The Last Great Ape Read online

  “Not a good idea.”

  I insisted and he was too soft and after one sip I vomited and fell asleep.

  I lay in bed, sweating, lonely, itching in places I couldn’t reach, defenseless against mosquitoes and the pain that tore through the drugs. At night I shouted for nurses up the hall who didn’t hear me because they were sleeping. Visitors came to my bedside, passengers from the bus, people who’d seen me carried into the hospital and people who’d just heard about the accident. All of them, to show sympathy, said, “Sorry sorry sorry.”

  As I convalesced in the clinic, I grew more amazed by the doctor who, without running water and often without electricity, stayed armed against all the ills of the bush that arrived to him. I didn’t know much about the other passengers; the plight of strangers hadn’t registered as the blood was flowing.

  The limping man, the third one from the crash, greeted me before his discharge.

  “Already you’re out!” I said. “The gods took care of you. Look at all my cuts. It’s a miracle you came out of this so easy.”

  The man exited and the doctor entered.

  “So was I the most seriously injured from the accident?” I said.

  “Who knows? I only treated two of you. For those who didn’t make it here—we probably won’t ever know. But with your injuries, it depends how you look at it.” The doctor smiled. “That other man had only one cut from the glass. But it took one of his testicles.”

  Uganda

  A TRIBE OF TWO

  Rachel turned her back as she slipped off her clothes. On the far side of the bed I turned away, too, not wanting to judge her body, not wanting to be judged. A lamp glowed on the bedside table. The floors were hardwood, the curtains drawn. Wiggling out of my pants burned and tore at my body. My shoulder drooped. My head, because of the neck wound, was tilted like a bewildered dog’s. I was drowsy from antibiotics. Held together by thread. Ugly. Clumsy pulling back the blanket and trying not to grunt as I swung my leg up to the mattress. It was cold in the room. I couldn’t pull the blanket over me with my left hand or swivel to use my right. I inched backwards, half-crippled, half my muscles unavailable to me as I flopped my head onto the pillow like a fish. Then I fought and groaned just to turn and look across the mattress. Rachel was watching me from her pillow, her black hair covering one eye.

  I’d landed in the morning at Entebbe without a visa, handing the local hyenas an excuse to badger me for a bribe. “We’re going to send you back on the plane to Nigeria!” By the time Rachel arrived, I was drained of the energy to fight them. Sight of her, stomping across the airport like a brawler, clashed with the image of the dark-eyed beauty I’d imagined lying beside me all those weeks in bed in Nigeria. She was heavier, wearing an unflattering brown shirt that made her look less like a traveler than a maid. She dealt with the police and pulled me through the airport, neither seeking a kiss nor glancing at me, and I thought, Maybe she sees me differently? Hadn’t our feelings for each other intensified while we’d been apart? I’d bought a nice white shirt to wear off the plane and scrubbed the iodine stain from my neck. But with my wounds oozing and the shirt red with blood I’d had to change into black.

  Outside the airport, Rachel closed the door of our cab, sealing off Uganda’s noise. She slid beside me. Our cheeks met. I shut my eyes, and she said, “You didn’t think I was going to let the police or anyone steal you away from me again, did you?”

  On the bed, I lay like a terrified boy with his arms straight at his sides. Rachel said, “Are you in pain? Don’t move, Ofirik.” She traced her finger around my ear and pulled back the sheet a bit at a time, kissing around each wound as though to accept what Nigeria had done. She smelled like dessert, like a drink. But I was useless as a lover. And worse; I was dangerous. And I collapsed, smashed into her chest trying to hold myself up with one arm.

  “Shh. It’s okay,” she said. “Does this hurt?” What protection there was in the dimness of the room, in the blankets and the strength of Rachel’s body. “I’ll find a way,” she said and pulled the sheet over us.

  We moved into a cabin at the Red Chili Hideaway, a Kampala hostel where backpackers pitched tents in the grass. A white doctor had sliced through the scar tissue over my chest wound, because fluid from an infection had forced the flesh apart and then started leaking. The nasty cave was full of undissolved stitches curling like black worms. Rachel sat on the bed between my legs and waved away the flies. She rolled gauze into strips and pressed them to the hole, then worked them into my chest with a matchstick, looking up again and again at my face to gauge whether she was hurting me. She pulled the fluid-soaked gauze out of the hole in my body like a magician drawing pink scarves from her sleeve and turned what might have been ugly into romance.

  I yanked Rachel to the curb when a car passed—a side-effect that had become habit since the crash. Near the Kampala bus station, we ate matoke, a dish made from plantains, and Rachel joked, “Who the hell can make ugali out of fucking bananas?” She sang as we paid and walked up the road toward the market. I reached out and took her hand. She looked around, embarrassed, and pulled her hand back, hid it in her pocket. My stomach dropped away from my ribs, and I thought, Maybe she doesn’t feel what I do.

  An engine revved. A horn. Glass broke and metal scraped along the road. People flocked from all sides of the street to the accident. Rachel raced ahead of me, burst through the ring of onlookers.

  “Don’t touch him. Don’t touch him,” she said.

  A motorcyclist lay bleeding and unconscious, his bike beside him on the pavement. Rachel leaned down and listened for his breath, then looked at his groin and touched it.

  “Woo!” said the shocked crowd, as though she’d broken a taboo.

  “A hard-on can mean you have a spinal injury,” she said. “Lift his legs, Ofir.”

  She pinched his trapezius. The man’s eyes opened and he talked to her. People on the street knelt down to take care of him. And we left the scene.

  I freed the wooden curtain rod in our room at the hostel and ran into the grass, scaring off a red-headed agama; Rachel had gone with a white girl in an adventure vest for pizza. The curtain rod was thicker than a broomstick and twice as long. I lifted it with my bad arm, leaned back to get it up to shoulder level, twirled it from side to side, slashing and swinging the stick, to fight to regain a few ounces of strength. Weeks from being ready to wear a backpack, I was bleeding again when I returned to the room.

  In the name of trying to give to Rachel the energy that Africa had given to me, I asked her to list all she wanted to do before she died. On the first line she wrote, “To be a pilot.” We took a bus and then a private taxi and walked a kilometer along a road. Crossing an overgrown field and sure we were lost, we came upon shirtless men bent over and slicing at the grass with machetes. When I asked about the small airport, they straightened their backs, wiped their foreheads and pointed.

  “The Israelis have returned to Entebbe,” said Jeremy, an old British flying instructor who had a gray broom of a moustache and who showed me in his log book that he’d crashed five times; this didn’t exactly instill confidence about fulfilling dreams. After three days in the classroom, Rachel and I climbed into separate one-engine Cessnas, each with our own instructor. I clamped the headphones over my ears, hit the switch. The plane clunked and spit as the propeller began to hum. The sun’s reflection hid Rachel inside her cockpit. I held the throttle, inched my Cessna forward and watched as Rachel zipped up the runway and lifted clear of the ground.

  I was terrified as I taxied into position.

  “Bravo Alpha Tango, 386, request permission for takeoff. Over,” I said.

  “Bravo Alpha Tango, 386, you are cleared for takeoff. Over.”

  We accelerated, rose. The propeller rolled the plane left. The heavy controls petrified in my hands. “Kick the right rudder. Kick it!” Jeremy said, hammering his hand down on my leg. “Kick it! Right. Okay. From here we have nothing to crash into.”

  Below
us were boats small as toys, the lake’s edge and a carpet of green.

  “Do you see them on your side?” Jeremy said. “Do you see them?”

  I didn’t want to look out of fear the plane would tumble as I turned. Still, it was the kind of moment that brought images from all parts of the past. I’d been frustrated by Rachel’s inability to communicate during our weeks in Uganda. Love for me was all-encompassing; to hold anything back was unnatural. She’d said, “Ofir, I’m trying to open up. What you give me I’ve never had, not in a relationship, not with my family. Can you understand that? I don’t have parents like yours. Okay? This ‘total love’ idea—I cannot do it in one day.” She revealed also that for all the time I’d known her, I’d never once brought her to climax. How could I be so insensitive not to have known?

  “There she is,” Jeremy said. “Do you see her? Look how relaxed she is!”

  Beyond the wing, Rachel’s plane was beside mine, passing through the clouds.

  We traveled to Israel soon thereafter. The hostility of our people toward each other made the atmosphere feel like that of the broken communities of Turkana, though with an abundance of medicine and food. We vowed never to stop being angry at Israel and all places like it. I was stronger now against the blank stares I’d always received from family and friends when I told stories of Africa, stronger in large part because Rachel defended so much of what I held dear. I found that my new need to give back was satisfied for a time by teaching in a private program at schools in central Israel. But home for us had morphed from a place we didn’t want to be into a place we couldn’t be. So Rachel and I headed back to Africa, to Ethiopia, in hopes of merging love and adventure with a plan of setting off together into the bush. And to know whether love was an exception to the rule that my journey had to be alone. Within a week of landing in Addis Ababa, I had the answer. It was tests I needed and scars I craved; and those awaiting me I could not share. The day I told Rachel I had to go on alone, I knew how far I was from being the noble man I’d promised myself to be while walking the shores of Lake Turkana. On our last day together, Rachel bought me a journal and wrote on the first page, “In the journey to the heart, I failed not once, but I continued, for I know that’s where hope lies. Love, Rachel.”

  2000

  Ethiopia

  HUNGER

  My horse, Konjo, had a white mane and freckles around his eyes, and he stared at the hippo as any boy would have who’d never left home. The hippo splashed, snorted, raised out of the river, inflated his lungs, changing his massiveness by degree. The water rippled where he sank and disappeared. I pulled Konjo by the reins and waded into the current, toeing over loose stones in the bed of the Gibe River, Ethiopia. There was no option but to cross; the bushy, boulder-strewn banks on our side, routinely difficult to follow, had become impassable where a mountain wedged against the water. The hippo surfaced just meters from us away like an emissary coming to inquire as to what we were. A second hippo made his display, snorting from afar. They were as cowardly as warthogs and would vanish with a clap. I sidestroked in the current, holding the reins, the horse swimming behind me. We were headed down the Gibe to the Omo River, which snaked and curled for untold months of trekking.

  I’d bought Konjo in Addis Ababa and ridden him out of the capital on the highway, his metal shoes clanking on the tarmac, head jerking with panic at the sight of cars and carts. Though I could barely handle a horse, a village man named D’Jote Aberra saw me on Konjo and said, “You watched too many Westerns.” After six days, two hundred kilometers of road, and an army of ants that gnawed Konjo’s ankle to the bone, we arrived to the village of Abelti. Then rested, healed, and descended into the river valley, in part because no one could tell me what was there. Father Albert had been placed by Father Paco in Nachukui; the church or someone had determined the need. Hoping to find my own Turkana, I aimed for the edges of life where in risking myself I might learn to see. After four days in the valley, having found little more than monkeys and baboons, I was down to a day’s worth of food.

  The hippos snorted as we climbed out, dripping, onto the far side of the river. The banks were soon as impassable as those we’d left behind, and Konjo and I began up the side of the gorge. The sun was strong enough to boil away everything but the rocks, the wind carrying the scent of charred trees. We scrambled through brush, earning views of ridges blackened by fire. The horizon was hazed over, flames somewhere still sending up smoke. The Gibe stretched out below us in the heat. Konjo jumped to a ledge, and the saddle and backpack slipped down his legs to his ankles, and he jumped free. The saddle and pack tumbled down the slope through gravel and dust and disappeared. Crashed some hundred meters down into riverside trees. I tied Konjo to a limb and descended, first for the bag, then the saddle. An hour or so on, the horse jumped and the saddle fell again, down around his ankles before vanishing into the gorge. “Fuck!” My voice echoed with the boom of crashing gear. An hour and a half later, Konjo and I climbed on, minus the water bottle that had broken loose from the pack. The black soil was steep, staked with dead trees. I tugged the reins, and Konjo leapt, his shoes chinking against a boulder. His hind legs slipped, and he caught himself. The slope everywhere was as broken and loose as ground uprooted by pigs, unsafe for the horse to climb, unsafe to descend. I gave Konjo time to choose his steps. The river seemed to be falling away from us, our crack through Ethiopia deepening. I loosened the reins and clucked, and Konjo sprung by, brushing my shoulder. He looked back at me, with eyes so much kinder than Lapa’s that he seemed naïve. “Konjo, let’s go. Come on, boy.” The soil slid away beneath his hooves. He caught himself, jumped. His head struck my back, lashing me against a boulder. I was a fool for bringing a horse to such a place, dumb again in so many ways. Konjo jumped, skidded on the rocks. The dirt gave out. His hooves clattered as he fell, his legs churning, and I was about to watch him slip away into the gorge when he thudded against a tree six meters down and stopped. Konjo was balanced on an outcropping, a large rock that a single rain might loosen from the mountainside. I took two steps toward him, slipped and fell on my back, slid downhill reaching out, grabbing for rocks as I sped toward the empty air, trying to dig into the mountain—the vision of my body flipping high over the gorge—when a dead tree rushed at me and I locked my hands around it. My body swung out into the air, butt and legs dangling over the edge. I lifted my leg, struggled for a foothold. The brittle tree, barely a stump, gripped the soil with weak roots. I shouted, slung my leg up. Pulled myself to safety and sat on a rock, panting, clasping my trembling thighs and trying to convince myself the ground wasn’t still moving.

  I spit dust from my mouth, picked gravel out of my bloody elbow and inched down to the horse. Konjo stood on a ledge that was like the last step of a staircase that had crumbled away. If I tried to force him to scramble back up the mountain, I feared he would resist, yank the reins, slip, and the steep slope of dirt and grass was as certain as a slide to send him plummeting into the canyon; my prodding or pulling was as much a risk to him as the ground. It was Konjo who had to choose his route, alone. Or was I just a coward for not wanting to watch him die? I unsheathed the dagger I’d bought at a market in Addis and steadied myself against the tree that had broken his fall. I climbed down to him and cut the ropes securing the backpack to the saddle. I lifted it off. I wedged the blade between his skin and the leather, sliced through the straps and put the saddle aside. “Konjo, I’m sorry,” I said, rubbing his neck. “I hope the lions don’t find you and I hope you find your way. Sorry, old friend.” I descended the cliff and in the rapids of the Gibe sat naked while holding on to a rock. Then stood in the sun to be dried.

  I walked until dusk and captured small frogs and fed them onto my fishhook. But I was too poor a fisherman to prove there were any fish alive at all. Dinner was boiled noodles, my food stock down to a can of beans. I drank straight from the river just to fill my stomach, and that night beside the tent I was scared without Konjo—loss of a fate tied to mine. The
trouble of many is the comfort of fools. And he was a horse! The moon rose late in the gorge, peeling back the darkness so I could see I was not being hunted. Morning, baboons watched me from the far banks of the river. Colobus monkeys hung in the trees with tails long and white as pontiffs’ robes. Tsetse flies burrowed into my hair, my pants, bit me behind the knees, bit my butt, face and arms. Maybe sleeping sickness was why no one lived here. As my stomach gurgled, I fished in deep water with caterpillars, hunted birds with rocks, kicked through the river around small cliffs. In the brush was a netted python, nonpoisonous, coiled. I photographed him, then stripped off my shirt and wrapped it around my hand in case he struck. He was thick and full of meat, and I could almost smell him roasting. I thought, He’ll struggle but I can catch him by the neck, crush his head. I lunged. He uncoiled, knocking me to the ground as he shot to the river, a foe as un-wrestleable as a crocodile. Three meters long, the snake glided across the Gibe in curves. By late afternoon, my body was turning inward with hunger. I set my pot on the banks where the river was deep, dunked a rock to scare the crocodiles, then swam out with the dagger. I felt for clams with my toes and dove down the rock face. I wedged the knife between an upper and lower shell, cracked it open, cutting my hands as I scooped out the mollusk. I swam the teaspoon of snot to the cooking pot and worked along the rock face, prying open clams in the cold water with my hands at my waist and my mouth in the air. The current stole half the take, the energy I spent foraging likely greater than what was contained in the pot of slime waiting when I climbed out wet onto the slate-colored rock. Fire, salt and water, I hoped, would transform it into food. The soup boiled down to roasted brown medallions streaked green: algae-tasting and rubbery, two hours of effort swallowed within a minute. I killed insects and threw them on the water in hopes of scooping up fish with my backpack pouch. The beans I couldn’t help but open. I warmed them and ate tiny spoonfuls, trying to erase the aftertaste of the excrement of clams. Morning, second full day without Konjo, sixth day on the river, I failed with rocks to bludgeon the monitor lizards sunning by the water. I spotted figures I thought from a distance were baboons. A mother and daughter! “Akkam!” I rushed to greet them. The girl wore a lime-green dress. Nothing they said could I understand. Two old men lounged in a hot spring in the rocks. With an Orominya phrasebook, I managed to explain what had happened, and a woman came with dry fibrous barley bread. One of the men, seeing me devour the food, opened a handkerchief full of roasted grains. The two men moved off to fish with ropes and hooks large enough for hanging meat, then returned a short time later with nothing, as if fishing were a whim. I tried to ask about their village, whether more people were near. The woman fixed me a glass of coffee, which I brought to my lips, longing for sugar. But it was sugarless and thick with salt, paralyzing, yet I drank all five cups she put in front of me—to avoid insulting her. There was a village somewhere, but how far away or whether there were others beyond it, I couldn’t understand. That night I put my sleeping bag beside them on the straw, and they kept the fire burning to scare away hyenas. I looked up at the stars and worried that the ease with which I’d left Konjo was like the way I left places and people behind. Morning, they gave me half their bread. The women wore nice dresses. The men had rope, fish hooks. This prosperity I took as proof others were near. I continued alone, finished the bread by noon, and the day passed and I found no one. The cliffs and boulders disappeared from the river and there weren’t even clams. I searched my backpack and found half a tube of concentrated milk paste. I squeezed the tube and swallowed it all. Time in Israel had shown me I wasn’t as strong as I thought. Animals circled in the dark. A limb cracked outside. A yip. I unzipped the tent door, stuck my head into the night—the terrifying edge of a blackness filled with mouths. I battled the gorge from dawn to dusk of the eighth day and found no one, and sleep that night did not come. Fear lay with me in the tent as I tried to will myself onto my feet at first light. The gorge, the absence of vistas, compressed my thoughts until insights seemed to fall from the cliffs above. I had one water bottle, 1.5 liters, not enough for the fight through the heat to the top of the gorge. It was two days back to the hot spring. Or three? But what if they’d gone? It was nine days back to Abelti with nothing to eat but clams. I packed the tent and struggled against the cliffs, followed by clouds of tsetse flies that feasted on my blood, leaving welts on my face. I walked nearly all the hours of daylight and found no signs of anyone. Dinner was toothpaste. I climbed an outcropping to watch light drain from the sky. A white bird alighted from shore and a crocodile snapped her jaws, missing. You’ve always found people. Why should it be different now? I woke in the dark and squeezed toothpaste into my mouth and in the morning I fell, jarred my leg trying to climb. I was lethargic from all the blood lost to tsetse flies. Two men held spears on the far banks! “Akkam! Akkam!” I waved and bounded downhill into the river and swam, the current sweeping me downstream like some crippled old zebra. I ran to them, sloshing, explained myself in broken Amharic, mimed the ordeal. They nodded. Their village was within a day of the river. They signaled for us to go. “Mefeleg keretteet,” I said in Amharic and raised my open hand. Five minutes. Please. I pointed to the bag and swam back across, kicking so hard I drove water into my nose. I wrapped my camera in plastic. When I lifted my head and looked to the far banks, there was no one. I jumped, shouted. “Whoa! Whoa! Akkam! Akkam.” I ran for a different view, whistled. Damn. They ran away. I crossed the river near hippos and stumbled up a tiny path, shouting and sucking into my throat the water that dripped from my hair. The path climbed, split three ways. I limped up the mountainside on the middle one. Found nobody. I struggled back and followed another path. I wasn’t going to catch them. Darkness fell in a way it never had, ending my chance to hunt for food. Dinner was a bullion cube I rescued from the bowels of my pack. I set it on my tongue and sucked and thought, Had you tossed aside your fucking principles and offered them money you might not be eating a spice cube instead of a meal. Sleep did not come; even that was being stripped away. I lay on the rocks with a fear that seemed to emanate from my bones. Day eleven, I climbed out of the tent, heavy, limping, lacking the power to shoo the tsetse flies. This cannot break me. I straightened my back, sensed I might faint, braced myself against a rock. Then smiled when I heard Ofer’s voice roaring through the gorge with his confidence from the army days: River, is this all you have? This barely tickles! Just wait for someone. I was dizzy, fearing I’d stumble, hit my head. I scraped algae and river weed from the rocks. Dried, covered with salt, the weed tasted of spinach but didn’t feel like food; it lacked what made food fuel. Fat. Protein. Oil. Sugar. Veins were rising from my limbs. A crack showed beneath my biceps. Someone else will come on the trail. Wait. Why hadn’t I turned back? It took an eternity to calculate the day. February 28th, 2000? The day of Sharon’s wedding, my cousin’s wedding. As I lay in the dark, hearing only insects and the river, I imagined my family together, laughing, my sister, aunts, my mom. They would be telling stories at the reception beside a table filled with food. Mounds of chicken, steaks, salad, cream cakes. Operation meat pot. I squeezed toothpaste onto my tongue and in my journal wrote all I would want sent by speed post, “White chocolate. Chocolate filled with cherry cream. Rollada cake. Chocolate wafers, cakes filled with hazelnut cream, Bamba, nuts, orange peel coated in chocolate.” I would spend every dollar I had in restaurants. The rituals of pleasure built around food were superfluous. No sleep. Toothpaste burned the length of my esophagus. Could I ever travel far enough that it would be okay just to live with Rachel? At dawn I turned back because no one was going to come. Trekking for months was no longer a thought; what more was there to face than the barrenness that had littered the earth with skeletons for eons? Day fourteen, I came upon a tree with pods I’d seen villagers eating in Abelti. Sour. Like lemon. Maybe it wasn’t the same tree. I waited to see if the pods would bring some new hell down on my body, then filled my pack, struggling against the exhaustion of lifting my shriveling ar
ms. I should have just traveled into an actual war zone. I smashed clamshells with rocks, sacrificing food for speed, the muffled underwater blows in slow motion. I was ill. I wasn’t going to make it to the hot spring. A commotion of vultures. I climbed. The smell of decomposing flesh. I picked up a rock and summoned a roar. The dozen vultures, nearly as large as men, were feeding on the carcass of a baby hippo. I lunged, stomped my boots and they flew off to watch me from above. Meat had been cut away from the hippo’s hide, the skin sliced straight. Leftovers of hunters, several days old. My teeth were useless for cutting the black hide, for chewing the fatty white flesh of the underside. With dry grass and sticks I lit a fire and roasted the hippo. It was as pointless as trying to cook a leather shoe. But oil beaded over the flame and rolled down the hide. I licked the droplets. I put the hide over the fire, licked, abandoned the reeking carcass. Farther on: children’s voices up a ridge. A little strength. It lasted ten steps. Uphill. Blood splattered where I smashed a tsetse fly on my arm. Four boys. “Akkam! Akkam!” Taking no chances, I gave them a gift of my dagger. “Mender. Inheed,” I said. Village. Go. We started up a narrow path curling through the rocks. I pushed down on my knees to help my thighs to lift me. The heat. Dead hippo on the tongue. The digestion of the very muscles powering my steps. I was too dehydrated to spit dust from my mouth. The distance between each boy and the next grew until the first one disappeared. The second. I shouted to the two boys still in view, “Mettebeq. Mettebeq. 100 birr.” They didn’t look back. “Wait. Wait.” Please. How could they be so cruel? The sun fell beyond the gorge. I opened my tent on the rocky path and drank all but a last splash of water. Wake at dawn, before the heat. The rocks mashed my skeleton—hip joints, knees, vertebrae. Not one minute of sleep. At first light, I was about to leave behind my pack when I saw a man. Was it? He took the money out of my palm. He grabbed my bag, which was covered in Konjo’s hair. Flies sucked blood from my face. I lacked the sharpness to talk. If I faint now at least he’s here. My legs cramped. He gripped my hand and helped me with the long steps between boulders. We reached his hut on the ridge and he put a basket of wild figs in my lap. Smoked meat hung from the rafters above his wife’s head. The sugar in the figs quenched me. I understood why a deer could approach a man for his salt. What relief to add something to the body. The couple watched me inhale the figs. Nausea. More food. Meat. Milk. Fat. Oil. The elements. But the taste of everything I’d left back in the gorge.