“CAN WE HIT those brakes a little harder?”
Dr. Helman’s nose was in my lab results. I sat across from her, slumped in a chair that used to engulf me but now felt comically undersized, like we were in a clown act.
“It doesn’t really work that way,” Dr. Helman said absently as she read over my endocrines. On the chart, I clocked: TACE inhibition. GHBP imbalance. Epiphyseal hypertrophy. Jargon that sounded eerily familiar.
“It doesn’t work at all, as far as I can tell,” I said, in a hopefully not too obnoxious way. “I’m still going strong here.”
Dr. Helman looked up. Fixed me with her sweet, infuriating cartoon-pig eyes. “Will, two things. One, this isn’t a bar. You can’t just order another shot of hormones.”
“I was under the impression that’s exactly what people can do these days.”
“No. It isn’t. Certainly not for this, which is…well, we still don’t know. And two, you’re a minor. Remember? We’ve bent the rules a little, let your friend pick you up from these appointments, because they’ve been so frequent. We know that’s hard.”
“It’s not hard. I feel fine. You keep telling me everything’s normal, except for, y’know, the obvious. So it’s not hard—”
“Psychologically,” said Dr. Helman.
“Isn’t that a little outside your job description?”
“I’d like your father here,” said Dr. Helman, “for your next appointment.”
“See, now, that’s hard,” I said. “On him. This stuff stresses him out. And you know my dad’s whole…history with this place—”
“I know,” said Dr. Helman. “And that’s why I’d like him here for these checkups. Especially if we’re looking at getting more aggressive with hormone therapy. Will?” She leaned across her desk and was suddenly a very serious cartoon pig. “You’ve got to let me do my job—Are you all right?”
I wasn’t. I was sweating. Breathing felt thick. The air was suddenly sticky, syrupy—how does anyone get this stuff into and out of their lungs?
I was hot. So hot.
I’m in the wrong body. Running hot. Melting down.
Mouse metabolism. Elephant body.
I was gonna burst into flame.
I remember Dr. Helman saying, Lie down, just roll. There we go. Now. Feet up. Don’t worry about the wall, scuff it up, it’s fine.
A few minutes later, I was on my back, my massive legs pointed straight up the wall. Dr. Helman and a nurse were standing over me.
“ ’S okay, I’m fine.” I started to get up. Dr. Helman knelt, put a hand on my chest.
“Not yet. Stay still a little longer.”
I laughed. “I’m gonna die, right?” I felt rivers of hot salt passing my temples. The ceiling was coming down, acoustic tile by acoustic tile. “I’m gonna die, let’s just say it. I’m gonna die of the same thing that killed my mom.”
“No,” said Dr. Helman. But I saw a bulb flicker behind her eyes.
“Something about it, though, reminds you of her thing. Right?”
Dr. Helman took a deep breath. “You don’t have cancer. This isn’t…that. You have…you had, I think, an insensitivity to growth hormone before this…spurt.”
“Can we…not call it that?”
“Before this phenomenon. Near as we can tell—and, Will, we’re working with specialists from all over—near as anyone can tell, your body…compensated for your innate insensitivity to growth hormone. And then all of a sudden, those factors blocking the hormone? The binding proteins that stopped you from growing? Just fell away. For reasons we don’t really understand. So you got both barrels from your pituitary gland. And…here we are.”
“And you’re saying this has nothing to do with my mom’s cancer? They’ve got nothing in common? Nothing at all? Not the GHBP? That’s growth hormone–binding protein, right? I see it on my labs, just like I saw it on hers. Not the TACE inhibition, either? C’mon, Doctor.”
Dr. Helman sighed. “You pose an interesting question, Dr. Daughtry.”
Don’t mess with Biology Boy.
Dr. Helman spoke slowly, chose her words carefully. “Your mother’s cancer,” she said, “involved a very rare interplay of hormonal and enzymatic factors regulating cell growth generally, and musculoskeletal growth and regeneration, chondrogenesis, and ossification in particular. And yes, some of those same factors are in play here, too. But we’re talking about the most basic mechanisms of growth, on a biomolecular level. So saying they’re related is like saying basketball is related to rock-paper-scissors. The answer is Sure! and also Not at all! The fact is, it’s still early days, and these therapies—it isn’t like stomping the brakes on a sports car. It’s pumping the brakes…on an aircraft carrier. You have to give it some room, Will.”
I thought about that, the room I’d given “it,” given myself. I thought about that all the way home in the car with Monica. I thought about how all games were feeling more and more like games of chance, not tests of strength or skill. Which made me feel all seasick and loopy again. I didn’t want to feel that way. I wanted to feel more like I felt when I spiked over the net, or when I moved Jaylen Teixiera off his stance, or when I broke Rafty’s backboard, even.
(Better scary than scared, right?)
So I just decided to feel that way. Just like that. And I felt better.
Maybe, I figured, I can just hold that thought.
I can’t even remember what we were having for dinner, the night it happened. My memory has it down as Sad Bowl of Corn and Tragic Lump of Mashed Potatoes, though that seems unlikely, given where Laura was with carbs.
This much is crystal: the Daughtry-Tannengers were engaged in what I’d classify as the Bitter Family Dinner, a classic of the genre. Kids’ eyes trained on their plates, parents’ eyes cutting to each other, signaling furiously, concerned. Brows furrowed, frowny faces over food that looked like plastic props in a local commercial, perfectly fine food made depressing and doomed by the grumpy people eating it. Dinners like that make the basic act of eating seem disgusting: you hear the chewing because there’s nothing to drown it out, and the business of placing organic matter in a mouth hole and dissolving it with enzymes in order to stay alive becomes hard to avoid, harder to dress up as anything other than what it is.
I still ate a lot. I mean: it was still food.
Anyway, the assembled mouth holes ate, and didn’t do much talking. When they tried, results were sketchy.
“How was everybody’s day?” Brian actually said, out loud and for real.
“Nothing,” Drew returned. Then he pushed away, got up. “Going to bed, g’night.”
“Uh. Good…night?” Laura said, watching him go.
Brian leaned over. “What’s going on?”
“Y’know. Stress. Sweet Sixteen’s coming up….”
Brian peered at me with diagnostic eyes. “Did something…happen?”
“Huh?”
“Between you two?”
Hahahahahahaha…Oh, Brian! Where to begin? I thought of Drew’s pointing finger: Right at your head, brother.
“No. Just, I dunno, a stressful time, I guess.”
“That word again,” said Brian. “Stress.”
“Puts it on himself,” I sniffed. “He doesn’t really have anything to worry about. Sixteen’s a dance, it’s just Portola again, and the Eight’ll be either Salazar or West Mira Mesa, and they’re both weak sauce—”
“I’m not talking about Drew.” Brian put down his fork. “I mean: I’m not just talking about Drew. I’m talking about everything that’s been going on.”
“Uh-oh. What are the chimps up to now? Are they running numbers?”
But Brian was really staring me down, giving me the ol’ Recess is over. Now I saw: he was going to use this awkwardness to pile on overdue awkwardness. Parenting deferred is never parenting denied.
“Will. I’m going to your appointments from now on. It’s not a request.”
I put down my fork. Gently. I didn’t want to look bratty. Even though I felt bratty. But nobody likes a bratty giant. Only the gentle kind, the low-talking, no-sudden-moves kind. “So…you called Dr. Helman?”
“She called me.”
“What’d she tell you? That something’s wrong? Because she keeps telling me everything’s fine.”
“She told me the same thing,” said Brian. “Look, Will, I’ve been pretty relaxed about all this, because at first I…I didn’t want to add to any…general hysteria—”
“Hey, don’t side-eye me,” Laura warned him, “when you say general hysteria.”
“I didn’t! I wasn’t!”
“We give you guys a lot of leash,” Laura said to me, “we know that. But this is a pretty…unique time….”
Brian put his hands together, as if saying grace. “If we’re continuing these hormone treatments—”
“Oh, we’re continuing them,” I almost snapped. So much for brat suppression. “I mean, unless you want to put a vaulted ceiling on this place.”
“Will? Hear me out. I should be there, and I want to be there.”
“You already know everything, you know everything I know, which is nothing, and you know everything they know, which is also nothing, but with data to back it up.”
“I want to be there. I want to be…”
He trailed off.
Because he heard it then. The sound. The cry. The call of the wild. I heard it, too. So did Laura.
“…Monica?…Monica!”
There are certain sounds that’ll stop you in your tracks. One of those is that of a largish-sounding human male in your front yard, at night, calling your friend’s name. A largish-sounding human male you did not invite.
“…Monica!”
I recognized the voice. It sounded like a death rattle in a crushed beer can.
Laura—who didn’t know that voice the way I did—was at the door before I could stop her. “Laura, wait—”
But the door was open already, and there he was, in a mist of Beam: Martin Eddy, navy pilot, retired. Looking drunk and defeated and nonspecifically at war with his surroundings, and that wasn’t strange. Looking that way on our front stoop, after dark? Was strange. Martin had on his old Miramar flight jacket and, for some reason, aviator shades. They were crooked, or maybe bent, like he’d put them on by falling face-first into an open box of aviator shades.
Martin Eddy (6′2″) was not a small man.
“Quick question: where’n the good goddamn is my daughter?”
“Martin,” said Brian, stepping into the doorway, “you don’t seem well, buddy, let’s get you—”
Martin shook his head vigorously, like a horse with a brain parasite.
“You think I can’t tail a city bus?” Martin called into the house. His voice was still calm, but there was something swollen under it. “I was a fighter pilot, honey.”
“Martin,” said Brian, in the voice he used to calm big cats, “I think there may be a misunderstanding. Monica isn’t here.”
“See, that’s a misunderstanding. ’Cause I just saw her climb in your boy’s window.” He jerked his head at me. “Not this one, the other. Your little one.”
“Go home, Dad.”
Her voice was muffled by Drew’s bedroom door, but audible.
Ah. So Monica was in Drew’s room. This surprising yet also not surprising fact sent a sour thrill through my GI tract.
“Send my daughter out, would you, good buddy? She left before I could explain….”
“Sleep it off!”
I heard the door to Drew’s room open, and I knew this was about to get a lot worse.
I could see Brian knew it, too. Monica was eighteen. She could do what she pleased. Martin was drunk. He could do what he pleased.
So Brian Daughtry made a keeper move.
He walked through the open front door, turned to me briefly, and said—
“Lock the door, Will.”
And because he’d said it to me in keeper voice, I did exactly what he told me. I shot the dead bolt.
I could hear them talking on the lawn.
Laura got out her phone. By then, Monica was standing in the dining room, hoodie and jeans pulled over pajamas. The clothes she’d fled her house in, clearly.
“Don’t call 911,” said Monica. “Please. He’s…he just needs to sleep it off.”
But Laura just shook her head and stepped over toward the kitchen, keeping the phone clapped to her ear. I heard her speaking in a low voice to someone on the other end.
Drew appeared behind her. “Where’s Brian?”
“Outside. Talking to him.”
“I’m going out there.”
“No, you’re not,” Laura said, in a voice that actually sat Drew down at the kitchen serving bar.
We heard murmurs outside. Male voices transacting something, it wasn’t clear what.
Then sirens. Distant, but nearing.
“I wish you hadn’t done that,” Monica said to Laura, through her hand.
Laura looked confused. “They told me someone had already called. Maybe the neighbors…”
Monica looked at Drew. Drew looked away.
“No,” Monica said. “It wasn’t the neighbors.” Her voice was several degrees below zero. For the first time since one-on-one, I actually felt bad for Drew. He’d done the right thing. But he’d done it on the sly, because he was afraid of Monica. The 911 call she’d forgive him for, eventually. But the fear? I wasn’t so sure.
“It’s okay!” Brian called from outside. “We’re okay.”
There was another sound. Coughing. The vanquished-sounding kind, the kind you associated with a fine mist of blood and bad news from the doc. It was Martin.
Monica’d already turned and headed back down the hall. She picked a room that wasn’t Drew’s—the old computer room—went into it, and shut the door.
Drew put his head in his hands.
“Just give her a minute,” Laura said to Drew.
She went to the door of the computer room. Knocked gently, announced herself, and entered.
I wasn’t sure what the New Plan and its many vague rules said about this situation. What was I supposed to do? Which room did I belong in? I was standing in the foyer like some gigantic useless weather vane on a windless day. Which friend was I allowed to comfort?
Maybe no plan can withstand impact from a Martin Eddy, from an object of such size and sadness.
Drew sucked on his teeth. I sent up a flare: “Hey, man, I think—”
Drew went into the bathroom, and SLAM! went the door.
He was in there awhile.
Red and blue lights painted the foyer, made the wallpaper dance epileptically. San Diego’s finest had arrived. The Crisis was ov—
THUMP!
The front door rattled in its frame. A hard impact. Body-hard. Had Martin—
“Dad?”
I was alone in the foyer, studying the hallway chandelier I was now basically at eye level with. My father was out there, protecting us from a scary drunk. But I was bigger than my father, bigger and stronger. And I was doing nothing.
So I flipped the dead bolt, jerked open the door, and saw…nothing.
Then: Brian. Safe. Over by the curb, leaning into the window of a police cruiser, saying, “He’s a family friend….”
And then, right next to me, in the portico, I saw Martin. At first I thought: Has he been shot? Tased?
No. He’d just fallen against the door, and was now trying to right himself against a portico column. He looked deflated under his lumpy flight jacket, bald spot lolling like a haywire satellite dish. A little kid wearing his dad’s clothes—maybe that’s how all grown men look when they can’t stand up straight anymore and keep the illusion going. Martin’s dopey aviators were sprawled on the bricks a few inches from his hand, like a crushed insect. Without them, his unguarded eyes were the pink of an albino lab rabbit.
“Hey. Big guy.”
I wondered if I should help him up. Decided he seemed comfortable how he was.
“Before I grab a ride,” said Martin Eddy, “with those fine gentlemen in uniform…I wanna have a talk with you. Who knows? We might not get a chance to conversate again.” He fixed those pink eyes on me. “I want you to know something. About your friend. Story of my birthday.”
“Uh. You lost me, Martin.” I was in full humoring mode. I’d decided to treat him like a concussion victim. Keep ’em talking!
Martin didn’t need prompting. He was on autopilot. “My birthday…few years back…she took me to the beach. Beautiful day. Sweet gesture. Picnic, barbacoa from my favorite truck, cupcakes with my name on ’em—very nice celebration, all the trimmings. Well. Not quite all the trimmings, and that’s why I brought…just this one little sixer, that’s it, slipped it in the cooler under the ice, big deal. But she sees it? And it’s freakin’ Armageddon. She’s screaming mad, You promised! You said you wouldn’t! This is why Mom left! Blah blah blah…”
Martin was knocking a little rhythm against the doorjamb as he spoke.
“And she gets so mad…she picks up her board…and she runs into the water. Now…this is Black’s, and there’s a warning that day, everybody out of the pond, ’cause the waves are, I dunno, thirty-five feet if they’re an inch. And here she is, fourteen years old, hundred pounds soaking wet, and just to spite me, see, she grabs her board, throws herself on one of these pro-grade waves, like she’s saddling a freakin’ dinosaur. WHAM! Bastard stomps her into the sand, then gives her a wallop with her own board. Had three fins on it, and those things, they’re carbon fiber, they’re like knives….”
Martin made a claw with his shaky hand. Raked imaginary ribs.
Slashes. Like a bear had taken a swipe…
Fourteen? At Black’s? In thirty-five-foot swells? Why hadn’t I heard this story?
“We go to a clinic, they patch her up—one of those fins was a quarter inch from nicking a lung. ’Nother one coulda severed her spine if things had wiggled a little different. Terrible accident. ’Cept it wasn’t, was it? An accident? She ran in there on purpose. She even ate it on purpose. I watched her flip her board. It wasn’t the wave! She had that thing handled. My girl’s a prodigy. But she kicked out on top, let that thing take her apart. Now…what would you call that?”
I’m not saying a drunken Martin Eddy was the most reliable source.
But something about this story rang a whole carillon of bells right down my damned spine.
“Boy, does that girl get mad when people let her down,” he went on. “You notice that? When our Monica gets mad…well, she takes it out on the closest soul in striking distance. And that always turns out to be…the same…person….”
Martin coughed, loudly. The sound of a car that wouldn’t start but kept cranking.
Brian was walking toward us with an officer who didn’t look much older than me and was a foot shorter. “Will, get back inside,” he said.
Martin was still coughing. Some kind of attack.
The cop gave me a once-over—Holy shit, is Lurch here gonna be a problem?—then crouched beside Martin and said, “Mr. Eddy? We’ll give you a ride home.”
Now I saw: Martin wasn’t coughing. He was crying. That’s just what crying sounded like when it came out of the broken thing that was Martin Eddy, fighter pilot.
That’s how Monica Bailarín became our housemate, for a brief and not very sitcommish time.
She wasn’t into the idea, at first. But she’d never experienced the full-court press from Brian and Laura combined. Unlike Drew and me, they weren’t so easily denied. I mean, she could have, if she wanted to. She was eighteen. But there are forces of nature stronger than legal/technical adulthood, forces stronger even than Monica Bailarín’s tungsten stubbornness.
Martin Eddy was under house arrest, judge’s orders. He could only come out for treatment and group therapy. A nursing service checked on him three times a week. He was in the system now. That’s what happens when you call the police.
Monica couldn’t live there anymore, of course.
At first she’d said, “I’ll camp at BoB.” Because she was still mad at Drew.
To which Laura answered, “No.” And this was a different kind of no, a no that Monica—raised by Martin Eddy—had never encountered.
Three days later, we’re all brushing our teeth in the same bathroom.
Brushing your teeth in proximity to someone is very different from being best friends with that same someone. Brushing your teeth in proximity to someone you once considered your one true love, but who’s now confirmed to be just a best friend—that’s just strange.
Her smell was everywhere. Every time I sat down on a couch or got an extra pillow from the linen closet, this plume of Monica would rise and wash over me. I started having flashbacks: I was back at BoB on Birthday Night, and we were pitching my lifts off the cliff, into the ocean….
Here it was. The Plan, writ large, writ now: the three of us never had to say goodbye, good night, see you tomorrow.
Hooray?
Monica slept in the computer room. I assumed she snuck out after everyone had gone to bed, slipped into Drew’s room—at least on the nights when they weren’t fighting. Were they still fighting? I didn’t actually know. Also, I didn’t like thinking about scenarios that involved Monica slipping into Drew’s room.
Every morning, I’d come downstairs, and she’d be in our breakfast nook, reading Leviathan and not eating the oatmeal she’d made. She’d do this until 7:42, then eat all her oatmeal in three feral bites and jump into the Yacht with us.
Every morning, I’d not-ask about the story Martin told. About Black’s. And the bear swipe on Monica’s back.
There was less and less talking in the Yacht. Was it because we all saw each other all the time now? Is it what they said about old married couples? The mystery’s gone? On the contrary: everything felt like a mystery, everything and everybody. Two surly mysteries, and one massive, puzzling medical mystery.
“When are you gonna be done with Leviathan?” I asked, “You’ve been reading it, like, forever.”
“I’m never gonna be done with it.” She was looking out the window. “It’s a reference book.”
That’s all she said, the rest of the morning.
And then, Tuesday night of the second week of this bad sitcom, I came down for my midnight snack (this was not a bad habit, it was a metabolic necessity) and found Monica at the kitchen table, eating yogurt in one of Drew’s old basketball camp T-shirts.
I was wearing just boxers and a shirt with a cartoon vole on it. The vole was wearing a helmet and carrying a popgun, over a banner that read Vole Patrol. I have no idea what it meant, or was meant to have meant. It was just the kind of shirt you sleep in.
“Chobani?” Monica asked.
“Nothankee.” I got out a tub of heavy, gory Bolognese sauce instead. Went at it cold, with a serving spoon. I know: sexy, right?
Monica watched me eat. I expected a joke. No joke was forthcoming. She just watched me eat meat sauce. She meant nothing by it, but something about the way I was being studied, in my natural habitat, annoyed me enough to ask a question I’d been suppressing.
“What happened? With your dad?”
It wasn’t a story Monica had volunteered. I didn’t necessarily expect her to spill now.
But she did. A little. “I gave an ultimatum. He made a promise. Then he broke it. So I said I was leaving, and he started breaking things. Most of the stuff in my room, to start with. I said, Fine, break everything. And I left. And then he followed me.” She spooned out a dollop of yogurt, let it drop back into her cup again. “Keeps forgetting I’m eighteen.”
“Well. You can stay here. With us. For however long. Until, I dunno, Irvine.”
Monica laughed, like that was hilarious.
“Right,” she said. “The Plan.”
Was the Plan hilarious now? Had it become a joke, without my knowledge or consent? Wasn’t there something in the Plan about not changing the Plan without my input?
My inner monologue was coming to a boil. The outer one stayed glassy.
“You know you’re always welcome here. You’re basically famil—”
“Uh, don’t. Say that.” Monica got up, dropped her spoon into her yogurt cup with a thunk. She didn’t meet my eyes as she spoke, which was highly un-Monica of her. “I mean, it’s beautiful, I’m flattered, I…I don’t deserve it. But that…particular combination of words…it’s just not what I—”
“I get it,” I said. “I get it.” But I didn’t, not entirely.
The reaction Monica’d just had—I recognized that reaction. It was the reaction of the friend-zoned. The head-patted. The sexually decommissioned. Except, obviously, for a billion reasons, it wasn’t that. Obviously.
Obviously.
“You’ve got…enough blankets and stuff?” I always know the stupidest thing to say, and I always say it.
“Yeah,” said Mon, “Laura keeps me in blankets, thanks.”
We just stood there. The half-eaten Chobani between us. Staring up at us, lidless.
We were about eight inches apart.
I had this whole speech in my head: Calling her on the carpet about the Sawtooth. Telling her I knew where the scars came from. I was going to find out what it all meant: Had she wiped out? Or busted on purpose? To hurt herself? Or worse?
Was she going to do it again?
At the Sawtooth?
I was going to tell her I couldn’t let her, and wouldn’t let her, and if that sounded overtestosterous, well, shit, maybe it was.
Instead of all that, I was suddenly just kissing her.
It didn’t even feel like a decision.
Good thing, too, because if it had been? It would’ve been a terrible decision. Warning lights were flashing all over my brain console. It didn’t matter. More elemental forces were at work.
Like gravity. Monica’s very specific gravity. Which I could feel now.
[WARNING: DREW]
And how about “trusting the water,” the way she’d always told me to?
[WARNING: SIDNEY]
Plus, we fit. I could feel that, too. Our bodies met perfectly now.
How bad could it be? After all, she was kissing me back.
[WARNING: MONICA]
Until she wasn’t.
She jumped back like I’d bitten her. Put her hand on her mouth. Choked. Not on Chobani. On the acid of complete and total disappointment in the human race.
And my first awful thought was, Hey, as long as you’re equally disappointed in both of us, then we’re fine, we’re in this together, let’s keep going—
Then her tears came, and exterminated all my awful thoughts, and all my nonawful thoughts, too. When tears came out of her, they didn’t come in little spring-rain spritzes, either—they came all at once, a rogue wave.
“Mon…”
She turned and walked into the computer room. Shut the door so quietly, it felt worse than a slam.
I stood there, waiting for her to come back so we could talk. Waiting for me to come back, too. I needed to find out who I was now, and if I’d ever be okay again, after I’d done what I’d done.
It was a long wait, and in the end, neither of us came back.
At 12:58 p.m., I gave up and went to bed.
Two hours later, I woke up starving, went to the kitchen, and ate half a chicken.
For lack of a better idea, I dug the tape measure out of the drawer. Measured myself.
Yep.
It was next month already. I’d gotten there early.
Two days later, I was at the Lowlands, and fruit was being served to a dyspeptic monarch. Jollof’d been under the weather. He was in a mood. He also had idiopathic diarrhea, which probably explained his mood. It was nothing but superficial colitis—not uncommon in a gorilla Jollof’s age, and very treatable, Brian said. He’d live. He’d be a little woozy on his meds, but he’d live. In the meantime, he’d make everyone around him want to die.
Generally, Jollof was sweet with the female handler (5′3″) who now brought him his chow, but that day, from Keeper Access, I watched him snarl at her.
“Not a good look on our boy,” she said as she came in.
“Tell me about it.”
Magic Mike just watched from a safe distance. Which made sense, given what Jollof’d done to him a few weeks before. (Back when Asshole had been in a good mood.)
I was doing inventory: bamboo pallets, protein supplements. Riveting stuff. I was watching the gorillas make their usual rounds in the habitat, just out of the corner of my eye. And I noticed, after a while, that Mike wasn’t on his typical pig path.
That pig path was a rangy one, giving the main troop a wide berth. But today he was closer in, closer to town center. Testing the troop, maybe. Testing Jollof.
Every time I looked up, he was closer.
And then he was just…gone. Vanished.
I got up, went to the glass, tried every possible angle. No Mike. Maybe, I figured, he was at the waterfall, in one of those little nooks that can only be seen from the concourse. I was about to go upstairs to check when—
A roar. Like a giant tree being pulled apart. The kind of sound that stops a conversation, or maybe a civilization.
Jollof.
Bellowing. Furious. Actually beating his chest. It wasn’t the superficial colitis.
It was Magic Mike. And what he’d done wasn’t superficial.
Magic Mike was sitting on Jollof’s rock. He was in the throne room.
Eating a mango. Casually. Like this was something he did on the reg.
And he was up there with Blue.
Suicide by silverback was my first thought. He’s finally snapped. No, Mike, no.
Jollof seemed to grow three sizes. It was mostly hair, but damn, was it effective. It looked like he’d been inflated. He tore up the path to the rock, scaled the boulder face in a matter of seconds. Blue’d already run screaming. Mike retreated, and my heart stopped.
Because Mike had moved farther into Jollof’s lair, which was a blind alley, a stone wall. The worst move he could’ve possibly made. Now there was no way out. No backing down. No way to show deference and restore the status quo.
This is how wars start, and how they end. This is the vanishingly rare situation in which you might actually lose a captive gorilla.
Silverbacks don’t usually kill. It’s incredibly uncommon. Even assholes like Jollof—they’re just not killers by nature. But when there’s an imbalance in the leadership, a change in troop social structure—yes, very occasionally, bad things can happen. It’s the exception, though, not the rule.
Magic Mike had backed himself into the perfect exception.
Jollof charged into the throne room, bellowing, pounding his chest, reaching for Mike’s head to crush it like an overripe melon. And Mike backed up, backed up, kept backing up—backing up when he should’ve been backing down. I couldn’t see what he was doing anymore; he’d retreated past the lip of the rock, where my sight line stopped. What the hell was he—
SCREECH! SCREECH! SCREECH!
Now I saw them: Mike had catapulted himself at Jollof. Bounced off the back wall and gone right at him, at a dead run, screaming. This scrawny, neurotic little gorilla—I say little, he still weighed almost three hundred pounds—gambled it all on a kamikaze dive, and this completely unexpected, out-of-character move so freaked out Jollof—hell, it freaked me out—that he reacted with a traditional gorilla defensive tactic: he broke left.
Except there was no left.
There was just air. A drop. A long one.
Which Jollof, in his surprise and colitis and medication, had apparently forgotten.
And so down he came,
this monster, this victim,
falling backward from throne room to forest floor—
SHUK!
A very bad sound when he hit the ridge of rock at the base of the throne.
Jollof didn’t move much after that.
There were twitches. Awful twitches. Meat, short-circuiting. Strange whistling noises that were not what the general public would think of as gorillaesque.
Whimpers.
Up above, on the throne, Magic Mike looked down at Jollof, his tormentor and king, shaking in the dirt, the life leaving him.
I hit the alarm.
In came the cavalry.
Out went Jollof, in traction, on a gurney.
Broken backs aren’t easy to treat in higher primates, even in state-of-the-art veterinary facilities. Jollof was gone by dinnertime. Just like that. Almost twenty years in charge, almost twenty-nine on earth. An endangered species, a little more endangered than it had been that morning.
One wrong turn. Broke left when he shoulda broke right.
And then: just broke.
All of us hominids, gorilla and human, we just sort of stood around for a while. Stunned. At sea. Wondering what came next.
I didn’t know.
Magic Mike, though, he sat on his throne, sat on it like a champ, and didn’t fidget. He sat there like he knew something. Like he was waiting for someone to come ask. Eventually, someone did. It was Blue.
We locked eyes at one point, Magic Mike and I. And my blood went cold.
Because he gave me a nod.
More than likely, it was just a twitch, a fleabite. But to my biased and unscientific eyes, he gave me a nod, and what—if you’re inclined to anthropomorphize gorillas, which I would never do, oh no, not I, because that way madness lies—you might even call a smile.
Who’d have thought? said the smile. Couple of nice guys like us. Look at us now, brother man. Look at us now.