But trail cameras eventually captured his presence, prompting Hollywood residents to panic in true Hollywood fashion. The park was a popular place for families. Its trails wove around the Hollywood sign and to the Griffith Observatory, where Rebel Without a Cause and La La Land had been filmed.
The park service issued reassurances that mountain lions (also called cougars or pumas) are basically shy creatures. To keep an eye on things, they sedated the animal, put a monitoring collar on him, named him P-22 (P for “Puma,” 22 to indicate the number of urban mountain lions being tracked at the time), and released him back into the park.
During this time, I lived in New York City, unaware of P-22 and his Hollywood haunting.
Four years later, I had decided I would have to hunt and kill him.
* * *
Brooklyn had been broody and dark and angry in a way I’d loved. There, I drank too much in cozy booths, felt anonymous in crowds, got into mutually therapeutic swearing matches with strangers on the subway, waved my hands a lot while talking about books, and struggled to keep houseplants alive in our dim home.
In Los Angeles, our apartment boasted views of palm trees from the toilet and so much natural sunlight that you had to wear sunblock in the kitchen. On clear days, from our living room, you could see the Hollywood sign through the fog. Outside, people smiled. My husband and I made new friends who boasted of their sobriety and invited me on hikes. In spite of my long-honed East Coast cynicism, the paved desert entranced me. It felt healthy, the sort of place where a modern-day Jane Austen character might go to “take the cure.” Evolutionary forces tied to environmental pleasures and age and general happiness elbowed my husband and me to reproduce. Our beatific surroundings sparked a roosting impulse.
Once the bliss of my first positive pregnancy test wore off, an animal panic set in. In order to exorcise from my mind the statistics surrounding miscarriage and genetic abnormalities, I gave up coffee, threw away my most effective acne creams, and ate organic, choking down unpalatable but nutrient-dense foods. Despite the West Coast diet, East Coast neuroticism clawed its way back into my brain. At 11:11, I kissed my fingers, muttering, “Strong baby.” I spent several hours each day googling “make healthy fetus no problems how do I.”
Since I had wanted to become pregnant, and even sort of planned for it, some of what I read online felt familiar. I’d already gone off the psychiatric drugs that might otherwise have given my fetus issues ranging from emotional problems to a micropenis, and I knew that I needed to take prenatal vitamins and avoid snorting cocaine. But other stuff surprised me, like apparently no one was allowed to rub the spot between my ankle bone and heel or I might go into premature labor, and I had to use plant-based beauty products, whatever those were, and the European studies about wine being okay were a myth, people over there were simply alcoholics, and if I bought baby clothes with buttons on them, the kid, if it survived gestation, would choke and die, and Tylenol, which I’d thought was fine, caused ADHD. I internalized it all.
Then one day I found myself struck by a pregnancy symptom euphemistically described by doctors as “breast tenderness,” which felt like someone had cut off my nipples with a serrated knife. I tried ice and Vaseline, but when the pain would not break, I broke and swallowed two Tylenol.
Afterward, I called my best friend Sarah McKetta, now in medical school, and murmured that I’d just given my fetus a learning disability.
“Nah,” she said. “It’s all heredity and chance. Doctors can’t say that to patients just in case something goes wrong and they sue for malpractice. But the truth is you can’t mess this up.”
She paused.
“Unless you binge drink every day or accidentally ingest abortion herbs. But I’m pretty sure they only sell those in Mexico.”
She meant to reassure me—to remind me that entire cultures eat raw fish or drink wine while pregnant and carry on. “Think of our grandmothers,” she said, and I knew exactly what she meant. Mine smoked and drank martinis throughout her seven healthy pregnancies, and they’re all mostly high-functioning adults who’ve never had cancer. (When Nana found herself pregnant with my dad, her fourth child, her 1950s doctor—apparently horrified by Nana’s admission that she felt fatigued and stressed out by being pregnant while tending to three children under the age of four—prescribed her amphetamines. Lots. And arguably my father’s only defects are restless leg syndrome and being twice divorced.)
All of this suggested that if I miscarried or produced an imperfect child, it might not be the result of my pregnancy regimen. The argument was tailored to relieve me, but it did the opposite, because if I couldn’t do anything to destroy my good fortune, then I couldn’t do anything to protect it, either.
* * *
A few days after this realization, Trump was elected president, and at my next doctor’s appointment, I found out we’d be having a girl. My husband made me promise to stop visiting pregnancy message boards. I blocked out the internet, turned off the news, and downloaded one of those apps that gives cute week-by-week size correlates (“Your baby is a blueberry!” “Your baby is a troll doll!”). Over the next few weeks, my body grew soft patches of blond fur, and I woke in the middle of the night to scavenge the kitchen for food. Nourished with prenatal vitamins, my nails grew, resembling claws by the time I remembered to trim them. One day, I scratched my chin and clipped what I assumed to be another pimple, only to realize I had crumbs of yesterday’s bread caught in my beard. According to my doctor, all of this was normal.
Yet every medical visit seemed to center on potential abnormality. At the nuchal exam, where they measure the baby’s neck to screen for Down’s syndrome, the technician ran her ultrasound wand through the jelly on my stomach, and there she was, my daughter, in black-and-white film, like a silent movie star. It was the first time we saw her. She sat in my uterus like it was a hammock.
“Looking good,” said the technician.
“Does that mean no Down’s syndrome?” I asked.
“Chances are now reduced to one in ten thousand,” the technician said, and even then I sensed a pattern: now and forever, the best they’d give us would be new versions of still-frightening odds. I watched the blurry skeleton of my daughter wiggle on the screen and squeezed my husband’s hand. Our baby stirred less than two feet from my heart, but I couldn’t help her. I turned to him and said, “She’s all alone in there.”
Around that time, I heard P-22 had broken in and out of the Los Angeles Zoo, leaping over an eight-foot wall in one of the enclosures to murder a koala. Later that night, my mouth full of bread and my body a furnace, because it now pumped two hearts, I imagined P-22 surveying the moonlit Hollywood sign, savoring its memories of the delicious flavor of koala bones, waiting for the scent of rodents, or escaped domestic animals, or trespassing teenage potheads—or babies. How could I go into labor in a world where hungry urban pumas were allowed to behave that way?
In the wild, pregnancy makes animals even more vulnerable to predators. But there are strategies for self-defense. I’d read laboratory studies on the effect of predator exposure on pregnant mice; when exposed to rat urine, they refused to give birth. They just gritted their teeth and held it in. If they could do that, so could I. Like an elephant (which gestates for two whole years) I’d simply cross my legs and scream. Eventually P-22 would die, and I’d let the baby fall out.
But my obstetrician said I couldn’t refuse to give birth—apparently that’s physically impossible. I wasn’t a mouse or an elephant, I was a human woman, and I was due on June 2.
The solution was simple: I’d hunt down P-22 and hang his head on the wall of my baby girl’s nursery, so that when she became sentient, she would know that her mother was strong and that she was safe.
Getting from point A (finding P-22) to point B (decapitation) remained a mystery to me, but in my blurry state of hormonal unbliss, I simply didn’t think about it. Instead, the following day, I laced up my hiking boots, parked my car on the winding
road leading to Griffith Park, and set off into the dusty wilderness with only a water bottle, potato chips, and my phone, like a much crazier Cheryl Strayed. She’d gone off trying to find herself. I’d find the lion and take it from there.
He and I had both migrated to Los Angeles. But the city was only big enough for one of us.
* * *
I beeped shut my car door, shoved my water bottle into my biggest coat pocket, and squinted at the sun, feeling hazy. Scholars think pregnancy hormones may enhance protective instincts by enabling women to better recognize fear. Others think it makes us aggressive. In a 1930s article on maternal instinct, scientists found that injecting lady rats with pregnancy hormones brought the females to an undefined “new element of consciousness”—and between the insistent hunger and my absentmindedness, I did feel a little like I’d taken drugs.
But there was nothing eye-opening about my current state. If anything, the fog hanging over Griffith Park mirrored the ecosystem of my brain when I tried to remember important information, like “When is my due date?” and, “Where is my nipple Tylenol?” Even then, in my fit of vague, murderous, motherly intention, I really had no idea why I was prowling around, scoping the trails for mountain lion shit, whatever that looked like. If you had asked me then what I was doing, I would have peered at you in confusion, like a child. If this was maternal instinct, our species might not survive very long.
* * *
In general, eating and walking staved off the persistent nausea, so I entered Griffith Park at a fast clip, letting potato chips dissolve against my tongue as if taking communion, greasily thumbing another round of baby name ideas on my phone. I always deleted the lists. Positive outlooks sparked my natural superstition. God was vengeful, I reasoned, and if the baby’s life was really up to chance, too much hopefulness, like a puma, might kill it. To compensate for counting chickens, I glanced at the California sky and did a little apologetic dance for the angels—just a shoulder wiggle with some frowning. I hadn’t been to church since high school.
I continued on, licking salt off my fingers and rubbing grease off my phone. Pine needles and dead leaves mashed into a red paste underfoot. The trails bumped up against backyards, and the residents bordering the park had barricaded themselves with chain-link fences and No Trespassing signs. “Too bad cougars can’t read,” I muttered to myself.
Suddenly, two elderly Asian women plowed past me, wearing sunglasses, sun hats, and sun gloves, poking the dust with hiking poles like a pair of skiing beekeepers and easily overtaking me despite our one-hundred-year age difference. The doctor had said something about my organs moving up, crowding the lungs, mirroring the symptoms of early emphysema. Less than five minutes into the climb, I was completely out of breath. I listened to the steady thwack of someone slapping his muddied shoes against a car bumper and thought, “If I turn back now, I can still make the all-day breakfast at that diner near here.” But, like a hero, I marched onward.
Halfway up the trail, I stopped to peer inside a corrugated drainage pipe. It seemed like a tight fit for a monster, but how big were mountain lions, anyway? In my efforts to avoid the internet, I hadn’t checked. I had, however, seen a three-year-old photograph of P-22 in an old issue of National Geographic. In it, he’s slinking before the distant, moonlit Hollywood sign, dwarfing the famous white letters.
I switched my attention to the paw prints stamped into the trail. Most were tiny—too small for my culprit—and I wondered at the irresponsibility of that: bringing a Chihuahua, or whatever, to a park where pumas hunted. I stopped the next dog walker I saw and self-righteously warned him to be careful.
“P-22 just ate a koala,” I announced, pointing to his golden retriever for a size comparison.
The guy stared at me. “P-twenty-what?”
I watched them trot away.
Moments later, fighting a sudden urge to pee, I looked around for the dirty park bathrooms but couldn’t locate them, and soon found myself racing back to my car, my bladder in emergency mode. “Sorry,” I called, hurrying past an unhurried hiker, who was wearing a leopard-print purse as a backpack. Once out of earshot, I turned the apology on my belly button. According to the pregnancy app, she could hear now.
“Sorry,” I murmured, skidding down the rest of the rocky slope to my car.
Mommy hadn’t killed the monster.
On my way out of the nearest café’s bathroom, I called my cousin Jenni, who, like me, was pregnant, but she also had a toddler at home. “All I did today was write about my feelings, take a seven-minute walk, and urinate,” I murmured, “and I’m exhausted.”
She laughed. “Just wait until you have a screaming baby.”
As if on cue, I heard her toddler screech in the background.
Jenni lowered her voice, sounding grave, and added, “Seriously, just wait.”
This turned out to be a common refrain. “Just wait” became an obnoxious sound track to my neuroses. Friends who had kids asked how I felt, only to reissue a variation on “If you think that’s bad, just wait.” Over the next month, I hiked in Griffith Park nearly every day, and even strangers started saying it. “Are you?” they gushed, nodding at my stomach, which stuck out through my hiking clothes—and then: “Any weird symptoms? Cravings? How are you feeling?” I fell for it every time, listing annoying but nondeadly stuff like “I feel pretty stupid,” or “I’m hot at night,” or “I’m still worried this mountain lion might eat my offspring.” And they’d wait for me to finish before issuing the tired punch line: “Just wait”—which seemed to roughly translate to: If you think that’s crazy, you childless innocent, you’re in for a true nightmare. Welcome to hell.
Their veiled warnings reminded me of this one night during my first trimester. Earlier that evening, I’d insisted my husband and I eat chicken liver and spinach for dinner, and afterward he lay on the couch with his head in my lap, digesting, chattering up at me, telling me jokes and being sweet. I don’t remember what it was, exactly, only that at one point he said something so funny that I choked on my laughter and barfed all over his face. The liver-colored puke pooled in his eyes and dammed at the corners of his mouth. I scrambled onto the rug to finish puking. My husband peeled off his shirt and used a clean corner to mop my chin and said, “I love you,” grimacing at the smell. It marked the first of many moments that now seem specific to pregnancy—a situation in which the surprising ignominy of something totally unexpected gets compounded by knowing things will only get weirder. There we were, covered in my puke, but in eight months, if everything went well, he’d watch my vagina explode.
Then eight months became six, then five, then four and a half—and there I was, a time bomb, counting down to the third trimester. When I rescheduled a session with my psychiatrist so I could, once again, go searching for P-22, my psychiatrist said, “Hmm,” and asked whether I might actually be worried about more abstract threats. “Motherhood, sexism, the idea of forever,” she offered. “A lot of my female patients are very upset about Trump.” She reminded me that at my wedding, the joy my husband and I felt had spasmed when we realized that everyone we loved would probably not be together in the same room again except at our own funerals, and only then if we died young. “For the neurotic, celebrations of life can conjure death,” she said. “Pregnancy is a time of regression. It throws the mind into maturational crisis.”
I reminded her that sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
I said, “Anyone who doesn’t fear the lion is insane.”
* * *
The photographer who’d captured that iconic photo of P-22 with the Hollywood sign had called the animal a “ghost cat,” and I was starting to understand why; I couldn’t find P-22, nor any trace of him. None of the other hikers I spoke with seemed worried—in fact, they rarely knew of his existence. I was starting to feel haunted, like that lady in the horror movie who’s trying to warn everyone that death is coming, but they keep saying, “Oh, honey, it’s just the wind.” After another fruitless hike, I sc
rawled a long, hysterical list of questions to ask the doctor at my upcoming sonogram—all of them some version of “Is the baby okay?” When I showed it to my husband, he asked me, “Baby, are you okay?”
The next day, I was having lunch with my friend Daniela, an otherworldly woman who sometimes texts me about the moon and had once harnessed psychic powers during a dinner party at my place to relay a message from my pet bunny rabbit, Mimosa, in which Mimosa expressed displeasure at my go-to term of endearment: “Fatso Batso.” (“Mimosa doesn’t like it when you affectionately call her fat,” Daniela chided me. “She prefers the term ‘beautiful.’”) Daniela lives near Griffith Park and has a small child who’s koala-sized, so I asked her what she thought of P-22, trying to sound casual.
“Oh, Kathleen, you didn’t hear?”
I shook my head, explaining I’d taken a break from the news, and braced myself for some gory tale of dismembered children—the discovery of a mountain lion’s nest made out of human bones.
“They scooped him up,” Daniela said, reaching for her phone. “Rangers. He ate a diseased rat and got mange.” She showed me a side-by-side comparison photo, published on some blog, of P-22 before and after the mange. Prior to getting sick, he’d been photographed in the wild, a resplendent, shiny beast—the same I’d seen in National Geographic—muscled and ready for his close-up. Post-mange, he sat in an enclosure, looking grumpy, his features discombobulated. Spiky fur, beady eyes. Even the shape of his head was weird.
“Looks like a bad police sketch,” I said.
Daniela nodded. “I have a feeling he was in distress.”
She explained that before news broke of the mange, P-22 had appeared to her in a dream.
“I’m under the impression that he understands what pets are and wants to be one,” she said, sipping her beet juice. “He said to me, ‘Let me live with you,’ and I was like, ‘What if you eat me?’ and he looked at me very gravely and responded, ‘I know what food is.’” She cut our vegan samosa with a fork and set aside half for me to eat. “But then he ate the diseased rat.”
Kathleen Hale Is a Crazy Stalker Page 11