We both know I despise orangutans, so stop fucking sending me pictures of orangutans dressed as humans. I get it: you hate me. That’s no reason to parade orangutans wearing g-strings through my inbox. The fuckers make me physically ill. I feel like I made this very clear in the early stages of our relationship. I’d rather you told every chick you know that I was a terrible lay, frankly. At least that would be an attack on me, as opposed to an attack on my sensibilities.

I went to the zoo, today. I didn’t even look at those fuckers. I did eyeball a gorilla for a minute or two, red pandas, too. I spent some time in front of the Komodo dragon’s habitat. I told some kids that that was the very creature that proved god and heaven were lies. I had words with their parents in the after, but I remain hopeful that something of what I said has become a healthy seed of doubt.

I bought a chocolate-covered banana on a stick. That was one tasty bit of alright. I ate it at the lemur garden. They sang a song of hope while I ate. I hummed along. I wiped my face. I put the stick in the trashcan and swore I’d never repeat their words.

I thought of you: you pointing at the Salisbury romantisaur in the reptile house; you digging for turtle eggs in the petting zoo sandbox; you crying at the back of the line for the ladies’ room. I thought of the last car ride, the one where you threw my copy of The Game’s debut album out the window and told me you’d had enough of the new rap music. As much as I agreed, the fight that followed still rattles through my mind.

I recited it, word for word, to the guy who sprays down the elephants between shows. I wish I didn’t feel so close to elephants. They bore me with their wisdom. They look so smart in their bovine eyes, despite the impossibility of such a thing. I thought I saw you there. I thought I saw you on the back of an elephant. You were holding its ears. An orangutan was holding your waist, eyes closed for fear of falling.

Night comes earlier in the off-season. I’d made up my mind to stay for far too long, to see each habitat three or four times, but then came the seeds of night and the knowledge that leaving was my only remaining option.

Gibbons mate for life, I’ve been told. They suffer for it. One gibbon dies, as gibbons often do, and the other cries endlessly, never fully understanding its loss, only that the dead gibbon is never there when the alarm clock sounds and showers and coffee and work become the business of the day. The surviving gibbon works its spreadsheets and revises its memos. It makes small talk in the break room. It swings from the fluorescent lights of its blue office. Yet, where once the surviving gibbon had found joy in such things, there is, now, only a sense that it is performing for the audience just beyond the glass of its carefully manicured environment.

I drove home along the bus route I used to take. It was a meandering course, but it seemed inviting after so many years of the direct approach. I thought about the time you promised to open a sandwich stand in Santa Cruz if you lived to see eighty. I wondered what you’d call it. I thought about satellites, how they dissolve upon reentry. I thought about all the wishes that had ever been wasted on burning satellites. I thought about your hair that night when you wrecked your car, about your bleeding nose and the clarity of your left eye versus the swelling of your right. I thought about home before I arrived, about how little I wanted to be there, about how soft a quiet escape into the night might be. I thought of down blankets and pillows, about how they start to hurt when the quills poke through the fabric.

Then there’s this: one new message; one new orangutan behind the wheel of a limo; one more Eighties film star mocking me in your voice. I’ll kill every orangutan on earth—there can’t be that many—before I’ll change my email address or filter you out with the junk mail. I’ll resurrect Kray Kavandash from beneath the dusty bones of the elephant graveyard that did him in and order him to commit his guns toward absolute extinction. I’ll have to learn voodoo or something to do it, but I’ve got nothing but time, these days. Then it’s only a matter of burning the photographs and the films and every last copy of National Geographic for Kids. I simply can’t stress how much I hate those fuckers, and no amount of trying to be cool with them seems to help.

Timestamp: 11.21.06 at 05:00 PM. Filed under: Fiction.