The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore

by Benjamin Hale

  Seeing that Lydia was now awake, I darted across the room to her and desperately hugged her legs. I feverishly kissed and kissed and kissed her sticky thighs. She patted me on the head, confused.

  “Who… who… who… who……… you…… who…,” she said to the strange woman standing in the doorway of our bedroom. In her pain and confusion, she seemed to have omitted the word are from her sentence.

  “I’m your neighbor,” she said. “I live upstairs. Your pet monkey came and got me. You in trouble?”

  Lydia looked absently around the room. The strange woman continued to stand there in the doorway. Her arms were crossed. Then, as if she had just seen something about Lydia that she hadn’t immediately noticed, she craned her neck forward and squinted, and her arms dropped to her sides.

  “Oh, honey,” she said. “Are you okay?”

  “I… don’t… don’t… don’t… don’t… don’t…,” Lydia said falteringly, groping in the dark for words. She probably repeated the word don’t twenty times. The woman advanced into the bedroom toward us. I released my embrace of Lydia’s sweet-smelling hot sticky bare legs, and I looked up at her face, towering above me. Her face was haunted with confusion the way a haunted house is haunted with ghosts. Lydia sat down heavily on the edge of the bed, and the bedsprings squeaked twice under her body. She looked at me. Then she looked at the woman who was standing in our bedroom. I snuggled next to her on the bed. She looked down at me and said, with agonizingly long pauses before and after the first of these words:

  “Where……………………………… are we?”

  “We better get you to a doctor,” said the woman. She repaired back upstairs to put on her clothes and shoes while I helped Lydia into her clothes and then helped myself into mine. I cannot even begin to adequately describe the terror I felt when I realized that I, at this particular moment, seemed to have more control over my faculties than did Lydia. This was the woman who raised me, who had given me consciousness, who had given me everything. She gave me civilization, gave me my mind, gave me everything I knew. And the way she was moving, the way her gaze just landed here and there on various objects in the room the way a fly buzzes around until it lands on something, and then decides to get up and go land on something else—the way she was looking around at everything like she’d just been born, as if she’d just peeled herself fully formed and sinless from the womb, the way she passively, curiously, dead-limbedly submitted to me ineptly, fumble-fingeredly dragging the sleeves of her coat over her arms and cramming her feet into her shoes—it terrified, it fucking terrified me. It was as if she had become the child, which meant that I had to understudy for the role of the adult. And how pitifully unprepared for the role I was. She was moving so strangely, so unnaturally. One of her arms seemed to be moving too stiffly, like someone had poured a little concrete powder into its veins, and she seemed to have developed a slight limp in her right leg overnight, as if in struggling with some mysterious stranger in a dream, her sciatic nerve had been wounded in her sleep.

  The woman from upstairs came back into our apartment, leaving our front door open to the public hallway, with a set of keys tinkling from her finger. She found Lydia and me haphazardly dressed and ready as ever to go. She led us outside to her car, which was parked on the side of the street near Lydia’s. Lydia’s eyes met the violent sunlight in a daze of molish blinks, as if she was emerging to the surface from a year of living underground. The woman helped Lydia into the passenger seat, and I climbed into the back of the chipped old red four-door sedan, and the woman drove us in this wheezy-engined vehicle to the University of Chicago Medical Center, just four blocks away from the Erman Biology Center, which is where they had taken me, languageless, naked and fresh from the zoo, to begin my induction into human civilization. The upstairs woman knew the way. She may have said something about how she worked here as a nurse on the night shift and slept in the daytime, which was why she knew what to do and where to go. But maybe not. My mind was already in a nauseous dream-state of panic, a panic that poured oil all over my brain for the whole day and made it difficult for things to stick in it properly, and so my memories are jumbled and unclear of going to the hospital—of our shoes clopping across the parking lot—of somebody speaking with somebody else at a desk—yes, definitely a big pink desk—of a clipboard of complicated paperwork that had to be filled out—were there forms to be filled in, Lydia?—how did you fill them in?—what could you have possibly written down to satisfy them? There was paperwork, there was a vast waiting room, there was a big pink desk. There were antiseptic and sharply ammoniac odors, there were shiny sleek-waxed floors that caused our shoes to crunch and squawk, there was a fish tank full of tropical fish, on the floor of which a ceramic man in a diving suit seemed to have just discovered a tiny chest of ceramic treasure half-buried in a bed of gravel made pink by a colored fluorescent tube overhead. Wait a moment—where did the woman who lived upstairs go, the woman who had driven us to the hospital? Did she vanish from our company at some point in that long, hellish day of fear and sorrow? She must have, because I remember we took a cab home after everything at the hospital. Did we ever thank her properly? Did we ever see her again?

  Here is what I remember from that day. I remember a room with some sort of giant machine in it. The machine was straight out of a science fiction movie set aboard a spaceship a thousand years in the future. It was a huge shiny white metal donut, standing up on its side, with a bed in it. Lydia was made to lie down with towels bunched around her body and a pillow beneath her knees, and she was told to put her head inside this cylinder of white metal. Then the bed was raised up by a robot and slid with buzzing motor into the yawning hole in the middle of the machine. For some reason there was music, melancholy opera music, playing from a stereo in the room. Why? I was not allowed to go into the room with her. I had to sit and watch it through a window in the wall of an adjoining room. Whatever this machine was doing to her, it took a really long time doing it, and as it did what it was doing the machine made chattering, bleeping, warbling, and gnashing noises that sounded exactly like noises a flying saucer would make as it hovers slowly to earth before a wonderstruck and fearful crowd, all points and murmurs and oohs and aahs, and do they come in peace? Why was there opera music blaring in that room? After they took Lydia out of this machine, we were made to wait again. Long bouts of waiting and uncertainty—that’s what I remember most about that day. Waiting. Back in the waiting room. Was it the same waiting room, or another one? I remember a room filled with uncomfortable chairs upholstered in an ugly tongue-colored cloth, I remember coffee tables littered with bright shiny magazines, pages that crinkled between the fingers, I remember a TV with the news on and the sound off. I remember that Lydia had to lie down across several of the pushed-together seats in the waiting room and take a nap, a long nap. I remember small Styrofoam cups of coffee and thin red plastic wands for stirring in the sugar and milk. I remember a water cooler whose blue plastic tank was flanked by a tall cylinder, from the bottom of which one could pull a conical paper cup to fill with the tepid water that trickled from a spigot; when one depressed the spigot’s lever the water tank would belch up a cluster of bubbles, and the conical paper cup in your hand would quickly become floppy with dampness. And then there was the aquarium with the ceramic treasure-hunting diver in it: I whiled away some of those sluggish, agonizing hours watching the angelfish dumbly swishing their flat, triangular, translucent bodies from one end of their ten-gallon universe to the other and back again. I remember that day as a Morse code of waiting and testing, a dash-dot-dash-dot-dash of long periods of waiting punctuated by brief periods of frenzy and terror, time spent with the doctors, with their scientific languages and ear-needling machinery. I remember holding and squeezing Lydia’s hand—more for my own comfort than for hers, I’m afraid—as the doctors turned off the lights, and in the darkness proceeded to clip black sheets of glossy film to a white glowing plate on the wall. I remember the doctors pointing
to certain areas of the images. I remember the wobbling sound of the film sheets in the doctors’ hands before they clipped them to the plate of light. These floppy sheets of shiny black film, when pressed flat against the glow of the plate on the wall, contained pictures that were thus: a bright white outline of a person’s head, emerging sharp against the darkness around it, and inside of the outline, an intricately branching lump of gray cauliflower. Inside the lump of cauliflower, in one cluster of its fat lumpy branches, was a dark blot. The doctors pointed to this blot as they spoke. I remember these doctors bandying about a certain very beautiful and musical polysyllabic word that nevertheless was a word to be said in a low voice and with a grave face on, which was “oligodendroglioma”—this complicated eight-syllable song of Greek roots lilting many times from the doctors’ lips.

  A brain tumor had been found in the left frontal lobe of Lydia’s brain. This tumor may well have been there for years, said the doctors. Years! They guessed this is probably what happened: a “benign” tumor, which had caused no “noticeably debilitating symptoms” (those words I remember clearly, as that is an exact quote from the mouth of one of these doctors: “noticeably debilitating”), had, for reasons unknown, recently begun to blossom into a “malignant” one. It had decided it was time to grow, and was currently in the process of chewing up part of Lydia’s brain, and was getting fatter and fatter, crowding out and pushing around all the good and needed matter of her front-left cerebrum. The way the doctors described it to us, I imagined Lydia’s tumor as a grotesquely fat man rudely shoving his way into a crowded elevator, squishing everyone else against the walls until they cannot breathe. There were several options, said the doctors, none good. They were united in the opinion that surgery—fucking brain surgery—was the best way to go, although they acknowledged that it could prove to be difficult, as apparently the tumor was located in a particularly inconvenient spot in her brain that would make it tricky to scrape out. So they advised first surgery—that definitely—and then a period of chemotherapy to follow it up. The chemotherapy was optional but strongly recommended. Lydia was told to think it over carefully, but that the brain surgery was a must if she hoped to live.

  (Note: Gwen has just called to question the accuracy of certain elements of my narrative. She asked whether the woman from upstairs was at all surprised to hear me speak. Wasn’t I not supposed to talk to strangers, anyway? Did they really allow me into the hospital? And etc., etc. I admit, as always, to embellishments here and there in servitude to the interests of drama, though I suggest you not worry too much about them. If I ever stray from the letter of the truth, I never do in spirit. Let’s move on.)

  XXIX

  About a week later Lydia underwent surgery. They had to shave her head so they could saw her skull open to get at the tumor. As it turned out, the surgery wouldn’t do much good. It would be a squandered effort. Lydia had no health insurance; so Mr. Lawrence paid for the surgery, a last act of kindness to us. But before we get to that, there’s one more thing I must tell you about. Our readers probably already know about this part of my story, which has been well documented in texts other than this one, so I won’t dwell on it overmuch.

  That day at the hospital wasn’t over yet. Or maybe this happened on another day. I can’t remember. We spent a lot of time at that hospital during this unhappy period. Let’s say it happened on the same day. Lydia did not yet know she was pregnant. I suppose she had not ovulated in months and had been gaining a lot of weight and so on, but these things were not the only things she had been ignoring since we had moved back to Chicago. It was discovered at the hospital in the course of all the many tests and whatnot that she had to endure because of her brain tumor.

  The following scene I remember, though, or I at least imagine. Lydia and I were in the waiting room. Lydia had just come back to me after running another gauntlet of medical tests. We were sitting by that fish tank again. The angelfish gaped and swam back and forth through their narrow corridor of water, their sequin eyes flat and emotionless. She had quit crying, and was now occupied in the business of staring at an area of the floor where a chair leg met the floor. A nurse bustled back to us from backstage the hospital’s theatre. She beckoned to Lydia. She said the doctors had found something interesting and unusual about the data of her body that they had collected. I was not allowed to be company when they were doing whatever they were about to do to her. Lydia obediently went with the nurse, leaving me with the fish. A long time passed. The fish did nothing interesting. Then the nurse returned, took me, Bruno, by the hand, and led me through the labyrinth of shiny white hallways lit by rectangles of fluorescent light buzzing softly overhead, past inoffensive framed watercolors of vases of flowers that blandly covered the nakedness of the walls, and into a certain room, where Lydia weakly smiled at me from the hospital bed on which she lay. I joined her at her bedside. The bed was elevated far off the floor, and I had to stand on a chair to make my body level with hers.

  I remember that room, and remember it clearly. I had come to hate hospital rooms because their atmospheres reminded me of laboratories. These rooms are lit by the same frantically flickering and humming fluorescent lights. Sometimes it seems like my whole life has been lit by the fluorescent tubes of science. These fluorescent lights make for soft bright lighting that steals the shadow out from under every object and every person in the room. The rooms made for science and medicine have the same unnerving disharmony of whirring, whining electronic machines and the same sickly mint-green paint on the walls. Why is this nauseating mint-green color associated with a place where diseases are supposedly cured? Lydia was lying on a crinkly paper mat on her high plastic bed. There was a doctor, a heavy woman with a sandy brown bob of hair, and let us say there was a stethoscope draped over her neck. I was sitting in a chair beside Lydia, holding her hand. It was late afternoon. A storm had broken above the city, and rainwater speckled and streaked the window. Lydia lifted up her shirt and showed the doctor her belly. There was a machine beside the bed. It was a computer on a cart. The doctor squirted some sort of oil on her belly from a squeeze bottle and rubbed it all over her. Then she unwound a wand tethered to the machine by a long white cord wound around a peg on the cart. She pressed the wand to Lydia’s belly. I squeezed Lydia’s hand. As I held and squeezed Lydia’s hand, the doctor pointed to the screen on the machine beside the bed. The screen was black except for a circle-and-triangle of green light, the shape of a keyhole. Indecipherable rows of green numbers and letters flickered skittishly at the top and bottom of the screen. Inside the keyhole of green light was a black, bean-shaped blob. The blob moved slightly. This small black bean-shaped blob, floating in a keyhole of glowing green goo, represented her child. And mine. Lydia was pregnant with our child.

  This doctor fled from the room, and shortly after returned in the company of another doctor. Both of them looked at the black bean-shaped blob floating in green goo on the screen, exchanged a few furtive words between them, then both left. Shortly after that, these two doctors returned in the company of a third doctor. All three doctors looked at the bean-shaped blob in the keyhole of glowing green goo on the screen on the machine beside Lydia’s bed. They looked at Lydia, and then looked at me; they looked back and forth from me to Lydia, from Lydia to me. Then all three of them redirected their eyes to the bean-shaped blob, floating in a keyhole of green goo on the screen of the machine.

  The doctors seemed surprised, although I see little reason why they should have been. Humans and chimps have more chromosomes in common than a donkey and a horse, Gwen. It’s only natural. What I find far more surprising is that this sort of thing doesn’t happen more often.

  Oh, and the fallout. I don’t want to extrapolate much on this next episode of my life, as it is perhaps one of the least interesting and best externally documented. Our readers will surely recall Lydia’s and my long and unwanted moment of infamy. They will no doubt recall the shock, the scandal, the public ridicule. They will no doubt recall the s
tories in the news and the long comet-tail of jokes on late-night talk shows that followed our initial splash of media attention. I suppose this is the moment where I would instruct the filmmakers of the film of my life to insert a sequence in which the front pages of newspapers, each one heralded in by a tumble of dramatic music, come rapidly spiraling at us out of a black void to splat against an invisible plane of space a few feet in front of our eyes, displaying headlines such as: CHIMPANZEE LEARNS TO SPEAK; HISTORY-CHANGING SCIENTIFIC BREAKTHROUGH DEMANDS REDEFINITION OF MANKIND; and CHIMP AND SCIENTIST INVOLVED IN SEXUAL RELATIONSHIP, WOMAN PREGNANT WITH “HUMANZEE”! Let’s leave it at that and try to move on; I find all this stuff deeply depressing and fundamentally boring. All this attention, to say the least, was undesired. Day and night that pale green phone on the kitchen wall needled us awake with its electric gobble, with voices on the other end of it begging for information, for interviews, offering money for appearances on TV talk shows—all of which, despite our poverty, were handily denied. After a few days Lydia unplugged the phone.

  It should come as no surprise people were far more interested in the salacious, prurient elements of my story than the mere fact that a nonhuman had become fully fluent in a human language. That’s what it takes to get the public’s attention. A “scandal.” The “experts” were certain that I had not actually attained “Language with a capital L” (whatever that means). Suddenly, for a few long days, it seemed you couldn’t turn on a TV without seeing Noam Chomsky vigorously denying to Larry King or some other idiot that what I spoke could possibly be properly called “language” for such-and-such reasons. These “linguists” would deny to my face that what I speak is language, even when I can personally engage them in verbal argument. Lydia advised me not to speak to the media, so I didn’t. I turned down all requests for interviews. What could I ever have said to satisfy them, anyway? Nothing! There was absolutely nothing I could do or say. Their minds were made up as to the uniqueness of human language, and no proof could have possibly swayed them. I am an animal, everybody knows animals do not talk, and that was that. To accept that I had language would have required them to evict their most narcissistic of species from the false office they believe themselves to occupy, and so they did not listen and never have since. What people were more interested in was that a human woman had become pregnant with the child of an ape—and that this woman and this ape were very much in love, and that this woman planned to bear the child to term. My child. And Lydia would get better. This bug in her brain was no big deal, we would suffer through it, she would get better, and we would raise our child together, and we would be happy. That was the plan.