Later—I’ve no idea how much later exactly—my nostrils woke me. I smelled the very distinctive odor of cigarette smoke. The sense-memory had caused me, just before I woke, to dream of my father. For he, fat, mean, implacable Rotpeter, my biological father, was the one with whom I will always associate that odd rank musty smell, half-sweet and half-stink. I saw him squatting on a log in our chimp habitat in the Lincoln Park Zoo, smoking his chest weak and his teeth yellow and making our air stifling with his smoldering ill-gotten and clandestine-kept tobacco. I gently pushed aside the plush curtain of a stuffed pig that lay before my eyes, and peered: there was a girl—a pretty little girl—dressed in jeans and a sweater of azure silver-threaded cashmere. Her hair was brown as a nut and parted precisely straight down the center of her head and falling past her skinny shoulders on either side of her face, which was round as a full moon and nearly as radiant with the luster and smoothness of delicate youth. Her mouth and skin looked like they had been sprinkled with a film of gold dust, and her chipped fingernails were painted alternately red and green, Christmas-tree colors. She sat in the fourth chair, the previously unoccupied chair around the tea table, in the fluffy, motionless, and mute company of bear, bunny, and duck, smoking a cigarette. That’s what had woken me. She brought the white stick to her lips and shallowly inhaled, and as she did the thing deftly crackled and the end of it glowed orange for a moment, and she blew the smoke out from between her gold-dusted shiny lips, and with a poised index finger she tapped on it until a cake of ash crumbled off of it into the hollow of a teacup. The fragile beauty of the girl and the childlike innocence of her surroundings contrasted with jarring sharpness against the unwholesomeness of her activity.
I must have made a noise of some sort then, or a movement, or else the girl sensed she was being watched, because her head snapped toward the pile of stuffed animals under which I lay buried. Perhaps she thought she had heard something and looked, but wasn’t sure what she was looking for amid the jumble of stuffed animals heaped up in the corner of the cottage. Her eyes scanned searchingly over the animals until she was staring fixedly in my direction. I blinked. She screamed.
She shivered involuntarily, jumped up in terror, shrieked, and so on. Now, the throat of a little human girl is acoustically unique in this world for the sheer hyperbolic qualities of the sound of which it’s capable: so long in duration, so deafening in volume, so piercing in pitch! I had to clap my palms over my ears lest my exploded eardrums further bloody her stuffed animals (I had already bled on them some), and in the process of clapping my hands to the sides of my head—such that I resembled the central of the Three Wise Monkeys—my flailing arms upset the pile of stuffed animals, sending them flying in all directions, and also revealing myself from the waist up—and, upon seeing me, the girl’s bright eyes waxed all the wider in fear, and she screamed all the louder. Then she shut her mouth, and the screaming ceased.
“Do not be afraid!” I said, trying, I suppose, to sound powerful but benevolent, like the voice of an angel appearing before a mortal. She wasn’t buying it. She threw down her cigarette and bolted for the door. I leapt after her from my makeshift nest, stuffed animals bouncing and scattering all over the little pink room. Her hand was already on the heart-shaped doorknob when I intercepted her. I grabbed her waist and covered her mouth with my hand, which she then, with astonishing ferocity, bit. I suppose I understand, for I’m no innocent when it comes to using my teeth to get out of a tight spot. However, it certainly did hurt, and I bellowed out in pain, but did not release her. She kicked and squirmed in my arms, hitting me with her elbows and trying to kick my shins with the heels of her shoes.
“Please don’t be afraid! Please, please don’t! I won’t hurt you.”
She was weeping now in fear, wailing, thrashing in my arms. I dragged her backward into the room toward the fluffy pile of animals in which I’d been sleeping, and shoved her down while grabbing her arms and holding them pinioned together behind her back. I quickly inspected my hand: she had left a puffy bite mark in the flap of flesh between my forefinger and thumb.
“You’re a monster!” she screeched. I did not try to correct her.
“Please help me. I mean no harm,” I said.
I was still holding her arms behind her, though, with her head buried in the stuffed animals, and when she spoke her words were muffled: “Are you gonna rape me?”
“No!” I said, with a gasp of offense.
“Then why the fuck were you hiding naked in my playhouse?”
“I was lost and hurt and cold!”
“Why naked?”
“Because I have no clothes! They were taken from me!”
She quit struggling beneath me. I loosed my grip on her arms.
“Please don’t scream or run away,” I said. I slowly stood up. As I did, I seized a stuffed zebra, and modestly held it over my genitals. The girl slowly rose to her feet, too. She did not run this time, but backed cautiously away from me. I edged myself nearer to the door to prevent her from escaping, while clutching the zebra to my crotch.
“Who the fuck are you?” she said. “Are you like, some weird midget or something?”
“I’m shocked to hear such coarse language issue from such a young mouth!”
“I’m fourteen, dickwad.”
This information immediately injected into my heart an added affinity for her—for I too was in my fourteenth year. She caught my eyes asking visually at our surroundings.
“This is all my baby shit from when I was a kid. This was my Little Princess Playhouse.”
“Please—,” I said, still obscuring my groin with the stuffed zebra. “I need help. I need some clothes, at least. It was never my intention to appear indecent before you.”
“So are you a midget, or what?”
“In a sense, yes.”
“God, you are so weird-looking.” She stepped closer to me, her fear quelled.
“I’m sorry if I frightened you,” I said.
“Jesus, I thought you were gonna rape me. You’re all bloody! What happened?”
“I had to climb over a barbed-wire fence.”
“Are you in trouble?”
“Much.”
She noticed that the cigarette she had dropped had landed in her teacup, and was still burning. She picked it up, pincered between her fingers, dragged on it, and stabbed it out in the bottom of the cup.
“Okay, come inside,” she said. “But my mom gets home at five thirty. You have to be gone by then.”
I said “Thank you” again and again until she shushed me, and then I was silent.
She led me out of the pink plastic cottage and across the lawn. I did not know how long I had been asleep. Over the course of the day—if indeed this was the same day on which I’d fallen asleep—gray clouds had smothered the sun and a few snowflakes fluttered to the earth like ash. The girl rolled open the sliding glass door to the massive house, where a tiny yellow dog was bouncing up and down at us, frantic with yapping.
“Shaddup!” she roared at it, and the little dog skittered out of sight in a diminuendo of whimpers. The girl led me through the opulent interior of the house: through a kitchen, up a long flight of curving stairs, down a hallway, through a door, and into a bedroom. She closed the door behind us.
“Wait here,” she commanded. I stood there, still self-consciously holding the stuffed zebra to my genitals, as she fled from the room and shut the door behind her. The room was decorated in a style similar to the Little Princess Playhouse: painted all around in that slightly nauseating shade of medicinal pink, with white trim. The room was large and featured a four-poster bed with a drooping canopy of diaphanous gauze. Piled up on the bed was a small ziggurat of yet more stuffed animals. More of those rubber effigies of beautiful blond women lay strewn about the room, and a caravan of unrealistically colored plastic ponies cantered, hooves frozen in midstep, across the windowsill. The ponies seemed to wear coy expressions. A dollhouse sat on the floor, bisected and winged ope
n at the hinges to allow an exploded view of its interiors. This and other residues of girlhood furnished the room, but this was a room, like its inhabitant, in a state of transition: I could see the girl’s burgeoning adolescence taking over the décor, the plastic ponies and dolls and stuffed animals reluctantly giving way to tacked-up posters displaying the countenances of the stars of popular music and contemporary cinema—of beautiful young men with wet hair falling tousled in their faces, and of beautiful young women in states of semidress looking down upon us from the walls through eyes heavy-lidded and viscous with sex. As I looked upon the two stages of the girl’s life represented in the changing décor—childhood and adolescence—I realized that the transition was not jarring, but actually a thematically fluid one. The languorous sex-sodden eyes of the women that she tacked to her walls for fastidious emulation were already there, in the heads of these female dolls left over from early girlhood—and indeed, strangely, even in the eyes of the ponies. The rubber effigies of beautiful naked women I had seen lacked sexual parts (like angels!) merely because they were there to represent an idea prior to the exposition of the specifics. Viewed in this context, all the trappings of the first stage—childhood—were not so innocent or so sexless, but rather, could be seen as all part of a careful preparation for the next.
A bathroom adjoined her bedroom, where I looked at myself in a mirror for the first time that day, and inspected the cuts in my naked flesh. The girl—whose name, she told me, was Emily—came back with some clothes for me. But first she told me to take a shower, which I did. It both cleaned and warmed me. I was so dirty the runoff that dribbled down my legs and spiraled down the drain was black. When I had showered, little Emily swabbed my wounds with cotton balls that she dampened with stinging alcohol, and taped over them with dozens of Band-Aids. I lay supine on her bed as she treated my wounds. I tried to be modest before her, but in her no-nonsense office of nurse she swatted away my hands that held the stuffed zebra, and she did not remark upon my indecency. She gave me a pair of men’s underwear, socks, a pair of corduroy pants and a cable-knit sweater as green as a green apple. All of these things were too big for me; the pants I had to roll up at the ankles and scrunch in at the waist by means of a belt she also fetched for me, and the green sweater clung loosely to my form with flapping sleeves. She said these clothes belonged to her older brother, who was away at college and wouldn’t miss them. Later, she unearthed from a closet an old pair of her father’s shoes. They were black leather loafers, slightly worn and like everything else too big for me, but serviceable enough. Prompted then by my cries of thirst and my belly that snarled audibly with hunger, she even brought me food and drink. (Oh—where would I be but for the kindness of women?) She restored my strength with a tall glass of water and choice viands—a dish, a great dish of chocolate chip cookies!—which she procured from somewhere downstairs. She warmed to me a little, then a little more, and then we sat in her bedroom and talked for a long while of general things. She was in the ninth grade, she said, and a freshman student in high school. She spoke of her father and mother and her older brother in a tone of bilious vituperation, and I replied that I only wished I had a family like hers, and that she ought to count herself fortunate to be raised in a good home with a nice family, and she riposted by giving me the finger. Of course she inquired about my own unusual circumstances—i.e., how I came to be discovered hiding in her “Little Princess Playhouse,” trembling from cold and fear, with flesh badly lacerated, mud-spattered, and nude. I stalled and stammered and creatively perambulated the truth—which I admit was morally wrong in theory but right in practice, for although I puttered and obscured and flat-out lied to her about certain ticklish specifics—I think I may have told her that I was born with gruesome birth defects, and my impoverished parents had sold me at a young age into a life of indentured servitude with a traveling circus, from which I had just escaped (which was plausible enough)—if I slightly fudged my autobiographical facts it was only because I was afraid of how she might react if she knew the truth.
Little Emily did not guess that the being who kept her company in her bedroom that afternoon and night was actually a chimp—and not just any chimp!—but Bruno, the speaking chimp of Chicago, who had already attained a dubious and unwanted degree of celebrity, as much for his iniquities as for his accomplishments. News of my daring escape from the New York University’s nearby Laboratory for Experimental Medicine and Surgery in Primates (LEMSIP) in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York, appeared on the front page of the newspaper the following morning (tucked away in a quiet corner of the front page, but on the front page nonetheless). I don’t think little Emily suspected me then, though. I allowed her to continue in her belief that I was merely some sort of deformed midget. It’s a testament to her sterling character that she took me in, believing even this (which is unusual enough), and nursed my wounds, and gave me clothing, food, and shelter. After the initial shock of discovering me, she saw that I was articulate, and moreover that I was kind, and her first fear—that she would come to some harm at my hands—abated more with every passing minute we spent in conversation; but I suppose what put her at ease with me the most was a combination of the erudition I have by learning, and the charm I have by nature.
Little Emily and I had become so engrossed in our discourses that she forgot the time, and when she heard the sound of the front door of the house opening and shutting—faint as the sound was, her hyperattentive young ears immediately detected it—the color drained from her face, her eyes widened in fear, and she said: “Shit! My mom’s home.”
Downstairs, the dog went berserk with yapping; keys tinkled, shoes hit the floor. Then the voice of a woman calling: “Emily?”
“What should we do?” I said.
“You stay here,” she whispered. “I’ll deal with her. She knows she’s not allowed to come in. She respects my personal space.” (What therapeutic language!) “If anybody comes in they’ll knock first. So hide if you hear a knock.”
She rushed out of the room and shut the door.
“Hi, Mom,” I heard her sweetly sing out. I listened to her feet thumping fast down the stairs, taking them two at a time. Then I heard two female voices in conversation, but could not discern what they were saying. Little Emily was gone for a long time. I sat on her pink bed for a while, in my borrowed clothes. I got up and inspected the things in the room. It wasn’t a boring place to be left alone, crammed to the gills as it was with all manner of interesting diversions. I opened and shut every drawer in the bathroom, sniffed all her little perfumes and rolled out red nibs of lipstick, noted the pack of cigarettes stashed in the medicine cabinet, and noted the presence of tampons that indicated she had already begun to menstruate. I cannot resist the lure of the accoutrements of human femininity: I love women’s bathroom counters, stocked like alchemy labs with all those puffs and powders and potions and phials and bottles and canisters—the heady, intoxicating smells of all that stuff! Then I scanned the spines of the books in her bookshelf, looking for a text to pass the time with. There were lots of books that I guessed were things she had been assigned to read in school, simply written slender volumes deemed “literature” while still being accessible to youth—Of Mice and Men, Lord of the Flies—a lot of girls’ classics—Anne of Green Gables, Little House on the Prairie, Little Women—and then, interestingly, a lot of books that were juicy with sex—Anaïs Nin, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Justine, The Story of O. There were textbooks, picture books, poetry: Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, Sylvia Plath. The books were arranged in no immediately discernible order: not alphabetical, not chronological, not Dewey decimal. I had already read some of these titles, either curled up in an armchair in Mr. Lawrence’s library or sitting beneath a lamp at one of the long wooden tables in the reading room at the University of Chicago library. To pass the time I settled on a whimsical bit of frivolous juvenilia about a girl who for some reason is living in an attic with her family, in the pages of which I busied my eyes until little Emi
ly’s return. Eventually she came back. She opened the door slightly, slipped inside, and clicked it shut behind her.
“You can stay here tonight,” she said in a voice two degrees north of a whisper. “But my mom and dad don’t know you’re here, so we have to be quiet. And you have to go in the morning. I have to eat dinner now. I’ll bring you some food later.”
Again she was gone, and again, maybe an hour or so later, she came back, this time with a plate of lukewarm food: chicken, carrots, peas, etc. “Here. I snuck this up for you.”
I was insane with hunger, and I ate it sitting at her desk, devouring with indelible gusto every edible atom of what was on the plate, and thanked her with an energy bordering on groveling.
“You must have been hungry,” she said.
“Starving!”
“I have to do my homework now.” She dumped out the contents of her backpack and flopped a heavy textbook open flat on her desk, switched on the desk lamp, and got to work on a series of mathematical equations.
“What are you doing?” I said.
“My algebra homework, dipshit. What, they don’t teach algebra to circus midgets?”
“No!”
“I know. That was sarcasm. We’re doing rational inequalities. I hate this stupid bullshit.”
I looked over her shoulder at the big glossy textbook pages from which she was copying “problems,” as she called them. I watched her work, and comprehended nothing. It was all a bunch of chaotic and elusive symbols to me, numbers mixed up with letters, lines, shapes, dots, punctuation marks, alien markings as enigmatic and indecipherable to my eyes as hieroglyphics carven on the walls of an Egyptian tomb. Little Emily, though, was apparently so accustomed to the business of unlocking these symbols’ mysteries that she was actually bored with it. She raced, flew right through the “problems,” mashing buttons on her calculator and using her pencil to scribble out more and more of these symbols, new symbols which the arrangements of the symbols in her book somehow unleashed into possibility—all while grumbling and sighing in irritation. I was fascinated by the process, watching her glance at the symbols and then send the tip of her pencil into a flurry of scratchings, scribblings, and crossings-out, until it arrived at some final number—the mysteriously-arrived-at “answer”—as seemingly arbitrary as the rest of the process—which she then lassoed in a circle of graphite before moving on to the next “problem.” I was not only enchanted by the sorcery of this, but I began to grow sick with envy in my heart at little Emily’s privilege of education. I was envious that she was so comfortable with this privilege that she had grown resentful of it. What I would have given for a formal education like hers! To learn algebra, geometry, calculus, and trigonometry and all the rest of it! All the education I had ever received—outside of my experimental instruction in spoken and written language and my lessons in philosophy and logic with Mr. Lawrence—I had given myself, with little outside guidance. I had given it to myself not out of a desire to better my mind, but simply out of curiosity, nothing but curiosity, as I sat in the reading room of the University of Chicago library, where I read many books more or less at random. I would read Thucydides followed by Freud followed by Dickens followed by Austen followed by Machiavelli followed by Blake followed by Montaigne followed by Wittgenstein followed by Cervantes, returning often to Milton, and most often, I think, to Shakespeare. I read these books merely because they were the books that happened to be in that room. I also read legal disquisitions, encyclopedias, medical school primers, travelogues, books on astronomy, botany—it didn’t matter, I was utterly indiscriminate in my reading; all of it fascinated me. The problem was (and this is the curse of the autodidact) my studies had no guiding direction, and so my education lacked any sort of coherent plan, path, or structure—and so there were (there have always been) gaping holes in my learning, and one of these holes was mathematics. Thus I stood gape-jawed and wide-eyed in rapture before little Emily’s arithmetical aptitude, while simultaneously eaten up inside with jealousy at her fortunate birth, a jealousy that darkened even into a shade of anger because she took her fortune for granted so. But my anger went away. “I was angry with my friend: I told my wrath, my wrath did end.” (Blake.) Only I didn’t tell it, actually. I swallowed it, and like a bit of unwholesome food it pained my belly awhile, and then the pain subsided as my system digested it. Silly monkey—educations are for kids.
The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore Page 37
