Zoo Read online

  TWENTY MINUTES LATER, my taxi driver cranked the reggaeton as we swam upstream through sludgy traffic on the Bowery for my early-morning meeting. Usually the noise would have driven me up the wall. But that morning, I actually found the only-in–New York aggravation oddly comforting. By the time we made it to the Flatiron district, I had begun to think affectionately of the swamp of traffic and gratuitous honking.

  It meant that, disaster or no, people were going to work today. The Big Apple hadn’t gotten the end-of-the-world memo just yet.

  Then I saw a dog on the street. It was moving along the sidewalk just north of Thirty-Fourth Street.

  On the east side of Third Avenue, coming off the curb about half a block ahead, was what looked like a medium-size black-and-white Border collie mix with a dirty blue bandanna around its neck. The mutt was by itself, and as I watched, it began to thread its way through the traffic, from east to west, across the avenue.

  What set my alarm needles to twitching was the animal’s sense of purpose, of deliberate calmness. Stray dogs usually have a guilty, skulking look about them, especially in a big city in broad daylight. This dog wasn’t going too fast or too slow, nor was it looking at anyone. It was focused, confident—looking like it was headed somewhere.

  I had a sudden hunch.

  I leaned forward. “Stop the cab, please,” I said.

  “Here?”

  I threw him a bill. “Keep the change.”

  “You want receipt?”

  I was out the door, narrowly avoiding becoming enmeshed in the grille of a beer truck as I jogged across Third Avenue and headed north in pursuit of the dog. I got to the corner of Forty-First Street and looked left, down the block where the dog had been headed. At first I couldn’t see anything. Then I stepped into the street alongside the line of parked cars and saw a white tail wagging as it crested the top of the rise by Lexington Avenue.

  “The hell do you think you’re doing?” a traffic cop shouted at me as I played Frogger across the intersection.

  I kept my eyes on the tail of the collie, its little white feet picking up into a trot, as it crossed Park Avenue, a block west.

  Kicking it up to a full-blown sprint, I managed to keep track of the dog as it crossed Madison Avenue. It kept going west on Forty-First, heading toward Fifth Avenue and the front steps of the New York Public Library.

  I got to Fifth just in time to see the dog heading north on the sidewalk on the west side of the avenue, toward the corner of Forty-Second.

  Dodging my way through an asteroid belt of early-morning commuters, I ran on the east side of the avenue, parallel to the dog—who was really moving now, boogying—toward Forty-Second. When I got to the corner there was too much traffic to cross and I had to wait for the light.

  It took ten ticks of eternity for the light to change.

  When it finally did I bolted ass-on-fire across Fifth, scanning the avenue up and down and looking east and west on Forty-Second. The dog could have gone anywhere—maybe into Bryant Park, behind the library to the west. It could have slipped into one of the surrounding office towers for all I knew.

  The dog was nowhere to be seen. Wherever it had gone, and whatever I might have learned from it, was lost now.

  I was crossing to the other side of Forty-Second to catch another cab, glancing at my watch and trying to calculate how late to the meeting I would be, when another dog almost ran between my legs in the crosswalk. I wheeled around and watched as a white Yorkshire terrier made the corner and trotted west along the south side of Forty-Second. Little dude was on a mission.

  Oz: follow that Yorkie.

  There was a small ornate stone building on the perimeter of Bryant Park—not taking my eyes off it, I watched the little white dog scuttle on stubby legs and disappear into the recessed doorway of the little building.

  In a moment I was standing by the squat, easy-to-miss building. The recessed doorway led to a small descending stairwell that ended in two black wrought iron doors hitched together with a padlocked chain.

  I stood at the top of the stairs, blinking. I was completely bamboozled. Because there was nothing else to see. The dog had vanished.

  Chapter 63

  I HEARD THE echoes of my shoes clattering down the fetid concrete stairs. I pushed against the doors—they creaked and groaned inward easily, making a wide gap against the bight of the heavy black chain. I presumed the dog had slipped through the gap.

  Why he had done so was a mystery.

  I squinted, peering through the dim gap. I thought about going into the library and finding out who might have the key to the lock.

  For about four seconds.

  I abandoned that plan and popped two buttons off my oxford cloth shirt, squeezing myself feetfirst through the narrow gap.

  Inside, I found a light switch and turned it on. A feeble orange lamp flickered on above. It was a storage room, full of lawn mowers, rakes, and other maintenance equipment for the park. Beside the equipment to the right were more stairs, leading to a downward-sloping corridor lined with ducts and pipes.

  The arched tunnel was made of old-fashioned faded red brick. I vaguely remembered that Bryant Park stands on the site of what had been the city’s main reservoir in the mid-1800s. The curving tunnel went on for ten feet and then opened up into a small round room filled with huge pipes, valves—everything gunked up with disuse and caked orange with rust. The largest of the pipes was open at the end and set sideways into the wall about a foot off the floor, like a tunnel.

  I squatted down next to the pipe and caught a scent—rank, musky, unmistakable.

  It was the smell of wet dog.

  Wet dog and then some. It was mixed with a lush potpourri of garbage, skunk, dead animal, shit. It was a smell that could peel paint. There was some kind of moisture on the floor of the wide pipe, and the stench seemed to emanate from it like smoke from a tire fire. It was acrid, hideous.

  I stared into the reeking blackness. For a long time. I thought of turning back, of dog attacks. Something about the complete focus of the dogs I had followed told me I was safe. I went into the pipe.

  It was like crawling into the asshole of Satan. Every five feet I had to stop and repress the urge to vomit. My hands, knees, and feet squelched in the sucking black muck as I slogged my way through the tube.

  Darkness. Stench. Claustrophobia.

  In the pipe, I could hear sounds coming from someplace I figured was at the opposite end. Yelping, whining. Dog sounds.

  Eventually I ran out of pipe. I stood up in the dark of some new room. The smell was even more concentrated here. Had I climbed into the sewer?

  There was a dim, barely luminous light on somewhere, a weak orange flicker. My eyes adjusted.

  Below me, the sunken floor of the ballroom-size underground chamber was moving.

  As far beyond me as I could see, there was a squirming mass of eyes, teeth, hair.

  The dogs were moving around and on top of each other in a way I had never seen before. They were slithering against each other like worms in a can. I was within scenting distance for all of them, but not a single one even turned toward me.

  Many of them were copulating. The dogs fucked impassively, with slack tongues and unchanging expressions. Others looked sick, their hides mottled in what looked like a whitish mold. Small fights broke out here and there. A few dogs would come together in a sudden tumble of kicking legs, snapping jaws, and barking—blazing into sudden fits, one dog dominating and another surrendering with a pitiful whine, the other dogs skulking away quickly. The room was foggy and hot with moving bodies, wet with breath and tongues. Snorting. Sneezing. Heads twitching. Legs scratching.

  Along the wall of the chamber to my right, galleries had been carved in the raw dirt walls and in them, female dogs were nursing puppies. The swollen bitches lay on their sides, their bloated bellies looking tender and thin-skinned, pink, jiggling with the weight of milk as the puppies suckled.

  I looked out across the squirming undergro
und orgy of dogs. These dogs were acting as if they were organized somehow, as if they had a hive mind. They were acting more like insects than like mammals.

  Then that lightbulb clicked on again above my head. The hive mind. Bugs. That proved to be one of the keys to understanding what was going on.

  The animals were all acting like social insects—swarming, teeming, feeding, breeding.

  The sight reminded me of something I once saw on a research trip to Costa Rica in grad school. The time I saw an ant death spiral. It’s an amazing thing. We came across hundreds and hundreds of ants, all running together in a giant spiraling circle. It was as though they were running laps, spiraling and spiraling together, a squirming black whirlpool of ants. It shows you the power of pheromones. Ants follow one another by their pheromone trails. When you see a line of marching ants, it means that each ant is following the chemical trail of the one in front it, picking up the scent with its sensitive antennae. But every once in a while something happens that breaks the pheromone trail—a log falls on the middle of the line, for example. And suddenly some ant in the middle of the chain now finds himself at the front of a new one. He panics. (I’m anthropomorphizing here, but bear with me.) He runs around like crazy, searching for another pheromone trail to follow. Eventually he finds one, and starts following this other ant. But unbeknownst to him, he’s just found the pheromone trail of the ant in the back of his own line. And then the column turns into a loop that winds and winds in on itself as the ants, blindly following one another, simply run around and around in circles until they die.

  And I thought: pheromones.

  Chapter 64

  INTA, RUSSIA

  TWENTY-FIVE KILOMETERS SOUTH OF THE ARCTIC CIRCLE

  SCRAMBLING, HUFFING, NEARLY ten meters up in the tree, Cheslav Prokopovich stops climbing and tentatively leans out, distributing his weight carefully along the limbs of the Siberian pine, which are getting thinner at this height.

  Through the mesh of crisscrossing branches, he can see for several kilometers down the rocky river valley, its horizontal visual panorama interrupted only by the tall and starkly looming transcontinental radio tower that is the reason for the village’s existence this far north.

  But sightseeing is the least of his concerns this afternoon.

  Prokopovich carefully unstraps his rifle from his back and flicks a downward glance at the forest floor, looking for the other members of his hunting party. From this height, Sasha, Jirg, and Kiril look identical. The three Russians are wearing army boots and cheap camouflage hunting coveralls. All of them are stocky, bald, and chunky-featured, as if they’re built out of rocks.

  Lifelong friends and residents of Inta, the four men had worked together in the nickel mine that opened up in the heady times after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Their annual late-summer hunt is supposed to be a time of respite before the snow and ice come, before the arctic temperatures drive them inside and underground for six months beside the fire—six long, boring, maddeningly sedentary months of bottomless cups of vodka and endless hands of durak.

  All year, Prokopovich anticipates this excursion, especially the sunny moment before he bags his elk—that full-body tremble of excitement, the childlike splashing of his heart inside his chest.

  His heart is splashing now, Prokopovich thinks as he breathes on his rifle’s scope and dries it with his sleeve.

  The weapon Prokopovich presses to his cheek is a handcrafted Mosin-Nagant hunting rifle. Through the scope’s reticle he scans the boreal forest of evergreens, firs, and pines that green the landscape. He is looking for any slight sign of movement.

  Specifically, he is looking for the wolves. The wolves that have been chasing them since morning.

  There are several dozen, maybe more. The biggest and most aggressive wolves he has ever seen. Why so many wolves have decided to pack together and come after them Prokopovich does not know. He only knows that if Kiril had not woken up early to take a piss and seen them in the distance, loping up the mountainside like lava flowing in reverse, they might already be dead.

  Prokopovich rests the sight on the rattletrap rail bridge that spans the ravine they crossed earlier. The abandoned rail line was built by gulag prisoners in the 1950s, when Inta’s network of government labor camps was still running. Their plan had been to head up the mountain across the dilapidated old bridge. They thought the wolves would be unable or too afraid to cross it. Up in the tree, he spies the bridge through the rifle scope, waits, and watches.

  Prokopovich is thinking about his wife when the wolves break cover from the tree line en masse and head for the ravine.

  “’Tchyo za ga’lima,” Prokopovich mutters to himself as the animals head straight for the bridge.

  He watches as they begin to fastidiously work their way across, gingerly picking over the decrepit wooden ties and iron beams, one by one, paw by nimble paw.

  “Blya!” Prokopovich says to the sky. “Vse zayebalo!”

  Whore!

  Fuck it all!

  Chapter 65

  SPITTING OUT A sticky pine needle, Prokopovich rivets his eyes on the approaching wolves. They are moving fast, but he tries to count them. Soon, the task of counting them becomes overwhelming. He can’t. There are too many. What he sees is impossible. He has heard of packs of ten, maybe fifteen. Surely there must be fifty wolves spilling out of the trees, funneling over the bridge after them.

  Prokopovich straps the rifle on his back and hurries down the tree.

  “What now, hunter man?” Kiril says, soothing his nerves with a swig of vodka from his canteen.

  Kiril’s face is cauliflowered and enflamed with rosacea. His eyes are like raisins.

  Prokopovich pauses for a moment, frowning. It is not Sasha, who still plays hockey, or his cousin Jirg, the weight lifter, whom he is worried about; it is the largest of the men, his best friend, Kiril, who causes him concern. The big, boisterous fool is squatting against the trunk of a tree, wheezing like a concertina from the exertion of the morning’s uphill march. Kiril is fat as a swine and smokes like a broken truck, and is as slow-moving as sap in January.

  Dead weight, Prokopovich thinks grimly, looking at his friend.

  “Blya! We run, you drunken pig. We run for our lives!”

  The wolves are a swarm of gray dots down in the distant valley, slaloming between trees up the mountain. They make no noise. No barking, no howling. Only silent running.

  “Hurry! Run, if you want to live!”

  The men have one last chance. There is another bridge over the ravine, a little less than a kilometer farther north. It is in even worse shape than the first one, a mere skeleton of a bridge, with no ties at all. They will have to scale the outside of its rusted latticework frame. An almost suicidal enterprise, especially for poor fat Kiril. But there is no other choice. At least there is no way the four-footed wolves will be able to cross that. The problem is getting there in time.

  They are within sight of the bridge when Kiril drops. He looks terrible. He huffs at the air like a fish out of water, hacks into a fist. His face is swollen, the color of borscht.

  “Bol’she—nyet!” he says between gasps. “No. More. Can’t. Not…one…more…step.”

  “Damn you!” Prokopovich gives him a savage kick. For all the good it does, he may as well have kicked a tire. “Mudak! Get up, you son of a whore.”

  “Blya, blya,” Jirg adds. “My wife isn’t going to be a widow because you’re a fat fuck.”

  “Pojdite! Go! Both of you!” Prokopovich says as his knees crunch in the pine needles beside Kiril. “Kiril just needs to catch his breath. We will catch up with you at the bridge.”

  Sasha and Jirg do not need to be told twice. In a breath, they are gone.

  Prokopovich holds Kiril’s heaving shoulder and gazes forlornly through the trees at the distant Ural Mountains, looming to the east.

  “Go, Cheslav,” Kiril pants. “Don’t do this.” His beady eyes look defeated and miserable. “Jirg is right. I am fa
t and useless. I am too weak. Always have been.”

  Kiril is a clumsy, bumbling fool, laughed at by one and all. What redeems him, what has always made him Cheslav’s best friend, is that Kiril himself is always the one who laughs the hardest.

  Prokopovich checks the ammo in his rifle as he sees the wolves beginning to race through the trees.

  “I’m sorry,” Kiril says as the panting of the wolves becomes audible now. Kiril is weeping. His voice is cracked and whimpery. “I always loved these hunts. You are my great friend, Cheslav. I never became a millionaire, but I am rich to have had you for a friend.”

  “Zatk’nis!” Prokopovich hocks a dismissive dollop of spit in the pine needles. “Shut up, you poof, and take up your gun. We are going to live.”

  As the wolves approach, Prokopovich looks down the valley. It is crisply sunny at this elevation, but the plain beyond the bridge, where the village is located, is overcast, bathed in a dark purple-red glow, as if lit by a black light.

  So this is where I die, Prokopovich thinks.

  Then the first wolf, a male with eyes as yellow as the moon, steps into the clearing.

  It is a monster of a thing, fifty kilos at least. When he was a child on a hunt with his father, Cheslav saw a wolf smaller than the one now before him take down a bull elk.

  Too bad I am not a bull elk, Cheslav thinks.

  “Stand up, you fool,” he says to Kiril.

  Kiril heaves himself to his feet.

  Together, they stand back-to-back, with their guns facing out.

  Prokopovich knows what to do with wolves. Stand your ground. You stay put, they respect you, you live. You run, you die.

  The wolves begin to gather around them. More and more come. The groups of wolves begin to mingle, merge, intermesh. Snarling, growling, teeth snapping, staccato bursts of threat-barks. The wolves form a circle around them. They advance, they retreat. The air is filled with a cacophony of barking.

  Prokopovich can feel Kiril quaking against his back.