The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore - Benjamin Hale [251]
In the end the court was swayed by the scientists’ arguments, and after a great deal of red tape had been slashed through, after a great deal of time and paperwork had come and gone and the question of what was to be done with me finally arrived at the point of egress of the complicated bureaucratic maze in which it had gotten hopelessly lost for a time, I was sent to live in confinement, relative peace, and seclusion in the Zastrow National Primate Research Center, located somewhere in rural Georgia, USA.
Here, within these four white walls, and within the perimeters of this land cordoned off by those tall chain-link fences that I told you about so long (it seems) ago, in the alternating sterility of the laboratories and the rich lushness of the forests outside, in the company of human scientists, unenculturated chimpanzees who do not understand me when I speak to them and whose inarticulate shrieks and gestures I no longer comprehend, I have lived for nine years.
The date today is August 8, 2008. I will turn twenty-five in twelve days. Next year I will have been here for a decade. I will have grown ten years older, and ten years wiser, maybe. I have continued to paint and read here in the solitary apartments that the scientists have kindly provided for me, and occasionally I have staged theatrical productions, which I direct and star in. Although I must work with a cast of nonprofessional actors, most of them chimps, and our audiences tend to be small—consisting only of the scientists who work here, usually—I do derive some joy from them. Leon still comes to visit me several times a year, and we correspond by mail frequently. Little Emily used to visit me in the early days of my incarceration, but I have not seen or communicated with her in years. I assume Emily has willingly forgotten me in order to concentrate on living the life of an independent young woman in her twenties, wherever it is she is doing that now. Tal visited me only once. That was an unpleasant visit. She still blames me—fairly or unfairly, I don’t know—for what happened to Lydia. To hell with her. I loved Lydia ten times ten times as much as she or anyone ever did. I probably loved her ten times ten times as much as anyone ever loved anyone, inside or outside of their own species. Mr. and Mrs. Lawrence visited me once as well, and on that occasion—I misremember how many long and quiet years ago now that must have been—they brought along my old mute companion, Clever Hands. It was a joy to see him. Hilarious Lily, they informed me, had passed away—she died in the same bed in which her husband, Hilarious Larry, had died a few years before her, clutching her rosary in her fist, going silently to her God.
Aside from that—except for you, Gwen—I have no visitors from the outside. Leon Smoler, who is my best living friend, surely has not got much time left. He is old, he is old. And, moreover, in terrible shape, which I shouldn’t find surprising. Pretty soon he will have to start patching up that old body for heaven. After he goes, I suspect that I will live out the rest of my days with little or no contact with anyone from the outside world. I obediently understand that it is most probably my fate to sit here and wait—cultured, educated, gifted with language and reason, and yet alone and deprived of my freedom—until, one day, I will die. And that will be all.
Unless, of course, I escape. As I have confessed to you before, Gwen, I have recurring dreams of returning to that human world that so badly mistreated me. If I were a rational creature (which, obviously, because I am also a conscious creature, I almost by definition am not), I would have absolutely no wish to rejoin human civilization, seeing as I have everything I could ever want right here inside this patch of the earth that is sectioned