The Last Mountain Gorilla (2 page)

Kwendro squeezes the radio in his hand until it snaps into several pieces and the voice stops. As if understanding the consequences, Kwendro pumps his chest and screams. He points down a narrow path and waves for us to go. Armel gets to his feet and nods in agreement.

“He is right,” he says. “We must leave. They will come for their man.”

Kwendro is jumping frantically and grunts with a low pleading tone.

“He must come with us,” I say. “They’ll kill him.”

“No,” Armel says. “He will not survive outside of the forest. He has eluded them for this long, it is his only chance.”

“He will die,” I say.

Armel will hear none of it. He’s been a Park Ranger for more than a decade so his understanding of this environment is far greater than mine.

We both stand there awkwardly, wondering how to respond. Armel finally leans in to the gorilla and Kwendro cradles the Ranger into his chest with a tender hug. I follow his lead and feel Kwendro’s massive hand caressing my head as I reach my arm halfway around his chest to return the hug.

Kwendro once again nods at the path and we move away, slowly at first, but then Kwendro waves his arm like a third base coach waving a runner to home plate.

As we move down the path I turn to see Kwendro standing tall and beating his chest. I ask Armel what he’s doing.

“He is preparing for battle,” he says.

Armel is limping, but he scurries ahead of me and I have to work to keep up.

“Why is he preparing for a battle?” I say. “Why doesn’t he lose them in the forest?”

“I know this path,” Armel says with enthusiasm. “This will take us to the army outpost.”

We hustle down the path; plants slap my face as I gain on Armel.

“Why don’t you answer me?” I ask.

He moves another ten yards, then stops and faces me. “Because,” he barks, “the animal knows we cannot outrun the Hutus without help. He will prevent them from catching us.”

“What?”

“Yes,” he says. Tears are once again filling his eyes. “It is his duty. He has no one left to protect.”

“Then he’s—”

But Armel has already moved ahead, his hand constantly wiping his eyes. We move in silence for twenty minutes when Armel recognizes the terrain and guides us to the east.

“There,” he points. “Over that ridge.”

From a distance behind us, we hear the gunfire. Rapid-fire bursts that pierce the jungle silence with a repulsive echo. Underneath the explosion of automatic weapons is a gut-wrenching howl. Kwendro’s final wail echoes throughout the forest with a fatal conclusion to an entire species. It chokes the life from the jungle leaving nothing in its wake. The birds aren’t chirping. The fish aren’t jumping. Even the rain has stopped.

I feel Armel’s hand squeeze my shoulder.

“Come,” Armel whispers. “We go.”

I want to go back. My heart is saturated with guilt.

Armel senses my reluctance and he grabs my arm and turns me around. His face is crazed with fury.

“You don’t understand,” he snaps. “If we don’t make it then his death is in vain. It is our duty to survive these madmen.”

Everything he says is true. I have the journalistic ability to make a difference here. I can affect change. Yet I can’t shake the feeling I’m deeply in debt.

I finally nod and we both turn and move toward our freedom. I barely have the energy to continue. I have my story of course, but it has nothing to do with Hutus and Tutsis. Nor is it about General Busutu and his attempt to murder us and keep the truth hidden from the rest of the world. No, my story is a much more personal. It’s a deeper exploration of humanity. It’s about a father who longs to be home with his family.

My story is about the last mountain gorilla.

The End

A Simple Solution

The stark white laboratory sparkled with rows of stainless steel counters full of test tube racks and glass beakers. Claire Jenson watched her husband flitter between the microscope and the incubator on the main lab bench. He held a micropipette in his left hand while typing data into a computer keyboard with his right. His movements were jerky and forced. His experiment was redundant and everyone in the research lab knew it.

“What are you doing?” Claire asked.

Dr. Brian Jenson didn’t seem to hear her. He busied himself with the fourth extraction of a primate’s DNA molecule. It was exactly two more than he needed.

“Brian?” Claire repeated.

“I’m proving a theory,” Jenson said without looking up.

“Honey, you’ve done everything you could. Now it’s up to the FDA to make the decision.”

Just the mention of the impending FDA approval caused him to glance at the phone once again.

Claire grimaced. It was all she could do to contain herself. She was standing in the room where her husband spent more than half of his day. Every day of the week. She was there to tell him goodbye.

“Honey,” she said, “we need to talk.”

“It’s not a good time.”

Claire was aware of her timing, but if she waited until Brian had a free moment she might be on social security. When they were first married his work ethic was a source of pride for her. Back then Brian would bring his work home and they’d discuss it late into the night, naked, in bed, with a half-eaten box of pizza next to them. But lust could only take them so far. Brian’s work ethic turned into his obsession and Claire became invisible. Unable to compete with his lone mission in life.

Now, ten years later, Brian looked past her and Claire followed his gaze to the west end of the lab where a solitary couch seemed out of place in the clinical setting. Sitting on the couch was Brian’s younger brother, Billy, who stared out of the picture glass window with a huge smile on his face. Even to a casual observer the smile alone could give away his condition.

“Beautiful,” Billy said as he gazed out over the valley and watched the sun sink below a distant range of mountains.

Claire made eye contact with her husband and saw his determination rise to a new level. Jenson placed his pipette in a wire rack and walked over to his brother who greeted him with a beaming smile. “It’s beautiful isn’t it, Brian?”

Jenson looked out the window. “Yes,” he said, “it’s beautiful.”

Billy had nothing more to say and appeared satisfied to view the vista.

Jenson turned to Claire. “You see why this is so important?”

Claire didn’t say a word. They’d argued this point for so long that she’d lost her appetite for the fight.

“He’s the reason I go on,” Jenson said.

Here it comes, Claire thought. The evasive conversation.

“Just once,” Jenson said, “I’d like to have a meaningful conversation with him. Just once.”

She bit her lower lip.

“How can I stop when I know I can reverse his condition,” Jenson continued. “I might be the only person on the planet who can help him.”

That was enough for Claire. She’d had his obsession intrude on their lives for too long.

“Do you know what he has that you don’t?” Claire said.

Jenson waited. His face was rippled with tension.

“Freedom,” Claire said. “He’s free to express himself however he chooses. He enjoys every little thing he does.”

“Oh, come on, Claire. Just look at him, he’s—”

“Yes, look at him. He’s the only one in this laboratory who’s appreciating the Arizona sunset. He’s the most caring and sentient person in the building.”

As if on cue Billy added another, “Beautiful.”

Claire sat next to Billy and reached her arm around his shoulder. He leaned into her and smiled as she delicately moved aside loose strands of hair from his drooping eyes.

“What did you need to talk about?” Jenson asked.

Claire sighed. She touched Billy’s face. “I came to tell you that I’ll always be there for him.”

Jenson’s eyebrows rose. “And?”

Claire looked at Jenson straight on. “I’m not sure I can say the same about you.”

Jenson stood motionless.

“I’m thirty-six,” she said. “I love Billy and I’ll always be there for him. But I deserve to have kids of my own. I deserve to have a husband there to help me raise them. I always thought that person was going to be you, but now . . .” Her thought dissipated into the purified laboratory air.

“Oh, come on, Claire. I’m on the threshold of reversing the effects of OTC and you’re threatening to leave me?”

“No,” she said, “I’m not threatening anything. You left me a long time ago. Only your body remains behind.”

“What are you saying then?”

Claire rubbed her temple. “I don’t know, I’m just having a discussion. That’s what husbands and wives do—they discuss their issues and come to resolutions, but you don’t do that. With you everything is black and white. We put everything off until you’re finished with your work. Except you’re never finished with your work.”

“Please don’t,” Jenson said.

Claire wanted to stop, but there was too much history. “You handle me like a test tube, Brian. Only more clinical. You know more about your nude mice than you do me.”

Jenson sighed.

She squeezed her eyes shut. “What color are my eyes?”

She waited. As the silence lingered, she heard a sniffle. She opened her eyes to see tears trickling down her husband’s cheeks.

“I am so sorry, Claire.” He pulled off his latex gloves and wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. “I don’t know how to shut my brain down. Even when I try to get four or five hours of sleep I lay there with my neurons going warp speed. I’ve tried every anti-anxiety, every anti-depressant and they all give me side effects. I can’t afford to have my senses dulled, yet I can’t keep going on like this. I need help. I know it.”

Claire had never seen her husband cry before. Never. It only confirmed the fact that he was losing it. The stress was killing him. She stood and approached him.

Jenson pulled her into a hug. Drops of sorry seeped down his face and she could feel them settle into the base of her neck. He trembled in her arms.

“Please don’t leave me,” he whispered.

Claire didn’t want to let the emotion of the moment skew her plans. She remained quiet.

“Claire?”

“You used to say you needed me,” she said. “All you need now is a molecule and a microscope.”

“I can change.”

Claire had heard those empty words before. Jenson had enough patent money coming in to allow them to retire years ago. There was no reason for anything outside of his obsession.

“Dr. Jenson,” a female voice called from the doorway. “They’re waiting for you.”

Jenson whimpered. Claire rubbed his back and acknowledged his assistant with a nod.

“What are you going to tell them?” Claire asked.

Jenson took a deep breath and stood back. “I don’t know. I thought we’d have heard from the FDA by now.”

“You can cancel.”

“No. That’ll only give them incentive to fill the gap with something negative.”

Jenson kept an even gaze on her eyes. “They’re a beautiful shade of hazel.”

“That’s cheating.”

Jenson forced a meager smile. For a moment the silence seemed natural.

You know,” Jenson said, “we still have our dreams.”

“Dreams don’t count. You have to live your life today. You can’t spend decades living for tomorrow.”

Jenson bent over the sink and splashed water on his face. When he stood he was back in scientist mode. “I need to go.”

Claire nodded.

Jenson started to leave, then turned. “Are you going to be here when I’m through?”

Claire shrugged. “I’ll be there for Billy. He’ll always need me.”

“Dr. Jenson?” his assistant’s face returned to the doorway.

“I’m on my way,” Jenson said. He held Claire’s shoulders and stared into her eyes. “What if I needed you more?”

They stood there and stared at each other. A stalemate of emotions hung between them. When Jenson didn’t get what he wanted, he nodded a discouraging nod, dropped his hands from her shoulders, and quietly exited the lab.

Claire stood in the back of the room and watched the reporters crowd the small University auditorium. Brian Jenson stood behind the wooden podium just as he did five years earlier when his nomination for the Nobel Prize in Medicine was announced. It was a happier and less stressful Jenson back then, who smiled and answered questions as if he were a Hollywood star. Now tension drenched his face. He squinted past the glare of the high-powered lights and appeared to search for Claire among the pack of journalists hungry for a story.

“Dr. Jenson,” one reporter called out, “have you truly discovered the cure for mental retardation?”

The question got Jenson’s attention. “No, no, let’s not get ridiculous. Specifically, with the aid of gene therapy, I’ve been able to reverse certain genetic disorders. One of those disorders is called ornithine carbamoyltransferase deficiency, or OTC for short.”

“How does it work?” another reporter asked.

“Well,” he smiled a confident smile, which Claire knew meant his stomach was turning. “I replace the abnormal gene with a normal one.”

“How is that done? Through injection?”

“Yes, I inject the normal gene within the confines of a virus. The virus is sort of the transportation for the new gene. To discover the specific gene, I actually had to work in reverse. I synthetically created the abnormal gene, then injected primates to create a test subject.”

“So you are able to actually give someone mental retarda—”

“OTC,” Jenson snapped. “And yes I can inject the virus into a primate and create a home for the disease.”

“These primates. Were you able to cure them?”

“Yes, we had a ninety-five percent success rate.”

“How prevalent is this OTC?”

That was the question that always brought tension to his face. Years of hunching over a microscope, crunching data into a computer, monitoring mice and eventually working around the clock with primates. All for just one person.

Jenson cleared his throat. “Well, it’s believed that one in every eighty-thousand—”

“Excuse me, Dr. Jenson, did you say one in every eight thousand, or eighty- thousand?”

“That would be eighty. But I must say that ultimately there will be testing done to treat other diseases, such as Downes Syndrome and others more common.”