The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore (7 page)

We were inside a clean, bright, spacious room, furnished with several islands of long rectangular tables, on which sat computers and other kinds of lab equipment. The room was made of four whitewashed walls, two of which featured whiteboards all scrawled over with shapes and symbols in red, green, and black marker, and two of which featured wide tall windows that could not be opened. The echoes of rain crackling and drumming on the roof warbled around in the big room, and waves of water chased each other down the sides of the windows, warping the view of what lay outside the building, which involved an expanse of green grass and several trees. One of the long tables was pushed against a wall, and on it sat a large cage fashioned from thin metal bars. The floor was of shiny salmon-pink vinyl tile. A big blue squishy mat lay in one corner of the room, on which was scattered a collection of brightly colored toys. Voices conversed; wet sneakers scrunched and squeaked; white fluorescent lights buzzed overhead and cast rectangular reflections on the shiny floor; human bodies moved around in the space. I realized that I had been in this room before.

There were other humans in the room. They crowded around to have a look at me. Lydia introduced me to a man whom I recognized from the day of the peaches. She took my rubbery little hand and held it out to him for a mock handshake, and the man gently smothered it in the hot flesh of his own fat hand and smiled.

“Bruno,” said Lydia, “this is Norm. I believe you two have met each other before. Norm is the director of the Behavioral Biology Lab. Norm is a very smart man.”

“Hello, Bruno,” said Norm, as he relinquished my hand to me.
“It’s an extraordinary pleasure to meet you. Do you remember me from our peaches experiment?”

I proffered him no reply.

“You showed us that day that you are a very interesting little guy, Bruno. You just might be a very important chimp.”

He smiled at Lydia and she smiled brightly back. I saw something in this exchange of faces between them that I did not like. Lydia took off her glasses and tucked a strand of hair behind her ear.

This man was Dr. Norman Plumlee. Remember that name. He was taller than Lydia but not by much, and I think he was in his late forties at the time. His face was porcine and buttery, the top of his head shiny and bald. Curly salt-and-pepper hair, more salt than pepper, wrapped around the back and sides of his head and curled over the ears into a kempt and understated beard that traced the edges of his jaw and encircled his mouth and looked like a crust of burnt toast. Unstylish glasses clamped the sides of his bulbous nose and unnaturally magnified his brown eyes, and when he raised his thick eyebrows he compressed the skin of his forehead into deep-creased strata, making his forehead look like a stack of flapjacks. His hands were thick and his fingers resembled sausages. He was overweight but not what I’d call fat. He spoke with a faint trace of an accent; I would later learn that there is a country called England, and that this man hailed from it. This meant that he incongruously added
h
’s to words that don’t have them and took
h
’s away from other words that do, many of his
r
’s became “ahs,” and when asking a question the pitch of his voice went
up-up-UP-down?
instead of
up-up-UP?

There were several other humans present besides Lydia Littlemore and Norman Plumlee who were introduced to me in turn. Andrea was a young woman with a buoyant mop of flame-red hair, her nose the epicenter of an explosion of rusty freckles. Prasad was a small and middle-aged dark-skinned bald man with glasses. Jake was a
lean and energetic young man with pallid skin and sandy hair. I was passed from one pair of arms to another, from one body to the next. All of them held me and played with me and spoke to me, but I was wiggly and impatient in the arms of anyone but Lydia.

People said things I failed to understand. Information was communicated—things were said that produced thoughtful expressions, things were said that produced ripples of laughter—but I didn’t get any of the jokes; it was all glossolalia to me. My understanding of language was so inchoate that the only words I managed to pick out of their fog of babble were my own name and Lydia’s. I don’t believe anyone began any serious attempts to instruct me on that first day in the lab. I wasn’t yet sure whether I would stay here or if I would be immediately returned to my family and the only home I had ever known in the Primate House of the Lincoln Park Zoo.

In any event my memory from this period is jumbled. I can’t recall what happened in exactly what order. I know that in a certain corner of the room there lay, as I mentioned earlier, a big blue squishy mat, of a slightly sticky texture, which I presume had been so placed on the cold hard floor in order to provide me with a pleasant place to sit, and on this mat lay an assortment of toys. I will catalog, as I remember them, Bruno’s first toys.

I remember a device consisting of two wooden stands connected by a series of parallel metal rods, each arranged equidistantly from the next in a lateral row, with brightly colored beads strung along the rods that could be pushed in either direction. This I would later learn was called an abacus. I remember a large soft ball made of red rubber that could easily be squeezed, rolled, thrown, or bounced. I remember a device shaped like a giant bowling pin, painted to resemble an animate being. The being wore a blue suit and a horror-stricken expression—a gaping mouth and eyes stretched wide in fear—and seemed to be holding a piece of paper in front of his torso, on which was a clumsy drawing—which the being himself
had presumably drawn—of a crude blue circle encircling a red dot, making a target. One could effortlessly push the being over, but he would always spring back up, recalcitrant, returning at once to an upright position. I remember a complex device made of brilliant green plastic: it was shaped roughly like a cloverleaf, with four prongs sticking out of a central hub, which featured several rows of tiny holes that made strange noises when the device was being operated; at the end of each of the four prongs was a larger hole. This device came with a hammer made of brown plastic, designed to mimic the look—but not the feeling—of a mallet fashioned of coarsely grained wood. During play, a brown plastic creature would emerge from one of the four holes. The creature looked like a brown lump and had eyes and a nose and a mouth from which two white square teeth exuded, and it wore a little red mining helmet with a headlamp on the front. When one smote the creature with the faux-wooden plastic hammer, it would vanish into the bowels of the machine, only to be replaced immediately by another creature, similar but not identical, from another hole. Each of the brown lump-creatures had a distinct personality: one was clearly a “nerd,” with glasses and a timid expression; one was female, with lipstick and long eyelashes; and one was a mentally deficient brown lump who wore his mining helmet backward. You could smite these creatures with the plastic hammer all you pleased, but another would always rise up, Hydra-like, to take the place of the last. The pattern, if there was one, was wildly unpredictable, and this process continued ad infinitum or until the smiter grew weary of smiting. This device I would later learn was called a Whack-a-Mole system, because the brown plastic lumps represented the subterranean animals, moles (hence the mining helmets), and the holes represented mole holes.

These and other such objects lay on the squishy blue mat in the corner of the room. I was encouraged to manipulate them—and manipulate them I did—in a zealous frenzy—in feverish abandon.

B
ut there is also another, chillier memory from that day embedded limpidly in my brain. It surely occurred on that first day; I don’t see how it could have not. The afternoon had passed, the rain had ceased, and I had been out of confinement—relatively speaking—all day, playing, interacting with the humans, exploring the laboratory. And the human beings one by one began to exit the room and not come back. They exchanged words with one another, and as each human left, he or she would make a certain utterance and perform a certain physical sign that I guessed to be a gesture signaling polite departure: to hold up a hand and move it around. Different people performed this sign in different ways, but it was always interpreted as containing more or less the same meaning: “I am about to leave and not return, but do not worry, I am not upset with you.” As each of the humans left they made a variation on this sign, and it was answered in kind by the other humans still remaining in the room. Most signs, I’ve noticed, that any animal makes one can basically group into two archcategories:
I mean harm
, or
I mean no harm.

The first to leave was the lean and energetic young man with sandy-colored hair who had been introduced to me as Jake. He
signaled his parting by slinging a rucksack over one shoulder, hooking one thumb under the strap, and using his free hand to gesture: he held out the hand with an open palm and fingers widely spaced, jerked it once to one side and left the hand in this position until the other humans acknowledged it with similar gestures, though some of them would acknowledge it merely by making a certain facial expression that was sometimes—though not always—accompanied with a deft dipping-down-and-then-up of the head, which I later came to know as a “nod,” a common human signal that can mean either an affirmative answer to a binary question or a no-harm sign—its opposite being a side-to-side movement of the head, which is called a “shake.” Vertical—yes—nod; horizontal—no—shake: these were some of the earliest signs I learned. Even though each human made the sign in a different way it was always interpreted identically, which told me that this sign enjoyed a certain marginal plasticity of process that allowed for the insertion of the signer’s personal style. The flame-haired Andrea, for instance, made this sign in a manner that I later came to understand is considered more feminine: by bringing one hand close to her body, and, palm-out, thumb more or less stationary, flapping her four fingers up and down repeatedly while using her face to smile. Prasad, the dark-skinned and bespectacled man, made his egress while gesturing so subtly that his sign was nearly invisible, but his leaving was still perceived as benign. The form of these hand gestures appeared to be so wildly disparate dependent upon the gesturer that the only thing cluing me in to the fact that they essentially all had the same meaning was the fact that each provoked the same interpretation. This gesture was, of course, a “wave.” This too I learned quickly. It is really astonishing how far a communicative arsenal consisting only of a nod, a shake, and a wave can carry you; with these three signs you can say to anyone
yes, no, harm, no harm, hello
, and
good-bye
. Add to these the smile, the frown, and the finger point,
and you’re practically already in basic-human-social-interaction business.

And then a thing of terror happened. The only humans remaining in the room now were Norman Plumlee and Lydia. While Plumlee was busying himself with some end-of-day chores, Lydia picked me up from the surface of the squishy blue mat, where I had been idly spinning the colorful beads of the abacus, and carried me to another part of the room where, atop one of the long gray Formica tables, there stood: a cage. Yet another cage. Granted, this cage was much larger than the one in which I had been conveyed from the zoo to the laboratory, but it was a cage nonetheless. In it was a bowl filled with dry and unpalatable food pellets, and a voluminous bottle of water strapped to the bars on one side of the cage with a metal tube coming out of the bottom of it, from which I was expected to drink, like a fucking hamster. A fuzzy blanket and a squishy blue mat made of a material identical to the one on the floor covered the bottom of the cage. It was tall enough that I could easily stand up in it, and spacious enough that I could walk four or five paces from one end of it to another. I could see through all four sides of the cage, composed of thin steel bars. All told—yes, I had been in worse cages. But it was, goddammit, a cage.

Lydia placed me inside the cage and shut the door and locked it. My heart didn’t so much break as drop uncontrollably through a hollow shaft in my chest like an elevator with a snapped cable.

Dr. Plumlee joined her in looking in at me. Lydia made the same gesture of polite parting to me as the other humans had made to each other. Her wave was of the more feminine variety: with her fingers, not her hand.

“Good night, Bruno,” said Lydia, and she and the other turned to go.

They were leaving me. For emphasis, I repeat:
they were leaving me
.

Whether or not they were leaving me forever, I did not know. It was then that I began to realize I would never see my family again. I would never return to the zoo. Never again would I commune with other chimps, never again would I enjoy exercising my limbs on our jungle gym, never again would I have to endure my brother’s bullying or my father’s relentless emotional abuse, nor would I ever again sit in my mother’s lap, nor ever again play with Céleste.

I watched them leave together, Norman and Lydia: when they reached the door, Norm stretched out an arm and touched a row of things on the wall. I heard the noises
clack clack clack
, and each
clack
was followed by a section of the room going slowly, then quickly, dark. He clicked the last clack, eliminating the last source of buzzing fluorescent light. Lydia and Norm left the room, shutting the door behind them,
ka-chunk
. I heard the turning of a key in the lock. For a moment through the smoked-glass door I saw their silhouettes, their two blurry shadows facing one another, speaking. Then their voices vanished together, diminuendoing down the hallway into watery echoes punctuated by the contrapuntal rhythms of their four sneakers squeaking and scrunching on the floor, then an elevator door
bing
ing and
bong
ing and scrolling open and then shut, and then silence—and then silence.