The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore E-Book

Benjamin Hale

• Herausgeber: Atlantic Books
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

SHORTLISTED FOR THE DYLAN THOMAS PRIZE 2011 Bruno Littlemore; linguist, artist, philosopher. A life defined by a soaring mind, yet bound by a restrictive body. Born in down-town Chicago, Bruno's precocity pulls him from an unremarkable childhood, and under the tuition of Lydia, his intellect dazzles a watching world. But when falls in love with his mentor, the world turns on them with outrage: Bruno is striving to be something he is not, and denying everything that he is. For despite his all too human complexities, dreams and frailties, Bruno's hairy body, flattened nose and jutting brow are, undeniably, the features of a chimpanzee. Like its protagonist, this novel is big, abrasive, witty, perverse, earnest and accomplished. The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore goes beyond satire by showing us not what it means, but what it feels like be human - to love and lose, learn, aspire, grasp, and, in the end, to fail.

Leseprobe

The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore

Benjamin Hale is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he received a Provost’s Fellowship to complete his novel, which also went on to win a Michener-Copernicus Award. He has been a night shift baker, a security guard, a trompe l’oeil painter, a pizza deliverer, a cartoonist, an illustrator and a technical writer. He grew up in Colorado and now lives in New York.

The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore

Benjamin Hale

Atlantic Books London

First published in 2011 in the United States of America by Twelve, an imprint of Grand Central Publishing, Hachette Book Group Ltd.

First published in Great Britain in 2011 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

Copyright © Benjamin Hale, 2011

The moral right of Benjamin Hale to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination and not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities, is entirely coincidental.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN: 978 1 84887 533 3 eBook ISBN: 978 0 85789 542 4

Printed in Great Britain

Atlantic Books, An imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd, Ormond House, 26–27 Boswell Street, London WC1N 3JZwww.atlantic-books.co.uk

In memory of Jesse Barboza

(1982–2007)

What I have learned from them has shaped my understanding of human behavior, of our place in nature.

—Jane Goodall

[The following manuscript contains the unedited transcripts of the memoirs of Bruno Littlemore, as dictated to Gwendolyn Gupta between September 9, 2007, and August 8, 2008, at the Zastrow National Primate Research Center, Eastman, GA 31024]

CONTENTS

Part One

CHAPTER I

CHAPTER II

CHAPTER III

CHAPTER IV

CHAPTER V

CHAPTER VI

CHAPTER VII

CHAPTER VIII

CHAPTER IX

Part Two

CHAPTER X

CHAPTER XI

CHAPTER XII

CHAPTER XIII

CHAPTER XIV

CHAPTER XV

CHAPTER XVI

CHAPTER XVII

CHAPTER XVIII

CHAPTER XIX

CHAPTER XX

Part Three

CHAPTER XXI

CHAPTER XXII

CHAPTER XXIII

CHAPTER XXIV

CHAPTER XXV

CHAPTER XXVI

CHAPTER XXVII

Part Four

CHAPTER XXVIII

CHAPTER XXVIX

CHAPTER XXX

CHAPTER XXXI

CHAPTER XXXII

Part Five

CHAPTER XXXIII

CHAPTER XXXIV

CHAPTER XXXV

CHAPTER XXXVI

CHAPTER XXXVII

CHAPTER XXXVIII

CHAPTER XXXIX

CHAPTER XL

CHAPTER XLI

CHAPTER XLII

CHAPTER XLIII

CHAPTER XLIV

Part Six

CHAPTER XLV

CHAPTER XLVI

CHAPTER XLVII

CHAPTER XLVIII

CHAPTER XLIX

CHAPTER L

Acknowledgments

Part One

. . . But man, proud man,

Dress’d in a little brief authority,

Most ignorant of what he’s most assur’d,

His glassy essence, like an angry ape,

Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven

As makes the angels weep; who, with our spleens,

Would all themselves laugh mortal.

—Shakespeare, Measure for Measure

I

My name is Bruno Littlemore: Bruno I was given, Littlemore I gave myself, and with some prodding I have finally decided to give this undeserving and spiritually diseased world the generous gift of my memoirs. I give this gift with the aim and hope that they will enlighten, enchant, forewarn, instruct, and perchance even entertain. However, I find the physical tedium of actually writing unendurable. I never bothered learning to type any more adroitly than by use of the embarrassingly primitive “hunt-and-peck” method, and as for pen and paper, my hands are awkwardly shaped and tire easily of etching out so many small, fastidious markings. That is why I have decided to deliver my memoirs by dictation. And because voice recorders detest me for the usual reasons, I must have an amanuensis. Right now it is eleven fifteen in the morning on a drably nondescript day in September; I am lying partially supine and extremely comfortably on a couch, my shoes off but my socks on, a glass of iced tea tinkling peacefully in my hand, and there is a soft-spoken young woman named Gwen Gupta sitting in this very room with me, recording my words in a yellow notepad with a pencil and a laserlike sense of concentration. Gwen, my amanuensis, is a college student employed as an intern at the research center where I am housed. It is she who acts as midwife to these words which my mind conceives and my lungs and tongue bear forth, delivering them from my mouth and by the sheer process of documentation imbuing them with the solemnity and permanence of literature.

Now to begin. Where should I begin, Gwen? No, don’t speak. I’ll begin with the first time I met Lydia, because Lydia is the reason why I am here.

But before I begin, I guess I should briefly describe my surroundings and current predicament. One could say that I am in captivity, but such a word implies that I have a desire to be elsewhere, which I do not. If one were to ask me, “Bruno, how are you?” I would most likely reply, “Fine,” and that would be the truth. I know I’m well provided for. I like to think of myself not as imprisoned, but in semiretirement. As you already know, I am an artist, which my keepers recognize and respect, allowing me to occupy myself with the two arts most important to my soul: painting and the theatre. As for the former, the research center generously provides me with paints, brushes, canvases, etc. My paintings even sell in the world beyond these walls—a world that holds little remaining interest for me—where, I’m told, they continue to fetch substantial prices, with the proceeds going to the research center. So I make them rich, the bastards. I don’t care. To hell with them all, Gwen: I paint only to salve the wounds of my troubled heart; the rest is grubby economics. As for the latter—the theatre—I am preparing to stage a production of Georg Büchner’s Woyzeck, directed by and starring myself in the title role, which our modest company will perform in a few weeks for the research center staff and their friends and families. Broadway it’s not, nor even off-Broadway—but it satiates (in a small way) a lust for the spotlight that may be integral to understanding my personality. My friend Leon Smoler visits me occasionally, and on these occasions we laugh and reminisce. Sometimes we play backgammon, and sometimes we converse on philosophical subjects until the smoky blue edge of dawn creeps into visibility through my windows. The research center allows me to live in all the comfort and relative privacy that any human being could expect to want—more, really, considering that my mind is free from the nagging concerns of maintaining my quotidian persistence in the world. I am even allowed outside whenever I please, where, when I am in my most Thoreauvian moods, I am allowed to roam these woods in spiritual communion with the many trees that are thick-trunked with antiquity and resplendent with drooping green mosses and various fungi. The research center is located in Georgia, a place I had never been to before I was relocated here. As far as I can determine from my admittedly limited perspective, Georgia seems to be a pleasant enough and lushly pretty place, with a humid subtropical climate that proves beneficial to my constitution. Honestly, on most days it feels like I am living in some kind of resort, rather than being confined against my will due to a murder that I more or less committed (which, by the way, could time be reversed, I would recommit without hesitation). Because this more-or-less murder is a relatively unimportant event in my life, I will not bother to mention it again until much later, but it is at least ostensibly accountable for my current place of residence, and therefore also for your project. I am, however, no ordinary criminal. I suppose the reason I’m being held in this place is not so much to punish as to study me, and I presume this is the ultimate aim of your project. And I can’t say I blame them—or you—for wanting to study me. I am interesting. Mine is an unusual case.

As a matter of fact, Gwen, I should apologize to you for my initial refusals to grant your repeated requests for an interview. Just speaking these opening paragraphs has made me realize that nothing I’ve ever yet experienced better satisfies my very human desire for philosophical immortality than your idea of recording this story—catching it fresh from the source, getting it right, setting it down for the posterity of all time: my memories, my loves, my angers, my opinions, and my passions—which is to say, my life.

Now to begin. I will begin with my first significant memory, which is the first time I met Lydia. I was still a child at the time. I was about six years old. She and I immediately developed a rapport. She picked me up and held me, kissed my head, played with my rubbery little hands, and I wrapped my arms around her neck, gripped her fingers, put strands of her hair in my mouth, and she laughed. Maybe I had already fallen in love with her, and the only way I knew to express it was by sucking on her hair.

Before I begin properly, I feel like the first thing I have to do for you here is to focus the microscope of your attention on this specimen, this woman, Lydia Littlemore. Much later, in her honor, I would even assume her lilting three-syllable song of a surname. Lydia is important: her person, her being, the way she occupied a room, the way she did and continues to occupy so much space in my consciousness. The way she looked. The way she smelled. That ineffably gorgeous smell simmering off her skin—it was entirely beyond my previous olfactory experience, I didn’t know what to make of it. Her hair. It was blond (that was exotic to me, too). Her hair was so blond it looked electrically bright, as if, maybe, in the dark, her hair would naturally glow forth with bioluminescent light, like a lightning bug, or one of those dangly-headed deep-sea fish. On that day when we first met, she had, as was her wont, most of this magnificent electric blond stuff gathered behind her head just under the bump of her skull in a no-nonsense ponytail that kept it from getting in her eyes but allowed three or four threads to escape; these would flutter around her face, and she had a habit of always sliding them behind the ridges of her ears with her fingers. Futilely!—because they would soon be shaken loose again, one by one, or all at once when she snatched off the glasses she sometimes wore. When Lydia was at work, her hands were endlessly at war with her hair and her glasses. Off come the glasses, fixed to a lanyard by the earpieces, and now (look!) they dangle from her neck like an amulet, these two prismatic wafers of glass glinting at you from the general vicinity of those two beacons of womanhood—her breasts!—and now (look!) they’re on again, slightly magnifying her eyes, and if you walk behind her you will see the lanyard hanging limp between her shoulder blades. On they went, off they came, never resting for long either on the bridge of her nose (where they left their two ovular footprints on the sides of the delicate little bone that she massaged with her fingers when she felt a headache coming) or hanging near her heart. Once, in fact—this was much later, when I was first learning my numbers—I had briefly become obsessed with counting things, and I counted the number of times Lydia took her glasses off and put them on again during an hour of watching her at work, and then I counted the number of times she tucked the wisps of hair behind her ears. The results: in a one-hour period, Lydia put her glasses on thirty-one times and removed them thirty-two, and she tucked the wisp or wisps of hair behind her ear or ears a total of fifty-three times. That’s an average of nearly once a minute. But I think these habits were merely indicative of a nervous discomfort she felt around her colleagues, because when she and I were alone together, unless she was performing some task demanding acute visual focus (such as reading), the glasses remained in their glasses-case and her hair hung down freely.

I will speak now of her body, style of dress, and general comportment. She was, obviously, much taller than me, but not ridiculously tall for a human woman, maybe about five feet five, though the birdlike litheness of her limbs gave the illusion that she was taller. To me, anyway. She exercised often, ate a salubrious diet, and never felt tempted by any of the body-wrecking superfluities that so easily sing me out to sea, so innately deaf was she to their siren songs; for instance, she drank only socially, and even then not much. Her hands were knobby-knuckled and almost masculine in aspect, with fingernails frayed from light labor and habitual gnawing (one of her few vices); these were pragmatic hands, nothing dainty about them; hers was not the sort of hand a pedestrian poet might describe as being “alabaster,” nor the sort of hand onto the ring finger of which one might slip a diamond ring in a TV commercial advertising relucent diamonds wrested from the soil of darkest Africa. She dressed sharply, a bit conservatively. She dressed stylishly but not in a way that drew outrageous attention to herself. No, ostentation was not her style. (Ostentation is my style.) Black turtleneck sweaters were her style. Light tan sateen blazers were her style. Flannel scarves were her style. She shopped at Marshall Field’s. She wore hairpins. She wore sandals in the summer. She wore boots in the winter. She wore jewelry only on special occasions, though she wore on all occasions an effortless aura of beatific radiance. She looked good in green.

I will speak now of the sound of her voice. It made its impression on me the very first day we met. Most people would speak to me in that putrid bouncing-inflection singsong that adults use when condescending to children or animals. But not Lydia. No, she spoke to me in the same sober conversational tone of voice she would have used to address anyone else, and this easily won my loyalty, at first. Her voice had a faint but discernible twang in it; she’d originated from a family of noble hardworking bozos from some godforsaken backwater town in rural Arkansas, but she had fled her background upward and away into education much in the same way as I’ve fled mine, and she spoke like a young woman with a doctorate from the University of Chicago, which is what she was. She spoke in grammatical sentences, with punctuation marks audible in them: periods, parentheses, colons, even the sometime semicolon. Listening to her voice was like listening to a piece of classical music being performed by a full symphony orchestra with one slightly out-of-tune banjo in it, lonesomely plinking along to the opus somewhere in the string section.

And I will speak now of her face. Lydia’s face was etiolated and Scandinavian-looking enough that she wouldn’t have looked out of place in a black-and-white Ingmar Bergman movie, though her eyes were not the pellucid blue ones that you would expect to see in the head of the woman I’ve thus far described. Her eyes were gold-flecked green. Her irises begged comparisons to tortoise shells, to the corollas of green roses with bronze-dipped petals, to two green-gold stars exploding in another galaxy, observed through a telescope a billion years later. On her driver’s license they were “hazel.” She had a long face with a lot of distance between her thin mouth and the bottommost tip of her slightly cleft chin. Her skin had the sort of pallor that pinks rather than tans in the sun. Two delicately forking blue veins were barely noticeable on her temples. The bridge of her nose was a perfectly straight diagonal line, but the tip of it was blunt and upturned at an angle just obtuse enough to allow, from a directly frontal view, easy gazing into the depths of her nostrils. Her forehead was wide and featured a very subtle bump above the supraorbital ridge. Her cheekbones were not high and emerged to definition only in the harshest of lighting. She seldom wore makeup, and when she did, it was just hints and touches, because slathering too much ornamental glop on that face of hers would have diminished its effect rather than enhance it. Her snaggletoothed smile served as a memento of childhood poverty. She was twenty-seven years old when I first met her, and thirty-four when she died.

But why—why have I spent so much energy, so much of both my time and yours describing this woman, having probably succeeded only in distorting rather than elucidating her image in your mind’s eye? Because Lydia was my First Love. Make sure you write that with a capital L, Gwen. And why don’t you go ahead and capitalize the F in first as well. Because Lydia was my capital-O Only capital-L Love, or at least the only Only Love I would ever dare to capitalize.

Now we may begin in earnest. New chapter, please.

II

The first time I met Lydia, I was so young and uncontaminated by the world that I didn’t even know I was participating in a scientific experiment. I was brought into a strange blank-white room: everyone’s shoes squeaked on the hard shiny floor, and the high-frequency buzzing of fluorescent lights overhead made me jittery and discombobulated. The three of us—I, Bruno; my idiot brother, Cookie; and little Céleste—were let out of the cage in which they had conveyed us to this alien room, to allow us a little time to acclimate ourselves to these surroundings at our leisure, to accustom our eyes to the stinging brightness, to meet the scientists. That’s when I met Lydia: she bent to the floor and held her arms open for me, and I ran to her and climbed into them, and for the rest of the day that was where I stayed, cradled in her arms, breathing her amazing scent that I even then must have found erotic—except when she was too busy with her work, or when they ripped us apart so they could run their moronic experiments on me.

I suppose I shouldn’t say moronic, because that experiment was what marked me as different right from the beginning. Of course I had no idea what was going on at the time. I had not yet acquired language, so I couldn’t have articulated my thoughts. (That, by the way, is the ironic thing about acquiring language relatively late in life: words don’t exist to adequately describe what it’s like when that tempest of wordless thoughts whirling around in your head suddenly snaps to definition; that great hop from prelinguistic to linguistic is squarely in the realm of the ineffable.) As far as I knew, all that was going on was this: I was taken into a small, empty white room with a long rectangular reflective panel embedded in one wall. (I now realize this was a one-way mirror, behind which another scientist was probably watching me like a voyeur with an eye to a keyhole.) The scientist who had conducted me into the room was not the woman whom I would later come to know as Lydia (was that you watching from behind the mirror, Lydia?), but some droll old fat bearded sot who held no special interest for me. There was a transparent plastic box on the floor. The scientist produced from the pocket of his white coat—with the excessively theatrical flourish of an amateur magician—a peach.

A peach, Gwen—he was my serpent and I was his Eve. There we were, me in my prelapsarian nudity and he in his demonic white coat, tempting me with fruit coveted but prohibited. The only difference was environmental: we’d swapped sexy Edenic lushness for the sterile whitewashed walls of Science. Also, that particular fruit is semiotically associated with the female pudenda, isn’t it? Isn’t that why Cézanne painted them?—Still Life with Peaches?—why, that’s just a quivering bowlful of vulvae sweating on the breakfast table, waiting for you to eat them up!

But the peach in question: so he takes, this scientist does, he takes a juicy piggish bite out of it and starts making yummy-yum-yum noises, mmmmmm, rubbing his belly, trying to goad my jealousy, you see. And as I recall, it worked. I was a simpler creature then. I remember wanting the peach at that moment more than anything. Hell, I would have sold my soul for a peach. (And in a way I did.) I remember hating, no, loathing that old smug fat imperious blob for the way he lorded the fruit over me so. So he took his bite, breaking the skin, releasing into the room the ambrosial aroma of that sticky wet fleshy treat, and then he, bastard, pushed me away when I reached for it. Then, turning to the box—transparent plastic box on the floor, remember?—he operated some sort of device which made the lid spring open, placed the peach inside and shut the lid. I was watching his actions with curiosity and a motley of deadly sins: greed, envy, gluttony, lust. Then, the demonstration: the box-opening mechanism consisted of a button and a lever; he pressed the button; then he rapped on the lid of the box three times with his knuckles, like this—knock, knock, knock; then he flipped the lever and the lid of the box popped open. He reached in and—again, moving his arms in such a grossly histrionic manner it was as if he wanted the people in the nosebleed seats to see what he was doing and making a face like Look, Bruno, what do we have here?—extracted the peach.

Again I reached for it. Again he pushed me away. Then he put the peach back in the box, promptly left the room and pulled the door shut behind him. Bruno was alone.

Alone with the box, with the peach clearly visible but locked away inside, forbidden to Bruno. I looked at it a moment. I pressed the button, knocked thrice on the lid, flipped the lever, opened the box and removed the peach. Did I dare to eat a peach? Indeed I did.

In this way I fell from my state of innocence.

The door opened, I was escorted out and my brother, Cookie, in, where I understand the same procedure was repeated on him. A little while later all three of us—Cookie, Céleste, and I—had made it through the first round, and I was taken back into the room, until they decided enough time had elapsed to renew my appetite.

Only this time—this time, it was Lydia—gorgeous-smelling Lydia, my human peach—who attended me into the little room with the box. Just being alone in a room with that woman was enough. And now she removed a peach from the pocket of her white coat, she took a sopping wet bite out of it and took her sweet time chewing. Then she placed the peach inside the box, waited a moment, pressed the button, knocked her knuckles on the lid three times, click-click-click, flipped the lever that opened the box and retrieved the peach. After locking it up again she left the room, though I entreated her to stay. Alone, I again in turn pressed the button, tap-tap-tapped, flipped the lever and proceeded to feast: but this peach tasted so much richer than the first, as it was imbued with the magic of her touch—with her lips, no less—her tongue!—I had seen that woman put her mouth on this object! The vicarious contact made me insane with desire. I would have preferred her to chew the peach to a pulp and sensuously ooze it intermingled with her own fluids into my mouth. I ate every shred of the thing, every last ort and fiber and dribble of nectar and then sucked on the stone for an hour after and became enraged—enraged!—when the other scientists tried to take it from me: I kept it securely in my cheek and would under no circumstances relinquish it, until, yes, Lydia, Lydia herself coaxed me to surrender it by holding her hand to my mouth, and, finally, I willingly spat the stone, slick with my saliva, into the cup of her pretty hand.

Anyway, this bizarre and (to me at the time) unfathomable procedure was repeated again and again all day until it looked like we’d all had our fill of their fucking peaches.

Much later, Dr. Lydia Littlemore would explain to me why my performance on that day had marked me as extraordinary. In retrospect I understand now what I could only feel at the time. As I’ve said, I did not yet have language. This is not to say that I did not have a consciousness in those days, or that I did not have thoughts—I certainly did—but I had none of these traps in which to capture and keep them—words. Back then my thoughts could only trickle through my head in a liquid state; trying to think clearly was like trying to drink water out of cupped hands: most of it drips through your fingers before you’ve really had a chance to drink, and you remain thirsty still—thirsty, and ignorant. When my consciousness was solidified enough to understand, Lydia told me that I had participated in a psychological experiment they were running on two groups, human infants and preadolescent chimpanzees. The experiment goes like this. You have this transparent Plexiglas box with a door that can be opened by a mechanism requiring a two-step process to unlatch: press the button and flip the lever. You place inside the box something the infant or chimpanzee is supposed to want, in my case a peach—and this, in my opinion, is the most problematic aspect of the experiment. What complex being will always want a peach? Suppose I wasn’t hungry? Am I supposed to be a creature of such brainlessly insatiate appetite that given the opportunity I would cram every last peach on the planet into my ravenous maw? Later in my life, when I was sitting in on an introductory course in microeconomics at the University of Chicago, I realized that economists tend to think about their fellow sapiens sapiens in exactly these terms. Rational choice theory, so they call it: Homo economicus. Fools! The thing that defines us rational creatures, like you and me, Gwen, is precisely the fact that we’re not always rational.

But I digress. So you put the peach in the box and then demonstrate to the subject how to open it. The scientist presses the button, taps three times on the lid of the box and flips the lever. Then leave the test subject alone and watch what he does. Then repeat this procedure ad nauseam on the largest test sampling you can get. The objective of the experiment was to see whether the human- or ape-child figures out that the tapping-on-the-box bit is an unnecessary step. Their typically anthropo-chauvinist hypothesis was that all your innately superior little human snots would quit tapping on the stupid box before the chimps. And the results were exactly the opposite of their predictions. All but one of the chimps (and they tested more than fifty of us and as many human infants) quickly figured out that the tapping shtick was a superfluous waste of time, and thus aborted the measure from the box-opening procedure on the second or third trial run. A few of the chimpanzee subjects, my older brother, Cookie, among them (and this sort of behavior is characteristic of him), on the third trial run got the box open simply by picking it up and smashing it against a wall. The humans, though—the human babies would faithfully tap on the box every time. Every one, every time. Now, Gwen, what do you think this means? I’ll tell you. It means this: for the human test subjects the whole thing was less about the reward than it was about the process. You see? It wasn’t so much that they wanted the peach as to participate in this enigmatic ritual, to perform the rite, to say their prayers. Because it’s you humans who have your absurdities of faith, your superstitions, your banshees and hobgoblins, your necromancies and haruspices, your charms and potions and voodoo dolls and magic mirrors and boogiemen, you who infantilize the universe by vainly searching for celestial answers to earthly questions in the movements of the stars, you who have your signs and symbols, your signifiers and signifieds, you who cast a terror-stricken backward glance into the darkness and ask yourselves who is that third who walks always beside you, you who chant your incantations, kiss the ring and cross yourselves, sear images into your flesh and poke holes in yourselves, hack off parts of your bodies and paint yourselves blue, burn witches and sacrifice your firstborns, scream into the whirlwind and wrestle with angels till the break of dawn! And they thought we would be the ones to continue squandering a few precious seconds that stood between us and those delicious peaches by tapping on the box even when the action obviously affected no empirical change upon the object? Absurd! It is only rubbing on the lamp! It is only magic. It is only religion. It is only the shadow of the hand of God. It is only one more example illustrating how feebly you people know yourselves.

Anyway, point being: who was the one and only chimpanzee among the hundred-some-plus sampling of members of my own birth species, Pan troglodytes, who, like the human children, never ceased to tap on the box? That’s right, c’est moi. I, Bruno, somehow understood on some fundamental level (as Lydia realized in hindsight, after the experiment was over and the unexpected results had been properly tabulated, scrutinized and pondered over until they succeeded in twisting some anthropo-chauvinist take out of the data) what it means to be human. And Lydia remembered me—me, Bruno, the chimpanzee who had fallen in love with her—and she sought me out, and found me, and began to bring me out of my animal darkness.

III

I think it had been some months since the experiments, some months since the Plexiglas box and that daylong procession of peaches, when Lydia came back for me. I had been returned to my family of uneducated slobs, to my mother and my father, my aunt and my uncle, my brother and Céleste. All of them sadly ignorant, broken and disaffected by lifetimes spent in diaspora.

I’m a Chicago boy, Gwen—I grew up in the Primate House of the Lincoln Park Zoo. Zoo records indicate that I was born with no complications on August 20, 1983. My mother, Fanny, had been born and raised there, had spent the entirety of her sad dull life in the very same zoo. I’m young enough to have been raised mostly in the considerably larger and sleeker modern facilities that were built to replace the outmoded sewer which had previously housed the great apes, and my mother never tired of silently reminding me and Cookie how good we had it. My father had a somewhat more interesting background. He wasn’t born in captivity, but in the Old Country, in the northeastern part of what was then Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of the Congo. At the time he was born there was some sort of bloodbath going on in Zaire, and the swarms of starving refugees fleeing hither and thither would butcher chimps for bushmeat. At a young age my father saw his mother and father murdered and subsequently devoured. He was forced to watch while they dismembered his parents with machetes, drilled spits through their corpses, cooked them over a fire and ate them. The two adult chimps they killed and ate because they were hungry, but they refrained from killing the baby right away because there was little meat on him (he was more valuable alive). Instead they tied him to a stick by his wrists and ankles, which they carried around with them for several days until they crossed the border to the Central African Republic and arrived at a populated area, where they sold my father to a German trader who illegally trafficked in exotic animals. The German was a man in a big yellow hat, who starved and beat him, and put him in a cage, which was transported from one place to another until he wound up on an airplane that landed finally in Germany, where he spent five years in the Berlin Zoo before a mysterious chain of exchanges and communiqués put him back on a plane, which this time landed at O’Hare, where he was loaded into the back of a van and conveyed to the Lincoln Park Zoo, where he was introduced to a jejune and somewhat mentally obtuse female chimp whom he was expected to shtup immediately, and whom out of boredom he eventually did. Thus my brother Cookie was conceived, followed three years later by me. The Germans had named him Rotpeter, meaning “Red Peter,” after the streaks of distinctly ruddy coloration in his fur. My father never quite lost that touch of aboriginal uncouthness. He’d known freedom only to have it cruelly revoked—whereas I, Bruno, was born in captivity, became free because I learned language, committed a transgression, and now, as you see, am in captivity once again. My father, though, had—however briefly—experienced life the way it was meant to be lived. He knew what he had lost, and this knowledge fueled him with an indignant rage that as a child—even in my terror of him—I admired. Not so my mother. She had never known Zion. She was born in the ghetto, a zoo-child of zoo-parents. And she suffered my father’s boorish machismo and womanizing with the same matter-of-factly passive acceptance with which she accepted her own confinement from birth. Rotpeter screwed my mother often but would also slip it in her sister whenever he felt like it. See, we shared our habitat with my maternal aunt, Gloria, and another adult male chimp, Rex—pitiful Rex!—who coupled with Gloria whenever Rotpeter was feeling too fucked out or overfed to swat him away, but Rex would never have dared try anything with my mother. Because Rotpeter was Alpha Male (not a hugely impressive achievement when there are only two adult males in the habitat) and because he had been born in the boondocks of Zaire and didn’t put up with anybody’s shit (at least not that of anybody he could physically overpower), he simply felt biologically entitled to every wet hole in the cage: my mother, her sister, and I could swear the disgusting fart already had a lecherous eye trained on little Céleste, who good Christ was still a child then, even younger than I, scarcely weaned from the teat.

Perverse, isn’t it? That I should sit keeping my poor dull downtrodden mother company, letting her comb the bits of filth out of my back fur while not twenty paces away my father is fucking my aunt? You’d think I grew up in Appalachia. This is the sort of background I came from. Oh, and I should tell you about the frog.

There was this frog—wait. Not now. Not just yet.

I think a general description of my early childhood is in order. The summers weren’t so bad, because they let us romp around on the grass outside. The whole family would spend most of the day lolling around in the trees and hammocks on this sort of grassy artificial island they’d built for us. We had enough space to move about as we liked, but there was a concrete ditch with a moat in it surrounding the island, and beyond that, a wall that was too high and steeply sloped for us to climb. The humans would crowd around the ledge of this wall and look at us. If it got too hot we could retreat inside to our dank dark room in the primate house, as they left the door open for us and we could come and go as we pleased between the shade and the outdoors. Those who inhabit zoos live like harem women: an idle life of well-provided imprisonment for the sake of others’ titillation. I suppose that sort of a life is luxury to those inclined to value their freedom less than their freedom from want, but Bruno the Prideful wished to be nobody’s pet. He wanted out, our Bruno did, out.

The Chicago winters tended toward bone-achingly frigid temperatures unbefitting the constitutions of tropical mammals like us, so every year we all spent November through usually, what, March, April even, cramped up indoors with less than half the roaming room we had in the summer. And the smell. How did it smell? The room smelled the way I presume any room might smell in which seven large naked primates are forced to live together for five consecutive months, doing all their eating and drinking and sleeping and fucking and fighting and farting and pissing and shitting within the confines of the same four walls—one of these walls, of course, being a thick sheet of glass provided for easy voyeurism. In the winter the room quickly took on a putrid mustiness, the primitive carpet of cedar planting chips almost immediately becoming so sodden with urine and sweat and other bodily miasmata you could practically watch the fetid steam waft up from the floor to smoke the glass opaque with fog and give us the closest thing we ever got to privacy. By the time the city thawed in the spring we were all half-crazed with cabin fever, bitchy and snappish, leaping at each other’s throats at the faintest provocation. Particularly my father, Rotpeter, who was a heavy smoker. Ah yes, my father’s smoking. In the summer, some of the humans would stand at the ledge smoking cigarettes, and my father, an extraordinarily perceptive ape, learned from watching the smoking humans the physical semiosis for Hey, can I bum a smoke?—which is: pantomiming the act of taking two drags of a cigarette by making a prong out of the index and middle fingers, puckering the mouth into a half kiss and touching the fingers twice to the lips. So when he saw someone standing at the ledge smoking a cigarette, he would look the person dead in the eye and make this gesture, and the smoking human would be so amused at his adorable mimesis that he or she would go ahead and throw him a cigarette. If it happened to land in the moat around our island (which it often did due to the lousy aeronautical properties of a cigarette), he would stoop to retrieve it, dripping from the water, and lay it out to dry on a rock. If not, he would pick it up, give the human a grateful thumbs-up gesture that he’d also learned from the passing sapiens and put it in his mouth. At first he would only mock-smoke them because he did not realize you had to light them to make them work, and in any event he obviously did not have anything to light them with, either. Eventually someone realized this, and the man (he was, as I recall, or let’s say I recall, a heavyset fellow in a Bears T-shirt) thoughtfully lit the cigarette for him, took a few puffs to get it going, then, correctly estimating the parabolic trajectory needed to vault the moat, using his ring finger as launching mechanism and his thumb as fulcrum he catapulted the burning missile over the Wall, over the moat, and onto the grassy shores of Monkey Island. My father actually smoked a cigarette then, and not long after he was hooked. He started adding a lighter-flicking gesture to accompany his can-I-bum-a-smoke gesture, and soon some kind soul threw him his own plastic cigarette lighter, which he also learned to use, and he immediately began to burn through his stockpile of cigarettes that people had previously thrown him but which he’d had no means of lighting. He hid his lighter and his cigs in a cache he surreptitiously dug in the planting chips in the interior part of our habitat, which he concealed with a rock. That was because the zookeepers were predictably horrified the first time they caught him smoking. They had tried to take the cigarette away from him, and Rotpeter threw a fit. After that, whenever a zoo employee happened around—they were easily identifiable by their light-brown uniforms—my father would hide the cigarette behind his back, or, if they got too close, would grind it out and then keep his foot over the butt. So he was able to fool them for a while, until the winter came and again we were all shut up inside, where for five months we chimps and the lowland gorillas would stare at each other from across the hall through our respective windows while the occasional gaggle of humans walked by between us, pausing awhile to gawk at the funny monkeys.

That’s when the zoo authorities got wise to the fact that my father hadn’t quit smoking: because now, in addition to the usual lush aroma of fecal matter, the habitat reeked of cigarette smoke. They tore the place up looking for Rotpeter’s stash, but he’d hidden it so well they never found it. Whenever the brownshirts arrived on a raid my father cleverly—oh, so clever, Rotpeter—cleverly sat on top of the very rock covering the cache. They never found it. He ran out, though, not even halfway through the winter, and the cravings made him moody and irascible. The next summer, the zoo employees posted a conspicuous sign outside the ledge looking into our habitat that must have said something like PLEASE DO NOT GIVE THE CHIMPANZEES CIGARETTES, though we were on the other side of the sign and did not know exactly what it said and, as all of us were unlettered, would not have been able to decipher it anyway—making my father furious with confusion as to why his bum-a-smoke gesture, though still amusing, failed to make good as often as it had the previous year. This, by the way, was the summer I met Lydia, and it was the same summer as the Frog Incident.

The Frog Incident: at some point during the time between the experiment with the peaches and the time Lydia came to fetch me for acculturation, a frog—yes, a frog, you know, ribbit—had somehow made it into our habitat. Curious Rotpeter was intrigued and entertained by this hapless amphibian: he managed to catch it, and began to play with it, flopping it back and forth in his hands and laughing at it, letting the terrified creature struggle away and get a few hops out before he snatched it up again. It was a perfect blue-skied summer day on a weekend, so the zoogoers were out in droves, and a large group of humans huddled at the ledge, pointing at my father and laughing at him laughing at the frog. Then what did Rotpeter, my father, do? He proceeded to fuck it. Yes: he fucked the frog. He played with himself till hard, pried the frog’s mouth open, rammed his schlong down its throat and began to rape it. The frog kicked its legs in agony, and there was a gruesome squishy sucking wet slurpy pumping squelching noise like skwerploitch, skwerploitch, skwerploitch (don’t make that face, Gwen)—which I imagine was distinctly audible even up there on the other side of the Wall. Once or twice the frog succeeded in hobbling away a few inches in a feeble attempt at escape, and Rotpeter would grab it by the leg, drag it back, reinsert himself and continue to take his pleasure with it. This is more or less what I recall, or imagine I recall or may as well recall overhearing among the humans who stood at the ledge, looking on in horror, and—as the urge to document is weirdly intrinsic to your species—videotaping it:

“I’ll have to tell people about this,” says the woman with the video camera.

“Mommy?” says a little girl, “is the monkey raping the frog?”

“This is the monkey,” says the woman to her camera, “oh, wait, oh, see the frog, see the frog—”

“Just look at him goin’ at it!” says a man.

From somewhere up above us comes the laughter of a child, a bright pretty squeal of the stuff.

“Look at him enjoying this, this is so horrible!”

“Oh my God, it’s still alive,” someone says.

“Yeah, what’s crazy is the frog is still alive,” says the man, typically quick to interject the more emotionally detached factual analysis on an atrocity.

“Oh, and it’s still alive!” says the woman. “Oh, you poor thing—run away, little froggie, run away!”

Of course the frog didn’t make it. After my father shot his wad down the frog’s throat, he peeled it off and tossed it over his shoulder like a slob does a dirty sock, and slumped himself down for a postcoital nap on the spot.

The frog wasn’t dead, just maimed, violated, wounded beyond the help of modern medicine. I so vividly remember seeing that poor stupid animal staggering around, reeling, the victim of a brutal sexual assault, dragging its belly through the dirt on its weak legs, near death, pale sticky underbelly heaving in, out, sputtering, my father’s jizzom dribbling from its mouth. And I was overcome with sympathy for this creature. I am no savage, Gwen. My own heart bleeds when I see pain in another. The only humane thing left to do for this frog was to put it out of its misery: and so I scooped up the ravished frog and, swinging it by the legs, mercifully bashed out what little brains it had in its frog head by whacking it against a nearby log. This coup de grâce was uncharitably misinterpreted by the humans as a mere continuation and the natural culmination of the sickening orgy of sadoerotic torture that the Pan troglodytes were for whatever reason enacting upon this defenseless frog. At this point I think a woman at the ledge shielded her young daughter’s eyes with a hand of parental censorship.

My father, needless to say, with his cigarette-smoking and frog-raping antics, was a local favorite among the primates at the Lincoln Park Zoo. His ill-gotten celebrity at the zoo outshone all the other residents of the Primate House, and oh God did he bask in that iniquitous limelight, the stupid narcissistic thug. They loved him at the zoo. Adored him. As I mentioned earlier, there were a few lowland gorillas living in the habitat across the hall from us, including a magisterial old silverback male whom I don’t believe I ever saw engaged in any activity other than dejectedly draping his massiveness over the structures in his habitat in various attitudes of languor so bored, so hopeless that they could have only arisen from a feeling of humiliation so complete as to reduce his life of confinement and public display to a flat stretch of days full of nothing but a dull yen for the only remaining passage of escape still availed him in the bittersweet promise of death. The miracle of my fate is that I was offered my release from just such a miserable life by the salvation of language. Quite literally, I talked my way out. But you could see, you could just see that fat old silverback’s regal eyes glistening with hatred for my father, hatred for all of Rotpeter’s zany performances, all his crowd-pleasing, repulsive clowning around, the way that self-debasing popinjay would prance up and down along the length of the chimp habitat right in front of the glass, banging on the window, hooting, clapping, stomping, clacking his teeth, making silly faces, doing the hear-no-see-no-speak-no-evil routine, peeling back his wet pink pinguid pithecine lips from his gums to reveal two rows of slimy yellow teeth, and slapping his palms on his chest and generally behaving for all the world like some sort of caricature of a chimpanzee, a loathsome self-parody, thus prompting the humans to point and giggle and ooglie-mooglie at him like the slavering idiot clods they were and oh, did they love him, the humans, how they would point at him behaving like a moron and then remark among themselves how human, how eerily strikingly human he looked (as if that was a compliment!). Look, look, look! Oh, honey, look at what he’s doing now! How almost human! And all the while that lazy indignant silverback gorilla across the hall (who never attracted a crowd because he never did anything) seethed with the desire to come over here and kick the shit out of him for all that repulsive singing and dancing—and wishing, of course, that he was not prevented from doing so by not one but two walls of three-inch-thick glass. But my father, but Rotpeter, oh, he was a primate’s primate all right, big hit with the humans: little ones, big ones, pretty ones, ugly ones, elderly and otherwise physically defective ones squeaking by in wheelchairs, handsome young couples holding hands, canoodling, pushing strollers containing yet more of their squiggling burbling spit-faced progeny to inherit and infest the earth and to one day, and it won’t be long, survive to celebrate the deaths of the last wild animals.

My feelings about the human race are complex. I love them and I hate them. More on this later. I’m telling you all this, I think, to underline the sense of relief, the feeling of having been specially selected for salvation that I felt when Lydia came to rescue me from having to spend the rest of my life in the company of these animals.

It is probably not a coincidence that I was the lowest-ranking male in the habitat. If I had been higher up on the dominance hierarchy I might not have wanted to leave as badly. But because I was the lowest rung on the ladder, I had nowhere to go but up. Or out, away. I fled. I fled into the arms of the human race, into the arms of a woman.

There must have been an aura of angelic luminescence encircling Lydia’s blond head, placed on those shoulders way up there on the very top of that long and beautiful human body. I saw her standing there in the doorway to the inside of our habitat—the door painted to disappear into the wraparound mural of the jungle scene, the door the zookeepers used to enter the habitat at feeding time. The door opened, and there stood Lydia, accompanied by one of the brownshirts. My father furtively stepped on the cigarette he’d been smoking.

“Rotpeter!” the brownshirt barked.

Rotpeter shrugged his shoulders, like, What?

“What have you got under your foot?”

Nothing, he shrugged.

“Don’t give me that, I can smell it all over you—it stinks like a bar in here.”

“You let him smoke?” said Lydia, horrified.

“God no! He learned to smoke from watching people, and now some idiots still throw him cigarettes even though we put up a sign.”

“How does he light them?”

The brownshirt sighed in pained, embarrassed resignation. “He’s got a lighter hidden around here somewhere.”

Lydia gave the brownshirt a look that an intervening social worker might give a neglectful parent when she sees the home is cluttered with unhygienic detritus.

“Oh, you poor baby,” said Lydia to me, realizing at once the shameful extent of the ugliness, the neglect and emotional abuse I had suffered in this hellhole, this prison, this degrading and dehumanizing panopticon in which I had grown up.

And she bent down to me and again held out her arms, like a saint, and she called to me:

“Come here, Bruno. Come to me.”

I raced into her arms, planting kisses of gratitude on every exposed patch of that glabrous, supple, sweetly aromatic human flesh I could reach. She’d come back! Come back for me! She must love me, too!

My mother grunted at her and suspiciously licked a glob of filth off of her thumb. My mother always knew I had a thing for human girls, and strongly, strongly disapproved of it. Of course, it was difficult for even me to tell precisely what my mother was thinking because she was so disastrously inarticulate. Like most chimps, hers was a vocabulary consisting entirely of signs—grunts, gestures, noises, postures, faces, and so on—signifiers with amoebic and inconstant sets of signifieds depending entirely upon the ephemeral context of the immediately present moment. She had in her communicative arsenal not one thing that could truly be called a word, which I think of as a sort of compact ball of signification—the use of which can change depending on the situation, but the meaning of which is firmer and less psychologically elastic than a nonlinguistic sign. Yes, conversations between chimps certainly do occur, thoughts of a certain sort are indeed communicated between them, but it would be absolutely impossible to translate them into human language, because these nonlingual conversations occur outside the sphere of activity that is capturable by the tools of the text; these communications happen entirely within the Theatre of Cruelty, within the realm that is ineffable, a dreamlike mode of communication halfway between thought and gesture, based not in words but in mentality and physicality, in the raw language of the nonsymbolic sign.

IV

I suppose the time to divulge the nature of my earliest sexual stirrings is now, Gwen. I had not yet come into full sexual maturity at this time. As I said, I think I was about six years old. Chimps—especially those in captivity—reach puberty at a younger age than humans. I was an unusual case. I always have been.

The other chimps in the zoo were perfectly content to mate among their own species—it seemed only natural; I don’t think any of them really even gave it any serious thought. But even my earliest sexual proclivities lay elsewhere. My father couldn’t have cared less, but I believe my mother found this—in her view—perversion of mine deeply disturbing.

There was only one female chimp close to my age living in the habitat: little Céleste. I will describe Céleste for you carefully, because she played an important part both in the development of my early consciousness and in landing me in my current situation. I gather that it was hotly anticipated and hotly hoped among the zoo management that either I or else my elder brother, Cookie, would one day couple with Céleste and impregnate her, thereby furnishing the Lincoln Park Zoo with additional chimps. Céleste was acquired from the Indianapolis Zoo when she was two years old and given to our poor aunt, who was as barren as Sarah, to raise as her own. (Keeping us apart for the first two years was a bulwark against the Westermarck effect, so that one day we might find each other sexually appetizing, as we had not been desensitized in early childhood to one another’s pheromones.) So Céleste was introduced to me when she was two years old, and I was three and a half.

Céleste never particularly bonded with Cookie, who was about eight years old at the time and much bigger than us, and was habitually boorish, brutal, and crude with her (Cookie took after our father in all the worst ways); but Céleste and I developed an adamantine emotional bond, a connection, primitive and deep, that needed no words to express it and needed none to understand. We often cuddled together in a warm tangle of slender hairy limbs, and, our two hearts, each the size of an avocado pit, beating softly in unison within a physical proximity of mere centimeters and our lazy young brains dopey with the natural tranquilizers of childhood love, we would fall asleep, in a nest of rushes, in a hot band of Chicago sunlight streaming through the window. Together, Céleste and I sweetly aped the bonding activities that we saw the grown-ups performing: with her fingers she would delicately pick the bugs and crumbs and weeds out of the fur on my back, and then she would turn around and let me do likewise unto her. We explored every inch of our habitat, Céleste and I, together we overturned everything in it that could be overturned, our young minds’ cups brimming over with environmental stimuli, the mysteries of existence rushing headlong into our eager consciousnesses.

I will relate one brief incident from my early childhood with Céleste, one of the few definite memories from this time in my prelinguistic life that I still carry with me, secreted away somewhere deep in the squiggly crevices of my tender electric brainflesh. I was playing with Céleste. We were playing with a hat. I don’t know how it got into our habitat in the first place—it must have come in the same way as the frog, these curiosities, these artifacts from the outside world that accidentally wandered in to become such important semantemes in the early development of my consciousness. Most likely the wind had blown this hat off of the head of a zoogoer, across the moat, and into our habitat—this being the one American city to claim the apropos moniker of “the Windy.” But this hat—I now realize, as I reconstruct the memory knowing what I now know—was a woman’s hat, a woman’s sun hat. It was beige, wide-brimmed, shallow-crowned and flat, made of straw—tightly woven slats of thin shiny straw. It was festive, festooned with a wide band of diaphanous silk on which was printed a design of blue and red and purple flowers, which wrapped around the crown of the hat and was secured in place with a bow. Perhaps at the time Céleste and I imagined—as I now imagine—that this hat had previously lived on top of the head of a beautiful woman. There were even—as I recall—a few long threads of human hair caught in the interstices of the hat’s weave, possibly red hair, almost invisible except upon close viewing, sleek and strong, as long as my forearm and well-nigh impossible to break with the hands. This hat was a magical object to us, a portent from the gods lying on the ground: beautiful, weird, otherworldly, bright.

Two young chimps, looking at a hat lying on the grass of their habitat. One, Céleste, the younger, is smaller with very dark fur, and her big ears stick far out of her head like wingflaps. The other, Bruno, the elder, has lighter and coarser reddish fur that he has inherited from Red Peter, his father, and smaller ears that lay flatter against the sides of his head. Both of them have the round heads and snowy beard-tufts of preadolescence.