Breed

by Chase Novak

Alex turns toward Adam’s voice, as if startled.

  “They’re getting away,” Twisden cries.

  “Put me down, Dad, please, put me down.”

  A young couple walking their Australian shepherd have stopped, and they stare openly at Alex and Adam while the dog sits, ears flat, hackles up, its docked tail twitching nervously.

  “Wait until you have children,” Alex says with what he dearly hopes looks like a good-natured grin. He hoists Adam up and holds him in the crook of his arm, as if his son were a three-year-old who has gotten tuckered out during his playtime and now must be carried. The very familiarity of the image seems to reassure the young couple, though if they had taken note of the apprehensiveness of their dog, they might not be quite so sanguine. And, of course, they can’t be faulted for not noticing how fiercely the man is gripping his son’s leg. But the privacy of family life, like the primacy of private property, is a given to most people, and the young man yanks his dog’s leash authoritatively and the couple continue on their way.

  “Dad?” Adam asks in his smallest, most timid voice.

  Alex, who has been making certain the couple and their juicy-​looking dog are indeed walking away, turns toward the sound of his son’s voice.

  Adam has exactly one second to implement his plan, and he does not waste it. As soon as his father is fully facing him, Adam runs his finger into Alex’s eye, stabs hard and remorselessly into the cool jelly of it.

  Alex howls with pain. He grabs for the pulsating flame of his eye and covers it with his hand, dropping Adam to the ground.

  “I’m sorry,” Adam whimpers as he scrambles over the wall and runs toward Alice and Michael, who have been waiting for him, thirty yards beyond.

  On the other side of the curving roadway connecting the east side of Central Park to the west is the monumental Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Michael leads the twins quickly and crazily across the road, dodging taxis, trucks, and cars. They run as fast as they can, past the sellers of postcards and pastel portraits and giant pretzels, fewer here than usual because of the raw weather.

  The massive white stone staircase leading to the museum’s entrance looms before them, at the top of which hang banners announcing the World of Watteau, Treasures of the Topkapi, and Representations of Evil—this last one made of dark red silk and bearing the silhouette of Lucifer, his arms raised high, one hand holding a pitchfork, the other a human head. Not daring to glance behind them, the three push through the doors. Inside, they slow themselves so as to not court unwanted attention, but they still move quickly as Michael guides them to the ticket booth. He has only a couple of dollars in his pocket but, though the admission price is hefty, it is also voluntary. “Three, please,” he says, pushing a single toward the woman in the booth, who impassively slides over three lapel pins, giving them access to the museum and its trillions of dollars’ worth of treasure.

  And here comes Alex, as arresting and incongruous in this great hall as a wild animal. He bursts into the great echoing main lobby, looking this way and that, his left eye deep red, his teeth bared. Whereas Michael and the twins even at the height of their fear are careful to remain somehow under the radar of the museum staff and the thousands of visitors, Alex feels no such need. After whirling around several times and failing to pick his children out from the waves of museumgoers that wash across the great room, he begins to shout: “Adam! Alice!”

  “Oh God,” Alice murmurs, hearing her name bellowed, hearing its second syllable echo, seeing the people stop in their tracks.

  A teacher and a couple of parent volunteers are escorting a class of sixth-graders from a nearby Catholic school—the boys in maroon blazers and white shirts, the girls in maroon skirts, kneesocks. Michael and the twins use them as a moving screen as they make their way toward the main staircase.

  The shouting has released Alex from his inhibitions and from his desire to appear as if he were a man like any other. His voice, powerful, strident, is nevertheless full of anguish. “Alice! Adam!” The names shouted out so vehemently—who knows what he is really saying? Adam? It could be a word in Arabic, which it truly does sound like after bouncing around the acoustic chaos of the Met’s lobby. People are openly staring at him now. Since New York entered the Age of Terror, sudden noises are more disquieting than ever, and a man acting in a strange, possibly possessed manner puts people very much on alert.

  Still, Alex’s piteous cries awaken compassion in some, though the overriding fact remains that he is causing a terrifying, completely destabilizing disruption, and whatever good reason he may have for carrying on like this, he should not be standing at the foot of one of the greatest collections of art and antiquity in the world and creating a disturbance of this magnitude, and so everyone feels a sense of relief when from every corner of the main floor, security guards come rushing toward him.

  Still using the parochial-school class as camouflage, the twins and Michael have gotten to the second floor, though they can well hear Alex bellowing below, a sound as gut-wrenching as the roar of a lion. Alice’s hands are over her ears; Adam’s jaw is set, and his eyes are flat, almost dead.

  “Keep going, keep going,” Michael says, tapping Adam’s shoulder. Alice is lagging behind and he reaches back for her. She takes his hand. When Michael glances over his shoulder at her, he sees the tears streaming down her face.

  “Sir? Sir? I’m going to have to ask you to be quiet.”

  This request is given by one of the twelve security officers who have come at Alex from all points, though it seems to be something a bit more than a request, since it is delivered as the guard—a tall, portly man with a shaved head and dark nostrils—pulls out a thirty-one-inch expandable steel baton.

  When the mass of people on the grand staircase reach the Met’s second floor, some go straight ahead, some turn right, and others head left. Everyone heads in a separate artistic and historical direction—to see swords and chalices, or Dutch masters, or black-and-white photographs from the early twentieth century, or crowns and scepters from kingdoms that history has disposed of, or the innumerable examples of the arts and crafts of various preindustrial peoples: baskets, hammocks, bowls, and knives that some explorer thought so highly of that he decided to pack them up and ship them to New York.

  Still following the sixth-graders, the twins and Michael veer slightly to the right and enter the first room of the Lucifer exhibition. To anyone looking, Adam and Alice are in this class, and Michael hopes that he will pass for either a teacher or a parent volunteer.

  Straight ahead is an enormous painting of a saber-toothed tiger walking through a pale green savanna, a deep blue sky above. The tiger’s head is squared, equine; his mouth is open and his incisors are immense, stained, it seems, by bloody meat. Its eyes are dark, utterly alive and remorseless.

  Alex has decided not to flee or fight, though the mental image of himself slashing and biting and pummeling those guards is so vivid and so real it feels like a memory. Yet as the guards draw closer and closer, he raises his hands and composes his face into a look of as much innocence as he can muster.

  “Hey, guys, guys, guys, come on, I’m sorry,” he says in a slightly abashed tone.

  “We’re going to ask you to come with us, sir,” says the baton-​wielding guard as he approaches Alex. He walks steadily forward, but he holds his metal wand in front of him as if it has magical powers. The guard takes note that he is approaching an individual whose left eye is as red as a cup of tomato soup.

  Among the other guards, all of whom are silent at this point, closing in on Alex one small step after another, a kind of prewar escalation is taking place—one has a pair of handcuffs, another has drawn a Taser gun, and another has a small silver can of pepper spray.

  “Look, guys,” Alex says. “I realize I was making a commotion, and I’m sorry. I’m a lawyer.” He starts to reach into his jacket but stops. “May I show you my identification?”

  “Keep your hands where we can see them, sir,” the lead officer s
ays.

  “Okay, no problem. I understand. But there’s something you need to understand too.” Alex feels one of the guards almost on him, and he whirls quickly, fixes the man with a stare that is so unexpectedly powerful that the guard stops for a moment.

  “I am here for my children,” Alex says. “My children are right here in this museum—where, by the way, I am a member, and where my father sat on the board of trustees. Not that it makes a difference.”

  By now, about two hundred people have gathered around to listen and watch this drama unfold.

  “I am going to ask you to calm down, sir,” the guard says. He takes a small tentative step toward Alex.

  “I am calm. And I apologize for the…” For what? The word is gone. Alex realizes that his immunity to the aphasia that has increasingly vexed Leslie is running out. If the decay of her speech is any harbinger of what will happen to him, his days of being able to easily express himself are coming to an end.

  “Listen to me,” he says, though he has always believed it is a crass and hopeless announcement of your own impotence to demand to be heard, Mark Antony’s speech to the rabble notwithstanding.

  “No, sir, I need you to listen to me.”

  The guard is just about to grab Alex by the wrist when Alex utters the magic word. “My children have been kidnapped by a pedophile and he has them somewhere in this building. You want to toss me out of here—fine. You want to put me in jail? I’ll spend my ten minutes in jail. But in the meantime, that pedophile has my kids and I want to know what you are going to do about it.”

  It turns out that the sixth-graders are more than a little revved up by the various Representations of Evil, and before long a few smart-ass remarks lead to a deluge of comments and jokes, which in turn leads to shoving, tugging, and the striking of poses—even in a world of Internet porn, the sight of a few painted bare breasts seems to have unhinged half the kids. And so, after quickly learning that their threats are either disbelieved or simply not heard, the adults in charge play what they believe to be their trump card. “If you guys can’t calm down, we’re leaving this museum and going right back to Our Lady Gate of Heaven,” the teacher says, her voice rising, hardened.

  Just then, however, one of the parent volunteers, a lovely young mother dressed as if for a date, comes clattering back into the room in her daring high heels. She has been downstairs to get a map of the museum and while she was there she heard Alex’s heartfelt plea to the guards. “There’s an old guy downstairs,” she says, “and he says there’s some pervert up here who’s got his kids. A bunch of the guards are running around.”

  “All right, let’s go,” the teacher announces, and for the moment the class is docile, obedient, and they follow her out of the Lucifer show’s first room. Michael, Alice, and Adam are suddenly bereft of human camouflage—at this point they are in front of an immense brown, gray, and yellow painting of Death astride a horse, the Devil and his strangely shy-looking steed trotting beside him in a landscape littered with human skulls. And in the relative quiet left in the wake of the sixth-grade class’s departure, they hear what sounds like an army’s worth of footsteps pounding up the grand staircase.

  Alex Twisden has swayed the jury of guards, and they are on their way to apprehend the terrible man who has his children.

  As soon as they hear the guards rushing up to the museum’s second floor, the twins break into a full-out run, with Michael close behind, marveling at their grace, their speed. They have no idea where they are going—the only plan is to go. They race past a couple of elderly women, one of them in a wheelchair; past an art student who has set up her easel and is copying a Hieronymus Bosch triptych; through the next gallery and the next as the display of Lucifer in art continues, and half the patrons wear earphones as they listen to the mellifluous voice of an art historian explaining the symbolism and historical background of the work. Those who are listening to the lecture seem to have no idea that two children and a man are racing through the rooms, and those who do notice can make no sense of it, and through sheer confusion (plus a desire to remain safe and uninvolved) they are virtually motionless as Michael and the twins run for their lives.

  Kings and queens, soldiers and frightened hares, rich merchants, peasants, and allegories of salvation, all of them in elaborate frames, go flashing by as one room turns into the next. Michael and the children who cleave to him as their only hope search for a way out of the museum. Now and then they see a sign signifying an exit, but when they race toward it they find themselves in yet another gallery. They are lost in a maze of priceless art.

  “Over here,” Michael says, so winded he can barely get the words out. He is pointing to a small sign that shows a stick figure making its way down a sketchily rendered staircase. They find themselves in what feels like a little-used corridor, rather dimly lit, housing glass cases jammed with Egyptian artifacts. But when they get to the staircase, there are multiple yellow ropes blocking it off and a sign that says DANGER.

  “We need to separate,” Michael says.

  “No, no,” Adam says, coming quickly to his teacher’s side.

  “Don’t leave us,” Alice says. Her eyes glitter like pulverized quartz. “Please.”

  Michael puts his arms around both children and gathers them close. He had not known how fierce and incoherent love could be, how it can turn within you like a wheel of fire. He will do anything to protect these two, even as he grapples and gropes his way toward a sense of what he is protecting them from.

  “We’re going to be okay,” he says. He kisses the top of Adam’s head; the boy’s scalp is drenched with sweat. He pulls Alice even closer to him. “Okay?” he whispers to her. “Okay?”

  “Thanks,” she manages to say.

  “They’re looking for a grown-up and two kids,” Michael says. “If we split up, we have a better chance. So here’s what. Find your way out, one way or another. Go to the Eighty-Sixth Street entrance to the park and walk south. Okay? Walk south on the sidewalk as close to the museum as you can get. And count fifty benches. All right? How many benches?”

  “Fifty,” Adam says.

  “Fifty,” says Alice.

  “And that’s where we’ll met.”

  “Then what?” Alice asks.

  “We’ll figure it out,” Adam says.

  “Yes,” Michael says. “We will. I promise you that.” To his surprise, his voice wobbles. It is unable to bear the full freight of his emotion right now. “We will figure it out.”

  They stow their jackets, figuring that anything that differs from Alex’s description will be to their benefit. Adam heads right, Alice goes left, and Michael hopes to look like any single man strolling through the Met as he wanders past ancient and near ancient art, and the art of Korea, and Chinese art, even stopping now and again to admire an urn, a spoon, an intricately stitched orange-and-blue robe. His heart is drumming at an impossible, unsustainable speed, as if it knows its moment of extinction is near and wants to quickly use up the allotment of beats it has been granted by fate.

  Look normal, look normal, he tells himself.

  While he is involved in this impersonation of a man of leisure, gazing at the finery that once belonged to a dowager empress, he is suddenly touched rather brusquely on the shoulder—somewhere between a tap and a clasp—and when he turns around he sees a Latina museum guard and a NYPD beat cop with a reddened face and a handlebar mustache.

  Michael manages to look at the two of them with a mixture of curiosity and annoyance. He raises his eyebrows, as if to say Yes?

  “Identification,” says the cop, allowing himself the shorthand of the all-powerful.

  Michael speaks to them both in fluent and very, very rapid French, all the while pointing this way and that, hoping, first and foremost, that neither of them speaks French, and next that his gesturing will be complicated enough to further frustrate them and send them on their way.

  Whatever quick description these two have been given, the particulars of Michael�
��a man alone speaking French!—convince guard and cop that they are wasting their time with him, and in a moment they continue their haphazard search for the pedophile and the two little innocents.

  Meanwhile, Adam is making his way past European sculpture, Islamic art, and musical instruments, walking quickly, with his hands in his pockets and his head down, as if he were looking for something that he dropped on the floor. He finds a staircase leading to the first floor, and he stops at the top of it and takes a deep breath. Let me go, let me go, he whispers to himself. He holds on to the banister. It is warm from the body heat of hundreds of hands. His legs tremble. He forces himself to feel lucky and takes the first step. He can see there are guards waiting at the bottom.

  His only hope is that they are looking for a grown-up with two kids and so one child all by himself, looking relaxed and happy, swinging his arms back and forth, will be allowed to pass.

  At the same time, Alice moves through the European paintings, past the muddy, moody Rembrandts, past the rearing white horses, the smoke-wreathed battlements, the choppy seas, the hopeful dawns, the enigmatic women in capes and mantillas, the haughty men in beige britches and shining boots. She is counting her breaths and is now up to four hundred. Leaving the paintings behind, she finds herself in a gallery filled with statues, some of them broken, some intact: Is that Neptune? Is that Pan? Is that a wolf or a dog? There is a din of voices in this room and once again she meets up with the sixth-grade class, who have finally pushed the teacher and the parent volunteers over the edge; the students all seem to know it as they abjectly march in single file with their eyes cast down while the teacher, who seems to be in a state approaching despair, mutters, “Remind me never to take you all anyplace nice.”

  Alice falls in line with the class as they make their way down the main staircase. She is walking next to a girl a few inches taller than herself, a girl with thick braids and dark brows. The girl glances at Alice and seems to register the fact that Alice is not in her class, nor is she someone whom she has ever seen before, but this knowledge is eclipsed by her unhappiness about being removed from the museum. “Do you think this place used to be a castle?” the girl asks Alice.