The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore

by Benjamin Hale

  Magic Marker was my first medium, Gwen, and I still think it’s a wonderful one. There’s the exhilarating smell when you uncap a marker, the juicy wet nib, the feeling of the thing bleeding ink onto the page for you, so smooth, so vibrant: the change one enacts upon a blank sheet of paper is so material, so pleasingly concrete and direct. Here’s a naked field of virginal white—now uncap a marker of your favorite color, drag it across the page and—shooop!—now there’s a violent streak of color in it, the immediately visible effect of your own physical agency, ha, ha, ha!

  The very first works in my oeuvre were mostly nonrepresentational and wildly expressionistic. I would create a picture that was a crazed scramble of red lines with an ugly muddy splotch right in the middle of it where young Bruno had experimented with scribbling all the different-colored markers on top of each other until the paper was wavy and warped with the dampness of so much ink, and then title the piece “Shoe.” Or I would jam a marker into the page like a jackhammer half a dozen times to make an exploding constellation of spattery green blots, then connect them with shaky blue lines, scribble over the whole thing with the orange marker and title it (intended only in affection) “Lydia.”

  I would draw all day long, practicing constantly, flying through reams of sketch paper and many, many boxes of Magic Markers. I rapidly improved, refining both technique and concept. During this period of accelerated mental maturation, when I wasn’t either studying language with Lydia or watching my beloved Bert and Ernie on Sesame Street, I was drawing. Soon I also got the knack of representational form, and now I was drawing everything in the house: pictures of the furniture, studies of various rooms, pictures of birds and squirrels I saw in the backyard, pictures of my goose lamp drawn from different angles, self-portraits drawn from the mirror, portraits of Bert and Ernie I drew from studying their images on television, and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of portraits of Lydia.

  And she did nothing but foster and encourage my artistic pursuits, Gwen. She magnetized some of my best work to the refrigerator door, and Bruno was proud. She meticulously dated and cataloged the rest of it and filed them all away in a cabinet for future scientific analysis. After I’d mastered the media of marker and paper, she bought me a set of acrylics and brushes and converted my old room into my studio. I helped her whitewash the walls, install track lighting, and rip out the carpet so I didn’t have to fret over making a mess with my paints. But I demanded she leave both my goose lamp and the mobile of the solar system right where they were: I liked to look at them.

  I say “my old room” because I was already sleeping with Lydia. No, God no, I don’t mean that euphemistically, Gwen. Not yet. I mean we literally slept together in the big cushy queen-size bed in her room. Why? Nightmares. My nightmares had never completely gone away. Plus sometimes Mr. Morgan’s parrots kept me awake at night, even though I knew their screams were benign. As for my nightmares: everyone has demons living inside them. Lydia had her recurrent headaches, and I had my nightmares. Lydia’s headaches I’ll speak of in a moment, for now I will speak of my nightmares. The Gnome Chompy was a recurrent figure in my nightmares. He would rob me of my voice and devour my parents in the jungle nearly every night. I was having more and more of these nightmares as I was learning language. Sometimes I still have them. Surely I’d had dreams before, but I only began to notice them after I started seriously acquiring language. Perhaps this is because the dreams of animals are not so very different from their waking lives. In both the dreaming and the waking consciousnesses of an animal, everything is immediate, everything happens all at once, everything is new and nothing is explainable. That is, of an animal that already has a consciousness, but not yet articulate language. I can assure you humans that when you dream, you are at your closest to the consciousness of a prelinguistic animal. That is why we feel that we must retroactively assign meanings to what we see in our dreams and nightmares. Because we, and I mean humans, are meaning makers. We do not discover the meanings of mysterious things, we invent them. We make meanings because meaninglessness terrifies us above all things. More than snakes, even. More than falling, or the dark. We trick ourselves into seeing meanings in things, when in fact all we are doing is grafting our meanings onto the universe to comfort ourselves. We gild the chaos of the universe with our symbols. To admit that something is meaningless is just like falling backward into darkness.

  There was one time, I remember, when I woke up chilled in my sweat in the middle of the night. I ran to Lydia’s bedroom, shaking and crying with fear. She was there. She was awake. Wide awake in the middle of the night. Lydia was half sitting up in the bed, and her face was contorted into a bizarre shape that I had never seen before on a real human being—only in paintings. Lydia was holding a hand to her mouth and her shoulders were shaking. She was crying. I had never seen a human cry before. It was terrifying.

  She spooked when she saw me standing in the doorway of her bedroom, and I spooked too when I saw her face, but then she waved at me to come here, come here, Bruno. And I jumped into her bed, and we held on to each other.

  She drained herself dry of tears that night. I snuggled against her chest with my arms around her warm body, and I think I both calmed her and was calmed by her. We woke up together the next morning, the sunlight slicing through the blinds, casting bright orange stripes across our bodies in the bed. My head on the pillow next to hers, her bedraggled slept-on hair, her eyes, sleep-custard still gooey in their corners, peeling open to get their first look at the day and seeing me lying next to her, and her smile at seeing me there—words would fail me if I even attempted to communicate to you the importance of that moment in my life.

  So my nightmares drove me to the solace of Lydia’s bed night after night, until she finally relented and just let me sleep with her all the time. The comfort of communion with another living creature. Her bed was our bed now.

  That was when Lydia dismantled the childlike bedroom that I had slept in for the last two years or so, and we converted it into my studio. With her warm body lying beside me, my nightmares grew less and less frequent, and eventually went away altogether, except for a freak incident now and then.

  Also, there was the fun ritual of “Going to Bed”: after Lydia read me our last bedtime story from the books, it was bedtime for Bruno, and for Lydia, too. She went to the bathroom and eventually came out in her pajamas, and then we brushed our teeth together in the mirror and spat out the toothpaste in the sink. She set the alarm clock, and we crawled into the bed, she on her side and me on mine. “Good night,” she would say every night, “sleep tight, don’t let the bedbugs bite!” And I then repeated this incantation tone for tone, though I had no idea what this singsongy rhyme meant—and then we began to sleep. For awaiting us in the morning was the ritual of “Getting Up”: we took turns in the shower—I had acquired an appreciation for the human custom of near-daily bathing. She showered, and then got dressed while I was taking my shower. Once I was dressed, I helped her make the bed. We dragged the coverlet into place together, and tucked the edges neatly under the mattress. Then, while I watched Francis the Gnome or Sesame Street, Lydia would prepare us a modest breakfast—oatmeal, Wheat Chex, bananas, strawberries, orange juice, things like that. While we ate our breakfast at the table the percolator would gurgle out a few inches of coffee. Lydia would drink a cup and dump the remainder into her portable plastic travel mug, which she would take to the lab. Then we were both buckled into her car and off to work. And when the work was done, we would repair home and begin our domestic life together anew. Dinner, books, and eventually bed. At the close of every day we went to bed together and held each other in the night like a brother and sister (or a mother and son?), making ourselves safe together against the darkness that ruled the world outside.

  XVIII

  Before going further I should mention Lydia’s periodic bouts with insomnia, and the related phenomenon of her terrible headaches.

  Lydia was the sort of person who
presented such a thick outward mask of composure to the daytime world that every demon that she quickly buried in her brain during the sunlit hours would come out to haunt her at night, sometimes costing her sleep.

  Usually she slept well enough. But once in a while, maybe ten or eleven times a year, the red-eyed monster of sleeplessness would drive Hypnos from her bed for a string of nights sometimes lasting up to a week. These insomniac fits were usually triggered by her menstrual cycle. Almost every time she experienced her “period,” Lydia would swoon with headaches—migraines. These migraine headaches, as I understand from her descriptions of them, were brutal skullbusters that made her feel as if she had a hatchet embedded in her head for several days straight, cleaving her two lobes straight down the braincrack, severing the corpus callosum, splitting the hemisphere of things from the hemisphere of symbols, each eye seeing things somewhat differently, edges failing to match up, seeing double—and this was accompanied by a cacophony of humming, gnashing, burning, chewing, grating, sawing, and buzzing noises in her head that sounded (she said) like heavy industry, like a lot of noises you might hear in a tank factory. Her eyes were also hypersensitive to light when these attacks occurred, and when the headaches were besieging her with their worst, she would lie on the bed all day with an ice pack on her head, her shoes off, and the blinds drawn shut to the world beyond the bedroom.

  She would rest but would not sleep, because the headaches were so horrific that they would not lend her a moment of peace long enough to let her fall asleep. Sometimes she got lucky, and those nearly monthly brain-blitzes failed, for whatever mysterious reason, to happen—but usually she could tell her period was coming because those headaches served as the grim harbingers of looming uterine discharge, warning her a day or two in advance. Then the headaches worsened at the peak of her three days’ bloodletting and left in their wake another three days of insomnia. I think the insomnia may have had something to do with all the Excedrin Lydia took during the time of the headaches. Extra-Strength Excedrin Migraine tablets were the only painkillers stalwart enough to even begin to quell the tempests that raged nightly in her skull, and perhaps she overmedicated herself, took too much of it, and it kept her awake, and she stayed awake, became moody, easily given to tears, emotionally haywire, would spend her nights alert and tormented, with her brain, I know, playing and replaying every regret and mistake in her life, every flare-up of fury or subjection to humiliation, until her heart rattled against her ribs like a broken machine and the light in the room shifted from orange to blue-gray and the streets outside became reanimated with the—to her—threatening and depressing sounds of early morning traffic and tweeting birds, which meant she would now be forced to face the coming day in this state, knowing that the closest she had managed to come to sleep was a sort of rollicking seasickness accompanied by a lurid zoetrope of nauseating images sliding across the screen of her inner eyelids, more like hallucinations than dreams.

  And then, after the headaches and the menstruation, followed by the insomnia, the only way to reregulate her circadian rhythm was to take these heavy-duty sleeping pills, for which she had a special prescription. And when she took one of those pills she would sleep like a corpse and could not have been woken even if the house was on fire. After a few nights of this, she was finally back on her biological track and she would be fine for another few weeks, until the headaches reemerged and the whole cycle began anew.

  Meanwhile, I was making great progress with my art. I would spend the whole weekend in my studio painting on paper with watercolors or on canvas with acrylics. Now, instead of watching TV, I would frequently retire to my studio directly after we got home from the lab in the afternoon, where I would immerse myself in my art until Lydia would fetch me, to ask me to clean up for dinner. She even successfully convinced Norm that I was making such fantastic headway with my painting that it would be beneficial to my mind and soul to cut our sessions at the lab down to a half day only, in order to reserve the afternoons for me to paint. Perhaps Norm’s quick acceptance of this idea arose more out of his exhaustions and frustrations with trying to work with me at the lab; I was, I admit, ever increasingly bitchy and uncooperative with him in the lab setting. He was glad to have the newfound peace and quiet in the afternoons. So I was seeing less and less of the Norm/lab world, and spending more and more time at home with Lydia. We all won in that way.

  After some initial frustrations with the difficulty of acrylics on canvas in comparison to markers on paper (paint is not like ink; it’s much subtler, requires one to think more in terms of color and tone than in line and form) I fell in love with the new medium and continued to expand my artistic vocabulary. I painted a series of works modeled after my mobile of the solar system, seen from various angles and lighting. First I painted individual portraits of each of the nine planets and the sun, then I painted them all together.

  All this time I was still learning a lot from Lydia. I was learning constantly—we’re still talking about my first explosive phase of awakening to the world. It wasn’t happening in big events—not some cataclysmic defining moment, not like the big bang that vomited up all the matter that composes those nine planets and you and me—but rather a very gradual formation of the universe inside my consciousness, more like the slow process of gravity rolling all that scattered dust into balls and setting them in motion, making planets, making stars—not big things, but billions of little things occurring over periods of months and years, pinching and molding my mind and soul into ontogenesis.

  I was, and am, fascinated by the human figure. The bottomless catalog of emotive capacities the human form and face is capable of. That’s why I’ve always been bored with still-life pictures. “Still life”?—my God, the very phrase is an oxymoron! Give me life! Hence, imitating my hero, Van Gogh, I painted thousands of self-portraits, and of course I continued to paint and paint and paint Lydia, who gamely continued to suffer to sit for my portraits. And when she took me for visits to the laboratory at the university, I would dash off sketches of the other scientists, which I would later use as studies for paintings.

  In seemingly no time at all I had become a painter of considerable technical accomplishment. By the time Lydia organized a formal exhibition of my work in a gallery space in the University of Chicago library, I had essentially settled into what would be my medium of choice for a long time to come: oil on canvas. Oils!—after you’ve worked with oils you’ll never want to dally in acrylics again. Acrylics—they’re too thin, too meek, the colors aren’t as vibrant, they don’t feel as real and viscous and, dare I say it, as human as oils. And I had started to work with big canvases, also. Most of the paintings included in that first exhibition of my work were painted on four-by-six-foot canvases. Lydia continued to generously purchase all my materials for me.

  I would like to describe for you in detail my first gallery exhibition. But before I do, I need to tell you something else, something very important. It has to do, naturally, with Lydia. I apologize for the brevity of this chapter, Gwen—but it is of paramount importance to me that we devote an entire and separate chapter to what I am about to tell you.

  XIX

  You have got to understand that I had been living with Lydia, and in fact had been platonically sharing a bed—a bed!—with her for over a year (in my admittedly hazy recollection) before anything “happened.”

  The sexual tension had been there right from the beginning, though. I think it had colored our relationship since the day we met—when I first fell in love with her—when I watched her take a bite out of that peach, when I tapped on that box, demonstrating to the scientists that I, too, could be just as irrational as any human being. My desire for her had gone through different phases. It had evolved and adapted to its environment through many marvelous mutations. Up until this point Lydia had taught me nearly everything I knew—everything she knew—because love—and I mean the real thing, Eros, romantic, sexual love—is possible only between psychological equals. And she raised
me up until I was practically her intellectual equal. We had come to a point in our relationship—a point at which there was but negligible difference between our respective levels of reasoning ability (though technically I suppose at this point I could still barely speak a coherent word other than yes, no, and my own name, and furthermore only Lydia could understand my speech), when we had ceased to be simply an educator and her pupil—or even a surrogate mother and her child—and became two true friends, who each learned from the other every day. We were partners in this project of ours, united against the stern world. I filled a vacancy in her emotional life, and she gave me my life as I know it, in the form of culture and knowledge.

  In a past life, Lydia had been robbed of a son and a lover. And I, Bruno, eventually gave her back both. So, yes, obviously there was a sense of some deep-seated and dangerous taboo that our relationship violated. But this taboo was not bestiality—it was incest.

  My own psychosexuality was (should I say, “is”?) tortured and twisted up and confused. Why? Because I love women, and I am a chimp.

  My relationship with Lydia progressed over the same period of time that I entered into manhood, both metaphorically and hormonally. I was sailing through both my intellectual awakening and my natural puberty at the same time. It wasn’t just that, as the intensity of the itches and tingles in my loins were slowly increasing, Bolero-like, at a steady cadence but with exponentially rising volume, I had truly begun to see Lydia as a sexual being—not just as an unattainable preadolescent fantasy but as a potential reality—but that my now very real sexual attraction to her became interwoven into the fabric of my true love. I longed to see Lydia naked. Just the symbol of her nudity to Bruno—what it meant to me then!