I do not know for how long we were being followed each morning before I noticed him. Tal and I had long since accustomed ourselves to slipping out the back way when we left the apartment in the morning on our way to work, but with the protesters gone, we felt safe enough from their molestations to brave the world through our own front door—imagine!—as if we were not hunted criminals. On a certain morning as we were crossing Fifty-fifth Street, I happened to look behind us. I don’t know what prompted me to look back. Some little inchworm of paranoia inched into my mind and whispered to me that we were being watched. I turned around. I felt we were in the company of a third. When I counted, there was only she and I together, but when I looked behind us down the white road, I saw another. I did not know whether a man or a woman. When I looked harder, when my eyes narrowed to slits of concentrated vision, the person went away—like a mirage, like a Fata Morgana appearing steamy and silvery on the horizon to the eyes of a traveler hallucinatory with thirst, only to vanish upon closer inspection. We walked on. A block or two later down the road I turned around again. I saw someone walking down the street, in our direction, a block and a half north of us. Granted, there would have been nothing unusual at all—as this was Hyde Park, not Shackleton’s Antarctic—about a lone pedestrian who happened to be walking a block and a half in tandem with us, but the way this person was moving suggested some ulterior hostility. We walked on. I filched another backward glance down the street, and this time saw nothing. This afforded me no comfort. I said nothing about this to Tal, who was walking alongside me, heaving breath into her scarf in the cold with her eyes locked to the ground.
The next morning I saw him again. I was sure it was a man now. I saw him again, and again I looked a second time and he was gone. But I had noticed—or thought I had noticed, or convinced myself later that I had noticed—a brown suit, of what may or may not have been houndstooth, and a long blue-and-white-striped scarf.
I asked Tal then if she noticed someone walking behind us. She said she didn’t see anyone, and shrugged it off. We went to the lab. I remember that day at work about as well as I remember my own birth. What I remember was what happened after.
When we left the lab that day, something in the world was wrong. The sun was waning weak and orange over the craggy parapets of the ivy-strangled gray stone buildings. It was early March. The snow on the ground had been painted over with rainwater, which had frozen to a candylike crunchy glaze of thin prismatic crystal on top of the old snow. Tal and I walked home together in near silence, listening to our breath and the footfalls of our booted feet busting through the carapace of ice on top of the snow. When we got home, Tal unlocked the front door and pushed it in. In the foyer we stamped the slush off our boot soles and hung our coats on pegs. The apartment was cold inside. It was nearly as cold inside as out. This was because someone had smashed in the glass in the back door. The remaining glass in the sliding door clung to the doorframe in jagged triangles. We walked into the silent living room in our snow boots. The blue-green glass was scattered like sugar, like sand, across the floor of our apartment. Shards of it kissed and crunched beneath our boots. Tal called Lydia’s name twice: the first time with the rising inflection of a question, and the second time loud, hard and flat. There was no answer.
Lydia was in the bedroom, right where we had left her that morning. We saw her lying in the bed. Tal saw her lying there, and immediately turned around and ran down the hallway to the phone. A moment later I heard her yelling and crying into the receiver of the phone in the kitchen. The room was dark, blinds shut. Lydia was in bed, in her nightgown—she effectively lived in that silken garment these days. The bed was soaked with her blood, soaked as damp as a sponge. I pressed my fingers into the mattress, and like a sponge its surface offered up blood as it squelched and sank under the slight pressure of my fingertips. Her legs were folded into her stomach beneath the wet bedsheet. Her blond hair stuck out of her head in short spiky sprigs because her head had been shaved for her surgery several months before. Her eyes were closed. Her bloody bare feet stuck out from under the sheet. A lamp that had been on the bedside table lay overturned and broken on the floor. I went to the head of the bed and put my hands on her head. Her eyes vibrated a little under her eyelids. Her chest was drawing and exhaling air. Tal came back from the kitchen and flicked on the bedroom light, and we winced at the sudden brightness. Lydia groaned. Tal unpeeled the sheet, limp and heavy with wetness, from Lydia’s body. Her arms and legs were swollen and purple with bruises. The bottom of her nightgown had been yanked inside out and jerked up past her navel. Her bloody naked legs were curled into her belly. From between her legs a knotty cable of red flesh came out of her body, and this cable of flesh wound and wound out of her and connected to a little thing that lay there in the bloody sheets beside her on the bed. This thing was about as big as two fists held together. It looked like a rubber puppet. Its skin was red and blotched with purple. Its eyes were closed. It was curled into itself, with knees drawn up, and long rubbery arms tucked under the chin. It had a face, a twisted-up rubbery goblin face. Its round flaps for ears stuck straight out of the sides of its clumsy round rubber ball of a head. The membranous skin of the ears was so thin it was translucent—I could see the forking blue veins in them. It had a wide mouth, with a long space between the flat, upturned nose and the upper lip. The wispy black beginnings of eyebrows sprouted above its eyes. It had long gangly arms and stubby, foreshortened legs. But its fingers and toes—already with tiny fingernails and toenails on them—were so thin, and so delicate, so unmistakably human.
We could already hear the siren of the ambulance that Tal had just called screaming up our street outside when we looked up and saw writing on the wall. This was something we had failed to see when Tal and I first walked into the room that afternoon. There was something scrawled on the wall of our bedroom. It was written above the headboard of the bed in black marker, in thick capital letters:
AND IF A WOMAN LIES WITH ANY ANIMAL, YOU SHALL KILL
BOTH THE WOMAN AND THE ANIMAL. THEY MUST BE PUT
TO DEATH. THEIR BLOOD SHALL BE UPON THEM.
LEVITICUS 20:16
Part Five
Gentlemen, pity me. I am science.
—Woyzeck
XXXIII
That night I was taken away. I was drugged, stripped naked, and locked in a cage. This cage was not dissimilar to the cage I had once been put into when Lydia conveyed me from my birth home in the Primate House of the Lincoln Park Zoo to the laboratory at the University of Chicago: it was a temporary cage, designed for carrying me against my will to a place where I had no wish to go. It was cramped, such that I could neither lie down at my full length nor stand up at my full height. It featured a grated metal door that hinged open when unlocked from the outside, through the squares of which I could only strain to see my surroundings. A repugnant odor filled this claustrophobic cube of space, smelling first of the unwelcoming plastic and chemical smell of its material, and later, once I had been forced by my confinement to piss and shit inside it, it smelled of my own bodily filth.
Why had I been put inside this cage that I describe? For three reasons: (one) I admit, for my own safety, as my life was believed to be in danger; (two) I suppose, for the safety of others, for I will own that on that evening I did do a good deal of weeping and gnashing of teeth, and of flailing, of spitting, of howling, of shrieking, of screaming, and I shall even humbly admit that my behavior disquieted and disturbed the humans who were then in my presence—that I was showing myself, despite my articulation and erudition, to be unfit—at least temporarily—for the freedom of unrestricted social congress with and within human (and please, Gwen, make sure to seal this next word in a bitterly mocking envelope of quotation marks) “civilization”; and (three) for transport. For I was set to be forcibly relocated. Whither? Eastward. Why? For my imprisonment.
It happened like this. We were back in the hospital. This place where we had been spending a lot of unhappy time
lately. The same giant university hospital as before: the bubble-belching water cooler, the fish tank, the pink-upholstered chairs in the waiting room, the coffee tables littered with bright crinkling magazines, the pervasive odor of antiseptic fluids. I rode with Tal in the back of the ambulance, with Lydia supine on a gurney. Bumpy ride, thankfully brief in duration. The banshee howl of the siren over our heads, transparent plastic bags dangling from hooks in the ceiling, tubes, machines, equipment. Lydia unconscious, covered in blood. First the paramedics snipped the umbilical cord that still connected her to our dead son, untimely ripped from her womb. Dark medical words and phrases floated around above my head, among them: “massive hemorrhaging,” “blood loss,” “forced abortion.” The back doors of the vehicle banged apart and we tumbled out. They took Lydia away on the gurney, wheeling and whanging her into a secret part of the hospital’s labyrinth, to which Tal was permitted to come, but not I, search me why. I was left alone in the waiting room, kept company only by the lady at the ER desk and the tank full of fucking fish. This was when all the sweetness and light of my learned humanity temporarily escaped my soul, leaving only the confusion of the animal.
Then two large and forceful men in turquoise onesies emerged from some hidden location, chased me down until they had me seized by the arms, and one of them produced a long hypodermic needle. They wore white latex gloves. The one with the needle pressed the button of it and made whatever was the vile liquid contained inside its chute squirt slightly from the point of the long fierce needle, and tapped it twice with his finger. He slid the needle into a vein in my arm and pushed the poison inside me. Admittedly, I may have been causing a ruckus. Admittedly, when left alone by my humans, I may have begun to scream. Admittedly, I may have torn around the room in a crazed apoplexy of fury. Admittedly, I may have been overturning tables and chairs. Admittedly, I may have bitten some woman, a total stranger, how deeply I do not know, on the leg. Admittedly, I may have tasted the warm coppery tang of blood on my tongue. Admittedly, I may have—for some reason that may or may not have made sense to me at the time—yanked out the leg of the piece of furniture that supported the fish tank, and, admittedly, the fish tank may have fallen, and may even have smashed upon the floor of the ER waiting room with catastrophic violence and noise, and the water in it may have whooshed swiftly across the room and gone spilling down the steps leading into the lobby from the door, and it may have smelled putridly, and the flat translucent triangular bodies of the angelfish may have lain, gaping, slapping, dying on the waiting room floor amid a crunchy scattering of slime-coated pink gravel and broken glass and the broken chunks of a ceramic deep-sea diver with a ceramic chest of sunken treasure. Admittedly, I may also have bitten the man who savagely held me to the floor while the other slipped that needleful of venom into my bloodstream, to make me sleep, and the bitten man may have cursed and shouted, for in fact I may have nibbled on his forearm so ferociously that it was a damned lucky thing for him that he happened to already be in a hospital, for his wound may indeed have required immediate medical attention. I looked up at the ceiling, hazily, the forced soporific trickling swiftly through my blood. I saw the rotating blades of a ceiling fan above me. I closed my eyes.
When my eyes opened I was in a cage. Four walls, a ceiling, a floor: no way out. Through the miserly square of vision given me of the world outside my cage, further cut by the crisscrossing metal bars into a grid of smaller squares, I saw a long metal floor, wavy with corrugations, and beyond that, a slightly curving metal wall. I heard a low droning rumble, a purring noise that gave this storage room or cargo hold—for that was what it appeared to be—an ear-swelling, stifling acoustic character. My head felt groggy, sick, hot, and blood-fat, as if my ears were plugged with wax. I rooted around with my fingers in the recesses of my giant round ears, and found nothing in them. I noticed that by yawning my mouth wide or by clicking my jaw this wax-stuffed ear feeling abated, albeit only slightly and temporarily. I also felt an unprecedented sensation in my guts, there was a woozy inconstancy to the quality of the gravity in this room. I concluded therefore that I was aboard a ship that was sailing on the sea. I had never been on a boat before of any sort, but I had heard and read accounts of the experience from various sources, and these remembered descriptions seemed to roughly align with what I was then experiencing: this nauseous pitching and rolling of the room, this dipping and weaving feeling, my body’s yearning for solid earth, for the reliability of gravity to keep my feet planted comfortably to ground. I made a noise, just to hear myself. I called out: “HELLO!” It was hard to hear with that softly vibrating rumble all over the room. No one answered. I was alone. Piled up in this room with me were all sorts of crates, boxes, bags, suitcases—suitcases?—why suitcases? Whatever journey we were on seemed to be a long one. It was chilly in the cargo hold of this vessel. My abductors had supplied me with a thin, ratty blanket—their one humane nod to considerations of my comfort—and in this flimsy scrap of cloth I wrapped myself tight against my shivering until the end of the journey, silently awaiting my fate. But this ship did not slowly push into port and maneuver itself at the dock to drop anchor, as I had expected, based on my chance readings on nautical matters, but rather, the sound of the vibrant rumbling purr that permeated the long dark metal room suddenly escalated in pitch and crescendoed in volume, and as it did I felt all my precious innards jump up into my throat with the sickening rollick of the craft. You see, Gwen, I was not in a ship sailing across the bubbling waves as I had thought, but rather flying through the sky, in an aircraft—and we were descending. The sound of the jet engines’ howl as we approached the surface of the earth was more terrifying than even thunder—for it was the work of man—and my heart nearly exploded in fear when I felt what I now believe was the jolting b-bump of our wheels making contact with the ground. This was followed by a period of comparative calm. I still sensed motion in my belly, but I guessed that our craft, grounded now, had slowed to a gentle creep, and the earth beneath us was perfectly flat. Then we stopped. I heard the hisses and sighs of depressurization. The reverberant purr of the whole moving building was abruptly cut, and silence swept into the auditory vacuum left in its wake. I heard noises above me, shifting, thumping, banging. Then a door opened. I heard a pressure lock released, the unratcheting of a hatch, something shrieking on metal hinges, and then the rich audioscape of the outside world. Two pairs of boots clanged arrhythmically on the corrugated metal floor. They were coming straight for me.
“There he is.”
“Poor guy.”
I decided to pretend to be asleep. I collapsed in affected slumber beneath my blanket. I heard the boots clang closer, and felt the presence of someone bending down to peer through the door of my cage. I dared not open my eyes.
“Smells like he pissed in his cage.”
“Where’s he going?”
“Westchester. NYU has a research lab up there.”
“The fuck’s wrong with his hair?”
“Dunno. They said it all just fell off.”
“Is he okay? He looks sick or something.”
“They knocked him on his ass with tranquilizers. They said he’d probably sleep straight through everything. This monkey’s out cold.”
“Look at the poor little guy, he’s all passed out and hairless and shit.”
“It’s a sad story. The lady he was with is terminally ill. She’s got brain cancer. Then she got attacked or something. Some religious nutcase tried to kill her. This all just happened yesterday. She’s in real bad shape. Then this guy just freaked his little ass out. For some fucking reason he was at the hospital with her in Chicago.”
“What? No.”
“Yeah. He starts tearing the place up, said he broke a fish tank or something. So they knock him out, good night. But then nobody knows what to do with him. They told me somebody puts in a call to somebody, yadda yadda yadda, the people at this NYU medical lab say they want him. They always need chimps. So they got him.”
�
��Is that the crazy lady in Chicago who was fucking her pet chimp?”
“Yeah, that’s the one. And this is the chimp.”
“I heard about that on the news. Shit was fucked up.”
“C’mon. You get that end.”
“We got directions?”
“I know the place. We take the Whitestone to the Hutch.”
I heard jostling and scooting, and then felt myself being hoisted up.
“He’s a heavy motherfucker.”
My cage wobbled and swayed as the possessors of these voices bore me away. I opened one of my eyes just a sliver. I saw the torso of one of the men, just outside the window of my cage. He was wearing a dark green uniform. He and the other man, who I could not see, carried me out of the cargo hold of the airplane and down a flight of stairs. It was daylight, cold and windy. I shivered under the thin blanket. They carried my cage across a wide flat expanse of gray concrete and set it down on the back of a motorized cart. The two men climbed into the front of the cart and we began to drive away. Through the small grated window and through a single eye that I would only half-open out of caution, I looked out across this expanse of gray concrete crisscrossed with long curving lines of yellow paint: I saw enormous machines resting on it; I saw people moving on it by foot and by vehicle; I saw an ice-blue sky looming cloudless overhead; and in the distance I saw many tall and glittering buildings. I saw a tangled lacework of gold, copper, silver, iron, steel—skyscrapers—the lattices of bridges, power lines, radio towers, smokestacks, and antennae. All this looked similar to what could be found in Chicago—similar in make and shape and character, and probably also similar in purpose—but I recognized none of it, which told me that I had been taken to another city, another seat of this civilization—one that was apparently even bigger than my beloved home city. What city on this earth, I wondered, could possibly have been built up wider and higher than Chicago? Was the world so insatiate? What conceivable need could there be for a city that was even greater yet, more sprawling, more complex, and more powerful than Chicago, my Chicago?
The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore Page 35