The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore (71 page)

It was unclear as of yet whether Mr. Finch would be found competent to stand trial. If found incompetent, or found competent and convicted but found not guilty by reasons of insanity, Mr. Finch would probably be indeterminately committed to a psychiatric facility.

The missing chimpanzee had still not been found.

Then I drew open the curtains. It was a bright day outside. I showered, as I had not done in three days, and put on fresh clothes. I tried to get Céleste to take a shower, but she was afraid of the shower and would not go in. I dressed Céleste as well, again in my droopy-sleeved green hooded sweatshirt for maximum possible inconspicuousness, and I put on my coat and my hat. I took my mute friend by the hand, and picked up my suitcase in my free
hand. We left the hotel room without looking back. It was the late morning. I guided her down the hallway, into the mirror-paneled elevator, pressed the button that took us down to the hotel lobby. The hood of her sweatshirt pulled low over her face to hide her apeness and the brim of my hat pulled low over my face to hide mine, I holding her hand, Céleste and I walked out of the elevator and through the high-ceilinged and spacious lobby of the Palmer House Hilton, all gilded decorations and Corinthian columns, glass and brass, golden-veined expanses of marble, painted plaster and potted ferns. We passed by the clerks at the front desk without a word or a backward glance. We let a descending escalator carry us to the ground floor, where we passed through the revolving glass doors. We walked past a doorman in a cap and gloves and a brilliant bottle-green coat with shiny gold buttons, who smiled and waved good-bye to us (we did not smile or wave back), and onto the street. I held Céleste’s hand in mine all the way.

With her long purple hand hot and sweaty in mine, we walked two blocks down Monroe and turned right on Clark, then walked north, holding hands and weaving in and out of the pedestrian traffic on the sidewalk for nearly two miles, a journey that took well over an hour. We stopped at a corner newsstand, where, still holding Céleste’s hand, I put down my suitcase, rooted through the pockets of my coat and dredged up the absolute last of my remaining money. I was able to scrape up enough wadded small bills and loose change to purchase a pack of Lucky Strikes. I put them in my pocket, picked up my suitcase, tugged on Céleste’s hand, and we kept walking. She followed as I guided us all the way up to Lincoln Park. We walked into the emerald-green rolls of Lincoln Park from the south entrance, waddled along the winding pedestrian footpath past joggers clad tightly in shiny spandex outfits, past little dogs tugging on their leashes, past a baseball diamond, an equestrian statue, and a big duck pond, where geese and swans drifted
through green water neon with algae, and then we entered the Lincoln Park Zoo.

We walked past the great cats, the giraffes, the Bactrian camels, the rhinos, the kangaroos and the zebras, until we came to the Primate House. We arrived at the Primate House from the south entrance, which overlooked the outdoor part of the chimp exhibit: colloquially known as Monkey Island. We looked over the concrete ledge that gazed across the water-filled ditch between the human observation area and the chimp habitat. It was a fairly warm day for March, and some of the chimps—some of our family—were playing outside, including my father, Rotpeter. I set down my suitcase and let go momentarily of Céleste’s hand. I reached into the pocket of my coat and took out the pack of cigarettes. I unwound the band of cellophane from the top, cracked it open and removed the foil lining of the pack. I backed up, wound back my arm, took aim, and threw it over the wall. It sailed over the moat and landed successfully on the grassy shores of Monkey Island. The chimps immediately all scrambled over to it to investigate. One of the babies picked it up in idle curiosity. I watched Rotpeter lumber over and rudely snatch it from the child’s hands. His personality had not changed one bit. He was still as brutish, as violent, as selfish and unenlightened as when I had left him. His face brightened at once with a look of surprise and rapture as he realized what it was. I watched him sniff them, relishing the smell of tobacco he had long, long been deprived of. He bolted off at once to dig up his old cigarette lighter from the cache where it had sat unneeded for years.

Then I took Céleste’s hand again, and I led her inside the Primate House. I let go of her hand. I put down my suitcase. I embraced her. I hugged her tightly to my chest, and I kissed her forehead and her silent face. The hood of her sweatshirt flopped back behind her head, revealing her apeness. I picked up my suitcase and waved good-bye to her. Céleste went to the window. She was confused.
She pressed her long purple hands flat against the glass and looked through the window at the chimp habitat. Our family stood gathered around her on the other side of the glass wall. My father, Rotpeter, already had a lit cigarette between his lips. All of them were hopping up and down, screaming, pant-hooting, ripping up fistfuls of straw and planting chips from the floor and throwing it in the air, bashing on the glass with their palms, displaying like mad—all of them probably wondering how in the world Céleste had come to be on the wrong side of the glass. Céleste pressed her hands to the glass and looked inside. She was happy to see them. She wanted to be with them. She wanted to be on the other side of the glass.

I left the Primate House. With my hat on my head and my suitcase in my hand, I slowly waddled away from it all. I made my way past the zebras, the kangaroos, the rhinos, the Bactrian camels, the giraffes, and the great cats, and out of the zoo. I walked out of the Lincoln Park Zoo for the last time in my life. I walked along the pedestrian footpath that encircled the park, past joggers clad tightly in shiny spandex outfits, past little dogs tugging on their leashes, past a baseball diamond, an equestrian statue and a big duck pond, where geese and swans drifted through the green water neon with algae. I said good-bye to the sky above my head. I said good-bye to Chicago. I said good-bye to my freedom to move at will through human society.

I saw what I wanted to see: I saw a mounted policeman reining his horse along the edge of the park. The giant sweaty brown animal clopped along at a leisurely pace. The policeman on the horse wore a dark blue coat, black riding boots in the stirrups, aviator sunglasses, and a sky-blue helmet with a visor. He seemed bored. He was watching the ducks in the pond. I waved to him and approached. The policeman snapped out of his duck-watching reverie as I came near. He tugged on the reins of his giant land-beast—like a hill of muscle—and clopped slowly toward me. We met on the pedestrian footpath, by the duck pond.

The policeman looked down at me, and I looked up at him. His horse snorted. The policeman raised his eyebrows and tipped up his sunglasses with a gloved finger to get a better look at this strange and tiny figure on the ground in front of him.

“Hello?” said the policeman. “Can I help you?”

I removed my hat.

“My name is Bruno Littlemore,” I said. “Bruno I was given, Littlemore I gave myself. I have committed a murder, and I have come forward to confess.”

The policeman peered down at me from on top of his horse with a look that suggested he was still searching for the owner of the voice that had spoken, still wondering if this small creature standing in the park with a suitcase and a hat could really be the owner of that voice. He took off his sunglasses, and blinked at me perplexedly in the late-twentieth-century Chicago sunlight.

T
he relevant parts of my tale are all told. It is a pleasing accident that this last chapter happens to be the fiftieth, the only other chapter in this volume except for the first (and, less elegantly, the fifth and tenth) to receive the honor of being headed with a bold and simple single capital letter. I began this narrative, as is natural, with an
I
: standing for the ego, the fount of the first-person voice. And I end it with an
L
. Does that
L
stand for light? For Lydia? For her given, and my self-given, surname? For locksmiths? For the commuter rail system of my home city?
L
is for laughter.
L
is for literature.
L
is for love.
L
is for life.
L
is for language.

It would serve as a useless and uninteresting dénouement to the story I have told you if I were to dig my long purple fingers too deep into the dirty details of my willing arrest, my confession, the trial, and the shock and scandal that surrounded it all—if I were to speak too much of the public reaction, how they remembered me from my previous scandals. Scandal erupts behind me everywhere I go. Scandal blooms in my footsteps like the flowers of discord. I confessed. I confessed all.

The evidence of Haywood Finch’s coerced confession was thrown out. He was freed, and his name cleared. That was my only
objective in coming forward to correct their faulty justice, and that much I achieved.

A few interesting points concerning the unusual particularity of my case arose on the legal agenda, especially in regard to the question of whether I should be tried as a man or as an animal. For one thing, I am not and have never been regarded as a legal citizen of this or any nation—even though I have never lived in any other—for no clear precedent or protocol exists concerning whether citizenship should or can be awarded to animals, be they mute or articulate, or what to do with talking animals if and when they transgress the laws of man. If I were to have been tried as an animal, then I would surely have been euthanized—destroyed, as any animal that harms a man must be. I, Bruno, however, was saved—and I leave it to my readers to ponder whether or not there is poetic irony in this—by science. ’Twas beauty killed the beast. ’Twas science resurrected him.

Scientists came forward to argue that I was too valuable and unique a specimen to be destroyed—that instead, I must be studied. Had I been exterminated—exterminated!—God, what fascistically clinical language!—then they would have lost much opportunity to study me. After all, I am interesting. Mine is an unusual case. There’s that Aesop’s fable, Gwen, about the farmer and his wife who had a goose that laid golden eggs. They thought maybe if they killed the animal it would be made of solid gold inside, so they cut it open and found it to be made of regular old goose-meat. Even if it had been made of gold it was poor economic reasoning to kill it anyway, but that aside—that’s me: I lay the human race golden eggs, and they decided I’m more use to them alive than dead. Oh, I’m sure the studying won’t stop with my death. They’ll probably put my brain in a jar for the scrutiny of future generations, slice it up and test the thisness or the thatness of it. And I am sure their scrutiny will reveal nothing. Just regular old chimp meat inside. There will be some scientist a hundred years from now who will
hold up my skull to show the classroom, like Yorick: look here, kids, behold the braincase of the long-dead jester—light, hollow, unfleshed by time, polished smooth as a gemstone. Notice the simian slope of the browridge, the jutting jaw. Would you believe that the monster who owned this once sang the world a song of pride and passion and love and joy and fear and darkness? No, they won’t believe it. Because that’s not how humans like to think of their wild animals. They want you in the dark, they want you shivering in the woods, cowering at the lightning flashes. They want to believe that they are not still shivering and cowering along with them. But they are. You are—you are, you upright beasts, you animals.

In the end the court was swayed by the scientists’ arguments, and after a great deal of red tape had been slashed through, after a great deal of time and paperwork had come and gone and the question of what was to be done with me finally arrived at the point of egress of the complicated bureaucratic maze in which it had gotten hopelessly lost for a time, I was sent to live in confinement, relative peace, and seclusion in the Zastrow National Primate Research Center, located somewhere in rural Georgia, USA.

Here, within these four white walls, and within the perimeters of this land cordoned off by those tall chain-link fences that I told you about so long (it seems) ago, in the alternating sterility of the laboratories and the rich lushness of the forests outside, in the company of human scientists, unenculturated chimpanzees who do not understand me when I speak to them and whose inarticulate shrieks and gestures I no longer comprehend, I have lived for nine years.

The date today is August 8, 2008. I will turn twenty-five in twelve days. Next year I will have been here for a decade. I will have grown ten years older, and ten years wiser, maybe. I have continued to paint and read here in the solitary apartments that the scientists have kindly provided for me, and occasionally I have staged theatrical productions, which I direct and star in. Although I must work
with a cast of nonprofessional actors, most of them chimps, and our audiences tend to be small—consisting only of the scientists who work here, usually—I do derive some joy from them. Leon still comes to visit me several times a year, and we correspond by mail frequently. Little Emily used to visit me in the early days of my incarceration, but I have not seen or communicated with her in years. I assume Emily has willingly forgotten me in order to concentrate on living the life of an independent young woman in her twenties, wherever it is she is doing that now. Tal visited me only once. That was an unpleasant visit. She still blames me—fairly or unfairly, I don’t know—for what happened to Lydia. To hell with her. I loved Lydia ten times ten times as much as she or anyone ever did. I probably loved her ten times ten times as much as anyone ever loved anyone, inside or outside of their own species. Mr. and Mrs. Lawrence visited me once as well, and on that occasion—I misremember how many long and quiet years ago now that must have been—they brought along my old mute companion, Clever Hands. It was a joy to see him. Hilarious Lily, they informed me, had passed away—she died in the same bed in which her husband, Hilarious Larry, had died a few years before her, clutching her rosary in her fist, going silently to her God.