James Patterson: Zoo

Then the moment passed. Attila dropped the computer and leaped off the table and into the corner with his head down.

“March, mister,” I said, grabbing his hand and taking him to his cage. He tried to pick up the American Girl doll as we passed his room.

“No,” I said, snatching it away.

“Bad Attila. Bad boy,” I said, shutting the gate and locking it.

After I swept up the broken glass and cleaned the chimp crap off the DVD player, I got on the Internet to book a flight to Botswana. The best I could do was a flight that left the next morning, with a stopover in Johannesburg, for three thousand bucks. My parents wouldn’t be happy, but I’d have to dip into the principal of the small trust Grandpa Oz had left me.

I packed. Passport, clothes, gear. I had a 35-millimeter Nikon with a superzoom lens, but my pride and joy was my professional-grade Sony DSR-400L camcorder. I took it out of its padded bag and tested its lights and charged up its lithium batteries before I stuffed it all away again.

I was hustling, bringing everything into the hallway, when I heard the whimpering.

It was Attila. He was sobbing after receiving his scolding.

I went into his room and opened the cage.

“Are you sorry, Attila? Are you really sorry?”

A high yelp assured me that he was, and we hugged it out for a while.

I let him romp around while I kept getting things ready. I was almost all packed when Attila tugged my shirt and clicked his teeth repeatedly. I knew what he wanted. We finally kissed and made up. Natalie would have puked.

“I have to go away for a few days now,” I said after I put him back into his cage. “It won’t be easy, but you’re going to be fine. Mrs. Abreu will look in on you early tomorrow, and so will Natalie. You remember Natalie. You be good to her, hear me? I know you understand me.”

Attila made a couple of whoops of complaint.

“I know, I know. It can’t be helped. I’m going to miss you, too.”

IT WAS EARLY summer. The morning light illuminated the crushed Marlboro boxes and Happy Meal cups in the roadside weeds.

Terrific. I’d just started my amazing journey, and I was already lost in the wilds. Of Queens.

Staring out from the back of my sticky JFK-bound taxi, I cursed as we slowed to a dead stop. Again.

We lurched forward a bit, and then stopped again. The cabbie bashed the horn and spat out a string of curses, went back to talking to somebody on his headset. Sounded like he was talking business. He was very dark and matchstick-skinny, a lot of red in his eyes.

Above the dash I could see that the LIE had become a frozen, curving conveyor belt of red brake lights. It was so bad even the jackasses on the shoulder trying to cut people off were jammed to a halt.

Surrounded by my bulky camera case, laptop, and carry-on, I checked the time on my iPhone for the five hundredth time. It was looking like making my 9:05 a.m. flight to Africa was going to need divine intervention in order to happen. I also noticed an e-mail from Natalie and made the mistake of opening it.

You don’t have to do this.

I sighed. Maybe my girlfriend was right. Maybe this was nuts. Wouldn’t it make more sense to head out to the Hamptons with her instead? Get some sand in my shoes. Eat some oysters. I could certainly use a Long Island iced tea or ten, not to mention a tan. Couldn’t this trip wait?

No. I knew full well it couldn’t. I was committed to this thing, far past the point of no return. Hamptons or no Hamptons, HAC was happening. Right here. Right now. Right frigging everywhere. I could feel it in my pores.

I went through my travel kit again. I sorted through my passport, my insurance, my federally mandated less-than-three-ounce travel toiletries, my skivvies, T-shirts and shorts, my red wool hat. Then I scooped up my antimalarial doxycycline pills that had spilled over my folded-up poncho until everything was wired tight.

To hell with the naysayers. I was good to go. Botswana or bust. The last thing to do was print out my e-ticket when I got to the airport, if I ever got there.

When we finally started moving, I took out a map of Africa. I was a forty–sixty mix of nervous–excited. Just the sheer size of Africa. Three times as big as Europe. I had learned so much about the continent during my first trip, when I was still in grad school, but this was different. This was no field trip.

The cabbie quit nattering into his Bluetooth and turned to me.

“Which terminal, sir?” The airport was finally beginning to crawl into sight.

“I’m not sure,” I said. “My flight’s on South African Airways.”

“You are going to Africa? South Africa?” asked the cabbie. I’d been preoccupied—now I noticed the guy looked and sounded African himself. His voice had that melodic lilt of African English. Nigerian, maybe.

“Botswana,” I said.

“You go from New York to Botswana? No! For real?” the cabbie said, his red eyes wide in the rearview.

He seemed even more skeptical than my girlfriend. I was getting nothing but unbridled support and good omens from all corners tonight.

“That’s the idea,” I said as we pulled up in front of a bustling terminal.

“Well, I hope is a busy-ness trip,” he said as he printed my receipt from the meter. “You make damn sure is a busy-ness trip, mon, you know what I mean.”

I did know what he meant, unfortunately. He was referring to Botswana’s AIDS epidemic, the second worst in the world. One out of every four adults in the country was supposed to have the dreaded sexually transmitted disease.

I wasn’t too worried about it. Between my long trip and dealing head-on with a frightening global epidemic, I didn’t think I’d have much time to squeeze in any hot, wild, condomless third-world sex. Besides, I had a girlfriend.

“Don’t worry,” I told the cabbie as I opened the door. “I won’t have any fun at all.”

ABOUT FOUR HOURS later I woke up thirty thousand feet above the Atlantic.

Blinking in the low, lonely roar of the 747’s cabin, I raised my seat and looked out the window beside me. Through spaces in the milky floor of dim clouds I could see the silver squiggles of the surf on the ocean far below. I definitely wasn’t in Kansas anymore—or Queens, thank God.

I yawned, unlocked and lowered my seat-back tray, and worried my laptop out of my carry-on bag. I was going to write some e-mails, but instead I found myself clicking open the file for the HAC PowerPoint presentation I’d shown in Paris.

It began with a photograph of a primitive painting from the famous Lascaux caves in France that clearly showed a guy being killed by a bison. Next was Rubens’s Chained Prometheus . In the painting, the torment in the upside-down Titan’s face is pretty damn visceral as an eagle tears into his, well, viscera. The Rubens was followed quickly by Nicolas Poussin’s haunting Renaissance painting The Plague at Ashdod, depicting a scene in which God has sent a plague of disease and mice onto the Philistines for disobeying him.

Next came stranger, darker, lesser-known images.

I felt my pulse skip a little when an ancient sculpture of a reclining jaguar appeared. It was found in an Aztec temple along with an apocalyptic prophecy of animals devouring all humanity.

The jaguar was followed by an eerie illustration from the Toggenburg Bible. It shows a man and a woman dying of bubonic plague. There’s something about its bright, static flatness—a characteristic of medieval art—that makes it particularly disturbing. The naked figures lie stiffly in bed like paper dolls, their pale bodies polka-dotted with protruding buboes. The Black Death, which killed 40 percent of the known world’s population, had been started by marmots and carried throughout Europe by rats.