That night I dreamed of the Gnome Chompy. It was a dark dream. A nightmare. The nightmare was this: Lydia was dead. Or no, not dead, as I had no proof of that, but I feared the worst, that she was gone. One day she simply went out and never came back. And I went out looking for her. I got lost in the world. I was exposed to all the shrieking entropic clatter and bang of the cosmos—without her, without a guide. For some reason I was on the commuter train at one point in the dream, riding uptown, deep into the belly of Chicago—but without Lydia it was not exciting, it was horrifying: howling through the darkness trapped inside a bullet aimed God knows where, vulnerable, weak, fragile, defenseless. I could not understand what anyone was saying—or, rather, the secret conversations of the other passengers hovered right on the brink of comprehension but never quite began to make any sense, many voices mixing into a glossolalia, a swarm of talking tongues as meaningless to me as the buzzing of bees. Then, without realizing how I got there, I was in Africa. I was in my father’s dangerous birthplace, Zaire. I was running through the jungle, lost in some tropical forest teeming with inky shadows, cacophonous with threatening noises, with hoots and cackles, in a place where there are humans afoot who want to kill and eat me. There are cannibals here—I say cannibals, Gwen, because the idea of humans eating chimpanzees is like dogs fleshing their teeth on the bellies of wolves!—it is tantamount to cannibalism. I met another ape in the forest. It was my father, Rotpeter. My mother was there with him, too. My father and mother. I tried to tell them something—to ask for help, supplicate their protection. But no words came out of my mouth. My father and my mother were sitting on the mossy forest floor, grooming each other. Then we heard a sound in the darkness. I knew that it was the Gnome Chompy. Something stirring in the trees. I heard leaves rustling, twigs snapping. Darkness. All primates have three primal fears: snakes, falling backward, and the dark. This was the dark. I knew the Gnome Chompy was somewhere in the darkness of the jungle that yawned all around us. I felt his presence. I heard his breath whistling in and out of his nostrils before I saw him. And then I saw his eyes. Two green bright eyes glowed in the dark behind my parents, over my father’s shoulder. He emerged from the dark. He was a little man—being a gnome—but the Gnome Chompy was a terrifying inversion, reversion, and perversion of everything that was good about Francis the Gnome. His skin was pale yellow, sallow and necrotic. Unlike Francis the Gnome—who loves all animals—the Gnome Chompy hates them. He hates all things living. His large forehead and thickly furrowed brow protrudes over the glistening green stars of his eyes. He smiled and looked right at me as he peeled open his wet mouth to reveal two rows of sharp slimy teeth and a red raw slab of tongue. He licked his teeth. He stood behind my parents, who were facing me. I wanted to call out to them. I wanted to warn them somehow. I wanted to point behind them and scream. But I could not. That was the power of the Gnome Chompy. He had robbed me of the power of speech. It was as if there was cement hardening in my throat. I could not even move my hand to point. The Gnome Chompy had robbed me of all my powers of communication. There was no way I could warn them. I was powerless. I simply had to watch them die and be eaten, just like my father had watched his own mother and father die and be eaten. I watched the Gnome Chompy tear into my father’s neck with his jaws. Then he snapped his teeth into my mother’s throat. He tore open their bellies, he disemboweled them and began slurping up their entrails, eating them alive. They were screaming. I woke up. It was dark. At first I didn’t know where I was. My eyes flitted around the room, aimlessly landing on the things in it, landing on the darkened shapes of clowns floating up to God by their balloons, on the planets of our solar system and the shadows they made, their silhouettes like cutouts from the sheet of moonlight on the opposite wall. My goose lamp was not on. I looked at these things, but failed to register their significances, their places in waking reality, the signifiers and signifieds all ripped apart and made meaningless.
From upstairs, directly above my bed, I heard Mr. Morgan’s parrots flapping and screeching. I did not remember having gone to bed that night. I must have collapsed into sleep from sheer exhaustion right there on the living room floor, beside the fire. Lydia must have scooped me up in her arms and carried me to my bedroom and tucked me into bed.
I climbed out of my bed, ran out of the room, down the dark hallway, and into Lydia’s bedroom. To make sure she was still there, still alive, still mine. I saw the two of them, lying together in Lydia’s bed. Lydia and Tal. The bedsheets were sloppily pulled halfway up over their bodies—but I could tell that they were not wearing clothing of any sort. They were asleep. So deeply, so peacefully asleep that even my crazily bursting into the room had not woken them. I listened to the soft contrapuntal rhythms of their shallow breathing. Tal lay on her side, with her hands folded under the pillow and her legs partially curled in. Lydia lay beside her, with her knees curled into the hollows of Tal’s knees, and her cheek resting on the skin of her shoulder. Lydia’s arm was wrapped around Tal’s body, with her right hand cupped over Tal’s left breast. Lydia was faintly, sweetly, laughing in her sleep.
XVI
It must have been a few weeks later when I bit Tal’s finger off. Though to be perfectly fair to me, she had been doing something I found irritating. Also it was essentially unintentional. I had only meant to give her finger a punitive little nibble, I certainly didn’t mean to bite the whole thing off.
We had been seeing a lot of Tal lately. She and Lydia had been having their little sleepovers with increasing frequency in recent weeks. Lydia had even taken me to Tal’s apartment, where I once spent a terrifying night sleeping on the foldout couch in her living room. Tal Gozani’s apartment was the opposite of Lydia’s. Whereas Lydia’s apartment was a clean and psychologically comforting space, Tal’s living quarters were like some cluttered gypsy bazaar, where one half-expected to hear the whine of a snake charmer’s flute weaving through the air amid all that chaotic gimcrackery of bottles, cups, candles, baubles, trinkets, gewgaws, and musical instruments (a French horn, a banjo, a guitar). The apartment was small, just three little rooms: a bedroom, a grimy nook of a bathroom, and a sitting room/dining room/kitchen that Tal also used as a puppet-making workshop. A massive rough wooden worktable was pushed against one wall, dwarfing the rest of the furniture in the room. The surface of the table was where she made all her silly disgusting horrific puppets, and it was cluttered with all kinds of tools and materials—pliers, wires, paints, brushes, glue, wood, putty, clay, fabric, scissors, knives, hammers, awls, hooks, clasps, rubber bands, string, buttons, ribbons, needles, thread—a whole arsenal of implements that were apparently necessary to the business of puppet production and which made the room look like a place where industrious elves make toys. In this room it was impossible to determine where the precise boundaries of the space were because it was so cluttered with needless bric-a-brac. And puppets. The room was: filled—with—puppets. There was that Mr. Punch puppet that had horrified me so, and his wife, Judy, hanging on the pegs of a hat tree. Tal made both hand puppets and marionettes. There was a jester, a skeleton, a chef, an alien, a witch, a sailor, a cowboy, an Arabian belly dancer, a robot, a pirate, a Cossack, a rabbi, a genie, a knight, a king, a queen, a princess, a matador, a three-piece mariachi band. There were monkeys, bats, turtles, horses, cows, pigs, rabbits. Tal suspended her puppets from hooks screwed into the ceiling and walls, such that all her eerie wooden homunculi dangled on their strings like hangmen all over the room, with their hideous expressions, their gawky shiny lacquered faces leering pruriently down at me everywhere I went.
And those are just the visuals of the place. As for the audibles, the olfactibles and the tactiles? Tal had these thin brown sticks that she would light on fire with a match, which slowly smoldered away into thin snakes of ash in their shallow brass trays, and as they burned they gave off musky odors that intermingled with the distinctive smell of the fat white cigarettes she sometimes smoked. She lived in an old wooden building, as creaky and leaky a
s a ship in a storm, situated in some far-flung area of the city that I don’t believe I’ve been to since. The final unsettling touch to this environment was that she lived directly below the tracks of the L. If you looked out her kitchen window you would see the sooty iron latticework that supported the elevated tracks, and periodically the whole apartment was set to shuddering and rumbling as the train blasted over us in the night.
I remember that evening vaguely. Usually Tal would visit us in our far more pleasant environs, and during these visits Lydia would insert an animated film for me—Cinderella, Pinocchio, etc.—into our television, which happily distracted my attention while the two of them sat on the couch, cuddling and cooing and sometimes smoking one of Tal’s lumpy white cigarettes. But for some reason, tonight we were visiting Tal’s place. And Tal—being no great lover of the candy frivolities of contemporary Western civilization—did not own a TV. Being in that place was like being in a store that sells expensive and fragile things. I was afraid to touch anything for fear that I would be castigated if something broke. So for entertainment I had to content myself with wandering her tiny apartment and visually inspecting the outlandish objects therein. I remember sitting with Lydia and Tal on her cramped, mildewy, musty-smelling couch and watching Tal page through a scrapbook of photographs, pointing at each one and explaining it to Lydia. There were lots of pictures of Tal standing around in some dusty brown godforsaken moonscape of a place that for some reason she kept insisting is real, even though Lydia did not appear to doubt the photographic evidence of its existence. She said she had been working on a caboose.
Lydia’s and Tal’s shared mood became sillier and sillier as the evening wore on. Tal’s company had an interesting effect on Lydia. Tal certainly lightened her spirits, that I will admit. When the two of them were together they even began to take on one another’s speech patterns and gestural mannerisms. When they would talk together they would almost mirror each other. Lydia began gesticulating when she talked in the same ways that Tal did, and vice versa. Lydia would absorb Tal’s habit of pulling her bare feet up beneath her and sitting cross-legged on a couch with her hands in front of her, grabbing her ankles through the triangle of space in her lap. They sat across from each other on the couch like this, and when Lydia’s hand fluttered to her face to tuck an errant strand of thin blond hair behind the ridge of her ear, Tal’s hand would unconsciously mirror the movement in sympathy, even though her own unruly cords of hair were too thick to stay in place. In this way, they talked and laughed and touched each other’s hands and drank wine and smoked the lumpy white cigarettes all night, their mood becoming ever sillier.
Eventually they became so disastrously silly that in the course of the evening, after food, after wine, as Lydia and Tal were passing one of their lumpy white cigarettes back and forth between them on the couch, they offered it to me. Perhaps I had reached for it in curiosity, and they interpreted this as a request. I accepted it: I took the smoldering thing between my little rubbery fingers as I had seen them do, I put it between my lips as I had seen them do, and I breathed it in as I had seen them do, bringing the hot pungent-smelling smoke deep inside my body. I exhaled, and then coughed—I coughed and wheezed and sputtered, choking on the smoke. My eyes watered and my throat constricted. I recovered soon after and felt better. And then I began to feel a feeling that was totally unprecedented by any of my previous experience with the world. It was like I had swallowed a jellyfish egg, and now it was growing inside my stomach, the amorphous gelatinous creature pulsing and throbbing deep within me. I felt exhausted and yet hyperalert at the same time. My head was floating like a balloon several feet above my body. Lydia held me, I curled up in her arms, and she stroked my fur with her hands and kissed the top of my head.
And then they started playing with the puppets. They took them down from their hooks in the walls and ceilings. Tal’s fingers crossed over and under the wooden X that controlled the limbs and head of one of the marionettes—it was the skeleton puppet—and the limp dead thing turned alive—dangling from her hand it was suddenly kissed with the breath of life. It even had a distinct personality. The bones came alive and danced, like the vision of Ezekiel. This time, I was cognizant enough that the puppet was not a real creature that I was content to observe it without feeling too much wild trepidation in my heart. One of the musical instruments Tal had in her apartment was a guitar. I do not remember how the guitar got to be in Lydia’s hands, but suddenly, it was there. There were many things I did not know about Lydia, things I had never wondered about because they were so beyond my conceptions of what was even possible. One of these things I had never known before was that Lydia knew how to play the guitar. She laughed a nervous little laugh when the thing was first in her arms, apologizing, excuse-making for her playing before she’d even begun to play, saying how she was years out of practice and so on. Tal said, don’t be modest, I don’t care, let’s hear you play it. I can’t play it, she said. Lydia strummed it once, and frowned at how out of tune it was. She twanged a string, with her head bent low over the golden body of hollow wood, her hair hanging down over the hole in the middle of it. She listened, her eyes closed in concentration, and with her left hand screwed and unscrewed the keys on the long end of the instrument while checking and balancing the looseness or tightness of the strings by softly hitting them with the knuckle of her thumb. Tal waited for her to tune the guitar with the skeleton marionette crumpled at her feet in a pile of painted wooden bones, and I watched. When she thought she had it tuned Lydia strummed it again, and the warm full note whanged out loudly and faded away, and with it the skeleton rose up from the floor. Lydia began to play a song on the guitar. I was amazed at the way her lithe strong slender fingers squeezed notes from that delicate machine of wood and wire. It was a joyful song, it was joyful noise. On the floor, the skeleton decided to dance to the music. Something about the combination of music and puppetry and the effects of the lumpy white cigarette did not frighten but rather transfixed me. The laughter of the two women, the clicking limbs of the wooden skeleton dancing like a dervish to the guitar from which Lydia’s hands coaxed a series of sublime noises: it was hypnotism. Soon there were two wooden Xs in Tal’s competent hands, and now there were two creatures dancing on the floor of her apartment to the music of the guitar: the Arabian belly dancer—blush-cheeked, diaphanous-veiled, and glitter-skinned—was now dancing with the skeleton, representing Eros and Thanatos respectively, sex dancing with death. Now a dance demon entered me. Now I, Bruno, was dancing with the puppets: a tangle of thin hairy limbs I was, jumping and swerving in—if not time, then an approximation of it—along with the puppets, as if they were my fellow living creatures: for at that moment, as brainless and artificial and as wooden-bodied as I knew them to be (the only brains they had they had by proxy from their mover and creator), for a long moment, the music and their movement made me fully accept them as conscious beings. Faster and faster we danced, the puppets clicking and rattling around me, the guitar ringing out, the trains rumbling past the window in the dark, the two women’s voices in constant laughter, and me with my body and mind in a waking fever dream, a trance.
When Lydia could play the guitar no longer, when Tal’s fingers and arms were exhausted from dancing the puppets, and when my own arms and legs were numb with fatigue, we all fell down together. Lydia and Tal collapsed on the couch. I collapsed on the floor. The puppets also collapsed on the floor. For a time (who knows how long?—Chronos had been murdered for one night), we all lay there, listening to the occasional roar of the train outside the kitchen window, Lydia and Tal hot-faced and gasping from too much laughter, Bruno panting on the floor, the guitar sleeping silently in Lydia’s lap, and the puppets lying danceless beside me with their strings limp around their crumpled bodies.
When it was time for bed, Tal pushed on the back of the couch, which turned into a flat, uncomfortable bed. A blanket and a pillow were procured for me, in order to mimic homier sleeping conditions. Lydia kissed me
and tucked me into this makeshift bed. The world was like a big warm pot of stew that I had dunked my head in. Then Lydia joined Tal in the bedroom. In the dark, the muddy ugly orange light from the streetlights outside crept into the room, casting the shadows of the puppets against the opposite wall. From time to time a train roared by above us. The tracks shook, the wheels of the train grinding against the tracks squealed and screamed, the whole place wobbled, thundered, and all the puppets dangling from the ceiling came alive and began to dance at the command of the train’s reverberations in the night. Their arms and legs and their grinning, grimacing heads jiggled and flailed, their wooden limbs clicked and clattered together as they danced. When I finally did fall asleep, my sleep was thrashing and fitful, and I dreamed of nothing but grinning little wooden men, dancing on the ceiling. That was a place where dream always teetered on the razor’s edge of nightmare. Lydia never took me back to that place again.
The finger-biting incident, though, happened one morning in the lab. For some reason I had slept poorly the night before, I don’t recall why. But in any event I was groggy and irritable, and not particularly looking forward to the day’s work ahead of me. We were doing some experiment; I think it had to do with more novel spoken instructions to manipulate various objects in various ways. Lydia was away, doing something else. I don’t know why, but she wasn’t in the room. Neither was Norm. I recall that it was just Tal and Prasad in the room with me. Tal was sitting with me on my squishy blue mat behind the glass wall that divided the domain of the human from the domain of the chimp. Prasad was on the other side of the glass, sitting at one of the lab tables, drinking a cup of tea and perusing some paperwork. Tal was holding a box of raisins.
The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore Page 16
