The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore (11 page)

Of course I understood her words, I grasped the meanings of her signs—but the links between the signs and their meanings dissolved in the air before they reached me. I simply sat there in the center of the room, mutely, stupidly, intermittently picking up an item here and there—a pencil, a plastic flower, a stuffed animal—fingering it disinterestedly, and putting it down again: behaving, in other words, exactly like an ordinary chimpanzee, rather than the genius chimp they had apparently been expecting. Lydia flushed and grew frustrated with me—infuriated, even.

Then: I smelled something. Something—specific, some smell that I had not previously noticed in the room. I detected some
faint but definitely present smell, a strange odor, oily and fleshy and sticky and briny and very, very human. I looked around the room, at all the bare legs, the flip-flops and the sticky thighs. There was a certain girl—oh, she was beautiful—this certain girl, so smooth, so soft, so bright—I could smell the films of sweat in the pits of her knees, between her toes, her thighs—she had an outrageous mane of thick black hair, a pair of mountainous breasts, seismically rising and falling under her clothes, filling me with violent desire. Her legs were effeminately crossed beneath a knee-length orange skirt made of a thin stretchy material, and one of her flip-flops—she was wearing orange flip-flops that matched the skirt—one of her sweaty squishy flip-flops dangled from the big toe of her bare foot, which she held partially aloft, bobbing the flip-flop, slapping it softly against her heel by pushing on the front of it with her toe. Her toenails were painted red. This faint smell, this weird oily briny coppery smell—this smell, I believed, originated from
her
.

I put down the stick or stone or stuffed animal or whatever it was that Lydia had just thrust into my hands and begged me to categorize, and I approached this woman, those legs, those yellow-and-green-stained feet, those blood-red toenails, those sweaty squishy orange flip-flops—that smell—and I crawled across the room to her. My limp leash dragged tinkling on the floor behind me. This girl was gnawing on the end of her pen and slapping her flip-flop against her heel. She realized that I was coming for her. She put down her pen, allowed the leg in question to descend and crossed it with the other, and as she did, that curious odor sharply, briefly spiked in pungency, and I had absolutely no doubt now that it was she whom I sought. I was getting curiouser and curiouser. I came closer, and at first the girl reached out to me with her pretty slender hands—the nail of each of her fingers was likewise painted red to match her toes—and I sniffed at her fingers, and determined that they were not what I was after. My head dove down to her
legs. I sniffed her grass-stained feet, her sweaty squishy orange flip-flops… getting closer, closer…

The girl emitted an involuntary squeak of shock. She recoiled from me in terror. She shoved her hands deep between her legs and bunched up the material of the orange skirt. I was trying to burrow my head beneath her skirt.

This is what I was doing when Lydia, in a fury, snatched at my leash and jerked me back, choking me. She tore me away from her.

I noticed then that all the other students were laughing. Roaring, thunderous with gleeful derisive laughter. All except for the girl herself—my wild-maned red-toed sweaty sticky squishy smelly girl—no, she was not laughing. She was burning. Her face was stained such a brutal shade of crimson that it looked like she was tied to the stake and burning, burning to death for passively committed blasphemies of medieval imagination, burning in order to be purified of some supernatural miasma cleansable only by passionate licks of fire, burning for witchcraft, burning, perhaps, for the visitation of an incubus…

Lydia’s face was equally red. She dismissed her class. I was severely reprimanded. I was ashamed. It would be a very long time before she ever took me to another one of her classes. Soon afterward, after I humiliated and embarrassed Lydia by my inability to perform before her students—well, not long afterward—actually, I have no idea how long afterward it was, but it was definitely afterward and not beforeward, of that I’m sure—I spoke to Lydia for the first time.

Maybe it was October, or at least October-ish, perhaps early November—I certainly wasn’t cognizant of the months of the calendar changing from one to the next, but I do recall that the weather had definitely veered toward the hibernal: the skies were grayer, the days shorter and darker, and the scarves, jackets, jeans, and sensible shoes had evilly chased away the tank tops and shorts
and skirts and flip-flops, sins which these articles committed annually in Chicago and for which I never forgave them.

I was sitting with Lydia on my squishy blue mat in the lab. I don’t recall what the other scientists were doing; they were probably busying themselves about the room with various scientific tasks. Lydia and I were taking turns whacking the moles of my Whack-a-Mole system. I did generally enjoy whacking the moles with the brown plastic hammer, but at this particular moment my heart wasn’t in it. I was not enjoying whacking the moles. The little bastards would always pop up again and again and never stay down—there was never any sense of triumph over them; the recalcitrant moles would allow you no feeling of accomplishment, only the Sisyphus-like frustration of endless futile labor. So I whacked the last mole I cared to whack and disinterestedly tossed the hammer aside. Lydia looked up at me. Perhaps she was a bit hurt by my disaffection with the device. I had been acting difficult lately. She picked it up and switched it off. I made a decision.

I looked at Lydia, and pointed at myself, and said to her: “Bruno.”

She answered me with this face: her eyes bugging, her nether lip hanging open and violently a-tremble.

This was hardly my water pump moment. I had been speaking my name to Haywood for months. It just happened to be the moment that I decided—partly out of my shame for having embarrassed and disappointed Lydia—to speak to her, to let her in on my secret world.

“Bruno—,” she said, craning her neck forward. She snatched off her glasses and let them dangle down on her chest. “What did you say?”

I looked at her blankly.

“
Hey
—” She stood up and shouted at the other scientists in the lab. “HEY!”

Like my moles ascending from the mole holes of my Whack-a-Mole system, all over the lab the heads of the other scientists popped up and turned toward Lydia.

“What?” they said all in unison. Lydia stood up.

“Bruno just—um. He just
spoke
. He said his name.”

Lydia’s eyes were enormous with shock and delight. She laughed: her body spontaneously convulsed with a breathy flutter of disbelieving laughter, and she put a hand to her mouth. She shook her head and blinked her eyes. With both hands she slid her hair behind her ears, then threw her hands in the air, slapped the tops of her thighs, and made a series of other gestures. Norm Plumlee made confused eyes at her and arched an incredulous eyebrow, and his forehead furrowed thickly.

“
What?
” he said. One could almost see a blizzard of question marks sprouting in the airspace above his head.

“Bruno just pointed at himself and
said his name
.”

The other scientists in the lab all stopped what they had been doing and immediately crowded around me on my squishy blue mat. Lydia knelt to the floor before me and looked deeply and passionately into my chimp eyes. She put on her glasses, then immediately snatched them off again, then tucked two stray strands of her hair behind her ears with both hands, then used these same hands to clap three times in rapid succession.

“Come on, Bruno. What did you say?”

I opened my mouth. But my lungs had been robbed of their oxygen. I don’t know what happened. I had just spoken—it was no accident, I knew that I had consciously and deliberately spoken my name to Lydia just a moment before. But I was speechless now. My diaphragm would not cooperate, it refused to provide the upward thrust of air in the throat necessary to bring a word into being. A demon of silence had entered me.

I looked from one face to the next, at the faces of all these
scientists standing behind Lydia and looking down at me. Lydia quickly whipped her head around to cast a look behind her shoulder, and said: “Somebody get a tape recorder!”

Andrea scurried away in search of the tape recorder.

“Where is it?”

“I don’t know.”

“Come on, Bruno. Say that again. I’m Lydia. Who are you? What’s your name?”

“I can’t find it!”

“Do that again. Do that again. Please, do it for me. Say ‘Bruno.’ ”

“Do you want a treat?” said Norm, or something like it. “Say that again and you will have a treat.”

“Got it!”

Now the flame-haired Andrea knelt on her knees beside Lydia, aiming a small gray hissing box at me. Norm was standing behind them, flapping a treat in his fingers in an “I bet you want this, don’t you?” way. Prasad looked on with his arms skeptically crossed. All eyes were focused on me, all ears turned sharply in my direction. I sat, cross-legged and silent, right where I had been sitting with Lydia when I made my experimental utterance. I grabbed my foot with my hand and averted my gaze. I felt acutely embarrassed. I wanted to hide. The dormant Whack-a-Mole system and the two brown plastic hammers lay forlornly before me on the mat.

I wanted to speak for them, I honestly did. But with all those faces, those anticipant faces looking at me wondering and agog, I found that I simply could not perform. I tried. God knows I tried. I kept pointing at myself and trying to pronounce my name, but getting nothing out but pitiful burping and puttering noises. They must have been watching me try to say my name for an hour at least—but all for naught. Eventually they all peeled off and drifted away and went back to what they had each been doing before my utterance; I realize in retrospect this was probably a ruse—perhaps
they thought my awareness of being observed was making me self-conscious and hampering my speech, that I would only have been able to speak when nobody expected me to. And perhaps they were right. But Lydia remained vigilant beside me for hours afterward, still coaxing me in a pleading whisper to speak.

I could not do it. I just could not speak for her, as badly as I wanted to. I was ashamed and embarrassed. I was experiencing the verbal equivalent of impotence. I don’t know why, but I could not speak.

But I do know that that evening, from my vantage point inside my cage I witnessed—but did not overhear in any detail—a very long and intense discussion, conducted on the part of both participants in the surreptitious sibilant hush of children talking in their beds after lights-out, between Dr. Lydia Littlemore and Dr. Norman Plumlee, who sat facing one another in the semidarkness of the lab after hours, hunched over one of the lab tables with elbows planted on the table. And I do know that I thought I could perceive a look of supplication on Lydia’s face, and an aspect of forbidding and reluctance on Norm’s. And I do know that Lydia said something that made Norm’s face smile, lighten, and soften. And I do know that shortly after this moment the conversation was considered finished, they had come to some sort of conclusion—most likely Norm had decided to acquiesce to a proposal of Lydia’s that he had initially regarded with dislike. And I know that Lydia and Norm then gathered up their things and stuffed them into satchels and struggled into their jackets and wound their scarves around their necks and did all the stuffing and zipping and buttoning prerequisite to venturing outside, because it had become quite cold by now, and I know they waved good-bye to me and switched off the fluorescent lights and let the door sigh shut and lock behind them. And I also know that the two of them had been talking together for so long after the end of the normal workday that they had overlapped with Haywood’s night shift, because he entered the room
almost as soon as they had left it. This is why I also know that they surely must have passed him in the hallway on their way to the elevator, they with their coats and scarves on and fat satchels swinging in their hands and he pushing his cart with the bags and rags and mops and brooms, with his crazy bidirectional eyes and limping walk and face perturbed with tics and shudders and his black rubber boots and long keychain and hoop of many keys, walking
kLOMPa-whap-SHLINK
every step down the dark and echo-haunted hallway, and perhaps—this I do not know—perhaps they even exchanged a nod or a wave or a smile or a mumbled hello, though I suppose it is more likely that they ignored him completely. And I do know that the next day, at the close of the work day, I was not locked in my cage, because Lydia on that day would take me home to live with her.
To live with her
—in her home—with
her
. And I do know that I would never again sleep in conditions of enforced confinement. (Until, of course, now.) And I do know that scarcely had I finished listening to the
bing
ing and
bong
ing of the elevator in the hall and the scrolling open of the elevator doors and Lydia’s and Norm’s four squeaky shoes entering the elevator and the scrolling shut of the elevator doors, when I saw Haywood Finch’s blurry shadow through the smoked-glass door to room
308: BEHAVIORAL BIOLOGY LABORATORY
, and I heard the sound of Haywood selecting a particular key from his hoop of many keys, and I heard the key being pushed into the lock and turned with the turning of the door’s handle. And I know that the door opened and Haywood entered the room and switched on the lights, which fluttered on in the way energy-saving fluorescent lights do, the full glow preceded by three false starts:
nzt-nzt-nzt-nzzzzzzzzzz
—————. And I know that upon seeing him, I stood up in my cage, and held on to the bars with one hand, and with the other I pointed at myself and said, as loudly and as articulately as any man: “BRUNO!”