Benjamin Hale - The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore

The nature of science I know — and in some oblique way I would say I even knew this at the time — was at the heart of why the life that Lydia and I had shared and known together in Chicago had come to an abrupt end, and why we had been violently uprooted and replanted in this new location that was alien to me — to both of us, as a matter of fact. Our project had grown too strange and dangerous for funding to keep coming from the normal channels through which scientific dollars flow. I understood that we were here in this unknown place in Colorado because we were refugees, banished to the fringes of science. We were refugees to whom the Lawrences kindly gave asylum.

Of course I understand that we were also there because I was an unpredictable and often violent little monster who had become an untenable legal liability to the university. After all, I was a “wild animal.” We were also there because the experiment so far had been in many respects an utter failure, a flop, a bust, a bomb. I had done nothing yet that other chimps — including Clever Hands, who sat mutely beside me in the backseat of Mr. Lawrence’s Jeep — had not done before. I shiver to think of what would have become of me if Norm had been able to completely terminate the experiment when he wanted to. I think that if the experiment had ended there — if the Lawrences had not snatched us from the flames when they did — I surely would have wound up much like poor Clever, trapped behind the half-silvered mirror of his mind.

I probably would have languished once again in the Lincoln Park Zoo for the rest of my life, having been picked up by the cruel and curious child of science, toyed with until boredom and then unceremoniously dropped, returned to my fellow animals with a mind now damaged, deformed, and deranged by human civilization but perversely ungifted with any of its benefits, not enough culture or language to build a communicative consciousness, and so doomed to sit forever in idiot moody silence, comprehending what is said and done all around me and yet unable to offer a word in return. Was it love — the love between me and Lydia — that saved me from such a fate?

No. Perhaps — this is what I think only when my mind is sunk in the mud of its darkest meditations — perhaps I should lend more of the credit for my successfully completed education into manhood to Mr. Lawrence than to Lydia, that I should say it was not so much our love but Mr. Lawrence’s money that saved me, because in this world that we have made for ourselves, love alone is powerless — everything is powerless — without capital. Yes, let’s face it: love was part of it, but honestly I was simply saved by a wealthy and generous man’s money. Love alone never saved a thing.

The final stop on Mr. Lawrence’s guided tour of his ranch deposited us before the small pink stucco house where Lydia and I would live like Ovid in exile for the next two years. Two times in this place we would see the crystalline white snow sublimate out of being to denude the brown and green ground, and two times we would see it slowly accumulate again. We experienced two winters, two springs, two summers, and two falls in this place, some seven hundred plus days, two Christmases, and four birthdays: two total Christmas trees, four total birthday cakes for me and Lydia. Over time, I would come to know Regina and Dudley Lawrence as friends of a certain sort — allies at the very least — though I never grew to feel entirely at home with them. I would come to love Sukie, the dog, and to know the friendship of Clever Hands, the only other member of my own species I would at all consider a true friend in my life.

The cabin — as Mr. Lawrence referred to it, as he parked the green Jeep before its pink-painted façade — was really a house, and a pleasant one. It afforded us at least three times as much living space as our apartment in Chicago had. It was a one-floor structure, complete with a fireplace, a bedroom, a bathroom, a cozy living room, a kitchen, and a garage that would mainly become a studio space for me, which I obligingly shared with Lydia’s car in the winter. We found the house decorated in the Southwestern themes prevalent in this area: brightly colored woolen serapes draped over sturdy rustic furniture, prints of yonic Georgia O’Keeffe paintings framed on the walls. We had an attractive front yard, in which spiky yellow and fluffy purple flowers sprouted in the spring. The steps of the back porch descended onto the grassy, lightly manicured wilderness of the Lawrence Ranch, where, when the snow had dissipated, emus, camels, giraffes, elephants, rhinos, zebras, and all kinds of other outlandish animals were permitted to wander the grounds at will, and their massive and ungainly bodies would often curiously saunter right up to our porch to gaze at us, or into the windows of our home.

These two years in the great American Southwest, our own savage pilgrimage, were two years of long meandering walks in the surrounding fields and woods and mountains, two years of feeding the animals, two years of ambling the trails of the ranch side-by-side with my surrogate brother and fellow semi-enculturated chimp, Clever Hands — Lydia, Clever and me, with Sukie the dog yapping excitedly ahead of us on the trail at a handful of passing zebras — and two years of continuing my education, as well as my passionate love affair, with Lydia. Every Arcadian day would be spent in play, in love, in conversation, in a simple life, simply lived. It was there, at the Lawrence Ranch in Colorado, during these two relatively uneventful years of contentment and bliss, where my ontogenesis was completed — in peace, in quiet, in secret. This was possible only because I was living in such an unstressed atmosphere, in such a safe, interesting, and pastoral environment, in which nothing much was ever expected or demanded of me, of us. Several evenings per week Lydia and I would spend in the “big house,” as we at once began referring to it, with Regina and Dudley Lawrence, with Larry and Lily and Clever, eating dinner — at the table, with civilized manners — and conversing, drinking wine, sometimes playing games late into the evening, such as charades, or board games like Monopoly and Pictionary. I tried to teach Clever Hands to play backgammon. He learned the game, but in the same way he learned sign language: he learned to perform the right motions, but would put them together in such erratic sequences that it was dubious whether he actually knew what they meant. In any event, I always won.

These were two happy years. In these two years I learned to speak, and later even to read. This could have only happened to me in such an unhurried atmosphere. All it required for my mind to go from a state of mostly mute listening and comprehension to a state of conversational participation — to the active production of language — was to have no one pushing me. Only pulling me, guiding me. Only then could I dare the audacity of speech. (I have always been this way: obstinate, stubborn, resistant to anyone’s pushing.) All real learning, all education, Gwen, is self-motivated. Teaching helps, yes, but teaching students by force, by pushing, is as good as preaching a sermon to a congregation of stones. It is a notably obscene crime of our language that educate is not an intransitive verb.

What can be said of a long, slow period of daily progress and habitual contentment? The angels of ecstasy and the demons of despair are visitations more at home in the house of literature, which is why I intend to nimbly skip and jump through the pages of this happy period in my life. What did my consciousness gain from my two contented years in Colorado? The cackling of coyotes at night, and in the day, the distant braying of elephants. The sharp pink-and-gold light in the early morning, and in the evening, a skyful of clouds that look as if they had been set afire. The curious company of Clever Hands and my new canine friend, Sukie. And the lineaments of gratified desire: love and love and freely conducted sexual bliss with my Lydia.