Zoo(30)

Then my eyes opened. It took me a long moment to realize who I was and where I was. When I realized these things, I wanted to go back to sleep. Maybe dream better dreams.

It was before dawn. I was in the Alphabet City apartment Chloe, Eli, and I had moved into a year ago.

I sat up. I placed a palm on Chloe's warm, still back, then looked across the dim room into the corner, where Eli slept soundly in his toddler bed, a curled hand clutching his stuffed bunny to his chest.

I wiped sweat from my face. My hand was shaking. My child and my wife. They were both safe. For now.

Since our return from Washington, things had been escalating. Day by day. Exponentially. Strange, extraordinarily violent animal attacks were on the news every evening now, happening everywhere from New Hampshire to New Delhi, from Sweden to Singapore.

There had been several bizarre animal attacks here in New York. Night before last, two kitchen workers in a chic French bistro in the West Village had been found dead. Mysterious circumstances. A Ninth Precinct cop who happened to live in our building had told us what the papers left out-at the government's request. The men had been killed by rats that had flooded in through the basement. They had been stripped to the bone. No word yet if this would affect their Zagat rating.

It was being called the Worldwide Animal Epidemic, and even my fiercest detractors were admitting that it was the worst global environmental disaster of all time. The phone rang off the hook with reporters asking me to comment, but I was too tired. I didn't take any pride in being right, in saying I told you so.

I blamed myself, really. I'd had years to prepare, to tell the world, to figure out why it was happening, to try to come up with a solution. I'd failed at all these things. Sitting there, staring at my son, I realized I had completely failed him-my son, my wife, everyone.</ol>
 
 

 

"Where's Eli?" said Chloe.

She sprang upright beside me in bed.

As I rubbed her back, I could feel her heart beating as hard and quickly as mine. Like me, Chloe was torn up inside, worrying about the increasingly bad news and about how we were going to protect ourselves and our son. Paranoia and sleeplessness were our new normal these days.

"He's okay. Everything's fine," I said. I pulled her close.

You know things are getting bad when you find yourself uttering empty platitudes that you don't even believe yourself.

"What time is it?" Chloe said, her slender olive-skinned arm fumbling for her watch on the bedside table. She was still gorgeous. That didn't change. "You can't be late for your meeting."

I'd gotten a call from the mayor the day before. He wanted a face-to-face. Though the National Guard had been mobilized for the first time since 9/11, the mayor's assistant said he needed all the advice I could give him on dealing with this wave of animal violence.

"Meeting's at eight," I said. "I'm going to get up in a second. How are we on food? I heard the union    Square farmers market is opening back up today."

Not just attacks but food was becoming a worry now. Some people said farming and trucking were being disrupted out west. There were rumors on the Internet of massive food shortages on Long Island. But no one really knew, or, in any case, no one knew what to do about it. Every day, people fled the city while others seemed to be flocking to it. We were approaching an end-times state of mind.

"We're still good," Chloe said. "We're out of milk, but that grocery store on Avenue A is still open."

"Fine, but don't stay outside more than you have to. And take the bear banger."

In addition to having an alarm installed and gates put on the apartment windows, I'd picked up some bear bangers from a sporting goods store on Broadway. The device looked like a pen but was actually an extremely loud explosive flare used by hikers to fend off wildlife.

I wrenched myself out of bed, gave Chloe a kiss, and headed for the shower.

Checking the locks on the gated window in the bathroom, I remembered the government code name for the environmental disaster, ZOO.

Why? I stood in the shower, letting the hot water roll over my head, staring at the tiles. Why is this happening? What has changed in recent history-what have we got now that wasn't here before?

Never in human history has there been a time when most people are so distanced from animals. So removed from them, both psychologically and physically. If you are a human being in a place like, say, where I live, New York City, you won't really have to interact with a nonhuman animal all day long. It makes me think about how the world must have been before the Industrial Revolution. You needed oxen to plow the fields. The fastest way between two points was a horse. Knowing animals, being close to them, used to be a way of life. Less and less so for more and more people now. Homo sapiens is so close to dogs that we even coevolved with them. The genetic difference between a human and a chimp is about the same as the difference between two subspecies of groundhog that evolved on opposite banks of a river-and yet even Attila had been affected. Surely the root of HAC was some very, very small, and very, very recent, change. And that change had to be something that humanity was up to, because we seemed to be the only mammal on the planet incapable of being affected. For whatever reason, whatever it was that was going on got along just fine with our brains, but simply did not gel with the brains of seemingly all other mammals.

It was a zoo, all right, I thought, shutting off the water, staring out through the bars down at Seventh Street. Only it was starting to look like the Homo sapiens were the ones who would be relegated to the cages from now on.





Chapter 62



TWENTY MINUTES LATER, my taxi driver cranked the reggaeton as we swam upstream through sludgy traffic on the Bowery for my early-morning meeting. Usually the noise would have driven me up the wall. But that morning, I actually found the only-in – New York aggravation oddly comforting. By the time we made it to the Flatiron district, I had begun to think affectionately of the swamp of traffic and gratuitous honking.

It meant that, disaster or no, people were going to work today. The Big Apple hadn't gotten the end-of-the-world memo just yet.

Then I saw a dog on the street. It was moving along the sidewalk just north of Thirty-Fourth Street.

On the east side of Third Avenue, coming off the curb about half a block ahead, was what looked like a medium-size black-and-white Border collie mix with a dirty blue bandanna around its neck. The mutt was by itself, and as I watched, it began to thread its way through the traffic, from east to west, across the avenue.</ol>
 
 

 

What set my alarm needles to twitching was the animal's sense of purpose, of deliberate calmness. Stray dogs usually have a guilty, skulking look about them, especially in a big city in broad daylight. This dog wasn't going too fast or too slow, nor was it looking at anyone. It was focused, confident-looking like it was headed somewhere.

I had a sudden hunch.

I leaned forward. "Stop the cab, please," I said.

"Here?"

I threw him a bill. "Keep the change."

"You want receipt?"

I was out the door, narrowly avoiding becoming enmeshed in the grille of a beer truck as I jogged across Third Avenue and headed north in pursuit of the dog. I got to the corner of Forty-First Street and looked left, down the block where the dog had been headed. At first I couldn't see anything. Then I stepped into the street alongside the line of parked cars and saw a white tail wagging as it crested the top of the rise by Lexington Avenue.

"The hell do you think you're doing?" a traffic cop shouted at me as I played Frogger across the intersection.

I kept my eyes on the tail of the collie, its little white feet picking up into a trot, as it crossed Park Avenue, a block west.

Kicking it up to a full-blown sprint, I managed to keep track of the dog as it crossed Madison Avenue. It kept going west on Forty-First, heading toward Fifth Avenue and the front steps of the New York Public Library.

I got to Fifth just in time to see the dog heading north on the sidewalk on the west side of the avenue, toward the corner of Forty-Second.

Dodging my way through an asteroid belt of early-morning commuters, I ran on the east side of the avenue, parallel to the dog-who was really moving now, boogying-toward Forty-Second. When I got to the corner there was too much traffic to cross and I had to wait for the light.

It took ten ticks of eternity for the light to change.

When it finally did I bolted ass-on-fire across Fifth, scanning the avenue up and down and looking east and west on Forty-Second. The dog could have gone anywhere-maybe into Bryant Park, behind the library to the west. It could have slipped into one of the surrounding office towers for all I knew.

The dog was nowhere to be seen. Wherever it had gone, and whatever I might have learned from it, was lost now.

I was crossing to the other side of Forty-Second to catch another cab, glancing at my watch and trying to calculate how late to the meeting I would be, when another dog almost ran between my legs in the crosswalk. I wheeled around and watched as a white Yorkshire terrier made the corner and trotted west along the south side of Forty-Second. Little dude was on a mission.

Oz: follow that Yorkie.

There was a small ornate stone building on the perimeter of Bryant Park-not taking my eyes off it, I watched the little white dog scuttle on stubby legs and disappear into the recessed doorway of the little building.

In a moment I was standing by the squat, easy-to-miss building. The recessed doorway led to a small descending stairwell that ended in two black wrought iron doors hitched together with a padlocked chain.