James Patterson: Zoo

For some reason I hadn’t pinned down yet, some kind of concerted transspecies evolutionary backlash against Homo sapiens was underway. Or, to put it in other terms, something was driving animals to go haywire, and the time to do something about it was running out quicker than the plastic wand supply at a Harry Potter convention.

I know how it sounds—wing-nut city. Different species of nonhuman animals working in some sort of collusion against humans. It’s absurd. Insane, impossible. I used to think it was a big, strange coincidence, too. Just lots and lots of totally unrelated, isolated incidents. Initially, it was just a goof among my colleagues that I’d started to track the phenomenon on my tongue-in-cheek blog, Man Against Nature .

I stopped laughing when I started looking at the evidence more closely. Nature, actually, was at war with man. And our side wasn’t even noticing.

The expression “between the devil and the deep blue sea” is a nautical one. The devil is what old sailors used to call the seam between two hard-to-reach planks on a ship. In order to caulk it, one had to be suspended from a plank held over the water. If you fell into the ocean, it was certain death. If you didn’t caulk the plank, the ship might sink. Either way was dangerous. Either way, you were screwed.

That’s exactly where I was now, out on a line, suspended between bad and worse. I felt like I was out there caulking the devil, hanging above the deep blue sea.

If I was wrong, I was crazy. If I was right, the world was doomed.

I’d been doing my best to get the word out, but was getting nowhere. I’d maxed out all my credit cards and those of several sympathetic relatives, speaking to anyone who would listen. My trip to Paris was for the purpose of attending an animal rights conference that I’d fibbed my way into in order to get some speaking time. I only got about halfway through before I was laughed off the stage.

No, people weren’t getting on board in the slightest. You’d be shocked and dismayed at the amount of intellectual intolerance directed at people who favor red lumberjack hats and wrinkled pajamas.

The L.A. zoo thing I’d just seen was the topper. The report had said that the cats had been born in captivity. Why would a pair of zoo lions one day just decide to start killing people and rampage through a city? Because there are two hundred channels and nothing is on? It didn’t make sense. Zoo lions don’t just go out berserking. There’s simply no reason for them to. Until now.

I speed-dialed my press agent to try to get on Fox. As usual, I got kicked immediately into voice mail. Even she thought I was nuts, and I paid her. Not a good sign.

After I recorded my latest plea to her, I decided to do the only thing I could think of. I plugged myself into my iPod and blasted some Motörhead to get some much-needed mental juices flowing. Help me, Lemmy. I slurped more Red Bull and tried to think while watching some more of the world’s unfunniest videos.

I sat up when Attila yanked my earbuds out.

“Yo, Attila,” I said. My roommate held out his hand for a low five. I gave it to him. “Look at this craziness. Every time I think things are going to calm down, the activity doubles. Sarah won’t call me back. Boy Who Cried Wolf, I feel your pain, you know?”

“Heeaagh! Heeaagh! Heeaagh!” said Attila.

Then he made a few panting hoots and scrambled into my lap and gave me a sloppy kiss and hairy-armed hug.

Attila, by the way, is a chimpanzee.

I KNEW THE TVs bothered him, so I took Attila by his hand—it was leathery and surprisingly soft, like a glove—and led him into the kitchen. Attila: five years, four feet, and a hundred pounds of chimpanzee.

For breakfast I gave him a mango, a stack of Fig Newtons (which he went ape over), and half a leftover turkey club. Today’s featured dessert was applesauce mixed with crushed-up vitamins and Zoloft.

That’s right, Zoloft.

Even apes need happy pills in our crazy world. Or maybe just the ones who live in New York City.

I brushed Attila’s teeth and brought him back to his room. Scattered across the newspaper-covered floor were Attila’s playthings: a sandbox, a toy chest filled with balls and dolls, an air hockey table, and an old pop-a-shot basketball machine. Actually, those last two were more my toys than his. But the Wii was definitely Attila’s. He could kick my ass at bowling.

I stood in the doorway and watched him play a little while. I’d fixed up the doorway to his room with a sturdy grate of steel wire, though he was getting older and I knew it wouldn’t be long before he found a way around it. I’d have to find another home for him soon. Attila’s favorite toy these days was an American Girl doll I’d recently bought him. She had braids and a gingham dress, very Little House on the Prairie. Attila rocked the big blond-haired doll back and forth and kissed her. Then he brought her over to me and held her up so I could kiss her, too. Attila panted, content, and took the doll back over to the beanbag chair in the corner and began to pretend to feed her.

The people who say their dogs are like children to them never lived with a chimp, believe you me. I shook my head and smiled at my little buddy. It was nice to see him quiet, calm, having fun. That certainly hadn’t been the case when we first met.

I found Attila two years before at the Willis Institute, a South Jersey bio-med shop where I’d been hired as a lab temp. I was cleaning up late on my second day when I opened a door, and there he was. The cutest damn three-year-old ape you ever saw, lying there with his pink face pressed against the cold bars of his tiny cage.

He was staring at me miserably, his eyes red-rimmed, his nose running to beat the band. Most biomedical research with chimps works like this: they infect the chimp with some disease before giving it the new cure they wanted to test out. If the cure doesn’t work, then whatever; the chimp dies. Or they look for side effects and so on. Flipping through the paperwork attached to the cage, I saw that some intrepid human had been doing some type of weird olfactory research on him. Testing perfumes or something.

When this little ape—he wasn’t Attila yet; back then he was number 579—looked at me so searchingly, so sadly, with his big brown eyes, my sucker’s heart came up with a plan. A week after the job ended, I found myself heading south down I-95 again with the DO NOT COPY lab key I’d very absentmindedly forgotten to return. When I pulled out of the lab’s parking lot after midnight, Attila was lying down in the back of my beat-up Hyundai Sonata, covered in Papa John’s pizza boxes.

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.

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.