The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore

by Benjamin Hale

  “Bruno, your art is wonderful,” said the woman in a loud, tuneful voice. The encomiastic gush in her tone caused me to redden a little. Regina Lawrence was much younger than her husband, in her forties, maybe. She was short and wide, but attractive in an explosive fleshy way, with a honking big bosom bursting from the neck of her red blouse like two plucked geese. Silver and turquoise jewelry clicked and rattled all over her. A long red and gold shawl was wrapped around her shoulders. Her eyes were sea green and her puffy lips as pink and shiny and sticky-looking as recently licked candy, and her earlobes were distended with the weight of two fat earrings made out of turquoise elephants. A white streak ran through the middle of her long orange hair. She beamed broadly at me as she took my hand and squeezed. I could tell at once that this woman was good and kind and bighearted and perhaps absolutely insane.

  After they had introduced themselves to me, the Lawrences rose to the conversation level of the other humans and introduced themselves to Norm and the Important Man. I looked up at their faces. I thought I could detect that Norm was visibly irritated that the man had introduced himself to Lydia—and then introduced his wife to me, the chimp—without first acknowledging him, and even further irritated that he had done so in front of the Important Man. The Important Man seemed to consider himself above such things—the battlefield of gestures, words, manners—the whole delicate metalanguage of human social posturing. What apes do with thumping on their chests, throwing clumps of grass, banging on logs—human beings do in subtler ways. There’s very little difference, otherwise.

  Dudley Lawrence, however—even then I could tell—thought he possessed something that made him feel perfectly secure in the belief that he was the most important of all. Later, I would learn that this something was lots and lots of money.

  So Dudley Lawrence entered the conversation and introduced his colorful wife. He was not a scientist; he was an interested layman. I could see that Lydia was extremely interested in what he had to say. She liked his attention. He wanted to know all about me. He kept asking questions—always addressing Lydia, whom he instinctively trusted more than Norm—which increasingly infuriated Norm. Meanwhile, his wife, Regina, lowered her big body back down to my level. Eventually she decided to actually sit on the floor, right in the middle of the gallery. With all the people milling around in the room, she sat down cross-legged on the floor in front of me.

  “How are you, Bruno?” she said. Without waiting for an answer, she went right on speaking. Her sea green eyes matched her turquoise elephant earrings. “I’ve been dying to meet you, Bruno. I’ve been reading all about you. I adore your work.”

  I nodded, graciously acknowledging the compliment.

  “I wonder,” she continued, “how you would say your unique cultural perspective as a chimpanzee living in our society informs your art?”

  I wondered that myself. Since then, I’ve been fielding questions like that my entire career. People never tire of asking it. I think I replied, communicating more or less in breathy, inarticulate puttering noises and vague gestures, that I supposed being a chimpanzee in human society makes one view the human condition in terms not of being but of becoming, compelling one to understand humanity as necessarily something swept up in the flow of nature, rather than over and against nature.

  “Yes of course!” said Mrs. Lawrence.

  We chatted some more in this affable fashion.

  I had grown comfortable enough with this woman that I had let go of Lydia’s hand.

  Meanwhile, in the conversation that was happening up above us—Lydia would later relate to me—Dudley Lawrence had asked at what price he could acquire the entire collection.

  “I’m sorry,” said Lydia, or something to this effect, “Bruno’s paintings are actually not for sale. We consider them valuable documents that we need to keep for research purposes, plus—”

  “That’s all right,” said Mr. Lawrence, or something to this effect, as he slid his pen and checkbook back into the inner pocket of his silver suit jacket, maybe even slightly embarrassed at having asked the question. “I understand. But I would at least like to commission the artist to paint a separate work for—”

  “I’m really not sure that that would be appropriate for Bruno—,” Lydia began.

  But at this point Norm, whose eyes had been following the exchange with increasingly frantic greed, interrupted: “Hold on, now, perhaps we could, er, maybe we could discuss the possibility of selling some of the works in this collection. We haven’t discussed the idea, actually—”

  “Yes we have,” said Lydia. “We agreed that—”

  Norm cleared his throat and scratched his cheek.

  “Pardon me,” Norm said to Mr. Lawrence. “Would you please excuse us for a moment? I have to consult with my colleague.”

  Mr. Lawrence graciously assented, nodding in understanding as Norm grasped Lydia’s arm and led her out of earshot. The two of them walked over to the other side of the room and began to argue in terse quick whispers, with heads bent close together. While they were gone Mr. Lawrence and the Important Man built another, separate conversation together, an unknowable conversation between two supposedly important men.

  Lydia was now far away from me. She was inextricably, unreachably engaged in some business all the way on the other side of the room. Norm had stolen her, taken her away from me. I had been left in the company of this Regina Lawrence, who was still sitting cross-legged on the floor in front of me, still weaving a tapestry of words that had now become a claustrophobic tent of incomprehensible babble. I realized that I did not have a clue who any of these people were. Not the Important Man, not the tall old man in the silver suit and cowboy hat, not the two men with strange gleaming wands behind their backs, not the big elaborate woman who sat beside me on the floor. I looked around the room. All of my paintings were hanging on the walls. Why? People whom I did not know were walking around and looking at them. Why?

  My heart rattled against my ribs with fear and rage. I knew nothing. Who were these people? Where was I? What the hell was going on? I panicked. What happened next I’m not proud of. I lost it. If I ever had it, I lost it that night. Lydia, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. (Gwen, when you type up these transcripts, please copy and paste “I’m sorry” until it repeats six thousand times.)

  You might say that the animal within me, within this chimpanzee, this mock-man, Bruno, at that moment chose an extraordinarily inopportune time to burst forth from below, come out and say hello to everyone. You might say that for some reason I chose that moment to rend my garments and commence to scream and howl savagely at the top of my lungs. If you had been there you might have observed people clapping their fat stupid hands to their ugly ears at the sound of all my hideous shrieking and bellowing. You might then have observed me, with my little gray suit already in tatters flapping about my torso, aimlessly tearing around the room, seemingly in every direction at once, scrambling pell-mell and helter-skelter among all those legs, all those pants and dresses and shoes. You might also have seen me overturn both of the two foldout tables, sending all those hors d’oeuvres, all those brownies, cheeses, crackers, cherry tomatoes, and little salami sandwiches scattering across the floor, and you might have heard all the wineglasses and bottles shattering to atoms upon contact with the floor, and in your sudden panic you might have mistaken all the red wine trickling across the floor amid all the broken glass that might have crunched under your feet for blood, for human blood, and you might have helped the others to squish the hors d’oeuvres into the floor, or got the brownies and little cubes of cheese stuck to the bottoms of your shoes when you joined everyone as they stampeded in terror out of the room. And, if you were far from the door when the impromptu mass exodus began, you might have been one of the unlucky ones who got squished and crushed in the doorway by all that panicked humanity, or you might have been one of the screaming ones, who was still in the room and could not get through because the doorway ha
d gotten clogged with humans, clogged like the drain of a bathtub gets clogged with inexplicable human filth, and if so you might have been in a position to watch it happen when those two healthy young men in blue pants and tan shirts chased me into a corner of the room and jabbed me several times with their wands, those mysterious silver machines that of course were mysterious to me no longer. You might have watched the two men deliver this raging, this “vicious” animal a series of correspondingly vicious electric shocks that instantly incapacitated him, that left him whimpering, shivering on the floor, not unconscious, but for an instant wondering if he were dead. You might—if you are someone who is given to empathy—have wondered for a moment what it felt like, and you might—if you are someone who is given to sympathy (and you are rare)—have even cared.

  I gazed—feverish, sick—distantly I gazed up at the ceiling from where I lay crumpled and collapsed in the corner of the room. A moment before, it was as if those things they poked me with had instantaneously replaced every drop of blood in my veins with boiling water, and then instantly replaced it again with ice. I was shaking involuntarily. I had never felt so much pain. So much raw, hideous, physical pain—never. I heard people screaming. I heard them as if they were at the far end of a long tunnel. I heard a woman screaming. Lydia was screaming. Not so much in sorrow, but in anger.

  Now my body lay rumpled, shaking, slack, in Lydia’s arms. I looked up at her face through the gauze curtain of my delirium and saw that her face was slick, bright with tears.

  Norm, keeping his distance, stood a little ways off and to the side. He looked bashful. He looked afraid. He looked like he did not know what to do with his hands. Something passed over the features of his face that suggested he had just remembered something. Then he went out the door, probably to look for the Important Man. The Important Man had been among the first to flee.

  Now everyone who had been in the gallery was gone, except for me, Lydia, and the two thugs who had shocked me into submission. No. There were two more people there. Dudley and Regina Lawrence stood still, side by side, in the middle of the room. They did not look like they had been frightened in the least by the regrettable events of the last minute and thirty seconds. They seemed to understand. They looked far more composed than Norm had been. They were keeping their distance not out of fear, but out of respect for me and Lydia. Even in my trembling stupor, even in my pain, even in my hate and misery—this endeared them to me.

  As we were leaving, Dudley Lawrence cautiously approached us in the doorway. His hat was in his hands. With my mind in a very distant place but my body present, I watched him hand Lydia a card, and wink knowingly, and whisper something into her ear that I did not understand. His wife blew me a kiss. Lydia was now in possession of a small starchy paper rectangle that would soon dramatically alter my future. If I could have read the card that Lydia had just been given, I would have read:

  Dudley Lawrence

  Co-Founder

  The Dudley and Regina Lawrence Foundation

  for Animal Rights & Habitat Conservation

  This was followed by an address and a phone number. But of course I could not read it yet.

  Somewhere, somehow, Norm came back into the room, and there followed some terse, whispered, angry—very angry—dialogue between Norm and Lydia. Norm was enraged. Rage and bombast puffed him up like a zeppelin. Lydia was still crying, trying to blink back her unprofessional, unscientific tears. I hated Norm. Somehow we got away from him. We parted from Norm’s company and went home.

  If you had been standing outside of the building, standing in the parking lot and looking at the side entrance of the University of Chicago Main Library, then you might have seen a beautiful and beautifully dressed young woman with short blond hair, in a black dress and high-heeled shoes, carrying in her arms a heavily subdued chimp, who wore the tattered remnants of a little gray suit and a lime-green tie.

  Actually, Lydia must have been wearing a coat and a scarf on top of her dress, because it was so cold that night. It was the dead of winter. The first dustings of what would become a blizzard were fluttering down to us from above, in snowflakes so big and wet and fat you could actually hear the noises they made as they hit the ground.

  Lydia and I exited the building into this skull-achingly cold night. The streetlights painted the dismal slab of urban sky above us with their sickly penumbras of orange light.

  Lydia carried me. Her heels went scrap-clock, scrap-clock on the asphalt, our mutual shadow shifting under us as we passed beneath one streetlight to the next, toward her car at the back of the long and now-deserted parking lot of the library.

  She stopped. Silence and the sounds of fat falling snowflakes replaced the rhythm of her footfalls. Languidly I looked around us. I did not understand what was wrong. Lydia’s tears had frozen to her face. Then I saw.

  Lydia had realized she was walking on a thin and invisible film of black ice: flat, frictionless, as slick as oiled glass.

  “Bruno,” she whispered. “Please hold on to me. Hold on tight.”

  I clung to her neck. My arms were still weak.

  Lydia kneeled to the ground. She placed her fingers on the pavement for support, and slowly slid her feet out of her shoes.

  “Please hold these,” she said, and she put her shoes in the cradle of space created by my body and hers. I sucked in the humid lush smell of the insides of her shoes. I drank in the savory odor of the cushioning pads soaked in Lydia’s sweat. The insteps had a little blood in them, from two twin blisters that had burst at the backs of her heels. The air coming into my nose and mouth from the insides of her shoes was a small puff of warmth in the harrowing cold.

  We had to walk another thirty feet or so to her car. Lydia sank all her gravity into one foot at a time, balancing me in her arms—walking so slowly, so carefully—not taking any risks. Heel-to-toe, heel-to-toe, each step flat on the freezing asphalt.

  Lydia winced with each step. I’m sure the ice against the soles of her feet through the flimsy nylon pantyhose was so cold that it spun the wheel of pain around a full revolution, such that it did not freeze, but burned: a pain so sharp that it was more like fire than ice against the skin. I am sure the pain of the cold parking lot shot through her legs as if something were drilling holes in her bones and siphoning out the marrow through a straw.

  That night, on our way home, Lydia made a stop somewhere and bought us a bottle of bourbon. That night, we took it home, and Lydia built a fire in the fireplace to warm her freezing feet by, and we got incredibly drunk together until we felt safe and warm and healthy and even sane. That night, Lydia and I made drunken love with the thrashing desperation of two people drowning, clinging to each other for help but in so doing only expediting their sinking, falling together under the surface of the sea.

  Part Three

  Sated at length, ere long I might perceive

  Strange alteration in me, to degree

  Of reason in my inward powers, and speech

  Wanted not long, though to this shape retained.

  Thenceforth to speculations high or deep

  I turned my thoughts, and with capacious mind

  Considered all things visible in Heaven,

  Or Earth, or Middle, all things fair and good.

  —Satan, to Eve, Paradise Lost

  XXI

  Lydia and I did not return to the lab after that. Lydia was depressed. The stress, the disappointment, the nausea—whatever it was, it caused the headaches to come roaring into her skull every single night for weeks. Not only at night, but during the day, as well. I had never seen her so miserably incapacitated by her headaches. She did not even permit me to watch TV, because she said the device’s persistent high-pitched electronic whine—and the nattering of the things and people that appeared on the screen—aggravated her headaches. She lay diagonally across the bed all day, in her pajamas, with the blinds drawn, clutching her temples and moaning. She was therefore, during this period, no fun. So for entertainment I had t
o content myself with paging through my picture books, or else busying myself with my artistic pursuits. Outside our home the winter still ruled the sky and streets and air; we were in a particularly nasty cold snap; thus I was stuck inside. It was a time of silence and darkness in 5120 South Ellis Avenue, Apartment 1A.

  When she wasn’t collapsed sideways across the bed or the couch, or slumped in a chair with an ice pack pressed to her temple in an attempt to chill the fire that raged in her brain and sometimes drove her to the point of vomiting, Lydia was often on the phone, conducting mysterious communiqués with unknown parties. Respectfully, I did not demand to know about them. I gave her privacy, space, and distance enough. I trusted her. I assumed she was conducting some sort of official business relating to my outburst at the art gallery, the particular implications of which I could not even begin to guess at. Our phone was in the kitchen. It was plastic and pale green, bolted to the wall at about (human) chest level, right beside the refrigerator, and the receiver was connected to the port by a long drooping plastic cord that coiled like a pig’s tail. When someone on the outside wanted to speak to Lydia, the phone would sound its alarm, which sounded like the gobbling of an electric turkey, and she would pad into the kitchen, her bare feet sticking to the floor, to pick up the receiver, and then would spend a long time—sometimes up to an hour or more—either speaking into it or listening to the inscrutably faint crunching noises that issued from it. I would watch her listening to or talking on the phone. We lived an almost entirely interior existence at this time—it was too cold to make going out any fun, and apparently there was nowhere we had to go, anyway—and Lydia, her poor brain dunked in headaches like a lobster in a boiling pot, would often go the whole day without changing out of the clothes she’d slept in, which often meant just a thin T-shirt and panties, and when she listened to the phone, sometimes she would unconsciously, very, very slowly, pace around in a small circle on the kitchen floor, and the long pale green plastic cord would wind itself around her body, around her pale bare legs—and then she would look down and realize what she had done, and reverse the direction of the small circles she was pacing, from counterclockwise to clockwise or vice versa, and the cord gradually unraveled around her, to hang loose and slack again between the phone port and her long, beautiful body.