“That’s the thing,” my friend Tomas said. “They always get it wrong. Every time, they get it wrong. They always get the wrong people. Once we get out of this,” he spread his arms and shook his head, as if to say—This colossal fuck-fest of a mess we’ve gotten ourselves into—“the next time, when we get our chance…” His voice died off. A few seconds later, it picked up again, “Hey, remember that book, the evolutionary biologist? I can’t think of his name.”
I was following leads inside my brain, traveling the corridors of dusty old neurons only to find locked doors and empty rooms. Nothing. I shook my head. Just as he was about to speak, it came to me. “The giraffes!” I blurted.
“Zebras.”
“Good,” I said. “I hate those long-necked fuckers.”
It was one of the books he’d loaned me over the years. Determinism, biology, physics, history, these were the things that interested him. So he studied, collected data, became obsessed. He always became obsessed. As a kid doing karate, he made himself practice each kick—front kick, back kick, spinning kick, etc.—one hundred times a night with each leg, fine-tuning his accuracy by knocking a cigarette off the top of a plastic bottle on his bureau or stopping just short. Then it was nunchakus. By the end of the year, he spun those things like Bruce Lee. Then he said he needed to get stronger. So he started doing pushups, sit-ups, knee bends, chin-ups, building up to a hundred of each, then two hundred, performing them twice a day, once in the morning, before school, and again at night, before bed. Six months later he was Bruce Lee, all grooves and notches. Then he got the barbells.
“Yeah,” I said. “I remember… the thing with the gorillas. We talked about it.”
Tomas cocked his head down, stared up, and, with sufficient mockery to emphasize the wrongness of my answer, said, “It was baboons.”
“You’re a fucking baboon.”
“Clever,” he said. “Do you write your own material?”
We were at his place, the derelict apartment he’d been forced to inhabit when his cabin was repossessed. We were sitting at his table, drinking. We should have been drinking tea, at least he should have been, with all the medications he had to take—blue with breakfast, pink on an empty stomach, yellow before bed: pills for his nervous system, pills for his immune system, pills for his endocrine system. There wasn’t a system he had that didn’t need a pill! But recently he’d thrown caution to the wind. He’d taken it to
