The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore (43 page)

Reverend Jeb was always there. Allow me to repeat for emphasis, lest that sentence look like a throwaway on the page:
he was always there
. Reverend Jeb was always, always,
always
there when we left our home—in which, during this brief, unhappy period of our lives, Lydia and I tended to barricade ourselves, unless some inescapable errand dragged us into the outside world. There he was, with his bow tie, his houndstooth suit, his blue-and-white-striped scarf and his RadioShack megaphone, timeless, undrainable of the venomous energy that surged in his jaws. Reverend Jeb apparently woke before us and went to sleep after us, if indeed he slept at all. His favorite words were (listed in, I believe, their approximate descending order of frequency in his speech; put these words in capital letters, Gwen, from the megaphone): “HELL,” “GOD,” “CHRIST,” “DAMNATION,” “EVIL,” “BEAST,” “MAN,” “WOMAN,” “SIN,” “SATAN,” “DEVIL,” “ABOMINATION,” “HEAVEN,” “WHORE,” “BABYLON,” “HARLOT,” “IMPURITY,” “UNCLEANLINESS,” “MONSTER.” Somewhere in my inner ear I can still hear the squawk and crunch of his RadioShack
megaphone, and hear his vitriolic oratory thundering from our lawn in the morning, calling us sinners, calling Lydia the whore of Babylon, calling me an abomination before God and man, asserting that there lived in her belly the child of Satan.

“NEITHER SHALT THOU LIE WITH ANY BEAST TO DEFILE THYSELF THEREWITH!”—he screamed at us one morning, reading from a Bible held in the hand that did not hold the RadioShack megaphone—“NEITHER SHALL ANY WOMAN STAND BEFORE A BEAST TO LIE DOWN THERETO: IT IS CONFUSION! DEFILE NOT YE YOURSELVES IN ANY OF THESE THINGS! FOR IN ALL THESE THE NATIONS ARE DEFILED WHICH I CAST OUT BEFORE YOU! AND THE LAND IS DEFILED! THEREFORE I DO VISIT THE INIQUITY THEREOF UPON IT, AND THE LAND ITSELF VOMITETH OUT HER INHABITANTS!”

During downtimes there were just three or four others with him, bundled in their winter coats to make the important pilgrimage to our lawn to harass us, but at peak hours he was surrounded by hundreds of people. They chanted, they held lit candles in their hands and sang their stupid hymnals and liturgies and hosannas and “prayed” at us. Sometimes there were so many of them! Sometimes these glassy-eyed slack-faced adults brought along their adorable glassy-eyed and slack-faced children, who stood right beside their parents with little blond heads all abob with springy ringlets of flax-blond hair, picking their snot-drooling noses with grubby little fingers.

These people looked just like normal people. You would think they might bear some sort of clear distinguishing mark, maybe black spots upon their foreheads or something—but no—outwardly, there was nothing odd about them. If you passed any of these people on the street—out of their proper context—you would not have looked twice at them. But there was something, there was some gruesome
contaminant in their brains that caused them to believe that the earth is six thousand years old, that cavemen rode dinosaurs to work, and that all the beauty of the natural world has been deliberately placed here by the devil like so many red herrings for scientists to find to test our faith in God. What in the world is
wrong
with a civilization in which we must take these people at all seriously? Why must we listen to their “opinions”? Why must we suffer them to jam their feet in the doors of our discourse? Why must we respectfully demur to their “faith”? Why allow their voices into our politics? Why must these intolerant people be tolerated? I refuse to tolerate them! I swear, Gwen, in my least “tolerant” moods I sometimes think that any truly just and wise society would regard religious faith not as some deep noble kind philosophical lofty spiritual bullshit, but merely as an official, DSM-certified
mental illness
! Throw it right in there with schizophrenia! Why not?

Religion says this world is not good enough for us—that there is more, or that there should be. What is religion but the philosophical hatred of the world?

But why did these people hate us? Why were these people bivouacked on our lawn in order to harass us all day and all night? Because they, being good Christians, did not believe in evolution. They did not believe in evolution because the Judeo-Christian tradition is the ultimate anthropo-chauvinist doctrine, which asserts that man has dominion over the earth—that God has told him to be fruitful and multiply, to fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth—that he stands over and against nature, the chosen son of all creation, given by God his mind, his consciousness, all his human “dignity.” And they hated us because of this: because there, swimming in a pouch of fluid in Lydia’s lower abdomen, was living, unassailable proof of human evolution.

T
he tumor in Lydia’s brain was located in a place called Broca’s area. I learned then that some parts of the brain have apparently been named, and some of them have been named, like new continents, after their first cartographers, as I suppose Mr. Broca was the first to map meaning onto this particular part of the brain. Broca’s aphasia (as opposed to Wernicke’s) is a problem not of understanding language but of the production of it, not of listening but of speaking.

Lydia’s aphasia began on that morning she had her seizure (for that was what it was, the doctors informed us). Even after her surgery, Lydia continued having seizures, and her aphasia only got worse, a decline that proceeded unchecked even after she started undergoing speech therapy. When it was first found the tumor was in such an advanced state of growth that the doctors suggested operating as soon as possible. Seven days after her first seizure, I was left alone at home while Tal drove Lydia to the hospital to get her head shaved, her skull sawed open, and a blob of disease cut out of her brain tissue. I forgot to mention that Tal came back into our lives at the beginning of Lydia’s illness (or the beginning of the time after Lydia learned she had an illness). Lydia must have
called her up and asked for her help, being estranged as she was and geographically removed from her family. Tal still lived in Chicago. The night before Lydia’s surgery, Tal brought us a dinner she’d cooked, a dish composed of a sticky yellow coagulum steaming beneath a sheet of aluminum foil in a rectangular pan that she carried up the walkway to our door, having threaded herself with some difficulty through the thick mob of nasty morons encamped in front of our building. Lydia was elated to see her. She had spent much of the last six days sleeping, or else being awake at odd times of the night. That blob in her head had the effect of throwing her circadian rhythms into disarray, like shouting out random numbers at someone who’s trying to do some complicated math in her head, or interrupting a string quartet that’s busy playing a waltz by brattling on a pot with a spoon. So Lydia had just dragged herself messy-haired and puffy-eyed from one of her many long naps when Tal appeared at our door in the late afternoon. The right half of Lydia’s face had been drooping ever since that seizure, gone flabby and slack as if someone had snipped the strings that held that side of her face together.

I was surprised to see Tal physically changed somewhat, though I shouldn’t have been, because the last time I’d lain eyes on her was more than two and a half years before. Gone were her dreadlocks. Before, her hair had looked like something that ought to be dangling from the throat of a bison, but now her hair was a floppy, messy mop of buoyant and bitumen-black coils. Tal and Lydia hugged like long-separated sisters in the foyer after the casserole had been set down. Then she fearlessly embraced me, too. I was all grown up, much more mature and conversant than the wild thing that had once munched off most of the middle finger on her right hand. Now that I had speech, I apologized profusely for my past transgression, and she thankfully accepted my apology with warmth but enough gravitas to indicate that her forgiveness was
sincere, which put me at relative social ease in her company, though every time I allowed my gaze to trickle from her face to her hand, and I saw the finger that abruptly truncated in a stub of scarred skin where once a prehensile digit of flesh and nerves and blood had been, I felt a pang of shame and remorse as tangibly felt in my innards as a pang of hunger. Tal fed and comforted us that night, rescuing us at least temporarily from the disorder, sorrow, and publicity of our current lives. She observed what a state we were in with no one around to help us, and wept with us tears of sympathy.

The next day Tal took Lydia to the hospital for her brain surgery. I pushed back the curtains to watch Tal and Lydia walk out of our apartment building and into the crowd of religious protesters. Reverend Jeb, diligently posted in front of our building on the frozen grass in his houndstooth suit, bow tie, and long blue-and-white-striped scarf, was shouting into the narrow end of his megaphone about man and beast and God. The protesters shielded their children’s eyes so they would not see the faces of the sinners, as they pumped their handmade cardboard picket signs up and down in the air, screamed their throats bloody, pointed their fingers at Lydia and Tal, and shouted “SINNER,” and “DEFILER,” and “WHORE.” They spat at them, and on them if they got close enough. Lydia and Tal pushed through them and made it to Lydia’s car, the paint job of which had recently been ruined by a palimpsest of defacements, and was now covered with prayers and Bible quotes and crude crosses that had been scratched with keys into the silver-blue paint. Tal opened the passenger-side door for Lydia, saw her in, and got into the driver’s side, squeezed the vehicle out of its parallel parking spot and onto the street. The protesters crowded around the car, spitting at it, screaming at the rolled-up windows, drumming with their fists on the doors and hood.

Tal did not come back until long after dark. I’d already watched
Pinocchio
three times. I was starving. Tal reheated some leftovers
for us to eat, and we ate together in near silence. I cried. She cried. Then she pulled herself together, stopped her tears, and washed the dishes. Tal slept on the couch that night, after sharing one of her lumpy white cigarettes with me.

Lydia came home from the hospital the next day. Her hair was completely gone, and her bald head was partially covered with a white bandage. She went immediately to bed.

The doctors had strongly recommended radiation therapy to follow up the surgery, which Lydia refused for several reasons, the main one being that radiation therapy posed a dangerous risk to our unborn child.

Tal moved in with us a few days later. She slept in my old studio, my old room—which was just as well, as I wasn’t painting. I didn’t have the spirit or energy to. We appreciated to no end the advent of her cooking and housekeeping, how it dramatically lightened our burden. Lydia and I had allowed these sorts of pragmatic domestic things to fall into a state of squalid neglect. We almost hadn’t noticed how filthy and cluttered our living space had become until Tal cleaned it up. It was Tal who finally ripped the packing tape off of the flaps of the brown cardboard boxes still stacked up here and there all over the apartment, opened them up and put their contents in their proper places—books on the shelves, clothes in the closets, so on and so forth. She swept and mopped the wood floors and vacuumed the carpets, took out the trash, changed the sheets, did the laundry, washed the dishes, and summarily brought our apartment back into a state of sanity and sanitation, all while Lydia lay languishing, sweaty, naked, and depressed in bed, with her mind on the wane and her womb on the wax, and while I sat around the house uselessly moping in despair.

That’s not quite true. I was useless in other ways, too. I took a lot of long walks that winter, alone, through the neighborhood. I would bundle myself up in disguise, in my oversized green hooded
sweatshirt, a scarf wound around my lower face to further hide my apeness, with dark sunglasses to shield my eyes from the blinding snow. Yes, it was winter in Chicago, and in my heart. Oh, hello again, you bitter Chicago winter! How could I have forgotten you? The bastard had come back for us, icing the streets, leadening the sky. And lo, the bile-throated gnashing-mouthed religious zealots on our lawn did not go away, they did not abandon their posts for one minute no matter how low the mercury sank in its thin glass flute: they kept at it, determined as ever in their mission that was from God to annoy and harass us, so steady and steadfast were their little Protestant work ethics, to stand in front of the door to our building in subfreezing temperatures, singing their glorious songs in angelic harmony with eyes lifted piously heavenward between bouts of indefatigable screaming about the supposed loves and hates of their jealous God.

Whenever I would leave the apartment on my walks I would slip out, fugitively, through the back, in order to escape the crowd of shouting protesters stationed out front. There was a back way: out through the glass doors that slid out onto the patch of backyard we shared with the other residents of the building, through the gate, past the garbage cans, down the alley and out onto the street. This was the first time I discovered the possibility of my independence. With Lydia desperately sick, mostly housebound and mostly bedridden, and me with my itchy restless boredom, I struck out on the streets, prowling the sooty, slushy grids of Hyde Park like a monster swaddled in human clothes.

I walked around on the campus of the University of Chicago, moving in the shadows of the magisterial ivy-strangled buildings—ivy I’d once gleefully climbed in my early days as an animal full of yearning—and over dead yellow and frost-dusted lawns past trees whose brittle leafless branches clicked and chattered together when the wind got strong. As these ambulations always passed without
incident, I suppose I was simply mistaken by the passersby for a student: a quiet, unhappy, unfriendly, brooding, and heavily bundled student with his hands sunk in his pockets and his eyes locked to the ground, and thus by this description not especially distinct from most of the actual students at the University of Chicago.