The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore Read Free Page A

richer than the first, as it was imbued with the magic of her touch—with her
lips
, no less—her tongue!—I had seen that woman put
her mouth
on this object! The vicarious contact made me insane with desire. I would have preferred her to chew the peach to a pulp and sensuously ooze it intermingled with her own fluids into my mouth. I ate every shred of the thing, every last ort and fiber and dribble of nectar and then sucked on the stone for an hour after and became enraged—
enraged!
—when the other scientists tried to take it from me: I kept it securely in my cheek and would under no circumstances relinquish it, until, yes, Lydia, Lydia herself coaxed me to surrender it by holding her hand to my mouth, and, finally, I willingly spat the stone, slick with my saliva, into the cup of her pretty hand.
    Anyway, this bizarre and (to me at the time) unfathomable procedure was repeated again and again all day until it looked like we’d all had our fill of their fucking peaches.
    Much later, Dr. Lydia Littlemore would explain to me why my performance on that day had marked me as extraordinary. In retrospect I understand now what I could only feel at the time. As I’ve said, I did not yet have language. This is not to say that I did not have a consciousness in those days, or that I did not have thoughts—I certainly did—but I had none of these traps in which to capture and keep them—words. Back then my thoughts could only trickle through my head in a liquid state; trying to thinkclearly was like trying to drink water out of cupped hands: most of it drips through your fingers before you’ve really had a chance to drink, and you remain thirsty still—thirsty, and ignorant. When my consciousness was solidified enough to understand, Lydia told me that I had participated in a psychological experiment they were running on two groups, human infants and preadolescent chimpanzees. The experiment goes like this. You have this transparent Plexiglas box with a door that can be opened by a mechanism requiring a two-step process to unlatch: press the button and flip the lever. You place inside the box something the infant or chimpanzee is supposed to want, in my case a peach—and this, in my opinion, is the most problematic aspect of the experiment. What complex being will
always
want a peach? Suppose I wasn’t hungry? Am I supposed to be a creature of such brainlessly insatiate appetite that given the opportunity I would cram every last peach on the planet into my ravenous maw? Later in my life, when I was sitting in on an introductory course in microeconomics at the University of Chicago, I realized that economists tend to think about their fellow
sapiens sapiens
in exactly these terms. Rational choice theory, so they call it:
Homo economicus
. Fools! The thing that defines us rational creatures, like you and me, Gwen, is precisely the fact that we’re not always rational.
    But I digress. So you put the peach in the box and then demonstrate to the subject how to open it. The scientist presses the button, taps three times on the lid of the box and flips the lever. Then leave the test subject alone and watch what he does. Then repeat this procedure ad nauseam on the largest test sampling you can get. The objective of the experiment was to see whether the human- or ape-child figures out that the tapping-on-the-box bit is an unnecessary step. Their typically anthropo-chauvinist hypothesis was that all your innately superior little human snots would quit tapping on the stupid box before the chimps. And the results were
exactly
theopposite of their predictions. All but one of the chimps (and they tested more than fifty of us and as many human infants) quickly figured out that the tapping shtick was a superfluous waste of time, and thus aborted the measure from the box-opening procedure on the second or third trial run. A few of the chimpanzee subjects, my older brother, Cookie, among them (and this sort of behavior is characteristic