The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore (41 page)

And then, one morning, one morning amid all this disturbing directionlessness, Lydia rolled—literally—out of bed, and fell facedown on the floor. She was wearing her nightgown. The bedroom was stacked full of unopened cardboard boxes. It was late—almost noon (we rose to greet the day late during this confusing period in our lives). I shook her. She didn’t wake up. I turned her over.

“Lydia?” I said.

“Mmmmnnnnnnnhhhhgh,” she said.

Her eyes opened briefly to slits, and then shut again. Her pretty blond head flopped over to one side, cheek to the carpet. Her face was—was
twitching
. Her cheeks and nose and lips were making all these quick, erratic jerking movements. Her body was jerking and flopping around all over, like a fish just hauled from the sea. I shook her again, again she grumbled incoherently, flopped around and twitched. My confusion quickly became fear. Then I aimlessly ran around the apartment for a while. Then I shook her again.

“Lydia?”

“Mbbrrmmngnnn,” she said, without even opening her eyes. She had quit shaking and twitching, and now she was just lying limp with a lolling head and eyes aflutter on the bedroom floor. I screamed a primal scream of terror. I shook and shook and shook her with my hands, and Lydia continued and continued and continued to not wake up.

I thundered out of the front door of 5120 South Ellis Avenue, Apartment 1A. I ran around for a while in the yard in front of
the building. I was still wearing my pajamas. My sky-blue pajamas were spangled with representations of superheroes, such as Batman and Superman. I looked up at the day through the bare brown canopies of the deciduous trees in front of our apartment building. The sun was out and the light was yellow and bright and crisp, but despite that it was cold, with a cutting wind. The wind whipped up dervishes of dead brown leaves on the sidewalk and in the street. I think this was in October. No one was out on the street, except for a woman in a puffy red coat up ahead of me on the other side of the street, walking a Doberman.

“HELP!” I shouted at her. The Doberman began to woof barbarically at me, and the woman checked him with his leash, and then turned heel and went the other way. Then I ran back into the apartment building, clattered up the entryway stairs and began battering my chimp fists against the door of 5120 South Ellis Avenue, Apartment 2A. I banged on the door until my fists were mushy with bruises. I’m surprised I avoided bashing my hands to bags of blood and broken bones against that door.

“HELP! HELP! HELP!”

The door remained obstinately shut, obstinately silent. I continued to bash my fists against it and scream for help. After I do not know how many minutes or hours of this, another door down the hallway squeaked narrowly open.

“What’s goin’ on out there?” demanded a voice. I wheeled around to look at the door. I could not see the person who stood behind it.

“Help!” I said. “Where’s Mr. Morgan? She won’t wake up! She won’t wake up! HELP HELP HELP HELP HELP!”

“The guy with the parrots?” said the dark sliver of space behind the door. It was a deep, throaty, dry, cracked voice, a sleepy voice, a woman’s voice?

“Yes!”

“He died.” The voice cleared its throat. “He passed away a few months ago.”

What could I do? Gwen, the world was reeling and crashing all around me! My panic had now spiked into an apoplectic crescendo. Griph Morgan? He was DEAD. What if Lydia WAS GOING TO DIE TOO?

Grace under fire? Ha. Far from it. I am not a little ashamed to admit that I was flailing my arms in the air and rattling around in the hallway like a Ping-Pong ball.

“AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH,” I said.

The door down the hallway thumped shut, and my heart fell into my bowels. Then it sailed back up into my throat as I realized that the person behind mysterious door number three had only closed it in order to unhook the chain, and now the door was swinging open to its full width to reveal the possessor of the voice that had spoken, who was a heavyset middle-aged black woman. She was wearing glasses and a bathrobe. She looked and acted like I had just woken her up.

“What the heck are you screaming your head off about?” she said.

“Come on,” I said, and grabbed her hand. “Lydia isn’t waking up.”

“You live downstairs?”

“
Yes!
Pleasepleasepleasepleaseplease
HELP!”

The woman yawned. I dragged her by the hand. She left her door open, and descended the stairs with me in a pair of faded purple slippers. I brought the woman into our apartment. She entered cautiously, knocking with her knuckles on the open front door. I
realized from the disgusted look on her face what a squalid and disreputable mess the house must have seemed to her. In the old days Lydia would never have let it get like this. It is true we had been living mostly out of our suitcases since we moved back several months (was that what they were, not weeks?) before. It is also true that Lydia had not been cooking like she used to, so we had been ordering in lots of pizza (which I liked) and Chinese food (which I also liked), and much of the refuse from these deliverable cuisines—i.e., boxes of various shapes, sizes, and degrees of residual soiledness—was piled up on top of the table and the countertops—on top of most surfaces, actually, including the moving boxes. I’ll own that at a certain point our apartment had developed a bit of a fly problem. It is also possible that our clothes and the sheets on our bed were unclean, as Lydia had not done laundry since moving back to Chicago. I have also neglected to mention that Lydia had some way of acquiring those lumpy pungent-smelling cigarettes she used to indulge in with Tal, and that she had been smoking them so habitually lately that the entire apartment had taken on their odor.

When I led this unknown woman from upstairs into our bedroom, Lydia was awake. Lydia was awake again and standing up in our bedroom, in approximately the same spot of the floor on which she had fallen, right next to her side of our bed. She was still wearing the nightgown in which she slept.

“Hello?” said Lydia. Lydia held her head with one hand in a way that suggested that her skull had cracked open and she was trying to hold it in place so that her brains wouldn’t dribble out. The sunlight coming through the bedroom window caught in the fibers of her hair, which was damp and bedraggled and falling in her face, and made them glow like the filaments of lightbulbs, like a disheveled scramble of tungsten wire. Her face was scrunched in pain, her eyebrows inwardly compressing the flesh above the bridge of her nose into two vertical folds. The bedsheets were in a state of
rumpled disorder, and the air in the room was thick and faintly malodorous with Lydia’s and my comingled sleep-sweat.

Seeing that Lydia was now awake, I darted across the room to her and desperately hugged her legs. I feverishly kissed and kissed and kissed her sticky thighs. She patted me on the head, confused.

“Who… who… who… who……… you…… who…,” she said to the strange woman standing in the doorway of our bedroom. In her pain and confusion, she seemed to have omitted the word
are
from her sentence.

“I’m your neighbor,” she said. “I live upstairs. Your pet monkey came and got me. You in trouble?”

Lydia looked absently around the room. The strange woman continued to stand there in the doorway. Her arms were crossed. Then, as if she had just seen something about Lydia that she hadn’t immediately noticed, she craned her neck forward and squinted, and her arms dropped to her sides.

“Oh, honey,” she said. “Are you okay?”

“I… don’t… don’t… don’t… don’t… don’t…,” Lydia said falteringly, groping in the dark for words. She probably repeated the word
don’t
twenty times. The woman advanced into the bedroom toward us. I released my embrace of Lydia’s sweet-smelling hot sticky bare legs, and I looked up at her face, towering above me. Her face was haunted with confusion the way a haunted house is haunted with ghosts. Lydia sat down heavily on the edge of the bed, and the bedsprings squeaked twice under her body. She looked at me. Then she looked at the woman who was standing in our bedroom. I snuggled next to her on the bed. She looked down at me and said, with agonizingly long pauses before and after the first of these words:

“Where……………………………… are we?”

“We better get you to a doctor,” said the woman. She repaired back upstairs to put on her clothes and shoes while I helped Lydia
into her clothes and then helped myself into mine. I cannot even begin to adequately describe the terror I felt when I realized that I, at this particular moment, seemed to have more control over my faculties than did Lydia. This was the woman who raised me, who had given me consciousness, who had given me everything. She gave me civilization, gave me my mind, gave me everything I knew. And the way she was moving, the way her gaze just landed here and there on various objects in the room the way a fly buzzes around until it lands on something, and then decides to get up and go land on something else—the way she was looking around at everything like she’d just been born, as if she’d just peeled herself fully formed and sinless from the womb, the way she passively, curiously, dead-limbedly submitted to me ineptly, fumble-fingeredly dragging the sleeves of her coat over her arms and cramming her feet into her shoes—it terrified, it fucking
terrified
me. It was as if she had become the child, which meant that
I
had to understudy for the role of the adult. And how pitifully unprepared for the role I was. She was moving so strangely, so unnaturally. One of her arms seemed to be moving too stiffly, like someone had poured a little concrete powder into its veins, and she seemed to have developed a slight limp in her right leg overnight, as if in struggling with some mysterious stranger in a dream, her sciatic nerve had been wounded in her sleep.

The woman from upstairs came back into our apartment, leaving our front door open to the public hallway, with a set of keys tinkling from her finger. She found Lydia and me haphazardly dressed and ready as ever to go. She led us outside to her car, which was parked on the side of the street near Lydia’s. Lydia’s eyes met the violent sunlight in a daze of molish blinks, as if she was emerging to the surface from a year of living underground. The woman helped Lydia into the passenger seat, and I climbed into the back of the chipped old red four-door sedan, and the woman drove us in this
wheezy-engined vehicle to the University of Chicago Medical Center, just four blocks away from the Erman Biology Center, which is where they had taken me, languageless, naked and fresh from the zoo, to begin my induction into human civilization. The upstairs woman knew the way. She may have said something about how she worked here as a nurse on the night shift and slept in the daytime, which was why she knew what to do and where to go. But maybe not. My mind was already in a nauseous dream-state of panic, a panic that poured oil all over my brain for the whole day and made it difficult for things to stick in it properly, and so my memories are jumbled and unclear of going to the hospital—of our shoes clopping across the parking lot—of somebody speaking with somebody else at a desk—yes, definitely a big pink desk—of a clipboard of complicated paperwork that had to be filled out—were there forms to be filled in, Lydia?—how did you fill them in?—what could you have possibly written down to satisfy them? There was paperwork, there was a vast waiting room, there was a big pink desk. There were antiseptic and sharply ammoniac odors, there were shiny sleek-waxed floors that caused our shoes to crunch and squawk, there was a fish tank full of tropical fish, on the floor of which a ceramic man in a diving suit seemed to have just discovered a tiny chest of ceramic treasure half-buried in a bed of gravel made pink by a colored fluorescent tube overhead. Wait a moment—where did the woman who lived upstairs go, the woman who had driven us to the hospital? Did she vanish from our company at some point in that long, hellish day of fear and sorrow? She must have, because I remember we took a cab home after everything at the hospital. Did we ever thank her properly? Did we ever see her again?

Here is what I remember from that day. I remember a room with some sort of giant machine in it. The machine was straight out of a science fiction movie set aboard a spaceship a thousand years in the future. It was a huge shiny white metal donut, standing up on its side,
with a bed in it. Lydia was made to lie down with towels bunched around her body and a pillow beneath her knees, and she was told to put her head inside this cylinder of white metal. Then the bed was raised up by a robot and slid with buzzing motor into the yawning hole in the middle of the machine. For some reason there was music, melancholy opera music, playing from a stereo in the room. Why? I was not allowed to go into the room with her. I had to sit and watch it through a window in the wall of an adjoining room. Whatever this machine was doing to her, it took a
really
long time doing it, and as it did what it was doing the machine made chattering, bleeping, warbling, and gnashing noises that sounded exactly like noises a flying saucer would make as it hovers slowly to earth before a wonderstruck and fearful crowd, all points and murmurs and
ooh
s and
aah
s, and do they come in peace? Why was there opera music blaring in that room? After they took Lydia out of this machine, we were made to wait again. Long bouts of waiting and uncertainty—that’s what I remember most about that day. Waiting. Back in the waiting room. Was it the same waiting room, or another one? I remember a room filled with uncomfortable chairs upholstered in an ugly tongue-colored cloth, I remember coffee tables littered with bright shiny magazines, pages that crinkled between the fingers, I remember a TV with the news on and the sound off. I remember that Lydia had to lie down across several of the pushed-together seats in the waiting room and take a nap, a long nap. I remember small Styrofoam cups of coffee and thin red plastic wands for stirring in the sugar and milk. I remember a water cooler whose blue plastic tank was flanked by a tall cylinder, from the bottom of which one could pull a conical paper cup to fill with the tepid water that trickled from a spigot; when one depressed the spigot’s lever the water tank would belch up a cluster of bubbles, and the conical paper cup in your hand would quickly become floppy with dampness. And then there was the aquarium
with the ceramic treasure-hunting diver in it: I whiled away some of those sluggish, agonizing hours watching the angelfish dumbly swishing their flat, triangular, translucent bodies from one end of their ten-gallon universe to the other and back again. I remember that day as a Morse code of waiting and testing, a dash-dot-dash-dot-dash of long periods of waiting punctuated by brief periods of frenzy and terror, time spent with the doctors, with their scientific languages and ear-needling machinery. I remember holding and squeezing Lydia’s hand—more for my own comfort than for hers, I’m afraid—as the doctors turned off the lights, and in the darkness proceeded to clip black sheets of glossy film to a white glowing plate on the wall. I remember the doctors pointing to certain areas of the images. I remember the wobbling sound of the film sheets in the doctors’ hands before they clipped them to the plate of light. These floppy sheets of shiny black film, when pressed flat against the glow of the plate on the wall, contained pictures that were thus: a bright white outline of a person’s head, emerging sharp against the darkness around it, and inside of the outline, an intricately branching lump of gray cauliflower. Inside the lump of cauliflower, in one cluster of its fat lumpy branches, was a dark blot. The doctors pointed to this blot as they spoke. I remember these doctors bandying about a certain very beautiful and musical polysyllabic word that nevertheless was a word to be said in a low voice and with a grave face on, which was “oligodendroglioma”—this complicated eight-syllable song of Greek roots lilting many times from the doctors’ lips.