Benjamin Hale - The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore

I should note that at some point during the time I lived with Lydia, these two photographs went away.

On the west wall of Lydia’s bedroom you will notice two doors; the door on the right leads to a bathroom (42) larger and better accommodated (tub, shower) than the one accessible from the hallway. The door on the left leads to a walk-in closet (43). (Lydia’s closet! That particular treasury of Venus, that Fort Knox of pure feminine gold, I’ll deal with in greater depth later on.) We leave the master bedroom and reenter the hallway. Open the door to your immediate right. It is a small linen closet (44), of little note. Now open the second door on the right, the last unopened door in the apartment.

The first time I ever passed through this door was on that day I went home with Lydia from the laboratory. I was clinging to her, loving, loved, awed. She opened the door and we went inside. On the other side of the door was (45) Bruno’s room.

My room! My, my, my, my room! Mine! My area ! My space ! (Do you realize what a godly luxury is the first-person possessive pronoun applied to physical space?) My own human bedroom in a human home! There was a bed made for me, and the walls were covered with sky-blue wallpaper with pictures of clowns all over it, each clown gripping a cluster of bright balloons, and using it to ascend like Icarus into the stratosphere. A mobile of the solar system dangled on a string above the bed. I loved it. The bed (46) was of the sort designed for very young children, with the mattress sunk at the bottom of an open wooden cage to prevent a human infant from rolling out of it. In the corner of the room there was a toy box (47) erupting with all manner of bright things for me to play with — animals and games and puzzles and so forth. There was a short narrow bookshelf (48) containing a modest library of stimulating picture books, each of which I would with time come to know practically by heart, including (but by no means limited to) Goodnight Moon, The Runaway Bunny, Mickey in the Night Kitchen, Aesop’s Fables and A Child’s Garden of Verses . Then there was a little dresser (49) against the south wall, atop which stood a giant hollow plastic goose (50) with an electric cord running from the back of her and into a wall outlet. This goose was a lamp. I loved that goose. I thought it was so wonderful that a lamp could be shaped like a goose, that such a thing was even possible. You turned on her switch, and she softly glowed from within, the shadow of her long curving neck and beak cast against the ceiling by the light of her own body, driving the terror of darkness from my bedroom at night.

The room was such a bright happy place for a young ape to be, just the right environment of whimsy and childlike wonder to aid the early social and spiritual development of someone standing on the threshold of his entry into human civilization. There were so many interesting things to look at in that room — the wild costumery of all the levitating clowns on the walls, a rectangle of light moving across the wall opposite the window, the hypnotizing oscillation of the ceiling fan, the books, the toys, the illuminate goose, and, most of all, the mobile of the solar system that dangled from the ceiling above my bed — the movement of its heavenly spheres: in the middle, the sun, that glowing gaseous monster constantly exploding with the energy of ten billion nuclear bombs per second, here pictured in the act of spurting a terrifying arch of flame; then hot little Mercury, a little too close for comfort to the big S; then bright sexy Venus coyly wrapped in her bridal veil of toxic clouds; now our own blue-green dot, teeming with all manner of activity, vegetable, animal, and mineral; then angry red Mars, the coral planet who may have once harbored life; then a dusting of crumbs representing the asteroid belt; then Jupiter, massive, swirling with bloody thunderstorms, a flock of moons reeling round him like indignant desert birds; now Saturn with his hula hoop making him the most visually fascinating of the nine; then Uranus and Neptune, cold blue unfriendly twins; and finally the runty Pluto, so tiny that he’s since been demoted to “dwarf planet” and unceremoniously renamed “134340,” swinging around way out there in the frigid boondocks of the system — all of these wandering stars, careening like drunks on orbits eccentric and elliptical, cogs in the celestial clockwork, all revolving above Bruno’s little bed.

Also, I forgot to mention that there was also a closet in this room (51), containing all sorts of adorable baby clothes — all obviously unworn!

Lydia took me back to the lab at the University of Chicago nearly every day, except on the weekends. The home was the domestic domain, the domain of Lydia, the domain of comfort, of leisure, of pleasure, of love. The lab was Norm’s domain: the man’s domain, the cold hard domain of work. But the lab was a much more tolerable place to spend my days when I knew that at the ends of them I had a comfortable human home to return to with Lydia. The tests continued. All their “language training” continued unabated. The naming of things, the plastic tokens, the stuffed animals, and all the rest of it. I performed their tasks for them, mostly in a state of complacent boredom. I performed their tasks correctly more and more often. As soon as I had one of their tasks down cold, they introduced another. I chose to learn them quickly, simply so that I wouldn’t have to suffer through the boredom of making them repeat their brain-numbingly dull procedures ad nauseam. But the lion’s share of the “work” I did with Lydia was unstructured; it occurred simply in the process of ordinary quotidian life, which of course occurred all the time, not officially beginning when we entered the lab and ending when we left it.

Life at home was cheery and domestic. Every day after we came home from the lab and on the weekends, she would spend hours speaking to me. She experimented with various stimuli — games, puzzles, dolls, flash cards, generally adhering to the Montessori method of pedagogy — unhurried, loosely structured, compassionate nurturing. In the evenings I would “help” her cook, and we ate together. I learned to eat sitting at the table in a chair on top of a stack of phone books, using a fork and knife for solids and a spoon for liquids, and later in the night I would curl up in her lap while she read to me from one of my picture books, clearly articulating the words as she traced them one by one with her finger, and I listened to the words and looked at the words, gradually beginning to learn to attach visual to auditory, signifier to signified.

When she had to leave the house alone, she would put me in my crib and fasten a plastic covering to the top to keep me out of trouble until she returned. But aside from that we were rarely apart, and seldom out of earshot. Gradually, as I became more civilized, she came to trust me enough to let me roam the house by myself when she was out, and I whiled away my time alone by perusing my picture books or watching television, though she told me not to do too much of that because it would rot my brain.

The one small subversive thing I would do when she was out — when I sat there watching TV alone — was to crack open the TV’s remote control to get at its nine-volt battery, which I would gingerly touch to the surface of my tongue to feel a mild but thrilling little fuzzy electric shock. I also loved the coppery aftertaste. I would touch the battery to my tongue again and again.

My favorite program was Sesame Street , which was fine with Lydia because it was covertly educational. And indeed I learned many fundamentals from Sesame Street : how to count to ten, the colors of the alphabet, why not to eat cookies in bed. I particularly adored the segments dealing with Bert and Ernie. I was always rooting for Ernie, the freewheeling embodiment of the id, whom Bert, his stern superego, is forever trying to repress with his uptight inhibitions. Ernie, so naïve, squat, and orange; and Bert, with his yellow napiform head and scraggly black unibrow so quick to V in anger… But Bert is also wise in his own weltschmerzy way, and the two of them usually wind up learning something from each other. Every episode left Ernie a little less innocent and Bert a little more, making me wonder if someday their personalities might meet in the middle, when both achieve a self-actualized balance of wisdom and joy. Through Bert’s admonitions Ernie would come to understand something important, usually relating to his own hygiene or personal safety, and Ernie would sometimes broaden Bert’s mind a little with his energetic love of life, like in the episode in which they go fishing, and Ernie teaches Bert his shamanistic trick of invoking the fishes to simply leap out of the water and into their boat by vocal commands alone, by the awesome thaumaturgy of mere language.