The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore (6 page)

My soul then was a thing of darkness, naked and devoid of form.

I remember this so vaguely that I’m not even sure whether I’m remembering it or making it up. But there it is, Gwen, you may have it.

But as for the earliest warning signs of my sexual perversion? Let’s talk about love. I felt love for my mother. I felt love for Céleste. But was there anything at all erotic in these loves? Did I feel anything remotely Oedipal in my biological mother’s warm, soft, stupid lap? Was there even the slightest tingle of preadolescent sexuality in my close bond with Céleste? No. No, no,
no
, absolutely not. Now, I do not assert this because I’m an anti-Freudian; I only assert this because my childhood was not innocent of sexual longings. In fact, I was obsessed with the sexual side of things, the coital, the carnal,
the warm creamy slippery fucking fuckal. From an abnormally, maybe even unhealthfully precocious age I was inwardly consumed with a fierce, insane, insatiable lust that was always rushing and crackling its way through my soul like a match held to a pile of dry straw.

I never felt—even very early on—I never felt like I quite belonged to the same species as my mother or Céleste. I loved Céleste, but I did not lust after her. I did not lust after her because she was a chimp. My erotic desires lay elsewhere, yes, even then. For years in the course of my early development I kept my burgeoning desires secret. Or at least I thought I did. In retrospect, surely my mother knew. She could see something in the way I watched the human women just beyond the glass wall or above the ledge of the greater wall—
the
Wall—some bright animus thrashing like an electric snake in the pits of my eyes that was more than just the chaste fascination of the amateur anthropologist. For fascinated indeed was I by their forms—but it was a fascination mingled in with the surging juices of young lust. And why
should
I have been, why should I ever have been sexually attracted to other chimps? By the time I was six years old I had seen thousands and thousands and maybe I don’t know
millions
of human beings, I had practically become an
aficionado
, a
connoisseur
of the human form, I noticed all their interesting differences in size, shape, texture, tone, style—upon seeing a human for the first time I immediately remarked to myself upon that particular human’s differentiating characteristics, height, heft, age, color, and sex, and if the sex was female then boy oh boy did I notice so much more!

When did my love of Céleste become tainted with physical revulsion? I’d seen Céleste scrounge parasites out of her fur and
eat
them! Am I expected to be attracted to a girl of such grotesque manners? Hell, she eats
my
parasites! But wait!—
I
do that, too! They’re good! No!
No!
Go ahead and eat your own delicious goddamn
parasites, Céleste, but Bruno’s moving up in the world!—even if it means leaving you—even if I do, in a very primitive and uncomplicated way, love you. Female chimps—when they’re in estrus their ugly plump vulvae inflate and swell out behind them, and they drag around these bloated pink balloons of flesh between their legs as they walk, their sphincters oftentimes plugged with repugnant globs of partially excreted shit. And those flat gray mealy breasts and protruding bellies and rangy hairy bodies and bald heads and scrunched-up noses? No, I’m sorry. It’s true, I am a deviant and depraved pervert: I have no desire to have sex with other chimps. But look—
look!
—look at all those
human
girls we see sashaying in all their anthropic glory past the Wall all day: all that long hair growing insanely out of the tops of their heads, those nearly hairless lower bodies propelled bipedally forward on those powerful, columnar legs, those massive round breasts so absurdly disproportionate to their bodies! So, as my father was loping around the habitat indiscriminately screwing any moist sluice he could find—my mother, my aunt, a
frog
for God’s sake—I had always been secretly pining for humans, longing to someday get to slither between the legs of those dazzling
sapiens sapienettes
I saw clip-clocking past me all day in those high-heeled shoes that make their calves taut and thrust their beautiful bulbous asses up, up, up in the air, just a little closer to God, like a streaming buffet of delicious desserts on display for Bruno behind impenetrably thick glass, to be admired but not to be touched.

Do I digress? Very well, then, I digress. I am large, I contain multitudes.

So there was Lydia, standing in the doorway of our habitat, bending to the ground and beckoning to me with her arms—so pink and smooth and fragrant—and into these arms I scrambled, and wrapped my hairy self around her neck, rested my head in the crook of her shoulder, and tossed a last parting glance upon my
family as she took me away. And Lydia held my hand and guided me through the first chapters of Bruno’s bildungsroman, the journey into manhood my life has been ever since. I did not bid good-bye to my mother, I did not bid good-bye to my brother, I did not bid good-bye to my father, and I did not even bid good-bye to Céleste. Instead, I went with Lydia. I went with the human. I went with love, I went with lust, I went with language. I went with Lydia.

H
ello, Gwen. This will probably be a brief session, I’m feeling moody and ill at ease today. We’ve only got twelve days to go before our performance of
Woyzeck
, and I fear my actors are still woefully unprepared. I was forced to make some criminally drastic cuts in the script owing to the fact that most of my actors cannot speak. Leon has volunteered to play the role of the Doctor whose psychological experiments drive the beleaguered Woyzeck deeper into madness, and I have convinced Sally—the assistant researcher who works part-time here at the research center on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays—to play Marie, the widow whom I, Woyzeck, murder in a fit of jealous rage at the climax of the play. The problem with Sally, though, is that although her verbal faculties are superb, her memory is not, and she’s prone to forget her lines, to say nothing of the fact that her acting is forced and wooden. Her delivery is off and her timing is bad even when she does remember her lines. All the other parts will have to be played by chimps, none of whom can speak a word of English, though a few of them can make a crude handful of ASL signs. Damn it, they’re
impossible
to work with. The researchers(-slash-wardens) who keep and study me patiently suffer the whims of my artistic genius, but all
they really want me to do is help them teach language to the other chimps—a task I find fundamentally boring and depressing. Being a scientific anomaly is such a burden, Gwen, I can’t even begin to tell you. I’ve spent so much of my life in starkly decorated cool white rooms from which escape is impossible. Why are laboratories always so uncomfortable? Always the same sepulchral décor, the same blue-green glass and concrete floors and whitewashed walls, the same ever-present ambient murmur of computers and fluorescent lights and air-conditioning. So of course I appreciate that they have allowed me to more or less furnish my own modest chambers according to my own taste. This couch we’re sitting on is my own. That is
my
coffee table, those are
my
books, and that’s my painting on the wall there.

When Leon was here yesterday he tried to smuggle in a bottle of Scotch for me. He was found out, the bottle was confiscated, and now poor Leon is severely on the outs with the management—which is infuriating, ludicrous. Is this a primatology research center that I’m in, or rehab? Sometimes I can’t tell. I detest being treated like a prisoner. There are times, Gwen, when I’m on one of my Thoreauvian walks in the woods—never unsupervised, even if the scientist charged as my chaperone respectfully gives me my distance—there are times when I’m walking in these woods, when I come to the very perimeter of the premises, where there is a twenty-foot-high chain-link fence forebodingly topped with a coil of concertina wire. The chain links of the fence mesh with the branches of the pine trees just beyond them to create dazzling moiré effects in certain light—at sundown, for instance. And sometimes I peer past the fence, through the many diamonds of negative space between the metal links, at the small patch of world that lies beyond it: beyond the fence are trees both coniferous and deciduous, bushes, ferns, and even a few palm trees to serve as taunting evidence of my proximity to the ocean, which is a sight I hold to be
beautiful and darkly mysterious. Farther yet, beyond all this vegetation, clearly visible through the leaves and the branches, is a narrow paved road. A road, Gwen. Flat gray asphalt cut down the center by a dashed yellow line into two lanes, coming and going, vein and artery. Beside the road, negative parabolas of wire droop from one wooden cross to the next. Sometimes there are blackbirds sitting on the long bights of wire. I’m going to confess something to you, Gwen, and you must never repeat it to anyone, lest I lose even more of my circumscribed freedom. Sometimes I wonder how quickly I might be able to scramble up that chain-link fence before I’m found out. I wonder how badly I might injure myself on that coil of concertina wire on my way over the top of the fence. I wonder at what vertical point on the other side of the fence it would be safe to let go and brace myself for the fall. I wonder where that road leads to, in either direction. I wonder if I would be able to hitch a ride with a passing motorist. I wonder all of these things, Gwen, when I see the birds and the road and the blue expanse of sky above it, and then I see a twenty-foot-high fence separating me from all of that, and I yearn to rejoin that foul and miserable and dark and disgusting world that hurt me so badly—all in spite of the fact that I have everything I could ever need right in here. There is my confession, Gwen. It is a sin not of deed, nor even word, but of thought, of the mind, of the heart, of
delectatio morosa
, of restlessness, of ingratitude, of hatefulness, of yearning for what I have not got, of desire.

Now we should return to my biography. I suppose at the time I did not realize I was bidding forever good-bye to my biological family. All I knew at this moment was that the only thing I ever really wanted was finally happening.

I held on to Lydia. My arms were wrapped around her neck and my face was planted against the warm sticky skin of the area of her
body where her neck sloped into her shoulder, she with one arm supporting my hindquarters and one hand rubbing the fur on the top of my head as she carried me. Dr. Lydia Littlemore was wearing a short-sleeved, red-checked gingham shirt tucked into her jeans, and her blond hair was in a ponytail. I hooked the opposable toe of my right foot in the breast pocket of her shirt. The zookeeper followed us with a set of keys as Lydia carried me through the dank pissy hallways of the managerial part of the Lincoln Park Zoo Primate House, brought me to a small holding and storage room, and locked me in a little cage with a handle on it for transport. This cage was an unpleasant thing, made of hard gray plastic outfitted with a metal grate for a door and a flap of sodden carpeting on the floor. Lydia wriggled her fingers through the squares of the grate, and smiled broadly and brightly at me with her face just a few inches past the door and her eyes meeting mine, in order to reassure me, I think, that I was not in trouble and not in danger, that this was only a temporary measure and I would soon be released. From my peripherally limited vantage inside the cage, I saw the world through a grid, changing from murky interior lighting to the comparatively blinding outdoors, although the weather was overcast. It was a warm wet summer day. Rain clouds loomed. The sky was a sheet of hammered iron, the sun a white blur. Lydia wedged my cage into the backseat of a car and closed the door. I saw the side of the back door of the car and a sliver of the window. I heard the sound of a car door opening, something going
bing bing bing bing
, the door slamming, keys entering the ignition. The radio came on and she turned down the dial until it was nearly silent. Keys turned, the engine went
chuppitachuppita-FROOM!
, a seat belt was buckled, the wheels loosened from a parked state into a state of motion. Then the perturbing sensation of movement, me sliding around inside the cage with the dips and turns in the road, the whoosh of other cars Dopplering past us. The clouds broke into rain, and the rain thrummed on the roof of
the car in a pulsing tattoo, like loose-flung fistfuls of crackling pebbles. I listened to the steadily rhythmic rubber-on-glass squealing of the windshield wipers. After a while we came to our final stop, and I heard Lydia unbuckle her seat belt, withdraw the car keys, and open the door, then the spatter and crash of rain outside, the door slamming, and I saw the door in front of me open. I saw that the downgushing rain had already darkened the fabric of her shirt, glued it to her flesh. She had no umbrella. I could see her brassiere through her shirt. I saw the rain glaze her skin. I saw her arms reach out to remove the cage. She carried me through a parking lot. I pressed my face to the grate and clung to it with my fingers. I saw cars parked in obedient rows, rainwater steaming on the hot black asphalt. It wasn’t night, but the storm’s sudden darkening of the day had triggered the streetlights, whose orange glows were mirrored in the shimmering street. We ascended a series of steps, and Lydia set my cage down while she opened a heavy door and propped it by kicking a wooden wedge under it. The rain plitted through the spaces in the grate of my cage, and the fetid flap of carpet I was sitting on began to smell worse. I stuck my tongue out to catch the thin needles of rain. I became wet. A moment later I felt myself being hoisted up again and taken inside the building. The heavy door sighed shut behind us and the atmosphere immediately became clean and quiet and dry, though the halls were noisy with the echoes of pounding raindrops. Lydia carried me through a labyrinthine network of bright hallways. Her wet sneakers scrunch-scrunch-scrunched on the floors. She stopped before two metal doors in which I saw our fuzzy reflection, and it scrolled open onto a tiny metal room. We got in and she put me on the floor, pushed a button, and the doors closed. Then a bizarre swooping sensation in my interior organs.
Bing
, the doors opened, she lifted my cage again and took me down another passageway, scrunch-scrunch-scrunch, until we arrived at another door, with a series of symbols printed across a smoked-glass window,
which I would much later learn spelled:
308 BEHAVIORAL BIOLOGY LABORATORY
. In we went. Lydia knelt on the floor and unlatched my cage, and as the door opened I tumbled out. She picked me up. She smiled, she kissed my head. Lydia was drenched, trinkets of water dappling her face, her blond hair dark, sopping, and flaccid.