Part 3
Russell brought his hand to the side of Kito’s neck. He waited until the gorilla’s face lifted toward him.
“Help me leave while I still can.”
The fingers released the shirt slowly. Russell stayed where he was, close enough that the wrinkled cloth still brushed Kito’s hands.
Then the gorilla lifted both palms to Russell’s face.
I had spent years observing the precision of those hands: how they could sort a mouthful of vegetation, test a latch, peel away something delicate without crushing it. Now one rested along each side of Russell’s jaw. His face looked small between them.
Russell let out a brief laugh that caught before it was finished.
“One more inspection, pal?”
Kito looked directly at him. Russell placed his own hands over the gorilla’s fingers, but made no effort to lower them.
“I spent years showing you I’d come back,” he said. “You understood the staying part better than I did.”
He stopped to breathe. No one behind the glass moved.
“There’s more I’m going to lose. This building. My family. Maybe what to call you.”
Eli turned toward the wall.
“Today you’re Kito. Today you’re my friend.” Russell’s thumbs moved over the gorilla’s hands. “If I lose that, don’t take it for me leaving you. I didn’t choose it.”
Kito drew him forward again. This time Russell reached with both arms, spreading his hands against the gorilla’s back. His forehead disappeared into the silver hair.
Denise eventually went to the gate. She stood there without calling his name.
Russell looked up, saw her, and nodded.
He took his time crossing the enclosure. At the threshold, he began to lift a hand, then let it fall against his leg. He went through without looking back.
Later, when I asked him about that, he said, “If I’d turned, you’d have had to fetch me out.”
Kito followed as far as the barrier. He pressed a palm to the mesh while Russell walked down the service corridor, past the hose reel and the row of empty feed tubs, until the turn hid him from view.
Long after the corridor was empty, Kito remained there.
The tablet in my bag kept knocking against my hip as a nurse led me through Vensara memory care. I had brought a video from the park. Outside the windows, the new leaves were still pale; six months had passed since Russell’s last shift.
His illness had continued at the speed his doctor had feared. By then, he didn’t recognize Eli. His wife could be sitting beside him when he asked someone to find her. His grown children brought photographs, and he received them courteously, studying each picture as though the people offering it deserved his best effort.
The nurse found him in a sunroom. He wore a soft green sweater, and his hair had been combed carefully away from his forehead. Without his cap and work clothes, I noticed how much narrower his shoulders had become.
I introduced myself and asked whether I could sit with him.
He smiled. “Of course.”
“We used to work together. I’m Natalie Voss.”
“That must have been nice.”
I took the chair beside him rather than the one facing him. For a moment, I left the tablet on my knees. Then I opened the recording and angled it so he wouldn’t have to turn far.
Kito was sitting beneath the fig trees in the habitat. One shoulder faced the camera. He had his hands resting loosely near his knees, and a leaf moved above him in the air from a vent.
Russell looked at the screen.
I watched his face too closely, then made myself look at the video instead. He owed me nothing. I had come with a memory and had nearly made it into a test.
His sleeve brushed mine as he leaned forward.
“Kito.”
The word was quiet enough that I thought, for an instant, I had supplied it myself.
Russell moved closer. His eyes focused on the animal’s face as Kito turned toward the camera.
“My pal,” he said.
I held the tablet steady with both hands.
The focus went out of his expression almost as quickly as it had arrived. He settled back and looked at me with the same courteous uncertainty he’d offered when I came in. When he noticed my tears, he seemed concerned that something had happened to me.
I wiped my face and let the video run.
His family was with him when he died three months later, not long after his fifty-sixth birthday.
The following morning, I went to Kito’s enclosure. Eli and the other keepers gathered nearby, quieter than they usually were at that hour. I stood where Kito could see me and told him Russell had died.
I cannot know what the words conveyed. He may have been responding to my voice, or to the stillness of people whose movements he knew. I had not finished speaking when he turned away.
He walked to the far concrete wall and sat facing it.
For days afterward, the keepers measured what he ate and recorded how little of it there was. His rest was broken. Eli approached on the familiar route, but Kito did not reach for him. When I called, he left his face turned toward the wall.
We continued to bring food, kept the routines predictable, and watched. The records filled with small quantities eaten, long periods awake, and contact declined.
On the fifteenth morning, Kito got up and crossed the enclosure.
Eli was near the observation room when it happened. He called me over with one quick movement of his hand, then stepped aside so I could see.
Kito had gone to Russell’s gate.
He stood with both hands against it. The service corridor beyond was empty, the floor newly rinsed. Nobody spoke through the microphone.
Then Kito made a soft call.
It was different from the rough distress sound we had heard on Russell’s final morning. I recognized it from the recordings of Russell becoming confused: the quieter sound Kito had used when he approached him, before a hand touched his back or an arm went around him.
Once, the call carried into the corridor. There was no answering footstep.
Kito lowered his hands and left the gate.
After that morning, he no longer waited there.
Sometimes, though, the first keeper into the building would find him beneath the fig trees before the visitors came and before the radios began their daily chatter. He would be sitting upright, his arms lifted in front of him.
There was nothing between them. His elbows were bent, his palms turned inward, held about as far apart as Russell’s shoulders.
He stayed that way for several minutes, looking into the quiet enclosure.