Benjamin Hale - The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore

Just a few moments spent in that place provided me with all the epiphany I needed to know the source of all those screaming dreams I had been having: the screams that my sleeping brain had built dark scenarios around were obviously the noisy, prehistoric squawks of these birds. The noises they made hearkened back to the days of the dinosaurs; it wasn’t hard to imagine these sounds coming from the throats of pterodactyls or archæopteryxes.

All of them could speak at least a little. They could say a few standard parrot things in English, such as hello and good-bye and wantsome when they wanted food of some sort. For instance, they might say wantsome cracker or wantsome apple . Some of them had learned profanities and would use the word dammit as an all-purpose intensifier, as in wantsome apple dammit . That was most of what the parrots would say in English. Mr. Morgan asserted that the parrots spoke far more in Scots Gaelic, their preferred language, which he had spent long and fruitful hours teaching to them. The parrots would frequently make a series of scratchy-throated trills and clicks and hauking and screaming sounds that Lydia and I assumed were just normal parrot noises, only to be informed by Mr. Morgan that the parrot who had made these sounds had actually just recited a couplet from the Scots Gaelic folk ballad “A Phiùthrag’s a Phiuthar.”

Mr. Morgan was also a great lover of games. In particular he loved chess and backgammon. He always preferred game playing to conversation. Mr. Morgan taught me to play chess and backgammon. Chess was Mr. Morgan’s wife and backgammon his mistress: he loved them both, but one more committedly than the other. I remember that Lydia once asked him where he went all day — he didn’t work and lived frugally on his disability checks — and he admitted that he spent most days playing chess in the park, even in the foulest weather. I now imagine him forlornly bundled up in a coat and hat in subzero weather, shivering at the stone chessboard in the park, playing against himself while waiting for a willing opponent to happen by. He usually had ten to twenty correspondence games going at once. He taught me to play chess, but was disappointed that I never got good enough to present him with any even remotely worthy opposition, which was why he preferred to play backgammon with me, the game at which I proved more skilled. I loved the mere object of his backgammon set: it came in a black leather briefcase that looked like it ought to contain important legal documents, or maybe stacks of crisp hundred-dollar bills in a heist movie; but unclasp the snaplocks and unfold it, and look! — inside is a flat board with pockets set in the sides of it for the dice, the leather dice cups and the black and white playing chips! The board is divided in two by the hinge of the case, and is covered with a chocolate-brown felt lining, with long narrow isosceles triangles of alternating dark and light brown leather sewn flat to the felt, pointing out of the side of each quadrant of the board like jagged teeth. I loved the smell of the thing, all the felt and leather and glue, and loved the sound of the dice rattling in the leather dice cups, and the noise of their tumbling onto the board, and the deft clicks of the plastic chips as we lined them up on top of the triangles. It is Mr. Morgan to whom I owe my love of backgammon, our uncommunicative upstairs neighbor, with his kilt, his boiling beans, his bagpipes, and his parrots. Later in my life I would play backgammon a lot with my friend Leon, whom I lived with for a year in New York when I was a Shakespearean actor. Leon is also an avid gamer. He likes backgammon but is not as good at it as Mr. Morgan was (I usually win when I play Leon). Every time Leon visits me in my place of confinement, he brings his backgammon set, and sometimes, if the staff of my research center can be persuaded to let us, Leon and I imitate older and happier times by staying up all night talking, drinking wine, and playing game after game of backgammon, the chips clicking and the dice rattling in the cups sometimes until dawn.

The longer Lydia and I sat there on his stacks of newspapers, the less we got out of him. Griph Morgan was so crusty and taciturn, his recluse’s windpipes so reticent to make human speech that the parrots actually made better conversationalists. Mr. Morgan was clearly a man who felt more conversationally at home in the company of creatures whose vocabularies did not exceed more than ten or twenty words, or who spoke a not-dead-but-nearly-forgotten language that almost no one speaks anymore. Eventually we retreated back downstairs, with Lydia in parting making a vague offer to invite him down to dinner sometime, and Mr. Morgan accepting the open invitation even more vaguely. But after that visit, two things changed. One: I no longer had bad dreams that came from the parrots’ shrieks and squawks, but rather my sleeping mind attached more pleasant associations to them now that I knew they were not screaming in pain, but reciting Scots Gaelic folk songs; now rather I dreamed of charming bonny lasses traipsing gaily through the highlands and things like that. Two: Now, whenever Lydia was busy with some task that need not involve me, such as cooking dinner, and we heard the low ululatory doleful drone of bagpipes coming from upstairs (how had we not noticed that before?), Lydia would permit me to run with thumping limbs up the stairs to knock on Mr. Morgan’s door, which would usually (though not always) open after the silencing of the bagpipes, whereupon Mr. Morgan would usually (though not always) permit me to sit on a stack of newspapers in his apartment and play with his parrots and listen to him practicing his bagpipes, as beans boiled on the stove and the ten birds squawked, trilled, cooed, whistled, and croaked out some of the words they knew in rancorous accompaniment to the pipes, or, if Mr. Morgan was in a really good mood, we would play backgammon, and the chips would click and the dice would rattle and tumble until Lydia would come upstairs to fetch me for dinner, usually (though not always) trying to engage Mr. Morgan in a brief but cordial conversation, her efforts usually (though not always) failing, and sometimes (though not usually) she would invite Mr. Morgan to join us downstairs for dinner, which invitation Mr. Morgan would (always) decline.

Sometimes Lydia took me on fun and educational outings. We would take the train uptown — I remember the insane joy of standing up on the seat of the train, my face squished to the window, making the glass moist and foggy with the smoke of my breath, to watch the intricate craziness and chaos and filth of the city rush by in panorama, all the untraceable activity in it like an unfurling fractal, the unnatural weirdness of all that steel and stone and glass warmed, enlivened by the human activity surging within it — or to the movies, or to lie in the sun on the lakefront in the summer, or once to the Field Museum… only once, because the sight of several taxidermized corpses of members of my own species propped up in fun poses inside a blatantly fake diorama horrified me.

(Since then, by the way, Gwen, I’ve been back to the Field Museum, and revisited the very diorama that so deeply unsettled the younger Bruno, and on seeing it again I only found it silly and quaint, and it was almost funny to remember how much it had disturbed me. It caused me to reflect on how far I’ve come, on the person I’ve since grown into. I no longer find the chimpanzee diorama so viscerally disturbing because I no longer consider myself one of them.)

Or we would go to the planetarium. I loved the planetarium. Lydia probably took me there because: (one) it was fun, (two) it was educational, and (three) we could remain inconspicuous in the darkness. I associate my memories of that place with an eerie chill in my spine and a crick in my neck from a whole afternoon spent looking up — an uncomfortable position for a human but even more so for a curvy-spined, short-necked ape. The stars above us in that great dark dome! — far more stars than were ever visible in the urban skies I was used to. I was really impressed with the alleged unfathomable vastness of the universe. Sitting in the planetarium, gazing up at the high-domed ceiling and watching the star shows was simultaneously joyful and terrifying. I appreciated the helpful glowing line drawings they would project over the constellations, showing us the shapes of the beasts and men and gods and monsters that the Ancients had wildly imagined out of the suggestions of these random scatterings of points of light in the darkness above them.