Zoo Read online

  We flagged down a cab. I opened the door for Chloe and dumped our bags in the trunk. I got in and told the driver my address. On the seat beside me Chloe was gaping through the window at the looming Empire State Building. It was lit up in tiers of white and blue.

  “I have not been in New York City in a long time,” she said.

  The rain gathered new momentum and drummed on the roof of the car like flung handfuls of gravel. Chloe was quiet. She snuggled into the crook of my arm, and I listened to the rhythmic rubber-on-glass squeals of the windshield wipers. The city lights blasted past us, twinkling like hazy underwater jewels in the dark.

  “It’s leaving, isn’t it?” she said quietly, into my chest.

  “What’s leaving? What are you talking about?”

  She sat up a little. Her eyes were moist. “I’m afraid that Claire Dugard is right,” she said. “The world is ending. Everything that everyone has worked so hard for, our parents, their parents. It’s all going away, and no one is going to do anything about it…and it’s just so…so sad.”

  “You can’t think like that,” I said, softly squeezing her shoulders. “This is crazy, I know, but we can solve it. We’re going to figure it out.”

  “I don’t know what to think anymore. We dreamed the same dream. That’s impossible. And then seeing that tarot card on the train. It’s silly, I know. But it scared me to death. I feel strange. I feel very strange.”

  I didn’t know what to say, so I just held her as she dissolved into real, racking sobs. We’d been through a lot lately. I hoped it was the jet lag.

  I thought what the grandmotherly Alice Boyd had said about the eerie, seemingly precognitive animal behavior right before natural disasters. I thought about the elephants and the birds heading for the hills days before the tsunami.

  What was the term Alice had used? A “cosmic event”?

  After a moment, I looked down at Chloe, and she reached for my face, a hand on each cheek, and kissed me deeply. Her face melted into mine. She kissed me.

  And I kissed back. I kissed back.

  Chapter 46

  YELLOW. A YELLOW car stops downstairs, in front of the building. Attila arrives at a thumping run at the front window of the apartment, gazes down at the street below. He looses a wild, piercing shriek as the cab door opens and he sees Oz. He hops up and down, howling in excitement.

  He stops, and is quiet. His dark, glistening brown eyes glide downward and see something else.

  Oz is reaching into the cab. Now another person emerges from the yellow thing. Even from five floors up, Attila can see it is a female. A woman.

  Attila’s face drops. He begins to whimper. The black tips of his long leathery fingers press against the glass. He blows from his nostrils in soft, sorrowful puffs as he stares down at his friend and the newcomer.

  His sadness sours into a feeling of betrayal. Of jealousy. The yawning gulf in his chest becomes filled with a new feeling. It pours in like floodwater.

  Hot, ugly rage.

  Rage gushes up inside him like an urge to vomit.

  Attila leaps up, pounding at his chest. Growling, gurgling noises erupt from his throat as he begins to tear back and forth through the ruins of the apartment, smashing and tearing everything in his path. He smashes and tears things not yet smashed and torn, and further smashes and tears things that have already been smashed and torn.

  Today is a day for biting and smashing.

  He begins pounding on the walls again, knocking down the few remaining pictures. Their frames clatter and crash. More glass scatters across the floor. He grabs the radiator in the hallway, begins to shake it. He winces as he pulls and pulls. The pipe that connects it to the wall whines. There is a shriek and a groan as he rips it free of its moorings. Attila hurls the radiator into the bathroom, the door to which he wrenched off its hinges a few days ago. The radiator bashes the bathroom sink and shatters it. The sink crumbles into chunks of porcelain rubble.

  Attila knuckle-walks to the front door. He sniffs. He hears Oz coming up the stairs now, with another pair of feet walking in tandem beside or behind him. He has an idea. Quickly, deliberately, he runs through the apartment, clicking off all the lights.

  The apartment is dark except for the orange glow from the lights outside filtering through the windows. The torn blinds cast orange tiger stripes of light across the room. A train rumbles by outside, and sets the room to shaking. Attila listens to the approaching, ascending footsteps. He yawns with his enormous jaws. He waits.

  Chapter 47

  CHLOE WAS STILL smiling, her body loose, soft, and warm in my arms, when the cab dropped us off in front of my building on 125th Street. Then she took a moment to absorb the squalid streetscape. Beside us, two homeless guys in a bus shelter were yelling and shoving each other for some reason as a rat the size of a Chihuahua looked on.

  “Home sweet home,” I said, as the Broadway local thundered by above us on the elevated track. “It’s not as bad as it looks. I promise.”

  “It is very, er…” She spun a finger in the air, searched for a word.

  “Urban?” I suggested.

  “Non, non. More, eh—what is the word? Misérable?”

  Huffing and puffing after hauling our bags up five flights of stairs, I was turning the key in the lock of my front door when I heard an unusual sound. It was coming from behind the door. It stopped, then started again—loud and rasping, some kind of hiss. I opened the door. I looked out into the darkness of my apartment. I was struck by the smell. Not good. It smelled like shit.

  I heard the sound more clearly: it was coming from somewhere beyond us through the unlit threshold. I moved in front of Chloe, and the darkness in the doorway seemed to collect together and form into a broad shape.

  “Attila?” I said.

  What in the hell? He should have been in his cage.

  “Oo-oo-oo-oo ah-ah-ah heeaagh heeaagh hyeeeaaaaaghhhh!”

  The shadow bulged, and then the weight slammed into my chest like a train. The blow knocked me on my back.

  “Attila!” I barked.

  Chloe was somewhere behind me, screaming. I was on my back in the doorway, my wind knocked out, tailbone smarting like hell, trying to process what was going on. Attila had knocked me over, and now he was tumbling in crazy circles around the apartment.

  “What the fuck is wrong with you?” I said. I gathered myself to my feet, fumbling for the light switch, glancing behind me for Chloe.

  How had he gotten out of his cage?

  He was just scared, I thought, frantically trying to assess the situation. He must have thought I was an intruder or something. I needed to calm him down.

  I stepped into the apartment and snapped on the light.

  “Look, Attila,” I said. “It’s me. Oz. You’re safe, kid.”

  The cold white fluorescent light slowly buzzed on, illuminating my apartment.

  It was a horror show. It looked exactly as though a wild chimp had been let loose in my apartment for a week. The whole place was in shambles. The refrigerator door was open, trickling feeble blue light into the room and humming, the food that had been in it rotten and scattered across the floor. The cupboard doors were wrenched off their hinges, all the dishes raked out and smashed on the floor, the faucet running in the sink for God knows how long, sticky puddles of dried piss on the linoleum, shit smeared in streaks on the walls. This sight proved to be a preview of what the rest of the apartment looked like.

  And then Attila was barreling toward me again from out of the darkened, ruined apartment. He seemed to know exactly who I was. And he was wearing my red hat.

  “ATTILA!” I screamed, and he sank his jaws down on my knee.

  I fought. I kicked. I punched him in the back of his head. He didn’t even seem to notice. My fists bounced off his skull like rubber balls. He wasn’t the same chimp. Something inside him had snapped.

  Chloe was screaming—I heard her distantly, as if I were underwater.

  There was a pan lying ov
erturned on the edge of the kitchen counter, just within arm’s reach. It was a hefty black cast-iron skillet that had belonged to my Polish grandmother. I’d eaten pierogi that had been fried in that thing, and that day it may have saved my life.

  I snatched it up and brought it down on the crown of Attila’s head, half strength at first, which did nothing, and then I swung it as though I were Roger Federer hitting a Dunlop crosscourt. The gruesome sound of the skillet bonking Attila’s skull made me wince. I felt his bite loosen. I hit him with it again, and he let go.

  He was dazed from the blow. He stumbled back into the corner by the refrigerator. His face was damp with blood. He cowered in the corner, shrieking.

  “Heeaagh! Heeaagh! Heeaagh!”

  “Oz!” said Chloe. “Are you okay?”

  Attila turned toward her. His eyes were blank and dangerous. He began to skulk toward us.

  “Stay away from her!”

  I heaved the skillet at him. He raised an arm and swatted it off, and the skillet went sailing behind him and smashed through the kitchen window almost as easily as if there hadn’t been any glass there. Shards of glass tinkled to the floor.

  For a moment I thought he’d snapped out of it. I dropped to the floor on my knees, and grimaced in pain. Attila had chewed up my knee badly.

  “Attila,” I said. My hands were palm up, open. I was using my lullaby voice. “Attila. What’s gotten into you? Relax! It’s me.”

  Chloe stood in the open doorway still, as if she were ready to bolt.

  Attila looked at me. He stood on a pile of crumbled dishes on the kitchen floor. He cocked his head and fixed his gaze on me from under the brim of my red knit hat.

  Attila’s face changed then. For a second, he seemed like himself again. As he looked into my eyes, his expression was an unnerving gaze of unbearable sadness—betrayal, knowing.

  Then he jumped onto the countertop and out the window onto the fire escape. He was gone.

  Chapter 48

  AN ELDERLY HISPANIC man in rumpled janitor blues is waiting for a bus. He sips a brown-bagged can of Tecate and hums half a tune. He’s on his way home from work. He nudges up the brim of a sweat-stiffened Yankees cap. Then a chimpanzee drops off the bottom of the fire escape of the building beside him. The chimp is wearing a red hat. The can of Tecate lands on the sidewalk.

  “Heeaagh!” says the chimp. “Heeaagh-heeaagh!”

  The chimp scrambles past him, an explosion of hairy limbs, feet, fingers. He sniffs, looks around, tears down the sidewalk with a bouncing, loping gait, propelling himself forward with long, powerful arms.

  The world is suddenly a wild swirl of strange lights and sounds—and a new sense of openness. Blindly knuckle-running down the sidewalk, Attila does not even pause as he bolts into the commotion of 125th Street. It’s a circus of honking. Attila streaks in front of a minivan, and the driver lays on the brakes and horn half a moment before the eastbound M104 bus behind it crushes its rear end. There’s a crunch of plastic, metal, glass. More honking.

  Now on the other side of the street, Attila races alongside the long and brightly lit window of a Duane Reade drugstore before he banks the corner and passes a fried-chicken restaurant.

  He pant-hoots at a number 1 train as it blasts by high overhead on the shaking iron latticework of the elevated tracks. He runs along the sidewalk, past benches and fire hydrants, scrabbling for a place to hide.

  A group of teenagers are halfheartedly punting around a battered soccer ball on the sidewalk in front of a bodega. A tiny, grizzled Hispanic man sits on a plastic folding chair by the door of the store, smoking a cigarette and watching the kids playing soccer. A sleek black car with tinted windows idles on the corner, a rap song blasting from its radio in fuzzy thumps that shake it on its springs.

  A chimpanzee wearing a red hat rushes headlong through the soccer game. The girls point and shriek. The soccer ball skitters away into the street.

  A patrol car from the Twenty-Sixth Precinct is just pulling away from the curb in front of a deli on Lenox Avenue when they get the call.

  “Repeat that, dispatch. Who’s on the roof of a candy store?” says Sergeant Timothy Perez, a tall, fit, five-year veteran who was promoted to his position the week before.

  The radio squeals, static crunches.

  “A chimpanzee,” says the bitch box.

  “Come again?” says Officer Jack Murphy, at the wheel.

  The growing crowd on the corner of Broadway and 123rd is spilling into the street when the police arrive on the scene. The lights paint the scene red and blue. Murphy gives a half whoop with the siren and curtly parts the crowd by climbing the cruiser onto the sidewalk.

  Sergeant Perez rolls down his window and shines his Maglite at the red plastic awning of the bodega. Bright eyes flash back at him in the pale ring of light.

  “Heeaagh heeaagh hyeeeaaaaaghhhh!”

  “Well, I’ll be a monkey’s uncle,” says Murphy.

  Okay, so dispatch isn’t on shrooms, Perez thinks. What appears to be a chimpanzee is indeed standing on top of the awning. Wearing a red hat.

  Perez and Murphy step out of the car.

  “Ooh, the po po’s here,” somebody says. “What’d the monkey do, Officer? He rob a bank?”

  One of the kids in front of the store whacks at the bodega’s awning with a broom handle.

  “C’mon, Bubbles,” the kid says in a high-pitched voice. “Quit messin’. It’s me, Michael.” He drops the impression. “Get down here ’fore I beatcha ass.”

  The kids are laughing. It’s a circus atmosphere.

  “Gimme that,” Perez says, snatching the broom from the kid.

  Perez looks up at the chimp. Noticing what looks like blood on the animal’s face, he lightly lays his hand on the handle of his Glock.

  He knows it’s not a funny situation. His brother-in-law, a New Jersey state trooper, once told him about an escaped pet chimp in West Orange who had turned some guy’s face into a Picasso. These guys can be very dangerous animals. Not to be fucked with.

  Perez puts the radio to his cheek.

  “We got the monkey over here on 123rd and Broadway. He’s perched on the awning over a store. We need to get animal control up here. Someone with a tranquilizer gun or something. We can keep watch in the meantime.”

  “Ten four,” says the radio, and Perez clips it to his belt.

  “Whatsamatter, Magilla Gorilla?” says Murphy. “You want a banana or somethin’?”

  Perez can’t believe it. It looks like talking a chimp off a ledge is going to be the first test of his command.

  Above the crowd, Attila cowers against the building’s bricks, paralyzed with fear and confusion. He scrambled up to escape the crowd of screaming people, and now he can’t go up or go down. Adrenaline surges in his nerves as more and more voices cackle and shout from below, and more cars with piercing colored lights arrive.

  Soon a large van joins the three police cruisers parked on the street. Two men in crisp tan uniforms step out of the van.

  Attila peeks out over the edge of the awning, then darts back into the corner against the brick wall. He shrinks into himself, trying to make his body as small as possible. He wants to disappear.

  Scrunched against the bricks, he finds a bundle of coaxial cables strung along the corner of the six-story building. He wraps his fingers around it, then his toes.

  The animal control officers—one of whom is a former horse trainer—aren’t city workers but independent contractors hired on a case-by-case basis. The one who’s a former trainer chambers a dart into his tranquilizer pistol while his partner unhooks the ladder from the van’s roof. Too late. The chimp is climbing.

  “Hey, hey, yo!” One of the street kids points. “He goin’ all King Kong up in this shit.”

  Sergeant Perez and the animal control guy exchange a look and a groan as the chimp scurries up a bundle of cables that runs along the side of the building. The speed with which he zips up there is pretty amazing. Dude is boogyin
g.

  “Go, monkey, go!” the kids start chanting. The ape makes it to the top of the six-story building and disappears over the ledge of the roof.

  After waiting a respectful moment, Officer Murphy shrugs at his boss and joins in the chanting.

  Chapter 49

  CHLOE WANTED ME to go to the hospital right away. I waved her off. I’d been in enough waiting rooms lately. Still keyed up with adrenaline, I dumped half a bottle of hydrogen peroxide over my knee and taped wads of paper towels to it. Clutching my leg, I hobbled around the apartment surveying the rest of the wreckage.

  It was as if everything I owned had been fed through a wood chipper. There was hardly an object in the apartment that Attila hadn’t found a way of smashing. To say nothing of the suffocating, nauseating stench of rotten food combined with the piss and shit spattered everywhere. I figured I shouldn’t count on getting my deposit back.

  I had known that before long Attila would become unmanageable, and I’d have to find a more suitable home for him, but he was only five. Chimps generally don’t get too unruly until they’re a bit older. I couldn’t help but wonder if what I was looking at here showed rage, a personal anger toward me. What had made Attila do this? Separation anxiety? And how had he escaped from his cage?

  With our bags still piled in the hallway outside the door, Chloe stepped gingerly amid the wreckage, afraid to touch anything.

  “Oz, I’m so sorry,” she said.

  Maybe it was Chloe’s presence that had set him off. Chimps are fiercely territorial, and have often been observed to kill over boundary disputes. Had Attila perceived Chloe as some sort of territorial threat?

  On the other hand, he’d clearly taken a lot of time to do this much damage to the apartment.

  I was walking past the doorway of the back bedroom when I smelled something especially foul. Even worse than the potpourri of rotten food and fecal matter that the rest of the apartment reeked of.