Benjamin Hale - The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore

On an early afternoon in Chicago in late March of 1999, I, Bruno, stood and peered through the window that looked into the chimpanzee exhibit in the Primate House of the Lincoln Park Zoo. I peered through the window that looked into my childhood home. My old wordless world, my animal habitat. I looked through a three-inch-thick sheet of glass at my biological family. It looked much the same as I had remembered it, although I’d grown upward by about a foot and outward by more than fifty pounds, and so the space looked even smaller than I’d remembered it. I saw — and remembered as I saw — a ledge, a certain wide flat metal shelf bolted to the wall in a corner, very high up near the ceiling in the interior part of the exhibit, accessible via the ropes and nets that hung from the ceiling down to the cedar-planting-chip-covered floor: we chimps would often scramble up those ropes and nets up to the shelf, muster ourselves on top of it and huddle there together in the winter months, napping, grooming, lazing around all afternoon long in a languid tangle of embraces. It was March now, and cold outside, though not bitterly so, and all the chimps were inside, and most of them were huddled together on top of the shelf in the corner, just as I had once done. The shelf, as I recall, was a favorite place of ours, in part because its height probably reminded our instincts of the tree canopies in which we would have been taking our naps if this were the jungle and there were predators afoot below us, and in part because its height made it one of the precious few areas of that Benthamite panopticon where we were not totally in view of our spectators. Of course the people could still see us — they could see that we were up there, could see our hands dangling off the edges of the shelf and could catch glimpses of the imperceptibly moving mounds of our warm breathing brown bodies — but at least we were not fully exposed up there. I looked up to the shelf, and I saw my family — my old family, my mother, Fanny, and my father, Rotpeter, my aunt Gloria, and my uncle Rex — huddled together on top of the shelf, several gangly purple hands and gangly opposably-toed feet poking out of the ball of appendages to dangle limply off the edge of the shelf. Down below them, on the ground, scratching and digging in the steamy urine-sodden carpeting of cedar planting chips, were two chimps whom I did not recognize. New additions to the zoo. One, a female, looked like a teenager — probably around my age, actually — fifteen years old. The bloated wad of pink flesh that she dragged along the ground beneath her advertised her fecundity, and a little brown button of a turd protruded shyly from her anus. The second new chimp was the infant she held in her arms.

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.