Elephant Man 2028: A Political Horror
ELEPHANT MAN 2028
A Political Horror
Fiction by John Pozer
The Ringmaster’s Diary
THE CALL
They keep me in a box.
Not pine, not satin-lined, not with a brass latch. No — acrylic. Crystal clear. Walls thicker than a man’s fist. A life-support coffin with wires trailing like spaghetti and tubes shoved up my neck.
I can’t scratch. Can’t smoke. Can’t sip coffee. God, do I miss coffee. Sometimes I hear the percolator: gurgle, plunk-plunk, hiss. Burnt truck-stop beans in Montana. That’s when I know I’m hallucinating — because here, nothing smells like anything. The air is scrubbed, filtered, sanitized. No odour. No texture. Just the endless white hum. Perfect for meditating.
And yet — I am still David Lynch. They took my body, but not my voice. Not my vision. Those survived. Like badges sewn onto my Scout uniform.
I am that I am. My new favourite mantra. Every day I remind myself: You’re still a film-maker. You’re still working, even now. I was debating whether a head in a box counts as an auteur when the phone rang. Not a phone, exactly. A plug in my skull, a tube funnelling sound straight into my ear canal. When it buzzes, it’s like a murder hornet trapped in my brain. They designed it so I don’t need to hold anything. Because, well — no hands. The hornet buzzed. A click. Then a voice:
“Mr. Lynch? We have a proposition for you.”
I groaned. I’d been propositioned before. MoMA wanted an AI retrospective. Netflix pitched me to write ‘Warp Speed, The Miracle.’ Even George Lucas called. I respect George. Good businessman. To all, I said no. Too many cooks. Too much meddling.
“Not interested,” I rasped, my voice bubbling through the speaker like tar.
“Sir ... it’s the President.”
“I already met one,” I sighed. “One was enough.”
“No, you don’t understand. The President is ... ill.”
Ill. They always start polite. Then comes the truth.
“What kind of ill?” I asked.
A pause. The kind where you picture the caller sweating, dizzy, wiping their brow.
“Elephantiasis. At least, that’s the clinical term. But this isn’t ordinary swelling. His ankles have ballooned in size. His skin is ... changing. Roughening. Turning gray. It’s happening fast.”
I laughed, though it came out like a wet cough.
“So what you’re saying is — he’s turning into an elephant?”
Another pause. Then, quietly: “Yes. Exactly.” And that’s when I knew the circus had come to town. And they needed me.
THE MEETING
Two days later, they wheeled me out of the lab, chamber perched on a steel pedestal. A convoy of black SUVs flanked me like pall-bearers. I felt like a carnival goldfish, sloshing in a bag, Secret Service staring at me like I wasn’t real. It’s nice to feel needed.
The White House smelled of bleach and fear. The Oval Office — smaller than TV promised. And there he was: the President. Slumped, ankles bulging from his loafers like roots hunting for soil. His hands cracked and gray, curled into stubby trunks.
He didn’t speak, just lifted his heavy head and stared at me with eyes that remembered being human.
“Mr. President,” I croaked. “You look like hell.”
His Chief of Staff winced. “Please, Mr. Lynch — sensitivity —”
“Shut up,” I said. “I’m talking to him.” The President’s lips twitched. Almost a smile. He nodded painfully. And they rolled me out.
I joined the President later in his private suite. He reclined, feet suspended by wire. The Chief of Staff asked if I would record what was happening — his silence, his body’s betrayal.
“Like the Maysles Brothers,” he said, trying to impress me. “Like Grey Gardens. Honest. Intimate.”
I thought of Merrick. My Elephant Man. A monster who climbed into society’s good graces.
“Elephant Man 2028,” I whispered.
“Pardon?”
“Nothing. Just thinking.”
I silently agreed to participate then and there. Because what else do you do when the leader of the free world is mutating into a pachyderm? You point a camera. You let the film roll. You watch. No script. No meddling. Final cut — or no deal. My terms were quickly drafted into a memo. I was back in charge. The unshackled director. The tortured ringmaster.
SHOOTING BEGINS
Day One: nothing happened. Which is to say, everything did — too slowly for television.
The camera swallowed the room whole: patriotic fringe on the curtains, a glass of untouched water with a lemon slice, a medical monitor blinking like a lie. The President stared at the middle distance. As if watching a country leave itself behind.
“Let it run,” I told the operator. “Let the boredom talk.”
The handlers hated that. Boredom is a crime in Washington. So they invented action: aides with folders, a doctor tapping a chart, someone cracking a weather joke. Nobody laughed. The jokes landed like dead birds on asphalt.
We waited. And we rolled. That’s the job.
Day Two: I asked for a foot bath. “Warm water. Epsom salts. No perfumes. White basin.” They looked at me like I’d ordered a volcano. But I knew: if you can’t get an actor to be honest, get them to feel something. Warmth. Relief. It opens a door.
They brought the basin. The President eyed it the way men in suits eye vulnerability. His swollen ankles, glazed and enormous, rested on a towel like alien fruit. The nurse lowered them into the water. A quiet gulp. His eyes closed.
“Keep rolling,” I whispered.
He didn’t speak. But he sighed. A man who’d carried a weight too long, setting down one corner at last. The room softened.
I made a note: Relief. The language of relief.
That night I couldn’t sleep, which is just plain weird for a head in a box. Sleep comes as a curtain of static for me. They dim the lights. The tubes tick. I drift. But in this particular drift I dreamed of old film stock, 16mm, black and white, the sound of it in a projector, the flutter as it challenges the gate, the clatter when it jams, the frame burning from the too-hot bulb, a white hole widening, eating a face.
When I woke, the room had that same burned-frame feeling. The lemon in the glass had sunk. The monitor’s green line climbed, fell, climbed.
“Coffee,” I said to no one. A reflex. I didn’t see the nurse, and she pretended she hadn’t heard.
In the morning, his skin had changed again. It’s a strange thing, to study the texture of another man’s body the way you follow a location scout’s map. The grey had darkened along the knuckles, little plates of roughness aligning in a pattern. A make-up artist, drafted in from the press team, dabbed at the fissures with a sponge. Flesh-coloured paint. A tic-tac-toe with no winner.
“Stop,” I told her. She froze, sponge mid-air. “You can’t paint over a weather system,” I said. “Let the storm be the storm.”
From then on, they stopped trying to hide it with cosmetics. The concealment moved elsewhere, the way a stain travels when you pour seltzer on it. Access lists tightened. The Press Secretary learned new deflection tactics. The public schedule thinned to a string of phone calls, each one “very productive.” Not “perfect,” but very productive. We filmed him taking none of them.
THE FIRST LEAK
A shoe under the resolute desk. A loafer split down the side. Strained leather peeled back in a curl. Empty. You fill in the rest.
The internet did what it does — memes, cartoons, outrage, jokes. A foam company pivoted to pachyderm boots by noon. A late-night host rehearsed a trumpet noise.
“Don’t worry,” a handler told me. “It’ll blow over.” His chin had a dimple like a third nostril.
“Weather doesn’t blow over,” I said. “It travels. It ends up somewhere.”
We filmed him walking. A new gait. Half-step, drag, bend at the waist. His right arm crooked forward, reaching for a thing that wasn’t there. The tail of something. The hand of someone. My camera operator gasped, then pretended he hadn’t.
“Keep rolling,” I whispered. “No zooms. Let the frame breathe.”
He refused the public. Refused microphones. In private he began to speak with motion, with breath. A tilt of the skull that had grammar. He held his arm out, drew it back slow, like pulling a rope. Groans like a foghorn in a bottle. Like the settling of a century-old house — a weight you can’t stop, only accept. At night, when they left me alone, I talked to him like a bad teacher. The worst kind. The kind who explains. “You’re living inside an allegory. It happens to all of us. Some stranger than others.”
He looked at me. Not at the camera — at me. He tapped two fingers on the chair arm. Again. And again. A dying metronome. The pulse of a herd crossing a dry riverbed. I let the silence stand. A good silence is eloquent. It lets me cut, one beat later than anyone expects. Aides brought him elephant videos. Therapy, someone said. Charity demo. Scientific study. Nothing has one reason in the White House. Everything has six.
He watched the herds cross the savannah. A calf plunging into water. The matriarch’s foot pressing into the mud. Two bulls testing resolve without malice. Trunks resting on faces in a loving touch older than any constitution. He began sleeping in the afternoons. In sleep he made a sound I thought I recognized. Not a snore. Not a wheeze. An event. A deep rumble that started far away and rolled in fast, like a summer storm.
The nurse wrote “snoring” on his chart. I erased it in my head.
Communication, I would have written.
WEEK THREE
The noise began. It always does.
First at the edges: a podcaster with a new nickname. A church sign swapping LION OF JUDAH for MIGHTY ELEPHANT, SLOW TO ANGER. A t-shirt shop stamping grey slogans on grey cotton. At a rally, his followers imitated what they thought they’d seen. Crowds linked trunk-to-tail — hands in belt loops — while a man with a bullhorn declared it ancient, dignified, the herd’s way of shielding itself from lions, hyenas, ankle-biting media.
The opposition did what it does: a rumour, a diagnosis, three op-eds from different angles that met in the same headline. The word was “monster.” The cult answered with “miracle.” Everyone agreed on the word that mattered least: man.
At night, while the building slept, I watched my footage. Aides kept their backs turned, collapsed around me in postures of prayer. I replayed the basin shot, the walk, the savannah on the screen. As if his life were a vinyl record and my job was to hear the crackle as music. And I found it. Not in his body, but in my memory.
Karl, my long-trusted camera operator — thin, precise, a man who could pull focus on a thought — leaned in close to my glass. “Are we making him into what he wants to be?”
I blinked. I cannot nod. “We’re making him into what we can see,” I said. “Which is worse.”
Karl studied the monitor: a distorted silhouette filled a corner of the frame. “Feels like we’re drawing a monster on a map. And now ships will go there.”
“Monsters attract ships,” I told him. “It’s their curse.”
I should know.
One rainy Monday, a doctor tried his hand. They never called it surgery. It was simply a procedure — the word you use to obscure, to fog a lens. The forehead bulge pressed forward like a hidden crescent moon. They thought they could reduce it, release pressure, coax nature back with a needle, a nudge, a stitch.
We filmed none of it. The door was closed. When it opened — grey dust flecked his sleeves. His eyes were wet.
The bulge looked the same. No — fuller. As if insulted, it had decided to grow.
He slept through the day. At dusk, he rose and walked the walk: arm extended, leaning forward, foot dragging, the invisible tail gripped by invisible fingers. He stopped at the French doors. The sky was the sad blue of a bruise that refused to heal. He raised his arm.
The garden lights rose, cued like theatre. Then the sound came. Long. Low. Vibrating the glass of my prison. Warping my frame at the edges. A sound no human throat should shape. And yet he did.
The nurse dropped her clipboard. The guard clutched his earpiece. Karl stiffened at the camera, staring at me with support. He is my greatest collaborator. My Dr. Frankenstein.
“Keep rolling,” I whispered.
He laughed once, disbelieving. “We are, sir.” The note ended. Afterward, the building cracked softly, as if the foundation had shifted to bear a new weight, a new pressure. The President looked over. At me, not the lens. The lens isn’t a person. It’s a mouth. He sought the voice behind it.
“Again?” I whispered.
No second sound. He didn’t need one. The first was still bouncing somewhere between stone and sky. Echoing off the mountains and clouds.
THE VOICE
No one gives you a voice until you lose it. Then everyone’s a sound engineer, twisting knobs, saying you’re fine but you need to project.
Next morning, they fed the press pool lies. “The President is in excellent spirits.” “He continues to work.” “We must focus on the amazing job done so far.” “This team is committed to success.” Lines that fit any week, any year, no matter who is dying. They promised a brief appearance. A wave.
We filmed him rehearsing the wave. He couldn’t do it. The arm wanted to be a trunk. The elbow, the wrist, the memory in the bones had been forgotten, misplaced. They had learned a new story. Each attempt to lift and rock the hand failed. The appendage curved forward instead, reaching for a tail that wasn’t there.
“Don’t force it,” I told him. “If you force it, you’re lying. People hate being lied to. They want their lies in other packaging.”
He stared. Eyes dark at the edges, dull in the middle. Marbles lost under a couch. I knew that look. I’d measured it in actors who’d reached the scene they feared. Not for content. For permanence. It sticks. Never comes off.
“What do you want?” I asked. “Not what do they want. What do you want?”
Some men live a lifetime and never answer in good faith. He made the low sound again, shorter this time, conversational. The Secret Service man by the door flinched.
“Not for them,” I said. “For me. Talk to me.” He tried words. First, a dry wheeze. Then a cough — like a faucet long dead spitting up a clot of brown water.
“Weight,” he said. The voice not his. Not showman. Beast. “It’s all ... mud.”
“Whose?” I asked.
His gaze turned to the window, seeking relief from his misery. “Mine,” he said. Then winced. “Theirs.” A breath, a crack. “History.”
After meetings filled with words like “progress” and “new phase,” the handlers agreed to mic him.
Karl attached the cordless lavalier. It trembled on his lapel like a bird in the wrong tree. His voice shook it with that low register.
“Noise,” he said. “Keeps the weight out. But the mud…” He trailed off.
“What mud?”
The bulge on his forehead caught a sliver of light from the rising moon. “The herd,” he said. Then, softer, confessing: “Carries the weight.”
The party didn’t need more chaos. It needed raw material.
A single sentence leaked. No one knew how, though everyone guessed. Carry the weight. The phrase took on a life of its own. “We carry the weight.” The party sold it. A congressman cried on camera. Said he’d felt heavy his whole life and now he knew why.
The opposition seized it too. Dead weight. Same word, different team.
I pushed. “Tell me about the mud.”
He spoke slowly, mouth rented for the night. “You don’t see, because you’re moving. Then you stop.” He glanced down at his swollen legs.
Karl followed his eyes, tilting the lens, framing a static image that looked like boots covered in mud. The President breathed in, a deep new life, and lifted his arm. The trunk that wasn’t a trunk made a searching motion. For a heartbeat his shadow on the wall was not the outline of a man. We all saw it. We all pretended we hadn’t. That’s become a national skill.
THE ROSE GARDEN
The cement patio of the Rose Garden became his refuge, his church. At night he let the low notes unfurl — one, two, sometimes three before fatigue hit. We recorded from inside; the handlers feared a parabolic mic hidden in the shrubs. I felt it through the thick glass, in my fluid, in the bones no longer mine. It vibrated something I hadn’t known I still owned.
Karl found the setting, the perfect tweak, that caught the note without distorting it. At two in the morning, he played it back on the headphones and wept. The kind of tears that slide away, as if gravity had changed its mind. “I don’t know what it’s doing to me,” he said. “Music is a drug,” I told him. “It speaks in languages we don’t have dictionaries for.”
Publicly, the line stayed the line: excellent spirits. Privately, aides practiced walking trunk-to-tail, in case he did it before others. I over-heard staffers debate whether “herd” could be reclaimed from its pandemic baggage. One said it belonged to animals. Another said animals are politics. A third said everything is. A bishop came. His cross was thick enough to serve as a weapon. He stood too close and used the voice that’s worked on dying men for centuries.
“You are loved,” he said, pressing are like a button on a sticky remote.
The President listened, polite, the way old men are polite when you cut their steak too small. And when the bishop finished, he looked at me. Everyone looked at me when they wanted to be understood.
“What do I say?” his eyes asked.
“Silence is power,” I said.
When the bishop left, the President spoke. “Herds protect their calves. They make a circle. The strong on the outside.”
“And the weak? The frightened?” I asked.
He waited, then: “They sing.”
THE ROUGH CUT
A week later, we screened the assembly. He hadn’t wanted to watch. Some folks don’t like mirrors that refuse to lie on command. But the handlers thought it would be good for morale. For narrative ownership: a phrase that made me miss a good smoke.
We watched the basin. The walk. The silhouette at the doors. The note that shook the glass. He watched with a face that wasn’t the one on screen. Like an actor studying their performance in a role they never auditioned for. At the end, I let the screen go black. I didn’t speak. People ruin their own moments by narrating them. He spoke first. “It’s beautiful.”
I waited. Sometimes people correct themselves to please you. He didn’t.
“It’s heavy,” he added. “It should be heavier.”
There it was. The producer note from a man who had never produced a thing in his life. Except a method for not hearing ‘no.’
“We can make it heavier,” I said.
“How?”
“Time,” I told him. “And silence. And shame.”
He flinched at that last one. I hadn’t meant it as an arrow, but it found its mark.
Two days later came the brief appearance. An event without officials. Without dignitaries. A slow exit onto a balcony. No wave. Just the arm in its new curve, and a long stillness.
The crowd — staff, cameras, a few invited friends — didn’t know whether to clap or stay silent. Interns, disguised as press, put their hands on the belt loops of the person in front. At first shy, like a secret kink. Then, ashamed of their shyness, bold holding on. Proud to form a chain.
He looked down at them, studying their shock. The bulge on his forehead had found a geometry. Not horn. Not tumour. A tightly-stretched dome of skin — sculpted by an angry god with a steady thumb. He didn’t speak. Murmurs rose from the crowd. And murmurs in this town become headlines. He turned and went inside.
“Good enough,” a handler said to me under his breath.
“Nothing recorded is ever enough,” I said. And I felt the old Boy Scout in me — blood and veins — stir with something like joy. The joy of service.
That night, Karl brought footage he hadn’t been ordered to shoot. He’d gone to the fence line, where tourists pressed phones through bars for a pixel of myth. A boy, twelve maybe, cradled his little sister. He moved to show her how to hook her hand on his belt loop. She giggled. He whispered, “This is how you don’t get lost.”
No merch. No politics. Just children.
“Put it in,” I said.
“In the cut?”
“In the blood.”
THE FINAL CUT
You want me to confess I made him a god. You want a culprit who can carry the blame, because it’s easier to say the film-maker did this than to admit the animal in us did what it always does when it sees something foreign, something odd: it hesitates, it circles, it tests the air. Then it leans in and listens. It watches, like a predator.
We screened the final cut for the inner circle first. They cried in all the right places, and in one incorrect place that I cherished. The boy and his sister at the fence. Power hates to be moved by the powerless.
We screened it for him last. He watched like a man who had never watched anything without also performing for it. When he saw his appearance on the balcony, he didn’t look at me. He looked down at his hand that wasn’t a hand, flexed it as if flexing were faith.
“It’s true,” he said. “Even if it isn’t.”
I didn’t ask which part. I’d learned to let ambiguity have a life of its own.
The handlers debated release strategies. They wanted a platform, a logo, control. I wanted a projector on a sheet in a field with crickets counting out the beats of life. We compromised: an East Room premiere to test an audience. Small crowd. No phones, because everyone important knows to leave theirs in the car. The real release would come later.
He insisted on one thing. “I want to be in the garden,” he said.
“After,” I said.
“During,” he said. “The door open.”
He had learned the value of an open door in a house famous for keeping them shut.
Night fell the way it does when a room is full of people trying not to rustle. The film played. Gasps at the walk. Cautious laughter at the basin. Then silence at the note — like a thousand people taking their first breath in years, then remembering they weren’t alone, and holding it.
I didn’t watch the film. I watched him. His eyes were alert, curious. He wasn’t checking for errors. He was trying to understand the man he had just met. At the end, I let the black sit longer than polite. Ten beats. Twelve. The room felt the weight. Then the lights came on.
He stood on the cement patio in the garden and turned away. The aides moved and un-moved when he ignored them. He stepped to the centre and stood in hunched silence. Then the arm, curving as it always did, searched the sky. The night comforting him as if he belonged in nature.
People half-followed, unsure, etiquette strangling instinct. He reached higher. Looked up. Found his moon. I like to think he smiled, though the new planes of his face made it hard to tell. He held the arm high. A salute. Far beyond the fence, a distant group with hands on belt loops recognized the signal.
And he sang.
The note rolled across the lawn and out into a city still deciding how far this could go. Streetlights blinked. Trees trembled. Cars slowed. A police horse lifted its head and whickered back. He lowered his arm. Silence filled the garden. The crowd held their breath, then did something unheard of: they did not clap. Even they knew. God and monsters need no applause.
AFTER THE NOTE
Do you want me to tell you what he said? You want a transcript? He didn’t use words. But afterward everyone swore he had — in their language, in their sorrow, in the exact timbre of comfort they imagined. People will say a violin spoke French if it lets them forget their past.
He turned and looked at me. Not the camera. Me. I thought: He has forgiven me. For what, I wasn’t certain. For filming him. For making him beautiful. For discovering beauty only because we chose to look. He walked toward me, slow, trunk-hand searching. He stopped at my pedestal and leaned in. Breath fogged the glass. He spoke softly, in the small words he had learned to trust.
“Do you hear them?”
“Who?” I asked.
“Us,” he said.
Behind him, under the patio lanterns, the powerful knelt with heads bowed. The cult at the fence fell back and marched into the night with the rhythm of a herd they had never known. Powerful. Meaningful. Unstoppable. In the distance a new chant rose: Hold the tail. Don’t get lost.
The sound found me through the glass, through the hum, through the part of me that refuses to be a box.
“He found his voice,” Karl whispered. “Congratulations.”
“Yes,” I said. Then, because I am a film-maker and I have learned to cut where it hurts: “But was it his? Or ours, all along?”
The night held the question the way a pond holds a stone: with rings, with echoes, with a surface that will forget by morning and a bottom that will not. We filmed until the batteries died. We looked long after the light stopped pretending to love us. And when they wheeled me back through halls that smelled of wax and polish, the lemon in the glass at the edge of the room had risen again, as if it had changed its mind about sinking.
I did not sleep. The tubes ticked. The pump ticked. The house settled around its new weight. Somewhere outside, a herd was growing and learning a new hymn. I told myself a lie to stay honest: You’re still a film-maker. The purpose of your art is to create truth, to bring new myths into the light.
I am cursed.
A NOTE TO SELF
The film was never released. Which means it was released everywhere. A leak is a premiere without credits. A bootleg moves faster than a rumour. If you want to make money on a film, call George Lucas.
Clips surfaced first in places that did not exist ten years earlier: streams that carried a thousand faces to a small screen, each one swearing they alone could hear the words. Later, it played bigger venues: on courthouse steps, on blankets in the desert, at rallies on phones held high like devotional candles.
No one agreed on what they saw. That is how you know an image has power. Some swore he was a prophet. Some swore he was a fraud. Some swore he was a mirror that had finally cracked and shown us the animal behind the glass.
Academics called it the first pachydermal presidency and footnoted themselves into exhaustion. Merchants sold candles with his silhouette. Politicians quoted him, or quoted against him, sometimes in the same speech. Children at playgrounds linked belt loops to keep from losing each other, and teachers called it unsafe.
I was asked, years later, if I regretted it. The film. The cut. The choice to take the gig. I gave the answer all film-makers give when the reel has ended and the audience still sits in the dark.
“No.”
Because regret is not in the frame. It is outside the projector, pacing the lobby, hiding behind a potted plant. Regret belongs to others. What remains is this: a sound that may or may not have been a word, a concrete slab that used to be a garden has turned into a cathedral, and an old country that learned the trick that it never learns: hope can die.
Note to self: When in doubt, make it heavier.
Message to all: When afraid, sing. »