Benjamin Hale - The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore

The train passed, the apes recovered, and we forged ahead with the few minutes of the play that remained. But the moment had been ruined, and the time was irrecoverable. I almost cried. I wonder if those clear-minded creatures would be so impressed by passing trains if they understood what they were. To them, the trains mean only that for a few minutes, for some reason, the predictable behavior of the universe has been briefly upended. Suddenly nature has gone unaccountably bonkers, something has replaced the stillness and quiet of the outside world with a circus of sound and vibration. So they all clap and hoot and howl at the spectacle, because they do not know what it means. Whereas I, Bruno, am forever doomed to know what it means, and I can only peer out the window of my prison and wonder not about what makes this dangerous magical noise in the darkness beyond our walls, but about where that train might be going, where it is coming from, what it might be bringing to the free people of the world.

So, for whatever reason or convergence of reasons, Lydia and I were back in Chicago. I wonder why we were there again, after the Lawrences had for so long afforded us so much unabated peace and comfort in Colorado. I’m not even sure how it was we were surviving. Lydia wasn’t working. Where was the money coming from, Lydia? I wish I could ask her now. Why did I never ask her? Was I not curious? Such things were so outside the sphere of my childish concerns that I never thought to ask such questions. Once again we were living at 5120 South Ellis Avenue. It was fall. The skies were gray and the denuded branches of the trees rattled against the punishing autumnal winds. We found our apartment much as we had left it, although the walls and carpets had taken on the smells of the tenants who had inhabited it during our long vacation. Lydia’s renters had somehow made the apartment smell like a cheese factory, and we wondered what unsavory acts they might have committed within these walls. More unsavory than mere bestiality? No, Gwen, that mere is not in any sense ironic: I am not a beast.

For a time, Lydia and I took daily walks through the leafy and imperious campus of the University of Chicago. Our old haunts! Lydia’s former place of employment. What in the world were we doing there, Lydia? Why didn’t I ask you any of these questions at the time? When you could still speak, and were still alive? Sometimes we would stroll, hand in hand, down the length of Fifty-seventh Street, Lydia stopping occasionally to purchase things from stores: a notebook, a cup of coffee, a candy bar for me, a long-stemmed green rose to take home and put in a jelly jar of water.

The neighborhood seemed to have changed relatively little in the two years we were gone. The same buildings were all in place, the same trees, the same landmarks. We would often see the same people — the same old lady in the bright blue coat and pink scarf who would often be standing at such-and-such a particular bus station at such-and-such a particular time, the same man walking the same dog, and so on. Some stores and restaurants had gone away and been replaced by other establishments, or were vacant, or new establishments had opened in formerly empty places. I resignedly resented every little change. You know a place is home when you resent change. When we were at home in the apartment I listened: but no sound came from upstairs. No squawking parrots, no moaning bagpipes. Where had Griph Morgan gone? There was nothing but silence upstairs, and no smells, either — no more eau de boiling beans and parrot crap. Soon after we returned, I began a daily pilgrimage of galumphing up the stairs to bang on Mr. Morgan’s door, in hope that maybe he would one day materialize behind it. It was a hopeless exercise that grew more hopeless each day I did it, but I did it every day. Or should I say it was the opposite of hopeless? — it was a vainly, absurdly hopeful exercise. Griph Morgan’s door became more like a pagan idol at an altar or an oracle for whom I would leave offerings: I did not expect a reply, but nevertheless kept at it, hoping for any small sign, suspiciously, irrationally ready to interpret a flock of birds or a change in the weather as an effect of the cause of my homage. Every day I knocked on his door and called his name, and every day the door remained shut, and the space behind it silent. But absence of evidence is not evidence of absence — like a true believer, all I needed was continued hope and continued silence to continue asking.

Around this time I also noticed a subtle change — or at least a change in my perception — in the way people on the street, or in the stores we went to, interacted with Lydia. They spoke to her more slowly and more cautiously, treading on eggshells. The clerks in the stores gave her what she wanted and then quickly sought to get rid of us. Sometimes people gave her confused or concerned or distrustful looks. Many people tried very hard to avoid eye contact with us at all.

In retrospect, I may allow myself to surmise that perhaps Lydia had become known to the local inhabitants of the area as “that crazy woman who walks around everywhere with her chimp.” In retrospect, rumors about Lydia and her past (“She used to teach at the university?”—“She was fired?”—“Some suspect her of…”—“With the chimp ? Really? No…”) may have been swirling. In retrospect, I realize that even many months after moving back into our — in retrospect, dingy — apartment in Chicago, we still had never fully unpacked our boxes from the move. In retrospect, I realize that Lydia wasn’t taking as much pride in her appearance as she used to — that her hair was often tangled and unkempt and unclean, that her smart, crisp style of dress had been largely replaced by sweatpants and floppy-sleeved dirty sweaters. I also remember how, during this time, her headaches and her insomnia were so miserable, and so miserably frequent, that she was taking her knockout drops not once or twice a month but every single night , and every morning she would drag herself out of bed as if from out of a pit of mud.

And then, one morning, one morning amid all this disturbing directionlessness, Lydia rolled — literally — out of bed, and fell facedown on the floor. She was wearing her nightgown. The bedroom was stacked full of unopened cardboard boxes. It was late — almost noon (we rose to greet the day late during this confusing period in our lives). I shook her. She didn’t wake up. I turned her over.

“Lydia?” I said.

“Mmmmnnnnnnnhhhhgh,” she said.

Her eyes opened briefly to slits, and then shut again. Her pretty blond head flopped over to one side, cheek to the carpet. Her face was — was twitching . Her cheeks and nose and lips were making all these quick, erratic jerking movements. Her body was jerking and flopping around all over, like a fish just hauled from the sea. I shook her again, again she grumbled incoherently, flopped around and twitched. My confusion quickly became fear. Then I aimlessly ran around the apartment for a while. Then I shook her again.

“Lydia?”

“Mbbrrmmngnnn,” she said, without even opening her eyes. She had quit shaking and twitching, and now she was just lying limp with a lolling head and eyes aflutter on the bedroom floor. I screamed a primal scream of terror. I shook and shook and shook her with my hands, and Lydia continued and continued and continued to not wake up.

I thundered out of the front door of 5120 South Ellis Avenue, Apartment 1A. I ran around for a while in the yard in front of the building. I was still wearing my pajamas. My sky-blue pajamas were spangled with representations of superheroes, such as Batman and Superman. I looked up at the day through the bare brown canopies of the deciduous trees in front of our apartment building. The sun was out and the light was yellow and bright and crisp, but despite that it was cold, with a cutting wind. The wind whipped up dervishes of dead brown leaves on the sidewalk and in the street. I think this was in October. No one was out on the street, except for a woman in a puffy red coat up ahead of me on the other side of the street, walking a Doberman.