I was exhausted by the relief of my terror when Tal’s arm turned into a normal human arm again, with a normal human hand on the end of it instead of an ugly little talking man. The terrible little man who had spoken was once again limp and impotent, and he was put away somewhere out of sight where he could not bother me. After this incident, I think the other scientists at the lab started taking Tal even less seriously than before.
The next time I was watching my beloved Bert and Ernie on Sesame Street, Lydia may have pointed out to me that even they were puppets of a certain sort—that these benign figures whom I loved were puppets, too, and I didn’t find them frightening, did I? True as that may have been, a key difference with Bert and Ernie was that the puppeteers of Sesame Street took pains to mask the human agency and artifice behind them. As long as the viewer is fooled, it doesn’t matter what they are. I was perfectly willing to believe that Bert and Ernie were real. I was willing to invest all my conviction in them, that they were autonomous, sentient beings, not artificial things designed to mimic the look of actual organisms, given movement to mimic life, and given voices to mimic conscious intelligence. Puppets are frightening only when the artifice is noticeable. It was also pointed out to me that one of my favorite films at the time (and still!), Pinocchio, concerned a puppet. That did not lend me any reassurance, either.
For one thing, Pinocchio is clearly not set in a universe that obeys our own conceptions of reality. This is evident right from the beginning of the film. The film opens with the lonely old puppet maker and clock maker, Geppetto, fashioning Pinocchio from a block of wood and painting him. When he completes the project, Geppetto dances the puppet (a marionette) around his home, to the general vexation of his two pets: a kitten named Figaro and a fish named Cleo. Before retiring for the evening, the childlike old man happens to look out of his bedroom window and notices that a new star has messianically appeared in the firmament. He wishes upon it, wishing that the puppet he has just made, Pinocchio, were a real boy. While he sleeps, the star becomes a beautiful semitranslucent woman who floats into the room through the window and, with a touch of her magic wand, animates Pinocchio. Pinocchio slowly blinks his wooden eyelids and stirs his wooden limbs, and—the strings attached to his head, arms, and legs having vanished—comes to life. Pinocchio arrives in the world already knowing language, but with an otherwise only partially formed consciousness. He is conscious, but without conscience, knowing nothing of the norms or moral conventions of the civilization into which he has just been born. For this purpose the blue fairy employs Jiminy, an anthropomorphic cricket drifter who happens to have earlier broken into Geppetto’s home unnoticed to seek shelter inside one of the room’s many clocks. The cricket finds the fairy sexually attractive. Jiminy, who obliges the fairy partly out of his attraction to her, is given a suit of fancy new clothes and employment as Pinocchio’s moral tutor. The fairy tells Pinocchio that he will be made into “a real boy” if he completes a sort of moral trial period as a living puppet. With this, the fairy retreats back through the window and goes back to being a star. Just then Geppetto wakes up. At first he is astonished that his wish has come true and the puppet has come alive, indicating that this is an unexpected event, but he surprisingly quickly readjusts his understanding of reality and soon has accepted that Pinocchio is alive. The very next morning, Geppetto decides that Pinocchio must go to school. He gives him a textbook and an apple to give to his teacher, and with no clear directions sends him on his way. However, Pinocchio is waylaid by an evil fox and a cat—both wearing clothes and anthropomorphic—who convince him to pursue a career in the theatre. Pinocchio’s naïveté causes him to easily fall victim to their chicaneries, and the fox and cat sell him into a life of indentured servitude to a brutal puppeteer named Stromboli. (Throughout the story, Pinocchio’s greatest vulnerability is his blithely trusting naïveté.) Many adventures follow, and Pinocchio, after repeated errors of judgment and understanding, is finally reunited with Geppetto; at the end of the film he is rewarded with becoming a biological human child. The fox and the cat, however, seem perfectly at ease in the human sphere of activity, communicating with and even engaging in economic transactions with humans, who never find it at all strange that they are animals: clearly, this is a universe in which Pinocchio’s quest to “become a real boy” is absurd. He is already anthropomorphic!—what else does he want? This is a universe in which some animals are merely animals—such as Geppetto’s pet cat, Figaro—and other animals have been given the pass of full human consciousness with which to enter into the dealings of ordinary human civilization. I have often wondered what would have become of Pinocchio had he chosen not to become a real boy, but rather to defiantly remain forever a puppet. When he becomes a real boy, his new human flesh grows smooth over his knobby wooden joints, and his eyes suddenly glisten with authentic moisture. He has become fully human—but at what price? Now that he has traded his wooden body for an organic body of electricity, bone, blood, and water, he will presumably now grow into a man, who will eventually die. Does Pinocchio realize he has traded a state of emotionally immature immortality for the mere right to call himself a human being, even though this is a world in which such a right matters little in the course of everyday business? Surely no right-thinking consciousness would swap gold for bronze like that! He’s only let himself get cheated one more time! Later, Pinocchio the real man will have to come to terms with the full implications of his humanity (wisdom, death) in order to realize that he doomed himself with the final mistake he committed in his prehuman puppethood.
XV
As we drove home from the lab that day—or maybe it was the next day, or the day after—I noticed Lydia seemed to be in higher spirits than usual. Not that she was ever morose, but she was typically serious. Yet today she was in a jocular, airy-fairy mood uncharacteristic of her. My own fragile soul was still a little rattled from my encounter with Tal’s horrifying puppet. It was the beginning of spring. I think it was among the first days of the year that were not abysmally cold. All over the city the gutter pipes whispered with snowmelt, and maybe even a hopeful bird or two dared to sing an early requiem for winter. As soon as we got in the car, as soon as Lydia had buckled me in and chortled up the engine with the keys, her hand leapt to the radio dial, and turned it on and turned it up, and proceeded to sing along with the song that issued from the holes in the dashboard of the car. She was in a good mood. She drove us home.
Scarcely had we shut the door, scarcely had our coats been hung and our shoes kicked off, when she started to cook. I offered to help. Lydia glanced down at me as I stretched my long hairy arms up at her with my eyes pleading for the mere privilege of her permission to participate in this activity; she smiled sweetly at me, patted my head and declared that she “could handle it.” She played joyful music on her stereo and sang along to it. Suddenly the kitchen was alive with the clamor of pots and pans, with hissing water, with warmth and rising steam, with the smells of chopped ingredients releasing their biological perfumes into the air as the blade of the chopping knife liberated the odoriferous chemicals trapped inside the bulbs of garlic and the onions.
“Tal is coming over for dinner tonight,” she chirped above the knock-knock-knock of the knife against the cutting board, by way of explanation for all this culinary activity.
I asked her what was for dinner.
“Paella,” she said. For all I understood her she might as well have made the word up on the spot. Lydia was a wonderful cook, by the way. Ordinarily she prepared for us delicious dishes that were suitable to my palate. Spaghetti and meatballs, I liked. Hot dogs, I liked. Macaroni and cheese, I liked. Peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, I liked. But this? What was it, even? The dish that was taking shape under Lydia’s hands seemed to be a counterintuitive and frankly insane one. It looked to me like something a Martian would have for dinner, this bubbling slumgullion of beans and peas and boiled sea creatures swimming in weird yellow slop.
I kept my ears trained
to the ceiling, listening for the tinny moans and ululations and the spirited squawkings of parrots that would indicate that Mr. Morgan was practicing his bagpipes, and perhaps would let me listen to him. Nothing, though. Mr. Morgan was not practicing his bagpipes on this particular evening. I asked Lydia for permission to go upstairs and see if Mr. Morgan wanted to play backgammon. She told me not to bother him.
I retreated to the living room to watch TV. Sesame Street wasn’t on, the bastards, nor was my second-favorite show, Francis the Gnome. In lieu of Bert and Ernie’s bumbling monkeyshines, or Francis the Gnome’s less interesting but still entertaining good deeds, a man and a woman sat still at a desk and spoke of the world’s troubles. It was boring. Lydia made me switch off the TV when Tal arrived.
“Hello, Bruno,” she said when she entered our house, carrying in one hand a bottle of wine, and in the other—unsettlingly—a bouquet of green roses. She ruffled the fur on my head with her fingers. Lydia and Tal hugged in the entryway, and Tal, who before this I had known only as a figure of the sterile and controlled environment of the lab, suddenly entered our home, causing a disturbing collision of my two social worlds, the domestic and the professional. Lydia took the flowers from her, snipped their stems, and put them in water in a rinsed-out spaghetti sauce jar.
Tal opened the bottle of wine she had brought by twisting the wine-opening implement deep into the neck of the bottle and levering out the cork with a satisfying fump. She trickled the liquid rubies the bottle contained into two glasses, which Lydia and Tal then knocked together with a ceremonial ding, and then each woman respectively and simultaneously brought her glass to her lips and took a sip. Then they began to converse, many heads above me, in complicated language I could not disentangle.
Tal leaned back with her elbow on the kitchen counter and her glass of wine in her hand while Lydia put the final aesthetic touches on the meal she had made. Lydia asked me to please set the table for three. Setting the table was one of my regular chores. Ordinarily I would have set it for two. Ordinarily I would have placed two napkins before two of the chairs that faced each other diametrically across the dining table, and then placed upon each of the napkins the three standard eating tools, one beside the other from left to right in descending order of length: knife, fork, spoon; this was “setting the table.” Lydia had shown me how to do this, and ordinarily I delighted in the ritual. But tonight, on this particular night, I remember that for some reason I just listlessly dumped several napkins and a random clattering of silverware on the surface of the table, and then clambered sullenly atop the stack of phone books on my chair, slumped myself down, and awaited the meal with crossed arms. Lydia scowled at me.
“Don’t be a little snot,” she said, half under her breath, rearranging the napkins and silverware into proper formation. “We have company tonight.”
That evening Lydia had also arranged the atmosphere of the apartment in an unusual way. She lit several candles, these fat and weird-smelling cylinders of colored wax, which she then placed in the center of the table, and then turned off all the lights in the apartment except for the lamp in the corner of the room. The music was still playing from the stereo—which wasn’t usually the case when it was just me and Lydia eating dinner—though she turned down the dial until the music was playing at a decibel level that just barely registered in the spectrum of the consciously audible—not to be actively listened to, but to provide a melodious bed of sound upon which to cushion the conversation.
In the darkness I watched the three bright flames of the three candles on the table twitch and wobble, moving in and out of existence. Their light softly painted the faces of the two women from below in red and yellow tones, and the shadows of their heads shifted and danced on the walls and ceiling. Tal poured more wine, and the two of them raised their glasses. They looked at me, and I did likewise with my plastic sippy cup full of apple juice. We all knocked our drinking receptacles together in the airspace over the center of the table. The contact of their wineglasses made a high pretty note that chimed once and rolled around in the bowls of the glasses before vibrating away to silence. The contact of their glasses with my plastic cup made no sound. We ate.
As we dined, Lydia and Tal talked, the two women’s voices twisting together into a songful braid of conversation. I did love listening to them talk. My mood lightened. The dish Lydia had prepared—while it still struck me as unnecessarily complex—wasn’t so bad, after all. I looked from one woman to the other, back and forth as they spoke, hearing the rhythms of their speech, the notes, the timing, how the sound was formed in the spaces of their mouths, how their conversation was formed in the space of time. Like music. Just like song. In those early days, just a few moments of listening to the conversation of two friends over dinner would teach me more language than I would learn in countless hours of deliberate instruction in the lab. I think that the wordless songs of love are the true mothers of language, not semiotics. Music precedes meaning.
Of what they spoke, I cannot accurately remember. I did not understand much of it. I do remember that they finished the bottle of wine as they talked and ate, and then they opened another. I remember intuiting that they were, ultimately, though perhaps indirectly, talking about me. I remember that they often uttered a word, or series of words, that sounded to me like, “Gnome Chompy.” Of course I understood what a gnome was, because a gnome happened to be the protagonist of my second-favorite TV show, Francis the Gnome. Francis was portrayed as a small, benevolent force in a big, wicked world. So I assumed that they were speaking of a gnome named Chompy. However, I could ascertain from the wrathful tones in which the two women spoke of the Gnome Chompy that they considered him to be a harmful and vituperative creature, much unlike the magnanimous-hearted Francis. I imagined Chompy—as his surname connotes—as a predatory gnome with a great gnashing jawful of evilly gleaming teeth, with which he dismembers the innocent creatures of the forest and devours their bloody entrails. I remember how they hated the Gnome Chompy. I remember hearing them say—or thought I heard them say—that they would have to protect me, Bruno, from the Gnome Chompy. I remember that they mentioned—and when they did their tone took on almost conspiratorial tones—they even mentioned Norm Plumlee’s name once or twice in connection with the Gnome Chompy, as if they believed that Norm and Chompy may have been in some kind of collusion. I remember that Tal said she would wash the dishes, and in response Lydia reached a hand across the table, and that her hand came to rest briefly on top of Tal’s hand, and Lydia said, “You don’t have to wash the dishes.” I remember that Tal insisted. I remember that Lydia finally politely acquiesced. I remember that I saw Tal standing at the kitchen sink, dipping the dirty plates one at a time into a pool of soapy water and scrubbing them clean. I remember that as she was doing this, Lydia walked up behind her and put her hands on Tal’s hips, and half-embraced her from behind. I remember being confused at the gesture. I remember that I found it saddening in one sense, because I loved Lydia. But I remember that in another sense it made me happy, because Lydia was happy. I remember it made me happy and sad simultaneously, and yet these two evenly matched but contradictory feelings both pushing and pulling at my heart somehow did not result in a sort of emotional net force zero, such that I simply felt normal—but somehow their equal opposition deepened both the happiness and the sadness that I felt. I remember there was chocolate ice cream for dessert. That I liked unequivocally.
The evening did not end there. After dinner, the dishes washed and the chocolate ice cream consumed, Lydia and Tal sat on the couch in our living room and continued their wine and conversation. Lydia built a fire in the fireplace. For a long time I sat and watched it. This was something I loved to do in the winter. I would stare into the coals and let the fire hypnotize me. I loved to watch the veins of fire tickle across a log, to watch the cinders crumble, to breathe on them and watch the ashes glow from within, as if they had a pulse, a heartbeat, like animals with fire for blood. I could sit and watch it for
hours. Soon it felt the time was approaching that would have ordinarily been my bedtime, and then it felt like that time had long since passed—but tonight for some reason the normal social structure of the universe had been relaxed, and I was allowed to do as I pleased. So I sat on the floor by the crackling fire, now and then playing with my toys, now and then gazing into the embers of the fireplace and imagining I saw ancient cities being sacked and burned, whole Carthages and Troys razed and lain to waste, complete with Aeneases escaping the flames with their fathers on their backs. The women’s voices grew lower and happier as the evening went on. At some point I remember suddenly detecting a very strange smell that I had never smelled before. It was a warm, delicious smell, but extremely thick and pungent, and I remember how this smell immediately permeated the entire apartment. I looked up at them from where I sat on the floor, and I saw the two of them engaged in an unfathomable activity on the couch. Lydia was sitting upright at one end of the couch, and Tal’s long yellow body was stretched supine along the length of it, with her dirty bare feet braced on the arm of the couch and her head, with its medusoid tangle of wild black hair, cradled in Lydia’s lap. Tal held a cigarette in her hand. Just like the cigarettes my father used to illicitly smoke in the zoo, only this one was kind of lumpy and homemade-looking, not like the perfectly cylindrical factory-made bolts of burning stink that my father, Rotpeter, had smoked. Tal brought it to her lips and sucked the smoke in deeply, and the end of it glowed orange and crackled as she did. The smoke slowly left her nostrils in twin gray streamers. She handed the cigarette to Lydia, who did the same. I don’t think they even noticed I was looking at them. They were still talking as they were doing this. When they had, taking turns, smoked all of it but a tiny remaining nubbin, Lydia let it drop from her fingers into her wineglass on the coffee table, and its speck of fire hissed out in the puddle of wine left at the bottom of the glass, and the bowl of the glass instantly filled with a burst of smoke, and for a moment the ribbons of smoke swam circles inside the glass like thin flat gray eels swimming in a fishbowl, and then the smoke floated out of the glass and dissipated in the air above it.
The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore Page 15
