The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore - Benjamin Hale [181]
“Banish not him thy Harry’s company,” he says, “banish not him thy Harry’s company—banish plump Jack, and banish all the world.”
And I, Bruno, counter him with what I know is the answer: “I do. I will.”
Then I see in his eyes that he has realized I am a chimp. The Beggar King places a huge paw of a hand on my head and takes off my hat. Everyone on the train is looking at us now. They may have been murmuring, or making interjections of wonder or gasps or shouts of fear—I don’t recall. The Beggar King has unmasked a monster in their midst.
“Great snakes!” says the Beggar King. “You, sir, seem to be an ape!”
At this moment the train slows down to make a stop: bing!—“Twenty-third Street,” the electronic female voice announces. The doors scroll open, and everyone on board who is neither Bruno nor the Beggar King hastily departs the train car at the same time. Let them go. Bruno is alone with the Beggar King. This is how I met Leon Smoler, the best human friend—besides Lydia—that I have ever had.
XXXVI
Why did Leon Smoler become my friend? Because he was one of the very few humans I had ever met who spoke to me without any underlying prejudice evident in his voice. Nor, on the other hand, did I find that he overvalued or exoticized me. Leon truly could not have cared less whether I was a chimpanzee or a biological human. Because Leon was just barely sane enough to live in the world, yet mad enough not to find it at all odd that Bruno, later his best friend, roommate, and business partner, was an articulate chimp. In Leon Smoler there was not the faintest shred of that incredulity, that horror, that queasiness, that shock and discomfort that betrays the face of pretty much everyone who has ever met me. If anything, when he found out I was a talking ape, he was amused and maybe mildly interested. For some reason, Leon is immune to the uncanny valley. This thing I can sense in people—maybe people with horrific deformities, severe physical defects, serious mental illnesses, maybe those sorts of people can understand that look in other people’s faces I am talking about. But I don’t think so. The discomfort I see in people’s faces when they look at me does not necessarily have any pity in it, or even any relief, any sure-am-glad-that’s-not-me in it. The look of unease that I am met with is a symptom of the same great unease that met and continues to meet Darwin even a century and a half after The Descent of Man. It is the sense of absolute nakedness, of humiliation that humans feel when confronted with the realization that they are not so fucking special. They look at me and see an assault on their notion of “human dignity.” Dignity? No, vanity! Who else—who else could be so vain?
But not Leon—in Leon Smoler there was—is—none of that. He is no anthropo-chauvinist. Because Leon’s as in touch with his animality as any human I have ever met. Have you ever heard of Diogenes the Cynic, Gwen? Once, in the course of my self-directed studies in the reading room of the main library at the University of Chicago, I sat at one of the long desks with a volume of Laërtius’s Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers splayed before me under the lamp, and I read in it an account of the life of Diogenes the Cynic. Back in Plato’s selfsame ancient Athens, Diogenes went naked and lived in a bathtub, urinated, defecated, and masturbated in public, and denounced all laws, religions, governments, and good manners. People called him “the Cynic” because the word means “doglike” in Greek, because Diogenes lived like a dog. He wasn’t offended, though; he liked it. You’re damn right I live like a dog, he said to them. Alexander the Great returned to Athens fresh from conquering the known world and found Diogenes, naked as was his fashion, sunning himself on the steps of