Benjamin Hale - The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore

I admit that like any true poet, I am vulnerable to romance. Do not think, Gwen, that I am an entirely rational creature, or conversely that I’m too irrational to consider and reflect upon my own moments of illogic. There is such a thing called confirmation bias, which is when the mind attaches significance to something insignificant, singling out a seemingly supernatural coincidence from all the chaotic junk in the world around it and funnels all its prayer and confidence into it because it wants it to be true — which is the source of much faith, much love, much religion, much magic, much hope, much hopeless error. I am aware of my hypocrisy when, in certain moods, I rail and rage against religion, then turn right around and find myself susceptible to belief in ghosts, in the prophecy of dreams, in spooky action at a distance. If I am vulnerable to these things it is because I have become human. I was the chimp who tapped on the box. If I rail and rage against religion, it is partly because religion is a magical belief structure that has hurt me personally, whereas secular magic has offered me hope. If I hate the irrational while being irrational myself, it is because my mind is trapped, like all human minds are trapped, between the rational understanding of the world sternly provided by empirical science (which includes the knowledge that I myself am irrational) and the ancient crazy wild beautiful brazen nonsense, the spookiness that all human consciousnesses are vulnerable to, even the hardest of scientists. It’s this human vulnerability to spookiness that had Sir Isaac Newton, when he wasn’t busy laying the foundations of classical physics, earnestly fiddling around with powders and potions and flasks and beakers, searching for the philosopher’s stone, for the elixir of life, for the secret to the transmutation of lead to gold. This is why I do not believe the argument that the light of empirical science will guide us on the path of progress, toward utopia, toward a great rational peace when nation no longer wages war against nation over pettifogging disagreements about invisible and almost certainly nonexistent things. If we ever arrived at this scientific utopia, there would be no religions, yes, and never again would a drop of blood be shed over such lunatic stupidities — but also we would produce no art; whether this is throwing the baby out with the bathwater I’m still not entirely sure. Even if we ever arrived at such a rational peace, when we got there we would no longer be human.

Meanwhile, after months of idleness, and now with the constant influx of medical bills like so many matches on the fire, our household finances were dwindling to nil. I had only a vague grasp of these things, being as I was then and am now very bad with money. Among the members of the little nuclear family unit that we had grown into out of necessary closeness, Tal was the one who mostly handled these issues. I don’t know how much money there was, but it may have been nothing, or nearly nothing, or we may have gone deeply in the red. Tal balanced our books, cleaned the apartment, kept things in order and cooked our meals. She was a decent cook in her own right, though I would have preferred Lydia’s cooking. Tal was capable of making something out of nothing in the kitchen; she could immaculately conceive a meal out of whatever pathetic smattering of ingredients happened to be knocking around in the cupboards and refrigerator — but satiating as her dishes were, these meals tasted ever increasingly of our bitter poverty. Lydia was out of commission. Even when she was awake, she just puttered around our apartment with the vacant eyes of a starving person, picking things up and putting them back down, often babbling incoherently, or else remaining disturbingly silent. If she wanted to salt her food at the table she would point at the saltshaker and say, “The… the… the… the…………… the…” Meaning, of course, “Please pass the salt.” Lydia’s silences grew longer, darker, more profound. Her words were leaving her. One by one the elements of her vocabulary were packing up their things and vacating their apartments in the condemned building of her mind. It was such a heartbreaking experience, I could never adequately describe what it was like to live with her in the following months. The only places Lydia ever went were to the doctor or to her speech pathologist, who was unable to prevent the words from crumbling away from her. Every word she spoke was preceded by and followed by such long silences that it was impossible to remember how her sentence had begun. Tal assured me that because of the nature of Lydia’s aphasia, because it was in Broca’s area and not Wernicke’s, she could understand us when we spoke to her, although she herself had greater and greater difficulty speaking. Her mind had become half-silvered, like Clever Hands’s. Her eyes were one-way mirrors, the windows to her soul opaque on the outside. She could see out; we increasingly could not see in. She slept all day. Her belly got bigger as my child grew obstinately inside her. I, Bruno, who was perfectly healthy, had become deeply nervous and unsure whether I would be able to handle the travails and responsibilities of my coming fatherhood — much less how she would handle her coming motherhood.

Once, after I arrived home through the sliding glass back doors to avoid the protesters, and shook the snow powder off my coat and thunked the mush off my boots against the doorframe, coming in from one of my daylong journeys that had taken me through the park and then through the vaulted and chandeliered reading room of the library and through the pages of whatever I was reading at the time (I think it was Gibbon’s Decline and Fall ), Tal asked me in a solemn tone to sit with her at the kitchen table. She wanted to talk with me about something. She was not angry, but I recognized the note of sternness, of getting-down-to-businessness in her voice when she requested my audience, and so I instantly began to dread whatever was coming. To her credit, at least she softened the hideous blow to my well-being she was about to deliver by preparing me a cup of hot chocolate. She knew precisely how I liked it, with five small slimy marshmallows bobbing on the surface, slowly dissolving into the hot tan liquid. I blew on the surface of my hot chocolate, and sipped.

“Bruno,” she said, her palms anchored on the surface of the kitchen table and her fingers intertwined. “You know we’re running low on money. I’m doing the best I can to take care of Lydia. But I’m afraid you need to help out, too.”

I gulped in mild terror, scalding the back of my throat with too big and quick an intake of hot chocolate. The thing was this: I had to get a job. I needed to “pull more of my weight” around our household. When Lydia and I returned to Chicago, Tal had been working at the lab again. She worked at the lab for most of the day, then came home to us to housekeep and nurse. And still there was no money. She was wearing herself thin. Norman Plumlee was still the director of the Behavioral Biology Lab at the Erman Biology Center. She said she could get me a job working at the lab. Now that I had learned language, apparently I was even more valuable to science, and Norm wanted me back. They were willing, she said, to pay for my services, since this time around I was considered conscious enough to provide consent, and therefore would no longer be treated like a slave. I had freed myself from the animal slavery of my silent mind, only to be offered my previous job at pittance wages. I would be able to help pay for things around the house. The way Tal put it, there seemed to be no option. Bruno was all grown up now, and tight circumstances demanded it was time for him to go to work. I, Bruno, nobly, albeit begrudgingly, decided to accept her offer — or command, or whatever it was. I had to go back to the lab. I would do it, but only for Lydia. Simply put, we needed money, and I, like any whore, had nothing to sell but myself. So I sold myself back to science, and back to the lab I went.