The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore (14 page)

Also, I forgot to mention that there was also a closet in this room (51), containing all sorts of adorable baby clothes—all obviously unworn!

L
ydia took me back to the lab at the University of Chicago nearly every day, except on the weekends. The home was the domestic domain, the domain of Lydia, the domain of comfort, of leisure, of pleasure, of love. The lab was Norm’s domain: the man’s domain, the cold hard domain of work. But the lab was a much more tolerable place to spend my days when I knew that at the ends of them I had a comfortable human home to return to with Lydia. The tests continued. All their “language training” continued unabated. The naming of things, the plastic tokens, the stuffed animals, and all the rest of it. I performed their tasks for them, mostly in a state of complacent boredom. I performed their tasks correctly more and more often. As soon as I had one of their tasks down cold, they introduced another. I chose to learn them quickly, simply so that I wouldn’t have to suffer through the boredom of making them repeat their brain-numbingly dull procedures ad nauseam. But the lion’s share of the “work” I did with Lydia was unstructured; it occurred simply in the process of ordinary quotidian life, which of course occurred all the time, not officially beginning when we entered the lab and ending when we left it.

Life at home was cheery and domestic. Every day after we came
home from the lab and on the weekends, she would spend hours speaking to me. She experimented with various stimuli—games, puzzles, dolls, flash cards, generally adhering to the Montessori method of pedagogy—unhurried, loosely structured, compassionate nurturing. In the evenings I would “help” her cook, and we ate together. I learned to eat sitting at the table in a chair on top of a stack of phone books, using a fork and knife for solids and a spoon for liquids, and later in the night I would curl up in her lap while she read to me from one of my picture books, clearly articulating the words as she traced them one by one with her finger, and I listened to the words and looked at the words, gradually beginning to learn to attach visual to auditory, signifier to signified.

When she had to leave the house alone, she would put me in my crib and fasten a plastic covering to the top to keep me out of trouble until she returned. But aside from that we were rarely apart, and seldom out of earshot. Gradually, as I became more civilized, she came to trust me enough to let me roam the house by myself when she was out, and I whiled away my time alone by perusing my picture books or watching television, though she told me not to do too much of that because it would rot my brain.

The one small subversive thing I would do when she was out—when I sat there watching TV alone—was to crack open the TV’s remote control to get at its nine-volt battery, which I would gingerly touch to the surface of my tongue to feel a mild but thrilling little fuzzy electric shock. I also loved the coppery aftertaste. I would touch the battery to my tongue again and again.

My favorite program was
Sesame Street
, which was fine with Lydia because it was covertly educational. And indeed I learned many fundamentals from
Sesame Street
: how to count to ten, the colors of the alphabet, why not to eat cookies in bed. I particularly adored the segments dealing with Bert and Ernie. I was always rooting for Ernie, the freewheeling embodiment of the id, whom
Bert, his stern superego, is forever trying to repress with his uptight inhibitions. Ernie, so naïve, squat, and orange; and Bert, with his yellow napiform head and scraggly black unibrow so quick to V in anger… But Bert is also wise in his own weltschmerzy way, and the two of them usually wind up learning something from each other. Every episode left Ernie a little less innocent and Bert a little more, making me wonder if someday their personalities might meet in the middle, when both achieve a self-actualized balance of wisdom and joy. Through Bert’s admonitions Ernie would come to understand something important, usually relating to his own hygiene or personal safety, and Ernie would sometimes broaden Bert’s mind a little with his energetic love of life, like in the episode in which they go fishing, and Ernie teaches Bert his shamanistic trick of invoking the fishes to simply leap out of the water and into their boat by vocal commands alone, by the awesome thaumaturgy of mere language.

I watched
Sesame Street
ritualistically every morning before Lydia took me to the lab. It began my day, providing a transition period from my dream state to my wakeful consciousness. If I got up before Lydia did I would report first to the television, to check in on the Muppet-populated universe of
Sesame Street
. In
Sesame Street
, as in much children’s entertainment, it is seen as perfectly natural that human beings should freely verbally communicate with nonhuman creatures.

Often, if I happened to rise early enough, I caught a show that preceded
Sesame Street
on weekdays, called
Francis the Gnome
. This was an animated series about a gnome named Francis who lived with his matronly gnome wife in a rustic home fashioned from the hollow of a tree in what appeared to be a temperate pine forest somewhere in North America. Francis wore a pointed green hat and a long white beard with a Tolstoyan fork. Francis served as doctor to the animals of the forest. He did good deeds for woodland animals
in trouble: releasing them from hunters’ traps, nursing them back to health when they took sick. Francis was at home in nature. He too communed with the animals.

So I would watch cartoons on TV early in the morning before Lydia got up, licking a nine-volt battery over and over and over.

Lydia also provided me with lots of puffy colorful plastic cases containing videotapes of animated films for me to watch. I appreciated all the Disney films, like
Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, Cinderella, The Sword in the Stone
and
Robin Hood
—but obviously, as it touched on certain core thematic elements of my life, my favorite by far was
Pinocchio
. The literary characters with whom I most strongly identify are Caliban, Woyzeck, Milton’s Satan, and Pinocchio. Pinocchio is perhaps the most important of these. Even at the time I may have associated Lydia with the beautiful blue fairy who floats in through Geppetto’s window to bestow consciousness upon the puppet with a touch of her magic wand.

Before I get too far ahead of myself, I should tell you an anecdote that begins with strange screams that I heard in my dreams at night. I don’t remember how soon it was after I began living with Lydia that I started having these dreams. They usually happened right before I woke up in the morning. I would be lying asleep in my bed, dreaming away on pleasant topics, when suddenly I would begin to hear screams, and my dreams would get bent into nightmares. I would hear these half-human noises—bursts of bloody-throated, high-pitched screaming. I dreamed of a prison, a torture garden where both people and animals wandered the grounds—or crawled along the floor, or were chained naked to posts—while guards marched up and down the halls of the castle (sometimes it was a castle), selecting the people or animals to be brought below to some place that was underground, for tortures or cruel scientific
experiments. The guards wore uniforms: some of them wore crisp, fascistic brown uniforms with gold buttons, like the zookeepers would wear, and others wore the uniforms of scientists—flowing white coats—and carried clipboards. A scientist would point out one of the people, and the zookeeper would yank at the chain the person wore around his neck, and with a whip drive the person four-legged down a cold stone staircase. Soon we on the surface would hear his screams, rising up from the vents in the floor. The screaming would grow louder, more painful and terrifying, until I woke up, and it was morning. This dream would recur with slight variations. What’s interesting about this dream is that it might have been the first dream in my life that I remembered any of at all. Before, in an alexic universe, all my dreams had bled right out of my brain only seconds after waking, but by this time I had learned enough language to begin to capture and keep my dreams.

I discovered the source of these dark dreams when Lydia and I met Griph Morgan. I do not know exactly how long Lydia had lived in that apartment before my arrival, but apparently she had never met Griph, her reclusive upstairs neighbor, until we bumped into him on the stoop of the building one afternoon when we happened to arrive home at the same time. Lydia and I had come home from the lab several hours earlier than usual that day for some reason—perhaps that was why she had never crossed paths with him before; Griph’s and Lydia’s schedules had never chanced to align. He was struggling with his keys in the door to the building when we came up the stairs. Griph Morgan was not very old, but he was in poor health. He was missing one leg (he was a veteran) and walked with a cane. He had one normal leg (though a little on the pale and flabby side) and the other one was a thin metal prosthesis, which culminated unsettlingly in a fake foot inside a sneaker; but what made this doubly unsettling was that one of the many points of pride Mr. Morgan took in his Scottish heritage was the tartan kilt
he usually wore, a pleated green-and-red plaid skirt, decoratively completed by a broad black belt and a rabbit-pelt sporran. Additionally, Mr. Morgan played the bagpipes, which that afternoon he had slung over his shoulder, as he was returning home from practicing in the park. To me Mr. Morgan’s bagpipes looked less like a musical instrument than a creature from another planet: a glossy black velvet bag for a body, from the top of which protruded a series of segmented stalks that looked like they could be sensory organs, and a long infundibuliform tube coming out the front of it that could have been some sort of silly nose. Lydia introduced herself and me, and he gruffly told us his name. Lydia began talking to him in the hallway of the building, though Mr. Morgan had already begun his slow clumping three-legged ascent of the stairs. First she asked him a neighborly question having to do with recycling. The question seemed to be a bit of a conversational ruse, Lydia’s real curiosity being more about her previously unseen Caledophilic upstairs neighbor than about what exactly the building’s protocol for disposing of glass and aluminum was. Mr. Morgan—who sported an interesting style of facial hair that he called a Vandyke—was characteristically laconic.

“I don’t drink anymore,” was all he said.

“But what about cans—?” Lydia must have asked, provoking a dismissive snort from beneath the mustaches of Mr. Morgan’s Vandyke before he replied that he purchased all his beans wholesale in bags and boiled them himself.

“You don’t boil your beans?” he said.

“Well—” Lydia seemed slightly confused by the question.

Like any Scotsman, Mr. Morgan was proud of his resourcefulness and frugality. He took a mild interest in me but did not seem particularly surprised that his downstairs neighbor shared her apartment with a chimp, and casually made mention of the fact that he himself cohabited peacefully with ten parrots.

“Do they talk?” Lydia asked with excitement.

“Of
course
they talk,” said Mr. Morgan, as if he was offended that she need even have asked. Then Lydia asked to see them, and then we were all upstairs in Griph Morgan’s apartment, which was (one) less than half the size of ours, (two) situated directly above my (Bruno’s) bedroom, (three) cluttered with old newspapers stacked to the ceiling (which Mr. Morgan clearly had no intention of recycling anytime soon), and (four) did indeed have a whole flock of parrots in it, flapping and squawking and crawling all over everything in the room. There was a big pot of beans boiling busily on the stove. Half the floor space of the living room was taken up by a huge wire birdcage, the door of which was open to allow free passage for the ten parrots. There was a tiny old TV with a twisted coat hanger for an antenna, a foldout card table, a side table, and a shabby brown easy chair facing the TV. The room had no other furnishings. The chair had been sat in so many times and so often that Mr. Morgan had carved a depression in the seat and the back that was shaped like his body, such that the negative space formed a phantomlike impression of Mr. Morgan sitting in the chair in the event of his absence. Mr. Morgan inserted his form into the Mr. Morgan–shaped crater in the easy chair, and Lydia and I sat on two of the shorter stacks of newspapers. The room was tropically dank and steamy, smelling of the combined effects of the potful of boiling beans and the parrots. Lydia would later confide in me that in her opinion Mr. Morgan’s apartment “stank,” and that she was glad she had finally discovered the source of “that weird smell in the building.” I, however, actually kind of liked the smell. Mr. Morgan’s apartment had a not-unpleasant soporific effect on me; I found its biotic pungency oddly cozy. In fits and starts of attempted conversation Lydia managed to extract from Mr. Morgan that the two things he lived for were his parrots and his bagpipes. As for the latter, he was the lead bagpiper in the Veteran’s Association of
Chicago & North Western Railway Bagpipe Band. When they played in parades, he would play his bagpipes from a wheelchair, which was pushed at the head of the formation by a tartan-clad volunteer. As for the former, Griph Morgan’s parrots consisted of three African greys, two macaws, two red-billed Pionuses, one blue-crowned racket-tail, one cockatiel and one Senegalese yellow-vented. All of Mr. Morgan’s parrots enjoyed free range of his small apartment. He considered these birds his friends and roommates more than his pets.