stared down, searching for the beavers below, hoping to catch site of the local native celebrities. The monorail’s cars are built so that you only sit on one side, facing the left of the track instead of toward the front of the train; and though they have roofs with translucent skylights, the viewing areas open to the elements, bordered only by a short railing of metal tubes. It can make for a great show as you skirt the perimeter in what feels like a moving couch or section of sports bleachers; but on this day, we saw no celebrity beavers.
Devin drove the train, talked into a microphone, and played some prerecorded narratives about the animals and the zoo’s conservation efforts. The track circles the perimeter of the “Wild Asia” exhibits, and it feels like you’re waiting for a show of some kind. On his own ride, David Villalobos positioned himself in the last car, far from the conductor, and he listened patiently along with the rest of the visitors, waiting for his chance.
The exhibits in Wild Asia mostly consist of various species of deer and cattle, all of which look only slightly different in size and shape from the deer and cattle that we all know. If he had been looking for them, David might have seen spotted deer and Taiwanese Formosan deer and one called a “hog deer.” There are also wild horses, massive buffalo-esque cattle, hairless jungle pigs, and rock-climbing goats. But the king of the mountain—so to speak—and the animal most of us were waiting to see, was the Siberian tiger.
The day Villalobos visited in 2012, a 400-pound Siberian tiger named Bashuta was “on exhibit.” The tigers are the only apex predators in Wild Asia, and their habitat is separated in part from the monorail and the traffic on the nearby Bronx Expressway by a tall wood-pike fence that looks like something out of the movie King Kong. This is one of two tiger habitats in the zoo, the other being a place called Tiger Mountain, where you view the cats not from above but instead through thick panels of glass.
As the monorail tram left behind Cali the rhinoceros and curved past the fence, the open side of the tiger paddock slowly would’ve revealed itself, almost like a curtain parting, and a grand green stage, set for drama, open for the existential business of witness. The tramcars ran right along the top of the chain-link boundary fence, sixteen feet up in the air, and David would’ve been able to look directly down into the grassy hillside habitat.
On the day I visited, the weather was perfect—sunny and about eighty degrees with a slight breeze—and the paddock looked like some kind of idyllic picnic spot or forested campsite. The air was cool and seemed like it had been freshly washed. Three tigers live in Wild Asia, but because they are solitary and fiercely territorial, only one of them is on exhibit at any given time. Devin told me that one of the tigers likes to lay up against the fence, just beneath where the tram passes and is, thus, hard to see without leaning out over the edge of the car.
For my visit, a Siberian tiger named Yuri lounged on the hillside in the sun, raising his head to consider us as we passed. It took me a while to spot him at first, but I followed where Devin pointed. Strangely, it was easier to see the tiger if you didn’t look directly at him. Yuri was enormous and regal, a striped king reclined on a blanket of green; not hiding, he was still somehow camouflaged against the background, his stripes creating a veil of color and shade.
Three young boys traveling in the same car with me drummed their feet against the fiberglass benches out of either boredom or excitement as their nannies and grannies squealed and pointed at Yuri.
Though Yuri seemed to be napping like a common house cat, he was also menacing in a way that’s hard to articulate. Even from a significant distance he seemed dangerous. Something about his body—the size of his paws and his head, in particular—broadcast power and violence. Yuri was fun to look at, and it sent a little tingle up my spine to see him there in his habitat. But I was fine with seeing him from afar. As an object in a cage. Contained and controlled. I didn’t need to be much closer.
The tiger habitat is shaped like a shorter, fatter football, and the backside of it, at the top of the hill, shares a chain-link fence boundary with exotic cattle and deer habitats—which I imagine must be, for the tigers, like staring outside your prison bars to see not just freedom but also a buffet of all the food you could possibly eat; and our train appeared regularly like a line of sushi boats floating just out of reach.
David Villalobos didn’t care about the Formosan deer or the hog deer or the wild horses with their short, bristly manes. He positioned himself in the very last car, and he waited for the guide to take them past the jungle pig and Cali the rhino and the wood-pike fence, until the car crept along the top of the tiger enclosure. He’d planned this. He knew exactly what he was doing. He had to have taken the ride a few times, gauging the distance, timing the tour and the movement of the tram. I imagine the zoo employees had come to know him, to recognize his face in line. Maybe they’d started to wonder why he came so often.
David knew what was about to happen: the guide slowed the cars, trying to spot Bashuta in the brush, and pointing her out to the other visitors. David waited for his cue, for the opportunity. As his car pulled up alongside the paddock, Villalobos suddenly stood up. He climbed up on the edge of the car, reaching up and bracing himself against the roof with his palms. He balanced briefly on the railing, rolling on the balls of his feet to get his balance right. Then he leaped, clearing four strands of barbed wire sixteen feet down into the tiger’s cage.
David landed on all fours, “like a cat,” he would later brag, then crumpled and rolled to the side.
People on the train gasped, pointed, and screamed.
Imagine the terror of witnesses. Think of how that moment must have shimmered and buzzed, electric with fear. I’ve tried to imagine David’s leap, perhaps as a way to get closer to understanding it. I’d come to New York to try and retrace his steps. I’d come to the zoo to find David.
“He jumped!” someone called ahead to the tram conductor. “Stop the train! That man. He jumped down there! Into the cage!”
Was this part of the tour? Is this real? Is it some kind of show? Already the question rises, as if released from the earth upon impact, like a cloud of dust: Why would he do that? And that question would linger, still floating in the air two years later when I visited.
David looked up at them and saw their mouths stretched into dramatic “O’s,” their arms and fingers extended, pointing, the other hand covering the eyes of a child or waving frantically, telling him to run, to get away—like people do when they’re watching a horror movie and the actors are doing things you know are going to get them killed; and perhaps David smiled and waved back at the people above, his witnesses and his audience. Or perhaps he was so focused on his mission that he didn’t even acknowledge the spectators and their commotion, and he simply gathered himself to stand and face the tiger.
BASHUTA, WHO DESPITE HER fairly domestic existence in Wild Asia still possessed all the instincts of an apex predator, made her way quickly over to David. I see him there, in the long slow seconds of those first moments in the cage, turning and smiling, his thick shock of black hair standing out against the green background, his eyebrows arching into eternity. There is no sound to these images. Bashuta’s huge paws pad silently on the grass, covering the ground between them in seconds. And if we pause the scene, you will notice that David is a handsome young man. Tall and slender, with those thick black eyebrows and high cheekbones—he could be a model, he could be your boyfriend or classmate, maybe just the guy you see every day on the subway into the city and you think to yourself that he looks familiar or famous or otherwise interesting. But in those ecstatic moments in the tiger’s cage, the sun dapples his face and he holds his arms out to the animal, as if to embrace Bashuta and, for a second, the scene is beautiful. Time slows down, filtered through the thick lens of memory. Each witness to David’s
