Benjamin Hale - The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore

And what about her position at the university? Surely we can’t just pull up stakes and leave so easily? Here she broke openly into tears as she said:

“Bruno, I don’t work at the university anymore.”

There followed another couple of weeks of busy preparations for our imminent departure. I understood so little of what was going on. I was not well traveled. Chicago was the only home I had ever known. I was born in it. I had never been outside its city limits. There were only three places in the world that I knew well: (one) the Primate House at the Lincoln Park Zoo; (two) the main campus of the University of Chicago in general and room 308 of the Erman Biology Center in particular; and (three) the interior of 5120 South Ellis Avenue, Apartment 1A, Chicago, Illinois. Now we were about to leave this place, this place that then constituted all the known world to me, and resettle in a place that was entirely alien to me, that was only a — not even a concept! — but just a word, a single meaningless word: Colorado. My inchoate young mind could not even begin to wrap itself around the full implications of all this. We would have to say good-bye to our urban existence. We would say good-bye to the magisterial ivy-strangled gray stone buildings of the University of Chicago. Good-bye to the crushing crowds, the bleating cars, the thundering trains that shook us in the night. Good-bye to the mannequins at Marshall Field’s, good-bye to the scientists at the lab, good-bye to Haywood, good-bye to Mr. Morgan, with his parrots, his bagpipes, his backgammon, and his boiling beans. Good-bye to everything I had ever known.

People, unknown people, came to us from the outside world from time to time. Lydia would greet them at the door of our apartment and tour them around our domicile. They would open the doors to the rooms and closets, point to what was inside of them, say things, then shut the doors, twist the faucets to run the water in the sinks, flush the toilets, aimlessly amble around from room to room fiddling with knobs and handles, inquisitively poking and pulling on the various elements of the space. They usually seemed amused or intrigued or frightened to see me, quietly, industriously painting away in my room. I generally ignored them. Eventually these strange visitations quit happening, and Lydia and I spent several days collecting all of the many personal articles of our domestic existence and putting them into big brown cardboard boxes. Then one day several enormous ill-smelling men came into our apartment, picked up all the boxes we had made and put our things into, carried them outside into the cold, and loaded them into a giant orange truck parked outside of our house; then they got inside of it and drove away with our things. Lydia assured me that our possessions would somehow already be in the new place where we were going to live when we got there, but I was not so sure.

The next day, Lydia and I locked our now nearly barren apartment, carried down the walk two brown suitcases stuffed fat with personal necessities such as clothing and toiletries and put them in her small car, buckled ourselves in, and began to drive.

Now, the longest trip in a vehicle that I had ever taken in my life was from Lincoln Park to Hyde Park, from the zoo to the lab. If traffic is light, this is a journey of about twenty-five minutes. Which is to say, I had absolutely no psychogeographical measuring stick in my mind by which to even begin to comprehend how mind-bogglingly big the world actually is, or of how much time it takes to truly traverse it. A woman and an ape drove from Chicago to Colorado: a journey of more than a thousand miles that swallowed up two long days by car, even traveling as we were at absolutely harrowing highway speeds.

We pulled ourselves out of the ooze of traffic that slimed the highways of the western suburbs and onto a smooth screaming expanse of gray asphalt that soon bore us through rolling white hills, through snowy fields — endless fields — past barns and grain silos and tractors and the metal skeletons of agricultural machinery sitting dormant in the winter, past ice-coated rivers, lakes and streams, past fences and long bights of utility wire drooping from one cross to the next, each one comfortably seating hundreds of blackbirds. The sky opened up. For the first time in my life, I saw the sun melt below a naked horizon, reminding me of a golden egg frying in a pan. For the first time in my life, I saw land, I saw a blue sky made giant by the absence of visual landmarks, I saw vast tracts of empty space. And it amazed me. No one had ever told me the world was this big. Throughout the entire journey I think my face was squished flat to the cold glass of the passenger-side window of Lydia’s car, my eyes watching the outside world whip past me in all its immeasurable and unknowable magnitude. Periodically, we stopped the car at gas stations. Lydia would insert a hose into a hole in the side of our car to replenish its lifeblood, and then we drained our throbbing bladders into the toilets of their grimy bathrooms, and then in parting Lydia would buy me a candy bar. Outside, the chilly wind snapped and sang across the barren prairies that stretched vanishing into the distance all around us, blowing rippling waves through the dead cornstalks in the brown fields, and the shadows of the clouds above raced across the hills. Then we were off again! And again, my face was pressed to the glass — more birds! — more barns! — more fences! — more cows! — more telephone poles! — more and more and more space! My heart filled to bursting with the excitement of all this newness, the adventure of it, all the shallow hills sloping and rising along with our rapid traversal of the land, the sky meeting the visible edges of the earth in every direction! Look! This is the world!

I could not understand why Lydia seemed so bored.

After we had spent the whole day sitting in the car traversing the earth, and the sun had long ago set, and the character of the geography beneath our wheels had dramatically shifted several times, we came to a certain area, somewhere in the plains, where there was a cluster of lights and buildings — though the buildings were nowhere near as tall and closely situated as the many buildings in Chicago, and the lights not as bright. We entered a stark ugly white slab of a building. We dragged our fat brown suitcases rolling and banging on the thin orange carpets of the hallways behind us as we passed one identical closed door after another. Lydia inserted a key into the lock of one of these doors. She pushed the door open and led me into a sterile and affectless imitation of a human dwelling, containing a bathroom, a chair, a table, a TV, and a big dry cake of a bed sealed in an envelope of scratchy, starchy sheets tucked so tightly under the mattress that they had to be completely yanked out and tousled around a bit to loosen them up before comfortable sleeping could occur between them. My limbs were antsy with atrophy from a long day of inactivity. Taking a very long trip by car discombobulates the soul for this reason: on the one hand, you have actually just traveled farther across the earth in one day than your poor primate’s grasp of time and space could allow your mind to truly comprehend, and yet, perversely, your body has not physically moved from the same spot all day. And don’t even get me started on air travel. Modern modes of transportation pollute and corrupt the reverent relationship our minds and bodies might once have had with the geographical space in which we live. And yet they’re so damn convenient, so why not? The sacredness of the physical world is one of the many things that we have sacrificed to mere convenience. That’s how the old gods die. It turns out the Tower of Babel is not vertical, but horizontal.