The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore (65 page)

Leon even began to grow uncharacteristically concerned that the long and pestering arm of the law might soon want to reach its way into our lives as a result of all this silly folderol, and stick its meddling fingers into our various pies, and so he suggested it might be wise to leave the state of New York for a period of time. He put in a call to another one of his ex-wives—who lived in Los Angeles, a city Leon himself had lived in for a time, in another life—and in terms deft and delicate explained the gist of what she needed to know of the situation, and requested her temporary asylum, which she grumblingly but generously agreed to grant. It was time to leave.

I, for my part, decided it was time I returned to Chicago. I had to see Lydia. I was tired of living as a fugitive. I longed to see her, and to kiss her face and feel her skin against mine. I hoped that she was well. I had so many adventures to tell her!

So Leon and I agreed to travel west together. Among Leon’s Luddite tendencies was a tremendous fear and distrust of travel by airplane. He suggested that it might not be wise to go that way in any case, as it might present legal hassles if they identified us at the
airport. So with the money from our ticket sales, we purchased boarding passes for an Amtrak train that would chug and roll all the way across America. We divided up the rest of the money, said good-bye (in our hearts, if not in person) to little Emily and her mother, and Leon’s daughter, Audrey, and her coworker, Sasha, and Mrs. and Dr. DaSilva, and everyone else who had entered my circle of civilization in New York. And so, we left.

It is a wonderful thing to travel by rail. Especially in the world as we have it now, when it seems such an anachronism. Traveling long distances by train is also an excellent way to meet people who, like Leon, are terrified of flying.

“I hope you never have to endure an airport or an airplane,” Leon told me, as we settled into our seats for the nineteen-hour trip from New York to Chicago. “It is a truly disgusting environment. All around you are nothing but the placidly content bourgeoisie, comfortable with their senses of entitlement and dispossessed of a single emotion worthy of feeling or a thought worthy of thinking. They are surface dwellers, both in soul and society. They wiggle into their seats subtly reeking of midprice perfumes and aftershaves, and usually proceed to look straight ahead of them without speaking a word to one another until the aircraft lands, or they open up their laptop computers to bury themselves in their work, or they open their artless books that are usually volumes advertised as being beneficial to their moral or psychological well-being, and if they chance to fall into conversation with their fellow passengers, they can only converse on harmless subjects such as golf or real estate. They are people who would rather pursue happiness than joy. That’s what I really detest about air travel. It’s not my fear of flying that prevents me from it; it’s my fear of the middle class. I can only tolerate the company of either the underclasses, or the aristocracy.”

Leon paused, held his breath and shifted his weight to ease the passage of a fart. He continued:

“So remember, Bruno: should you ever need to travel any great distance, you must always if possible take a train or a bus, any mode of transport but an airplane. That hideous invisible gas that permeates our civilization is at its thickest and most dangerous level of concentration inside the sealed cabin of a passenger airplane. But here? Look around! What do we see? We see all manner of people too low-class to fathom the idea of purchasing an airplane ticket. We see recent immigrants from distant impoverished lands, nattering amongst themselves in their exotic tongues, as well as a healthy sampling of drunks, perverts, rednecks, gangbangers, and drug addicts. We see people who are frighteningly thin as well as those who are frighteningly fat. We see people who belong to atavistically folksy religious sects that require them to dress for the early nineteenth century and speak in long-forgotten dialects. I prefer the company of these people, Bruno. In here, one can barely smell that poisonous gas—it is too well masked by the comingling odors of microwaved hot dogs, flatulence, and feet.”

The idea of flying (I have only been on an airplane once in my life, and under unpleasant circumstances that I have already related in this narrative) does not repulse me for safety reasons (which I would have to admit irrational), nor for Leon’s more subtle and difficult sociological reasons, and not only because there is nothing in my evolutionary pedigree (nor is there, for that matter, in yours) that could prepare me for the unnerving bodily discombobulation of the experience; rather, the idea of flying repulses me philosophically and psychogeographically. I have heard and I believe that a child in an airplane during takeoff may often be overheard to remark that the things he sees below through the window look like “toys.” That’s just it! Observing the earth from such a godlike perspective destroys an animal’s reverence for its geography. They’re not “toys,” kid. All that land you’re zipping over at forty thousand feet and five hundred miles per hour? Down there is a multitude
of worlds that you will never know of. People may come to forget them, because they no longer care about them. So go ahead and let them die. Let the earth die, let all the animals die. You probably wouldn’t be interested in them anyway. All people care about is getting from one human environment to another as quickly as they can, wasting the minimum possible time in the places between the places. The human imagination yearns to connect point A to point B not with a line, but simply by folding space until the points touch—to entirely eliminate the space between them. This is why, in some science fiction films, people in the future may travel from place to place by teleportation. That is the ultimate realization of humanity’s quest to devise faster and more efficient ways of getting from one place to another: to simply eliminate the liminal spaces entirely. And then people will finally become what they have always sought to be: an animal who moves exclusively in environments of its own design, an animal that is all mind, an animal who has no use for its body, an animal who has no use for the earth.

But it was fun to ride the train! Beside us to our left the Hudson River rushed and sparkled against the Palisades as we shuffled and hooted away from New York City. We passed the train station of Hastings-on-Hudson, where I had once chosen to board the southbound train instead of the northbound train, and thus met Leon and had all the rest of that adventure. That was more than a year earlier. I liked the crisp dark blue suits that the ticket collectors wore, and I liked their shiny brass buttons and the flat plastic visors on their caps. Leon and I sat in a booth in the dining car, playing the games we had brought: chess (a game at which I am not skilled) and checkers (at which I am) and, as always, my most beloved game, the one that a certain bean-boiling one-legged bagpiper first taught me many years ago, backgammon. The train shuddered and hooted and rolled onward, and the chessmen, checkers, and dice clicked, clattered, and tumbled on the table between us. We talked
to the people who came and went from the dining car; we watched the landscape slowly scrolling by, gradually changing from urban to rural and back to urban again. Everyone is so friendly on a train, so curious and talkative and eager to make friends with strangers. Perhaps this is because the people on a passenger train are acutely conscious of the anachronism of it, pushing the experience into the realm of novelty, of the fun and interesting and unusual, which prompts people to want to talk. Or perhaps this friendliness arises because those who choose to travel by train tend to be the people who, like Leon, long for an earlier world, a chaotic and inconvenient world where things took a lot of time and people enjoyed talking to each other. A world before the world became a world where every place looks the same and nowhere is home.

So Leon and I intermittently conversed together and conversed with the other passengers and played our games and read our books and watched the land roll past the windows and dozed slumped over in our seats off and on from New York City to Albany to Buffalo to Cleveland to Toledo to Gary to Chicago.

My heart leapt inside me when I saw those familiar buildings rising in the distance, those very buildings that had once bewitched and seduced me when I was only a mind-silent animal. I myself was practically leaping up and down in my seat by the window with irrepressible glee as we rattled across the Union Station switchyard with the early morning sunlight flashing on the rails of the tracks.

Oh! Chicago! (My heart exclaimed within me in rapture.) I have been away from you for more than a year! Oh!—Chicago, are you happy to see me? It’s me, Bruno—your son and lover! I have been unfaithful to you, I admit. I come back to you from an affair with your big sister—your bigger, older, meaner, and more complicated sister who lives eight hundred miles beyond you to the east! But Chicago, inland Chicago, redbrick and brown Chicago, freshwater Chicago, almost-uninhabitably-cold-for-the-better-part-of-the-year
Chicago, I’ve come back to you!—for you are the only city that I can truly love.

The train docked in a tunnel and hissed in repose, and then fell silent. Everyone disembarked, for it was the end of the line. Leon and I breakfasted together on bagels, bacon, eggs, and coffee at the Union Station food court before I saw him off at the gates of his connection, which would take him far away, across the great American interior—past I know not how many mountains and plains and desert cacti and shaggy-maned buffalo—to the sun-dappled land of California, where asylum had been promised him. Leon and I embraced as we said good-bye, with tears shed on the behalves of both parties. I stood at the gate, waving, as I watched him fastidiously guide his mass down the ramp that led to the train platform, and my heart burned as much with my gladness to be back in my homeland as with my reluctance to see him go.

He was wearing a rumpled brown corduroy suit, and he laboriously struggled to drag along a fatly stuffed rolling suitcase behind him on the concrete platform. His hair was long and knotty, his beard bushy, his body huge. Altogether Leon looked like a baby whale that had been stuffed into a brown suit. Ah, but he carried himself with the dignity of a prince. Like the Prince of Whales, I should think. Farewell, thou latter spring! Farewell, thou all-hallown summer! Thou sweet creature of bombast!

And I, for my part? I, Bruno, left the train station. I left the station with a suitcase in my hand that contained my every remaining possession on earth, and exited into the busy morning bustle of Canal Street, crossed the river by the Adams Street bridge, crossed Wacker, passed beneath the shadow of the Sears Tower and pierced my way into the heart of the heart of the city. I breathed the familiar scent of this my home city, I observed the familiar stone ornaments on the buildings, I kept my eyes peeled for any significant change, but detected little. I went in search of Lydia.

I
t was still early in the morning. The train had left New York City the previous morning, and had traveled all day and all night before depositing us in Chicago at nine or so in the a.m. I had slept fitfully on the train, and the bright busy morning in Chicago took on the mildly hallucinatory quality a bright busy morning does when one hasn’t slept well. I wanted to do nothing more than go straightaway to see Lydia, but something made me check myself. I thought it might be too strange or too rude to show up unannounced at her apartment so early in the day. She probably wouldn’t even have been at home, I thought. So instead I spent a good part of that morning walking around in the city, ambling beneath the rumbling red iron latticeworks that support the L, noting down various poetic observations in my head. Every winking traffic light and every plump purring pigeon that hopped along the sidewalk seemed to welcome me back. “Hello, traffic light!”—I could barely restrain myself from saying aloud—“Hello, pigeon!”

Hello, Bruno!
I would imagine the pigeon articulating back to me through her trilling throat.

I looked at the stone lions that guarded the doors of certain buildings, I gazed through windows at storefront displays of beautiful
woman mannequins wearing various styles of clothing, I ducked in and out of bookstores and spent a while sitting at the foot of the giant Picasso sculpture at Daley Center Plaza. Gradually, gradually, I gravitated uptown—knowing full well, not in my conscious mind, but in my bones, where my puttering feet were taking me.

That was the first time I experienced the Lincoln Park Zoo as a visitor, rather than as an exhibit. On all our fun/educational outings in the early days of my enculturation, Lydia had never once taken me here. Surely this was because she was afraid of what I would think, what I might do. What the other chimps would think and do, for that matter. Taking me to see my own imprisoned family must have seemed a perverse torture she did not wish to inflict upon my vulnerable developing consciousness.

I walked into the emerald-green rolls of Lincoln Park from the south entrance, waddled along the winding pedestrian footpath past joggers clad tightly in shiny spandex outfits, past little dogs tugging on their leashes, past a baseball diamond, an equestrian statue, a big duck pond, where geese and swans drifted through green water neon with algae, and entered the zoo: the Lincoln Park Zoo, apparently, is free, a realization that stung slightly of insult. Oh!—to enter such a familiar space from such an unfamiliar angle! The violence of the gestalt shift whacks the mind like a club!

Seeing the place from the angle of the human observer disoriented me. It looked familiar and yet eerily alien to me at the same time. I had never realized what a sad, dirty little zoo it really is. The animals in it have so little space to roam. The big cats are cornered into such dirty, miserable little cages—old-fashioned ones with bars on them rather than glass, evoking prison cells rather than displays, with cold concrete straw-scattered floors that reeked of melancholy and urine. The animals in them looked so shabby and dejected, their souls broken, resigned to quiet lives of captivity
and humiliation. The leopards and lions and tigers neurotically skulked back and forth behind the bars of their cages, pitifully trying to uphold their dignity, like ruined aristocrats. As they paced their aimless loops their hipbones and shoulder blades undulated with a physical grace not even humanity could take away, but their heads ticked now and then with tiny spasms of uncontrollable rage. When I lived in this place, I had known only the inside of the chimp exhibit, and what was immediately visible from within it. I could not see much beyond the concrete wall that dammed the moat surrounding our small artificial island. I had no idea that the zebras and kangaroos were within eyesight of the ledge that looked onto our exhibit, that we could have physically seen these strange beasts if only we had been able to stand on top of the wall. So I observed and pitied the animals—the cats, the birds, the giraffes, the elephants, the rhinos—as I followed the maps that led me through the small zoo to the Primate House.