The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore (67 page)

I stood so close to the wall of glass that the brim of my hat touched it. (I was wearing the same coat and hat that I had once found in a closet in little Emily’s house.) I shielded my eyes with a hand cupped against the glass to block my reflection. The glass had a faint blue-green tint. Beside me, a few paces away, there was a woman and a child. The woman looked middle-aged and middle-class, and wore a candy-apple-red coat with thick black buttons, a blue sweater, and glasses, and her brown hair was tied loosely back. There was a stroller beside her. It contained a soft fuzzy blue blanket and a stuffed animal, but other than that it was vacant—its presumed occupant was crawling around on the floor, wearing the standard uniform of an infant: a one-piece jumpsuit with a button-up door in the hindquarters for easy diaper-changing; the
jumpsuit was blue, which we for some reason consider a color that connotes the innocence of infancy while still being appropriately masculine—oh, what an odd thing it is that humans begin to sexualize their young even when they’re scarcely washed of womb-goo!—before they’re born, even! (Perhaps this note should go somewhere in the blurb of species information on the human? No! No room for such details! That’s where the devil is. Gwen—there’s simply too much to say! There’s too much to say!) This child, this presumably male human infant, was padding around, hands and feet slapping like four fat little flippers on the floor of the human observer’s area of the Primate House of the Lincoln Park Zoo. Oh, God, he was beautiful. He was a beautiful baby, plump, bald, smooth-skinned, bright and Buddha-like, a creature at that stage of pure and perfect passions, the needle of his emotional meter capable of swinging instantaneously from bliss to despair and back to bliss on account of stimuli so easy as the touch of his mother’s skin. Sometimes I see a baby and I nearly cry.
Why?
Why does the sight of a baby make me cry? Is it because I know too much about the world he’s been born into? No, that’s much too insipidly romantic, that can’t be it. The sight of a baby fills me instantly with desperate, insane, boundless love. I love human babies! I love the animals! I love the world!… but—
I hate it! I love and I hate the world with equal passion!
That’s why I cry when I see a baby! The hot and cold fronts in my soul slam together and make a storm—a tempest!—and I cry!

This child, this baby in the zoo, was too young to speak. His consciousness was still at the level of an animal’s, that of an uneducated ape. He was babbling, being at the prelinguistic stage of early childhood when a baby is perpetually fascinated anew by his own ability to make noise, and so he spends every spare waking second he can get with his mouth busily spewing a nonteleological flux of cooing, humming, burbling, gurgling, and singing. In constant
song! Music always precedes meaning! Music before meaning! On and on and on he babbled and sang, employing every technique available to the infant’s cantatory repertoire. First he sang a high, constant note while repeatedly cupping and releasing a hand over his mouth to create an autohypnotic ululating effect. Soon he decided to modify this technique by rapidly flapping his fingers over his lower lip while dropping his voice to a hum, which made a noise like the low idling of an engine, and after tiring of that he took the same concept and kicked it into higher gear by increasing the pressure of his outward breath while rapidly vibrating his smiling lips; this last technique quickly led to an excess of drool leaking over his chin—ah, but he cared not.

The bottom three feet of the glass wall that looked into the chimp exhibit was foggy with little handprints, and soon this child began adding his own to the fog. He crawled up onto the short step that ran beneath the bottom of the glass, and pressed himself to the window to get a better look. He was still making a motorboat noise with his reverberating lips, absentmindedly, or maybe to make himself a little music to accompany the sight. He squished his tiny hands flat against the glass as he peered through it at the chimps. Inside the exhibit, eight or ten feet away from the window, the female chimp whom I did not recognize had slumped over backward onto the damp floor of cedar planting chips—not from fatigue, but probably from boredom—and the infant chimp whom she had been holding scrambled out of her arms, clambered over her hairy protuberant belly, and began to make his way on thin spindly arms and stumpy legs across the floor of the exhibit toward the window. The baby chimp crawled right up to the baby human. The chimp pressed his own hands against the glass and looked directly out the window into the face of the human child on the other side. Two babies, two species, inches apart, looked at one another through the glass. They were about the same size. Young chimps look even
more humanlike (or rather, humans look like neotenic chimps): they have big eyes, big round heads, and small faces. I watched as these two primates, as these two children from slightly different species, looked at one another through the wall of blue-green glass, each with hands pressed flat to the window, each big-headed and big-eyed, each without language. At that moment—at this stage of their respective developments—it seemed completely arbitrary who was on which side of the glass. Each of them only knew that a glass wall divided them, and neither understood why.

The child’s (I mean the human child’s) mother eventually decided it was time to go, and she picked him up and deposited him in his stroller for transport.

As his mother was wheeling him out of the room, the human child peered over the rim of his stroller, looked back at the ape behind the glass, and waved.

They left. I remained. I stood in front of the glass and watched the chimps all afternoon.

I must have cut a strange figure that afternoon: a man, a hairless and somewhat deformed dwarf, in a coat and black fedora with a suitcase in his hand, standing all day in front of the chimp exhibit at the Lincoln Park Zoo. No one bothered me, though. The other chimps one by one roused from the naps they were taking on that high shelf in the upper corner of the exhibit, yawned, sleepily stretched their long hairy arms and scrabbled down the ropes and nets that hung from the ceiling to the floor. They putzed around, they chased one another, they groomed one another, they batted their hands at one another, they occasionally broke into rapid exchanges of howls and squeaks, they climbed their ropes, they nibbled at the food pellets they found in the planting chips on the floor. I watched my old family for hours. They never recognized
me. I was a stranger to them. And why should they have recognized me? I was not an animal like them anymore. I was hairless, I was upright, I was clothed, I was nosed. That is why I stood on my side of the glass, and they on theirs. Their Bruno was a man now.

I noticed that Céleste was not among them. I looked outside, and did not see her there, either. I wondered if she had been transferred to another zoo for some reason. Wherever she was, she was not there.

I wondered long and hard if I regretted anything. I tried to imagine what my life would have been like if I had remained in the zoo with my original family. If I was with them still, still relegated to being the lowest-ranking male in the social group, never knowing anything of the world but this infinitesimally small patch of it. Never falling from innocence or stepping out of the darkness. Never knowing language, never feeling that strange alteration in me, to degree of reason in my inward powers, nor thenceforth to speculations high or deep to turn my thoughts, and with capacious mind consider all things visible in heaven, or earth, or middle, all things fair and good. The idea was now so foreign to me that it almost caused me to laugh. It was an aimless wondering, leading me nowhere. These animals were now so alien to my consciousness that I could no longer fathom what was going on inside their minds. Their behavior, the mental processes of these animals, had become as opaque to me as lead. Now I could only see them through a glass, darkly.

I
left the zoo that afternoon with a feeling in me that was not sadness. It was a feeling like sadness, but quieter and stranger. I left the zoo that day feeling as if I had attended the funeral of a good friend who died of an unpreventable and accidental cause. It was the late afternoon by the time I left the Primate House.

There was still something preventing my going to see Lydia. I found a bar on Clark Street, a dark place of brass and leather and lacquered wood, where in silence and solitude I quieted my nerves with three whiskeys while eavesdropping on the nattering conversation of three big pink men in disheveled suits and loosened ties sitting at a corner table by the window. One of them was narrating to the other two men a chronicle of complications surrounding his pending divorce. The other men were warily trying to salve his sadness with the medicines of laughter and anger. The first man joined in the angry laughter, he joined in their raucous tit-for-tatting of misogynist banter, but his sadness seeped through his jocularity like water through cheesecloth. Now I was back once again in the human zoo. All the world’s a zoo, and all the men and women merely animals. The stage and the zoo are interchangeable,
Gwen: remember, we have already discovered that theatre is biology, and biology is theatre. All the world’s a zoo.

It was near St. Patrick’s Day. Maybe it was the day before, or maybe the day after. I recalled in a rush how Chicago would dye its river green—so that it looked like a river of toxic waste—and I recalled wondering whether green fish ever turned up weeks later in the slapping and shimmering hauls in the nets of fishermen many miles north of the city. The streets, the windows of the shops and restaurants, were rife with St. Patrick’s Day decorations: lots of green streamers, paper shamrocks, images of leprechauns. I don’t know why the color green is supposed to symbolize Irish heritage—perhaps because of the famous verdancy of Ireland?

In any event, I walked past the window of a flower shop: outside the door, in a basket, the flower shop had green roses on display. Green roses! I recalled Lydia’s weakness for them. As always, the green roses struck me as freakish, fascinating for their proud artificiality, the clear deliberation behind their bioengineering, the dye in the soil, or however it is the skilled florists turn the petals green. It always seemed to me that a flower—especially a rose—ought to be a different color from its stem, at least for contrast’s sake. I entered the flower shop. I walked into a lush blast of fragrance and humidity, and selected one dozen long-stemmed green roses. I had the pencil-mustached man behind the counter roll them up in a cone of cellophane and then in another cone of decorative paper. I carefully carried them out in the hand that didn’t hold my suitcase. Their smell was as intoxicating as wine.

I had a little money left—only a little—so I hailed a taxi on Lincoln Avenue and took it all the way down to Hyde Park, where I directed the driver to drop me off right before the door set in the side of a redbrick slab of apartments that led to 5120 South
Ellis Avenue, Apartment 1A. All the while during the drive I spent rehearsing in my mind a thousand things that I would say to Lydia. I was nearly queasy with anticipation. I crushed the green petals of the flowers to my face and felt the velvety wetness of their texture and sucked in their smell. I had no idea what she might say about my new clothes and my new nose. I had so much to tell her. I had so many exciting adventures to narrate, which I would regale her with. We would drink wine as I narrated my tales, and I would make us laugh until we became as light-headed as if we’d been inhaling helium all day, until we’d nearly faint from laughter, and in the end we would go to bed together, and in the morning we would resume our lives together.

I am, at heart, an optimist, Gwen, if that’s the word for willing yourself to hope for the best when you know the truth is probably so horrible you don’t want to look. Of course I knew why I had delayed seeing her after I arrived in Chicago. I had no idea what state she may have been in. I had been absent for a year. Honestly, however high I may have held my head in my self-imposed false good mood, still my steps were leaden with guilt. In the fantasy I had been entertaining for my homecoming, Lydia looked exactly as she had that day when I first met her, when I was a child, the day of the experiment with the peach in the box. She was young, healthy, gorgeous, with all her long blond hair, her skin smooth and her eyes alive with youth, and so on. Lydia smiling, Lydia laughing, Lydia stroking the rich red-brown fur that I had back then. The door would open, and that Lydia of my memory would somehow be standing there. I wanted the door to open into a time machine, which I would program to take us back six or seven years, and then freeze time, just hold it there. Gwen, I once saw a wonderful film about the life experiences of Superman. At the end of the film, Superman’s girlfriend, Lois Lane, is crushed by a collapsing bridge because Superman was too busy with other matters at the time to
save her. But not to worry, because it turns out that not even the space-time continuum is too immutable for Superman’s prowess and ingenuity. Superman flies into the bubble of near outer space surrounding the earth’s atmosphere, then starts flying so quickly around the circumference of the earth, over and over, that he succeeds in reversing the direction of the earth’s rotation, which somehow acts as a massive “rewind” button for the planet. Then he zooms back down to earth, saves Lois Lane from the falling bridge, then zooms back into space and considerately recorrects the direction of the earth’s rotation. It’s this last bit that I would have omitted from the procedure, had I Superman’s powers. I would have sailed up to the ionosphere, spun the earth backward to a day when Lydia and I were cohabiting this apartment, together, in youth, in love, but before her sickness, and before I could speak—and then I would blast back to the outer rind of the atmosphere, and through a difficult series of maneuvers, I would fly clockwise a little, then counterclockwise a little, left, right, left, bit by bit, until I succeeded in making the earth just stop, and hang there, quiet, suspended, and still in the blackness of space. Then I would return to earth, now converted into a giant fossilized snapshot of some particular moment on some particular day in say the fall of about 1994—all around the world, forks frozen forever about to enter open mouths, people stuck at the edge of day in slippers with arms stretched in midyawn, murderers ossified with guns still smoking in their hands, lovers cemented in embrace—and I, Bruno, would put myself in that last category: I would float down to a certain apartment in Hyde Park, Chicago, and find a healthy young Lydia, and viably position her arms such that they conformed to the shape of my body, and slip into them, and shut my eyes, and join the vast stagnant earth at that precise moment, and remain there, forever.