Benjamin Hale - The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore

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.