Benjamin Hale - The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore

I was repentant in silence.

“The next time you want to do that with someone, you have to wait until she’s awake. Then ask. And if she doesn’t want to, then that means you can’t. Okay?”

There followed then what was perhaps the most pregnant of pregnant silences in history. Then she embraced me. I hoped that I was forgiven. I felt horrible. Then she got dressed. It was a Saturday morning.

Thus was my lesson in human sexual morality. I had to learn this. When my father, Rotpeter, wanted to stick his dick in something, he simply went and did it. I had to learn restraint . I had to learn empathy. When it came to sex, I had to make the Buberian moral shift from I/it to I/thou . That is, a soul is a thou and a body is an it . The problem with this construct is, of course, that when sex enters into any relationship between two conscious beings with sufficient theory of mind to cognize the consciousness of the other, we must deal with the philosophical difficulty of seeing another person as an it and a thou at the same time. I have since noticed that not even most humans can do this. At the height of passion, animal solipsism is absolute, and everything but the I is an it.

That day, after Lydia had dressed and we had eaten, she announced, to my delight, that there would be no lessons today and suggested we take the afternoon off instead and go on an outing. It was a pretty day in the fall, in October, I think. The ground was clustered with fallen leaves but the weather was still warm, and all the Chicagoans were out in the streets and parks, taking advantage of the nice weather before winter descended again upon the city: walking dogs, jogging, riding their bicycles, window shopping, all of them up and out and active and happy to be alive. We went uptown on the train and took a long walk in the park. Lydia bought me a balloon.

Balloon: stationed in the park, professionally merry and loudly attired, was a clown. And not just any clown — this was a clown who specialized in twisting long, sausagelike balloons into labyrinthine knots resembling various creatures, as per the request of the child for whom each balloon creation was intended. A child would say, “Make me a giraffe,” and the clown, upon receiving fifty cents’ compensation, would snap from his balloon pouch one of the stretchy raw balloons, pull and knead some more elasticity into it, inflate it with his mighty lungs, and then, with a few artful squeaky jerks, sculpt a sort of expressionistic abstraction of a giraffe, which was usually discernibly enough a giraffe to please the child. Then he would tie a string to the navel of the balloon and deliver the floating animal to his young customer, whereupon a parent or guardian would often loosely tie it around the child’s wrist to prevent its accidental ascension. The clown was standing by a waist-high wrought-iron fence at an intersection of two pedestrian paths in the park, and he had tied samples of his work to the railing of the fence. All around him, tethered to their posts, floated his colorful menagerie, an assortment of animals, but with the overrepresentation of mammals typical to the human zoological imagination: lions, giraffes, bears, dolphins, kangaroos, etc. — but I remember there was one particularly impressive, multiballooned magnum opus, an outlandishly intricate octopus, each tentacle represented by a different balloon, which incited the passersby to point at it and say, “Wow — this guy is good .” I was mesmerized watching the man at work — call it animal magnetism. I asked Lydia to pay the clown to twist up one of his creations for me. She obliged.

“Well now,” said the clown as we approached, “would the monkey like a balloon?”

“He’s a chimpanzee,” Lydia corrected him.

“Well ex cuse me!” he said through an exhalation of boisterous laughter.

Laugh, clown, laugh.

“Monkeys have tails,” she said. “Apes don’t have tails.”

Lydia handed him fifty cents, which he deposited, clink-clink, into a fanny pack.

“Now what kind of animal would you like me to make for you?” said the clown to me.

A human , I communicated.

“What?” said the clown.

Lydia, who could understand my gestures and noises, translated:

“He said he wants a person.”

“Gee,” said the clown, snapping a fresh balloon from the dispenser he wears on his belt, “I’ve been making balloon animals ever since I was debarred from practicing law, and that’s the first time anybody’s ever asked me to make a balloon human!”

Make me a human! Bruno demanded.

“I’ll see what I can do,” said the clown, these words half-muffled as he puts the limp red bag to his lips and puffs it into a long, ellipsoidal tube of air.

Twist, squeak, squeak, twist, scrunch, squeak —and behold! My own balloon person!

He had created a miniature pink effigy of a human being: what the clown had succeeded in creating for me looked something like the internationally recognized pictogram for the men’s restroom. Simple, featureless, classically proportioned and racially indistinct, standing, frontally or antipodally we cannot tell, with his feet together and his arms at his sides, with maybe a hint of masculine aggressiveness implicit in his stance: Ecce Homo —Behold the Man.

Leaving the clown, Lydia tied my floating pink man around my wrist with his string. As we walked down the path in the park, Lydia held my left hand, and my balloon man bobbed on a string two feet in the air above my right wrist.

Then we purchased ice cream cones. Lydia selected strawberry ice cream and I, now a man, deliberately opted for a manlier flavor: chocolate. We consumed our ice cream while sitting on a park bench, watching people jog past us on the path. Nearby, a deranged ruffian with one eye made guttural choking noises in the back of his throat as he loped crazily from one public wastebasket to the next, pausing at each to peek for scraps. I slipped my hand from the loop of string, let go, and my balloon man drifted heavenward.

“Bruno!” Lydia snapped. “I’m not buying you another one.”

I don’t want another one , I communicated.

“Why in the world did you do that?”

I wanted to see what would happen if I let go , I communicated.

“That’s what happens. When you let go of your little human, he flies away.”

I need hardly bother to explicate the metaphorical implications of this moment.

We watched my balloon homunculus soar into the ether, shrinking from sight until he became an indistinguishable speck of pink against the blue of the sky. This was the ascent of man.

Where does it go? I asked.

“Africa,” said Lydia.

Africa, I wondered. My ancestral homeland. That’s where Zaire is, the birthplace of my biological father. I inwardly repeated the word to myself, codifying it to a mantra: Africa, Africa, Africa. The heart of darkness. The cradle of civilization. I understood it to be a violent place where one can never be safe. Where human beings eat chimps. The setting of my nightmares. Why did she say that so easily? So thoughtlessly? Africa.

On the way home, we stopped at a flower shop, where Lydia bought a bouquet of green roses.

When we arrived at home that evening, Lydia cooked one of my favorite foods: spaghetti. It’s such a cartoonish food. I loved to slurp up the long, slippery noodles. Damn it, I still do. Lydia opened a bottle of wine and poured herself a glass. I expressed a desire to imbibe as well, and she poured me a tiny amount — not in a wineglass, because she was afraid my maladroit hands would shatter such a delicate drinking vessel — but one of the nearly indestructible and spill-proof plastic sippy cups that were designated in our household specifically for my use.