The first few weeks in my apartment he'd been wary, hypervigilant, hardly getting any sleep as he waited fearfully to see if I would hurt him. A vet friend of mine diagnosed him with post-traumatic stress disorder and wrote out a scrip for the Zoloft, which worked like a charm.</ol>
I know what you're thinking. I'm either a left-wing animal rights loon or I watched one too many episodes of B.J. and the Bear as a kid. Or insane. Or an idiot. I usually don't tell other scientists I have a chimp in my apartment. I never planned on being the twenty-first-century Man with the Yellow Hat. It just kind of happened. My original thought was to drop Attila off at an animal sanctuary in rural Louisiana that takes in retired research monkeys. And that is still my eventual plan. But for the time being, Attila lives with me.
Attila put the doll down and walked to the door of the terrace off his room, tapping on it to be let out onto the fenced-in outdoor space, where I'd set up a tire swing.
"Think fast, Attila! Pit attack!" I said, digging in for tickles.
"Oo-oo-oo-oo ah-ah-ah heeaagh heeaagh hyeeeaaaaaghhhh!"
I watched him knuckle-run over to the swing and jump on it with a scream of joy before I turned, shut the gate, and headed back to work.
Chapter 6
LYING FACEDOWN IN the tire swing, Attila waves his long, powerful arms to swing himself back and forth. The tips of his long, knotty fingers graze the ground. Strong, lean arms, built for climbing trees. Like most chimps, Attila likes to play. He likes wrestling, laughing, being tickled.
And, like humans, he is sharply status-conscious and capable of deception.
He is more like people than any other living creature.
When Attila spies the man down the hallway, he makes a high, curt cry, indicating his agitation, his anxiety. Getting no response, Attila crashes back into the tire swing and hurtles himself back and forth, the chain creaking loudly under the strain.
Everything is so strange. The moving, boxlike shapes below. The small thunder overhead sometimes. Sometimes, everything suddenly has the smell. The Smell. The scary smell, the Bad Smell, the one that used to fill his cage in the big bright room, the smell that makes Attila's stomach hurt and the fur on his back stand straight up. The smell is getting stronger. Always stronger. Even outside. More and more each day.
Bored, angry, afraid, Attila turns away from the window and searches around his play area until he finds the mirror. He holds it up in front of his face and looks at himself. Like all chimps, he recognizes himself. He's now five, and his face is losing its pinkish tinge and getting darker. His tuft of wiry white chin hair is almost gone.
Tiring of the mirror, he puts it aside and runs back and forth, shaking the fence, shrieking down at the strange walls and moving things. After a while, he begins to amuse himself by tossing around the stuff on the terrace. The plastic chair. The Thomas the Tank Engine big wheel. Then his gaze falls on a stuffed bunny. He picks it up and brings it over to the corner.
He cuddles it, delicately petting its soft fur with his fingers, when a breeze wafts in over the terrace, and the Bad Smell hits his nose like a punch.
Attila rips the bunny in half with his hands. A chimp's grip is as powerful as a pit bull's jaws. He makes a low howling sound as he tears it to fluff and tatters. Then he stuffs the pieces of bunny through the holes in the fence, hooting as they flutter like snow, like ash, down to the rear alley of the building.
This makes Attila feel better.
After a minute, Attila flops himself back into the tire swing again, and wheels himself in circles with his long arms.
Chapter 7
FOR THE NEXT hour or so, I sent out feelers to all my contacts about the lion attack in L.A. to get their reaction. I made an effort to get in touch with a man named Abraham Bindix, a safari guide living in Botswana, whom I'd met in Paris. Guy knew a hell of a lot about lions, and he was actually one of the few people I'd met who didn't think my HAC theory was total loony tunes.
I was still waiting to hear back from people and putting in my second call to my press agent when I got a text.
HAC 911! WHERE R U?
"Shit," I said. I knew I'd forgotten something.
On my way, I text-lied back. Then I called down to my super's apartment. Five painfully long minutes later, an elderly woman arrived, faded floral-print dress dangling from her little bones, arms full of needlepoint and Spanish crossword-puzzle books. It was the super's mother, Attila's occasional babysitter. She didn't have to do anything except call me in case of an emergency.
Attila was looking in the mirror I'd bought him when I arrived at the terrace door.
"Hey, good-lookin'. Mrs. Abreu is here to watch you, buddy, so be good, okay? I have to check something out, but when I get back, we'll play some soccer. I promise."
Attila dropped his head, his lips protruding in a pout. Until I opened my arms. He almost knocked me over as he leaped into them. He let loose with a series of whooping howls. It was his signature pant-hoot, which chimps use to identify themselves.</ol>
Attila was visibly pleased as I copied his pant-hoot back at him, whoop for whoop.
Farewells over, I threw my Cannondale road bike onto my shoulder, carried it down the five flights of stairs, and started to ride north up traffic-clogged Broadway. Head down, I put it into overdrive, sailing past gypsy cabs, C-Towns, flower shops. My thighs began to throb around the 140s as Broadway started its long ascent into Washington Heights.
Cutting off a garbage truck at 159th Street, I made a left onto Fort Washington Avenue and followed it as it looped around to the north. A few minutes later I took a right onto narrow 181st Street and squealed to a sweaty stop in front of a once-grand prewar building. There was a 99 cents store beside the building's entrance, and after I U-locked my bike, I went in and made a purchase that made the stone-faced Chinese lady behind the counter break into a leering grin.
I dripped sweat in the building's dingy vestibule as I thumbed the buzzer for the apartment of "N. Shaw" and received an immediate buzzing-in. N. Shaw met me in the sixth-floor hallway just outside the elevator, her sneakered foot below her blue-green scrubs tapping agitatedly against the faded tile floor. This really was one HAC emergency, it seemed.
"I can't believe you. You know how little time I have between class and my shift," said Natalie, as she shoved me down the hallway and into her apartment.
Natalie was statuesque in scrubs. Bottle-green eyes, red hair-and I mean red, red, Irish girl's red hair-creamy skin, so many freckles on her it was like a pastry chef had been at her with a cinnamon shaker.
"You promised you'd be here waiting. ‘With bells on,' I believe was the term you used," she said, green eyes glowing like kryptonite as she yanked at my shirt in her foyer. Now her hands were on my belt. "Let's see some bells, Ozzy."
Natalie was an explosion of sex, a queen-size libido in hospital turquoise. She was also a brilliant Columbia med student on track to becoming a neurologist. It was a nice combination, though sometimes I wondered if she wanted me more for my body than my mind. Guess I'd have to live with it.
"No bells, but I did manage to pick you up a little something," I said as I took my 99-cent purchase out of my back pocket.
Dangling from my finger was a pair of the slightest, rudest thong panties Thailand had ever produced, candy-apple red and transparent as cellophane.
"Who says I don't know the value of a dollar?" I said.
Natalie planted her hands on her hips.
"Let me get this straight. First you're late for the only chance we've had to have sex in three days," Natalie said, cocking her head, eyes in slits. "Then you show up wanting me to slip into some slutty trash a streetwalker would be embarrassed to wear?"
"Pretty much," I said.
"You didn't kiss that monkey before you came over here, did you? If you did, then turn the hell around."
"Nope," I lied with perfect conviction.
"In that case," she said. She grabbed the panties from my hand. They stretched, snapped like a rubber band off my finger.
"I really hate you, Oz," she shouted over her shoulder on her way to the bedroom.
"I hate you too, honey."
"Get on the couch," she ordered from behind her open bedroom door. I could just see her shimmying the panties up her legs in the bedroom mirror. "Take off your shirt, leave the pants. I want to undo the belt with my teeth."
Chapter 8
"THAT … WAS … ," NATALIE started to say. She was out of breath, biting a knuckle, her slippery body sprawled like a broken marionette on the floor of her bedroom, where we'd ended up half an hour later.
"Jungle love?" I asked, untying the 99-cent purchase, which had somehow become tangled over my left shoulder. I brushed back some broken glass from a picture frame that had fallen off the wall. It was a photo of her dad, a Connecticut equities trader. Girl had some blue blood in her. I turned it over and scooted it under the bed.
"Equatorial rain forest love," Natalie said, rolling on top of me. She licked my earlobe. "I mean, doing it standing on a couch?"
"Well, if you recall, I was the only one standing," I said. In the corner of my eye, the winking red light of my iPhone let me know I had a message.
"How could I forget?" she said, thumbing sweat out of her eyes. "That wasn't biology. That was geology. You know, seismology, tectonics."