The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore - Benjamin Hale [8]
The Chicago winters tended toward bone-achingly frigid temperatures unbefitting the constitutions of tropical mammals like us, so every year we all spent November through usually, what, March, April even, cramped up indoors with less than half the roaming room we had in the summer. And the smell. How did it smell? The room smelled the way I presume any room might smell in which seven large naked primates are forced to live together for five consecutive months, doing all their eating and drinking and sleeping and fucking and fighting and farting and pissing and shitting within the confines of the same four walls—one of these walls, of course, being a thick sheet of glass provided for easy voyeurism. In the winter the room quickly took on a putrid mustiness, the primitive carpet of cedar planting chips almost immediately becoming so sodden with urine and sweat and other bodily miasmata you could practically watch the fetid steam waft up from the floor to smoke the glass opaque with fog and give us the closest thing we ever got to privacy. By the time the city thawed in the spring we were all half-crazed with cabin fever, bitchy and snappish, leaping at each other’s throats at the faintest provocation. Particularly my father, Rotpeter, who was a heavy smoker. Ah yes, my father’s smoking. In the summer, some of the humans would stand at the ledge smoking cigarettes, and my father, an extraordinarily perceptive ape, learned from watching the smoking humans the physical semiosis for Hey, can I bum a smoke?—which is: pantomiming the act of taking two drags of a cigarette by making a prong out of the index and middle fingers, puckering the mouth into a half kiss and touching the fingers twice to the lips. So when he saw someone standing at the ledge smoking a cigarette, he would look the person dead in the eye and make this gesture, and the smoking human would be so amused at his adorable mimesis that he or she would go ahead and throw him a cigarette. If it happened to land in the moat around our island (which it often did due to the lousy aeronautical properties of a cigarette), he would stoop to retrieve it, dripping from the water, and lay it out to dry on a rock. If not, he would pick it up, give the human a grateful thumbs-up gesture that he’d also learned from the passing sapiens and put it in his mouth. At first he would only mock-smoke them because he did not realize you had to light them to make them work, and in any event he obviously did not have anything to light them with, either. Eventually someone realized this, and the man (he was, as I recall, or let’s say I recall, a heavyset fellow in a Bears T-shirt) thoughtfully lit the cigarette for him, took a few puffs to get it going, then, correctly estimating the parabolic trajectory needed to vault the moat, using his ring finger as launching mechanism and his thumb as fulcrum he catapulted the burning missile over the Wall, over the moat, and onto the grassy shores of Monkey Island. My father actually smoked a cigarette then, and not long after he was hooked. He started adding a lighter-flicking gesture to accompany his can-I-bum-a-smoke gesture, and soon some kind soul threw him his own plastic cigarette lighter, which he also learned to use, and he immediately began to burn through his stockpile of cigarettes that people had previously thrown him but which he’d had no means of lighting. He hid his lighter and his cigs in a cache he surreptitiously dug in the planting chips in the interior part of our habitat, which he concealed with a rock. That was because the zookeepers were predictably