Benjamin Hale - The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore

So Leon and I intermittently conversed together and conversed with the other passengers and played our games and read our books and watched the land roll past the windows and dozed slumped over in our seats off and on from New York City to Albany to Buffalo to Cleveland to Toledo to Gary to Chicago.

My heart leapt inside me when I saw those familiar buildings rising in the distance, those very buildings that had once bewitched and seduced me when I was only a mind-silent animal. I myself was practically leaping up and down in my seat by the window with irrepressible glee as we rattled across the Union Station switchyard with the early morning sunlight flashing on the rails of the tracks.

Oh! Chicago! (My heart exclaimed within me in rapture.) I have been away from you for more than a year! Oh! — Chicago, are you happy to see me? It’s me, Bruno — your son and lover! I have been unfaithful to you, I admit. I come back to you from an affair with your big sister — your bigger, older, meaner, and more complicated sister who lives eight hundred miles beyond you to the east! But Chicago, inland Chicago, redbrick and brown Chicago, freshwater Chicago, almost-uninhabitably-cold-for-the-better-part-of-the-year Chicago, I’ve come back to you! — for you are the only city that I can truly love.

The train docked in a tunnel and hissed in repose, and then fell silent. Everyone disembarked, for it was the end of the line. Leon and I breakfasted together on bagels, bacon, eggs, and coffee at the Union Station food court before I saw him off at the gates of his connection, which would take him far away, across the great American interior — past I know not how many mountains and plains and desert cacti and shaggy-maned buffalo — to the sun-dappled land of California, where asylum had been promised him. Leon and I embraced as we said good-bye, with tears shed on the behalves of both parties. I stood at the gate, waving, as I watched him fastidiously guide his mass down the ramp that led to the train platform, and my heart burned as much with my gladness to be back in my homeland as with my reluctance to see him go.

He was wearing a rumpled brown corduroy suit, and he laboriously struggled to drag along a fatly stuffed rolling suitcase behind him on the concrete platform. His hair was long and knotty, his beard bushy, his body huge. Altogether Leon looked like a baby whale that had been stuffed into a brown suit. Ah, but he carried himself with the dignity of a prince. Like the Prince of Whales, I should think. Farewell, thou latter spring! Farewell, thou all-hallown summer! Thou sweet creature of bombast!

And I, for my part? I, Bruno, left the train station. I left the station with a suitcase in my hand that contained my every remaining possession on earth, and exited into the busy morning bustle of Canal Street, crossed the river by the Adams Street bridge, crossed Wacker, passed beneath the shadow of the Sears Tower and pierced my way into the heart of the heart of the city. I breathed the familiar scent of this my home city, I observed the familiar stone ornaments on the buildings, I kept my eyes peeled for any significant change, but detected little. I went in search of Lydia.

It was still early in the morning. The train had left New York City the previous morning, and had traveled all day and all night before depositing us in Chicago at nine or so in the a.m. I had slept fitfully on the train, and the bright busy morning in Chicago took on the mildly hallucinatory quality a bright busy morning does when one hasn’t slept well. I wanted to do nothing more than go straightaway to see Lydia, but something made me check myself. I thought it might be too strange or too rude to show up unannounced at her apartment so early in the day. She probably wouldn’t even have been at home, I thought. So instead I spent a good part of that morning walking around in the city, ambling beneath the rumbling red iron latticeworks that support the L, noting down various poetic observations in my head. Every winking traffic light and every plump purring pigeon that hopped along the sidewalk seemed to welcome me back. “Hello, traffic light!”—I could barely restrain myself from saying aloud—“Hello, pigeon!”

Hello, Bruno! I would imagine the pigeon articulating back to me through her trilling throat.

I looked at the stone lions that guarded the doors of certain buildings, I gazed through windows at storefront displays of beautiful woman mannequins wearing various styles of clothing, I ducked in and out of bookstores and spent a while sitting at the foot of the giant Picasso sculpture at Daley Center Plaza. Gradually, gradually, I gravitated uptown — knowing full well, not in my conscious mind, but in my bones, where my puttering feet were taking me.

That was the first time I experienced the Lincoln Park Zoo as a visitor, rather than as an exhibit. On all our fun/educational outings in the early days of my enculturation, Lydia had never once taken me here. Surely this was because she was afraid of what I would think, what I might do. What the other chimps would think and do, for that matter. Taking me to see my own imprisoned family must have seemed a perverse torture she did not wish to inflict upon my vulnerable developing consciousness.

I 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, a big duck pond, where geese and swans drifted through green water neon with algae, and entered the zoo: the Lincoln Park Zoo, apparently, is free, a realization that stung slightly of insult. Oh! — to enter such a familiar space from such an unfamiliar angle! The violence of the gestalt shift whacks the mind like a club!

Seeing the place from the angle of the human observer disoriented me. It looked familiar and yet eerily alien to me at the same time. I had never realized what a sad, dirty little zoo it really is. The animals in it have so little space to roam. The big cats are cornered into such dirty, miserable little cages — old-fashioned ones with bars on them rather than glass, evoking prison cells rather than displays, with cold concrete straw-scattered floors that reeked of melancholy and urine. The animals in them looked so shabby and dejected, their souls broken, resigned to quiet lives of captivity and humiliation. The leopards and lions and tigers neurotically skulked back and forth behind the bars of their cages, pitifully trying to uphold their dignity, like ruined aristocrats. As they paced their aimless loops their hipbones and shoulder blades undulated with a physical grace not even humanity could take away, but their heads ticked now and then with tiny spasms of uncontrollable rage. When I lived in this place, I had known only the inside of the chimp exhibit, and what was immediately visible from within it. I could not see much beyond the concrete wall that dammed the moat surrounding our small artificial island. I had no idea that the zebras and kangaroos were within eyesight of the ledge that looked onto our exhibit, that we could have physically seen these strange beasts if only we had been able to stand on top of the wall. So I observed and pitied the animals — the cats, the birds, the giraffes, the elephants, the rhinos — as I followed the maps that led me through the small zoo to the Primate House.

To my right was the gorilla exhibit. That huge old magisterial silverback was still there. He was napping, slumped over limp-limbed and dejected in his rope hammock, looking as if he hadn’t moved a muscle in all the years I’d been gone, one arm resting on his massive belly and the other arm dangling down beneath him, his fat-fingered wrinkled leathery hand grazing the ground like an old work glove.