Insight From an Animal Guru
If he'd been just some regular guy saying this stuff, it wouldn't have been so cool. But he was a gorilla.
He wasn't the kind of gorilla that eats bananas and doesn't speak telepathic English. Think about the leader gorilla in Tarzan. He was that kind of gorilla.
But he wasn't too nice. If he'd been too nice, he would've been like any magical animal guru. He was all about tough love. If I'd been a sports team, I would've totally won the World Series. Or the Super Bowl. It doesn't matter which, because in reality, he was doing something way cooler than sports. He was saving the world. With thoughts.
"I don't see the connection," I said. There was totally a connection. I was just too dumb to figure it out.
"Do you have a fucking brain?" he grunted. He was too wise to say things in a normal tone of voice. "Eve ate an apple. Apples are red. So are fire trucks. There was a fire in Chicago in 1871. Do you see?"
"I don't reall---"
"DO YOU SEE?"
He punched me in the stomach. It was incredible.
***
"No one in your culture has been able to interpret the Bible," he grunted. "Not ever." Outside, a rabbi, a priest, and several literary critics wept tears of shame. "In fact," he continued. "You can't even read."
I looked down at the upside down tag on my T-shirt. I couldn't figure out what it said. "Because we don't know what letter are," I whispered.
"Exactly. Do you even know what comes after "R"?"
I had no fucking idea.
***
"I'm gonna say a word you've never heard in your pathetic life," he said. After he said it, I gasped. I didn't even care that it was two words. Because I'd never heard those words in my life. I didn't even know what they meant. That's how amazing they were.
I gave a cry of glee and lapsed into a coma.
***
After the paramedics had resuscitated me, I sat in silence for about a hundred hours, just trying to absorb his teachings. My brain was a sponge, and he was filling it with brain diamonds.
"Did you take retard pills today?" he asked.
"I don't even know anymore." Normally I would have thought he was being offensive, but what did I know? Everything I knew had been a lie. Even all the lies. Even this thought, right now, about lies was probably just an even bigger lie.
"So, how can I fix everything?" I asked.
He slapped my face. The skin he touched turned gold and exploded.
***
I was on my hands and knees, picking up pieces of my broken brain so I could glue them back together like a jigsaw puzzle.
He was looking at a map covered in craypaper and glitter. He sprinkled on some googly eyes, and another paradigm shift happened all over the map. Outside, the honking horns went silent. A pigeon flew backwards. A banana unpeeled itself.
"Do you see?" he asked. I nodded. It was all starting to come together.
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