The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore (66 page)

To my right was the gorilla exhibit. That huge old magisterial silverback was still there. He was napping, slumped over limp-limbed and dejected in his rope hammock, looking as if he hadn’t moved a muscle in all the years I’d been gone, one arm resting on his massive belly and the other arm dangling down beneath him, his fat-fingered wrinkled leathery hand grazing the ground like an old work glove.

To my left was the chimpanzee exhibit. I noticed for the first time in my life that in front of the window looking into the exhibit, a row of plastic cards are held up suspended on thin metal stands, and on the cards are printed brief blurbs of educational information about my species. Several of these cards displayed color photographs of wild African chimps grooming each other, swinging in trees and so on, and another displayed a map showing where our natural habitat is, colored in red: two small blotches of red, one
in Central Africa and the other on the southern coast of the gun-handle of West Africa. Like this:

On another card was written the following text:

Chimpanzee

Pan troglodytes

Mammals

Order

Primates

Description

Length: 2.5–4 feet. Weight: 125–175 pounds, males slightly larger. Zoo weights higher. Much variation in body size and proportion. Coat mostly black; short, white beard common in adults of both sexes. Baldness also occurs in adults, more so in females. Face mostly hairless and light, darkening with age. Ears large, nostrils small. Females have prominent swelling of the pink perineal region while in heat; males have very large testes. Young have white tuft of hair on rump.

Range

Western and central Africa, north of River Zaire, from Senegal to Tanzania.

Habitat

Humid forest, deciduous woodland or mixed savanna; presence in open areas depends on access to evergreen, fruit-producing trees.

Niche

Omnivorous: mainly eats fruit and leaves, but during dry season will eat seeds, flowers, bark, insects, birds and mammals. Diurnal; sleeping nests built fresh each night. Mainly terrestrial, walking on soles of hind feet and knuckles of forelimbs, but will spend time or build nests in trees (especially young), using brachiation to travel. Communities number 15–120, but feeding is usually an individual activity, especially among females. Males are gregarious and form a loose dominance hierarchy. Neighboring community ranges overlap.

Life History

Mating non-seasonal; single young born after about 9 months gestation. Young cling within a few days, ride mother at 5–7 months, are weaned at about 3 years. Mature at about 10–11 years, earlier in captivity. Females promiscuous, migrating to a new community during an adolescent estrous period. Life span 40–45 years.

Conservation Status

This species is listed as threatened and commercial trade is prohibited by international law. Principal cause of population decline is habitat destruction, particularly commercial logging. Some hunting for bushmeat or commercial purposes still occurs and has severely depleted populations in some areas.

Much of this, Gwen, was news to me. Let us imagine—as I myself have often imagined, in the cumulative years of idle moments since the beginning of my second confinement—a similar text that would
be written upon a similar placard, to be displayed before a cage designed to represent a human environment. A thick glass wall would look out onto another (perhaps a third?) species’ crude caricature of their idea of a typical human setting. Although our readers may imagine whatever they wish—the interior of a mud hut, an igloo, a log cabin, the Hapsburg Palace—I personally, for my maximum amusement, imagine a blandly fake room in a hyper-imagined middle-class home somewhere in a North American suburb, furnished with somebody’s rough idea of prototypically “human” items: a four-poster bed, a couple of armchairs, a dining table, and so on. There are candles on the table. The walls are painted a sickly cotton-candy pink. There is a reproduction of the
Mona Lisa
hanging in an ornately gilt frame on the wall. A false picture window looks out onto a painted backdrop of a pleasant sunny day. There is a mantel and a fireplace, inside of which glow flames cut from red and yellow crepe paper, underlit by a hidden lamp. Beside the fireplace lies, curled on a rug as if in slumber, a taxidermized dog, with a food bowl set before him, labeled S
POT
. Inside this room are five or six humans of both genders and varying ages and races. One of the cards outside the window features a map showing in red the areas of the earth usually inhabited by human beings, with a card beside it detailing basic information about this species.

Human

Homo sapiens sapiens

Mammals

Order

Primates

Description

Length: 4–6.5 feet. Weight: 75–400 pounds, males slightly larger. Zoo weights considerably higher. Much variation in body size and proportion. Coat very sparse except on top of head and areas surrounding genitals and underarms; males may have hair on faces. Body modification, including selective hair removal, is common. Small ears, prominent noses. Long legs, short arms. Baldness often occurs in adult males. Females feature prominent teats. Young have disproportionately large heads.

Range

Because the human is highly adept at travel, transportation of materials and sheltering themselves from adverse environmental conditions, this species has spread to nearly every climate and lives on every continent of the world.

Habitat

Humans tend to live in small groups within much larger social hive areas. The human generally prefers not to inhabit environments in which other non-domesticated animals may be found. (The human often allows domesticated animals—especially dogs—to symbiotically cohabit its living space.) The human is most comfortable in areas specifically designed for human habitation.

Niche

Very omnivorous, generally diurnal. Mainly terrestrial, walking upright on soles of hind feet, though young remain quadrupedal until about 1 year of age. Adults may travel
long distances by use of various tools, including in aquatic and aerial environments. Size of communities varies greatly; though some humans are known to live alone, most live in larger communities ranging from 100 to approx. 10,000,000. Feeding is often a communal activity. Both males and females tend to quickly form fierce dominance hierarchies. Neighboring community ranges overlap significantly. Humans have no known natural predators.

Life History

Mating non-seasonal and constant. Single young born after about 9 months gestation. Young cling within a few days, are weaned at about 1 year. Males may occasionally assist females in rearing of young. Sexually mature at about 13–15 years, earlier in captivity. Many never fully psychologically mature. May form sexually monogamous couples, usually leading to extreme psychological stress. Life span 40–90 years.

Conservation Status

The human is in no imminent danger. Due to its alpha predator status coupled with the ability to control its own climate, the human has ceased to evolve, thereby effectively removing itself from nature. Currently, the only palpable threat to the human is the human.

This imagining, however, will probably never come to be. There are laws against things like that—human laws. Laws that would prevent keeping a group of humans in captivity for purposes of public education and entertainment. Such an idea would violate our notions of ethics, which have always struck me as problematically anthropocentric. The chimps and the humans at the zoo are separated by that wall of glass because the chimps might harm the humans were there no glass. Albeit the same (it is almost too
obvious to point out) could be said of humans and humans. However, humans only imprison other humans after the humans in question have proven themselves to be harmful to humans. If one were to apply the same logic to human beings as humans do to animals, then we would have to preventatively imprison everyone from birth. Then we would all be safe.

On an early afternoon in Chicago in late March of 1999, I, Bruno, stood and peered through the window that looked into the chimpanzee exhibit in the Primate House of the Lincoln Park Zoo. I peered through the window that looked into my childhood home. My old wordless world, my animal habitat. I looked through a three-inch-thick sheet of glass at my biological family. It looked much the same as I had remembered it, although I’d grown upward by about a foot and outward by more than fifty pounds, and so the space looked even smaller than I’d remembered it. I saw—and remembered as I saw—a ledge, a certain wide flat metal shelf bolted to the wall in a corner, very high up near the ceiling in the interior part of the exhibit, accessible via the ropes and nets that hung from the ceiling down to the cedar-planting-chip-covered floor: we chimps would often scramble up those ropes and nets up to the shelf, muster ourselves on top of it and huddle there together in the winter months, napping, grooming, lazing around all afternoon long in a languid tangle of embraces. It was March now, and cold outside, though not bitterly so, and all the chimps were inside, and most of them were huddled together on top of the shelf in the corner, just as I had once done. The shelf, as I recall, was a favorite place of ours, in part because its height probably reminded our instincts of the tree canopies in which we would have been taking our naps if this were the jungle and there were predators afoot below us, and in part because its height made it one of the precious few areas of that
Benthamite panopticon where we were not totally in view of our spectators. Of course the people could still see us—they could see that we were up there, could see our hands dangling off the edges of the shelf and could catch glimpses of the imperceptibly moving mounds of our warm breathing brown bodies—but at least we were not fully exposed up there. I looked up to the shelf, and I saw my family—my old family, my mother, Fanny, and my father, Rotpeter, my aunt Gloria, and my uncle Rex—huddled together on top of the shelf, several gangly purple hands and gangly opposably-toed feet poking out of the ball of appendages to dangle limply off the edge of the shelf. Down below them, on the ground, scratching and digging in the steamy urine-sodden carpeting of cedar planting chips, were two chimps whom I did not recognize. New additions to the zoo. One, a female, looked like a teenager—probably around my age, actually—fifteen years old. The bloated wad of pink flesh that she dragged along the ground beneath her advertised her fecundity, and a little brown button of a turd protruded shyly from her anus. The second new chimp was the infant she held in her arms.