And I, for my part? I, Bruno, left the train station. I left the station with a suitcase in my hand that contained my every remaining possession on earth, and exited into the busy morning bustle of Canal Street, crossed the river by the Adams Street bridge, crossed Wacker, passed beneath the shadow of the Sears Tower and pierced my way into the heart of the heart of the city. I breathed the familiar scent of this my home city, I observed the familiar stone ornaments on the buildings, I kept my eyes peeled for any significant change, but detected little. I went in search of Lydia.
XLVI
It was still early in the morning. The train had left New York City the previous morning, and had traveled all day and all night before depositing us in Chicago at nine or so in the a.m. I had slept fitfully on the train, and the bright busy morning in Chicago took on the mildly hallucinatory quality a bright busy morning does when one hasn’t slept well. I wanted to do nothing more than go straightaway to see Lydia, but something made me check myself. I thought it might be too strange or too rude to show up unannounced at her apartment so early in the day. She probably wouldn’t even have been at home, I thought. So instead I spent a good part of that morning walking around in the city, ambling beneath the rumbling red iron latticeworks that support the L, noting down various poetic observations in my head. Every winking traffic light and every plump purring pigeon that hopped along the sidewalk seemed to welcome me back. “Hello, traffic light!”—I could barely restrain myself from saying aloud—“Hello, pigeon!”
Hello, Bruno! I would imagine the pigeon articulating back to me through her trilling throat.
I looked at the stone lions that guarded the doors of certain buildings, I gazed through windows at storefront displays of beautiful woman mannequins wearing various styles of clothing, I ducked in and out of bookstores and spent a while sitting at the foot of the giant Picasso sculpture at Daley Center Plaza. Gradually, gradually, I gravitated uptown—knowing full well, not in my conscious mind, but in my bones, where my puttering feet were taking me.
That was the first time I experienced the Lincoln Park Zoo as a visitor, rather than as an exhibit. On all our fun/educational outings in the early days of my enculturation, Lydia had never once taken me here. Surely this was because she was afraid of what I would think, what I might do. What the other chimps would think and do, for that matter. Taking me to see my own imprisoned family must have seemed a perverse torture she did not wish to inflict upon my vulnerable developing consciousness.
I walked into the emerald-green rolls of Lincoln Park from the south entrance, waddled along the winding pedestrian footpath past joggers clad tightly in shiny spandex outfits, past little dogs tugging on their leashes, past a baseball diamond, an equestrian statue, a big duck pond, where geese and swans drifted through green water neon with algae, and entered the zoo: the Lincoln Park Zoo, apparently, is free, a realization that stung slightly of insult. Oh!—to enter such a familiar space from such an unfamiliar angle! The violence of the gestalt shift whacks the mind like a club!
Seeing the place from the angle of the human observer disoriented me. It looked familiar and yet eerily alien to me at the same time. I had never realized what a sad, dirty little zoo it really is. The animals in it have so little space to roam. The big cats are cornered into such dirty, miserable little cages—old-fashioned ones with bars on them rather than glass, evoking prison cells rather than displays, with cold concrete straw-scattered floors that reeked of melancholy and urine. The animals in them looked so shabby and dejected, their souls broken, resigned to quiet lives of captivity and humiliation. The leopards and lions and tigers neurotically skulked back and forth behind the bars of their cages, pitifully trying to uphold their dignity, like ruined aristocrats. As they paced their aimless loops their hipbones and shoulder blades undulated with a physical grace not even humanity could take away, but their heads ticked now and then with tiny spasms of uncontrollable rage. When I lived in this place, I had known only the inside of the chimp exhibit, and what was immediately visible from within it. I could not see much beyond the concrete wall that dammed the moat surrounding our small artificial island. I had no idea that the zebras and kangaroos were within eyesight of the ledge that looked onto our exhibit, that we could have physically seen these strange beasts if only we had been able to stand on top of the wall. So I observed and pitied the animals—the cats, the birds, the giraffes, the elephants, the rhinos—as I followed the maps that led me through the small zoo to the Primate House.
To my right was the gorilla exhibit. That huge old magisterial silverback was still there. He was napping, slumped over limp-limbed and dejected in his rope hammock, looking as if he hadn’t moved a muscle in all the years I’d been gone, one arm resting on his massive belly and the other arm dangling down beneath him, his fat-fingered wrinkled leathery hand grazing the ground like an old work glove.
To my left was the chimpanzee exhibit. I noticed for the first time in my life that in front of the window looking into the exhibit, a row of plastic cards are held up suspended on thin metal stands, and on the cards are printed brief blurbs of educational information about my species. Several of these cards displayed color photographs of wild African chimps grooming each other, swinging in trees and so on, and another displayed a map showing where our natural habitat is, colored in red: two small blotches of red, one in Central Africa and the other on the southern coast of the gun-handle of West Africa. Like this:
On another card was written the following text:
Chimpanzee
Pan troglodytes
Mammals
Order
Primates
Description
Length: 2.5–4 feet. Weight: 125–175 pounds, males slightly larger. Zoo weights higher. Much variation in body size and proportion. Coat mostly black; short, white beard common in adults of both sexes. Baldness also occurs in adults, more so in females. Face mostly hairless and light, darkening with age. Ears large, nostrils small. Females have prominent swelling of the pink perineal region while in heat; males have very large testes. Young have white tuft of hair on rump.
Range
Western and central Africa, north of River Zaire, from Senegal to Tanzania.
Habitat
Humid forest, deciduous woodland or mixed savanna; presence in open areas depends on access to evergreen, fruit-producing trees.
Niche
Omnivorous: mainly eats fruit and leaves, but during dry season will eat seeds, flowers, bark, insects, birds and mammals. Diurnal; sleeping nests built fresh each night. Mainly terrestrial, walking on soles of hind feet and knuckles of forelimbs, but will spend time or build nests in trees (especially young), using brachiation to travel. Communities number 15–120, but feeding is usually an individual activity, especially among females. Males are gregarious and form a loose dominance hierarchy. Neighboring community ranges overlap.
Life History
Mating non-seasonal; single young born after about 9 months gestation. Young cling within a few days, ride mother at 5–7 months, are weaned at about 3 years. Mature at about 10–11 years, earlier in captivity. Females promiscuous, migrating to a new community during an adolescent estrous period. Life span 40–45 years.
Conservation Status
This species is listed as threatened and commercial trade is prohibited by international law. Principal cause of population decline is habitat destruction, particularly commercial logging. Some hunting for bushmeat or commercial purposes still occurs and has severely depleted populations in some areas.
Much of this, Gwen, was news to me. Let us imagine—as I myself have often imagined, in the cumulative years of idle moments since the beginning of my second confinement—a similar text that would be written upon a similar placard, to be displayed before a cage designed to represent a human environment. A thick glass wall would look out onto another (perhaps a third?) species’ crude caricature of their idea of a typical human setting. Although our readers may imagine whatever they wis
h—the interior of a mud hut, an igloo, a log cabin, the Hapsburg Palace—I personally, for my maximum amusement, imagine a blandly fake room in a hyper-imagined middle-class home somewhere in a North American suburb, furnished with somebody’s rough idea of prototypically “human” items: a four-poster bed, a couple of armchairs, a dining table, and so on. There are candles on the table. The walls are painted a sickly cotton-candy pink. There is a reproduction of the Mona Lisa hanging in an ornately gilt frame on the wall. A false picture window looks out onto a painted backdrop of a pleasant sunny day. There is a mantel and a fireplace, inside of which glow flames cut from red and yellow crepe paper, underlit by a hidden lamp. Beside the fireplace lies, curled on a rug as if in slumber, a taxidermized dog, with a food bowl set before him, labeled SPOT. Inside this room are five or six humans of both genders and varying ages and races. One of the cards outside the window features a map showing in red the areas of the earth usually inhabited by human beings, with a card beside it detailing basic information about this species.
Human
Homo sapiens sapiens
Mammals
Order
Primates
Description
Length: 4–6.5 feet. Weight: 75–400 pounds, males slightly larger. Zoo weights considerably higher. Much variation in body size and proportion. Coat very sparse except on top of head and areas surrounding genitals and underarms; males may have hair on faces. Body modification, including selective hair removal, is common. Small ears, prominent noses. Long legs, short arms. Baldness often occurs in adult males. Females feature prominent teats. Young have disproportionately large heads.
Range
Because the human is highly adept at travel, transportation of materials and sheltering themselves from adverse environmental conditions, this species has spread to nearly every climate and lives on every continent of the world.
Habitat
Humans tend to live in small groups within much larger social hive areas. The human generally prefers not to inhabit environments in which other non-domesticated animals may be found. (The human often allows domesticated animals—especially dogs—to symbiotically cohabit its living space.) The human is most comfortable in areas specifically designed for human habitation.
Niche
Very omnivorous, generally diurnal. Mainly terrestrial, walking upright on soles of hind feet, though young remain quadrupedal until about 1 year of age. Adults may travel long distances by use of various tools, including in aquatic and aerial environments. Size of communities varies greatly; though some humans are known to live alone, most live in larger communities ranging from 100 to approx. 10,000,000. Feeding is often a communal activity. Both males and females tend to quickly form fierce dominance hierarchies. Neighboring community ranges overlap significantly. Humans have no known natural predators.
Life History
Mating non-seasonal and constant. Single young born after about 9 months gestation. Young cling within a few days, are weaned at about 1 year. Males may occasionally assist females in rearing of young. Sexually mature at about 13–15 years, earlier in captivity. Many never fully psychologically mature. May form sexually monogamous couples, usually leading to extreme psychological stress. Life span 40–90 years.
Conservation Status
The human is in no imminent danger. Due to its alpha predator status coupled with the ability to control its own climate, the human has ceased to evolve, thereby effectively removing itself from nature. Currently, the only palpable threat to the human is the human.
This imagining, however, will probably never come to be. There are laws against things like that—human laws. Laws that would prevent keeping a group of humans in captivity for purposes of public education and entertainment. Such an idea would violate our notions of ethics, which have always struck me as problematically anthropocentric. The chimps and the humans at the zoo are separated by that wall of glass because the chimps might harm the humans were there no glass. Albeit the same (it is almost too obvious to point out) could be said of humans and humans. However, humans only imprison other humans after the humans in question have proven themselves to be harmful to humans. If one were to apply the same logic to human beings as humans do to animals, then we would have to preventatively imprison everyone from birth. Then we would all be safe.
On an early afternoon in Chicago in late March of 1999, I, Bruno, stood and peered through the window that looked into the chimpanzee exhibit in the Primate House of the Lincoln Park Zoo. I peered through the window that looked into my childhood home. My old wordless world, my animal habitat. I looked through a three-inch-thick sheet of glass at my biological family. It looked much the same as I had remembered it, although I’d grown upward by about a foot and outward by more than fifty pounds, and so the space looked even smaller than I’d remembered it. I saw—and remembered as I saw—a ledge, a certain wide flat metal shelf bolted to the wall in a corner, very high up near the ceiling in the interior part of the exhibit, accessible via the ropes and nets that hung from the ceiling down to the cedar-planting-chip-covered floor: we chimps would often scramble up those ropes and nets up to the shelf, muster ourselves on top of it and huddle there together in the winter months, napping, grooming, lazing around all afternoon long in a languid tangle of embraces. It was March now, and cold outside, though not bitterly so, and all the chimps were inside, and most of them were huddled together on top of the shelf in the corner, just as I had once done. The shelf, as I recall, was a favorite place of ours, in part because its height probably reminded our instincts of the tree canopies in which we would have been taking our naps if this were the jungle and there were predators afoot below us, and in part because its height made it one of the precious few areas of that Benthamite panopticon where we were not totally in view of our spectators. Of course the people could still see us—they could see that we were up there, could see our hands dangling off the edges of the shelf and could catch glimpses of the imperceptibly moving mounds of our warm breathing brown bodies—but at least we were not fully exposed up there. I looked up to the shelf, and I saw my family—my old family, my mother, Fanny, and my father, Rotpeter, my aunt Gloria, and my uncle Rex—huddled together on top of the shelf, several gangly purple hands and gangly opposably-toed feet poking out of the ball of appendages to dangle limply off the edge of the shelf. Down below them, on the ground, scratching and digging in the steamy urine-sodden carpeting of cedar planting chips, were two chimps whom I did not recognize. New additions to the zoo. One, a female, looked like a teenager—probably around my age, actually—fifteen years old. The bloated wad of pink flesh that she dragged along the ground beneath her advertised her fecundity, and a little brown button of a turd protruded shyly from her anus. The second new chimp was the infant she held in her arms.
I stood so close to the wall of glass that the brim of my hat touched it. (I was wearing the same coat and hat that I had once found in a closet in little Emily’s house.) I shielded my eyes with a hand cupped against the glass to block my reflection. The glass had a faint blue-green tint. Beside me, a few paces away, there was a woman and a child. The woman looked middle-aged and middle-class, and wore a candy-apple-red coat with thick black buttons, a blue sweater, and glasses, and her brown hair was tied loosely back. There was a stroller beside her. It contained a soft fuzzy blue blanket and a stuffed animal, but other than that it was vacant—its presumed occupant was crawling around on the floor, wearing the standard uniform of an infant: a one-piece jumpsuit with a button-up door in the hindquarters for easy diaper-changing; the jumpsuit was blue, which we for some reason consider a color that connotes the innocence of infancy while still being appropriately masculine—oh, what an odd thing it is that humans begin to sexualize their young even when they’re scarcely washed of womb-goo!—before they’re born, even! (Perhaps this note should go somewhere in the blurb of species information on the human? No! No room for such details! That’s where the devil is. Gwen—there’s simply too much to
say! There’s too much to say!) This child, this presumably male human infant, was padding around, hands and feet slapping like four fat little flippers on the floor of the human observer’s area of the Primate House of the Lincoln Park Zoo. Oh, God, he was beautiful. He was a beautiful baby, plump, bald, smooth-skinned, bright and Buddha-like, a creature at that stage of pure and perfect passions, the needle of his emotional meter capable of swinging instantaneously from bliss to despair and back to bliss on account of stimuli so easy as the touch of his mother’s skin. Sometimes I see a baby and I nearly cry. Why? Why does the sight of a baby make me cry? Is it because I know too much about the world he’s been born into? No, that’s much too insipidly romantic, that can’t be it. The sight of a baby fills me instantly with desperate, insane, boundless love. I love human babies! I love the animals! I love the world!… but—I hate it! I love and I hate the world with equal passion! That’s why I cry when I see a baby! The hot and cold fronts in my soul slam together and make a storm—a tempest!—and I cry!
This child, this baby in the zoo, was too young to speak. His consciousness was still at the level of an animal’s, that of an uneducated ape. He was babbling, being at the prelinguistic stage of early childhood when a baby is perpetually fascinated anew by his own ability to make noise, and so he spends every spare waking second he can get with his mouth busily spewing a nonteleological flux of cooing, humming, burbling, gurgling, and singing. In constant song! Music always precedes meaning! Music before meaning! On and on and on he babbled and sang, employing every technique available to the infant’s cantatory repertoire. First he sang a high, constant note while repeatedly cupping and releasing a hand over his mouth to create an autohypnotic ululating effect. Soon he decided to modify this technique by rapidly flapping his fingers over his lower lip while dropping his voice to a hum, which made a noise like the low idling of an engine, and after tiring of that he took the same concept and kicked it into higher gear by increasing the pressure of his outward breath while rapidly vibrating his smiling lips; this last technique quickly led to an excess of drool leaking over his chin—ah, but he cared not.
The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore Page 49
