The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore (44 page)

I sat in on courses at the university. I would slip into lecture halls while the classes were in session, with my green hooded sweatshirt pulled low over my face, and take as inconspicuous a seat as I could toward the back of the room. I sat in on courses in literature, history, philosophy, economics, art history, physics, biology. I wanted to know everything I possibly could. I wanted to devour the world. I also spent a lot of time in the reading room of that cathedral of a library, sitting at one of the long desks that furnish the high-ceilinged, architecturally sepulchral, and ceremonially symmetrical room, whose walls are outfitted and ornamented with monster faces as rubber-mask-like as my own, their stone mouths carven in permanent howls of laughter or scowls of disgust, who have watched generations of readers with those fixed expressions implicative of emotional violence. In this room I would sit and while away hours to avoid the sadness of my home, where Lydia lay in bed with a decaying mind while a band of chimeras more grotesque even than these shouted and cackled at her from outside. Here among the dust motes flurrying in the light shafts that filtered through the multicolored panes of the stained-glass windows, I sat under a lamp at one of the long wooden mess-hall tables, getting up now and then to browse the shelves and unshelve books, which I splayed open on the table and read all day long. A lot of my education happened that winter, as I sat, usually alone or nearly alone in that huge solemn room, with the gloom of November in the windows, and in the back of my mind the gloom of the illness of the one person in my life I have truly loved.

Sometimes, if I did not feel like sitting in on classes or visiting the library, my solitary walks took me through a leafless-treed and
snow-covered Washington Park. One day I was walking along the periphery of the park, clutching my coat tight to my weird little body and wading through rattling heaps of dead leaves, my feet crunching the frost-crystallized grass, keeping away from the other people in the park—just smatterings of people here and there who stood in the park wrapped up like mummies and bouncing on their knees to keep their blood moving, who had come to the park to unleash their dogs to let them scamper and arf around for a few minutes before returning home to hibernate away the winter like all good mammals should. And I was walking
crunch-crunch
under the sleeping trees with my gaze downturned and my head roiling with dark thoughts, when I saw the dead parrot.

It was a macaw. A red and green, yellow, blue, and very dead parrot, lying on the ground in the frosted-gray grass. It was unmistakably one of the recently deceased Griph Morgan’s parrots. One of the parrots whose coos, screeches, and squawks had once harmonized roughly with Griph’s bagpipes, and had once colored my dreams red, green, yellow, and blue with unusual cycles of affinity and association. There he lay, stiff and ice-coated at my feet. He was frozen. His steely gray horn of a beak was stuck in a slightly unhinged position, as if in midspeech, or in reaching out to accept a remunerative cookie or cracker. His eyes and tongue had dissolved, leaving two gray sunken holes that looked back into the inside of his now-hollow skull where a walnut-sized brain had once been. The barbs of his colorful feathers were brittle with ice. I guessed that he had probably died at first frost. Where were the others? Griph had shared his apartment with ten birds. I suppose they had been released into the “wild” when the vandyked, bean-boiling, and backgammon-playing Griph Morgan passed away. I hoped that he was buried with his bagpipes. I hoped that the other nine birds had enough wisdom to fly south when the weather began to turn. But probably they did not. A creature raised in captivity with central
heating to eliminate the seasons remains ignorant of the paths of his ancestors. So the birds had most likely simply settled in the branches of the closest thing they could find to the equatorial rain forests where their blood told them to go—which happened to be the trees of Washington Park. And when the winter came, they dropped dead from the trees. I imagined this parrot, an aristocratic flame of an animal, his bright red, green, yellow, and blue plumage contrasting ludicrously against the sepia-toned gray-and-brownness of Chicago, a bird colored like a magician’s flash-and-burst of obfuscatory smoke perched in the dying black-branched trees of Washington Park, chattering, hauking, fluffing up his neck feathers with his beak and smoothing them down again with passerine prissiness—outside in the world, free at last, and without a clue as to how to be a real bird in it, blithely whistling and chirping away, occasionally singing snippets of Scots Gaelic folk ballads, and shouting out with ebullient gusto at the bemused passers-by from his perch in the tree: “HELLO!”—shouting it as a salutation at first, as if cordially inviting small talk—“HELLO, HELLO!”—then later, as the people turned their faces away, in anger—“HELLO!”—and then, finally, as winter descended, in desperation—“HELLO?… HELLO?… HELLO?” And then he died.

I nudged the bird with my shoe. The frozen parrot was light as nothing, it moved across the ground so easily. Now my eyes were secreting tears. They turned to ice in my eyelashes. I looked up to see if anyone was looking at me: they were not. I tried to dig a little grave in the ground for this frozen parrot: I could not. I clawed my long purple fingers bloody trying to dig a hole, but the dirt was so tightly compacted and solidly frozen that to dig a hole in it would have been impossible without a shovel. So I gave up and turned back for home. I felt like a failure, and in many more ways than just in my apparent inability even to successfully dig a grave for a deceased parrot. But as I was heading home, as I was walking down
Fifty-fifth and about to cross Cottage Grove, waiting for the light to change, I realized that it makes no ceremonial sense to bury a bird. Just that day, or maybe the day before, I had been sitting in the reading room of the library perusing a volume of Herodotus. I had come across a passage in which the historiographer related—with a clear note of revulsion—the Persian funeral custom, which was to lay the body of the dead stark naked on a platform in the open air at the very top of a tall tower, and let the birds pick the bones clean. Herodotus found the practice disgusting, unbefitting his notions of human dignity. For him, the only dignified methods of getting rid of a stiff were either to vaporize it with purgatory fire or bury it in the ground. On first thought I agreed with his judgment, but when I had another think on it I realized that perhaps there may actually be a counterintuitive metaphorical beauty to the Persian custom. For cremation implies a total erasure, a vanishing act: as goes the soul, so must go the body, up and away in a puff of useless smoke. Burial—especially the kind where the king is buried with all his things—implies the opposite, a clinging refusal to let go, even of one’s earthly property. Whereas to dissolve the body in the bellies of birds seems rather to give back what is nature’s to nature. By extension I therefore reasoned that it would make no semiotic sense to bury a bird. That bird—and granted it may have lain there until spring before the body defrosted—would be slowly disappeared by the weather, decomposed and reconstituted into the stuff of the world, without ceremony, without any sign or token or record at all to mark that it had once lived, spoken, and died in the world.

I admit that like any true poet, I am vulnerable to romance. Do not think, Gwen, that I am an entirely rational creature, or conversely that I’m too irrational to consider and reflect upon my own moments of illogic. There is such a thing called confirmation bias, which is when the mind attaches significance to something insignificant, singling out a seemingly supernatural coincidence from all
the chaotic junk in the world around it and funnels all its prayer and confidence into it because it wants it to be true—which is the source of much faith, much love, much religion, much magic, much hope, much hopeless error. I am aware of my hypocrisy when, in certain moods, I rail and rage against religion, then turn right around and find myself susceptible to belief in ghosts, in the prophecy of dreams, in spooky action at a distance. If I am vulnerable to these things it is because I have become human. I was the chimp who tapped on the box. If I rail and rage against religion, it is partly because religion is a magical belief structure that has hurt me personally, whereas secular magic has offered me hope. If I hate the irrational while being irrational myself, it is because my mind is trapped, like all human minds are trapped, between the rational understanding of the world sternly provided by empirical science (which includes the knowledge that I myself am irrational) and the ancient crazy wild beautiful brazen nonsense, the spookiness that all human consciousnesses are vulnerable to, even the hardest of scientists. It’s this human vulnerability to spookiness that had Sir Isaac Newton, when he wasn’t busy laying the foundations of classical physics, earnestly fiddling around with powders and potions and flasks and beakers, searching for the philosopher’s stone, for the elixir of life, for the secret to the transmutation of lead to gold. This is why I do not believe the argument that the light of empirical science will guide us on the path of progress, toward utopia, toward a great rational peace when nation no longer wages war against nation over pettifogging disagreements about invisible and almost certainly nonexistent things. If we ever arrived at this scientific utopia, there would be no religions, yes, and never again would a drop of blood be shed over such lunatic stupidities—but also we would produce no art; whether this is throwing the baby out with the bathwater I’m still not entirely sure. Even if we ever arrived at such a rational peace, when we got there we would no longer be human.

M
eanwhile, after months of idleness, and now with the constant influx of medical bills like so many matches on the fire, our household finances were dwindling to nil. I had only a vague grasp of these things, being as I was then and am now very bad with money. Among the members of the little nuclear family unit that we had grown into out of necessary closeness, Tal was the one who mostly handled these issues. I don’t know how much money there was, but it may have been nothing, or nearly nothing, or we may have gone deeply in the red. Tal balanced our books, cleaned the apartment, kept things in order and cooked our meals. She was a decent cook in her own right, though I would have preferred Lydia’s cooking. Tal was capable of making something out of nothing in the kitchen; she could immaculately conceive a meal out of whatever pathetic smattering of ingredients happened to be knocking around in the cupboards and refrigerator—but satiating as her dishes were, these meals tasted ever increasingly of our bitter poverty. Lydia was out of commission. Even when she was awake, she just puttered around our apartment with the vacant eyes of a starving person, picking things up and putting them back down, often babbling incoherently, or else remaining disturbingly silent.
If she wanted to salt her food at the table she would point at the saltshaker and say, “The… the… the… the…………… the…” Meaning, of course, “Please pass the salt.” Lydia’s silences grew longer, darker, more profound. Her words were leaving her. One by one the elements of her vocabulary were packing up their things and vacating their apartments in the condemned building of her mind. It was such a heartbreaking experience, I could never adequately describe what it was like to live with her in the following months. The only places Lydia ever went were to the doctor or to her speech pathologist, who was unable to prevent the words from crumbling away from her. Every word she spoke was preceded by and followed by such long silences that it was impossible to remember how her sentence had begun. Tal assured me that because of the nature of Lydia’s aphasia, because it was in Broca’s area and not Wernicke’s, she could understand us when we spoke to her, although she herself had greater and greater difficulty speaking. Her mind had become half-silvered, like Clever Hands’s. Her eyes were one-way mirrors, the windows to her soul opaque on the outside. She could see out; we increasingly could not see in. She slept all day. Her belly got bigger as my child grew obstinately inside her. I, Bruno, who was perfectly healthy, had become deeply nervous and unsure whether I would be able to handle the travails and responsibilities of my coming fatherhood—much less how she would handle her coming motherhood.

Once, after I arrived home through the sliding glass back doors to avoid the protesters, and shook the snow powder off my coat and thunked the mush off my boots against the doorframe, coming in from one of my daylong journeys that had taken me through the park and then through the vaulted and chandeliered reading room of the library and through the pages of whatever I was reading at the time (I think it was Gibbon’s
Decline and Fall
), Tal asked me in a solemn tone to sit with her at the kitchen table. She wanted
to talk with me about something. She was not angry, but I recognized the note of sternness, of getting-down-to-businessness in her voice when she requested my audience, and so I instantly began to dread whatever was coming. To her credit, at least she softened the hideous blow to my well-being she was about to deliver by preparing me a cup of hot chocolate. She knew precisely how I liked it, with five small slimy marshmallows bobbing on the surface, slowly dissolving into the hot tan liquid. I blew on the surface of my hot chocolate, and sipped.

“Bruno,” she said, her palms anchored on the surface of the kitchen table and her fingers intertwined. “You know we’re running low on money. I’m doing the best I can to take care of Lydia. But I’m afraid you need to help out, too.”

I gulped in mild terror, scalding the back of my throat with too big and quick an intake of hot chocolate. The thing was this: I had to get a job. I needed to “pull more of my weight” around our household. When Lydia and I returned to Chicago, Tal had been working at the lab again. She worked at the lab for most of the day, then came home to us to housekeep and nurse. And still there was no money. She was wearing herself thin. Norman Plumlee was still the director of the Behavioral Biology Lab at the Erman Biology Center. She said she could get me a job working at the lab. Now that I had learned language, apparently I was even more valuable to science, and Norm wanted me back. They were willing, she said, to pay for my services, since this time around I was considered conscious enough to provide consent, and therefore would no longer be treated like a slave. I had freed myself from the animal slavery of my silent mind, only to be offered my previous job at pittance wages. I would be able to help pay for things around the house. The way Tal put it, there seemed to be no option. Bruno was all grown up now, and tight circumstances demanded it was time for him to go to work. I, Bruno, nobly, albeit begrudgingly, decided to accept
her offer—or command, or whatever it was. I had to go back to the lab. I would do it, but only for Lydia. Simply put, we needed money, and I, like any whore, had nothing to sell but myself. So I sold myself back to science, and back to the lab I went.