Benjamin Hale - The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore

Whenever I would leave the apartment on my walks I would slip out, fugitively, through the back, in order to escape the crowd of shouting protesters stationed out front. There was a back way: out through the glass doors that slid out onto the patch of backyard we shared with the other residents of the building, through the gate, past the garbage cans, down the alley and out onto the street. This was the first time I discovered the possibility of my independence. With Lydia desperately sick, mostly housebound and mostly bedridden, and me with my itchy restless boredom, I struck out on the streets, prowling the sooty, slushy grids of Hyde Park like a monster swaddled in human clothes.

I walked around on the campus of the University of Chicago, moving in the shadows of the magisterial ivy-strangled buildings — ivy I’d once gleefully climbed in my early days as an animal full of yearning — and over dead yellow and frost-dusted lawns past trees whose brittle leafless branches clicked and chattered together when the wind got strong. As these ambulations always passed without incident, I suppose I was simply mistaken by the passersby for a student: a quiet, unhappy, unfriendly, brooding, and heavily bundled student with his hands sunk in his pockets and his eyes locked to the ground, and thus by this description not especially distinct from most of the actual students at the University of Chicago.

I sat in on courses at the university. I would slip into lecture halls while the classes were in session, with my green hooded sweatshirt pulled low over my face, and take as inconspicuous a seat as I could toward the back of the room. I sat in on courses in literature, history, philosophy, economics, art history, physics, biology. I wanted to know everything I possibly could. I wanted to devour the world. I also spent a lot of time in the reading room of that cathedral of a library, sitting at one of the long desks that furnish the high-ceilinged, architecturally sepulchral, and ceremonially symmetrical room, whose walls are outfitted and ornamented with monster faces as rubber-mask-like as my own, their stone mouths carven in permanent howls of laughter or scowls of disgust, who have watched generations of readers with those fixed expressions implicative of emotional violence. In this room I would sit and while away hours to avoid the sadness of my home, where Lydia lay in bed with a decaying mind while a band of chimeras more grotesque even than these shouted and cackled at her from outside. Here among the dust motes flurrying in the light shafts that filtered through the multicolored panes of the stained-glass windows, I sat under a lamp at one of the long wooden mess-hall tables, getting up now and then to browse the shelves and unshelve books, which I splayed open on the table and read all day long. A lot of my education happened that winter, as I sat, usually alone or nearly alone in that huge solemn room, with the gloom of November in the windows, and in the back of my mind the gloom of the illness of the one person in my life I have truly loved.

Sometimes, if I did not feel like sitting in on classes or visiting the library, my solitary walks took me through a leafless-treed and snow-covered Washington Park. One day I was walking along the periphery of the park, clutching my coat tight to my weird little body and wading through rattling heaps of dead leaves, my feet crunching the frost-crystallized grass, keeping away from the other people in the park — just smatterings of people here and there who stood in the park wrapped up like mummies and bouncing on their knees to keep their blood moving, who had come to the park to unleash their dogs to let them scamper and arf around for a few minutes before returning home to hibernate away the winter like all good mammals should. And I was walking crunch-crunch under the sleeping trees with my gaze downturned and my head roiling with dark thoughts, when I saw the dead parrot.

It was a macaw. A red and green, yellow, blue, and very dead parrot, lying on the ground in the frosted-gray grass. It was unmistakably one of the recently deceased Griph Morgan’s parrots. One of the parrots whose coos, screeches, and squawks had once harmonized roughly with Griph’s bagpipes, and had once colored my dreams red, green, yellow, and blue with unusual cycles of affinity and association. There he lay, stiff and ice-coated at my feet. He was frozen. His steely gray horn of a beak was stuck in a slightly unhinged position, as if in midspeech, or in reaching out to accept a remunerative cookie or cracker. His eyes and tongue had dissolved, leaving two gray sunken holes that looked back into the inside of his now-hollow skull where a walnut-sized brain had once been. The barbs of his colorful feathers were brittle with ice. I guessed that he had probably died at first frost. Where were the others? Griph had shared his apartment with ten birds. I suppose they had been released into the “wild” when the vandyked, bean-boiling, and backgammon-playing Griph Morgan passed away. I hoped that he was buried with his bagpipes. I hoped that the other nine birds had enough wisdom to fly south when the weather began to turn. But probably they did not. A creature raised in captivity with central heating to eliminate the seasons remains ignorant of the paths of his ancestors. So the birds had most likely simply settled in the branches of the closest thing they could find to the equatorial rain forests where their blood told them to go — which happened to be the trees of Washington Park. And when the winter came, they dropped dead from the trees. I imagined this parrot, an aristocratic flame of an animal, his bright red, green, yellow, and blue plumage contrasting ludicrously against the sepia-toned gray-and-brownness of Chicago, a bird colored like a magician’s flash-and-burst of obfuscatory smoke perched in the dying black-branched trees of Washington Park, chattering, hauking, fluffing up his neck feathers with his beak and smoothing them down again with passerine prissiness — outside in the world, free at last, and without a clue as to how to be a real bird in it, blithely whistling and chirping away, occasionally singing snippets of Scots Gaelic folk ballads, and shouting out with ebullient gusto at the bemused passers-by from his perch in the tree: “HELLO!”—shouting it as a salutation at first, as if cordially inviting small talk—“HELLO, HELLO!”—then later, as the people turned their faces away, in anger—“HELLO!”—and then, finally, as winter descended, in desperation—“HELLO?… HELLO?… HELLO?” And then he died.

I nudged the bird with my shoe. The frozen parrot was light as nothing, it moved across the ground so easily. Now my eyes were secreting tears. They turned to ice in my eyelashes. I looked up to see if anyone was looking at me: they were not. I tried to dig a little grave in the ground for this frozen parrot: I could not. I clawed my long purple fingers bloody trying to dig a hole, but the dirt was so tightly compacted and solidly frozen that to dig a hole in it would have been impossible without a shovel. So I gave up and turned back for home. I felt like a failure, and in many more ways than just in my apparent inability even to successfully dig a grave for a deceased parrot. But as I was heading home, as I was walking down Fifty-fifth and about to cross Cottage Grove, waiting for the light to change, I realized that it makes no ceremonial sense to bury a bird. Just that day, or maybe the day before, I had been sitting in the reading room of the library perusing a volume of Herodotus. I had come across a passage in which the historiographer related — with a clear note of revulsion — the Persian funeral custom, which was to lay the body of the dead stark naked on a platform in the open air at the very top of a tall tower, and let the birds pick the bones clean. Herodotus found the practice disgusting, unbefitting his notions of human dignity. For him, the only dignified methods of getting rid of a stiff were either to vaporize it with purgatory fire or bury it in the ground. On first thought I agreed with his judgment, but when I had another think on it I realized that perhaps there may actually be a counterintuitive metaphorical beauty to the Persian custom. For cremation implies a total erasure, a vanishing act: as goes the soul, so must go the body, up and away in a puff of useless smoke. Burial — especially the kind where the king is buried with all his things — implies the opposite, a clinging refusal to let go, even of one’s earthly property. Whereas to dissolve the body in the bellies of birds seems rather to give back what is nature’s to nature. By extension I therefore reasoned that it would make no semiotic sense to bury a bird. That bird — and granted it may have lain there until spring before the body defrosted — would be slowly disappeared by the weather, decomposed and reconstituted into the stuff of the world, without ceremony, without any sign or token or record at all to mark that it had once lived, spoken, and died in the world.