot, wet, or bright, according to their taste. And as their tastes grew more perverted, their contraptions grew ever more outlandish. Soon they invented television sets, which allowed them to sit in one place for hours without getting bored; bathtubs, where they could get soaking wet, yet remain unable to swim; and keys and locks, which, when fastened to other devices, sealed them off completely and made them unavailable for use. To top it all off, they lived in special homes, called “houses,” which—get this—did not lie underground at all, but up above the soil, apparently tunneled out of empty air. When I heard all this, I didn’t know whether to laugh or to roll my eyes. As it happened, I did neither. For my mother told the story with straight-faced solemnity, and it brooked no contradiction.
       Soon, however, she went further. Pretty soon she was telling me that just down the river lay the continent’s biggest collection of humans, a gigantic settlement (or “city,” as she called it), by the name of “Sydney,” which contained—get this—three million humans. That’s when I knew my mother had gone off her rocker. I listened coolly as she went on about how these people crossed the land in “cars,” sailed the seas in “ships,” and cruised the sky in “airplanes.” I made special effort not to wince as she went on about “toasters” and “tablecloths,” “trumpets” and “tennis shoes,” “trolleys” and “trinkets” and “tripe.” But she didn’t stop there, not my mother. Pretty soon she was telling me that there were such places as the Alamo, Borneo, Congo, Draganovo, Edinboro, and Fresno, and that there were all sorts of wild beasts, such as gorillas and hummingbirds and iguanas and jaguars and kites. I remained cool as she told me how these people studied lymphology and microbiology and nanotechnology and ontology and parapsychology, and that they grew up to become queens and rabbis, students and teachers, umpires and vampires, womanizers and xenophobes, yew-keepers and zookeepers. In the midst of this preposterous claptrap, it was all I could do to keep my head.
       Finally I exploded. “Mother, mother,” I shouted, “what is all this about? Where did you get these delusions? Do you actually believe all this, or are you testing my gullibility? Before long you’ll be asking me to believe that these humans give birth to full-grown babies; that they groom their hair with curling irons; that they have governments and taxes and religious disputes; and that they eat their food in ‘hotels’ and ‘restaurants’ and ‘bars’ and in every other inconceivable location. You’ll be saying they believe in such nonsense as ‘photons’ and ‘protons’ and ‘quarks,’ and spend long hours talking about ‘galaxies’ and ‘nebulas’ and ‘black holes.’ You’ll be saying they’ve probed the mysteries of the ‘brain,’ the ‘kidneys,’ the ‘pulmonary system,’ the ‘lymphatic nodes,’ even the ‘mitochondria’; you’ll probably even say that they’ve sailed into space and walked on the moon. You’ll be telling me that there are places with such ridiculous names as Azerbaijan, Baja California, the Dardanelles, El Ferrol, Gaza, and Hokkaido Island; that there are plants so strange as to be called juniper and kumquat and lilies-of-the-valley and mandrakes and nightshade; that there are foods so exotic as octopus and parsley and quiche and rhubarb and succotash and tortellini; and that there are disciplines so diverse as uranography, virology, winnowing, xerography, yeomanry, and zymurgy. What you’re saying just doesn’t make sense! These humans can walk, they can swim, and they can fly? What are they—mammals, birds, or fish? I know taxidermists who can lie better than that! Mother, mother, I have to leave you now! This is just too insane!”

Dreams

For a platypus, dozing off can be a hallucinatory experience. After I moved out of my mother’s place, I dug a burrow of my own, and it was then that I began to dream my own dreams, to escape and let my mind go yonder, to collapse and plummet into nocturnal mysteries. Yes, the more time I spent in my own burrow, the more time I spent in my own dreams. Only there, in deepest solitude, in the innermost hollows of my lair, could I seem to tap into my mind’s deepest wellsprings. And once I started, I couldn’t stop. On and on, I kept dreaming, more and more, until pretty soon it was the main thing on my mind. Out sunning myself on the bank, out hunting down by the river, I kept ruminating over the last night’s phantasms. Before long, I couldn’t think about anything else. My every thought became a daydream; my every act became the act of a sleepwalker. In the end, I lived to dream. The reason I woke up in the morning was in order to go to sleep at night.
At first I dreamt of the usual things: the falling, the being chased, the swimming downstream to find that you were gradually changing into a two-ton wombat—you know, the usual stuff. By and by, however, I began to dream different dreams. First I dreamt that all my hair fell out. Then I dreamt that I wandered into a cave, where some bats came by and chased me away. Then I dreamt that I climbed up an old wattle tree, where lightning struck me, and I fell to the ground like a charred cinder. Then I dreamt that all my hair fell out, gathering into little clumps on the ground, until it changed into bats, which sailed up into the sky, higher and higher, until lightning struck them, and they caught fire, yet still they flew higher and higher, looking like nothing so much as frenzied little lanterns, until eventually they ascended to the heavens, where, at last, they rested, and then they turned into stars.
That’s how it was at first. But then I made a decision, and it changed everything. No longer, I decided, would I settle back and let my mind take me wherever it pleased. Rather, I decided, I myself would seize control, would overthrow my haunted half, would take the helm for my own and plunge my own ship into dark waters of my own selection. It was a big step, and certainly easier said than done. One doesn’t just say, “I think I’ll have such-and-such a dream,” any more than one says, “I think I’ll have such-and-such a universe.” Rather, in both cases, you simply wake up and find yourself there, left to make of it what you can. Indeed, to the average

But even when you’re given the world, it takes spunk, it takes muster, to shape it. If you don’t lead, you’ll be led, and there’s a big difference between the two. What’s stranger still, it’s even harder to sleepwalk than to walk. The material world can be embraced, but the ethereal world eludes one’s grasp. For some, a dreamed pebble can be harder to move than an mountain in the waking world. But what’s magical is this: if you can move a dreamed pebble, then dreamed mountains become portable with a wish, and nothing is beyond your grasp.
Each day at bedtime I made a solemn vow to make every effort—to flex my mind and do my darndest—to gain control of my dreams. At first it didn’t work. At first all the usual images flew past me like river water, and I floundered for a time in impotence. It took me quite a while before I was able to exert my will. In my dream, I climbed up a hill. I bathed in the sun. I wandered to a lake. I caught twenty live perch. I thought, “Wouldn’t it be nice just to float in this lake for hours on end?” I floated in the lake for hours on end. I wondered, “Hey, did I do that on purpose?” I decided to give myself a test. I said, “Wouldn’t it be nice if I used that wattle tree as a diving board?” I climbed up the wattle and sprang into the water. I thought, “Wouldn’t it be nice if the sun wasn’t quite so hot? If the sky was just a bit more pink?” The sun changed its brightness and the sky its hue. I thought, “No, that stinks. Let’s just—hey, how about if this lake turns into a whirlpool, sucks me down, and carries me to Zanzibar?” The lake began to foam and froth. I went down, and then I woke up. Ever thenceforth, I have had no trouble controlling my dreams.

Electrolocation

Whenever I wasn’t dreaming, I was out finding food. Into the water I went with my eyes shut, my ears closed, my nostrils squeezed tight. The only thing I could rely upon was my sense of electrolocation. That’s right, electrolocation. This bill of mine can sense all kinds of electrical activity, especially underwater. In fact, it’s so sensitive that it can detect even the tiny electrical currents generated by the muscles of aquatic animals—including freshwater shrimps, and all the yummiest kinds of food. So it’s the buzzing of electric currents that I listen to when I’m underwater; or rather I don’t listen to them, but somehow “see” them; or rather I don’t see them, but somehow “feel”; or rather . . . well, you know what I mean.
       Normally I don’t sense this current until I’m within a few inches of it, and so, normally, I really have to nose my way around when I look for food. One time, though, there was an electric current so strong that it screamed out to me the moment my bill touched the water. It was downstream—how far, I couldn’t tell, but I knew I had to go there to check it out. By the time I got there, the electricity was overpowering, almost deafening. As I moved closer, however, I could make out other patterns in the electrical current. There were muscle-motions all around it, the muscles of good-sized animals—and so many of them, in fact, that I decided I’d better not go any farther. I jumped out of the water and sat down on the bank, and looked out at the spectacle.
       What I saw completely astonished me. Just ahead of me, in the river, there was a whole swarm of platypuses, all of them, seemingly, fighting with each other underneath the waves. The sight was truly astounding, something I’d never imagined, we platypuses are solitary animals, never congregating at all, except in order to mate. But here in front of me were six or seven platypuses, all of them apparently duking it out beneath the waves. When I looked closer, I saw that they were fighting for some small object at the bottom of the river. Then it struck me that maybe the object was the thing that was giving off the electricity. I sat and watched as the scuffle went on for several long minutes.
       Then, finally, one platypus proudly emerged with a hunk of metal in his mouth. He tried to eat it, but soon discovered it wasn’t food. Then another stole it from him, and tried to eat it too. But this platypus was soon mauled by the surrounding crowd, and the object sailed through the air. Presently it landed with a clatter in the rocks beside me.
       I only saw it for a brief moment, but that was enough. I had never seen anything like it. It was made of metal, and yet it was completely smooth, as if some creature had crafted it deliberately, but with a skill surpassing any beast’s. It had two structures on top, knobs which I might hesitatingly call “terminals”—one marked with a cross, the other with a straight line. The thing was silver on one side and black on the other. On the side of it, there was a single word: “Energizer.”

Doing It

Sometimes being a female platypus isn’t a total picnic. The first time breeding season rolled around, I hid in my burrow all day long. I starved myself, only coming out a couple of hours each night to feed. I cringed there every day, my knees shaking, my heart pounding, my body curled up as if inside an egg. What was I afraid of? Well, basically, I was afraid of sex. And I had good reason to be.
       Male platypuses, God’s most obscene joke! First they have this all-consuming desire to shag your brains out every year. But then they have these venomous spurs on their legs—spurs which no female would ever have—and really deadly spurs, too, which are supposedly useful in fighting each other over us females—but, because of these males’ incompetence, the spurs most often end up getting used accidentally, thereby killing us, us females, during the act of intercourse! It would be enough to make you laugh, if it didn’t also make you scared for your life. Well, many females accepted the risk, but as for me, I said, “No thank you.” So there I hid, down in my burrow, all day long.
       That was the first year. The second year, it was different. That year, a couple of males spotted me early on. They’d both had their eye on me for weeks, so it wasn’t like I could pretend I wasn’t there. If I didn’t give in to one of them, I was more than half convinced that one of them might take me by force. And then there was another reason. During the past year, I’d had time to think things over, to reflect on what I wanted to do with my life, and to come to a few conclusions. During the past year, I’d eaten; I’d dreamed; I’d had a few interesting experiences; but what had I really accomplished? What was this business of gobbling down shrimp really going to do for me? What was the meaning, the purpose? I didn’t have an answer to this question, and it was quite disquieting. And then, later during the same year, I’d noticed one or two little platypuses just struggling to dig their burrows and make it on their own. It struck me that they could have been my little ones, if I had only taken a chance and participated in the last breeding season. If I had raised a couple of little platypuses of my own, then at least I could say I had accomplished something, other than a little digging and hunting and sitting in the sun. And so I decided to have children. And so my participation in the mating ritual that year was by choice, even in spite of the urgent circumstances, which would have forced me to do the same thing anyway.
       And so that was how it was when, one day late during that breeding season, I walked out of my burrow, and there they both were: Eddie and Jake, standing on the other side of the river, and both eyeing me up and down as if they owned me. There was a tension in the air as they glared at me, and I knew a confrontation was inevitable.
       Then, in a flash, they turned toward each other and began to growl ferociously, to face each other off on the rocky shore. One of them moved this way, the other that. They taunted each other, hurling insults back and forth, each daring the other to make the first move. Then, in an instant, Jake lunged for Eddie, and the two were in each others’ claws. They wrestled for five whole minutes. Even from across the river, I could easily see the aggression in their eyes, the tension in their bulging muscles. At this moment Jake seemed to be in control; then, in a flash, Eddie seemed to gain the upper hand. At this minute, Eddie appeared the champion; the next, Jake took command, lunging up with a fearsome body blow that sent the two plunging into the river.
       I could scarcely make out what happened beneath the waves. The river was choked with tears and blood as the grappling fight ensued to its extreme. The river churned; the bodies thrashed; the two beasts bashed each other to their utmost; but for five minutes no winner or loser appeared. Finally, from beneath the depths, I heard a gargled howl, and it was then that Eddie emerged, his hind leg rent with a nasty gash, and he slunk off, whimpering, into the woods. It was then, too, that Jake resurfaced, and it was then, once again, that he began to eye me up and down as if he owned me. I felt a stirring in my loins as I joined him in the river.
       What can I say about what happened next? For two whole days we just swam together, and then we got down to business. And then the river resumed its former fury, choked with screams and spasms as our grappling fight ensued to its extreme. The river churned; our bodies thrashed; and the two of us bashed each other to our utmost. And then, when it was all over, we parted. Jake disappeared down the river, and I never saw him again.
       More than anything else, I was relieved. The tumult was over with, and no one had been envenomed. Anyway, now that Jake was gone, I was left to raise the hatchlings on my own. This I did as well as I knew how. I laid the eggs, and kept them warm. I scarfed down every last shrimp in the river, and gave my milk to my little platys. I watched them grow up. I tried to teach them everything I knew—all the tricks of the river, all the life lessons that my mother had taught me. Later, even, I saw them go off and dig burrows of their own. But I did not indulge with them in some absurd fantasy about a monstrous eight-foot biped—call it what you will: Bigfoot, the Abominable Snowman, Homo sapiens—scaring creatures up and down the river. I did not tell them this, because although I love the old legends, I also love the truth, too much to repeat my mother’s preposterous flights of fancy.
       But then, months later, I saw something that changed my opinion entirely. It shook me to my core, it made me question the unquestionable, and, when you get right down to it, it made me wonder about the most basic facts of existence.

The Vision

I was climbing to the hilltop when I saw him. He was a hulk of a beast. He stood on his hind legs, eight or nine feet into the air. His front paws hung free on both sides. He was bereft of any hair, except for his scalpe, where a few sparse strands hung down from the top. Apart from his face, which was bald, he stood entirely caged up in garments, cooped up from the sun and the wind. His skin shone the most outrageous shade of beige. He was a fantastical image, as if from some legend. At first I thought I might be dreaming. But when I tried to turn him into a wattle tree by mere force of willpower, I did not succeed, and so I was led to conclude that I was not dreaming. And so he was real, and he was standing there like a monument; like a towering cliff; like a long and prosperous family line; like a galah bird gone south for the winter; like Dmitri Platypus, who, having built a raft of sticks and twigs, rode it out to sea; like an avalanche; like an earthquake; like a total eclipse of the sun. He was standing there, and he was staring at me with perfect boldness, and yet with perfect detachment. For some reason I did not feel afraid. I did not run away, nor do I think I could have if I’d tried. And so I just stood there, stock-still, for five long minutes, locked in eye contact with the mysterious beast. Then, finally, the sun went behind a cloud, and the breeze picked up. My legs regained their strength, and I slithered down the slope, back to the river, back to the real world, back to the leeches and slime-covered rocks.
That whole day, my consciousness overflowed. It was indescribable. My mind ached—whether from some stupendous idea trying to break out, or trying to break in, I do not know which. I slept unsoundly that night. My dreams were dark and disturbed. When I woke up the next morning, it was as if the whole world had changed its color. I got out of my burrow and found the wind strangely calm, the water strangely quiet. I looked into the water, and then I saw it: my reflection.
Platypuses, God’s most preposterous joke! Just then I realized how absurd it was, the platypus condition. For just then, as I looked at myself in the river, suddenly I realized how silly it looks, the body of the platypus—going from bill to fur, from fur to flippers, from flippers to mamma, as if it didn’t know what kind of animal it was supposed to be. And as for the eyes, they point straight up into the air, so that you can’t see where you’re going. And as for the teeth, we lose them as hatchlings, so we can only eat the softest of foods. And as for the venomous spurs, they never help anybody. The longer I sat there and stared at myself, the more preposterous my image began to appear. In fact, I began to chuckle a bit, taken aback by it all, and after that I began to laugh outright. What stupid kind of animal goes out hunting every day, but only after closing his eyes, shutting his nostrils, and covering his ears up tight? What silly sort of beast never congregates in herds, except in the presence of Energizer brand rocks? What preposterous kind of creature spends the whole day dreaming, and then spends the whole night dreaming of dreams to come? It was so ridiculous I couldn’t stop laughing. I had to clutch my belly, I was shaking so hard, but then my belly became ticklish, and I fell over onto my side, howling with hilarity, quaking with glee, clenching all my muscles in an extended fit of mirth that would not let go. I rolled around on the rocks, pounding and kicking the ground, yelling and whooping as I lived through the longest and most physically painful fit of laughter in my life. Finally I splashed over backwards and went rolling down the river, but I didn’t care, it was just too damn funny. This thing called a platypus, it just doesn’t make sense. It has a furry pelt, a duckbill, and flippers, to boot? What is it—a mammal, a bird, or a fish? I’ve got a mother who can lie better than that! Holy man, I have to leave you now! This is just too insane!

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