Zoo

“Now, this is the one that will answer the question,” Chloe said as I arrived at the tenth card. She flipped it over.

Outside, the eastern seaboard clattered by in swaths of gray and brown; snatches of the ocean sparkled weakly in the failing afternoon light.

I looked at the card. It looked like a picture of an angel with birdlike wings. Feathers and red and yellow triangles splayed out from the cloud he was sitting in, and the angel seemed to be blowing through some sort of straw.

“What is it? The angel?” I said.

Chloe bit her lip as she kept staring at the card. “This card is Le Jugement.” She pointed at the angel. “This is the angel Gabriel, blowing his horn.” She pointed at the red and yellow triangles. “This is fire.”

I didn’t need a crystal ball to know what that meant.

I showed her my question.

“Duh-duh-duh…” Chloe playfully hummed ominous movie music. She smiled, laughed, and scooped up the cards. But as she did, I saw that her hands were shaking slightly.

We sat in silence as the Acela train blasted like a switch across the miserable ass of Delaware. Gazing out at the blur of tract housing and strip malls, for some reason I started thinking about the book The Little Red Caboose, which my mom used to read to me when I was a kid.

How wonderful the illustrations had made the world seem. Shiny cars and friendly policemen as the train went through the city; apple-cheeked farmers driving corn-filled pickups in the country; painted Indians on horseback as the train chugged up the mountain. I remembered looking at the pictures for hours, at the world that was waiting for me, happy, colorful, safe.

As we went into a tunnel, I closed my eyes and saw the card again: the Judgment.

What kind of storybooks would I be reading to my children? I wondered.

Chapter 45

IT WAS ABOUT nine at night when we emerged from Penn Station onto the bustling expanse of Eighth Avenue in midtown Manhattan. The dark mood that had gripped me after the tarot reading hadn’t let go. The city was wet. The clouds had broken into rain during our journey, and now the weather alternated between drizzle and bursts of harder rain. We stood on the curb, burdened with our luggage, without umbrellas, getting wet. Steam rose from the streets, and the headlights of the cars were mirrored in the shimmering asphalt.

We flagged down a cab. I opened the door for Chloe and dumped our bags in the trunk. I got in and told the driver my address. On the seat beside me Chloe was gaping through the window at the looming Empire State Building. It was lit up in tiers of white and blue.

“I have not been in New York City in a long time,” she said.

The rain gathered new momentum and drummed on the roof of the car like flung handfuls of gravel. Chloe was quiet. She snuggled into the crook of my arm, and I listened to the rhythmic rubber-on-glass squeals of the windshield wipers. The city lights blasted past us, twinkling like hazy underwater jewels in the dark.

“It’s leaving, isn’t it?” she said quietly, into my chest.

“What’s leaving? What are you talking about?”

She sat up a little. Her eyes were moist. “I’m afraid that Claire Dugard is right,” she said. “The world is ending. Everything that everyone has worked so hard for, our parents, their parents. It’s all going away, and no one is going to do anything about it…and it’s just so…so sad.”

“You can’t think like that,” I said, softly squeezing her shoulders. “This is crazy, I know, but we can solve it. We’re going to figure it out.”

“I don’t know what to think anymore. We dreamed the same dream. That’s impossible. And then seeing that tarot card on the train. It’s silly, I know. But it scared me to death. I feel strange. I feel very strange.”

I didn’t know what to say, so I just held her as she dissolved into real, racking sobs. We’d been through a lot lately. I hoped it was the jet lag.

I thought what the grandmotherly Alice Boyd had said about the eerie, seemingly precognitive animal behavior right before natural disasters. I thought about the elephants and the birds heading for the hills days before the tsunami.

What was the term Alice had used? A “cosmic event”?

After a moment, I looked down at Chloe, and she reached for my face, a hand on each cheek, and kissed me deeply. Her face melted into mine. She kissed me.

And I kissed back. I kissed back.

Chapter 46

YELLOW. A YELLOW car stops downstairs, in front of the building. Attila arrives at a thumping run at the front window of the apartment, gazes down at the street below. He looses a wild, piercing shriek as the cab door opens and he sees Oz. He hops up and down, howling in excitement.

He stops, and is quiet. His dark, glistening brown eyes glide downward and see something else.

Oz is reaching into the cab. Now another person emerges from the yellow thing. Even from five floors up, Attila can see it is a female. A woman.

Attila’s face drops. He begins to whimper. The black tips of his long leathery fingers press against the glass. He blows from his nostrils in soft, sorrowful puffs as he stares down at his friend and the newcomer.

His sadness sours into a feeling of betrayal. Of jealousy. The yawning gulf in his chest becomes filled with a new feeling. It pours in like floodwater.

Hot, ugly rage.

Rage gushes up inside him like an urge to vomit.

Attila leaps up, pounding at his chest. Growling, gurgling noises erupt from his throat as he begins to tear back and forth through the ruins of the apartment, smashing and tearing everything in his path. He smashes and tears things not yet smashed and torn, and further smashes and tears things that have already been smashed and torn.

Today is a day for biting and smashing.

He begins pounding on the walls again, knocking down the few remaining pictures. Their frames clatter and crash. More glass scatters across the floor. He grabs the radiator in the hallway, begins to shake it. He winces as he pulls and pulls. The pipe that connects it to the wall whines. There is a shriek and a groan as he rips it free of its moorings. Attila hurls the radiator into the bathroom, the door to which he wrenched off its hinges a few days ago. The radiator bashes the bathroom sink and shatters it. The sink crumbles into chunks of porcelain rubble.

Attila knuckle-walks to the front door. He sniffs. He hears Oz coming up the stairs now, with another pair of feet walking in tandem beside or behind him. He has an idea. Quickly, deliberately, he runs through the apartment, clicking off all the lights.

The apartment is dark except for the orange glow from the lights outside filtering through the windows. The torn blinds cast orange tiger stripes of light across the room. A train rumbles by outside, and sets the room to shaking. Attila listens to the approaching, ascending footsteps. He yawns with his enormous jaws. He waits.

Chapter 47

CHLOE WAS STILL smiling, her body loose, soft, and warm in my arms, when the cab dropped us off in front of my building on 125th Street. Then she took a moment to absorb the squalid streetscape. Beside us, two