Zoo Read online

  As I waited for everything to boot up, I popped my first Red Bull of the day. Another number 1 train kicked up my heart rate along with a cloud of dust off the windowsills. Call me crazy—go ahead, you wouldn’t be the first—but after the initial shock, I kind of liked my apartment’s MTA-provided sound track. I don’t know why, but from the time I was a little kid up until I received my Rhodes Scholarship, my ADD-addled brain tended to fire on all cylinders when it was surrounded by headbanging noise. Old-school AC/DC, that was my bag. Metallica, Motörhead, with all the knobs cranked to eleven.

  I frowned at the lightening screens, remembering my father, a lieutenant in the FDNY, watching the evening news. After a Bronx four-alarmer, he would come home, drop in front of the tube, and at the first commercial, after a Miller High Life or two, he would say, “Oz, boy, sometimes I think this world of ours is nothing but a goddamn zoo.”

  In front of me, animals began to fill the screens. Lots of them. All of them behaving very badly.

  Fathers really do know best, I guess, because that’s exactly what was happening. The world was becoming a zoo, without cages.

  Chapter 3

  SETTLING BACK INTO my tag-sale leather rolling chair, I lifted a new legal tablet from the fresh stack on the table to my right, clicked a pen, wrote the date.

  I turned up the volume on set number four.

  “A missing seventy-two-year-old hunter and his fifty-one-year-old son were found dead yesterday,” said a correspondent from WPTZ in Plattsburgh, in upstate New York, a good-looking brunette in a red coat. She held the microphone as though it were a glass of wine. “The men were apparently killed by black bears while illegally hunting outside of Lake Placid.”

  The camera cut to a shot of a young state trooper at a press conference. Buzz cut, lanky. Country boy, uncomfortable in front of cameras.

  “No, there was no way they could have been saved,” the trooper said. He blew his p’s and b’s straight into the mike. “Both men were long dead and partially eaten. What’s still puzzling to us is how it happened. Both of the men’s weapons were still loaded.”

  He ended the report with the claim that the father and son were known poachers, fond of using an illegal hunting method known as deer dogging—using dogs to chase out and ambush deer.

  “Back to you, Brett,” the brunette said.

  “Not good, Brett,” I said as I muted set four and cranked up set eight. Blip, blip, blip went the green bars on the screen.

  On it, a news program from NDTV, a sort of English-speaking Indian version of CNN, was starting.

  “A Keralan mahout was killed yesterday while he was training elephants,” the middle-aged anchorman said. He had a mustache and a Bollywood swipe of hair; there was something of Clark Gable about him. “Please be advised: the footage we are about to show you is graphic in nature.”

  He wasn’t kidding. I watched as an elephant, tied to a stake in a village square, stomped a little guy in front of her into the ground. Then she wrapped her trunk around the guy’s leg and tossed him up in the air.

  The anchorman explained that the attack had occurred while the mother elephant was being separated from its baby during a training ritual known as phajaan.

  I’d heard of it. Also known as torture training, phajaan is the preferred way of elephant training in rural parts of India. A baby elephant is separated from its mother and put in a cage so villagers can whack it with hot irons and sticks that have nails on the ends. The brutal beating continues to the point where either the baby elephant allows itself to be ridden or dies.

  “Guess Ma wasn’t down with the program, dude,” I said to the dying elephant trainer on the screen.

  But the pièce de résistance was the breaking news I pulled off Fox News on set two. The Barbie doll on TV informed me that two lions from the L.A. zoo had not only killed their keeper and escaped, they’d also killed some guy on a nearby golf course. On the screen, half a dozen LAPD with M16s cordoned off a block lined with palm trees, people from animal control milling around behind them in white jumpsuits.

  “The lions were last spotted in the La Brea neighborhood, near Beverly Hills,” chirped Megyn Kelly, her vacant eyes nailed to the teleprompter.

  I threw down my pen. I was pissed, pissed, pissed. Skin itching, heart going like a hammer. Was everyone asleep? Under hypnosis? High? Was everybody frigging stoned?

  I grabbed the pen again and scribbled three letters on the pad, hard enough to tear the paper.

  H A C !!!!!!!!

  Then I threw the pad of paper across the room.

  “When will you people listen?” I yelled at my wall of media.

  It was time for more caffeine.

  Chapter 4

  I SAT BENT over in my chair for a few minutes of therapeutic seething. I listened to an uptown train blasting by my window, then a downtown one. Then I crossed the room, picked up the pad again, and went back to work.

  HAC: Human-Animal Conflict. This was the theory I was working on.

  Basically, it was my belief that all throughout the world, animal behavior was changing. Not for the better, either. Not even a little. On every continent, species after species was suddenly displaying hyperaggressive behavior toward one particular animal.

  The enemy was us. You and me. People. Man, man.

  The facts were undeniable. From Romania to Colombia, from the Pyrenees to the Rockies, from St. Louis to Sri Lanka, there’d been an exponential increase in animal attacks on humans—by wild leopards, bears, wolves, boar, all kinds of different animals, you name it. In fact, the worldwide rate of wild animal attacks in the last four years was double the average of the previous fifty. For emphasis, I repeat: double.

  It wasn’t just wild animals, either. In Australia, injuries from cats and dogs had swelled by 20 percent. In Beijing, it was 34 percent. In Britain, nearly four thousand people had needed hospital treatment for dog bites in the previous year.

  For some reason I hadn’t pinned down yet, some kind of concerted transspecies evolutionary backlash against Homo sapiens was underway. Or, to put it in other terms, something was driving animals to go haywire, and the time to do something about it was running out quicker than the plastic wand supply at a Harry Potter convention.

  I know how it sounds—wing-nut city. Different species of nonhuman animals working in some sort of collusion against humans. It’s absurd. Insane, impossible. I used to think it was a big, strange coincidence, too. Just lots and lots of totally unrelated, isolated incidents. Initially, it was just a goof among my colleagues that I’d started to track the phenomenon on my tongue-in-cheek blog, Man Against Nature.

  I stopped laughing when I started looking at the evidence more closely. Nature, actually, was at war with man. And our side wasn’t even noticing.

  The expression “between the devil and the deep blue sea” is a nautical one. The devil is what old sailors used to call the seam between two hard-to-reach planks on a ship. In order to caulk it, one had to be suspended from a plank held over the water. If you fell into the ocean, it was certain death. If you didn’t caulk the plank, the ship might sink. Either way was dangerous. Either way, you were screwed.

  That’s exactly where I was now, out on a line, suspended between bad and worse. I felt like I was out there caulking the devil, hanging above the deep blue sea.

  If I was wrong, I was crazy. If I was right, the world was doomed.

  I’d been doing my best to get the word out, but was getting nowhere. I’d maxed out all my credit cards and those of several sympathetic relatives, speaking to anyone who would listen. My trip to Paris was for the purpose of attending an animal rights conference that I’d fibbed my way into in order to get some speaking time. I only got about halfway through before I was laughed off the stage.

  No, people weren’t getting on board in the slightest. You’d be shocked and dismayed at the amount of intellectual intolerance directed at people who favor red lumberjack hats and wrinkled pajamas.

  The L.A. zoo
thing I’d just seen was the topper. The report had said that the cats had been born in captivity. Why would a pair of zoo lions one day just decide to start killing people and rampage through a city? Because there are two hundred channels and nothing is on? It didn’t make sense. Zoo lions don’t just go out berserking. There’s simply no reason for them to. Until now.

  I speed-dialed my press agent to try to get on Fox. As usual, I got kicked immediately into voice mail. Even she thought I was nuts, and I paid her. Not a good sign.

  After I recorded my latest plea to her, I decided to do the only thing I could think of. I plugged myself into my iPod and blasted some Motörhead to get some much-needed mental juices flowing. Help me, Lemmy. I slurped more Red Bull and tried to think while watching some more of the world’s unfunniest videos.

  I sat up when Attila yanked my earbuds out.

  “Yo, Attila,” I said. My roommate held out his hand for a low five. I gave it to him. “Look at this craziness. Every time I think things are going to calm down, the activity doubles. Sarah won’t call me back. Boy Who Cried Wolf, I feel your pain, you know?”

  “Heeaagh! Heeaagh! Heeaagh!” said Attila.

  Then he made a few panting hoots and scrambled into my lap and gave me a sloppy kiss and hairy-armed hug.

  Attila, by the way, is a chimpanzee.

  Chapter 5

  I KNEW THE TVs bothered him, so I took Attila by his hand—it was leathery and surprisingly soft, like a glove—and led him into the kitchen. Attila: five years, four feet, and a hundred pounds of chimpanzee.

  For breakfast I gave him a mango, a stack of Fig Newtons (which he went ape over), and half a leftover turkey club. Today’s featured dessert was applesauce mixed with crushed-up vitamins and Zoloft.

  That’s right, Zoloft.

  Even apes need happy pills in our crazy world. Or maybe just the ones who live in New York City.

  I brushed Attila’s teeth and brought him back to his room. Scattered across the newspaper-covered floor were Attila’s playthings: a sandbox, a toy chest filled with balls and dolls, an air hockey table, and an old pop-a-shot basketball machine. Actually, those last two were more my toys than his. But the Wii was definitely Attila’s. He could kick my ass at bowling.

  I stood in the doorway and watched him play a little while. I’d fixed up the doorway to his room with a sturdy grate of steel wire, though he was getting older and I knew it wouldn’t be long before he found a way around it. I’d have to find another home for him soon. Attila’s favorite toy these days was an American Girl doll I’d recently bought him. She had braids and a gingham dress, very Little House on the Prairie. Attila rocked the big blond-haired doll back and forth and kissed her. Then he brought her over to me and held her up so I could kiss her, too. Attila panted, content, and took the doll back over to the beanbag chair in the corner and began to pretend to feed her.

  The people who say their dogs are like children to them never lived with a chimp, believe you me. I shook my head and smiled at my little buddy. It was nice to see him quiet, calm, having fun. That certainly hadn’t been the case when we first met.

  I found Attila two years before at the Willis Institute, a South Jersey bio-med shop where I’d been hired as a lab temp. I was cleaning up late on my second day when I opened a door, and there he was. The cutest damn three-year-old ape you ever saw, lying there with his pink face pressed against the cold bars of his tiny cage.

  He was staring at me miserably, his eyes red-rimmed, his nose running to beat the band. Most biomedical research with chimps works like this: they infect the chimp with some disease before giving it the new cure they wanted to test out. If the cure doesn’t work, then whatever; the chimp dies. Or they look for side effects and so on. Flipping through the paperwork attached to the cage, I saw that some intrepid human had been doing some type of weird olfactory research on him. Testing perfumes or something.

  When this little ape—he wasn’t Attila yet; back then he was number 579—looked at me so searchingly, so sadly, with his big brown eyes, my sucker’s heart came up with a plan. A week after the job ended, I found myself heading south down I-95 again with the DO NOT COPY lab key I’d very absentmindedly forgotten to return. When I pulled out of the lab’s parking lot after midnight, Attila was lying down in the back of my beat-up Hyundai Sonata, covered in Papa John’s pizza boxes.

  The first few weeks in my apartment he’d been wary, hypervigilant, hardly getting any sleep as he waited fearfully to see if I would hurt him. A vet friend of mine diagnosed him with post-traumatic stress disorder and wrote out a scrip for the Zoloft, which worked like a charm.

  I know what you’re thinking. I’m either a left-wing animal rights loon or I watched one too many episodes of B.J. and the Bear as a kid. Or insane. Or an idiot. I usually don’t tell other scientists I have a chimp in my apartment. I never planned on being the twenty-first-century Man with the Yellow Hat. It just kind of happened. My original thought was to drop Attila off at an animal sanctuary in rural Louisiana that takes in retired research monkeys. And that is still my eventual plan. But for the time being, Attila lives with me.

  Attila put the doll down and walked to the door of the terrace off his room, tapping on it to be let out onto the fenced-in outdoor space, where I’d set up a tire swing.

  “Think fast, Attila! Pit attack!” I said, digging in for tickles.

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

  I watched him knuckle-run over to the swing and jump on it with a scream of joy before I turned, shut the gate, and headed back to work.

  Chapter 6

  LYING FACEDOWN IN the tire swing, Attila waves his long, powerful arms to swing himself back and forth. The tips of his long, knotty fingers graze the ground. Strong, lean arms, built for climbing trees. Like most chimps, Attila likes to play. He likes wrestling, laughing, being tickled.

  And, like humans, he is sharply status-conscious and capable of deception.

  He is more like people than any other living creature.

  When Attila spies the man down the hallway, he makes a high, curt cry, indicating his agitation, his anxiety. Getting no response, Attila crashes back into the tire swing and hurtles himself back and forth, the chain creaking loudly under the strain.

  Everything is so strange. The moving, boxlike shapes below. The small thunder overhead sometimes. Sometimes, everything suddenly has the smell. The Smell. The scary smell, the Bad Smell, the one that used to fill his cage in the big bright room, the smell that makes Attila’s stomach hurt and the fur on his back stand straight up. The smell is getting stronger. Always stronger. Even outside. More and more each day.

  Bored, angry, afraid, Attila turns away from the window and searches around his play area until he finds the mirror. He holds it up in front of his face and looks at himself. Like all chimps, he recognizes himself. He’s now five, and his face is losing its pinkish tinge and getting darker. His tuft of wiry white chin hair is almost gone.

  Tiring of the mirror, he puts it aside and runs back and forth, shaking the fence, shrieking down at the strange walls and moving things. After a while, he begins to amuse himself by tossing around the stuff on the terrace. The plastic chair. The Thomas the Tank Engine big wheel. Then his gaze falls on a stuffed bunny. He picks it up and brings it over to the corner.

  He cuddles it, delicately petting its soft fur with his fingers, when a breeze wafts in over the terrace, and the Bad Smell hits his nose like a punch.

  Attila rips the bunny in half with his hands. A chimp’s grip is as powerful as a pit bull’s jaws. He makes a low howling sound as he tears it to fluff and tatters. Then he stuffs the pieces of bunny through the holes in the fence, hooting as they flutter like snow, like ash, down to the rear alley of the building.

  This makes Attila feel better.

  After a minute, Attila flops himself back into the tire swing again, and wheels himself in circles with his long arms.

  Chapter 7

  FOR THE
NEXT hour or so, I sent out feelers to all my contacts about the lion attack in L.A. to get their reaction. I made an effort to get in touch with a man named Abraham Bindix, a safari guide living in Botswana, whom I’d met in Paris. Guy knew a hell of a lot about lions, and he was actually one of the few people I’d met who didn’t think my HAC theory was total loony tunes.

  I was still waiting to hear back from people and putting in my second call to my press agent when I got a text.

  HAC 911! WHERE R U?

  “Shit,” I said. I knew I’d forgotten something.

  On my way, I text-lied back. Then I called down to my super’s apartment. Five painfully long minutes later, an elderly woman arrived, faded floral-print dress dangling from her little bones, arms full of needlepoint and Spanish crossword-puzzle books. It was the super’s mother, Attila’s occasional babysitter. She didn’t have to do anything except call me in case of an emergency.

  Attila was looking in the mirror I’d bought him when I arrived at the terrace door.

  “Hey, good-lookin’. Mrs. Abreu is here to watch you, buddy, so be good, okay? I have to check something out, but when I get back, we’ll play some soccer. I promise.”

  Attila dropped his head, his lips protruding in a pout. Until I opened my arms. He almost knocked me over as he leaped into them. He let loose with a series of whooping howls. It was his signature pant-hoot, which chimps use to identify themselves.

  Attila was visibly pleased as I copied his pant-hoot back at him, whoop for whoop.