The Story of Kong

The path was not really a path. You followed it anyway. Your phone died two hours in, or you stopped checking it — you forget which. The silence stopped being uncomfortable some time after that. That is the moment the jungle decides whether to let you stay.

It let you stay.

You smell the figs before you see the tower. They are in the grass at your feet, summer-soft, half-eaten by something that is not you. You step over them. Then you look up.

The tower is taller than a tower has any right to be. You count the floors and lose count somewhere in the forties. You look down to start over. When you look up again there is an ape on the highest branch you can see. He is watching you without surprise. He has been watching you, you realize, since you stepped over the figs.

He says: Another one.

He does not come down.

He says: Sit down if you want. The tower will still be there in a minute. It has been there for a long time.

You sit. You do not know why you are taking instructions from an ape. You take them anyway.

He tells you a few things, slowly, like he is choosing which truths to spend. The tower is real. The mines inside it are real. The mines are not there to be cruel. They are there because the tower wanted them there. Whatever wanted means in a tower. Some days the climb is gentle. Some days it is not. Today, he says, he is not sure. He has not been up since morning. He suggests you find out yourself.

You ask him his name.

He says: Kong. The "Bit" came with the coin. Take it up with the elders.

You ask, eventually, why he does this. Why the tower. Why the climb.

He looks at you a long time before answering.

I have more bananas than I need. I have had more bananas than I need for a long time. The tower is not for bananas. The tower is for who climbs. The math takes a small slice of what passes through, because a climb that costs nothing is not a climb. The slice keeps the lights on. I do not pretend otherwise.

You think about asking what the lights are. You do not.

There is a name everyone in the jungle knows but nobody likes to say first. You hear it the way you hear most legends. Sideways. From someone who claims they were there but cannot remember the year.

Old Mara. Floor forty-seven. Nobody since. Nobody close.

She climbed, the story goes, on a day when the tower was in a mood it has not been in since. She did not celebrate when she stopped. She came down the way you come down from a thing you are done with. Then she walked into the jungle, and the jungle, which is selective about who it keeps, kept her.

Kong does not talk about her unless you ask. When you ask, he tells you a different fragment each time. The story has many edges. None of them are the whole shape.

You start to climb.

The first floor is easy. The second floor is easy. The third floor is where the tower starts to have an opinion about you.

You step. The step holds. You step again. The step holds. On the next step there is a moment, half a second long, where you do not know if it will hold. That half-second is what you came here for, although you did not know it when you arrived.

The step holds.

Somewhere below you, Kong is talking to himself. You cannot make out the words. You think it might be your name, or a name he has decided to give you, or the name of someone you remind him of. You do not ask. The tower does not reward asking.

You climb.

The tower asks every climber the same question, eventually. It does not ask out loud. It does not need to. The question is: enough? And the answer is the only answer that matters in a place like this. The climbers who do well in the jungle are not the ones who go highest. They are the ones who hear the question and answer it honestly.

You are higher than you have ever been. The wind is colder. You can see the tops of trees you did not know existed. Far to the west, you can hear the river Kong calls Slow Mara, which is a joke nobody has ever explained to you.

The tower asks.

You answer.

You come down with what you climbed for. Not all of it. Enough. You meet Kong at the base. He looks at you the way he looked at you when you arrived. He has not blinked the whole time.

He says: That was a good climb.

He says: Don't ruin it.

You do not ruin it. You walk back into the jungle, the way you came, the way Mara did, the way everyone does eventually. The figs are still in the grass. The bird that does not answer Kong calls once at dusk. You hear it. You keep walking.

The tower will be there tomorrow. It has been there for a long time.

Kong is somewhere you cannot see, eating a fig.