Before I get too far ahead of myself, I should tell you an anecdote that begins with strange screams that I heard in my dreams at night. I don’t remember how soon it was after I began living with Lydia that I started having these dreams. They usually happened right before I woke up in the morning. I would be lying asleep in my bed, dreaming away on pleasant topics, when suddenly I would begin to hear screams, and my dreams would get bent into nightmares. I would hear these half-human noises—bursts of bloody-throated, high-pitched screaming. I dreamed of a prison, a torture garden where both people and animals wandered the grounds—or crawled along the floor, or were chained naked to posts—while guards marched up and down the halls of the castle (sometimes it was a castle), selecting the people or animals to be brought below to some place that was underground, for tortures or cruel scientific experiments. The guards wore uniforms: some of them wore crisp, fascistic brown uniforms with gold buttons, like the zookeepers would wear, and others wore the uniforms of scientists—flowing white coats—and carried clipboards. A scientist would point out one of the people, and the zookeeper would yank at the chain the person wore around his neck, and with a whip drive the person four-legged down a cold stone staircase. Soon we on the surface would hear his screams, rising up from the vents in the floor. The screaming would grow louder, more painful and terrifying, until I woke up, and it was morning. This dream would recur with slight variations. What’s interesting about this dream is that it might have been the first dream in my life that I remembered any of at all. Before, in an alexic universe, all my dreams had bled right out of my brain only seconds after waking, but by this time I had learned enough language to begin to capture and keep my dreams.
I discovered the source of these dark dreams when Lydia and I met Griph Morgan. I do not know exactly how long Lydia had lived in that apartment before my arrival, but apparently she had never met Griph, her reclusive upstairs neighbor, until we bumped into him on the stoop of the building one afternoon when we happened to arrive home at the same time. Lydia and I had come home from the lab several hours earlier than usual that day for some reason—perhaps that was why she had never crossed paths with him before; Griph’s and Lydia’s schedules had never chanced to align. He was struggling with his keys in the door to the building when we came up the stairs. Griph Morgan was not very old, but he was in poor health. He was missing one leg (he was a veteran) and walked with a cane. He had one normal leg (though a little on the pale and flabby side) and the other one was a thin metal prosthesis, which culminated unsettlingly in a fake foot inside a sneaker; but what made this doubly unsettling was that one of the many points of pride Mr. Morgan took in his Scottish heritage was the tartan kilt he usually wore, a pleated green-and-red plaid skirt, decoratively completed by a broad black belt and a rabbit-pelt sporran. Additionally, Mr. Morgan played the bagpipes, which that afternoon he had slung over his shoulder, as he was returning home from practicing in the park. To me Mr. Morgan’s bagpipes looked less like a musical instrument than a creature from another planet: a glossy black velvet bag for a body, from the top of which protruded a series of segmented stalks that looked like they could be sensory organs, and a long infundibuliform tube coming out the front of it that could have been some sort of silly nose. Lydia introduced herself and me, and he gruffly told us his name. Lydia began talking to him in the hallway of the building, though Mr. Morgan had already begun his slow clumping three-legged ascent of the stairs. First she asked him a neighborly question having to do with recycling. The question seemed to be a bit of a conversational ruse, Lydia’s real curiosity being more about her previously unseen Caledophilic upstairs neighbor than about what exactly the building’s protocol for disposing of glass and aluminum was. Mr. Morgan—who sported an interesting style of facial hair that he called a Vandyke—was characteristically laconic.
“I don’t drink anymore,” was all he said.
“But what about cans—?” Lydia must have asked, provoking a dismissive snort from beneath the mustaches of Mr. Morgan’s Vandyke before he replied that he purchased all his beans wholesale in bags and boiled them himself.
“You don’t boil your beans?” he said.
“Well—” Lydia seemed slightly confused by the question.
Like any Scotsman, Mr. Morgan was proud of his resourcefulness and frugality. He took a mild interest in me but did not seem particularly surprised that his downstairs neighbor shared her apartment with a chimp, and casually made mention of the fact that he himself cohabited peacefully with ten parrots.
“Do they talk?” Lydia asked with excitement.
“Of course they talk,” said Mr. Morgan, as if he was offended that she need even have asked. Then Lydia asked to see them, and then we were all upstairs in Griph Morgan’s apartment, which was (one) less than half the size of ours, (two) situated directly above my (Bruno’s) bedroom, (three) cluttered with old newspapers stacked to the ceiling (which Mr. Morgan clearly had no intention of recycling anytime soon), and (four) did indeed have a whole flock of parrots in it, flapping and squawking and crawling all over everything in the room. There was a big pot of beans boiling busily on the stove. Half the floor space of the living room was taken up by a huge wire birdcage, the door of which was open to allow free passage for the ten parrots. There was a tiny old TV with a twisted coat hanger for an antenna, a foldout card table, a side table, and a shabby brown easy chair facing the TV. The room had no other furnishings. The chair had been sat in so many times and so often that Mr. Morgan had carved a depression in the seat and the back that was shaped like his body, such that the negative space formed a phantomlike impression of Mr. Morgan sitting in the chair in the event of his absence. Mr. Morgan inserted his form into the Mr. Morgan–shaped crater in the easy chair, and Lydia and I sat on two of the shorter stacks of newspapers. The room was tropically dank and steamy, smelling of the combined effects of the potful of boiling beans and the parrots. Lydia would later confide in me that in her opinion Mr. Morgan’s apartment “stank,” and that she was glad she had finally discovered the source of “that weird smell in the building.” I, however, actually kind of liked the smell. Mr. Morgan’s apartment had a not-unpleasant soporific effect on me; I found its biotic pungency oddly cozy. In fits and starts of attempted conversation Lydia managed to extract from Mr. Morgan that the two things he lived for were his parrots and his bagpipes. As for the latter, he was the lead bagpiper in the Veteran’s Association of Chicago & North Western Railway Bagpipe Band. When they played in parades, he would play his bagpipes from a wheelchair, which was pushed at the head of the formation by a tartan-clad volunteer. As for the former, Griph Morgan’s parrots consisted of three African greys, two macaws, two red-billed Pionuses, one blue-crowned racket-tail, one cockatiel and one Senegalese yellow-vented. All of Mr. Morgan’s parrots enjoyed free range of his small apartment. He considered these birds his friends and roommates more than his pets.
Just a few moments spent in that place provided me with all the epiphany I needed to know the source of all those screaming dreams I had been having: the screams that my sleeping brain had built dark scenarios around were obviously the noisy, prehistoric squawks of these birds. The noises they made hearkened back to the days of the dinosaurs; it wasn’t hard to imagine these sounds coming from the throats of pterodactyls or archæopteryxes.
All of them could speak at least a little. They could say a few standard parrot things in English, such as hello and good-bye and wantsome when they wanted food of some sort. For instance, they might say wantsome cracker or wantsome apple. Some of them had learned profanities and would use the word dammit as an all-purpose intensifier, as in wantsome apple dammit. That was most of what the parrots would say in English. Mr. Morgan asserted that the parrots spoke far more in Scots Gaelic, their preferred language, which he had spent long and fruitful hours teaching to them. The parrots would frequently make a series of scratchy-throated trills and clicks and hauking and screaming sounds that Lydia and I assumed were just
normal parrot noises, only to be informed by Mr. Morgan that the parrot who had made these sounds had actually just recited a couplet from the Scots Gaelic folk ballad “A Phiùthrag’s a Phiuthar.”
Mr. Morgan was also a great lover of games. In particular he loved chess and backgammon. He always preferred game playing to conversation. Mr. Morgan taught me to play chess and backgammon. Chess was Mr. Morgan’s wife and backgammon his mistress: he loved them both, but one more committedly than the other. I remember that Lydia once asked him where he went all day—he didn’t work and lived frugally on his disability checks—and he admitted that he spent most days playing chess in the park, even in the foulest weather. I now imagine him forlornly bundled up in a coat and hat in subzero weather, shivering at the stone chessboard in the park, playing against himself while waiting for a willing opponent to happen by. He usually had ten to twenty correspondence games going at once. He taught me to play chess, but was disappointed that I never got good enough to present him with any even remotely worthy opposition, which was why he preferred to play backgammon with me, the game at which I proved more skilled. I loved the mere object of his backgammon set: it came in a black leather briefcase that looked like it ought to contain important legal documents, or maybe stacks of crisp hundred-dollar bills in a heist movie; but unclasp the snaplocks and unfold it, and look!—inside is a flat board with pockets set in the sides of it for the dice, the leather dice cups and the black and white playing chips! The board is divided in two by the hinge of the case, and is covered with a chocolate-brown felt lining, with long narrow isosceles triangles of alternating dark and light brown leather sewn flat to the felt, pointing out of the side of each quadrant of the board like jagged teeth. I loved the smell of the thing, all the felt and leather and glue, and loved the sound of the dice rattling in the leather dice cups, and the noise of their tumbling onto the board, and the deft clicks of the plastic chips as we lined them up on top of the triangles. It is Mr. Morgan to whom I owe my love of backgammon, our uncommunicative upstairs neighbor, with his kilt, his boiling beans, his bagpipes, and his parrots. Later in my life I would play backgammon a lot with my friend Leon, whom I lived with for a year in New York when I was a Shakespearean actor. Leon is also an avid gamer. He likes backgammon but is not as good at it as Mr. Morgan was (I usually win when I play Leon). Every time Leon visits me in my place of confinement, he brings his backgammon set, and sometimes, if the staff of my research center can be persuaded to let us, Leon and I imitate older and happier times by staying up all night talking, drinking wine, and playing game after game of backgammon, the chips clicking and the dice rattling in the cups sometimes until dawn.
The longer Lydia and I sat there on his stacks of newspapers, the less we got out of him. Griph Morgan was so crusty and taciturn, his recluse’s windpipes so reticent to make human speech that the parrots actually made better conversationalists. Mr. Morgan was clearly a man who felt more conversationally at home in the company of creatures whose vocabularies did not exceed more than ten or twenty words, or who spoke a not-dead-but-nearly-forgotten language that almost no one speaks anymore. Eventually we retreated back downstairs, with Lydia in parting making a vague offer to invite him down to dinner sometime, and Mr. Morgan accepting the open invitation even more vaguely. But after that visit, two things changed. One: I no longer had bad dreams that came from the parrots’ shrieks and squawks, but rather my sleeping mind attached more pleasant associations to them now that I knew they were not screaming in pain, but reciting Scots Gaelic folk songs; now rather I dreamed of charming bonny lasses traipsing gaily through the highlands and things like that. Two: Now, whenever Lydia was busy with some task that need not involve me, such as cooking dinner, and we heard the low ululatory doleful drone of bagpipes coming from upstairs (how had we not noticed that before?), Lydia would permit me to run with thumping limbs up the stairs to knock on Mr. Morgan’s door, which would usually (though not always) open after the silencing of the bagpipes, whereupon Mr. Morgan would usually (though not always) permit me to sit on a stack of newspapers in his apartment and play with his parrots and listen to him practicing his bagpipes, as beans boiled on the stove and the ten birds squawked, trilled, cooed, whistled, and croaked out some of the words they knew in rancorous accompaniment to the pipes, or, if Mr. Morgan was in a really good mood, we would play backgammon, and the chips would click and the dice would rattle and tumble until Lydia would come upstairs to fetch me for dinner, usually (though not always) trying to engage Mr. Morgan in a brief but cordial conversation, her efforts usually (though not always) failing, and sometimes (though not usually) she would invite Mr. Morgan to join us downstairs for dinner, which invitation Mr. Morgan would (always) decline.
XII
Sometimes Lydia took me on fun and educational outings. We would take the train uptown—I remember the insane joy of standing up on the seat of the train, my face squished to the window, making the glass moist and foggy with the smoke of my breath, to watch the intricate craziness and chaos and filth of the city rush by in panorama, all the untraceable activity in it like an unfurling fractal, the unnatural weirdness of all that steel and stone and glass warmed, enlivened by the human activity surging within it—or to the movies, or to lie in the sun on the lakefront in the summer, or once to the Field Museum… only once, because the sight of several taxidermized corpses of members of my own species propped up in fun poses inside a blatantly fake diorama horrified me.
(Since then, by the way, Gwen, I’ve been back to the Field Museum, and revisited the very diorama that so deeply unsettled the younger Bruno, and on seeing it again I only found it silly and quaint, and it was almost funny to remember how much it had disturbed me. It caused me to reflect on how far I’ve come, on the person I’ve since grown into. I no longer find the chimpanzee diorama so viscerally disturbing because I no longer consider myself one of them.)
Or we would go to the planetarium. I loved the planetarium. Lydia probably took me there because: (one) it was fun, (two) it was educational, and (three) we could remain inconspicuous in the darkness. I associate my memories of that place with an eerie chill in my spine and a crick in my neck from a whole afternoon spent looking up—an uncomfortable position for a human but even more so for a curvy-spined, short-necked ape. The stars above us in that great dark dome!—far more stars than were ever visible in the urban skies I was used to. I was really impressed with the alleged unfathomable vastness of the universe. Sitting in the planetarium, gazing up at the high-domed ceiling and watching the star shows was simultaneously joyful and terrifying. I appreciated the helpful glowing line drawings they would project over the constellations, showing us the shapes of the beasts and men and gods and monsters that the Ancients had wildly imagined out of the suggestions of these random scatterings of points of light in the darkness above them.
And then there was the business of learning to use the toilet. Yes, I too would have to learn the curious human taboo about urinating and defecating in public. Back in the lab, my potty training had been a rigorously enforced process of conditioning, with sweet rewards and draconian punishments. I had been lavished with particularly sumptuous treats if I dealt with my bodily excretions properly, but if I urinated or defecated on the floor of the lab, I was chastised more severely than for any other trespass. In the lab there was a little plastic chamber pot, colored red and topped with a yellow plastic lid that had a hole in the center of it, which was affixed by a valve to the rim of the receptacle: this was called my “potty.” It had not taken me much time to learn to expel all my bodily fluids and solids into the recess of this thing, because I quickly realized that my living area was a far more pleasant place in which to be if the floor was not, in fact, splattered with my piss and shit. After I came to understand the purpose of the potty, I was glad to acquiescently squat on the lid and deposit the contents of my bowels into its red plastic concavity; soon thereafter one of the lab assistants would swoop in to bear my waste away and would return shortly
with the potty, emptied and freshly washed. This was a far cry from the disgusting conditions in the zoo, from the piss-sodden carpeting of cedar planting chips in our habitat, and I welcomed it. But when I began living with Lydia, I was introduced to the bathroom.
Lydia indicated to me that from now on, while I was living in her home, I was to exclusively use this gleaming white machine for bodily waste disposal. I examined it. I lifted the lid, peered inside, set it down again. I looked into the pellucid waters within, wondering where the hole in the curving bottom of it led to. I did not quite yet realize that the little red potty that I had learned to use in the lab was in fact designed to mimic this very device. I grasped the sides of the seat with my long rubbery hands and stared into its depths while Lydia tore a square of toilet paper—also a novel thing to me then—threw it in, and flushed. I watched, rapt in awe, as the suck-crash-thunder of the torrent of water gushing in from some unknown source caused the delicate square of tissue to spiral around and around the bowl until it was finally sucked out of sight through the mysterious hole in the bottom, and I marveled as the bowl, with a prolonged hissing noise coming from deep within the machine, refilled anew with clean clear water that trickled in slowly, rose to a certain level, and then, as if God had told it to, simply stopped—and then there was silence.
I was transfixed. I myself tore off a handful of toilet paper, threw it in the bowl, yanked the trigger, and watched the machine repeat the whole magic show. I was so mesmerized by it that I probably would have kept at it until every last square of toilet paper in the world had vanished down the gurgling throat of this porcelain beast, had Lydia not stopped me to try to explain that this new machine was expressly for the disposal of one’s urine and feces. She calmly explained to me that the next time I had to “pee” or “poop” I was to utilize this device. She asked me if I understood, and I replied—perhaps over-hastily—that I did.
The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore Page 11
