Deep in the Virunga Forest of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, coffee beans hung from branches like teardrops, making chandeliers of the trees. The discordant shrieking of insects was punctuated by the occasional chop of the rangers' machetes, which glinted as they swung, exposing the white flesh of severed branches. Skeletal fern-fingers left watery trails on my arms as I brushed past, cooling my skin.

            Although I could not see more than a few feet through the thick brush, I was not as lost as I was at home in the maze of suburbia. I came looking for a clear path. Your eyes, all-knowing and familiar, had stared at me from the glossy pages of a magazine. Call me dramatic, but I came to you as a faithful disciple, looking for answers. Who better than a surviving member of a critically endangered species to distill life into its truest elements?

            My heart rattled in my ribcage. I inhaled slow breaths and studied the careful movements of the four rangers who had agreed to lead me to you. Like them, I swung my head in a slow arc, scanning the brush. Like them, I climbed with reverence over the roots that knotted the ground. Your half-eaten Tamarillos spilled glistening seeds, which would bring me to my knees when, weeks later and an ocean away, I unpacked and found them lodged in the treads of my hiking boots.

            The rangers pointed out your fruit-filled feces with the tips of their blades, confirming that we were getting closer. Their eyes were bloodshot, and their mouths hung between deep grooves. I did not yet understand that this jungle was their war zone, replete with ghosts of rangers and gorillas who had been killed by poachers.

            Hours into our trek, the trees parted and revealed acres of tall grass ignited a neon green by the blazing sun. You sat in the center of the field: a hulking black monolith. At the sight of you, I stopped breathing. Your head, wedged between your shoulders, echoed the volcanoes in the distance. I expected you to do something: to stand tall and pound your chest, or to startle and race off into the trees. But you were absorbed in your lunch, and you regarded me with little interest. I guess you saw the way I cowered. Besides, if you needed to, you could have held your bamboo meal with one hand and lifted me by my neck with the other. You could have swung me around like a rag doll and broken me on the ground like the twigs I had been snapping under my feet. Sweat streamed down my spine as I waited for you to finish eating. Your gums flashed pink as you chewed. When you finally paused and focused on me, I knew why I had recognized you in those photographs.

            I recognized the marks that result from a life of crisis management. The weary etchings in the rough bark of the skin around your eyes. You had already spent years examining the yawning recesses between the trees, checking that the light that dappled the leaves was not obscuring the confetti spots of a leopard. You had already squinted for thousands of hours at the openings between the swamp grass that vibrated in the breeze, searching for the black nose of an AK-47. You were exhausted.

            And it was something more: I saw my father in your eyes. Even as you chewed your bamboo, I could see that you were a titan. You know best that certain genetic features bestow dominance. The longest tusks, the darkest manes, the most pheromones: all the traits that give rise to kings and queens. How it must have felt to look over your shoulder at the sweet age of thirteen or fourteen and see your destiny, the hair on your back coming in as a silver gossamer, like the morning dew. What it must have been like to feel the space open around you as the other gorillas crouched and clung to the outer edges of your path.

            My father must have known this feeling. You should have seen how he walked through the city streets, his overcoat flapping behind him like the wings of a condor, his sea of black hair divided by a wake of silver. Like yours, his eyes were two harvest moons that glowed from beneath a heavy brow. Gold eyes are rare in humans, and so I suppose they were his dominant trait. Caught in his glare, people straightened their spines and tightened their lips. Faces tipped downward, as if pouring something from the top of their heads.

            To me, the light of his glare was expectant and challenging, the way the sun restores daytime colors at dawn, sending nocturnal animals back into hiding and offering a day of adventure for those who had slept in the dark. His gaze woke me, chucked me under the chin, straightened my slouch. Well? They seemed to ask. What are you going to do with your life? For years, I grappled with the answer.

            On the long drive back to my hotel, my phone began vibrating in my backpack like a nest of wasps. Numerous messages appeared, each one more urgent than the last, and the bounty of our encounter folded up on itself, flattened by the weight of fear and the sudden need to get home.

            Upon landing in New York the next day, I learned that cancer cells, undaunted by my father’s formidable glare, were marching like an army of red ants from his lungs to his brain. They sunk their mandibles and injected their poison, chewing up his time on Earth. Only, unlike the ants that had found their way up my pant leg, there would be no wild slapping dance, no shaking of fabric to scatter the cancer cells into the wind. I was outraged by their obstinacy.

            Jet-lagged and sad, I nodded off in the hospital waiting room. You appeared in my dreams as big as King Kong, a movie I’d watched with my father in the theater. Dozens of ant-sized poachers emerged from the grass, firing at you with crossbows and guns. Your wild eyes pleaded with me. I tried to yell to the rangers, but my throat refused to open. I jerked awake, strangled by my failure to save you.

            More than once, my father surged his heavy bones out of the hospital bed, only to crash to the floor, clattering equipment and startling the night shift. Lifting him was like pulling the roots of a Lombi tree out of the ground. You would have been impressed by his refusal to surrender and the battle scars he sustained from his escapes. Secretly, I celebrated his defiance.

            Morphine brought him more sleep. I escaped the faint beeping of machines and the faded colors of the upholstery by escaping into my photographs. I scrolled through images of African redwoods, blood-red at the trunk; the skinny leaves of Papyrus sedge exploding like Roman candles; a waterlogged tree trunk that spanned across the swamp. I conjured the buzz-saw din of cicadas. I inhaled the memory of volcanic soil, sticky and rich, that generated new growth as it consumed what died.

            I stopped at an image of you, the one in which you looked hard into the lens, reaching across continents and time. Your eyes were clear, as my father’s had been. I had come to you for the same answers I had tried to give my father. But, like him, you seemed to expect me to do the answering, your eyes asking, "Well? What are you going to do with your life?”

            In the rectangle of light that radiated from the back of my camera, dust floated in cursive. In one photo, I was surprised to see myself reflected in your eyes, twin souls holding twin cameras, and I found myself feeling split in two. My body stayed in the pastel waiting room, locked in our staring contest, while my soul soared out of the hospital, over the Manhattan skyline and across the ocean to the hard blue sky of the DR Congo, where I watched you from above: a king in silver fur. The grassland that surrounded you blanketed out to the thick jungle and the busy villages beyond, where women carried babies on their backs and firewood on their heads. I floated higher until I saw your whole continent, the color of paprika, crusted with foliage like beds of emeralds. Higher still, I saw the ocean chiding and slapping the land: yours, mine, all her children.

            On the day I met you, a ranger’s gravelly voice broke my trance, and blood raced through the tributaries in my body, up inside the mahogany branches, loud and alive. My feet rooted to the ground as securely as the Eulalia grass that ribboned around us, and I felt almost whole. I wanted to crawl into your round lap. I knew that if I could just hold your massive, leathery fingers in mine, your heartbeat would thump the truth against my back.

            My father asked to die at home, and we transferred ourselves to his apartment, saturated with familiar shapes and colors. Moments of beauty pushed through the sorrow. His red chair greeted his body like an old friend. His tawny hand covered my son’s back when he lay across his chest. And near the end, when the static in his eyes cleared, bringing him back to me for a moment, I assured him, “We’re going to be okay.” It came out like a question, but he repeated my words back to me, his voice like a storm, and turned my words into a command.

            It was you, dear Silverback, who had ended our visit that day in the jungle. You shifted your weight onto your knuckles and lumbered off, your silver hair roiling over your back muscles in velvety waves. The incoming mist swallowed you, and my feet sank into the wet ground. I followed the rangers out of your jungle, my steps heavier with the weight of your absence.