Zoo Read online

Farewells over, I threw my Cannondale road bike onto my shoulder, carried it down the five flights of stairs, and started to ride north up traffic-clogged Broadway. Head down, I put it into overdrive, sailing past gypsy cabs, C-Towns, flower shops. My thighs began to throb around the 140s as Broadway started its long ascent into Washington Heights.

  Cutting off a garbage truck at 159th Street, I made a left onto Fort Washington Avenue and followed it as it looped around to the north. A few minutes later I took a right onto narrow 181st Street and squealed to a sweaty stop in front of a once-grand prewar building. There was a 99 cents store beside the building’s entrance, and after I U-locked my bike, I went in and made a purchase that made the stone-faced Chinese lady behind the counter break into a leering grin.

  I dripped sweat in the building’s dingy vestibule as I thumbed the buzzer for the apartment of “N. Shaw” and received an immediate buzzing-in. N. Shaw met me in the sixth-floor hallway just outside the elevator, her sneakered foot below her blue-green scrubs tapping agitatedly against the faded tile floor. This really was one HAC emergency, it seemed.

  “I can’t believe you. You know how little time I have between class and my shift,” said Natalie, as she shoved me down the hallway and into her apartment.

  Natalie was statuesque in scrubs. Bottle-green eyes, red hair—and I mean red, red, Irish girl’s red hair—creamy skin, so many freckles on her it was like a pastry chef had been at her with a cinnamon shaker.

  “You promised you’d be here waiting. ‘With bells on,’ I believe was the term you used,” she said, green eyes glowing like kryptonite as she yanked at my shirt in her foyer. Now her hands were on my belt. “Let’s see some bells, Ozzy.”

  Natalie was an explosion of sex, a queen-size libido in hospital turquoise. She was also a brilliant Columbia med student on track to becoming a neurologist. It was a nice combination, though sometimes I wondered if she wanted me more for my body than my mind. Guess I’d have to live with it.

  “No bells, but I did manage to pick you up a little something,” I said as I took my 99-cent purchase out of my back pocket.

  Dangling from my finger was a pair of the slightest, rudest thong panties Thailand had ever produced, candy-apple red and transparent as cellophane.

  “Who says I don’t know the value of a dollar?” I said.

  Natalie planted her hands on her hips.

  “Let me get this straight. First you’re late for the only chance we’ve had to have sex in three days,” Natalie said, cocking her head, eyes in slits. “Then you show up wanting me to slip into some slutty trash a streetwalker would be embarrassed to wear?”

  “Pretty much,” I said.

  “You didn’t kiss that monkey before you came over here, did you? If you did, then turn the hell around.”

  “Nope,” I lied with perfect conviction.

  “In that case,” she said. She grabbed the panties from my hand. They stretched, snapped like a rubber band off my finger.

  “I really hate you, Oz,” she shouted over her shoulder on her way to the bedroom.

  “I hate you too, honey.”

  “Get on the couch,” she ordered from behind her open bedroom door. I could just see her shimmying the panties up her legs in the bedroom mirror. “Take off your shirt, leave the pants. I want to undo the belt with my teeth.”

  Chapter 8

  “THAT… WAS…,” NATALIE started to say. She was out of breath, biting a knuckle, her slippery body sprawled like a broken marionette on the floor of her bedroom, where we’d ended up half an hour later.

  “Jungle love?” I asked, untying the 99-cent purchase, which had somehow become tangled over my left shoulder. I brushed back some broken glass from a picture frame that had fallen off the wall. It was a photo of her dad, a Connecticut equities trader. Girl had some blue blood in her. I turned it over and scooted it under the bed.

  “Equatorial rain forest love,” Natalie said, rolling on top of me. She licked my earlobe. “I mean, doing it standing on a couch?”

  “Well, if you recall, I was the only one standing,” I said. In the corner of my eye, the winking red light of my iPhone let me know I had a message.

  “How could I forget?” she said, thumbing sweat out of her eyes. “That wasn’t biology. That was geology. You know, seismology, tectonics.”

  “It’s like Archimedes and I always say,” I said. “Give me a place to stand, and I can move the world.”

  I waited until Nat headed for the shower before I retrieved my phone. My message was a text from Abraham Bindix, my lion man.

  OZ, UNBELIEVABLE. IT’S NOT JUST L.A. IT’S HAPPENING HERE, 2!

  I called him immediately.

  “Oz, you are not so crazy after all,” Abe said in his Afrikaans accent, with his slightly rolled r’s and chopping-block consonants. “You were right. Lion behavior is wrong, absolutely wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong.

  “I just got back from a curtailed hunt, up north, near Zimbabwe. We came upon a village—an entire village—emptied out. From one end to the other was lion spoor and blood. I’ve never seen or even heard of such a thing.”

  There was a note of panic in Abe’s voice. Which was odd, coming from this burly Afrikaner who looked like a retired strongman from the circus.

  “In fact, I’m here dealing with the military, so I cannot exactly talk about it. But when I saw on the news about the lion attack at the L.A. zoo, I knew I had to call you. You have to come here to Botswana, man. And bring cameras. You and the rest of the world have to see this to believe it.”

  “Say no more,” I said. My iPhone pinched under my jaw, I snatched up a pen and looked around Nat’s bedroom for something to write on. “I’m packing a bag and catching the next flight. Where can you meet me? At the airport in Maun, is it?”

  “Right, man. Maun. Let me know which flight you’ll be on as soon as you can. This is incredible, terrible, incredible.”

  “I’ll call you when the first flight changes over,” I said as Nat came in, wearing a towel.

  “Right, man,” said Abe, and hung up.

  “Um, flight? You’re going somewhere?” she said. I was scribbling notes on the receipt for the panties.

  “On a, uh…a trip,” I said.

  “I gathered that much. Where?”

  “Botswana,” I cough-said.

  “What?”

  “Botswana.”

  “Botswana. Africa?! Are you nuts?” She flicked her wet hair over her shoulder. “No, of course you are. Silly question. But you can’t do that. People can’t do that. You can’t get a phone call, and then, like, call a taxi out to JFK and go to Botswana! Especially if you’re unemployed!”

  “You’re right,” I said. “What the hell do I do with Attila? Can you watch him for me?”

  Chapter 9

  “SO NOW I have to babysit a monkey?”

  “An ape,” I said.

  Nat was beginning to get actually pissed at me now, not just play-pissed.

  “The answer’s no, Oz. You know how creeped out I get. Besides, I have class.”

  “Relax. My super’s mother has it mostly covered. You just have to check in on him once a day and give him his meds. Please. You could polish up your bedside manner.”

  “On a monkey?” she shrieked.

  “An ape!” I said. “Besides, this trip is the breakthrough I’ve been waiting for. If I get some tape of abnormal lion behavior in Africa and couple it with the L.A. zoo breakout, people might listen, and we can start trying to figure this thing out for real. Humanity is in jeopardy. We can—”

  “Please,” she said. “Don’t give me the HAC spiel again. Just don’t. I really can’t believe you, Oz. First, you drop out of the PhD when you’re practically ABD—”

  “I was bored.”

  “Then for over a year—I don’t know, for a hobby?—you decide to randomly disrupt classes at New York’s finest institutions of higher learning. You were lucky NYU didn’t press charges for the chemistry thing.”

  �
�I was trying to get people to use their goddamn heads.”

  “I like you, Oz,” Natalie said. “I know you’re brilliant, but this HAC thing is really starting to get between us. With my class schedule, there’s barely enough time for us to even see each other. I mean, I can’t even remember the last time you took me out to a real restaurant. Now you’re leaving for Africa.”

  I looked at my girlfriend, perched on the edge of the bed. She was gorgeous. And she liked beer and Chris Farley movies. She played Modern Warfare 2 with me—and was good at it. We watched basketball together. She was a Celtics fan, but that was one of her only flaws.

  That’s when I shocked her—and myself.

  “How about this?” I said. “I go to Africa. If it’s another dud, I pack up my End-Is-Nigh sandwich boards, hand in my white–Harlem Globetrotter ID card, and get a job where I have to wear pants. Agreed?”

  “If you come back.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. Is it a deal?”

  She rolled her bottle-green eyes.

  “Fine, Tarzan. I’ll watch King Kong while you go into the jungle, even if it means for the last time. But concerning Attila, don’t think this is some sort of mommy tryout. I told you I don’t want kids. Not with you. Not with Leonardo DiCaprio. No one.”

  “I know, I know,” I said. “Relax. I just have a chimp who needs to eat. Have you seen my boxers anywhere?”

  She finally smiled.

  “Try the couch cushions in the living room.”

  Chapter 10

  I LEFT NATALIE’S apartment, a little uncertain of what I’d just gotten myself into. What if Botswana was a bust? Sometimes I wish I could put my mouth in a cage. It’s always pushing me into corners. I’d rather picture myself in a coffin than in a cubicle.

  But by the time I unlocked my bike, I decided that I actually needed my own ultimatum. This was it. It really was time for me to put up or shut up concerning HAC. If a pride of maniacal lions didn’t open the world’s eyes to what was coming down the pike, then nothing would.

  Back at the apartment, after I relieved and paid Mrs. Abreu, I took out Attila’s folding cage from the closet and assembled it. Attila whimpered when he saw me putting it together, knowing what it meant when I had to bust the thing out. I hated to delegate the poor guy to six-by-four-foot solitary for the time I’d be away, but there wasn’t much else I could do. I wrote a quick note for Nat to double his Zoloft and increase his vitamin D supplements, since he wouldn’t be able to exercise out on the terrace.

  After I got the cage put together, I let Attila in from the terrace and set him up in his beanbag chair for a special treat. I gave him his lunch as I played his favorite Beatrix Potter DVD, The Tale of the Flopsy Bunnies and Mrs. Tittlemouse.

  As he sat contentedly watching, I ran downstairs to get my bags from the storage bin. When I came back less than five minutes later, I couldn’t believe what was going on.

  Attila wasn’t in front of his DVD player anymore; he was in the shop. He’d already hurled two of my TVs into the wall and was standing on the table, banging a laptop against the corner.

  “Attila!” I shouted. “Stop it! Get down this instant! What the hell are you doing?”

  Attila turned, screeching.

  For a moment—just a brief, brief moment—I saw something in his eyes, a coldness, a meanness, that I’d never seen before. I actually thought he would swing the laptop at me.

  Then the moment passed. Attila dropped the computer and leaped off the table and into the corner with his head down.

  “March, mister,” I said, grabbing his hand and taking him to his cage. He tried to pick up the American Girl doll as we passed his room.

  “No,” I said, snatching it away.

  “Bad Attila. Bad boy,” I said, shutting the gate and locking it.

  After I swept up the broken glass and cleaned the chimp crap off the DVD player, I got on the Internet to book a flight to Botswana. The best I could do was a flight that left the next morning, with a stopover in Johannesburg, for three thousand bucks. My parents wouldn’t be happy, but I’d have to dip into the principal of the small trust Grandpa Oz had left me.

  I packed. Passport, clothes, gear. I had a 35-millimeter Nikon with a superzoom lens, but my pride and joy was my professional-grade Sony DSR-400L camcorder. I took it out of its padded bag and tested its lights and charged up its lithium batteries before I stuffed it all away again.

  I was hustling, bringing everything into the hallway, when I heard the whimpering.

  It was Attila. He was sobbing after receiving his scolding.

  I went into his room and opened the cage.

  “Are you sorry, Attila? Are you really sorry?”

  A high yelp assured me that he was, and we hugged it out for a while.

  I let him romp around while I kept getting things ready. I was almost all packed when Attila tugged my shirt and clicked his teeth repeatedly. I knew what he wanted. We finally kissed and made up. Natalie would have puked.

  “I have to go away for a few days now,” I said after I put him back into his cage. “It won’t be easy, but you’re going to be fine. Mrs. Abreu will look in on you early tomorrow, and so will Natalie. You remember Natalie. You be good to her, hear me? I know you understand me.”

  Attila made a couple of whoops of complaint.

  “I know, I know. It can’t be helped. I’m going to miss you, too.”

  Chapter 11

  IT WAS EARLY summer. The morning light illuminated the crushed Marlboro boxes and Happy Meal cups in the roadside weeds.

  Terrific. I’d just started my amazing journey, and I was already lost in the wilds. Of Queens.

  Staring out from the back of my sticky JFK-bound taxi, I cursed as we slowed to a dead stop. Again.

  We lurched forward a bit, and then stopped again. The cabbie bashed the horn and spat out a string of curses, went back to talking to somebody on his headset. Sounded like he was talking business. He was very dark and matchstick-skinny, a lot of red in his eyes.

  Above the dash I could see that the LIE had become a frozen, curving conveyor belt of red brake lights. It was so bad even the jackasses on the shoulder trying to cut people off were jammed to a halt.

  Surrounded by my bulky camera case, laptop, and carry-on, I checked the time on my iPhone for the five hundredth time. It was looking like making my 9:05 a.m. flight to Africa was going to need divine intervention in order to happen. I also noticed an e-mail from Natalie and made the mistake of opening it.

  You don’t have to do this.

  I sighed. Maybe my girlfriend was right. Maybe this was nuts. Wouldn’t it make more sense to head out to the Hamptons with her instead? Get some sand in my shoes. Eat some oysters. I could certainly use a Long Island iced tea or ten, not to mention a tan. Couldn’t this trip wait?

  No. I knew full well it couldn’t. I was committed to this thing, far past the point of no return. Hamptons or no Hamptons, HAC was happening. Right here. Right now. Right frigging everywhere. I could feel it in my pores.

  I went through my travel kit again. I sorted through my passport, my insurance, my federally mandated less-than-three-ounce travel toiletries, my skivvies, T-shirts and shorts, my red wool hat. Then I scooped up my antimalarial doxycycline pills that had spilled over my folded-up poncho until everything was wired tight.

  To hell with the naysayers. I was good to go. Botswana or bust. The last thing to do was print out my e-ticket when I got to the airport, if I ever got there.

  When we finally started moving, I took out a map of Africa. I was a forty–sixty mix of nervous–excited. Just the sheer size of Africa. Three times as big as Europe. I had learned so much about the continent during my first trip, when I was still in grad school, but this was different. This was no field trip.

  The cabbie quit nattering into his Bluetooth and turned to me.

  “Which terminal, sir?” The airport was finally beginning to crawl into sight.

  “I’m not sure,” I said. “My fli
ght’s on South African Airways.”

  “You are going to Africa? South Africa?” asked the cabbie. I’d been preoccupied—now I noticed the guy looked and sounded African himself. His voice had that melodic lilt of African English. Nigerian, maybe.

  “Botswana,” I said.

  “You go from New York to Botswana? No! For real?” the cabbie said, his red eyes wide in the rearview.

  He seemed even more skeptical than my girlfriend. I was getting nothing but unbridled support and good omens from all corners tonight.

  “That’s the idea,” I said as we pulled up in front of a bustling terminal.

  “Well, I hope is a busy-ness trip,” he said as he printed my receipt from the meter. “You make damn sure is a busy-ness trip, mon, you know what I mean.”

  I did know what he meant, unfortunately. He was referring to Botswana’s AIDS epidemic, the second worst in the world. One out of every four adults in the country was supposed to have the dreaded sexually transmitted disease.

  I wasn’t too worried about it. Between my long trip and dealing head-on with a frightening global epidemic, I didn’t think I’d have much time to squeeze in any hot, wild, condomless third-world sex. Besides, I had a girlfriend.

  “Don’t worry,” I told the cabbie as I opened the door. “I won’t have any fun at all.”

  Chapter 12

  ABOUT FOUR HOURS later I woke up thirty thousand feet above the Atlantic.

  Blinking in the low, lonely roar of the 747’s cabin, I raised my seat and looked out the window beside me. Through spaces in the milky floor of dim clouds I could see the silver squiggles of the surf on the ocean far below. I definitely wasn’t in Kansas anymore—or Queens, thank God.

  I yawned, unlocked and lowered my seat-back tray, and worried my laptop out of my carry-on bag. I was going to write some e-mails, but instead I found myself clicking open the file for the HAC PowerPoint presentation I’d shown in Paris.