He scratched his head trying to figure out an answer. Is he visible or not just because he cannot see? That was his lifelong question.
She looked at him with her bedroom eyes but he was blind. He couldn’t see since the day he was born. He always felt invisible. His presence was always avoided. Baboons can’t stand anyone who is different. Makes them edgy.
Nonetheless, he liked to hang down from trees. He didn’t mind his invisibility. After all, we all are invisible to some extent and to one another. We don’t see each other truly because we don’t want to and we don’t have the ability to. That doesn’t make any sense to know-it-alls.
She offers him bananas sometimes but he can’t see.
One day instead of the bedroom eyes there were eyes of blue and sadness. She heard they were taking him away. It was all over the jungle. Men with rifles and traps. The invisible baboon was easy prey.
He wakes up in a cage. That was it. He thought it was a legend. Cages and remote places long-haul operations. Turns out it was not. It is the truth. Some creatures come and take you away and put you in a cage in a far-off land. Australia maybe. He doesn’t care. He knew that humans existed though he never saw one. He cannot see. He probably was on a cargo plane. He would have wanted to be awake to feel that flying what it looked or felt like. Funny how you cannot help yourself but use visual adjectives even though you are blind. So strange.
He realized he was in Japan. Not from the very beginning. He could smell strange spices and voices being uttered different from those in Africa. He'd gotten used to the smells of ramen, raw fish, noodles and kimchi, whatnot. He craved beer, though. He missed beer. Beer and peanuts. You know small stuff that makes up a cozy life sitting in front of a TV or computer screen.
Now the main thing for him was green tea. Any kind. He got hooked on it. Banana was also all over the place but he stopped eating them because they reminded him of home. He starts writing a book, a memoir actually about his lonely invisible life of an ordinary baboon. They announced his death in the jungle. It was so weird. Honestly, it seemed to him like therapy. He just disappeared; he was invisible, as it is, so who cares. Therapeutical invisibility. It's as if you are as good as a ghost. Why not?
He is used to living alone in his Japanese zoo. It is total zen. Beautiful greenery and koi ponds. Everything looks joyful and happy. He needs that semblance of happiness. Funny how the brain can be tricked when you do not have eyes. Since when he was a kid he could smell colors. Yellow has always been banana to him. Flowers were always her. He will never forget her offering him bananas. What joy it was for him, she could not even begin to fathom.
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