James Patterson: Zoo

What is here and there—everywhere—is the problem I was monitoring, the global problem I’d by that point pretty much devoted my life to trying to figure out.

It sounds grandiose, I know, but I feared that if I were right—and for the first time in my life I truly hoped I was wrong—a planetary paradigm shift was underway that was going to make global warming feel like a Sunday stroll through an organic community garden.

I HOPPED OUT of bed wearing a pair of wrinkled gray pajama bottoms that Air France had gifted me with on a recent flight to Paris. Shaved, showered, teeth brushed, I got back into the fancy French pajamas. Working from home has its perks. Okay, “working” implies I was making money. This was another kind of work. Anyway. They were really comfortable pajamas.

Coming out of my bedroom, I retrieved another prized possession from the doorknob—my fire-engine-red woolen hat, which I’d acquired on a recent trip to Alaska. With my thinking cap firmly on the bottle, I got down and pumped out my daily hundred push-ups, a habit I’d picked up on yet another jaunt, a four-year stint in the US Army before college.

PE complete, I headed into my shop. I flipped the surge-protector switches, turning on the TV sets that I’d lined across a metal workbench in the center of the industrial-style room. There were eight of them in all. Some were nice new flat-screens, but most were junkers I’d picked up diving Dumpsters after the digital signal changeover. Behind them, a Gordian knot of wires connected them to cable boxes and satellite receivers and a set of laptops and computer servers that I’d modified with the help of some electronic buddies of mine into the world’s biggest, baddest DVR.

As I waited for everything to boot up, I popped my first Red Bull of the day. Another number 1 train kicked up my heart rate along with a cloud of dust off the windowsills. Call me crazy—go ahead, you wouldn’t be the first—but after the initial shock, I kind of liked my apartment’s MTA-provided sound track. I don’t know why, but from the time I was a little kid up until I received my Rhodes Scholarship, my ADD-addled brain tended to fire on all cylinders when it was surrounded by headbanging noise. Old-school AC/DC, that was my bag. Metallica, Motörhead, with all the knobs cranked to eleven.

I frowned at the lightening screens, remembering my father, a lieutenant in the FDNY, watching the evening news. After a Bronx four-alarmer, he would come home, drop in front of the tube, and at the first commercial, after a Miller High Life or two, he would say, “Oz, boy, sometimes I think this world of ours is nothing but a goddamn zoo.”

In front of me, animals began to fill the screens. Lots of them. All of them behaving very badly.

Fathers really do know best, I guess, because that’s exactly what was happening. The world was becoming a zoo, without cages.

SETTLING BACK INTO my tag-sale leather rolling chair, I lifted a new legal tablet from the fresh stack on the table to my right, clicked a pen, wrote the date.

I turned up the volume on set number four.

“A missing seventy-two-year-old hunter and his fifty-one-year-old son were found dead yesterday,” said a correspondent from WPTZ in Plattsburgh, in upstate New York, a good-looking brunette in a red coat. She held the microphone as though it were a glass of wine. “The men were apparently killed by black bears while illegally hunting outside of Lake Placid.”

The camera cut to a shot of a young state trooper at a press conference. Buzz cut, lanky. Country boy, uncomfortable in front of cameras.

“No, there was no way they could have been saved,” the trooper said. He blew his p ’s and b ’s straight into the mike. “Both men were long dead and partially eaten. What’s still puzzling to us is how it happened. Both of the men’s weapons were still loaded.”

He ended the report with the claim that the father and son were known poachers, fond of using an illegal hunting method known as deer dogging—using dogs to chase out and ambush deer.

“Back to you, Brett,” the brunette said.

“Not good, Brett,” I said as I muted set four and cranked up set eight. Blip, blip, blip went the green bars on the screen.

On it, a news program from NDTV, a sort of English-speaking Indian version of CNN, was starting.

“A Keralan mahout was killed yesterday while he was training elephants,” the middle-aged anchorman said. He had a mustache and a Bollywood swipe of hair; there was something of Clark Gable about him. “Please be advised: the footage we are about to show you is graphic in nature.”

He wasn’t kidding. I watched as an elephant, tied to a stake in a village square, stomped a little guy in front of her into the ground. Then she wrapped her trunk around the guy’s leg and tossed him up in the air.

The anchorman explained that the attack had occurred while the mother elephant was being separated from its baby during a training ritual known as phajaan .

I’d heard of it. Also known as torture training, phajaan is the preferred way of elephant training in rural parts of India. A baby elephant is separated from its mother and put in a cage so villagers can whack it with hot irons and sticks that have nails on the ends. The brutal beating continues to the point where either the baby elephant allows itself to be ridden or dies.

“Guess Ma wasn’t down with the program, dude,” I said to the dying elephant trainer on the screen.

But the pièce de résistance was the breaking news I pulled off Fox News on set two. The Barbie doll on TV informed me that two lions from the L.A. zoo had not only killed their keeper and escaped, they’d also killed some guy on a nearby golf course. On the screen, half a dozen LAPD with M16s cordoned off a block lined with palm trees, people from animal control milling around behind them in white jumpsuits.

“The lions were last spotted in the La Brea neighborhood, near Beverly Hills,” chirped Megyn Kelly, her vacant eyes nailed to the teleprompter.

I threw down my pen. I was pissed, pissed, pissed. Skin itching, heart going like a hammer. Was everyone asleep? Under hypnosis? High? Was everybody frigging stoned?

I grabbed the pen again and scribbled three letters on the pad, hard enough to tear the paper.

H A C !!!!!!!!

Then I threw the pad of paper across the room.

“When will you people listen? ” I yelled at my wall of media.

It was time for more caffeine.

I SAT BENT over in my chair for a few minutes of therapeutic seething. I listened to an uptown train blasting by my window, then a downtown one. Then I crossed the room, picked up the pad again, and went back to work.

HAC: Human-Animal Conflict. This was the theory I was working on.

Basically, it was my belief that all throughout the world, animal behavior was changing. Not for the better, either. Not even a little. On every continent, species after species was suddenly displaying hyperaggressive behavior toward one particular animal.

The enemy was us. You and me. People. Man, man.

The facts were undeniable. From Romania to Colombia, from the Pyrenees to the Rockies, from St. Louis to Sri Lanka, there’d been an exponential increase in animal attacks on humans—by wild leopards, bears, wolves, boar, all kinds of different animals, you name it. In fact, the worldwide rate of wild animal attacks in the last four years was double the average of the previous fifty. For emphasis, I repeat: double.

It wasn’t just wild animals, either. In Australia, injuries from cats and dogs had swelled by 20 percent. In Beijing, it was 34 percent. In Britain, nearly four thousand people had needed hospital treatment for dog bites in the previous year.