The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore (36 page)

“Now say the frog wants to hop to the pond,” said Mr. Lawrence, and already I was remembering the image of my father, Rotpeter, raping the throat of an even less fortunate frog than this one. I shook off the unpleasant memory and tried to pay attention.

“But!—there’s a problem: each time he takes another hop, the frog can only hop
half the distance
of the last hop.”

What?—I thought, my mind beginning to roil—why?—what kind of bizarre hopping disorder afflicts this particular frog?

“So right away he hops halfway to the pond,” and with a sweeping squeak of the black marker Mr. Lawrence drew a parabola that spanned from the frog, seated at the base of the tree, to a point about halfway across the plane between tree and pond, representing the arcing motion of the frog’s first hop.

“Then, on the second hop, the frog only hops half of the distance he just hopped.” Mr. Lawrence drew another arc, about half
as big as the last one. “On the third hop, he can only hop
half
the distance of
that
hop, and then half of that and half of that…” Mr. Lawrence’s voice grew quieter and quieter as the hops he was drawing dribbled into a squiggle that culminated in a static black blot representing the point at which the exponentially diminishing distances of the frog’s hops had become unillustratably microscopic. Like this:

I glanced over at Clever, sitting in the schoolboy’s desk beside me. Ours were the only two desks in the classroom. Clever was scratching the back of his neck and looking out the window.

“So then,” said Mr. Lawrence, turning to face us. Clever dragged his gaze from the window to the whiteboard in a pretense of attention. “
When
will the frog reach the pond?”

I reasoned that although he was moving very slowly, the frog was in fact moving forward, so surely he had to get there at some point unless he died of thirst before reaching the pond, which at the rate he was going had to be a concern.

“Nope!” said Mr. Lawrence, with a certain pedantic pleasure
evident in his bright eyes and lips pursed beneath the snowy broom of his mustache.

“Clever?”

Clever shrugged his shoulders, more from apathy than ignorance.

“Because space is infinitely divisible,” Mr. Lawrence concluded in triumph, “the frog will
never reach the pond!
”

But how could this be possible? I thought. As I remember, I pointed out that the frog himself must take up a certain amount of space, and I asked how it was that the frog could leap a distance shorter than the length of his own body. I looked at the illustration, eyeballed the size of the frog drawn beneath the tree and visually measured it against the amount of space that remained between the edge of the pond and the black blot at the end of the frog’s trajectory where the hops had grown too tiny to see, and it looked to me that the yet-untraveled distance was shorter than the frog himself, so surely he was close enough to the pond that he could simply bend his lips to the edge of the water to drink. I remember asking this, and I remember Mr. Lawrence’s response was twofold: (one) that he never said the frog wanted to go to the pond because he wanted to drink, only that he wanted to go there because he wanted to
be at the pond
(to swim, then? I wondered); and (two) that I was for the purposes of the thought experiment to ignore
the
body of the frog
, that this was an abstract, mathematical frog, a frog who is merely a point in space devoid of volume, area, or any other dimensional analog. I could not even begin to fathom how a frog could be a volumeless point in space and still be considered a frog. And then I began to ponder the fate of this poor frog, who was doomed by his rare and improbable condition to die en route to his destination, so very close to it, within sight, within mere inches of the pond, yet effectively stuck there, out of reach of it. Much later, I would read the Greek myths about the cruel and ironical tortures
that certain heroes had to endure for eternity in Hades: about Prometheus, shackled to a rock, whose liver regenerates in his body every night so that come the morning the eagle may disembowel him afresh; or Sisyphus, who must in endless repetition roll his rock uphill until he’s moments away from finishing the job, when he loses his grip on it and must watch it tumble back to the foot of the mountain; or Tantalus, forced to stand forever in a pool within arm’s reach of branches burdened fat with fruit, but doomed to everlasting hunger and thirst because the branches of the tree bend just out of reach when he tries to pick the fruit, and the water at his feet evaporates if he kneels to drink it; and studying these mythological punishments I recalled the unfinishable journey of Xeno’s incorporeal frog, and wondered what it was about the psychology of this famous race of wisdom-loving ancients that made them so fascinated and horrified by the eternal wax-and-wane of favor and denial, of futile labors and frustrated desires.

After class was dismissed, Clever and I would be released to play outside. We would skip through the fields of grass with Sukie the dog, and play fetch, or go for long walks in the woods, or go to pet or feed the animals with Lydia.

When I had begun to speak articulately enough that people other than Lydia could understand me, Lydia extracted a promise from me: that for the time being, I would not speak to any humans who did not already know my secret. If I was in the presence of her, or the other chimps, or Mr. and Mrs. Lawrence, or Rita—all the people in the world who knew I could talk—then I could say all I liked, but around anyone else mum was the word. The reason for this moratorium on my speaking was that she wanted to keep me a secret from the world in order to give her as much time as possible to teach and study me in peace and without the winds of unwanted publicity and public outcry howling at the door. I complied with her request of my silence. I slipped up only once.

Clever and I would often take walks along the high metal fence that separated the vineyards from the free-range area of Mr. Lawrence’s property. It looked much like the tall chain-link fence that surrounds the research center where I live now. Clever and I enjoyed conversations together, of a certain sort. Linguistically speaking, they were all very one-sided. I did all the talking, and he just made gestures that I failed to understand. I liked his company though, and he liked mine: we were friends. We were walking along the fence, with Sukie, the dog, yapping and panting about ten feet up ahead of us. Clever and I walked side by side. My hands were clasped behind my back, and I was in the middle of pontificating aloud on some ponderous philosophical subject, while Clever mutely listened, dragging a stick against the fence to make it go
clink-clink-clink-clink
as we walked.

“… and indeed,” I was saying to Clever, “not even Augustine conceived of a God in terms of material imagination, yet for Kierkegaard—” I stopped cold, my thought truncated in midsentence. I had been so lost in my soliloquizing that I was startled by a small grubby-faced child standing just on the other side of the fence, looking out at us. Her star-kissed ink-black eyes were transfixed in an expression halfway between wonder and fear. She stood stock-still, silent. She had heard every word.

I looked past her. Up ahead, in the vineyard, in the aisle of dirt between two long fences covered in grape vines, was a group of vineyard workers. They were bent over their labor: picking the grapes and putting them in the big plastic buckets that hung from their fingers. They wore straw hats to keep off the October sun that glued their clothes to their skin with sweat. Some of them were barefoot; some of the men were shirtless. The little girl who had heard me speak ran off toward them. Clever and I stood there at the fence, trading nervous looks, unsure of what to do.

“Mamá, mamá!” said the girl. One of the grape-picking women looked up at her, put down her bucket and wiped about a gallon of sweat from her brow with the back of her hand. She visored her eyes with a hand and squinted at me and Clever, standing just beyond the fence at the edge of the vineyard.

“
¡Oí que el mono habla!
” said the little girl, pointing at me. “
¡Aquel mono puede hablar! ¡El mono puede hablar!
”

The men picking grapes all looked up at us and laughed. The little girl jumped up and down and shrieked in frustration.

“
¡Es verdad! ¡Oí que el mono hablaba!
”

The girl’s mother sighed heavily and shook her head.

“
No estás tonta
,” she muttered, and went back to work. “
Imaginas cosas locas, Mercedes
.”

The girl stamped her foot in frustration. She ran back to us at the fence.

“Speak, monkey!” she shouted at me in English. “Speak again!”

I did not like doing what I had to do next. I shook my head no, and turned away from her. She was a child, and would never be believed. My secret was safe. I looked back as we were leaving and saw her beginning to cry. My heart was heavy. I took my leave of Clever’s company and returned to the cabin, where I knew Lydia was. I wanted to be with the woman I loved, and to speak freely.

During our savage pilgrimage Lydia never ceased to feel uncomfortable with the Lawrences’ generosity. She slowly lost all contact with the outside world. In a way she was as much a prisoner as I was. She fell completely out of touch with her old friends and family. Lydia’s parents had both been dead for a long time, and she had become estranged from her brothers and sisters. She regretted this. They came from humble stock, she told me. The last she knew, all of her living family members remained in Arkansas. They were farmers, miners, carpenters, mechanics—none of whom lived
much farther than a stone’s throw from the house they grew up in. Her brothers and sisters were salt-of-the-earthers who were content to plod through unremarkable lives, the kind that Thoreau called lives of quiet desperation. She had fled her family into education. She was the first and only person in her family to go to college, much less graduate school, and when she came back to them with a master’s and a doctorate, she found that they no longer spoke quite the same language. She said her parents had been alcoholics. I got this story in bits and pieces over the course of many quiet nights sitting by the fire or lying naked in bed, talking. She had been married. She had been pregnant, but the child had died inside her just before she was due, and she had no choice but to endure the agony of childbirth only to push from her body what she already knew was a corpse. Sometime afterward, her husband, who had been a young architect on the up-and-up, for his own various reasons jumped off the Congress Parkway Bridge and died. Then she met me. And devoted her life to me. She had no one left but me. And I devoted my life to her. We were devoted to each other. Sometimes in the night she would wake up crying. She would tell me it was because she did not know what she was doing. She would say that she had no clear plan for the future. A few years before, she had been happily married and expecting a child, and had a promising academic career ahead of her. Now she had lost her child, husband, and career. She had lost the respect of the scientific community and now found herself living as an indefinite houseguest in near isolation on a remote ranch in a strange place, and was furthermore the lover of an ape. This of course she did not articulate to me, but all things considered, I wonder if at the time she suspected she was losing her mind.

Lydia accepted the Lawrences’ magnanimous hospitality, but she hated feeling like a parasite. I would ask her why we couldn’t just live here forever. She would have no answer. Only that she knew
that at some point our living situation would inevitably come to an end. Then we would make love again, and forget everything.

One would think that all this privileged peace would have alleviated the problem of her headaches, but it never did. In fact, in the course of these two otherwise happy years, her headaches even seemed to have gotten more frequent, longer in duration, and worse. She went to doctors in town—the closest town was fifteen miles down the road, the small mountain town of Montrose—but the doctors never knew what was wrong with her. They told her that her headaches were stress-related, psychosomatic, they were all in her head. Of course they’re in my head, she would say, they’re headaches. She worried. I worried, too, because I loved her.

M
y memories of my time at the Lawrence Ranch in Colorado could fill a dozen thick and happy volumes for you to store on your bookshelf to await your occasional perusal like a set of encyclopedias whose editors have permitted articles only on subjects pertaining to love, wonder, and joy. But to tell of love, wonder, and joy is not what I am here to do.