Benjamin Hale - The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore

(Note: Gwen has just called to question the accuracy of certain elements of my narrative. She asked whether the woman from upstairs was at all surprised to hear me speak. Wasn’t I not supposed to talk to strangers, anyway? Did they really allow me into the hospital? And etc., etc. I admit, as always, to embellishments here and there in servitude to the interests of drama, though I suggest you not worry too much about them. If I ever stray from the letter of the truth, I never do in spirit. Let’s move on.)

About a week later Lydia underwent surgery. They had to shave her head so they could saw her skull open to get at the tumor. As it turned out, the surgery wouldn’t do much good. It would be a squandered effort. Lydia had no health insurance; so Mr. Lawrence paid for the surgery, a last act of kindness to us. But before we get to that, there’s one more thing I must tell you about. Our readers probably already know about this part of my story, which has been well documented in texts other than this one, so I won’t dwell on it overmuch.

That day at the hospital wasn’t over yet. Or maybe this happened on another day. I can’t remember. We spent a lot of time at that hospital during this unhappy period. Let’s say it happened on the same day. Lydia did not yet know she was pregnant. I suppose she had not ovulated in months and had been gaining a lot of weight and so on, but these things were not the only things she had been ignoring since we had moved back to Chicago. It was discovered at the hospital in the course of all the many tests and whatnot that she had to endure because of her brain tumor.

The following scene I remember, though, or I at least imagine. Lydia and I were in the waiting room. Lydia had just come back to me after running another gauntlet of medical tests. We were sitting by that fish tank again. The angelfish gaped and swam back and forth through their narrow corridor of water, their sequin eyes flat and emotionless. She had quit crying, and was now occupied in the business of staring at an area of the floor where a chair leg met the floor. A nurse bustled back to us from backstage the hospital’s theatre. She beckoned to Lydia. She said the doctors had found something interesting and unusual about the data of her body that they had collected. I was not allowed to be company when they were doing whatever they were about to do to her. Lydia obediently went with the nurse, leaving me with the fish. A long time passed. The fish did nothing interesting. Then the nurse returned, took me, Bruno, by the hand, and led me through the labyrinth of shiny white hallways lit by rectangles of fluorescent light buzzing softly overhead, past inoffensive framed watercolors of vases of flowers that blandly covered the nakedness of the walls, and into a certain room, where Lydia weakly smiled at me from the hospital bed on which she lay. I joined her at her bedside. The bed was elevated far off the floor, and I had to stand on a chair to make my body level with hers.

I remember that room, and remember it clearly. I had come to hate hospital rooms because their atmospheres reminded me of laboratories. These rooms are lit by the same frantically flickering and humming fluorescent lights. Sometimes it seems like my whole life has been lit by the fluorescent tubes of science. These fluorescent lights make for soft bright lighting that steals the shadow out from under every object and every person in the room. The rooms made for science and medicine have the same unnerving disharmony of whirring, whining electronic machines and the same sickly mint-green paint on the walls. Why is this nauseating mint-green color associated with a place where diseases are supposedly cured? Lydia was lying on a crinkly paper mat on her high plastic bed. There was a doctor, a heavy woman with a sandy brown bob of hair, and let us say there was a stethoscope draped over her neck. I was sitting in a chair beside Lydia, holding her hand. It was late afternoon. A storm had broken above the city, and rainwater speckled and streaked the window. Lydia lifted up her shirt and showed the doctor her belly. There was a machine beside the bed. It was a computer on a cart. The doctor squirted some sort of oil on her belly from a squeeze bottle and rubbed it all over her. Then she unwound a wand tethered to the machine by a long white cord wound around a peg on the cart. She pressed the wand to Lydia’s belly. I squeezed Lydia’s hand. As I held and squeezed Lydia’s hand, the doctor pointed to the screen on the machine beside the bed. The screen was black except for a circle-and-triangle of green light, the shape of a keyhole. Indecipherable rows of green numbers and letters flickered skittishly at the top and bottom of the screen. Inside the keyhole of green light was a black, bean-shaped blob. The blob moved slightly. This small black bean-shaped blob, floating in a keyhole of glowing green goo, represented her child. And mine. Lydia was pregnant with our child.

This doctor fled from the room, and shortly after returned in the company of another doctor. Both of them looked at the black bean-shaped blob floating in green goo on the screen, exchanged a few furtive words between them, then both left. Shortly after that, these two doctors returned in the company of a third doctor. All three doctors looked at the bean-shaped blob in the keyhole of glowing green goo on the screen on the machine beside Lydia’s bed. They looked at Lydia, and then looked at me; they looked back and forth from me to Lydia, from Lydia to me. Then all three of them redirected their eyes to the bean-shaped blob, floating in a keyhole of green goo on the screen of the machine.

The doctors seemed surprised, although I see little reason why they should have been. Humans and chimps have more chromosomes in common than a donkey and a horse, Gwen. It’s only natural. What I find far more surprising is that this sort of thing doesn’t happen more often.

Oh, and the fallout. I don’t want to extrapolate much on this next episode of my life, as it is perhaps one of the least interesting and best externally documented. Our readers will surely recall Lydia’s and my long and unwanted moment of infamy. They will no doubt recall the shock, the scandal, the public ridicule. They will no doubt recall the stories in the news and the long comet-tail of jokes on late-night talk shows that followed our initial splash of media attention. I suppose this is the moment where I would instruct the filmmakers of the film of my life to insert a sequence in which the front pages of newspapers, each one heralded in by a tumble of dramatic music, come rapidly spiraling at us out of a black void to splat against an invisible plane of space a few feet in front of our eyes, displaying headlines such as: CHIMPANZEE LEARNS TO SPEAK; HISTORY-CHANGING SCIENTIFIC BREAKTHROUGH DEMANDS REDEFINITION OF MANKIND; and CHIMP AND SCIENTIST INVOLVED IN SEXUAL RELATIONSHIP, WOMAN PREGNANT WITH “HUMANZEE”! Let’s leave it at that and try to move on; I find all this stuff deeply depressing and fundamentally boring. All this attention, to say the least, was undesired. Day and night that pale green phone on the kitchen wall needled us awake with its electric gobble, with voices on the other end of it begging for information, for interviews, offering money for appearances on TV talk shows — all of which, despite our poverty, were handily denied. After a few days Lydia unplugged the phone.

It should come as no surprise people were far more interested in the salacious, prurient elements of my story than the mere fact that a nonhuman had become fully fluent in a human language. That’s what it takes to get the public’s attention. A “scandal.” The “experts” were certain that I had not actually attained “Language with a capital L” (whatever that means). Suddenly, for a few long days, it seemed you couldn’t turn on a TV without seeing Noam Chomsky vigorously denying to Larry King or some other idiot that what I spoke could possibly be properly called “language” for such-and-such reasons. These “linguists” would deny to my face that what I speak is language, even when I can personally engage them in verbal argument. Lydia advised me not to speak to the media, so I didn’t. I turned down all requests for interviews. What could I ever have said to satisfy them, anyway? Nothing! There was absolutely nothing I could do or say. Their minds were made up as to the uniqueness of human language, and no proof could have possibly swayed them. I am an animal, everybody knows animals do not talk, and that was that. To accept that I had language would have required them to evict their most narcissistic of species from the false office they believe themselves to occupy, and so they did not listen and never have since. What people were more interested in was that a human woman had become pregnant with the child of an ape — and that this woman and this ape were very much in love, and that this woman planned to bear the child to term. My child. And Lydia would get better. This bug in her brain was no big deal, we would suffer through it, she would get better, and we would raise our child together, and we would be happy. That was the plan.