The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore (70 page)

How love must suffer in this stern world. How love must suffer.

W
ith most of the money I had left from New York I paid for another taxi to take us northward out of Hyde Park. I told the driver to let us out when we were passing between the stony feet of the skyscrapers of the Loop, and I asked for a room at the Palmer House Hilton on Monroe and State. We had ducked inside the hotel almost at random. It was raining again, and deep night. I was still woozy-brained with drink, and Céleste was drugged and stumbling. Two small figures, their clothes soaked flat to their suspiciously proportioned little bodies, waddled past a doorman in a cap and gloves and a brilliant bottle-green coat with shiny gold buttons, pushed through the hotel’s revolving glass doors, wandered through the elegant underbelly below the hotel’s main lobby, found an escalator, and rode it up a floor to a high-ceilinged and spacious and crapulously decorated lobby, all gilded neoclassical ornaments and Corinthian columns and so forth, glass and brass, golden-veined expanses of marble, painted plaster and potted ferns. I yanked the hood of my floppy green sweatshirt low over Céleste’s face, to hide her apeness. At the golden-veined marble slab of the hotel’s front desk I booked a nonsmoking room with one king-size bed on the nineteenth floor. I put it on Dr. Norman
Plumlee’s credit card. I kept my hat tipped low over my features. The mirror-paneled elevator whooshed us up to the nineteenth floor in seconds—so fast it was slightly nauseating—and we scurried down the hallway and found the door to our room. I slid the keycard inside, watched a light flash green, and pushed the door open. I flicked on a light, took the sign reading
DO NOT DISTURB
from the other side of the door and affixed it onto the outer door handle, then shut the door, locked it, and clapped the hasp of the door guard over its brass knob.

We drew the curtains over the window and did not leave the room for three days. We hung our damp clothes from the shower curtain rod in the bathroom, and went naked for the rest of the time. The room immediately took on the smell of damp fur, and the smell got mustier and more mildewy over the course of the next three days. We ordered up food for ourselves from room service, always instructing the staff to leave the trays of food outside the door. We dined on steak. We dined on lobster. We ordered up bottles of wine. We dined on prosciutto and melons, chilled oysters, oxtail, salmon, duck, soft-boiled quail’s eggs and venison sausage, and ordered crème brûlée and chocolate mousse cake and sweet port wine for dessert. All of it went on Norm’s MasterCard. We let the dirty dishes stack up on the floors. We held on to one another for long hours. I gave Céleste whiskey and wine. I told her stories about my long adventure in human civilization, and she blinked dumbly at me, pursed her lips, and scratched her hairy protuberant belly. I tried to show her how to use the toilet, but she did not comprehend me. When she shat on the floor I dutifully picked it up in a wad of toilet paper and disposed of it. I read to her from the Bible we found in the drawer of the dresser: for idle entertainment I read her Genesis and Job and the Song of Solomon—and Céleste blinked dumbly at me, pursed her lips, and scratched her belly. On the first night we stripped the quilt and the tightly tucked crisp
white sheets from the mattress and tore them into fine shreds, and we ripped open the plush pillows piled at the headboard, and we scattered all the tatters and soft feathery fluff around on the bed and wadded it into a warm fluffy nest on top of the mattress, in which we would lie together all day and all night, in our nest, in a lazy-limbed embrace, napping. Soon, having no clear use for them otherwise, we also shredded the various literatures provided in the room—the Bible, the phone book, and a copy of
Be My Guest
, the autobiography of Conrad Hilton (the room service menu we spared)—and we scattered the shredded pages all over the carpeted floor of the room. Sometimes, for recreation, we would jump up and down on the bed until we collapsed from exhaustion and mirth. At these times I could never help but to sing aloud:
two little monkeys, jumping on the bed…
and as I sang this song, this children’s song, Céleste would howl and pant-hoot and shriek along to the tune in very approximate accompaniment—no doubt causing much wonder as to the nature of our racket in the adjacent rooms. Other times, we would sit up on the bed in our fluffy nest and watch TV. We watched TV while Céleste sat behind me and went through the motions of grooming me, even though I had no fur, and then we would switch places, and I picked and combed my fingers through the fur on her back, just as we had done when we were children. So we sat on the bed and took turns grooming one another, with plates of gourmet food sitting before us in the nest of tatters and fluff on top of the mattress, and I cut her steaks into bite-size pieces for her, and she would daintily pinch up the little bits of meat in her long purple fingers and insert them between her wide pink lips and chew them, and we sipped our wine, and we watched TV. We watched soap operas. We watched sitcoms. We watched daytime talk shows. We watched late-night talk shows. We watched music videos. We watched old movies—the movies I used to watch with Leon: with Greta Garbo, the Marx Brothers,
Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn, Jimmy Stewart, Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, Errol Flynn, Laurence Olivier, and Orson Welles. We also watched
Sesame Street
, so that Céleste too could know the joys of Bert and Ernie. We watched interesting pornographic films that we ordered to the room on Norm’s credit card. And—perhaps most important—we watched cartoons! We watched Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck! Goofy and Donald Duck! We watched the cartoons that take eternal pursuit as their theme: both the amorous pursuit of lover and beloved—such as Pepé Le Pew, that French skunk undaunted in his unrequited and mistaken love for a black cat whose back has been accidentally painted with a white stripe—as well as the violent pursuit of predator and prey: Coyote and Road Runner, Sylvester and Tweety, Tom and Jerry… all that mythic pursuit!—the endless flux of the chase, the magnetic push-and-pull of aggression and defense, of repulsion and desire!… perhaps the true spirit of myth—of Echo and Narcissus, of Achilles and Hector—survives for us, in its pure form, only in cartoons.

That is how Céleste and I spent three days. These were three days of odd bliss that I spent with my little animal friend. These were my last three days of freedom in the human world.

In addition to all our joyful cartoons, we also, occasionally, watched the news. Although the time we spent in that room almost immediately blurred into the animal-minded time of liquid, dreamlike continuum (I had unplugged the alarm clock, and took but passing notice or interest in the lightening or darkening of the rising day or falling night behind the thickly drawn curtains), I believe it must have been on the second afternoon or night that, as a cartoon we were enjoying had ended and been superseded on that channel by some less diverting programming, I snatched up the remote control and began flicking through the many channels, looking for something fun to watch, and settled briefly on a
local news broadcast. Céleste, who sat beside me on the bed in our nest, picking with her dirty fingers at a platter of seaweed-wrapped salmon pâté, gave me a lazy-blooded and dismissive wave of her hand to indicate that I should skip past this channel, because it was boring. However, I shushed her, because I thought I recognized a building on the screen. The establishing shot that led into the news segment was of the Erman Biology Center: I recognized that magisterial ornate gray stone architecture, the cornices and gargoyles, the ivy crawling up the stones. It was a video of a curious crowd gathered around the entrance to the building, which was cordoned off by long strips of bright yellow police tape. A lot of police officers were milling around by the building’s entrance as two paramedics wheeled what looked like a body out of the doors on a gurney. The body was covered with a sheet. I turned up the volume. The voice on the TV told us that a certain Dr. Norman Plumlee, a research scientist and tenured faculty at the University of Chicago and lab director of the Behavioral Biology Laboratory at the University of Chicago’s Institute for Mind and Biology, renowned in scientific circles for a long career of groundbreaking research on animal cognition and primate psychology, was found dead that morning in a laboratory on the third floor of the Erman Biology Center at the University of Chicago by a graduate student who worked at the lab, who had immediately notified the police. Dr. Plumlee appeared to have been brutally murdered by an unknown assailant. The police had no suspects and no leads at that time, and knew of no possible motives for the crime. Dr. Plumlee was beloved by his students, some of whom were interviewed, croaking their bafflement at the strange and horrible crime into the reporter’s camera in various states of shock and tears. Dr. Plumlee’s wife was also interviewed, expressing shock, anger, and immeasurable sorrow. The police were offering a reward for any information leading to the resolution of this terrible crime. Then the newscasters promised weather
and sports updates after the break, and a commercial came on, and I continued flicking through the channels until I found a Porky Pig cartoon, which made us laugh, and I picked up the phone and ordered up another bottle of wine, and again we pleasantly forgot all the trouble in the world, the leavening effects of the wine and the Looney Tunes banishing all thoughts dark and grave from our minds as the birdsong banishes winter.

Later (was it the following evening? I don’t remember, and have no way of estimating) the TV said it had come to light that Dr. Norman Plumlee, on the night he was murdered, had been performing experiments on a thirteen-year-old female chimpanzee named Céleste, whom the laboratory had on temporary loan from the Lincoln Park Zoo. This chimp—most likely the only witness to the murder—had escaped, having apparently been deliberately set free, probably by Dr. Plumlee’s killer or killers. While investigators were not willing to rule out the possibility that the chimp herself had killed the scientist, it seemed unlikely for several reasons: that Céleste had no history of violence and was by all accounts a small and fairly docile chimp; and although chimps are extremely strong and can be violent when surprised or provoked, said the TV, forensic experts reported that the nature of the fatal wounds was extremely uncharacteristic of an animal attack. Plumlee had almost certainly been killed by repeated trauma to the head with a blunt object, most likely a badly damaged computer keyboard which had been found near the body. Probably the most telling evidence of human involvement, though, was the trail of bloody shoe prints that led from the scene of the crime all the way outside the building, where the unknown assailant had wiped his shoes off in the grass. Police were investigating the possibility that the crime was committed in connection with the Animal Liberation Front, or other animal rights or ecoterrorist organizations. This theory was circumstantially corroborated by the fact that all of the video
cameras in the room, which were there to capture experiment data, had been switched off shortly before the estimated time that the murder took place, indicating some sort of human premeditation. The animal may be on the loose, and residents of the Hyde Park neighborhood and surrounding areas were advised to be on the lookout for an escaped chimpanzee. If you see the animal, pleaded the woman behind the news desk on the TV, please immediately call this number (which scrolled across the bottom of the screen) to contact City of Chicago Animal Care and Control Services. Disturbingly, several pornographic magazines as well as traces of semen had also been found at the crime scene. Police still had no witnesses or suspects.

The next segment dealt with the outpouring of community grief at the University of Chicago, with shots of a candlelit vigil and so on, and more tearful interviews with Dr. Plumlee’s colleagues and students. The woman on the TV began to mention the connection Dr. Plumlee had to the infamous case of Bruno, the Chicago chimp who—(here I changed the channel).

The animal-rights-terrorist-group angle was not, after all, strictly incorrect. In a way I had acted as an animal rights terrorist cell of one. But I did not liberate an animal for larger ideological reasons. I liberated just one animal for deeply personal reasons, and in so doing, as we will see, I imprisoned myself. But come to think of it, I did not liberate Céleste, either—in the end I only delivered her into another kind of captivity. If it isn’t one kind of captivity, it’s another. There’s no way out, no way out. You see, my actual feelings on animal rights are somewhat complicated and ambivalent. One hears much talk these days of free-range animals and cage-free eggs and so on. On the one hand I suppose it’s a good thing to acknowledge our debt to the animals we enslave and kill for our pleasure by making their lives prior to slaughter as pleasant as possible, while on the other hand the impulse strikes me as emblematic
of a romantically rosy view of nature. It’s all a paradox anyway. If we think of the whole world as a prison, then there’s no such thing as a cage-free animal.

On the third and last day that Céleste and I spent in our hotel room, a breaking news flash in the middle of the day announced that the brutal murder of Dr. Norman Plumlee had been solved.

The murder had been committed by a man named Haywood Finch, who worked as a night-shift janitor at the University of Chicago. Mr. Finch was probably the only other person in the building at the time of the murder. The police had apprehended Mr. Finch the previous evening and taken him in for interrogation, where they almost immediately obtained a full confession. Mr. Finch confessed both to murdering Dr. Plumlee and setting the chimp free. Mr. Finch, a developmentally disabled man—said the TV—had a long history of psychiatric and emotional disturbances and was severely autistic, with only a third-grade education and an IQ of 54. Police psychologists judged Mr. Finch to be a highly mentally unstable person and suggested that he may have a violent personality disorder.