The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore Read Free Page B

of him), on the third trial run got the box open simply by picking it up and smashing it against a wall. The
humans
, though—the human babies would faithfully tap on the box
every time
. Every one, every time. Now, Gwen, what do you think this means? I’ll tell you. It means this: for the human test subjects the whole thing was less about the reward than it was about the process. You see? It wasn’t so much that they wanted the peach as to participate in this enigmatic ritual, to perform the rite, to say their prayers. Because it’s
you humans
who have your absurdities of faith, your superstitions, your banshees and hobgoblins, your necromancies and haruspices, your charms and potions and voodoo dolls and magic mirrors and boogiemen,
you
who infantilize the universe by vainly searching for celestial answers to earthly questions in the movements of the stars,
you
who have your signs and symbols, your signifiers and signifieds,
you
who cast a terror-stricken backward glance into the darkness and ask yourselves who is that third who walks always beside you,
you
who chant your incantations, kiss the ring and cross yourselves, sear images into your flesh and poke holes in yourselves, hack off parts of your bodies and paint yourselves blue, burn witches and sacrifice your firstborns, scream into the whirlwind and wrestle with angels till the break of dawn! And they thought
we
would be the ones to continue squandering a few precious seconds that stood between us and those delicious peaches by tapping on the box even when the action obviously affected no empirical change upon the object? Absurd! It is only rubbing on the lamp! It is only magic. It is only religion. It is only the shadowof the hand of God. It is only one more example illustrating how feebly you people know yourselves.
    Anyway, point being: who was the one and only chimpanzee among the hundred-some-plus sampling of members of my own birth species,
Pan troglodytes
, who, like the human children, never ceased to tap on the box? That’s right,
c’est moi
. I, Bruno, somehow understood on some fundamental level (as Lydia realized in hindsight, after the experiment was over and the unexpected results had been properly tabulated, scrutinized and pondered over until they succeeded in twisting some anthropo-chauvinist take out of the data) what it means to be human. And Lydia remembered me—me, Bruno, the chimpanzee who had fallen in love with her—and she sought me out, and found me, and began to bring me out of my animal darkness.

III

    I think it had been some months since the experiments, some months since the Plexiglas box and that daylong procession of peaches, when Lydia came back for me. I had been returned to my family of uneducated slobs, to my mother and my father, my aunt and my uncle, my brother and Céleste. All of them sadly ignorant, broken and disaffected by lifetimes spent in diaspora.
    I’m a Chicago boy, Gwen—I grew up in the Primate House of the Lincoln Park Zoo. Zoo records indicate that I was born with no complications on August 20, 1983. My mother, Fanny, had been born and raised there, had spent the entirety of her sad dull life in the very same zoo. I’m young enough to have been raised mostly in the considerably larger and sleeker modern facilities that were built to replace the outmoded sewer which had previously housed the great apes, and my mother never tired of silently reminding me and Cookie how good we had it. My father had a somewhat more interesting background. He wasn’t born in captivity, but in the Old Country, in the northeastern part of what was then Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of the Congo. At the time he was born there was some sort of bloodbath going on in Zaire, and the swarms of starving refugees fleeing hither and thither would butcher chimpsfor bushmeat. At a young age my father saw his mother and father murdered and subsequently devoured. He was forced to watch while they dismembered his parents with