The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore (40 page)

Regina Lawrence opened her arms to her for a hug. She was again wearing both parts of her bipartite red swimsuit. Lydia, now fully clothed, placed herself into her embrace. The wet skin of Regina Lawrence’s body dampened Lydia’s clothes.

Now Lydia and I, holding hands as we walked along the narrow trail of gravel, headed back to our little house on the Lawrence
Ranch, a half a mile away from the big house. The lights in the big house were still on behind us. Our feet crunched along the gravel path, and the crickets all chirped their cricket song in the grass.

And now, if you would, please imagine the hands of that symbolic clock that I promised you earlier, spinning themselves faster and faster into a symbolic radial blur. Time passes. After our extended stay at the Lawrence Ranch, Lydia and I moved back to Chicago. When we finally returned from our Ovid-like exile in the wilderness, I could speak, read, and write the English language and had received some of my sentimental education. In fact, it may not have been long after the memory I just related that Lydia and I left the Lawrence Ranch and returned to Chicago. I honestly don’t know why exactly we left the Lawrence Ranch when we did. I won’t pretend to know how much—if at all—our re-relocation to Chicago had to do with this curious incident that I found last night in my memory-box. But our move back may have had to do with many other factors as well. For one thing, I think Lydia missed the city, as did I. She missed its familiarity; she missed feeling her independence. She did not enjoy feeling like a perpetual houseguest. She missed the place she had called home for nearly ten years. We thanked the Lawrences for all their financial support, their kindness, their enduring, tireless, and outrageously generous hospitality. We tearfully said good-bye to Dudley and Regina Lawrence, and even more tearfully to Hilarious Lily, and to Sukie, the dog, to the memory of Hilarious Larry, and most tearfully of all to Clever Hands, who signed
Good-bye!
to us and kept on waving, even as Lydia’s car was tumbling over the washboards down the narrow dirt road. The sun may have been setting—or rising—painting the mountains behind us in majestic colors. And we left.

I
apologize that it’s been so long since our last session, Gwen. You know I was extremely busy with
Woyzeck
, which you saw us perform last week. I honestly wasn’t thrilled with the way the performance turned out. We took our bows at the end of it, and our audience applauded when it was time to applaud. I have fallen so far from the zenith of my theatrical career, back when Leon and I put on our epic production of
The Tempest
. That was more than ten years ago now.

Don’t worry, Gwen, I’m not offended that stage fright prevented your acting in my play. I am afraid our production was amateurish at best. Chimps are very difficult to direct. I’m seriously considering learning the dark art of puppetry. Puppets would be more obedient actors.

I’m concerned about Leon. Leon is now over sixty. He has a moist eye, a dry hand, a yellow cheek, a white beard, a decreasing leg and an increasing belly, every part about him blasted with antiquity. His gait is slow and uncertain, his flesh doesn’t have the sanguinity it used to. A man of great heart and courageous stomach, he’s been dragging his body through hell all his life. He looks much older than he really is. Leon is the best and the last great
friend I have left in the world, and I’m afraid it may be sooner than I’d like that I’ll lose him, too. Freud observed that to love anyone is to give fate a hostage. These days, when I see Leon, I can almost see fate standing behind him with a knife pressed against his fat throat. I’m afraid for him. I will miss him when he’s gone. We have heard the chimes at midnight. That we have, that we have.

Our performance of
Woyzeck
, as I’m sure you observed, was marred by an irritating accident. There is a train track that passes right outside the grounds of the Zastrow National Primate Research Center, situated somewhere in rural Georgia, USA. Every once in a while—probably three or four times a day—a freight train thunders by the research center. It makes a deafening noise, usually accompanied by a long, low blast from its horn and an uncertain shuddering of the earth, during which everything in this place is set to slight wobbling. The apes—by which I mean the animal apes, the non-enculturated chimps, bonobos, and orangutans who live in this research center—they love it. They are so mystified and enchanted and terribly impressed with all the phenomena that occur every time a train passes. During these few minutes of rumbling, bellowing, and earth-shaking that happen several times daily, they all—down to an ape—commence to jump up and down, clap their hands, howl and pant-hoot and scream in wonder and irrepressible joy. And, as bad luck had it, at the absolute emotional climax of the play—the moment when Woyzeck murders his wife in a fit of jealous rage—what should happen, but that goddamn train decided to blast by outside the research center. As I staggered onstage with angst-haunted eyes and the retractable-bladed plastic toy knife in my hand, that stupid train chose that particular moment to blow its stupid horn and come rolling its stupid way along its stupid tracks, and at that moment, all the walls of our onstage narrative—fourth, third, second, first—instantly came crashing down, and not in a good way. All the chimps on the stage
(except one) and all the chimps in the audience, when they heard that train roaring by, felt instantly compelled to start jumping up and down, clapping, hooting, howling, and screaming out in joyous rapture—completely ruining my play. All of my actors immediately forgot their roles, and were no longer characters in one of the greatest psychological dramas of early modern theatre, but were just chimps again, enthralled with a train.

The train passed, the apes recovered, and we forged ahead with the few minutes of the play that remained. But the moment had been ruined, and the time was irrecoverable. I almost cried. I wonder if those clear-minded creatures would be so impressed by passing trains if they understood what they were. To them, the trains mean only that for a few minutes, for some reason, the predictable behavior of the universe has been briefly upended. Suddenly nature has gone unaccountably bonkers, something has replaced the stillness and quiet of the outside world with a circus of sound and vibration. So they all clap and hoot and howl at the spectacle, because they do not know what it means. Whereas I, Bruno, am forever doomed to know what it means, and I can only peer out the window of my prison and wonder not about what makes this dangerous magical noise in the darkness beyond our walls, but about where that train might be going, where it is coming from, what it might be bringing to the free people of the world.

So, for whatever reason or convergence of reasons, Lydia and I were back in Chicago. I wonder why we were there again, after the Lawrences had for so long afforded us so much unabated peace and comfort in Colorado. I’m not even sure how it was we were surviving. Lydia wasn’t working. Where was the money coming from, Lydia? I wish I could ask her now. Why did I never ask her? Was I not curious? Such things were so outside the sphere of my childish concerns that I never thought to ask such questions. Once again we were living at 5120 South Ellis Avenue. It was fall. The skies were
gray and the denuded branches of the trees rattled against the punishing autumnal winds. We found our apartment much as we had left it, although the walls and carpets had taken on the smells of the tenants who had inhabited it during our long vacation. Lydia’s renters had somehow made the apartment smell like a cheese factory, and we wondered what unsavory acts they might have committed within these walls. More unsavory than mere bestiality? No, Gwen, that
mere
is not in any sense ironic: I am not a beast.

For a time, Lydia and I took daily walks through the leafy and imperious campus of the University of Chicago. Our old haunts! Lydia’s former place of employment. What in the world were we doing there, Lydia? Why didn’t I ask you any of these questions at the time? When you could still speak, and were still alive? Sometimes we would stroll, hand in hand, down the length of Fifty-seventh Street, Lydia stopping occasionally to purchase things from stores: a notebook, a cup of coffee, a candy bar for me, a long-stemmed green rose to take home and put in a jelly jar of water.

The neighborhood seemed to have changed relatively little in the two years we were gone. The same buildings were all in place, the same trees, the same landmarks. We would often see the same people—the same old lady in the bright blue coat and pink scarf who would often be standing at such-and-such a particular bus station at such-and-such a particular time, the same man walking the same dog, and so on. Some stores and restaurants had gone away and been replaced by other establishments, or were vacant, or new establishments had opened in formerly empty places. I resignedly resented every little change. You know a place is home when you resent change. When we were at home in the apartment I listened: but no sound came from upstairs. No squawking parrots, no moaning bagpipes. Where had Griph Morgan gone? There was nothing but silence upstairs, and no smells, either—no more eau de boiling beans and parrot crap. Soon after we returned, I began a daily
pilgrimage of galumphing up the stairs to bang on Mr. Morgan’s door, in hope that maybe he would one day materialize behind it. It was a hopeless exercise that grew more hopeless each day I did it, but I did it every day. Or should I say it was the opposite of hopeless?—it was a vainly, absurdly hopeful exercise. Griph Morgan’s door became more like a pagan idol at an altar or an oracle for whom I would leave offerings: I did not expect a reply, but nevertheless kept at it, hoping for any small sign, suspiciously, irrationally ready to interpret a flock of birds or a change in the weather as an effect of the cause of my homage. Every day I knocked on his door and called his name, and every day the door remained shut, and the space behind it silent. But absence of evidence is not evidence of absence—like a true believer, all I needed was continued hope and continued silence to continue asking.

Around this time I also noticed a subtle change—or at least a change in my perception—in the way people on the street, or in the stores we went to, interacted with Lydia. They spoke to her more slowly and more cautiously, treading on eggshells. The clerks in the stores gave her what she wanted and then quickly sought to get rid of us. Sometimes people gave her confused or concerned or distrustful looks. Many people tried very hard to avoid eye contact with us at all.

In retrospect, I may allow myself to surmise that perhaps Lydia had become known to the local inhabitants of the area as “that crazy woman who walks around everywhere with her chimp.” In retrospect, rumors about Lydia and her past (“She used to teach at the university?”—“She was fired?”—“Some suspect her of…”—“With the
chimp
? Really? No…”) may have been swirling. In retrospect, I realize that even many months after moving back into our—in retrospect, dingy—apartment in Chicago, we still had never fully unpacked our boxes from the move. In retrospect, I realize that Lydia wasn’t taking as much pride in her appearance as she used
to—that her hair was often tangled and unkempt and unclean, that her smart, crisp style of dress had been largely replaced by sweatpants and floppy-sleeved dirty sweaters. I also remember how, during this time, her headaches and her insomnia were so miserable, and so miserably frequent, that she was taking her knockout drops not once or twice a month but
every single night
, and every morning she would drag herself out of bed as if from out of a pit of mud.