photo credit: yaaaay

1. Once, when I was still a cub, not more than four months old, my father took me to the edge of our pride’s territory, marked by his rank, generously administered urine, and said, “One day, son, you will be King of the Jungle.”

Even then, in my impressionable infancy, I could sense that my father was not well.

We lived in northern Kenya, in the semi-arid scrublands, with acacia plains and rocky hills and a brown river that disappeared and reappeared capriciously. None of us had even seen a jungle, much less fantasized achieving dominion over one. We were like any other pride — the children suckling and playing in the dirt, the women stalking the veldt for clinically depressed zebra too despondent to run away — but my father, his gaze fixed on the faraway mountains, clearly longed for something more.

“King of the Jungle,” he repeated, his eyes strained and yearning, hungry for whatever lay beyond the damp, demarcative grasses where he had relieved himself.

My father was the only male in our pride, a frequent bone of contention between my aunts, who hated him, and my mother, who defended him, albeit halfheartedly and more out of reflexive contrarianism than loyalty. Our family’s sororal bickering was constant, inescapable, but it grew most venomous at dinnertime, when we’d gather around the eviscerated carcass of a dik-dik or impala and my aunts would recall the many suitors who, thanks to the impassioned appeals of my mother, were regrettably spurned in favor of my guileless, freeloading, good-for-nothing father.

“Remember Charles?” Aunt Ruby said during one such dinner. “Healthy head of hair on that one.”

“Mmmm hmmm,” Aunt Nyanza concurred. “Charles.”

“Nice, firm flank too,” said Ruby, gnawing on a femur bone. “God, when I think of running my paws through that golden, lustrous mane . . .”

“Shut up,” my mother said. “Shut up.”

My father said that when he met my mother she was the prettiest girl he’d ever seen, and he’d seen quite a few. He’d left his home in the Serengeti in the waning days of the wet season and had wandered for three years in search of a pride of his own, systematically rejected by every female from the Olduvai Gorge to Mount Kilimanjaro due to his laughable appearance and his weak, ineffectual roar. Having never had to hunt his own food before, my father found solitary living exceedingly difficult, and by the time he reached northern Kenya he was bleary-eyed, malarial, and meatless, a staggering skeleton draped with a mangy, slipshod carpet of a hide. When he first saw my mother, standing victoriously, radiantly over a freshly intercepted antelope, his mind raced to think of something clever to say, something charming, that would forever endear him to her heart, but instead he staggered to a stop, let out a pathetic, muffled groan, and passed out, ten meters away from the perplexed, amber-eyed beauty he was certain was his one true love.

When my aunts tell the story, they emphasize their immediate discernment of my father’s uselessness, unburdening themselves of any blame associated with our family’s subsequent, unrelenting misery. He first appeared to them as a sorry, slumped sack of bones dragged by my mother beneath the shade of a fig tree, and when he was deposited at their feet my aunts said, “You expect us to mate with that?” and spit indignantly in the dirt.

“Oh have a heart,” my mother said. “He’s starving. What do you want me to do, leave him to the buzzards?”

“Yes,” said my aunts. “That is one appealing option.”

For a week my mother kept a vigil at my father’s side, talking him through his deliriums and delivering leftovers from the day’s hunt, despite the clamoring protests of my aunts. They warned her that once he regained his strength he’d be rutting them left and right, saddling the pride with all kinds of malformed, plus-or-minus-limbed offspring, but she said, “Don’t be ridiculous, he’s perfectly harmless. When he’s better we’ll send him back to the Serengeti.”

“Should have left him to the buzzards,” said my aunts, shaking their heads, but my father paid them no attention. In his fevered state the only voice he could understand was my mother’s, cool and gentle, like the tributaries of the brown river blessedly trickling across the grateful, sun-parched land.

How my parents fell in love, the narrative of their romance, came to me piecemeal, one anecdote at a time, the facts often disputed voraciously by my aunts, who attribute the whole affair to any number of reason clouding sub-Saharan illnesses. There was the story of my mother dragging my father to the river, her body straining against his, fearing heat stroke, as he mumbled deliriously about every lioness who hadn’t loved him. There was the story of my mother licking my father’s coarse, patchy fur, grooming him, after my aunts’ barrage of mange-related insults reduced him to tears. During this time, other males approached our pride, ones with rippling muscles and luxurious, flowing manes and a minimum amount of parasites, but after every date, every romantic rendezvous in the tall grass, my mother found some irredeemable fault in her latest suitor and drove him away with gnashing teeth and expletive-laced vitriol, much to the displeasure of my aunts.

“What happened to Leon?” said Ruby after one such incident.

“I told him he was arrogant,” said my mother. “He didn’t care for that so he left.”

“I heard you called his mother a cryptosporidic whore,” said Nyanza, “and that you threatened to chew off his testicles.”

My mother thought for a moment.

“That may have been mentioned, yes,” she said.

As this scene played itself out again and again, the handsome gentleman callers sent storming away by my mother’s antagonistic rants, my aunts’ frustrations reached the boiling point.

“What happens when we go into heat,” they lamented, “and the only male for twenty kilometers is that cripple beneath the fig tree?”

“Oh, go hump a donkey,” she’d tell them. “Go screw a jackal.”

For my father, meanwhile, these tumultuous times were the happiest days of his life. Every morning he’d wake to a glorious sunrise, the outstretched shadows of doum palms and thorn trees gradually receding as the sun lifted into the cloudless sky, and there would be my mother, watching over him, the nascent sunlight outlining her features with an otherworldly, angelic glow. He wouldn’t be hungry, his shriveled stomach wrecked by starvation, but he’d eat whatever scraps of antelope or water buck she brought because he wanted to please her, and because she paid him such close attention while he was chewing, as if she half expected him to choke on a vertebra shard and asphyxiate.

photo credit: DavidDennis

As he ate my father would tell my mother about the Serengeti, his home, with its verdant grasslands, its crocodile infested floodplains, its statuesque rock outcroppings standing stoically alone like sentinels, and my mother would listen raptly, transported, for the first time in her life, to a world beyond the urine-soaked boundaries of her family’s territory. My aunts ridiculed him, refused to accept that the Serengeti even existed, but my mother believed in my father’s homeland the way one might believe in heaven – a perfect, magical dream that would be too heartbreaking to conceive of as untrue.

One day, as my father described for my mother in vivid detail the Great Migration, when over a million wildebeest trek two thousand miles clockwise, following the shifting bounties of the rainy seasons, she asked him if he’d like to join her for a walk along the river. Where a month ago there had been nothing but dust and desiccated skeletons was now a muddy, free flowing stream, and as my parents strode along its banks they were both filled with an overwhelming sense of rejuvenation, of lush and fertile possibilities, of the full circumference of the Circle of Life. Neither of them remembers exactly what was said, how the discussion of migrating wildebeest and zebra and Thomson’s gazelle turned to the harbored secrets of their hearts, but what is certain is that, wordlessly, my mother followed my father from the banks, a smile slowly forming on her face, and disappeared into the tall grass, not to reappear until the following morning again painted the dusty valley with light.

Four months later, I was born.

2.

By the time I came into this world the river was gone, as was the romantic idealism of my parents’ courtship. The principal culprits, of course, were my aunts, whose relentless potshots at my father got my mother so worked up she would frequently run into trees while chasing gazelle, saddling her with maddening headaches and, possibly, brain damage, which gave her near constant rants at anyone in close proximity a lurid, surreal quality, like the nonsensical rhetoric of dreams.

My aunts’ misgivings about my father were, for the most part, aesthetic – his lice-ridden fur, his laughable roar, his distinct aroma of sweat and antelope dung due to infrequent bathing – but there were also more serious, pointed complaints, such as the endlessly repeated claim that my father was, for all intents and purposes, useless. My father was a dreamer, not a doer, and often when he was supposed to patrol the outskirts of our territory or chase away carrion from last night’s kill he would instead wander aimlessly along the dry riverbed, contemplating such profundities as the origin of species and the eloquent beauty of the Circle of Life as vultures devoured our lunch with uncontested abandon.

“Look where philosophy’s got us now,” my aunts would say as we gnawed on the bones the vultures had left behind. “If philosophy’s so great, how come philosophy never chased away a buzzard? How come philosophy never caught a gazelle?”

Despite all of this, all the badgering, the name-calling, the cruel, malicious jokes, everything would change, at least temporarily, when my aunts, due to unprovenanced forces beyond their control, went into heat. Several times a year, on no regular cycle or schedule, they would grow uncharacteristically warm and agreeable, withholding their complaints and insults, instead inquiring pleasantly about my father’s wanderings at dinnertime, about the quixotic ruminations of his ever-churning mind. At night, as cicadas chattered from the trees, my aunts would beckon my father into the tall grass, purring insinuating phrases and disappearing behind a curtain of wind-rustled stalks, and then the rustling would intensify, as if the grasses were being throttled by an unseen storm, followed by panting, and growling, and then, suddenly, silence. “What was that?” I asked my mother, but she shrugged me off, said, “I’ll tell you when you’re older,” and, despite the insistent drone of the cicadas, I could hear her softly weep. The next morning, freshly emerged from the grass, my aunts reverted to their old callousness, their perennial disgust, and it was as if the previous evening never happened, as if it were nothing more than a ponderous midsummer night’s dream.

My half brothers and sisters, born not out of love but of lust, were every bit as vicious and disagreeable as their preternaturally unhappy mothers. Though they were younger and smaller than me they possessed strength in numbers, and therefore had no trouble making my life as miserable as imaginably possible, biting, cursing, dunking me in the newly flowing brown river, all the while parroting every insult they’d heard their mothers sling at my hapless, long suffering father.

As a result, when my own mother gave birth to two baby girls, I was ecstatic, eager to acquire relatives who weren’t genetically preprogrammed to chew on my tail or devour my portion of antelope. My mother, of course, was equally enthused, her old routines of screaming obscenities and running angrily into trees replaced by the simple, unassailable joy of caring for her precious infant daughters. My father, however, became preoccupied, his brow forever furrowed, his solitary walks growing longer and more frequent, until we barely saw him, except at dinnertime, when he would chew on his bone marrow and endure the jeers of my aunts, silent, unflinching, as if he wasn’t even there. He neglected his familial duties, never groomed, never bathed, spent his waking hours pondering some unanswerable question the rest of us could only guess at, but, even though my mother clearly wished he would spend more time with his daughters, would play with them, would remember their names, she was so enwrapped in her own parental duties that she let my father’s distant behavior go, assumed it was a phase, some form of paternal postpartum depression. Thus, despite everything, life was relatively harmonious, until the suitors came.

They came from the south, as my father had, but rather than limping in sickly and skeletally they strode confidently up to our borders, regal, entitled, plying my mother and aunts with artificially sweetened solicitations: “Hey sugar, hey mama, what’s good sweet thing? Where you been all my life?” My aunts, thrilled beyond description to be courted again, offered the opportunity to rid themselves at last of my father, who had brought them only tears, tribulations, and ill-tempered children, immediately swooned, crossed the boundaries marked by my father’s excretions and replied in their sexiest purrs, “Hey big boy, hey stud, hey lover, show me what you got.”

My mother, of course, wanted nothing to do with them. She cursed, bared her teeth, insinuated their ancestral line was composed of baboons and Black-backed jackals, but this made the intruding males only desire her more. “That’s right,” they said. “Keep talking dirty, mama. Just like that.” If my father were anyone else, a normal father, a keeper and protector, a pater familias, the suitors would have been chased from our territory at once, spirited away with flailing paws and gnashing teeth, cast back into the bowels of the Serengeti from whence they came, but I had no such father. Instead, as the suitors paced our borders, murmuring the various graphically specific things they were going to do to my mother the moment she went into heat, my father wandered along the river, abandoning his marital responsibilities, contemplating the mystical, ever-confounding question he could never, for the life of him, answer.

For the next few weeks the suitors were a constant presence at the far borders of our land, all sweet talk and bravado, accepting the gifts of antelope meat giddily offered by my aunts and casting devious stares at my mother as she hunted, roaring suggestively as she pursued her doomed, futilely fleeing herbivores. “Okay mama,” they said. “Gonna give you something good to eat tonight.” Whenever my father was around, which was not often, my mother implored him to get rid of the ungentlemanly callers, to for once in his life perform his expected role in the pride’s explicitly structured hierarchy, but he always mumbled, “Maybe tomorrow,” and walked off toward the river, as far away from his rivals as he could get without completely disappearing from sight.

My aunts, meanwhile, escalated their character assassination of my father to record levels, exhaustively detailing every fault, every misstep, every unforgivable personal shortcoming that made my father a blight on their existence, clamoring for his expulsion, his replacement by the handsome lotharios displaying their physical perfection at the outer reaches of our territory. And even though my mother had aired many of the same complaints, the same indictments, had assailed my father with her fair share of frustrated, hourlong marital rants, she refused to give up on him, to sell him out, compelled by her mystifying love to defend him, unconditionally, even if all of Africa was against her. For her, love was simply a winning argument over logic, a justified absence of reason. Love was nothing more than seeing a miracle when everyone else saw a mistake.

And so the battle lines were drawn: my mother, faithful to the end, fighting tooth and nail on behalf of her ever-wandering, ever-muttering husband, versus my aunts, shrieking for my father’s eternal banishment, sex-starved and drooling over their newly arrived Serengeti Romeos. Dinners, never pleasant or peaceful in the first place, became the favored arena in which the familial war was fought, and it was not uncommon for thirty minutes of no-holds-barred brawling to erupt between the first and second bites of whatever hooved mammal was lying bloody and intestineless before us. The suitors, meanwhile, kept prowling the perimeter, licking their chops over the sleek, sassy females thrown into a furor by their arrival, and after the dust settled and the lionesses licked their wounds and returned to their meal in icy silence, the amorous newcomers would laugh and salivate. “Mmm mmm,” they’d say. “Girls want it bad.” But as long as my mother violently resisted, as long as she preserved my father’s honor with her snarling jaws and powerful forelimbs and unequivocal refusal to surrender, the suitors remained beyond our borders, unwilling to overstep their boundaries, limiting themselves to mere innuendoes of what they would do when they finally crossed that invisible, aromatic line.

Until the hyenas came.

photo credit: appenz

One of my father’s principal responsibilities, the responsibilities he had been grossly neglecting, was to protect the children from hyenas while the females hunted. Although, as lions, we occupied the upper rung of the food chain, the hyena was a perennial nemesis, poaching our kills and disrespecting our borders, and in times of hunger and desperation they were known to go after our defenseless young. My aunts always kept an eye out for hyenas, as they didn’t trust my father’s abilities in the least, but one day a particularly lengthy and strenuous hunt took them far from our pride’s territory and a pack of hyenas slipped in from the south, stealthy and methodical, roving right past the no doubt grinning suitors as they pressed forward in their ravenous quest, while my father, the keeper and protector of the pride, was but a speck in the scavengers’ luminescent-eyed periphery, standing with me at the opposite end of our land and staring at the distant mountains, promising me my jungle kingdom.

When we returned we found my mother with her head in her paws, wailing, beside herself. We found my aunts, glaring at my mother unsympathetically, as if to say, “I told you so.” We found blood, on the grass, in the dirt, smeared on an acacia tree, the narrative of struggle, the artifacts of tragedy. And we found what was left of my young sisters, scattered, unceremoniously, across the dusty ground.

Not a word was spoken. Not an insult or a reproach was volleyed. My mother just sobbed, my aunts glared, and my father, not knowing what else to do, headed for the river, his head bowed, his feet tracking his children’s blood across the dusk-shadowed terrain. Meanwhile, I, I did nothing, did nothing but watch as the suitors arrived, crossing our borders for the first time, whispering, “Hey sugar, hey mama, hey sweet thing,” as they closed in on my surviving family members, what was left of my pride.

3.

After my sisters’ deaths was when my father’s fascination with the jungle grew into an all-encompassing obsession. It was all he talked about, all he thought about, all he dreamed about – his sleep spent exclusively in vivid revelries of lush canopies, chattering primates, insects the size of his paws. He wasn’t sure exactly where the jungle was, had heard it was somewhere to the south, beyond the horizon-obscuring mountains, but he was determined to find out and relentlessly pestered my mother and me with grandiose plans of escape from our stifling scrubland existence, plans that were unfortunately met with little enthusiasm from either party.

“I swear to God,” my mother would say, “if you mention the jungle one more time, I’m going to rip out your vocal cords with my teeth.”

As annoying as our father’s jungle-related ramblings were, both my mother and I recognized that his immersion in a rain-soaked, tree-lined fantasy world was his only means of coping with the profound and humiliating changes that had occurred in his life ever since the hyenas devoured my sisters and cousins and the sleazeball suitors became full-fledged patriarchs of our family. For one, although he was accustomed, by now, to the relentless insults and diatribe of my aunts, my father now had a male chorus of derision to contend with, tenors and baritones in conspiratorial alliance with Ruby’s alto and Nyanza’s soprano, and whereas before he had shrugged off the verbal slings and arrows of my aunts by retreating into his mind, his rich inner life, the post-hyena five part cacophony of defamation and degradation proved too much for his natural defense systems to handle, and it was the rare dinner where my father didn’t convulse in paroxysms of anguish and shame and crawl inside the bone-picked husk of a zebra, as if he could disappear inside its lifeless body, exit his misery in the void that had replaced flesh and blood, heart and soul. Another, even crueler blow to my father was that my mother no longer defended him, no longer bared her teeth and cursed, no longer possessed even a spark of the fire with which she once fought for his honor, holding her tongue instead of lashing out in saliva-soaked monologues, chewing her antelope instead of chomping at her sisters’ faces, and this, more than a thousand slurs from my aunts and uncles, this is what truly devastated him, forced him to retreat into fancies of tropical fruits and sylvan waterfalls and resourceful pygmy tribes every time my mother stood by silently as the pride methodically tore him to pieces.

Still, even though my aunts had assumed my father would leave, that my mother, in her grief and anger, would demand his departure, he remained, my mother refusing to let him go, forever loyal, regardless of the pain and suffering he inflicted daily to her heart. This, of course, aggravated my aunts to no end: “Why is he still here?” they’d say, every time his sorry, slumped shape appeared in the distance, returning from a day’s worth of staring hypnotically at the jungle-hiding mountains, but my mother never had an answer for them. After burying her daughters, she never had an answer for anything. She just sat in the shade of the acacia trees and let the wind speak for her, the rustling of leaves, sounds free of bitterness and hatred, blessedly stripped of all meaning.

Despite the past success of my own, acutely honed strategy of surviving family life, which involved never speaking to my aunts and maintaining, when possible, a distance of no less than a kilometer between myself and their children, the incorporation of the suitors into our pride meant that my days of isolationism were numbered. I was approaching the age when a male typically leaves his birthplace, searching, as my father had, for a pride of his own, but I couldn’t bear the thought of leaving my mother alone with my new, lecherous uncles and their unsavory intentions, and spent my days immovable from my mother’s side, ready to defend her to the death while my father was off somewhere imagining his jungle coronation.

Strangely, my mother, over time, softened her aversion to the suitors, so that, while not welcoming them with outstretched paws, she was able to make it through dinner without biting large chunks of cartilage out of their ears every time they referred to her as “sugar mama” or “sweet flanks.” She appreciated my company, but assured me that my round-the-clock protection was unnecessary: “They won’t do anything,” she’d tell me, as I obsessively monitored their every movement. “I’m a big girl. I can take care of myself.”

Even more disconcerting was that, due to my blossoming sexual maturation and the absence of any potential leonine mates, my REM sleep became inundated with strange, lurid dreams involving herbivores: frolicking in the grass with antelope, moonlit heart-to-hearts with zebra, forbidden kisses with a reticulated giraffe, her gorgeous eyelashes fluttering, her long, slender neck seductively lowering to reach my awaiting mouth. I mentioned the dreams to no one, not even my mother, but it was apparent to everyone that some repressed inner secret was tormenting me once I began skipping meals, refusing to eat anything with hooves, subsisting only on insects and ostrich and the occasional vulture, mysteriously fallen, dead, from the sky.

I started accompanying my mother and aunts on hunts, and as they pursued their terror-stricken ungulate prey, their victims’ adrenaline fueled limbs succumbing to exhaustion, their bulging eyes seized by fear, I imagined strolling with the doomed impalas and dik-dik along the river, at a reflective, leisurely pace, conversing easily about the approaching wet season, the migratory patterns of flamingos, the incomparable beauty of a heart-stopping north Kenyan sunset. I saw myself nuzzling them, grooming their fur, sharing intimate moments in the tall grasses, and when the animals were finally brought down by my family members, their throats crushed, their carotid arteries severed, I was overcome by despair, sinking into an unshakeable state of lethargy and depression. Eventually I took to joining in the chase, tearing after the terrified beasts myself, and as they blathered and blubbered incoherent prayers for deliverance from death I supplicated them: “Please, don’t run away, I only want to talk to you. My intentions are honorable and pure.” But when I finally caught a gazelle, tackled her to the ground with my powerful forelimbs, my primal conditioning took over, her vain struggles to escape thwarted by my knifelike canines, and when she finally stopped moving, allowing me to gaze for the first time deep into her beautiful, limpid eyes, she was dead, as were my romantic yearnings, freeing me to resume my old eating habits, dream my old dreams, of dusty grasslands and cloudless skies, of acacia trees and faraway mountains, of hunting and feasting, raining and bleeding, of birth, rebirth, and murder.

The day my father left us for good was the hottest day of the year, the sunbaked land cracking in complaint, the brown river reduced to little more than a pathetic, insignificant trickle. I was poised at the edge of our property, surrounded by dust and dying grass, and as wobbly, erratically circling birds fell from the sky and littered the earth with their dehydrated bodies my father gave one of his jungle pep talks, staring off into the distance with his trademark expression of daydreaming, reality-free rapture.

“In the jungle it rains almost every day,” he said. “Plentiful food, plentiful water. Lots of shade. And the diversity! Most diverse ecosystem on the planet.”

No one knew where my father got his information. We guessed half of it was made up, half was gleaned from migrating birds. He could talk about the jungle for hours, if allowed, raving about the plant life, the delicate cycle of death and regeneration, decaying trees sacrificing themselves so that others may thrive, grow to one day reach the towering canopy, but no one permitted him more than five seconds of discursive jungle rambling except me, so I alone was the less-than-enthusiastic sponge for his endless font of knowledge, the unwilling future monarch of his fairy tale kingdom beyond the mountains.

As of late, I had been spending more time with my father, less with my mother, sensing that it was he who most needed protection, needed the love and support my mother could no longer give him. My mother, though she had passionately lobbied for my father’s right to stay after the carnage of the hyenas, had become aloof, arctically unaffectionate, and to any outsider her relationship with my father would have been indiscernible from her relationship with the suitors: reserved, removed, distant. When my father took me on our one-on-one walks to discuss the jungle I found it difficult to follow his obtuse, droning lecture style, his frequent pedagogical digressions, but it wasn’t ultimately important whether I understood the difference between two species of parasitic creepers or comprehended the ecological importance of the termite, all that mattered was that I was there, not interrupting him, not berating him for voicing the one dream he had left.

“In the jungle,” he said, “there are no seasons, no climatic changes. Time itself stops. The entire world is suspended in the beauty and simplicity of now.”

When we walked back to the center of our land, to the sheltering acacia trees where we sought relief from the cruel and unusual punishment of the sun, I immediately sensed that something was amiss, out of place, feeling like a white stork whose jittery behavior signals the coming of a terrible storm. We saw my aunts and two of the suitors, recovering from heat stroke in the shade, but my mother and the other suitor were missing, odd since, in her depression-induced torpor, my mother rarely left the sanctuary of the acacias except to hunt.

“I’m going to check down by the tall grass,” my father said, heading off to the now nearly absent river. “I have something I want to tell her about the perils of deforestation.”

What my father discovered in the tall grass was never entirely clear, but minutes later he came bounding from the thicket in a psychotic rage, hot on the heels of the reappeared suitor, unleashing every last venom-laced barb of vitriol that, until now, he hadn’t had the strength to utter. Not long after my mother emerged, tears streaming down her face, and she could only watch as the other suitors rushed to their compatriot’s aid, forcing my father to the dirt and mauling him with their teeth and claws, my father’s lean, unathletic physique no match for the fierce, rippling muscled triumvirate battering him with bites and blows. I tried to defend my father, charged the suitors with a bloodcurdling battle cry, but my aunts blocked my path, grabbed me by the neck and pinned me to the ground, and I, like my mother, could only be a spectator to the carnage. “He’s had this coming for a long time,” my aunts said, sneering. “Let the big boys sort it out.”

When it was over, my father was still alive but virtually unrecognizable. He staggered to his feet, tottered, then fell again, his coat crimson with blood, his face gashed, an ear missing.

“Come on, darling,” he said to my mother, struggling to find his footing. “We’re going to the jungle.”

My mother turned away. She couldn’t bear to look at him.

“Beautiful birds in the jungle,” he continued, in between expectorations of blood. “Red, gold, green, every color of the rainbow. Brilliant plumage. And the songs – enchanting.”

My mother was sobbing now. She was shivering, on the hottest day of the year, shivering and shaking. She retreated to the tall grass, where her transgressions had transpired, and as my father described the layers of vegetation in the jungle – the emergents, ninety meters tall, the canopy, forty meters, the understory, the forest floor – she disappeared, at first a faint rustling betraying her movements, and then, finally, nothing.

“How about you son?” my father asked me. “King of the Jungle. Lord and Conqueror. Top of the food chain. What do you say?”

What could I say? I knew the story of my father’s emaciated three-year journey from the Serengeti. Traveling with him on his quixotic, head-in-the-clouds quest was tantamount to suicide. What could I possibly say?

When my father realized I was not coming, that my mother was not coming, not joining him in his exodus to paradise, he took a long, final look at our pride, his pride, surveying our family and the sun-cracked landscape with the saddest face I have ever seen, and then turned around and commenced his journey, crossing the edge of our property, the boundaries he himself had laid, toward the distant mountains, toward the homeland he had left to find his one true love. The suitors and my aunts left, not bothering to watch him recede into nothingness, but I stayed, stayed until my father was indistinguishable from a speck in my eye, a windblown piece of dirt, dust, and then I, too, turned away, returned to the safety and sanctuary of the shade. The next day the brown river dried up, disappeared, vanished, and as my father trekked to the glorious, tree-lined, rain-soaked promised land the rest of us were left to wait impotently for the river’s return, for its life-giving waters to rejuvenate the barren, sun-parched scrublands. And yet, we knew it would reappear, somehow sensed that it would not, could not, abandon us, and so we waited, unafraid, waited for the waters to flow from some mystical, faraway source, a gift of nature we could barely even begin to fathom.