Zoo

Chapter 1

I WOKE UP shaking.

I panicked at first, thinking I was having a stroke or something. Then I opened my eyes, relieved, as I remembered it wasn’t me that was shaking. It was my apartment.

Outside the wall of dusty industrial-style windows beside my bed came what sounded like a regiment of giants rhythmically striking concrete with their rifle butts in a parade drill. But it wasn’t the jolly green marines. I knew it was the elevated number 1 Broadway local, rattling to shake the dead back to life next to my new fifth-floor Harlem loft apartment. Hadn’t gotten used to that train yet.

I winced, covered my head with a pillow. Useless. Only in New York did one have to actually pay for the privilege of sleeping beside an overpass.

But I was so broke I couldn’t even afford to complain. I sat up. I couldn’t even really afford to sleep. I couldn’t even afford to think about money. I’d spent it all and then some; my credit was in the sewer. By that point I was in tunnel-vision mode, focusing my entire life on one desperate need: to figure things out before it was too late.

Things hadn’t always been so dire. Only two years before, not only had I lived in a nonvibrating apartment, I was actually on the PhD fast track at Columbia University. I was the golden boy in the ecology, evolution, and environmental biology department, so close to the brass ring I could practically smell the book contracts, the cocktail parties, the cushy university appointments.

But then I came into contact with the event—what others called the mistake—that changed my life.

I noticed something. Something that wasn’t quite right. Something I couldn’t let go.

That’s the way it happens sometimes. Life is flowing along like a fairy tale, and then you see something that you just can’t categorize. Something that starts filling your every thought, your every dream, your every waking moment.

At least, that’s the way it happened with me. One minute I was about to realize my goal of academic greatness, and the next I was wrestling with something I couldn’t stop thinking about, something I couldn’t shake, even as my world crashed around my ears.

I know how nuts it sounds. Intellectual promise plus obsession plus throwing away conventional success usually ends pretty badly. It certainly did for Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, and Chris McCandless, the Into the Wild guy, who died on that bus.

But I wasn’t some malcontent or mystic trying to form a deep intrinsic connection to an ultimate reality. I was more like Chicken Little, an evolutionary biologist Chicken Little who had detected that the sky actually was falling. Except it wasn’t the sky that was falling, it was worse. Biological life was falling. Animal life itself. Something very, very weird and very, very bad was happening, and I was the only voice shouting in the wilderness about it.

Before I get ahead of myself, my name’s Oz. My first name is Jackson, but with a last name like mine, no one uses it. Unfortunately, my father is also known as Oz, as are my mother, my three sisters, my uncles, and all my paternal cousins. Which gets confusing at family reunions, but that’s neither here nor there.

What is here and there—everywhere—is the problem I was monitoring, the global problem I’d by that point pretty much devoted my life to trying to figure out.

It sounds grandiose, I know, but I feared that if I were right—and for the first time in my life I truly hoped I was wrong—a planetary paradigm shift was underway that was going to make global warming feel like a Sunday stroll through an organic community garden.

Chapter 2

I HOPPED OUT of bed wearing a pair of wrinkled gray pajama bottoms that Air France had gifted me with on a recent flight to Paris. Shaved, showered, teeth brushed, I got back into the fancy French pajamas. Working from home has its perks. Okay, “working” implies I was making money. This was another kind of work. Anyway. They were really comfortable pajamas.

Coming out of my bedroom, I retrieved another prized possession from the doorknob—my fire-engine-red woolen hat, which I’d acquired on a recent trip to Alaska. With my thinking cap firmly on the bottle, I got down and pumped out my daily hundred push-ups, a habit I’d picked up on yet another jaunt, a four-year stint in the US Army before college.

PE complete, I headed into my shop. I flipped the surge-protector switches, turning on the TV sets that I’d lined across a metal workbench in the center of the industrial-style room. There were eight of them in all. Some were nice new flat-screens, but most were junkers I’d picked up diving Dumpsters after the digital signal changeover. Behind them, a Gordian knot of wires connected them to cable boxes and satellite receivers and a set of laptops and computer servers that I’d modified with the help of some electronic buddies of mine into the world’s biggest, baddest DVR.

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.

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.

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 flight’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.

It began with a photograph of a primitive painting from the famous Lascaux caves in France that clearly showed a guy being killed by a bison. Next was Rubens’s Chained Prometheus. In the painting, the torment in the upside-down Titan’s face is pretty damn visceral as an eagle tears into his, well, viscera. The Rubens was followed quickly by Nicolas Poussin’s haunting Renaissance painting The Plague at Ashdod, depicting a scene in which God has sent a plague of disease and mice onto the Philistines for disobeying him.

Next came stranger, darker, lesser-known images.

I felt my pulse skip a little when an ancient sculpture of a reclining jaguar appeared. It was found in an Aztec temple along with an apocalyptic prophecy of animals devouring all humanity.

The jaguar was followed by an eerie illustration from the Toggenburg Bible. It shows a man and a woman dying of bubonic plague. There’s something about its bright, static flatness—a characteristic of medieval art—that makes it particularly disturbing. The naked figures lie stiffly in bed like paper dolls, their pale bodies polka-dotted with protruding buboes. The Black Death, which killed 40 percent of the known world’s population, had been started by marmots and carried throughout Europe by rats.

I looked out the window again. As I stared out at the clouds thousands of feet below me, and the ocean below that, I had a strange sensation. It was a sinking, chilling feeling. For a moment, hurtling six hundred miles an hour toward Africa, I felt suddenly very tiny and very alone. I wasn’t religious, but as I sat there, I started wondering about the inexplicable nature of these things.

It was as though I could actually feel the apocalyptic shift that was occurring. I thought of horses, birds, snakes. I thought of the curse God puts on the snake in Genesis: he will crush your head, and you will strike his heel…

The wrath of God?

Or maybe it was just my jet lag, I thought, rubbing the gunk out of my eyes. There was no doubt that I’d become obsessed with HAC. I thought about all the sleepless nights; the quitting school. And now I was actually on a plane to Africa. Maybe I would finally find the answers I was looking for. Or maybe I was delusional. I was beginning to doubt my own sanity.

I glanced down at my laptop and saw that I had another e-mail from Natalie. This one was a real picker-upper.

Oh, boy. I knew what was coming. I almost quit reading then and there. The same way I looked at my bank statements in those days. Just flick my eyes over it, knowing I don’t want to see it. Anyway. I read the rest quickly:

Okay, then, I thought. Whoopee. I’m back on the market.

I considered replying to her e-mail, but then decided to just ignore it, leave things alone. I couldn’t turn back now. Natalie knew that, and I knew Natalie’s priority was to become a doctor. She’d always been clear about that. Maybe we did need a break.

I’d just have to call the other woman in my life. I left a message for Mrs. Abreu on her machine, begging her to feed Attila for me until I came back. She wouldn’t let me down.

I closed my laptop and stretched. I had twelve hours to go before I reached Johannesburg for my stopover. I reached into my laptop bag for my iPod, put in my earbuds, cranked some Black Sabbath, and headed down the aisle of the speeding plane in search of the stewardess and some Red Bull.