The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore

by Benjamin Hale

  We walked past the great cats, the giraffes, the Bactrian camels, the rhinos, the kangaroos and the zebras, until we came to the Primate House. We arrived at the Primate House from the south entrance, which overlooked the outdoor part of the chimp exhibit: colloquially known as Monkey Island. We looked over the concrete ledge that gazed across the water-filled ditch between the human observation area and the chimp habitat. It was a fairly warm day for March, and some of the chimps—some of our family—were playing outside, including my father, Rotpeter. I set down my suitcase and let go momentarily of Céleste’s hand. I reached into the pocket of my coat and took out the pack of cigarettes. I unwound the band of cellophane from the top, cracked it open and removed the foil lining of the pack. I backed up, wound back my arm, took aim, and threw it over the wall. It sailed over the moat and landed successfully on the grassy shores of Monkey Island. The chimps immediately all scrambled over to it to investigate. One of the babies picked it up in idle curiosity. I watched Rotpeter lumber over and rudely snatch it from the child’s hands. His personality had not changed one bit. He was still as brutish, as violent, as selfish and unenlightened as when I had left him. His face brightened at once with a look of surprise and rapture as he realized what it was. I watched him sniff them, relishing the smell of tobacco he had long, long been deprived of. He bolted off at once to dig up his old cigarette lighter from the cache where it had sat unneeded for years.

  Then I took Céleste’s hand again, and I led her inside the Primate House. I let go of her hand. I put down my suitcase. I embraced her. I hugged her tightly to my chest, and I kissed her forehead and her silent face. The hood of her sweatshirt flopped back behind her head, revealing her apeness. I picked up my suitcase and waved good-bye to her. Céleste went to the window. She was confused. She pressed her long purple hands flat against the glass and looked through the window at the chimp habitat. Our family stood gathered around her on the other side of the glass wall. My father, Rotpeter, already had a lit cigarette between his lips. All of them were hopping up and down, screaming, pant-hooting, ripping up fistfuls of straw and planting chips from the floor and throwing it in the air, bashing on the glass with their palms, displaying like mad—all of them probably wondering how in the world Céleste had come to be on the wrong side of the glass. Céleste pressed her hands to the glass and looked inside. She was happy to see them. She wanted to be with them. She wanted to be on the other side of the glass.

  I left the Primate House. With my hat on my head and my suitcase in my hand, I slowly waddled away from it all. I made my way past the zebras, the kangaroos, the rhinos, the Bactrian camels, the giraffes, and the great cats, and out of the zoo. I walked out of the Lincoln Park Zoo for the last time in my life. I walked along the pedestrian footpath that encircled the park, past joggers clad tightly in shiny spandex outfits, past little dogs tugging on their leashes, past a baseball diamond, an equestrian statue and a big duck pond, where geese and swans drifted through the green water neon with algae. I said good-bye to the sky above my head. I said good-bye to Chicago. I said good-bye to my freedom to move at will through human society.

  I saw what I wanted to see: I saw a mounted policeman reining his horse along the edge of the park. The giant sweaty brown animal clopped along at a leisurely pace. The policeman on the horse wore a dark blue coat, black riding boots in the stirrups, aviator sunglasses, and a sky-blue helmet with a visor. He seemed bored. He was watching the ducks in the pond. I waved to him and approached. The policeman snapped out of his duck-watching reverie as I came near. He tugged on the reins of his giant land-beast—like a hill of muscle—and clopped slowly toward me. We met on the pedestrian footpath, by the duck pond.

  The policeman looked down at me, and I looked up at him. His horse snorted. The policeman raised his eyebrows and tipped up his sunglasses with a gloved finger to get a better look at this strange and tiny figure on the ground in front of him.

  “Hello?” said the policeman. “Can I help you?”

  I removed my hat.

  “My name is Bruno Littlemore,” I said. “Bruno I was given, Littlemore I gave myself. I have committed a murder, and I have come forward to confess.”

  The policeman peered down at me from on top of his horse with a look that suggested he was still searching for the owner of the voice that had spoken, still wondering if this small creature standing in the park with a suitcase and a hat could really be the owner of that voice. He took off his sunglasses, and blinked at me perplexedly in the late-twentieth-century Chicago sunlight.

  L

  The relevant parts of my tale are all told. It is a pleasing accident that this last chapter happens to be the fiftieth, the only other chapter in this volume except for the first (and, less elegantly, the fifth and tenth) to receive the honor of being headed with a bold and simple single capital letter. I began this narrative, as is natural, with an I: standing for the ego, the fount of the first-person voice. And I end it with an L. Does that L stand for light? For Lydia? For her given, and my self-given, surname? For locksmiths? For the commuter rail system of my home city? L is for laughter. L is for literature. L is for love. L is for life. L is for language.

  It would serve as a useless and uninteresting dénouement to the story I have told you if I were to dig my long purple fingers too deep into the dirty details of my willing arrest, my confession, the trial, and the shock and scandal that surrounded it all—if I were to speak too much of the public reaction, how they remembered me from my previous scandals. Scandal erupts behind me everywhere I go. Scandal blooms in my footsteps like the flowers of discord. I confessed. I confessed all.

  The evidence of Haywood Finch’s coerced confession was thrown out. He was freed, and his name cleared. That was my only objective in coming forward to correct their faulty justice, and that much I achieved.

  A few interesting points concerning the unusual particularity of my case arose on the legal agenda, especially in regard to the question of whether I should be tried as a man or as an animal. For one thing, I am not and have never been regarded as a legal citizen of this or any nation—even though I have never lived in any other—for no clear precedent or protocol exists concerning whether citizenship should or can be awarded to animals, be they mute or articulate, or what to do with talking animals if and when they transgress the laws of man. If I were to have been tried as an animal, then I would surely have been euthanized—destroyed, as any animal that harms a man must be. I, Bruno, however, was saved—and I leave it to my readers to ponder whether or not there is poetic irony in this—by science. ’Twas beauty killed the beast. ’Twas science resurrected him.

  Scientists came forward to argue that I was too valuable and unique a specimen to be destroyed—that instead, I must be studied. Had I been exterminated—exterminated!—God, what fascistically clinical language!—then they would have lost much opportunity to study me. After all, I am interesting. Mine is an unusual case. There’s that Aesop’s fable, Gwen, about the farmer and his wife who had a goose that laid golden eggs. They thought maybe if they killed the animal it would be made of solid gold inside, so they cut it open and found it to be made of regular old goose-meat. Even if it had been made of gold it was poor economic reasoning to kill it anyway, but that aside—that’s me: I lay the human race golden eggs, and they decided I’m more use to them alive than dead. Oh, I’m sure the studying won’t stop with my death. They’ll probably put my brain in a jar for the scrutiny of future generations, slice it up and test the thisness or the thatness of it. And I am sure their scrutiny will reveal nothing. Just regular old chimp meat inside. There will be some scientist a hundred years from now who will hold up my skull to show the classroom, like Yorick: look here, kids, behold the braincase of the long-dead jester—light, hollow, unfleshed by time, polished smooth as a gemstone. Notice the simian slope of the browridge, the jutting jaw. Would you believe that the monster who owned this once sang the world a song of pride and passion and love and joy and fear and darkness?
No, they won’t believe it. Because that’s not how humans like to think of their wild animals. They want you in the dark, they want you shivering in the woods, cowering at the lightning flashes. They want to believe that they are not still shivering and cowering along with them. But they are. You are—you are, you upright beasts, you animals.

  In the end the court was swayed by the scientists’ arguments, and after a great deal of red tape had been slashed through, after a great deal of time and paperwork had come and gone and the question of what was to be done with me finally arrived at the point of egress of the complicated bureaucratic maze in which it had gotten hopelessly lost for a time, I was sent to live in confinement, relative peace, and seclusion in the Zastrow National Primate Research Center, located somewhere in rural Georgia, USA.

  Here, within these four white walls, and within the perimeters of this land cordoned off by those tall chain-link fences that I told you about so long (it seems) ago, in the alternating sterility of the laboratories and the rich lushness of the forests outside, in the company of human scientists, unenculturated chimpanzees who do not understand me when I speak to them and whose inarticulate shrieks and gestures I no longer comprehend, I have lived for nine years.

  The date today is August 8, 2008. I will turn twenty-five in twelve days. Next year I will have been here for a decade. I will have grown ten years older, and ten years wiser, maybe. I have continued to paint and read here in the solitary apartments that the scientists have kindly provided for me, and occasionally I have staged theatrical productions, which I direct and star in. Although I must work with a cast of nonprofessional actors, most of them chimps, and our audiences tend to be small—consisting only of the scientists who work here, usually—I do derive some joy from them. Leon still comes to visit me several times a year, and we correspond by mail frequently. Little Emily used to visit me in the early days of my incarceration, but I have not seen or communicated with her in years. I assume Emily has willingly forgotten me in order to concentrate on living the life of an independent young woman in her twenties, wherever it is she is doing that now. Tal visited me only once. That was an unpleasant visit. She still blames me—fairly or unfairly, I don’t know—for what happened to Lydia. To hell with her. I loved Lydia ten times ten times as much as she or anyone ever did. I probably loved her ten times ten times as much as anyone ever loved anyone, inside or outside of their own species. Mr. and Mrs. Lawrence visited me once as well, and on that occasion—I misremember how many long and quiet years ago now that must have been—they brought along my old mute companion, Clever Hands. It was a joy to see him. Hilarious Lily, they informed me, had passed away—she died in the same bed in which her husband, Hilarious Larry, had died a few years before her, clutching her rosary in her fist, going silently to her God.

  Aside from that—except for you, Gwen—I have no visitors from the outside. Leon Smoler, who is my best living friend, surely has not got much time left. He is old, he is old. And, moreover, in terrible shape, which I shouldn’t find surprising. Pretty soon he will have to start patching up that old body for heaven. After he goes, I suspect that I will live out the rest of my days with little or no contact with anyone from the outside world. I obediently understand that it is most probably my fate to sit here and wait—cultured, educated, gifted with language and reason, and yet alone and deprived of my freedom—until, one day, I will die. And that will be all.

  Unless, of course, I escape. As I have confessed to you before, Gwen, I have recurring dreams of returning to that human world that so badly mistreated me. If I were a rational creature (which, obviously, because I am also a conscious creature, I almost by definition am not), I would have absolutely no wish to rejoin human civilization, seeing as I have everything I could ever want right here inside this patch of the earth that is sectioned off from the rest of the planet by that high metal fence. But whenever I am outside in the forest, feeling the heat of the Georgia sun on my face, sucking this wet Southern air into my lungs, listening to the calls of the birds, who are free to fly where they will and to sing their songs beyond mankind, something restless in my heart induces my gaze to tip curiously skyward, to the top of that razor-wire-topped chain-link fence that surrounds the grounds of the Zastrow National Primate Research Center. However, Gwen, these are only dreams, which are the children of an idle brain, begot of nothing but vain fantasy. These seeds of my dreams of escape never germinate past the first saplings of vague plots and plans in the mischief-rich soil of my devious mind: plots and plans of somehow getting over or under that fence, or past the door that I see you walk in and out of every day you come to visit me—and get out. There must be a way out.

  The world is large. I know that I am not fit to live in human society. But then again, who is? There may still come a day, Gwen, when Bruno Littlemore is free to walk the world again.

  Today, Gwen, this Scheherazade will officially fall silent for you for the last time, but I hope this will not be your last visit, because, as you’ve probably noticed, I have fallen in love with you.

  That aside, earlier this morning, before you came to me today to complete your project, I was reading the Book of Psalms. No, please don’t expect this narrative to end with some sort of Dostoyevskian last-minute prison conversion. Unlike Hilarious Lily, I have never been a religious ape. I was and remain the chimp of the perverse. But in my long hours of solitude and quiet reflection I have taken to reading the Bible. I admit sometimes it can be very beautiful. There is a dark and primitive energy in its words that sometimes, if I allow them to, can put a shiver in my spine, can make me feel as if my blood has turned to ice. And sometimes, too, I read it only to enrage me. I read it to make my blood sing out with violent fury in my heart at all humankind. It is an unusual text that can produce both awe and rage in me at once.

  And I was flipping through the double-column-texted, tissue-thin and gold-edged pages of that famous book—the “Good Book”—and I landed on the Psalms (which as it so happens I read often, because they come right after Job, which is the book of the Bible I reread the most), and I came across this:

  When I look at thy heavens, the work of thy fingers,

  the moon and the stars which thou hast established;

  what is man that thou art mindful of him,

  and the son of man that thou dost care for him?

  Yet thou hast made him little less than angels,

  and dost crown him with glory and honor.

  Thou hast given him dominion over the works of thy hands;

  thou hast put all things under his feet,

  all sheep and oxen, and also the beasts of the field,

  the birds of the air, and the fish of the sea,

  whatever passes along the paths of the sea.

  When I read those words, it was not that feeling of awe that came to me, but a feeling of rage.

  Little less than angels?

  No! No, no, NO! Not little less than angels! Little more than apes! No! Nothing more than apes! Apes! Just apes! Arrogant, self-deluding, talking… apes! And now I am one of you. I am one of you, and I cannot ever go back! Go tell your God what I would give to unlearn your language! To go back to being an animal!

  No, I can never go back! I can never go back again. I cannot unlearn my humanity. For evolution, perversely, moves forward. I do not mean it progresses, but only that it cannot be turned back like the hands of a clock. We cannot walk backward through time. We cannot put all our words into a pot and boil them down to a salty residue of grunts and howls and shrieks and gestures, we cannot retreat back across the ancient savannahs, grow our arms long again and climb back into the trees, let our spines stretch out into tails and let our stereoscopic eyes slowly recede to the sides of our heads, shake off our hair, cool our blood and drain our breasts of milk, turn our hot weak flesh to cold slimy scales, sprout spikes and horns and webs and flippers and fins, become fish, and go slithering on our disgusting bellies back into the sea.

  If only we could! If only w
e could spare ourselves from all our suffering, from all our knowledge of death. If only we could spare the earth all our desecration. And, yes, I know we would also discard a lot of beauty and music and greatness and joy and blah blah blah and so on. Beware! That’s how you get hooked! That’s what seduces you!—what seduced me! Beware, you little fish!

  Who, though—who among the host of devils could fault that sea creature of many years ago for gazing out through the mediary muck of its existence upon that muddy bank and open air and sunshine, and innocently wondering what beauty and music and greatness and joy might lie in wait up there? There, there would this monster make a man.

  So go ahead, you stupid fish, you silent-minded monster. Crawl up out of the water. See what is up there. There may be some profit in it, after all. As I, Bruno, would like to say to the whole world, to scream and rattle up and down the Great Chain of Being from the simplest life-forms all the way to the upper links where the angels crowd around the heavenly throne with wings beating and mouths open wide in glorious song, but especially, especially to humankind, to this animal, man, who thinks he is the measure of all things: you taught me language, and my profit on it is, I know how to curse.