The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore

by Benjamin Hale

“I’m not upset at all. Just tired. Please don’t worry. We’re going to bed. It was a wonderful evening. Really.”

  “If you like. But don’t leave us like that. Come on, now.”

  Regina Lawrence opened her arms to her for a hug. She was again wearing both parts of her bipartite red swimsuit. Lydia, now fully clothed, placed herself into her embrace. The wet skin of Regina Lawrence’s body dampened Lydia’s clothes.

  Now Lydia and I, holding hands as we walked along the narrow trail of gravel, headed back to our little house on the Lawrence Ranch, a half a mile away from the big house. The lights in the big house were still on behind us. Our feet crunched along the gravel path, and the crickets all chirped their cricket song in the grass.

  And now, if you would, please imagine the hands of that symbolic clock that I promised you earlier, spinning themselves faster and faster into a symbolic radial blur. Time passes. After our extended stay at the Lawrence Ranch, Lydia and I moved back to Chicago. When we finally returned from our Ovid-like exile in the wilderness, I could speak, read, and write the English language and had received some of my sentimental education. In fact, it may not have been long after the memory I just related that Lydia and I left the Lawrence Ranch and returned to Chicago. I honestly don’t know why exactly we left the Lawrence Ranch when we did. I won’t pretend to know how much—if at all—our re-relocation to Chicago had to do with this curious incident that I found last night in my memory-box. But our move back may have had to do with many other factors as well. For one thing, I think Lydia missed the city, as did I. She missed its familiarity; she missed feeling her independence. She did not enjoy feeling like a perpetual houseguest. She missed the place she had called home for nearly ten years. We thanked the Lawrences for all their financial support, their kindness, their enduring, tireless, and outrageously generous hospitality. We tearfully said good-bye to Dudley and Regina Lawrence, and even more tearfully to Hilarious Lily, and to Sukie, the dog, to the memory of Hilarious Larry, and most tearfully of all to Clever Hands, who signed Good-bye! to us and kept on waving, even as Lydia’s car was tumbling over the washboards down the narrow dirt road. The sun may have been setting—or rising—painting the mountains behind us in majestic colors. And we left.

  Part Four

  threadsuns

  Above the grayblack wastes.

  A tree-

  high thought

  grasps the light-tone: there are

  still songs to sing beyond

  mankind.

  —Paul Celan

  XXVIII

  I apologize that it’s been so long since our last session, Gwen. You know I was extremely busy with Woyzeck, which you saw us perform last week. I honestly wasn’t thrilled with the way the performance turned out. We took our bows at the end of it, and our audience applauded when it was time to applaud. I have fallen so far from the zenith of my theatrical career, back when Leon and I put on our epic production of The Tempest. That was more than ten years ago now.

  Don’t worry, Gwen, I’m not offended that stage fright prevented your acting in my play. I am afraid our production was amateurish at best. Chimps are very difficult to direct. I’m seriously considering learning the dark art of puppetry. Puppets would be more obedient actors.

  I’m concerned about Leon. Leon is now over sixty. He has a moist eye, a dry hand, a yellow cheek, a white beard, a decreasing leg and an increasing belly, every part about him blasted with antiquity. His gait is slow and uncertain, his flesh doesn’t have the sanguinity it used to. A man of great heart and courageous stomach, he’s been dragging his body through hell all his life. He looks much older than he really is. Leon is the best and the last great friend I have left in the world, and I’m afraid it may be sooner than I’d like that I’ll lose him, too. Freud observed that to love anyone is to give fate a hostage. These days, when I see Leon, I can almost see fate standing behind him with a knife pressed against his fat throat. I’m afraid for him. I will miss him when he’s gone. We have heard the chimes at midnight. That we have, that we have.

  Our performance of Woyzeck, as I’m sure you observed, was marred by an irritating accident. There is a train track that passes right outside the grounds of the Zastrow National Primate Research Center, situated somewhere in rural Georgia, USA. Every once in a while—probably three or four times a day—a freight train thunders by the research center. It makes a deafening noise, usually accompanied by a long, low blast from its horn and an uncertain shuddering of the earth, during which everything in this place is set to slight wobbling. The apes—by which I mean the animal apes, the non-enculturated chimps, bonobos, and orangutans who live in this research center—they love it. They are so mystified and enchanted and terribly impressed with all the phenomena that occur every time a train passes. During these few minutes of rumbling, bellowing, and earth-shaking that happen several times daily, they all—down to an ape—commence to jump up and down, clap their hands, howl and pant-hoot and scream in wonder and irrepressible joy. And, as bad luck had it, at the absolute emotional climax of the play—the moment when Woyzeck murders his wife in a fit of jealous rage—what should happen, but that goddamn train decided to blast by outside the research center. As I staggered onstage with angst-haunted eyes and the retractable-bladed plastic toy knife in my hand, that stupid train chose that particular moment to blow its stupid horn and come rolling its stupid way along its stupid tracks, and at that moment, all the walls of our onstage narrative—fourth, third, second, first—instantly came crashing down, and not in a good way. All the chimps on the stage (except one) and all the chimps in the audience, when they heard that train roaring by, felt instantly compelled to start jumping up and down, clapping, hooting, howling, and screaming out in joyous rapture—completely ruining my play. All of my actors immediately forgot their roles, and were no longer characters in one of the greatest psychological dramas of early modern theatre, but were just chimps again, enthralled with a train.

  The train passed, the apes recovered, and we forged ahead with the few minutes of the play that remained. But the moment had been ruined, and the time was irrecoverable. I almost cried. I wonder if those clear-minded creatures would be so impressed by passing trains if they understood what they were. To them, the trains mean only that for a few minutes, for some reason, the predictable behavior of the universe has been briefly upended. Suddenly nature has gone unaccountably bonkers, something has replaced the stillness and quiet of the outside world with a circus of sound and vibration. So they all clap and hoot and howl at the spectacle, because they do not know what it means. Whereas I, Bruno, am forever doomed to know what it means, and I can only peer out the window of my prison and wonder not about what makes this dangerous magical noise in the darkness beyond our walls, but about where that train might be going, where it is coming from, what it might be bringing to the free people of the world.

  So, for whatever reason or convergence of reasons, Lydia and I were back in Chicago. I wonder why we were there again, after the Lawrences had for so long afforded us so much unabated peace and comfort in Colorado. I’m not even sure how it was we were surviving. Lydia wasn’t working. Where was the money coming from, Lydia? I wish I could ask her now. Why did I never ask her? Was I not curious? Such things were so outside the sphere of my childish concerns that I never thought to ask such questions. Once again we were living at 5120 South Ellis Avenue. It was fall. The skies were gray and the denuded branches of the trees rattled against the punishing autumnal winds. We found our apartment much as we had left it, although the walls and carpets had taken on the smells of the tenants who had inhabited it during our long vacation. Lydia’s renters had somehow made the apartment smell like a cheese factory, and we wondered what unsavory acts they might have committed within these walls. More unsavory than mere bestiality? No, Gwen, that mere is not in any sense ironic: I am not a beast.

  For a time, Lydia and I took daily walks through the leafy and imperious campus of the University of Chicago. Our old haunt
s! Lydia’s former place of employment. What in the world were we doing there, Lydia? Why didn’t I ask you any of these questions at the time? When you could still speak, and were still alive? Sometimes we would stroll, hand in hand, down the length of Fifty-seventh Street, Lydia stopping occasionally to purchase things from stores: a notebook, a cup of coffee, a candy bar for me, a long-stemmed green rose to take home and put in a jelly jar of water.

  The neighborhood seemed to have changed relatively little in the two years we were gone. The same buildings were all in place, the same trees, the same landmarks. We would often see the same people—the same old lady in the bright blue coat and pink scarf who would often be standing at such-and-such a particular bus station at such-and-such a particular time, the same man walking the same dog, and so on. Some stores and restaurants had gone away and been replaced by other establishments, or were vacant, or new establishments had opened in formerly empty places. I resignedly resented every little change. You know a place is home when you resent change. When we were at home in the apartment I listened: but no sound came from upstairs. No squawking parrots, no moaning bagpipes. Where had Griph Morgan gone? There was nothing but silence upstairs, and no smells, either—no more eau de boiling beans and parrot crap. Soon after we returned, I began a daily pilgrimage of galumphing up the stairs to bang on Mr. Morgan’s door, in hope that maybe he would one day materialize behind it. It was a hopeless exercise that grew more hopeless each day I did it, but I did it every day. Or should I say it was the opposite of hopeless?—it was a vainly, absurdly hopeful exercise. Griph Morgan’s door became more like a pagan idol at an altar or an oracle for whom I would leave offerings: I did not expect a reply, but nevertheless kept at it, hoping for any small sign, suspiciously, irrationally ready to interpret a flock of birds or a change in the weather as an effect of the cause of my homage. Every day I knocked on his door and called his name, and every day the door remained shut, and the space behind it silent. But absence of evidence is not evidence of absence—like a true believer, all I needed was continued hope and continued silence to continue asking.

  Around this time I also noticed a subtle change—or at least a change in my perception—in the way people on the street, or in the stores we went to, interacted with Lydia. They spoke to her more slowly and more cautiously, treading on eggshells. The clerks in the stores gave her what she wanted and then quickly sought to get rid of us. Sometimes people gave her confused or concerned or distrustful looks. Many people tried very hard to avoid eye contact with us at all.

  In retrospect, I may allow myself to surmise that perhaps Lydia had become known to the local inhabitants of the area as “that crazy woman who walks around everywhere with her chimp.” In retrospect, rumors about Lydia and her past (“She used to teach at the university?”—“She was fired?”—“Some suspect her of…”—“With the chimp? Really? No…”) may have been swirling. In retrospect, I realize that even many months after moving back into our—in retrospect, dingy—apartment in Chicago, we still had never fully unpacked our boxes from the move. In retrospect, I realize that Lydia wasn’t taking as much pride in her appearance as she used to—that her hair was often tangled and unkempt and unclean, that her smart, crisp style of dress had been largely replaced by sweatpants and floppy-sleeved dirty sweaters. I also remember how, during this time, her headaches and her insomnia were so miserable, and so miserably frequent, that she was taking her knockout drops not once or twice a month but every single night, and every morning she would drag herself out of bed as if from out of a pit of mud.

  And then, one morning, one morning amid all this disturbing directionlessness, Lydia rolled—literally—out of bed, and fell facedown on the floor. She was wearing her nightgown. The bedroom was stacked full of unopened cardboard boxes. It was late—almost noon (we rose to greet the day late during this confusing period in our lives). I shook her. She didn’t wake up. I turned her over.

  “Lydia?” I said.

  “Mmmmnnnnnnnhhhhgh,” she said.

  Her eyes opened briefly to slits, and then shut again. Her pretty blond head flopped over to one side, cheek to the carpet. Her face was—was twitching. Her cheeks and nose and lips were making all these quick, erratic jerking movements. Her body was jerking and flopping around all over, like a fish just hauled from the sea. I shook her again, again she grumbled incoherently, flopped around and twitched. My confusion quickly became fear. Then I aimlessly ran around the apartment for a while. Then I shook her again.

  “Lydia?”

  “Mbbrrmmngnnn,” she said, without even opening her eyes. She had quit shaking and twitching, and now she was just lying limp with a lolling head and eyes aflutter on the bedroom floor. I screamed a primal scream of terror. I shook and shook and shook her with my hands, and Lydia continued and continued and continued to not wake up.

  I thundered out of the front door of 5120 South Ellis Avenue, Apartment 1A. I ran around for a while in the yard in front of the building. I was still wearing my pajamas. My sky-blue pajamas were spangled with representations of superheroes, such as Batman and Superman. I looked up at the day through the bare brown canopies of the deciduous trees in front of our apartment building. The sun was out and the light was yellow and bright and crisp, but despite that it was cold, with a cutting wind. The wind whipped up dervishes of dead brown leaves on the sidewalk and in the street. I think this was in October. No one was out on the street, except for a woman in a puffy red coat up ahead of me on the other side of the street, walking a Doberman.

  “HELP!” I shouted at her. The Doberman began to woof barbarically at me, and the woman checked him with his leash, and then turned heel and went the other way. Then I ran back into the apartment building, clattered up the entryway stairs and began battering my chimp fists against the door of 5120 South Ellis Avenue, Apartment 2A. I banged on the door until my fists were mushy with bruises. I’m surprised I avoided bashing my hands to bags of blood and broken bones against that door.

  “HELP! HELP! HELP!”

  The door remained obstinately shut, obstinately silent. I continued to bash my fists against it and scream for help. After I do not know how many minutes or hours of this, another door down the hallway squeaked narrowly open.

  “What’s goin’ on out there?” demanded a voice. I wheeled around to look at the door. I could not see the person who stood behind it.

  “Help!” I said. “Where’s Mr. Morgan? She won’t wake up! She won’t wake up! HELP HELP HELP HELP HELP!”

  “The guy with the parrots?” said the dark sliver of space behind the door. It was a deep, throaty, dry, cracked voice, a sleepy voice, a woman’s voice?

  “Yes!”

  “He died.” The voice cleared its throat. “He passed away a few months ago.”

  What could I do? Gwen, the world was reeling and crashing all around me! My panic had now spiked into an apoplectic crescendo. Griph Morgan? He was DEAD. What if Lydia WAS GOING TO DIE TOO?

  Grace under fire? Ha. Far from it. I am not a little ashamed to admit that I was flailing my arms in the air and rattling around in the hallway like a Ping-Pong ball.

  “AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH,” I said.

  The door down the hallway thumped shut, and my heart fell into my bowels. Then it sailed back up into my throat as I realized that the person behind mysterious door number three had only closed it in order to unhook the chain, and now the door was swinging open to its full width to reveal the possessor of the voice that had spoken, who was a heavyset middle-aged black woman. She was wearing glasses and a bathrobe. She looked and acted like I had just woken her up.

  “What the heck are you screaming your head off about?” she said.

  “Come on,” I said, and grabbed her hand. “Lydia isn’t waking up.”

  “You live downstairs?”

  “Yes! Pleasepleasepleasepleaseplease HELP!”

  The woman yawn
ed. I dragged her by the hand. She left her door open, and descended the stairs with me in a pair of faded purple slippers. I brought the woman into our apartment. She entered cautiously, knocking with her knuckles on the open front door. I realized from the disgusted look on her face what a squalid and disreputable mess the house must have seemed to her. In the old days Lydia would never have let it get like this. It is true we had been living mostly out of our suitcases since we moved back several months (was that what they were, not weeks?) before. It is also true that Lydia had not been cooking like she used to, so we had been ordering in lots of pizza (which I liked) and Chinese food (which I also liked), and much of the refuse from these deliverable cuisines—i.e., boxes of various shapes, sizes, and degrees of residual soiledness—was piled up on top of the table and the countertops—on top of most surfaces, actually, including the moving boxes. I’ll own that at a certain point our apartment had developed a bit of a fly problem. It is also possible that our clothes and the sheets on our bed were unclean, as Lydia had not done laundry since moving back to Chicago. I have also neglected to mention that Lydia had some way of acquiring those lumpy pungent-smelling cigarettes she used to indulge in with Tal, and that she had been smoking them so habitually lately that the entire apartment had taken on their odor.

  When I led this unknown woman from upstairs into our bedroom, Lydia was awake. Lydia was awake again and standing up in our bedroom, in approximately the same spot of the floor on which she had fallen, right next to her side of our bed. She was still wearing the nightgown in which she slept.

  “Hello?” said Lydia. Lydia held her head with one hand in a way that suggested that her skull had cracked open and she was trying to hold it in place so that her brains wouldn’t dribble out. The sunlight coming through the bedroom window caught in the fibers of her hair, which was damp and bedraggled and falling in her face, and made them glow like the filaments of lightbulbs, like a disheveled scramble of tungsten wire. Her face was scrunched in pain, her eyebrows inwardly compressing the flesh above the bridge of her nose into two vertical folds. The bedsheets were in a state of rumpled disorder, and the air in the room was thick and faintly malodorous with Lydia’s and my comingled sleep-sweat.