The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore (5 page)

Two young chimps, looking at a hat lying on the grass of their habitat. One, Céleste, the younger, is smaller with very dark fur, and her big ears stick far out of her head like wingflaps. The other, Bruno, the elder, has lighter and coarser reddish fur that he has inherited from Red Peter, his father, and smaller ears that lay flatter against the sides of his head. Both of them have the round heads and snowy beard-tufts of preadolescence.

At first we were a little afraid of it. What is this thing? Whence did it come? We look up—we cast our humble gazes upon the foreboding thing we have seen every day of our brief existences: the
Wall. Massive, starkly unadorned and unreachable, the cold, gray, steeply sloping bowl of concrete, over and beyond which lies the unknown part of the universe. This must have come from beyond the Wall, a place purported to exist, but for which we have as yet no a priori proof. The only things we know exist are the ones we see marching past the Wall. Are they the things of this world, or only their shadows? We don’t know. But the hat: this is no shadow of a hat, this is a hat itself. Only we do not know that it is called “hat.” We do not know what it is. We do not know what it does. Is it friend or foe? For a while we observe the hat from a safe distance. Then I, the young Bruno—who at this point is simply another baby chimp of no particularly remarkable genius—warily approach the thing. A hand reaches out, followed by a thin hirsute arm—to touch it. I only barely brush the edge of the object with the tips of my fingers, and reflexively jerk my hand back at once. Wait!… It did me no harm, no harm. Tentatively, tentatively, the hand reaches out to touch it again. The hand makes contact, and there it remains. Emboldened, I go so far as to pick it up. Céleste approaches now. She places her head on my right shoulder, looks on at the thing, which is now in my hands—my God!—it’s so light, nearly effortless to lift. Céleste puts her hand on the brim of the hat. We touch it together, peacefully, we explorers, we two little scientists, we run our fingers along its contours, its edges, its angles, its convexities and concavities, feeling its texture, the taut bouncy waxen feeling of the tightly woven lacquered straw, the smooth and delicate feeling of the silken hatband, bespangled with the images of blue and red and purple flowers.

There was probably, as these episodes tend to go, a cluster of humans gathered by now at the ledge of the Wall, snapping their photographs, pointing at us and swooning with remarks about the adorableness of our behavior toward the hat. As my attentions at the moment were directed far, far elsewhere, I cannot recall if
anyone noticed us or not, but if they did, Céleste and I paid them no heed. And it was Céleste, Céleste who discovered what the thing was, in the human sense, “for”: she was putting various parts of her body into the bowl of the hat, until finally she put the top of her head into it, and when she removed her hands the hat remained there of its own accord. I gasped—in shock and laughter, I gasped at the sight of Céleste “wearing” the hat, and pointed, and collapsed onto the ground in paroxysms of mirth.

Collecting myself, I removed the hat from her head and put it in like manner on mine—partly, I admit, out of jealousy, and partly in order to demonstrate to her what someone looked like underneath the object, which produced similar fits of laughter in her. We passed the hat back and forth in this way many times, by turns reducing one another to helpless jellies of giggling. Unfortunately this show we were creating attracted the attention of Cookie, my mangy philistine of an older brother, my bully, the big hairy Esau to my crafty little Jacob, three years my senior and already nearly as big as an adult, who lumbered up to us and snatched the hat from our young hands. Céleste and I howled our protestations. He would not give it back, would not play along. He bore the thing no special love, nor even curiosity: he did not wish us to have it merely because he saw that it gave us joy. Yes, he touched it, too, he too put it on his head, but I am certain that the subtleties of its beauty were lost on him. He scoffed at the femininity of the article. I tried to seize it from him; he pushed me down. This enraged me. He ran away with the hat and we immediately gave chase, she first and I clambering to my feet and hands to follow. In this way the squabble erupted into a full-on disruptive spectacle, with all three of us stumbling and raging pell-mell and helter-skelter over the logs and trees and rope-swings and other primitive furnishings of our habitat, hooting and shrieking, a whirlwind of hairy brown limbs, an ecstasy of fumbling, one body fleeing and two in pursuit. The
humans may have thought we were “playing.” Maybe Cookie was, but Céleste and I were in dead fucking earnest. The chase ended only when Rotpeter—the Alpha Male and sole gubernative power over our pitifully tiny civilization, our sovereign, our lawgiver and enforcer, our Draco, Solon, Hammurabi and Caesar, oh you Leviathan, you, Rotpeter, you petty patriarch—dropped down from a tree and interpolated himself between us. And what did this microcosmic Ozymandias do? First he snatched the hat away from his eldest son, who, trembling before the greater authority, fell back. Then Rotpeter briefly and unceremoniously examined the hat, snorted his disapproval, and, determining that he could neither smoke it nor fuck it and therefore had little reason to tolerate its continuing to exist, with feet, fists, fingers, and teeth he beat, ripped, tore, and chewed it, right before our eyes, to shreds. We, the children, wept in anguish.

Rotpeter decimated that hat and disseminated the loose scraps of straw until they were indistinguishable from the rest of the offal strewn about the floor of our habitat, and the hatband of diaphanous silk, bespangled with blue and red and purple flowers, he spent the rest of the day munching and sucking on until it disappeared inside him, though tattered remnants of it later reappeared in his black and steaming globes of stool.

But I promised to speak of sex.

So then, damn the torpedoes and full Freud ahead: my mother. The same people who would later claim responsibility for my case—even though it was actually only Lydia, all Lydia, and me, just us, all the others really had very little to do with it (but these are outrages and injustices I will discuss in greater detail later)—these same people, the researchers at the Behavioral Biology Laboratory at the University of Chicago’s Institute for Mind and Biology, once tried to teach my poor stupid mother a little sign language. It was a bust, a miserable failure. The spirit of language thrived not in her.
They were able to trick her, through some elementary-level Skinnerian operant conditioning, into making a few signs of ASL; her entire active vocabulary made possible but a single mandative sentence, which, feebly enacted on her part and loosely interpreted on theirs, amounted to: “Give [me]
that!
” (The second word being implied and the last a vigorous waving in the general direction of the coveted object.) It was impressive that they were able to teach her even that. This is how I remember my mother. I see her lazing in the cradle of a certain hammock in our habitat in which she was wont to laze. This hammock is made of thin brown ropes diagonally knotted together to form a pattern of many diamonds. One end of the hammock is secured around the limb of a tree, and the other around the sturdy wooden post of a jungle-gym-like structure. When my mother lazes in it, the bottom of the hammock sags until it is only an inch or two above the ground at the lowest point; when she is not lazing in it, the hammock contains the phantom of her presence, and in the part of the hammock where she puts most of her weight the diamonds are loose and stretched, warped and misshapen. In my memory of my mother, in the eidetic image of her that my brain projects onto the screen of my inner eyelids when I close them and work to recall her, she is lazing in this hammock. In her lap is a baby chimpanzee, less than a year old, looking much like a human infant only much more hirsute. This baby chimpanzee is me. (Does it seem incongruous to you that I should make an appearance in my own childhood memory? The eyes of the mind can easily leave the body—how else would you know your double when you meet him in a dream?) My mother strokes her long purple fingers through the thin fur on my head. Her eyes glisten with love and awe in the way the eyes of any mother of any species glisten with love and awe. (With the possible exceptions of guppies and hamsters and other ridiculous animals who spawn a teeming cloud or pile of offspring and then immediately eat most of them.)
My mother kisses the top of my head. The folds of her body, in which I am half-enveloped, are warm and comforting. The love between these creatures, between the mother and the infant, is entirely without words, and needs none to explain it. I loved her. In a strange way, I love her still, and there’s the rub. There’s so much I would like to tell her, but I have entirely forgotten the wordless vocabulary of my animal innocence.

Have you ever read
Paradise Lost
, Gwen? I stumbled across a battered copy of it in the course of my wanderings across this blighted earth, by which I mean I once stole a copy of it from the University of Chicago library. And God, did I fall in love with the Devil. Could it be more fitting that Lucifer is a master orator? Demonic rhetoric, Satanic language!

I have heard, Gwen—spoken, as can be expected, in tones of dreary admonition—that self-authorship is the bourgeois fantasy par excellence, as in Milton’s Satan: “Who saw when this creation was?… We know no time when we were not as now, know none before us, self-begot, self-raised.” But why condemn the rebel angel for the fantasy of self-invention? Who could help feeling seduced by Satan’s poetry when compared to the dull, paternalistically castigatory abashments of God? As Blake points out, the reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels & God, and at liberty when of Devils & Hell, is because he was a true Poet and of the Devil’s party without knowing it. Well, I too am a true poet, but unlike Milton and more like Satan, I know it! And also like Satan, I made myself with words. I wrote myself into the world. With my own hand I reached into the cunt of the cosmos and dragged myself kicking and screaming out—HELLO, WORLD. HELLO, YOU BASTARDS. HERE I AM. IT’S ME, BRUNO, THE BOURGEOIS APE.

(And also like Satan, I’m a beautiful loser.)

It is impossible, however, to write a poem, or anything for that
matter, about an unfallen Adam and Eve, because I cannot imagine them as having language. In Paradise there is nothing to say. Eden was sacrificed not for the pleasure of a fruit, but for the pleasure of the word. Now we have shame and pain and knowledge of death and whatnot, but at least we can talk about it. And talk and talk and talk! And maybe—I think—maybe it was even worth the trade. Sometimes the things of this world are less beautiful than their shadows. What is poetry but the shadowplay of consciousness?

But wait, Gwen—wait! I have just recalled that there is another important memory of my mother, buried somewhere deep in the bedrock of my brain, which resurfaces sometimes in my dreams: an extremely vague memory of accompanying my mother to the laboratory. Look: the clouds of forgetfulness are pulling apart! What lies behind them? Shine forth, my memory, show us the truth. Was it the same laboratory where I would later be experimented on? No, it couldn’t be. It didn’t look the same. It was a different room. The lighting was different. I remember a strong yellow tint to the room. Was it the floor? The tiles must have been yellow. I was an infant; I was probably in a position to observe the floor more closely than other aspects of the room. How did I get there? How old am I? Look at me!—you could almost fit me in the palm of your hand, I must be only a month or two old. There are others there with us, humans, scientists—as always, scientists…. They’re not in the same room with us, though. They’re crowded together just outside a glass wall. We can see them, and we can hear them through holes in the glass. They’re speaking to my mother. She isn’t even curious about what they’re saying. But I am. I remember my urgent curiosity, I remember listening to the burbling waves of vocalization streaming from the mouths of the humans. Their faces are all indistinct in my memory. Mostly I’m looking at their legs. Their pants, the workaday shoes they wear to the lab, the flapping tails of their thin
white coats. There is a strange sort of machine in the room—
that
I recall clearly. A computer—that’s what it must have been. There is a kind of platform with a padded surface in front of the computer, where my mother sits and attempts to manipulate the machine. There is a screen in it, and a long plastic tube coming out of the side of it that spits treats into a shallow plastic tray bolted to the bottom of the computer screen. To me it is a fascinating, alien curiosity, a thing of signs and wonders. Certain images appear and disappear on the screen, weird hieroglyphic emblems throbbing with artificial light. My mother clumsily touches the things that appear on the screen, and sometimes a computerized female voice utters some magic word in response, and then sometimes the symbols touched will disappear, and sometimes a peanut encased in a colorful shell of hard chocolate rolls happily through the narrow plastic tube in the side of the machine and lands
click-rattle
in the plastic tray, and my mother greedily snatches it from the tray and inserts the sweet little reward into her cheeks, and commences immediately to touch the screen again, hoping for another. She never gave me any of her food rewards. To my mother it must have simply been some glowing totemic god-in-a-box that chose to distribute peanut M&Ms at times according only to the dictate of its unknowable whimsy. My mother was a creature of such intellectual poverty, I’m sure she was doing little else besides randomly punching the screen and praying for her chocolate-covered peanuts. Meanwhile, when she wasn’t cradling me in her arms while touching the screen, I, Bruno, was permitted to bumble around on the floor of the lab, playing with various objects that the scientists had strewn around to distract my attention while they performed experiments on my mother. How many times did this scene occur? I haven’t a clue. I was so young, I barely remember. I cannot remember if what I just described is a unique memory of a particular event, or a patchwork of many different memories of many similar events that occurred
over a prolonged period of time. In hindsight, it must be the latter. I remember the babble of the scientists all around me in the room. I remember a certain rubber ball that I played with while my mother was busy pathetically flunking test after test. The ball was blue, with a yellow stripe in the middle bisected in the exact center by a narrower red stripe. I remember the artificial and oddly intoxicating gluey rubbery smell of the ball. I remember enjoying these visits. I remember sitting in my mother’s warm soft lap as she punched the colorful glowing screen over and over, trying to coax peanut M&Ms from the frivolous demon in the wall. I remember listening to the people talking, trying to discern the mechanics of this weird world to which I was a newcomer, a foreigner, a stranger. I remember feeling myself being wrapped in the soft blanket of their babble. I remember—very, very vaguely—I remember even beginning to feel at home with the sinuous ribbonlike rhythms of human conversation fluttering in and out of my ears, trickling like cool water over the smooth stone of my brain, carving designs into my infantile and infinitely malleable consciousness.