The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore (42 page)

A brain tumor had been found in the left frontal lobe of Lydia’s brain. This tumor may well have been there for years, said the doctors. Years! They guessed this is probably what happened: a “benign” tumor, which had caused no “noticeably debilitating symptoms” (those words I remember clearly, as that is an exact quote from the mouth of one of these doctors: “noticeably
debilitating”), had, for reasons unknown, recently begun to blossom into a “malignant” one. It had decided it was time to grow, and was currently in the process of chewing up part of Lydia’s brain, and was getting fatter and fatter, crowding out and pushing around all the good and needed matter of her front-left cerebrum. The way the doctors described it to us, I imagined Lydia’s tumor as a grotesquely fat man rudely shoving his way into a crowded elevator, squishing everyone else against the walls until they cannot breathe. There were several options, said the doctors, none good. They were united in the opinion that surgery—
fucking
brain surgery
—was the best way to go, although they acknowledged that it could prove to be difficult, as apparently the tumor was located in a particularly inconvenient spot in her brain that would make it tricky to scrape out. So they advised first surgery—that definitely—and then a period of chemotherapy to follow it up. The chemotherapy was optional but strongly recommended. Lydia was told to think it over carefully, but that the brain surgery was a must if she hoped to live.

(Note: Gwen has just called to question the accuracy of certain elements of my narrative. She asked whether the woman from upstairs was at all surprised to hear me speak. Wasn’t I not supposed to talk to strangers, anyway? Did they really allow me into the hospital? And etc., etc. I admit, as always, to embellishments here and there in servitude to the interests of drama, though I suggest you not worry too much about them. If I ever stray from the letter of the truth, I never do in spirit. Let’s move on.)

A
bout a week later Lydia underwent surgery. They had to shave her head so they could saw her skull open to get at the tumor. As it turned out, the surgery wouldn’t do much good. It would be a squandered effort. Lydia had no health insurance; so Mr. Lawrence paid for the surgery, a last act of kindness to us. But before we get to that, there’s one more thing I must tell you about. Our readers probably already know about this part of my story, which has been well documented in texts other than this one, so I won’t dwell on it overmuch.

That day at the hospital wasn’t over yet. Or maybe this happened on another day. I can’t remember. We spent a lot of time at that hospital during this unhappy period. Let’s say it happened on the same day. Lydia did not yet know she was pregnant. I suppose she had not ovulated in months and had been gaining a lot of weight and so on, but these things were not the only things she had been ignoring since we had moved back to Chicago. It was discovered at the hospital in the course of all the many tests and whatnot that she had to endure because of her brain tumor.

The following scene I remember, though, or I at least imagine. Lydia and I were in the waiting room. Lydia had just come back to
me after running another gauntlet of medical tests. We were sitting by that fish tank again. The angelfish gaped and swam back and forth through their narrow corridor of water, their sequin eyes flat and emotionless. She had quit crying, and was now occupied in the business of staring at an area of the floor where a chair leg met the floor. A nurse bustled back to us from backstage the hospital’s theatre. She beckoned to Lydia. She said the doctors had found something interesting and unusual about the data of her body that they had collected. I was not allowed to be company when they were doing whatever they were about to do to her. Lydia obediently went with the nurse, leaving me with the fish. A long time passed. The fish did nothing interesting. Then the nurse returned, took me, Bruno, by the hand, and led me through the labyrinth of shiny white hallways lit by rectangles of fluorescent light buzzing softly overhead, past inoffensive framed watercolors of vases of flowers that blandly covered the nakedness of the walls, and into a certain room, where Lydia weakly smiled at me from the hospital bed on which she lay. I joined her at her bedside. The bed was elevated far off the floor, and I had to stand on a chair to make my body level with hers.

I remember that room, and remember it clearly. I had come to hate hospital rooms because their atmospheres reminded me of laboratories. These rooms are lit by the same frantically flickering and humming fluorescent lights. Sometimes it seems like my whole life has been lit by the fluorescent tubes of science. These fluorescent lights make for soft bright lighting that steals the shadow out from under every object and every person in the room. The rooms made for science and medicine have the same unnerving disharmony of whirring, whining electronic machines and the same sickly mint-green paint on the walls. Why is this nauseating mint-green color associated with a place where diseases are supposedly cured? Lydia was lying on a crinkly paper mat on her high plastic bed. There was
a doctor, a heavy woman with a sandy brown bob of hair, and let us say there was a stethoscope draped over her neck. I was sitting in a chair beside Lydia, holding her hand. It was late afternoon. A storm had broken above the city, and rainwater speckled and streaked the window. Lydia lifted up her shirt and showed the doctor her belly. There was a machine beside the bed. It was a computer on a cart. The doctor squirted some sort of oil on her belly from a squeeze bottle and rubbed it all over her. Then she unwound a wand tethered to the machine by a long white cord wound around a peg on the cart. She pressed the wand to Lydia’s belly. I squeezed Lydia’s hand. As I held and squeezed Lydia’s hand, the doctor pointed to the screen on the machine beside the bed. The screen was black except for a circle-and-triangle of green light, the shape of a keyhole. Indecipherable rows of green numbers and letters flickered skittishly at the top and bottom of the screen. Inside the keyhole of green light was a black, bean-shaped blob. The blob moved slightly. This small black bean-shaped blob, floating in a keyhole of glowing green goo, represented her child. And mine. Lydia was pregnant with our child.

This doctor fled from the room, and shortly after returned in the company of another doctor. Both of them looked at the black bean-shaped blob floating in green goo on the screen, exchanged a few furtive words between them, then both left. Shortly after that, these two doctors returned in the company of a third doctor. All three doctors looked at the bean-shaped blob in the keyhole of glowing green goo on the screen on the machine beside Lydia’s bed. They looked at Lydia, and then looked at me; they looked back and forth from me to Lydia, from Lydia to me. Then all three of them redirected their eyes to the bean-shaped blob, floating in a keyhole of green goo on the screen of the machine.

The doctors seemed surprised, although I see little reason why they should have been. Humans and chimps have more chromosomes in
common than a donkey and a horse, Gwen. It’s only natural. What I find far more surprising is that this sort of thing doesn’t happen more often.

Oh, and the fallout. I don’t want to extrapolate much on this next episode of my life, as it is perhaps one of the least interesting and best externally documented. Our readers will surely recall Lydia’s and my long and unwanted moment of infamy. They will no doubt recall the shock, the scandal, the public ridicule. They will no doubt recall the stories in the news and the long comet-tail of jokes on late-night talk shows that followed our initial splash of media attention. I suppose this is the moment where I would instruct the filmmakers of the film of my life to insert a sequence in which the front pages of newspapers, each one heralded in by a tumble of dramatic music, come rapidly spiraling at us out of a black void to splat against an invisible plane of space a few feet in front of our eyes, displaying headlines such as: C
HIMPANZEE
L
EARNS TO
S
PEAK
; H
ISTORY
-C
HANGING
S
CIENTIFIC
B
REAKTHROUGH
D
EMANDS
R
EDEFINITION OF
M
ANKIND
; and C
HIMP AND
S
CIENTIST
I
NVOLVED IN
S
EXUAL
R
ELATIONSHIP
, W
OMAN
P
REGNANT
W
ITH
“H
UMANZEE
”! Let’s leave it at that and try to move on; I find all this stuff deeply depressing and fundamentally boring. All this attention, to say the least, was undesired. Day and night that pale green phone on the kitchen wall needled us awake with its electric gobble, with voices on the other end of it begging for information, for interviews, offering money for appearances on TV talk shows—all of which, despite our poverty, were handily denied. After a few days Lydia unplugged the phone.

It should come as no surprise people were far more interested in the salacious, prurient elements of my story than the mere fact that a nonhuman had become fully fluent in a human language. That’s what it takes to get the public’s attention. A “scandal.” The “experts” were certain that I had not actually attained “Language
with a capital L” (whatever that means). Suddenly, for a few long days, it seemed you couldn’t turn on a TV without seeing Noam Chomsky vigorously denying to Larry King or some other idiot that what I spoke could possibly be properly called “language” for such-and-such reasons. These “linguists” would deny to my face that what I speak is language, even when I can personally engage them in verbal argument. Lydia advised me not to speak to the media, so I didn’t. I turned down all requests for interviews. What could I ever have said to satisfy them, anyway? Nothing! There was absolutely nothing I could do or say. Their minds were made up as to the uniqueness of human language, and no proof could have possibly swayed them. I am an animal, everybody knows animals do not talk, and that was that. To accept that I had language would have required them to evict their most narcissistic of species from the false office they believe themselves to occupy, and so they did not listen and never have since. What people were more interested in was that a human woman had become pregnant with the child of an ape—and that this woman and this ape were very much in love, and that this woman planned to bear the child to term. My child. And Lydia would get better. This bug in her brain was no big deal, we would suffer through it, she would get better, and we would raise our child together, and we would be happy. That was the plan.

I’m sure our readers know as well as you and I, that did not happen.

For a long and obnoxious time Lydia and I could not leave our apartment without having to push our way through a slobbering throng of journalists, gawkers, and protesters.

Ah, yes. The protesters. Shouting and chanting their idiocies outside of our apartment all day and all night. Praying for us, they
said. Holding candles and singing hymns. Pumping picket signs in the air. Screaming their putrid throats bloody with their vile, hateful screeds. At least the journalists would only appear and disappear from the vicinity of the front door of our now-unhappy home at relatively sane times of day—they, after all, had their jobs, and presumably lives of their own to live—but the fervent religious zealots apparently did not, as they never,
ever
seemed to leave. Sometimes—in the beginning of the fallout—early in the morning, there would be hundreds of them standing in front of our building. They were a pestilence, an infestation. Sometimes we could call the police, who would come rolling leisurely down the street in their black-and-white cruisers, wheeling their way through the zoo, the human zoo into which these people had converted our quiet, tree-lined block of South Ellis Avenue. The cops would turn on the blue and red bar of light on top of their car and give them all a truncated whoop from the siren, and they would scatter in all directions, as cockroaches do when you flick the light on, only to congregate again mere minutes after the cops had left, huddling together all their bodies that housed all their pious Sunday-morning souls.

These people were led by a man whose name, as he told us through his megaphone, was “Reverend Jeb.” Reverend Jeb was not an “ordained” reverend of any church but his own. His full name was Milton Jebediah Hartley III. He was the proprietor of a nondenominational fundamentalist Christian church in Wichita, Kansas, who had driven himself and other protesters up to Chicago in a bus to camp out on our lawn and harass us. This Lydia and I surmised because we read the papers. He carried his body with the bloated parody of dignity that is common among “men of God,” and his typical uniform was a wool houndstooth suit worn with a blue bow tie and a blue-and-white-striped scarf that he would jauntily toss over his shoulder as he shouted his spittle-choked lunacies
into the narrow end of his RadioShack megaphone. Reverend Jeb was a handsome older man, there’s no denying that. He had the leathery face and blocky features of an old-fashioned movie star, and a full head of brown hair shot through with gray, which he would swish back on his head with his fingers with the same theatricality as he would sling his blue-and-white-striped scarf over his shoulder. Nor is there any point in denying that Reverend Jeb was a man who—by dint of his style of dress and the booming braggadocio in his rich gravelly voice, carefully hedged into an accent that was part Southern preacher and part midcentury radio announcer—hearkened back with his every word and movement to a previous era—not necessarily a
better
one, mind you, but a previous one—when no man left his home without a hat on and not to be able to sing or tell a story right was seen as a sad, inhibiting trait.