The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore - Benjamin Hale [230]
And I, for my part? I, Bruno, left the train station. I left the station with a suitcase in my hand that contained my every remaining possession on earth, and exited into the busy morning bustle of Canal Street, crossed the river by the Adams Street bridge, crossed Wacker, passed beneath the shadow of the Sears Tower and pierced my way into the heart of the heart of the city. I breathed the familiar scent of this my home city, I observed the familiar stone ornaments on the buildings, I kept my eyes peeled for any significant change, but detected little. I went in search of Lydia.
XLVI
It was still early in the morning. The train had left New York City the previous morning, and had traveled all day and all night before depositing us in Chicago at nine or so in the a.m. I had slept fitfully on the train, and the bright busy morning in Chicago took on the mildly hallucinatory quality a bright busy morning does when one hasn’t slept well. I wanted to do nothing more than go straightaway to see Lydia, but something made me check myself. I thought it might be too strange or too rude to show up unannounced at her apartment so early in the day. She probably wouldn’t even have been at home, I thought. So instead I spent a good part of that morning walking around in the city, ambling beneath the rumbling red iron latticeworks that support the L, noting down various poetic observations in my head. Every winking traffic light and every plump purring pigeon that hopped along the sidewalk seemed to welcome me back. “Hello, traffic light!”—I could barely restrain myself from saying aloud—“Hello, pigeon!”
Hello, Bruno! I would imagine the pigeon articulating back to me through her trilling throat.
I looked at the stone lions that guarded the doors of certain buildings, I gazed through windows at storefront displays of beautiful woman mannequins wearing various styles of clothing, I ducked in and out of bookstores and spent a while sitting at the foot of the giant Picasso sculpture at Daley Center Plaza. Gradually, gradually, I gravitated uptown—knowing full well, not in my conscious mind, but in my bones, where my puttering feet were taking me.
That was the first time I experienced the Lincoln Park Zoo as a visitor, rather than as an exhibit. On all our fun/educational outings in the early days of my enculturation, Lydia had never once taken me here. Surely this was because she was afraid of what I would think, what I might do. What the other chimps would think and do, for that matter. Taking me to see my own imprisoned family must have seemed a perverse torture she did not wish to inflict upon my vulnerable developing consciousness.
I walked into the emerald-green rolls of Lincoln Park from the south entrance, waddled along the winding pedestrian footpath past joggers clad tightly in shiny spandex outfits, past little dogs tugging on their leashes, past a baseball diamond, an equestrian statue, a big duck pond, where geese and swans drifted through green water neon with algae, and entered the zoo: the Lincoln Park Zoo, apparently, is free, a realization that stung slightly of insult. Oh!—to enter such a familiar space from such an unfamiliar angle! The violence of the gestalt shift whacks the mind like a club!
Seeing the place from the angle of the human observer disoriented me. It looked familiar and yet eerily alien to me at the same time. I had never realized what a sad, dirty little zoo it really is. The animals in it have so little space to roam. The big cats are cornered into such dirty, miserable little cages—old-fashioned ones with bars on them rather than glass, evoking prison cells rather than displays, with cold concrete straw-scattered