Zoo

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—what 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.

The Bad Smell is people. And as he stands here in the epicenter of one of the most densely populated places on earth, this frightening, stifling, choking stench closes in on him like a noose, like a bag over his head.

He is shaking. His hands are trembling. The wind shifts, and he smells the psychiatric center a block north. He hears screaming and smells horror, unbearable pain.

All this terrible foulness collects in his mind like smoke in an air filter. Attila plugs his nostrils with his fingers. He stops shaking and opens his glassy brown eyes. He shudders.

A cracked coffee mug with two toothbrushes in it rests on the soap dish. Attila picks it up, shakes out the toothbrushes, and flops the mug back and forth in his hands, wondering what to do with it. He looks again at his reflection in the mirror, wearing the red hat. He rocks back and flings the cup hard at the mirror, smashing it to smithereens and splintering the mirror into a fractured starburst. It feels good. It scratches an itch inside of him.

Then the itch comes back.

Huffing, panting, yowling, he leaps from the sink into the hallway, hurling and smashing everything he can reach. He goes into the room with the computers and smashes them all. He rips them from the wall, yanking out their electrical cords, and tosses them into each other. Sparks crackle and fizz, bits of machinery fly about the room like handfuls of flung sand.

Soon he hears a noise: a repeated thumping on the wall near the door.

“SHUT THE FUCK UP IN THERE!” comes the muffled voice of a person. Next-door neighbor. “You stop that shit right now or I’m calling the cops!”

Attila screams back as he rushes over to the wall and begins pounding it as hard as he can. Plaster particulates rise in the air like white smoke as the mirror on the wall jumps once, twice, then breaks free of its moorings and crashes to the floor near his feet. Glass scatters across the hallway.

When he sniffs again, he catches a new scent emanating from the adjacent apartment.

Attila pant-hoots and shrieks as he scampers through the ruined room.

There is one human smell he enjoys, and he can smell it now.

The scent of human fear.

Chapter 38

THE HAC MEETING was still in full swing that afternoon when an e-mail popped up on my iPhone from Elena Wernert, Senator Gardner’s senior staffer.

The senator couldn’t meet with me today, she informed me, and my heart sank like a stone before I read the bit that followed: if I was interested, she could “squeeze me in” for five minutes at a conservation hearing that the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works was holding tomorrow at ten.

I thought: a congressional hearing—booyah. That was better than a meeting with the senator. I couldn’t have rubbed on a bottle and asked a genie for a better way to get the word out.

So: was I interested?

Absolutely interested, I wrote back, tapping letters on the phone’s glowing screen under the table.

As the meeting wore on toward evening, something strange happened. More people kept arriving, prominent geneticists, biologists, people whose names I’d known for years but whom I had never met. I did a double take when Jonathan Eley walked in—a popular astronomer who hosted a New Agey PBS series on the origins of the universe.

They all wanted to see the lion attack footage, which by then had been set up to run continuously in a cordoned-off section of the meeting room.

The Botswana zoological anomaly, as many were starting to call it, was attracting scientists like moths to a flame.

This whole thing was on a new level now, I realized. The buzz on this was intense. Also, in a strange way, I’d won a kind of respect that I’d never really had before: as the meeting gradually segued from the ballroom to the hotel bar, well-known scientists from top-shelf institutions—Harvard, MIT, Johns Hopkins—who normally wouldn’t have given me the time of day shuffled over to shake my hand or offer to buy me a beer.

As the attaboys accumulated, I took five from worrying about the end of the world to allow myself a golden moment of self-congratulation. Even after people had called me crazy, I’d stuck to my guns with HAC, and now I felt vindicated.

“Well, aren’t you quite the celebrity?” Chloe said, picking at the shoulder of my sport coat after I’d said good-bye to a frosty-haired Princeton microbiologist. My hand was pink and hot from handshakes.

“Yep,” I said. “Ladies and gentlemen, Jackson Oz, rock-and-roll biologist. No autographs, and easy on the flash photography.”

After the meeting broke up in the early evening, Chloe and I went upstairs to her hotel suite to prepare for the Senate hearing. Sharing a pot of coffee, we cranked out a five-minute statement to the committee that emphasized the dire nature of the problem. I gave several specific policy suggestions, such as broadcasting warnings to every local department of animal care and control to be on alert for increased aggression. But the most important request was for funding to research the problem. We needed to get the best people we could, as fast as possible.

After rereading it, Chloe collapsed in a chair and nodded her head.

“This is good, Oz. With the tape, it should cause quite a stir. We’ve already grabbed the attention of scientists. Now we’re going to tell the world.”

We called room service and had the coffee exchanged for a late dinner. Skate wing with capers and cauliflower farro and a bottle of Vouvray (Chloe’s suggestion). It was delicious.

She was oddly quiet as we ate. She swirled her wine and gazed distractedly through the window. Outside in the bluish, luminous dark, the Frederick Douglass Bridge, lit up like a birthday cake, spanned the Anacostia River.

When Chloe finally looked at me, her brown eyes were glistening with moisture.

“Back in Africa,” she began, her voice quiet, “when night fell, I had resigned myself to my death. I started praying to my grandfather, saying that if I had to die, that maybe he could help somehow. That it would be quick. The next day, I was about to give up hope. Then I looked up, and you were there.”

“And now we’re here,” I said, raising my glass.

“Exactly,” she said. “I never believed in fate before, but now I don’t know. One moment, I’m about to die in Africa, and the next, I’m in America. And in the middle of a storm. Something that might be one of the biggest events in history. This doesn’t often happen to a girl from Auvergne. It doesn’t seem real.”

“It is real,” I said. “You want me to pinch you to prove it?”

That’s when she leaned across the tiny table and touched my face.

“No,” she said. “I want you to kiss me.”

I leaned toward her from across the table and we kissed for the first time. It was soft and right. Then the image of Natalie floated across my eyelids, and though it was the last thing on earth I wanted to do, I broke it off.

“No?” Chloe said surprised. “I thought—”

“I should have told you. I’m sort of, uh—”

“You’re married.”

“God, no.”

“Petite amie? Une amante?”

“No, no. I mean, it’s, uh…it’s hard to say. I think I just broke up with someone,” I said, avoiding her eyes.

Chloe harrumphed. “You think?”

“Yeah.”

Chloe lifted her glass, took a sip of wine. “Well, I appreciate your honesty, Mr. Truth and Justice,” she said.

“I guess I should go back to my room,” I said. I wadded my napkin on my plate and stood. “We have a big day tomorrow.”

“Are you completely crazy? You are here now,” she said. Then she sipped more wine and added: “Besides, I’ve already seen your underwear.”

I gave her a look.

“No, I’m serious, Oz. I don’t want to be alone tonight. Please stay?”

“I’ll sleep on the chair.”

She rolled her eyes.

“Sleep in the bed, with me,” she said over the rim of her glass. “Don’t worry. Just sleep.”

It turned out she wasn’t kidding about the just sleeping part. She was sawing logs by the time I came out from my shower.

I watched her in the dim light from the window—her dark eyelashes, her pale face, her thin, delicate arms. Lying there, she looked lovely, so girlish and birdlike. I was already kicking myself. What were you thinking? Natalie broke up with you. It’s done. You’re a free agent now. Go for it.

Chloe had come all this way for me, I realized. She trusted me and believed in me, which Natalie never really did.

After I tucked her under the covers, I lay beside her and looked at the ceiling.

“Good night, you dumbass,” I said to myself, and shut my eyes.

Chapter 39

MY EYES OPENED I don’t know how many hours later. The room was so dark I almost couldn’t tell whether or not I’d opened my eyes. Not even an orange glow from the city outside. It was as if someone had put blackout curtains on the windows, which I hadn’t remembered doing.

Then: shaking. Some sort of clicking, metallic rattle. My eyes flitted around the dark room. It took me a moment to realize it was the doorknob.

The rattling became louder—and more violent—as if someone were trying to wrench the doorknob out of the door. A grinding, scratching sound soon accompanied it. Then came a tentative whump against the door.

My first thought was that it was one of the other scientists playing a joke. After the meeting, the beer had been flowing like water.

There was a second whump. Harder now. Something big and heavy behind it.

I sat up. I didn’t think it was a joke. It wasn’t funny enough.

The blow that followed made the top of the door crack. I heard wood splintering.

What the hell?

I threw back the sheet and was on my feet as the groaning hinges ripped free from the door frame. The door exploded inward, smashing against the floor.

An enormous shape filled the doorway. Then it didn’t. There was movement in the room. Then another huge shape darkened the door for an instant and was gone, inside the black room.

“Oz? Are you there?”

Behind me, Chloe sat up in the bed, reached over to the bedside lamp, switched it on, and screamed.

They were bears. Two bears—two massive fucking grizzly bears—filled the room, maybe five feet from the bed. The two bears moved forward on stout, powerful legs, their fur rippling over their bodies in waves. Drool swung from their open mouths, and their beady little black eyes stared outward, as blank and indifferent as death.

I could not move. It was as if my feet had been nailed down. There was no thinking. No fight-or-flight. Even my lizard brain had checked out.

Bear One reared back on his hind legs and swiped at me with his paw. I tumbled backward and felt bright hot wetness I knew was blood on my cheek and neck. My hand flew to my face: blood poured between my fingers, covered my face, stung my eyes.

Then I woke up on my back in the bed, screaming. My hands were flailing at the empty air above me. I reached for my neck. No blood. No pain.

It took me a moment to realize Chloe was screaming, too, beside me in the bed.

“Recevez les de moi!” she yelled in the dark.

I grabbed her shoulders.

“Get them off me! No!” Chloe said, pushing me away. Her eyes were open, but still seeing her nightmare.

“It’s okay, Chloe! It’s a dream! Just a dream!”

Her lungs sucked at the air. I held her and felt her body slowly loosen.

“But it was so real. We were sleeping, and then the door broke down and bears rushed in. I watched one of them kill you.”

“What?” I clicked on the light. “You dreamed about bears?”

“Yes. They were huge. Two huge grizzly bears broke down the door and came in the room.”

“Bullshit!” I hopped out of bed and began pacing.

“What is it?”

“I had the same dream. Two grizzly bears knocked down the door and came in, and one of them ripped my face off!”

“How is that possible? How is it possible we both had the same nightmare?”

I had heard of mutual dreaming before, but I’d always been skeptical, never having experienced it. Only in the most extreme cases were there reports of people dreaming the exact same thing. Was it because we were exposed to the same stimuli, or was it something else? Did it have to do with HAC? Surely not…

“Mon Dieu,” Chloe said. “What is this? I’m so scared, Oz. What is going on? What is happening to the world?”

A feeling like a vein of ice sliced from my toes to the top of my head.

“I don’t know,” I said, holding my head in my hands.

Chapter 40

WHEN MY EYES opened again the next morning, Chloe was curled up against me, her head nestled in my armpit and my hand in her hair. Looking down at her, I thought about the night before. The shared nightmare, dreaming the same dream.

I didn’t know what to think. A definite first for me. Chloe didn’t seem to want to talk about it, either. She didn’t mention it as we got ready and went down to get our cab.

Outside, it was a crisp, sunny summer day. Sharp light, cloudless blue sky. Taxis and bike messengers, businesspeople going to work, sipping coffee, looking at their watches, Kindles out and earbuds in to isolate themselves for the commute. Seeing them made me think of the animals in Sri Lanka heading for the hills days before the tsunami while the people stayed behind, gathering seashells on the newly extended beach and wondering where the elephants went. Chloe and I exchanged a dark look as we rode. We didn’t have to say it. You could practically taste it in the air. Something bad was coming. Something the world had never seen.

The Dirksen Senate Office Building was in the northwest part of the Capitol complex on First Street. I was heartened when I spotted some national media trucks at the curb outside the majestic white marble building. At least we had a shot now at giving people a warning.

I also noticed some familiar faces waiting on the sidewalk beside the building’s steps. I shook hands with my old professors Gail Quinn and Claire Dugard. Dr. Charles Groh was there in his wheelchair. I patted his shoulder and squeezed it.

“Go get ’em, Oz,” Groh said, turning the pat into a hug. “You can do this.”

Chloe and I continued into the building, where white-shirted Capitol cops manned metal detectors. In the sweeping marble atrium behind them, spiffy Senate staffers, lobbyists, and press people swarmed about like bees in a hive, making honey and royal jelly. More shabbily dressed groups of people waited in line behind velvet ropes and looked bored.

As we headed for the security desk, we had to walk around a massive public art installation, a thirty-foot-tall sculpture that looked like a stainless steel oak tree. “Hi, I’m here for the ten o’clock hearing for the Committee on Environment and Public Works,” I said to the cop behind the desk. He was a big handsome black man with a shaved head and a face as hard to crack as a bank safe.

He sighed as he lifted his clipboard. “Name?” he said.

“Jackson Oz,” I said. “O z, Oscar Zulu.”

He tsk-tsked as he shook his head at his clipboard. “Hmm. No Oz,” he said, and stared back up at me.

“There must be a mix-up,” I said. “I was invited by Senator Gardner yesterday at the last minute. Could you double-check with his office for me?”

The crime dog looked at me as if I’d asked to borrow his gun.

“Please?” tossed in Chloe, sweetening the sauce.

“Fine,” he said, leaning back in his squeaky leather chair and chinning the receiver of the desk phone. “Now I’m a receptionist, I guess.”

He punched some numbers. Then he turned in his chair and mumbled into the phone. He had a slight smirk on his face when he hung up.

“Just what I thought. They told me to watch out for you activist crazies at dispatch. Sorry, buddy. You’re not on the list, and you need to go now.”

My stomach fell inside me like an elevator that had snapped a cable. I exchanged a baffled look with Chloe.

“Did they say why?” I said.

“Don’t push it,” the cop said. “There’s the exit. Use it.”

I thought quickly. “The website said that some seats are open to the public. Can’t we just attend as spectators, then?”

He gave a dismissive noise through his nose, half chuckle and half snort. “How long you been in D.C.?” he said, pointing down the corridor behind him at the line of people behind the velvet rope.

“You see those folks?” he said. “Lobbyists have been paying those sorry individuals twenty bucks an hour for the last two days to wait on line in order to snag a seat for that hearing. First come, first served here, buddy, and it’s been served for some time.”

He turned to Chloe with a genuinely sorry expression on his face. “Sorry, sweet cheeks. A pretty face can only get you so far in this town. ’Bye, now.”

Chapter 41

THE SPECTATORS WEREN’T the only ones who’d been served, I thought, fuming as we walked away from the desk.

I couldn’t believe what we were being told. Was this some sort of sick joke?

On the steps outside the building I took out my phone and dialed Senator Gardner’s office.

“Yes?” said a quick, impatient female voice.

Elena Wernert, the staffer who had called me the day before.

“This is Jackson Oz,” I said. “There’s been a mistake. Security’s not letting me into the hearing.”

“Yes, well. I’ve been trying to contact you, Mr. Oz,” Wernert said. “We’re not going to be able to accommodate you after all. The hearing is full.”

“Bullshit,” I said. “Bull. Shit!”

“Funny you should use that term, Mr. Oz,” Wernert spat. “Because bullshit is exactly what we’ve been hearing about you. We were led to believe that you were a Columbia scholar, but we’ve looked into your background. You neglected to inform us of some of the more radical claims on your blog. We need some insight into the animal conservation problems we’ve been having, not some lunatic with a conspiracy theory about animals taking over the planet. We’re sorry, but Senator Gardner doesn’t need to associate with wing-nut bloggers.”

I knew it. More politics, more people covering their asses rather than actually trying to understand what’s happening in the real world. It was Washington at its finest.

I took a deep breath.

“There is an imminent threat, ma’am,” I said. “Perhaps if you’d taken time out of your busy day, you could have come by the meeting yesterday and seen for yourself. Animal behavior is changing radically and alarmingly, and people are dying. I can prove it.”

“It doesn’t make the slightest shred of sense,” Wernert said. “Why is it happening?”

“I’m not sure. Not yet. That’s one of the questions we need to figure out. But the why of it is not what’s at stake at the moment, Ms. Wernert. You don’t have to know why your house is on fire to run for the exit. Warnings need to be sent out right now for people to be wary of animal aggression.”

“Right. I’m afraid that’ll fly like a lead balloon on CNN,” Wernert said. “Senator Gardner tells the public, ‘Lock up your killer Shih Tzu.’”

“Please. At least let me show Senator Gardner the film I have.” I was irritated to hear a new note of begging in my voice.

“The senator has more important things to do than become involved with your fringe theory. He’s booked solid for the next month. Good-bye.” Wernert hung up.

I stared at my phone. To come this far just to be sold down the river was unacceptable. I didn’t even care about all the time and effort it took me to put this presentation together. It was the fact that the public needed to hear what I had to say, and that the facts were being hidden by the very people who were supposed to be protecting the populace.

Senator’s blessing or not, a warning needed to go out. No one else was going to do it. It was up to me.

I looked at the media people down by the door, gathered for the environmental hearing that was starting to get underway, and a plan came to me.

As I walked back toward the metal detectors, I turned and stopped. Then I climbed up on the platform base of the giant indoor sculpture, jumped up, and caught the first branch of the stainless steel tree.

Lawyers and politicians and even some real people stopped and started pointing as I scurried up to the top.

“Excuse me!” I called to everyone through cupped hands. “Excuse me. I have something important to say.”

“Oz?” Chloe said, looking up at me from the lobby floor. “What are you doing?”

“The only thing left to do,” I called down to her. “The people need to know.”

Chapter 42

“EXCUSE ME!” I shouted. “Everyone—I am a scientist. My name is Jackson Oz, and I was invited to speak at an environmental hearing for the US Senate before I was mysteriously uninvited.”

I glanced down to see the cop who’d just eighty-sixed us standing beneath the tree, his gun in one hand, his radio in the other.

I paused, swallowed, continued.

“An environmental disturbance of global proportions is happening. Three days ago, in Botswana, more than a hundred people were killed by wild animals. I believe this epidemic is spreading worldwide. Everyone may be in jeopardy. Be on the lookout for sudden aggression in animals—”

An alarm sounded. I paused. A piercing white light strobed, and the hallway reverberated with clanging bells. From deeper inside the building, I could hear an approaching herd of stomping footfalls.

I bit my lip. I thought maybe I’d grab a little attention from a reporter or two before I was arrested, but now I was worried. After 9/11, this was probably one of the best-guarded places on earth. Maybe my plan wasn’t as brilliant as it sounded a moment before.

That thought was confirmed as a team of men in black fatigues appeared from an interior hallway, swinging M16s and riot shields. As the SWAT team came through the ringing metal detectors, I could see the letters CERT flashing in silver tape across the backs of their flak jackets.

“Get down from there! Now!” a mustached man in a tactical helmet called from the skinny end of a crackling megaphone as he trained the business end of his M16 at my chest.

I was doing just that, kneeling down to hang-jump off the metal branch, when I heard a boom, and what felt like an A-Rod line drive hit me in the back of my right hand. My grip faltered and I dropped to the marble floor like a bag of meat.

I looked at my hand. It felt broken. It looked like I’d been stung by a hornet the size of a kitten. I’d been shot with some type of nonlethal round. A rubber bullet, I guessed.

But that was the least of my problems. Two blinks later, there was a violent, zinging pain in the backs of my legs and my teeth involuntarily clenched as I started shaking.

“You are being Tasered. Don’t move, you squirrelly little prick,” said a voice so close to my head I could smell the onions on his breath.

That was easy: I couldn’t move, as my muscles were being zapped into paralysis. Even after the Taser’s fishhooks were ripped from my back, it still felt like someone was boring into my skull with an electric drill. My brain was numbed.

Now four cops were on top of me, wrenching my arms behind my back to cuff my wrists.

“That’s what you get for dicking around,” the cop said in my ear. “You’re in trouble. Like federal homeland security–style trouble.”

I was hauled to my feet and shove-walked toward an open double door in the marble wall. I tried to get my feet under me, but the muscles in my legs were still wobbly. I stumbled, they dragged me, I got my legs back, and then they fell out from under me again. I looked down at my useless, jellylike legs. It was like they were somebody else’s.

“Oh, so now you’re resisting arrest,” the cop sneered, and a boot blasted into my spine.

“Get off of him! Stop hurting him!” A woman, screaming. I heard it as if I were underwater, registered it as if I were in a coma.

I saw Chloe out of the corner of my eye. She was rushing forward, pushing at the cops as she screamed.

I also spotted Gail Quinn, Claire Dugard, and Charles Groh beside her, shouting at the Capitol police. The hallway resounded with the cacophonous echoes of shouting, scuffling, stomping boots.

Two dream moments later, they were all cuffed and trussed on the floor beside me. They even cuffed Charles Groh to his wheelchair. Clearly a very dangerous man, him.

We were yanked up and dragged toward a side door opening onto a dingy back corridor.

“Hey, look, Larry,” said the cop to one of his buddies. “It’s the attack of the retards. Where’s the bearded lady? Outside keeping the short bus running for the getaway?”

Right then was when I truly lost it. I turned and tried to kick the cop in his balls. I missed, though I did manage to land a pretty good blow on his shin.

Then my view was blocked by a fist, showing me a sweeping vista of some guy’s fingers and knuckles. I took in the scenery for a leisurely fraction of a second before being disturbed by the noisy crunch of my nose breaking, which echoed numbly in my ears as the lights above me dimmed and sputtered out.

Chapter 43

AFTER THE PANDEMONIUM, the Capitol cops brought us to an MPDC holding tank. We were processed and conveyed into a cell in the rear of the building. The walls were cluttered with peace signs, anarchy signs, and pot leaves that previous occupants had keyed and Sharpied onto the grimy tiles. This room had seen its share of troublemakers.

We spent the night in the cell: Gail Quinn, Claire Dugard, Charles Groh, Chloe, and me, as well as a few cockroaches I at first mistook for Yorkshire terriers. I leaned against the wall with two scraps of paper towel twisted in my nostrils and my sinuses clogged with blood.

We used the time wisely. After I was done apologizing profusely for landing us all in jail, we stayed up half the night in the windowless concrete room, trying to piece together the potential causes of HAC.

We kept bumping up against the same barriers we had encountered at the meeting. We decided it was unlikely that it was a virus. Whatever it was, for it to similarly affect various different species in diverse areas argued against that possibility. We all agreed it was more likely that this sudden and aberrant shift in behavior was probably a response to some change in the environment. Obviously the best thing to do now was to perform autopsies on affected animals and look for any anatomical or physiological peculiarities that might point us in the right direction.

Dr. Quinn pledged the help of the Columbia University biology department, if and when we could get a specimen.

“Who needs the government anyway, Oz?” she said from where she sat, campfire-style, by the jail cell door. “Even if they’d listened to you today, they would have formed a committee to hire a research team to come up with a study on the personality types of the best people needed to come up with an action plan.”

We were freed the next morning after our arraignment. The others got off with a misdemeanor charge of public disturbance and a five-hundred-dollar fine, and I was charged with criminal trespass and had to enter a plea and pay three thousand dollars in bail.

Though I now had a federal record and a court date, I wasn’t terribly worried about it as we pushed Dr. Groh’s wheelchair down the ramp beside the courthouse steps in the early morning sunlight. I had bigger fish to fry—we all did, whether anyone realized it or not. The government was about to be overwhelmed with a lot more important things than me.

“What now? We go hunting?” Chloe said after we had helped load Dr. Groh into the back of a wheelchair-accessible cab with Claire and Gail and said our good-byes.

“First, the next portion of your vacation package,” I said, pointing to a restaurant down the street. “Allow me to introduce you to an American gem: the twenty-four-hour diner.”

“I have another suggestion,” Chloe said, pointing at my nose. “Your nose looks crooked. Very crooked. You might want to think about seeing a doctor.”

So our breakfast wound up being eaten in the waiting room of the George Washington University Hospital’s ER. After wolfing down an Egg McMuffin while John Hancocking half a dozen documents, I stood on a chair and blitzed through the channels of the wall-mounted TV, trying to see if there was any word of our protest on the news. Two trips around the horn and I left it on ESPN, where they were recapping a game last night in which the Celtics had lost to the Knicks: a small glimmer of good news.

“This is ridiculous,” I said to Chloe. “There’s nothing. Not a single word about Botswana or the protest. We were arrested for nothing.”

Another hour of waiting and I was taken for some X-rays. When Chloe and I came back into the treatment room, we noticed a prisoner in an orange jumpsuit surrounded by armed guards in the bay across from us.

“Look. Another troublemaker,” Chloe whispered to me. Her smile was sweet and impish.

I smiled back. That she could keep up a sense of humor through all this bullshit was incredible.

“Yeah, well,” I said. “This must be the mad, bad, and dangerous-to-know section.”

After a while a handsome doctor came in with my X-ray, the glossy sheet of black film flopping in his small, smooth hand. He looked young enough to be a George Washington University undergrad. He glanced at Chloe a beat too long for my liking and smiled cheerily as he told me that my nose was indeed broken.

“I didn’t like your nose before anyway,” Chloe said as Dr. Feelgood snapped a pair of latex gloves onto his tiny porcelain hands to set my nose back into its proper form.

“I am kidding,” said Chloe, smiling behind her hand. In a moment I was lying with my shirt off on a crinkling sheet of gurney paper.

“I’m going to have to rebreak your nose before I set it,” the doctor said as he pinched down hard on my face. “It’s been a number of hours since you were injured.”

I didn’t like the sound of that. My face betrayed me.

“It’ll only take a second,” said the doctor. He was talking to me as though I were a child afraid of needles.

“Ready?” He snapped his glove. Bastard was whistling.

I was struggling to sit up, and then I felt a soft hand in mine.

“You can do this, Oz,” Chloe said, squeezing my hand. “I’m right here.”

A funny thing happened then. I actually did calm down. This was becoming a theme for us, helping each other out, anticipating each other’s needs. As I looked at Chloe and felt her cool hand in mine, I realized I was falling very hard and fast in love with this woman. I had a suspicion it was happening to her, too.

Then the doctor broke my nose and I screamed like a baby.

Chapter 44

WITH A BANDAGE X-taped across my face and bloody cotton balls peeking rakishly from my nostrils, I left the hospital with Chloe and caught a cab back to the hotel. We showered, packed, checked out, and went to Union Station to catch the next New York–bound Acela train.

New criminal record or not, I needed to return to the Big Apple to regroup and try like hell to broadcast my lion footage to the world. Get it on the Internet, see if I could get it on the network news.

As we were settling into our seats, I tried calling Natalie again. The phone went straight to voice mail, and I hung up. I’d left her a message almost forty-eight hours before. What the hell? Was she icing me out?

Half an hour later I was coming back from the snack car with a beer and a half bottle of wine. Chloe was shuffling a deck of cards on the tray table in front of her.

“Go fish,” I said.

“These aren’t playing cards,” Chloe said. “These are tarot cards.”

“Tarot cards?” I said, giving her a quizzical look. “What scientist carries tarot cards?”

Chloe shrugged.

“I think they are very beautiful,” she said. “They belonged to my mother. I found them in a box of her things after she died. It’s my—how do you say it?—good luck charm. It’s superstitious, I know.”

She slipped them back in their box and reached beneath her seat for her purse.

“Lemme see those,” I said, putting a hand on hers. “Do you know how to…do whatever it is you do with tarot cards?”

“We can do a reading,” she said, sliding the cards back out of the box. “You shuffle the cards and then lay out ten of them in what is called the Celtic cross. The best kind of reading is the question reading. First you write down a question, then deal out the cards to find the answer. The tenth card in the sequence will give you the answer.”

I uncapped a pen and scribbled out on an Amtrak cocktail napkin:

Will HAC destroy the world?

I handed her the napkin, but she waved it off.

“Don’t show it to me yet. Just turn it over and shuffle.”

So I folded it and put it down. I shuffled the cards and carefully slipped them off the top of the deck one by one, laying them down on the tray table in the places where she pointed.

The formation complete, Chloe began turning the cards over. The first one showed an old man in a cloak, holding a staff and a lantern.

“That’s the Hermit,” she said. “It represents, er—how do you say?—introspection, searching.”

Chloe’s voice had a slight note of seriousness in it. How did a scientist become a closet mystic? I was intrigued. It made me think of Isaac Newton doing alchemy experiments in his spare time, trying to turn lead into gold when he wasn’t busy laying down the foundation of classical physics.

She turned over the other cards. One card was called the Tower, another the Lovers, which I liked the sound of.

“Now, this is the one that will answer the question,” Chloe said as I arrived at the tenth card. She flipped it over.

Outside, the eastern seaboard clattered by in swaths of gray and brown; snatches of the ocean sparkled weakly in the failing afternoon light.

I looked at the card. It looked like a picture of an angel with birdlike wings. Feathers and red and yellow triangles splayed out from the cloud he was sitting in, and the angel seemed to be blowing through some sort of straw.

“What is it? The angel?” I said.

Chloe bit her lip as she kept staring at the card. “This card is Le Jugement.” She pointed at the angel. “This is the angel Gabriel, blowing his horn.” She pointed at the red and yellow triangles. “This is fire.”

I didn’t need a crystal ball to know what that meant.

I showed her my question.

“Duh-duh-duh…” Chloe playfully hummed ominous movie music. She smiled, laughed, and scooped up the cards. But as she did, I saw that her hands were shaking slightly.

We sat in silence as the Acela train blasted like a switch across the miserable ass of Delaware. Gazing out at the blur of tract housing and strip malls, for some reason I started thinking about the book The Little Red Caboose, which my mom used to read to me when I was a kid.

How wonderful the illustrations had made the world seem. Shiny cars and friendly policemen as the train went through the city; apple-cheeked farmers driving corn-filled pickups in the country; painted Indians on horseback as the train chugged up the mountain. I remembered looking at the pictures for hours, at the world that was waiting for me, happy, colorful, safe.

As we went into a tunnel, I closed my eyes and saw the card again: the Judgment.

What kind of storybooks would I be reading to my children? I wondered.

Chapter 45

IT WAS ABOUT nine at night when we emerged from Penn Station onto the bustling expanse of Eighth Avenue in midtown Manhattan. The dark mood that had gripped me after the tarot reading hadn’t let go. The city was wet. The clouds had broken into rain during our journey, and now the weather alternated between drizzle and bursts of harder rain. We stood on the curb, burdened with our luggage, without umbrellas, getting wet. Steam rose from the streets, and the headlights of the cars were mirrored in the shimmering asphalt.

We flagged down a cab. I opened the door for Chloe and dumped our bags in the trunk. I got in and told the driver my address. On the seat beside me Chloe was gaping through the window at the looming Empire State Building. It was lit up in tiers of white and blue.

“I have not been in New York City in a long time,” she said.

The rain gathered new momentum and drummed on the roof of the car like flung handfuls of gravel. Chloe was quiet. She snuggled into the crook of my arm, and I listened to the rhythmic rubber-on-glass squeals of the windshield wipers. The city lights blasted past us, twinkling like hazy underwater jewels in the dark.

“It’s leaving, isn’t it?” she said quietly, into my chest.

“What’s leaving? What are you talking about?”

She sat up a little. Her eyes were moist. “I’m afraid that Claire Dugard is right,” she said. “The world is ending. Everything that everyone has worked so hard for, our parents, their parents. It’s all going away, and no one is going to do anything about it…and it’s just so…so sad.”

“You can’t think like that,” I said, softly squeezing her shoulders. “This is crazy, I know, but we can solve it. We’re going to figure it out.”

“I don’t know what to think anymore. We dreamed the same dream. That’s impossible. And then seeing that tarot card on the train. It’s silly, I know. But it scared me to death. I feel strange. I feel very strange.”

I didn’t know what to say, so I just held her as she dissolved into real, racking sobs. We’d been through a lot lately. I hoped it was the jet lag.

I thought what the grandmotherly Alice Boyd had said about the eerie, seemingly precognitive animal behavior right before natural disasters. I thought about the elephants and the birds heading for the hills days before the tsunami.

What was the term Alice had used? A “cosmic event”?

After a moment, I looked down at Chloe, and she reached for my face, a hand on each cheek, and kissed me deeply. Her face melted into mine. She kissed me.

And I kissed back. I kissed back.

Chapter 46

YELLOW. A YELLOW car stops downstairs, in front of the building. Attila arrives at a thumping run at the front window of the apartment, gazes down at the street below. He looses a wild, piercing shriek as the cab door opens and he sees Oz. He hops up and down, howling in excitement.

He stops, and is quiet. His dark, glistening brown eyes glide downward and see something else.

Oz is reaching into the cab. Now another person emerges from the yellow thing. Even from five floors up, Attila can see it is a female. A woman.

Attila’s face drops. He begins to whimper. The black tips of his long leathery fingers press against the glass. He blows from his nostrils in soft, sorrowful puffs as he stares down at his friend and the newcomer.

His sadness sours into a feeling of betrayal. Of jealousy. The yawning gulf in his chest becomes filled with a new feeling. It pours in like floodwater.

Hot, ugly rage.

Rage gushes up inside him like an urge to vomit.

Attila leaps up, pounding at his chest. Growling, gurgling noises erupt from his throat as he begins to tear back and forth through the ruins of the apartment, smashing and tearing everything in his path. He smashes and tears things not yet smashed and torn, and further smashes and tears things that have already been smashed and torn.

Today is a day for biting and smashing.

He begins pounding on the walls again, knocking down the few remaining pictures. Their frames clatter and crash. More glass scatters across the floor. He grabs the radiator in the hallway, begins to shake it. He winces as he pulls and pulls. The pipe that connects it to the wall whines. There is a shriek and a groan as he rips it free of its moorings. Attila hurls the radiator into the bathroom, the door to which he wrenched off its hinges a few days ago. The radiator bashes the bathroom sink and shatters it. The sink crumbles into chunks of porcelain rubble.

Attila knuckle-walks to the front door. He sniffs. He hears Oz coming up the stairs now, with another pair of feet walking in tandem beside or behind him. He has an idea. Quickly, deliberately, he runs through the apartment, clicking off all the lights.

The apartment is dark except for the orange glow from the lights outside filtering through the windows. The torn blinds cast orange tiger stripes of light across the room. A train rumbles by outside, and sets the room to shaking. Attila listens to the approaching, ascending footsteps. He yawns with his enormous jaws. He waits.

Chapter 47

CHLOE WAS STILL smiling, her body loose, soft, and warm in my arms, when the cab dropped us off in front of my building on 125th Street. Then she took a moment to absorb the squalid streetscape. Beside us, two homeless guys in a bus shelter were yelling and shoving each other for some reason as a rat the size of a Chihuahua looked on.

“Home sweet home,” I said, as the Broadway local thundered by above us on the elevated track. “It’s not as bad as it looks. I promise.”

“It is very, er…” She spun a finger in the air, searched for a word.

“Urban?” I suggested.

“Non, non. More, eh—what is the word? Misérable?”

Huffing and puffing after hauling our bags up five flights of stairs, I was turning the key in the lock of my front door when I heard an unusual sound. It was coming from behind the door. It stopped, then started again—loud and rasping, some kind of hiss. I opened the door. I looked out into the darkness of my apartment. I was struck by the smell. Not good. It smelled like shit.

I heard the sound more clearly: it was coming from somewhere beyond us through the unlit threshold. I moved in front of Chloe, and the darkness in the doorway seemed to collect together and form into a broad shape.

“Attila?” I said.

What in the hell? He should have been in his cage.

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

The shadow bulged, and then the weight slammed into my chest like a train. The blow knocked me on my back.

“Attila!” I barked.

Chloe was somewhere behind me, screaming. I was on my back in the doorway, my wind knocked out, tailbone smarting like hell, trying to process what was going on. Attila had knocked me over, and now he was tumbling in crazy circles around the apartment.

“What the fuck is wrong with you?” I said. I gathered myself to my feet, fumbling for the light switch, glancing behind me for Chloe.

How had he gotten out of his cage?

He was just scared, I thought, frantically trying to assess the situation. He must have thought I was an intruder or something. I needed to calm him down.

I stepped into the apartment and snapped on the light.

“Look, Attila,” I said. “It’s me. Oz. You’re safe, kid.”

The cold white fluorescent light slowly buzzed on, illuminating my apartment.

It was a horror show. It looked exactly as though a wild chimp had been let loose in my apartment for a week. The whole place was in shambles. The refrigerator door was open, trickling feeble blue light into the room and humming, the food that had been in it rotten and scattered across the floor. The cupboard doors were wrenched off their hinges, all the dishes raked out and smashed on the floor, the faucet running in the sink for God knows how long, sticky puddles of dried piss on the linoleum, shit smeared in streaks on the walls. This sight proved to be a preview of what the rest of the apartment looked like.

And then Attila was barreling toward me again from out of the darkened, ruined apartment. He seemed to know exactly who I was. And he was wearing my red hat.

“ATTILA!” I screamed, and he sank his jaws down on my knee.

I fought. I kicked. I punched him in the back of his head. He didn’t even seem to notice. My fists bounced off his skull like rubber balls. He wasn’t the same chimp. Something inside him had snapped.

Chloe was screaming—I heard her distantly, as if I were underwater.

There was a pan lying overturned on the edge of the kitchen counter, just within arm’s reach. It was a hefty black cast-iron skillet that had belonged to my Polish grandmother. I’d eaten pierogi that had been fried in that thing, and that day it may have saved my life.

I snatched it up and brought it down on the crown of Attila’s head, half strength at first, which did nothing, and then I swung it as though I were Roger Federer hitting a Dunlop crosscourt. The gruesome sound of the skillet bonking Attila’s skull made me wince. I felt his bite loosen. I hit him with it again, and he let go.

He was dazed from the blow. He stumbled back into the corner by the refrigerator. His face was damp with blood. He cowered in the corner, shrieking.

“Heeaagh! Heeaagh! Heeaagh!”

“Oz!” said Chloe. “Are you okay?”

Attila turned toward her. His eyes were blank and dangerous. He began to skulk toward us.

“Stay away from her!”

I heaved the skillet at him. He raised an arm and swatted it off, and the skillet went sailing behind him and smashed through the kitchen window almost as easily as if there hadn’t been any glass there. Shards of glass tinkled to the floor.

For a moment I thought he’d snapped out of it. I dropped to the floor on my knees, and grimaced in pain. Attila had chewed up my knee badly.

“Attila,” I said. My hands were palm up, open. I was using my lullaby voice. “Attila. What’s gotten into you? Relax! It’s me.”

Chloe stood in the open doorway still, as if she were ready to bolt.

Attila looked at me. He stood on a pile of crumbled dishes on the kitchen floor. He cocked his head and fixed his gaze on me from under the brim of my red knit hat.

Attila’s face changed then. For a second, he seemed like himself again. As he looked into my eyes, his expression was an unnerving gaze of unbearable sadness—betrayal, knowing.

Then he jumped onto the countertop and out the window onto the fire escape. He was gone.

Chapter 48

AN ELDERLY HISPANIC man in rumpled janitor blues is waiting for a bus. He sips a brown-bagged can of Tecate and hums half a tune. He’s on his way home from work. He nudges up the brim of a sweat-stiffened Yankees cap. Then a chimpanzee drops off the bottom of the fire escape of the building beside him. The chimp is wearing a red hat. The can of Tecate lands on the sidewalk.

“Heeaagh!” says the chimp. “Heeaagh-heeaagh!”

The chimp scrambles past him, an explosion of hairy limbs, feet, fingers. He sniffs, looks around, tears down the sidewalk with a bouncing, loping gait, propelling himself forward with long, powerful arms.

The world is suddenly a wild swirl of strange lights and sounds—and a new sense of openness. Blindly knuckle-running down the sidewalk, Attila does not even pause as he bolts into the commotion of 125th Street. It’s a circus of honking. Attila streaks in front of a minivan, and the driver lays on the brakes and horn half a moment before the eastbound M104 bus behind it crushes its rear end. There’s a crunch of plastic, metal, glass. More honking.

Now on the other side of the street, Attila races alongside the long and brightly lit window of a Duane Reade drugstore before he banks the corner and passes a fried-chicken restaurant.

He pant-hoots at a number 1 train as it blasts by high overhead on the shaking iron latticework of the elevated tracks. He runs along the sidewalk, past benches and fire hydrants, scrabbling for a place to hide.

A group of teenagers are halfheartedly punting around a battered soccer ball on the sidewalk in front of a bodega. A tiny, grizzled Hispanic man sits on a plastic folding chair by the door of the store, smoking a cigarette and watching the kids playing soccer. A sleek black car with tinted windows idles on the corner, a rap song blasting from its radio in fuzzy thumps that shake it on its springs.

A chimpanzee wearing a red hat rushes headlong through the soccer game. The girls point and shriek. The soccer ball skitters away into the street.

A patrol car from the Twenty-Sixth Precinct is just pulling away from the curb in front of a deli on Lenox Avenue when they get the call.

“Repeat that, dispatch. Who’s on the roof of a candy store?” says Sergeant Timothy Perez, a tall, fit, five-year veteran who was promoted to his position the week before.

The radio squeals, static crunches.

“A chimpanzee,” says the bitch box.

“Come again?” says Officer Jack Murphy, at the wheel.

The growing crowd on the corner of Broadway and 123rd is spilling into the street when the police arrive on the scene. The lights paint the scene red and blue. Murphy gives a half whoop with the siren and curtly parts the crowd by climbing the cruiser onto the sidewalk.

Sergeant Perez rolls down his window and shines his Maglite at the red plastic awning of the bodega. Bright eyes flash back at him in the pale ring of light.

“Heeaagh heeaagh hyeeeaaaaaghhhh!”

“Well, I’ll be a monkey’s uncle,” says Murphy.

Okay, so dispatch isn’t on shrooms, Perez thinks. What appears to be a chimpanzee is indeed standing on top of the awning. Wearing a red hat.

Perez and Murphy step out of the car.

“Ooh, the po po’s here,” somebody says. “What’d the monkey do, Officer? He rob a bank?”

One of the kids in front of the store whacks at the bodega’s awning with a broom handle.

“C’mon, Bubbles,” the kid says in a high-pitched voice. “Quit messin’. It’s me, Michael.” He drops the impression. “Get down here ’fore I beatcha ass.”

The kids are laughing. It’s a circus atmosphere.

“Gimme that,” Perez says, snatching the broom from the kid.

Perez looks up at the chimp. Noticing what looks like blood on the animal’s face, he lightly lays his hand on the handle of his Glock.

He knows it’s not a funny situation. His brother-in-law, a New Jersey state trooper, once told him about an escaped pet chimp in West Orange who had turned some guy’s face into a Picasso. These guys can be very dangerous animals. Not to be fucked with.

Perez puts the radio to his cheek.

“We got the monkey over here on 123rd and Broadway. He’s perched on the awning over a store. We need to get animal control up here. Someone with a tranquilizer gun or something. We can keep watch in the meantime.”

“Ten four,” says the radio, and Perez clips it to his belt.

“Whatsamatter, Magilla Gorilla?” says Murphy. “You want a banana or somethin’?”

Perez can’t believe it. It looks like talking a chimp off a ledge is going to be the first test of his command.

Above the crowd, Attila cowers against the building’s bricks, paralyzed with fear and confusion. He scrambled up to escape the crowd of screaming people, and now he can’t go up or go down. Adrenaline surges in his nerves as more and more voices cackle and shout from below, and more cars with piercing colored lights arrive.

Soon a large van joins the three police cruisers parked on the street. Two men in crisp tan uniforms step out of the van.

Attila peeks out over the edge of the awning, then darts back into the corner against the brick wall. He shrinks into himself, trying to make his body as small as possible. He wants to disappear.

Scrunched against the bricks, he finds a bundle of coaxial cables strung along the corner of the six-story building. He wraps his fingers around it, then his toes.

The animal control officers—one of whom is a former horse trainer—aren’t city workers but independent contractors hired on a case-by-case basis. The one who’s a former trainer chambers a dart into his tranquilizer pistol while his partner unhooks the ladder from the van’s roof. Too late. The chimp is climbing.

“Hey, hey, yo!” One of the street kids points. “He goin’ all King Kong up in this shit.”

Sergeant Perez and the animal control guy exchange a look and a groan as the chimp scurries up a bundle of cables that runs along the side of the building. The speed with which he zips up there is pretty amazing. Dude is boogying.

“Go, monkey, go!” the kids start chanting. The ape makes it to the top of the six-story building and disappears over the ledge of the roof.

After waiting a respectful moment, Officer Murphy shrugs at his boss and joins in the chanting.

Chapter 49

CHLOE WANTED ME to go to the hospital right away. I waved her off. I’d been in enough waiting rooms lately. Still keyed up with adrenaline, I dumped half a bottle of hydrogen peroxide over my knee and taped wads of paper towels to it. Clutching my leg, I hobbled around the apartment surveying the rest of the wreckage.

It was as if everything I owned had been fed through a wood chipper. There was hardly an object in the apartment that Attila hadn’t found a way of smashing. To say nothing of the suffocating, nauseating stench of rotten food combined with the piss and shit spattered everywhere. I figured I shouldn’t count on getting my deposit back.

I had known that before long Attila would become unmanageable, and I’d have to find a more suitable home for him, but he was only five. Chimps generally don’t get too unruly until they’re a bit older. I couldn’t help but wonder if what I was looking at here showed rage, a personal anger toward me. What had made Attila do this? Separation anxiety? And how had he escaped from his cage?

With our bags still piled in the hallway outside the door, Chloe stepped gingerly amid the wreckage, afraid to touch anything.

“Oz, I’m so sorry,” she said.

Maybe it was Chloe’s presence that had set him off. Chimps are fiercely territorial, and have often been observed to kill over boundary disputes. Had Attila perceived Chloe as some sort of territorial threat?

On the other hand, he’d clearly taken a lot of time to do this much damage to the apartment.

I was walking past the doorway of the back bedroom when I smelled something especially foul. Even worse than the potpourri of rotten food and fecal matter that the rest of the apartment reeked of.

In the bedroom doorway I smelled something so concentratedly dense, so horrific, that I was afraid to turn on the light. But I did turn on the light.

I stood there for a moment, stock-still, breathing heavily.

“What is it, Oz?” Chloe called from behind me, in the hallway.

It wasn’t just that the room was a wreck. It wasn’t just that the stripped mattress was torn to tattered fluff and sodden with urine—though there was that.

I could feel my heartbeat hammering in my ears as my eyes scanned the room. There was blood on the walls. In thin streaks and freckles. In wide, heavy smears. Handprints.

Huge, long handprints—chimp handprints. There was one right there beside the switch plate, which also had blood on it. Four very long, thick fingers and a small stubby hook of a thumb.

I looked up. There was dried blood misted on the light fixture in the ceiling. It gave the room a slightly pinkish cast. All this blood had been there for days. It was dry and dark, the color of brown rust.

With my eyes, I followed the blood smears to the far corner of the room.

“What?” Chloe said in the hallway.

There was something on the floor in the corner of the room opposite me, between the bed and the wall. The streaks of blood led there, just as all roads led to Rome.

I could feel Chloe behind me.

“Stay there,” I said. “Don’t come in.”

I covered my face with the collar of my shirt and I stepped farther into the room. I tasted bitterness in the back of my mouth. Bile was rising in my throat.

It was a human body. Most of one, anyway. It was a decomposing—and what looked like a partially eaten—human body. I couldn’t identify it by the face, because the face was gone. As were the feet and hands. But there was long red hair. Red, red, Irish girl’s hair, and the body was wearing turquoise hospital scrubs.

A rectangular plastic card was clipped to the breast pocket of the blood-stiffened shirt.

I unclipped it and looked at it. Under dirt-brown streaks of dried blood, there was Natalie’s deer-in-the-headlights mug shot on her hospital ID badge.

NATALIE MARIE SHAW, it said beneath the picture.

I hardly noticed Chloe as I brushed past her in the hallway. I’d made it to the front door when Chloe grabbed my arm.

“What is it? Tell me, Oz. Please. What’s in there?”

I babbled. “My—uh, my girlfriend…”

She balked, scrunched her face up. Her face showed confusion, with the possibility of anger in it.

“I thought she was your ex-girlfriend.”

“She is now.”

We called the police from Mrs. Mullen’s apartment. Mrs. Mullen, my next-door neighbor—a sweet little Irish lady who was so old she’d probably come over in the potato famine. I wasn’t terribly shocked when Mrs. Mullen said she hadn’t heard anything in the last week. The lady was deaf as a stone. She didn’t even know I lived with a chimp.

The first cops to arrive were already aware of Attila. They told me he had been spotted on the street but that he was still on the loose. Something about hiding on the roof of a bodega.

What now? What did I do with my life?

My home was destroyed. If I hadn’t zipped off to Africa and asked Natalie to take care of Attila, she would still be alive. My fault. If I didn’t have a fucking chimp in my apartment she would still be alive. Also my fault. She was a saint—even after breaking up with me, she’d still come over to check on Attila. And he had killed her. I went further and further back down the chain of decisions I’d made, thinking about what I could have done differently. A lot. Regret sucked at my heart like a leech.

Chloe sat beside me and held my hand as I sat in the stairwell while police radios squawked and crackled in my apartment and all down the hallway neighbors had come out to stare.

What now? What indeed.

And the nightmare wasn’t over. Not even close.