Zoo Page 9

  He looks at himself in the mirror and positions the red hat on his own head at a rakish angle. He crouches on the edge of the sink, opposable toes gripping the porcelain rim, staring at himself.

  Attila sits blank-faced on the sink, motionless and tense, as he stares into his own glassy brown eyes, his rubbery, masklike face. Attila is confused, becoming more agitated by the moment. Something strange and awful is stirring in his soul. He feels alienated by his own reflection.

  From the moment Natalie arrived, Attila had detected an odd, unsettling smell—a mixture of the apricot scent of her shampoo, her minty deodorant, even the slight acrid whiff of nail polish on her toes. There was something queasy, bad, sickening about the combination of smells on her. All those grubby odors mingled with the worst smell of all—the scent of her, her resentment of him, her disgust. He smelled that. He had smelled her contempt.

  That’s why he had tricked her.

  Attila returns to his cage. From the corner he retrieves what looks like a children’s toy tablet. It is a PECS—a Picture Exchange Communication System—a talking touch-screen laptop designed to help teach language to autistic children, which Oz has used in his experiments with Attila.

  On the screen are rows of pictures, things that Attila might want, such as bananas, peanuts, balls, and dolls. Also scattered among the columns are pictures of faces displaying various expressions.

  Again and again, Attila presses the picture representing himself, and then the face in the lower right-hand corner of the grid.

  “Attila, angry!” says the chipper, computerized female voice to the empty apartment. “Attila, angry!”

  Book Three

  HOME SWEET HOME

  Chapter 34

  MAUN TO JOHANNESBURG, Johannesburg to New York, New York to D.C. The chirping of the jet’s landing gear and the accompanying jolt of bumping wheels woke me up as we touched down at Reagan National Airport.

  As we thudded along the runway I gaped out the window at the majestic and welcome sight of the Washington Monument’s ivory spire across the Potomac. I remembered coming down to D.C. from New York on Amtrak with my dad to see the sights when I was a kid. We would visit the Lincoln Memorial, throw pennies in the reflecting pool. Everything had seemed so solid then. So rational and safe.

  I reached into the seat-back pocket in front of me and took out the DVR tape of the lion attacks that I’d smuggled out of Africa. That was then, I thought, shaking my head at it. This is now. Then I slipped the tape into my shirt pocket.

  I turned on the iPhone I’d bought in the airport: my in-box was flooded with e-mails, and there were nineteen voice mails. During the layover in Johannesburg I’d been contacting every scientist I could think of who might have any interest in HAC.

  I’d put out the Bat-Signal all over the world, and had managed to scramble together a last-second rendezvous with several of my allies before my meeting with Senator Gardner. This was our first shot at getting HAC taken seriously by the world, and I wanted to go over everything one last time to make sure we had our story straight.

  I looked beside me at Chloe, sleeping peacefully with her head against my arm.

  No wonder she was exhausted. We’d talked pretty much nonstop on our transcontinental trip back to the States, going over all possibilities about HAC. I was a little amazed at how quickly we also slid into more personal matters. Our childhoods, families, the kinds of things that really mattered.

  Chloe’s mother had died when she was five. Her father was a career military man, an officer in the French Foreign Legion, who often left her on her grandparents’ isolated cattle farm in Auvergne. Her grandfather, a retired civil engineer turned farmer, opened her eyes to the wonders of the natural world—farming, gardening, and especially animals.

  As the plane wheeled toward the terminal, Chloe woke up and, seeing me watching her, sat upright as she rubbed her eyes.

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “Nothing to be sorry about,” I said as the seat belt light bonged off.

  When we’d made it off the plane, I stopped in front of a breaking-news feed scrolling across a newsstand TV.

  “What is it?” Chloe said.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I was hoping CNN picked up on the animal attacks in Botswana.”

  It was craziness, all right. But not ours. A girl with a shaved head, some sort of pop singer, was attacking a car with a broken umbrella while a dozen paparazzi recorded her every move.

  KITTY KATRINA SHAVES HEAD, ATTACKS PAPARAZZI. HAS KITKAT GONE OFF THE DEEP END? shouted the crawler at the bottom of the screen.

  “Who’s Kitty Katrina?” Chloe said, looking at the screen, confused.

  I shrugged.

  “Welcome to America,” I said.

  Chapter 35

  THE ROCKFORD HOTEL, where our meeting was scheduled to take place, is situated in a run-down, slightly sketchy area of southeast D.C. across the water from Buzzard Point.

  We checked into separate rooms and dropped off our things. I showered and used the quick moment of peace and solitude before the meeting to call Natalie. It was early afternoon on a Wednesday, and I was pretty sure she was off work at the moment. Her phone rang until I got her voice mail.

  “You’ve reached the voice-mail box of”—said a robot, and then a pause, and Natalie’s bright bell of a voice carefully saying her own name—“Natalie Shaw.”

  “Please leave a message after the tone.”

  “Hi, Natalie,” I said into the void, looking out the hotel window at the Potomac. “I’m back in the States. I saw your e-mail. I just wanted to talk things out. I’m in D.C. right now, but I’ll be back in New York tomorrow, I hope. Let me know what’s up.”

  In fact, I was mainly worried about Attila. It had been almost a week since I’d left him. I hadn’t heard back from Mrs. Abreu, either. I hoped he was all right.

  I had work to do.

  “Are you sure we’re in the right place?” Chloe asked as we entered the shabby hotel ballroom. The carpeting was criminally ugly—stain-mottled and worn thin in the heavily trafficked spots.

  There was a small crowd milling around a table set with cheap hors d’oeuvres, water pitchers, and coffee urns. It was a sea of flannel, glasses, and beards, swarming around the free food as enthusiastically as the vultures I’d seen in the Okavango Delta.

  “Believe me,” I said. “We’re in the right place.”

  On our way to the front of the room, we passed a young, skinny white guy with intense blue eyes and blond eyebrows that disappeared into his face. He was wearing a red tracksuit and a white Kangol hat, and was bent in ferocious attention over the glowing oracle of his iPad. Spotting us, he jumped out of his seat and gave me an awkward fist bump.

  “Word to your moms, Ozzle,” he said.

  “Dr. Strauss, thanks for coming,” I said, introducing him to Chloe. “Eberhard was just awarded the microbiology chair at the University of Bonn.”

  Chloe and I walked on. “You see why I need you now?” I said, gesturing at the rows of World of Warcraft diehards we passed. “These guys are all beyond brilliant, but, as you can see, PR is not their strong suit. That’s why it’s so important that you agreed to come with me.”

  “And I thought you wanted me for my mind,” Chloe said, smiling.

  “Give me the tape, Oz. The audiovisual is in operating order,” said a fresh-faced kid dressed as though he were ready for a rodeo. His shoulders were hunched up to his ears and his long arms dangled stiffly at his sides. He turned and sniffed loudly at Chloe’s hair.

  “Your hair smells good,” he said in a too-loud voice, half Okie and half machine, as if Robby the Robot had grown up in a Steinbeck novel.

  “Jonathan, thanks, man. Here you go.” I handed him the tape and ushered Chloe along.

  “Don’t mind him. That was Jonathan Moore. He’s an autistic savant, and one of the best agricultural engineers in the world. He’s a renowned animal communicator. He was one of my first contacts when I
started researching HAC. He helped me work with Attila.”

  I had rolled the dice and told Chloe about Attila on our flight. I even showed her my wallet pictures. She said she thought I was brave for having rescued him. So she seemed cool with it. Go figure.

  Chapter 36

  SOME MINUTES LATER I found myself on the stage, tapping the podium microphone. The feedback squealed and settled down. The murmuring room went silent, and all heads swiveled in my direction.

  “Without further ado, folks,” I said, nodding to Jonathan, who gave me a thumbs-up by the projector. “This is what is happening in Africa. It speaks for itself. I recorded this two days ago in the Okavango Delta in Botswana.”

  I stepped back into the dark to watch the room watch the video. I was pleased to see that they were stunned. When the male lions’ heads appeared in the field, a wave of whispers rose up in the room. These were some very smart folks, and I’d definitely gotten their attention.

  When Jonathan turned the lights back on, the roomful of whispers broke into a full-blast cacophony of forty people trying to shout over each other all at once.

  “Come on, folks,” I called over the din as I waved the legal tablet in my hand and stepped up to the microphone. “My meeting with the senator is only a few hours away. His first question is going to be, why is this happening? We have proof not only of this inexplicable hyperaggressive behavior in lions but also of an unprecedented change in their social behavior. We need to come up with some workable theories.”

  “How can this be, Oz?” my former evolutionary biology professor, Gail Quinn, said. “How can this have happened overnight?”

  “I don’t know, Gail,” I said. “That’s what I called you all here to try to help me figure it out. My best guess so far is that it may be some sort of radical new adaptive zone. I’m thinking that there may be a dramatic change in the environment that for some reason we haven’t been able to pick up on yet.”

  “Which aspect of the environment is changing, though?” somebody said.

  “My money is on a viral agent, Oz,” Eberhard Strauss said. “As I said before, these behaviors, especially the hyperaggression, are symptomatic of rabies. I am not saying it is rabies, but it may be some virus that attacks the nervous system.”

  “I considered that,” I said. “But for one thing, rabies is transmitted from animal to animal through bodily fluids. That might explain what’s going on in the wild, but in the recent L.A. lion attack and escape, the animals were completely isolated.”

  “Assuming that incident has anything to do with this,” someone said.

  “That’s right. Assuming it is, though—bear with me—how could isolated zoo animals have been affected?”

  “It could be airborne,” Strauss pointed out. “Or carried by parasites. Mosquitoes, fleas.” He ticked off possibilities on his fingers. “The meat they were feeding the lions in the zoo could have been infected. You name it. Many possibilities.”

  “Let me throw out another argument against the virus theory,” I said. “An animal with rabies, or similar diseases that attack the nervous system, usually exhibits more symptoms than hyperaggressive behavior. Erratic muscle movement, mange, dermal lesions, hydrophobia. The lions that killed my friend looked quite healthy to me. Physically, at least. And the zoo lions in California weren’t displaying any physical symptoms, either. I certainly wouldn’t rule out a virus at this point, but it would have to be one we’ve never seen before.”

  “Has there been an autopsy on any of these animals?” asked Dr. Quinn.

  “No,” I said. “The African authorities won’t allow it. That’s one of the first things I’m going to bring up with the senator.”

  “What about an autopsy on the zoo lions in L.A.?” somebody shouted.

  “Good question,” I said.

  “If it’s not a virus, then we may be talking about a cascade change in the environment,” said Alice Boyd, a regal, silver-haired septuagenarian, a MacArthur fellow from the University of Washington. “Have you thought about solar flares? A geomagnetic reversal? I’m only thinking of the way that animal behavior sometimes changes rapidly before a major geological event—earthquakes, tsunamis. Maybe something’s coming. A cosmic event that these animals are somehow sensing.”

  “Good point,” I said, dashing it down on my tablet. I liked the idea of geomagnetic reversal—well, actually, I hated it, as it was scary as hell, but I liked it as a suggestion. Geological data show us that every once in a while the earth’s magnetic field reverses itself: basically, after such an event, your compass needle will point south where before it had pointed north. These switches seem to be random as far as we can tell. There’s a lot of disagreement about how long these shifts last—recent evidence from the USGS suggests that one of these shifts in the past lasted only four years. But a geomagnetic shift’s potential effect on the biosphere is unknown—for the simple reason that it has never happened in human memory.

  “Are you people this stupid?” someone shouted in the murmuring crowd. I looked: it was a lean, handsome young man I didn’t know. He was the only person in the room wearing a suit. “Those lions could have been trained by Siegfried and Roy. This footage doesn’t prove a thing.”

  There was a hush in the crowd followed by the buzzing can-opener hum of an electric wheelchair.

  I nodded at Charles Groh as he piloted his iBOT wheelchair down the ballroom’s center aisle. Charles was one of the world’s leading gorilla experts, although he was effectively retired these days, unfortunately. Three years ago he was suddenly attacked by a four-hundred-pound gorilla whom he had known and worked with for ten years. The ape broke all the bones in his face and tore away his nose, lips, one of his ears, one of his eyes, and one of his hands. He also took off Groh’s right leg from the knee down.

  The primatologist stopped in front of the handsome skeptic.

  “That tape is as real as my face,” he said.

  I smiled in relief as the group continued debating among themselves. A terrific dynamic was forming now. What had once been mere tolerance of my HAC obsession by my friends and colleagues had now suddenly become scientific respect. The debate was shifting from the question of whether something was happening to the more important questions of why it was happening and how to fix it.

  But what Alice Boyd had said about geomagnetic shifts stuck with me. It lodged itself in the back of my mind and refused to go away. I had a feeling she was barking up the right tree. It wasn’t exactly the suggestion of a geomagnetic shift affecting the biosphere in unforeseen ways as it was the general direction of her thinking: a massive but invisible change in the environment that animals could sense but we could not.

  Do you remember the Indian Ocean tsunami? Yes, we live in interesting times. As the wars and natural disasters fall one upon another like a hard rain, they get buried in the quickly overlapping layers of mud in our shitty memories. Which catastrophe was that? December 26, 2004. The giant tsunami that ripped across the Indian Ocean from the epicenter of a 9.0-magnitude earthquake off the coast of Sumatra, drowning more than two hundred thousand people in Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India, and Thailand. I was in Iraq at the time. I remember crowding around a cheap little TV in our base camp, watching the news. I remember how I was struck when I heard that, in Sri Lanka, a full day before the first wave hit, the animals began to disappear inland. Birds, lizards, snakes, mongoose—gone. Elephants ran for higher ground. Dogs refused to go outdoors. Flamingos abandoned their low-lying breeding areas. Although the tsunami killed hundreds of thousands of people, relatively few animals were reported dead. Animals’ more acute hearing and other senses might have enabled them to hear or feel the earth’s vibration, tipping them off to the approaching disaster long before humans realized what was going on. The animals knew something bad was up. They could feel the vibrations, feel it in their bones. The people, though? Oblivious. Even when the sea mysteriously retreated by a mile and a half, gathering itself for the eighty-foot wave that followed—wh
at did they do? The children went down to the exposed ocean floor to gather seashells.

  Chapter 37

  RED AND BLUE lights flash against the walls of the dark apartment as a howling fire truck roars down Broadway, far below. The siren dissipates, soon replaced by the grating, music-box tinkle of an ice cream truck.

  Sitting on the edge of the sink in the stifling yellow bathroom, Attila glances at the window idly for a moment, as if trying to remember something. Then he shifts his weight forward and goes back to studying himself in the mirror.

  He’s been looking in the mirror for hours. With meticulous fascination, he gazes at his deep-set, burnished, golden-brown eyes rimmed in black, the wide pink saucers of his ears poking out from beneath the red woolen cap. Periodically he opens his wide, protrusive mouth and thumbs at his long canine teeth. He looks down at his arms, examines the coarse brown hair, the thick leathery skin of his hands, his black fingernails, his long, knotty-knuckled fingers and stubby thumbs.

  He closes his eyes and sucks in a deep, meditative breath through his nose. Attila tilts forward until his fingertips and his forehead press against the cool sleek glass of the mirror, his mind trying to right itself, trying to quit roving crazily over the swirling, sickening landscape of strange sounds and strange smells.

  There’s the scent of crackling grease from the chicken place across 125th Street. The damp, chalky smell of Sheetrock from the church renovation around the corner. The rancid stink of a water treatment plant. The oily, garbagey, fishy smell of the Hudson River.

  If there were an EEG monitoring his brain waves, it would be showing a spike of activity in the amygdala, the part of the primate brain responsible for smell, memory, and learning.

  Then the Bad Smell comes again.

  It comes from the buildings and rooms and pipes, from the streets and alleys and sewers, from the cars and buses. From everywhere, all at once.