"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.</ol>
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.</ol>
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.