homeless guys in a bus shelter were yelling and shoving each other for some reason as a rat the size of a Chihuahua looked on.
“Home sweet home,” I said, as the Broadway local thundered by above us on the elevated track. “It’s not as bad as it looks. I promise.”
“It is very, er…” She spun a finger in the air, searched for a word.
“Urban?” I suggested.
“
Huffing and puffing after hauling our bags up five flights of stairs, I was turning the key in the lock of my front door when I heard an unusual sound. It was coming from behind the door. It stopped, then started again—loud and rasping, some kind of hiss. I opened the door. I looked out into the darkness of my apartment. I was struck by the smell. Not good. It smelled like shit.
I heard the sound more clearly: it was coming from somewhere beyond us through the unlit threshold. I moved in front of Chloe, and the darkness in the doorway seemed to collect together and form into a broad shape.
“Attila?” I said.
What in the hell? He should have been in his cage.
The shadow bulged, and then the weight slammed into my chest like a train. The blow knocked me on my back.
“Attila!” I barked.
Chloe was somewhere behind me, screaming. I was on my back in the doorway, my wind knocked out, tailbone smarting like hell, trying to process what was going on. Attila had knocked me over, and now he was tumbling in crazy circles around the apartment.
“What the fuck is wrong with you?” I said. I gathered myself to my feet, fumbling for the light switch, glancing behind me for Chloe.
How had he gotten out of his cage?
He was just scared, I thought, frantically trying to assess the situation. He must have thought I was an intruder or something. I needed to calm him down.
I stepped into the apartment and snapped on the light.
“Look, Attila,” I said. “It’s me. Oz. You’re safe, kid.”
The cold white fluorescent light slowly buzzed on, illuminating my apartment.
It was a horror show. It looked exactly as though a wild chimp had been let loose in my apartment for a week. The whole place was in shambles. The refrigerator door was open, trickling feeble blue light into the room and humming, the food that had been in it rotten and scattered across the floor. The cupboard doors were wrenched off their hinges, all the dishes raked out and smashed on the floor, the faucet running in the sink for God knows how long, sticky puddles of dried piss on the linoleum, shit smeared in streaks on the walls. This sight proved to be a preview of what the rest of the apartment looked like.
And then Attila was barreling toward me again from out of the darkened, ruined apartment. He seemed to know exactly who I was. And he was wearing my red hat.
“ATTILA!” I screamed, and he sank his jaws down on my knee.
I fought. I kicked. I punched him in the back of his head. He didn’t even seem to notice. My fists bounced off his skull like rubber balls. He wasn’t the same chimp. Something inside him had snapped.
Chloe was screaming—I heard her distantly, as if I were underwater.
There was a pan lying overturned on the edge of the kitchen counter, just within arm’s reach. It was a hefty black cast-iron skillet that had belonged to my Polish grandmother. I’d eaten pierogi that had been fried in that thing, and that day it may have saved my life.
I snatched it up and brought it down on the crown of Attila’s head, half strength at first, which did nothing, and then I swung it as though I were Roger Federer hitting a Dunlop crosscourt. The gruesome sound of the skillet bonking Attila’s skull made me wince. I felt his bite loosen. I hit him with it again, and he let go.
He was dazed from the blow. He stumbled back into the corner by the refrigerator. His face was damp with blood. He cowered in the corner, shrieking.
“Oz!” said Chloe. “Are you okay?”
Attila turned toward her. His eyes were blank and dangerous. He began to skulk toward us.
“Stay away from her!”
I heaved the skillet at him. He raised an arm and swatted it off, and the skillet went sailing behind him and smashed through the kitchen window almost as easily as if there hadn’t been any glass there. Shards of glass tinkled to the floor.
For a moment I thought he’d snapped out of it. I dropped to the floor on my knees, and grimaced in pain. Attila had chewed up my knee badly.
“Attila,” I said. My hands were palm up, open. I was using my lullaby voice. “Attila. What’s gotten into you? Relax! It’s me.”
Chloe stood in the open doorway still, as if she were ready to bolt.
Attila looked at me. He stood on a pile of crumbled dishes on the kitchen floor. He cocked his head and fixed his gaze on me from under the brim of my red knit hat.
Attila’s face changed then. For a second, he seemed like himself again. As he looked into my eyes, his expression was an unnerving gaze of unbearable sadness—betrayal, knowing.
Then he jumped onto the countertop and out the window onto the fire escape. He was gone.
Chapter 48
AN ELDERLY HISPANIC man in rumpled janitor blues is waiting for a bus. He sips a brown-bagged can of Tecate and hums half a tune. He’s on his way home from work. He nudges up the brim of a sweat-stiffened Yankees cap. Then a chimpanzee drops off the bottom of the fire escape of the building beside him. The chimp is wearing a red hat. The can of Tecate lands on the sidewalk.
The chimp scrambles past him, an explosion of hairy limbs, feet, fingers. He sniffs, looks around, tears down the sidewalk with a bouncing, loping gait, propelling himself forward with long, powerful arms.
The world is suddenly a wild swirl of strange lights and sounds—and a new sense of openness. Blindly knuckle-running down the sidewalk, Attila does not even pause as he bolts into the commotion of 125th Street. It’s a circus of honking. Attila streaks in front of a minivan, and the driver lays on the brakes and horn half a moment before the eastbound M104 bus behind it crushes its rear end. There’s a crunch of plastic, metal, glass. More honking.
Now on the other side of the street, Attila races alongside the long and brightly lit window of a Duane Reade drugstore before he banks the corner and passes a fried-chicken restaurant.
He pant-hoots at a number 1 train as it blasts by high overhead on the shaking iron latticework of the elevated tracks. He runs along the sidewalk, past benches and fire hydrants, scrabbling for a place to hide.
A group of teenagers are halfheartedly punting around a battered soccer ball on the sidewalk in front of a bodega. A tiny, grizzled Hispanic man sits on a plastic folding chair by the door of the store, smoking a cigarette and watching the kids playing soccer. A sleek black car with tinted windows idles on the corner, a rap song blasting from its radio in fuzzy thumps that shake it on its springs.
A chimpanzee wearing a red hat rushes headlong through the soccer game. The girls point and shriek. The soccer ball skitters away into the street.
A patrol car from the Twenty-Sixth Precinct is just pulling away from the curb in front of a deli on Lenox Avenue when they get the call.
“Repeat that, dispatch. Who’s on the roof of a candy store?” says Sergeant Timothy Perez, a tall, fit, five-
