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