The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore (21 page)

The evening did not end there. After dinner, the dishes washed and the chocolate ice cream consumed, Lydia and Tal sat on the couch in our living room and continued their wine and conversation. Lydia built a fire in the fireplace. For a long time I sat and watched it. This was something I loved to do in the winter. I would stare into the coals and let the fire hypnotize me. I loved to watch the veins of fire tickle across a log, to watch the cinders crumble, to breathe on them and watch the ashes glow from within, as if they had a pulse, a heartbeat, like animals with fire for blood. I could sit and watch it for hours. Soon it felt the time was approaching
that would have ordinarily been my bedtime, and then it felt like that time had long since passed—but tonight for some reason the normal social structure of the universe had been relaxed, and I was allowed to do as I pleased. So I sat on the floor by the crackling fire, now and then playing with my toys, now and then gazing into the embers of the fireplace and imagining I saw ancient cities being sacked and burned, whole Carthages and Troys razed and lain to waste, complete with Aeneases escaping the flames with their fathers on their backs. The women’s voices grew lower and happier as the evening went on. At some point I remember suddenly detecting a very strange smell that I had never smelled before. It was a warm, delicious smell, but extremely thick and pungent, and I remember how this smell immediately permeated the entire apartment. I looked up at them from where I sat on the floor, and I saw the two of them engaged in an unfathomable activity on the couch. Lydia was sitting upright at one end of the couch, and Tal’s long yellow body was stretched supine along the length of it, with her dirty bare feet braced on the arm of the couch and her head, with its medusoid tangle of wild black hair, cradled in Lydia’s lap. Tal held a cigarette in her hand. Just like the cigarettes my father used to illicitly smoke in the zoo, only this one was kind of lumpy and homemade-looking, not like the perfectly cylindrical factory-made bolts of burning stink that my father, Rotpeter, had smoked. Tal brought it to her lips and sucked the smoke in deeply, and the end of it glowed orange and crackled as she did. The smoke slowly left her nostrils in twin gray streamers. She handed the cigarette to Lydia, who did the same. I don’t think they even noticed I was looking at them. They were still talking as they were doing this. When they had, taking turns, smoked all of it but a tiny remaining nubbin, Lydia let it drop from her fingers into her wineglass on the coffee table, and its speck of fire hissed out in the puddle of wine left at the bottom of the glass, and the bowl of the glass instantly
filled with a burst of smoke, and for a moment the ribbons of smoke swam circles inside the glass like thin flat gray eels swimming in a fishbowl, and then the smoke floated out of the glass and dissipated in the air above it.

That night I dreamed of the Gnome Chompy. It was a dark dream. A nightmare. The nightmare was this: Lydia was dead. Or no, not dead, as I had no proof of that, but I feared the worst, that she was gone. One day she simply went out and never came back. And I went out looking for her. I got lost in the world. I was exposed to all the shrieking entropic clatter and bang of the cosmos—without her, without a guide. For some reason I was on the commuter train at one point in the dream, riding uptown, deep into the belly of Chicago—but without Lydia it was not exciting, it was horrifying: howling through the darkness trapped inside a bullet aimed God knows where, vulnerable, weak, fragile, defenseless. I could not understand what anyone was saying—or, rather, the secret conversations of the other passengers hovered right on the brink of comprehension but never quite began to make any sense, many voices mixing into a glossolalia, a swarm of talking tongues as meaningless to me as the buzzing of bees. Then, without realizing how I got there, I was in Africa. I was in my father’s dangerous birthplace, Zaire. I was running through the jungle, lost in some tropical forest teeming with inky shadows, cacophonous with threatening noises, with hoots and cackles, in a place where there are humans afoot who want to kill and eat me. There are cannibals here—I say
cannibals
, Gwen, because the idea of humans eating chimpanzees is like dogs fleshing their teeth on the bellies of wolves!—it is tantamount to cannibalism. I met another ape in the forest. It was my father, Rotpeter. My mother was there with him, too. My father and mother. I tried to tell them something—to ask for help, supplicate their protection. But no words came out of my mouth. My father and my mother were sitting on the mossy forest
floor, grooming each other. Then we heard a sound in the darkness. I knew that it was the Gnome Chompy. Something stirring in the trees. I heard leaves rustling, twigs snapping. Darkness. All primates have three primal fears: snakes, falling backward, and the dark. This was the dark. I knew the Gnome Chompy was somewhere in the darkness of the jungle that yawned all around us. I felt his presence. I heard his breath whistling in and out of his nostrils before I saw him. And then I saw his eyes. Two green bright eyes glowed in the dark behind my parents, over my father’s shoulder. He emerged from the dark. He was a little man—being a gnome—but the Gnome Chompy was a terrifying inversion, reversion, and perversion of everything that was good about Francis the Gnome. His skin was pale yellow, sallow and necrotic. Unlike Francis the Gnome—who loves all animals—the Gnome Chompy hates them. He hates all things living. His large forehead and thickly furrowed brow protrudes over the glistening green stars of his eyes. He smiled and looked right at me as he peeled open his wet mouth to reveal two rows of sharp slimy teeth and a red raw slab of tongue. He licked his teeth. He stood behind my parents, who were facing me. I wanted to call out to them. I wanted to warn them somehow. I wanted to point behind them and scream. But I could not. That was the power of the Gnome Chompy. He had robbed me of the power of speech. It was as if there was cement hardening in my throat. I could not even move my hand to point. The Gnome Chompy had robbed me of all my powers of communication. There was no way I could warn them. I was powerless. I simply had to watch them die and be eaten, just like my father had watched his own mother and father die and be eaten. I watched the Gnome Chompy tear into my father’s neck with his jaws. Then he snapped his teeth into my mother’s throat. He tore open their bellies, he disemboweled them and began slurping up their entrails, eating them alive. They were screaming. I woke up. It was dark. At first I didn’t know where I
was. My eyes flitted around the room, aimlessly landing on the things in it, landing on the darkened shapes of clowns floating up to God by their balloons, on the planets of our solar system and the shadows they made, their silhouettes like cutouts from the sheet of moonlight on the opposite wall. My goose lamp was not on. I looked at these things, but failed to register their significances, their places in waking reality, the signifiers and signifieds all ripped apart and made meaningless.

From upstairs, directly above my bed, I heard Mr. Morgan’s parrots flapping and screeching. I did not remember having gone to bed that night. I must have collapsed into sleep from sheer exhaustion right there on the living room floor, beside the fire. Lydia must have scooped me up in her arms and carried me to my bedroom and tucked me into bed.

I climbed out of my bed, ran out of the room, down the dark hallway, and into Lydia’s bedroom. To make sure she was still there, still alive, still mine. I saw the two of them, lying together in Lydia’s bed. Lydia and Tal. The bedsheets were sloppily pulled halfway up over their bodies—but I could tell that they were not wearing clothing of any sort. They were asleep. So deeply, so peacefully asleep that even my crazily bursting into the room had not woken them. I listened to the soft contrapuntal rhythms of their shallow breathing. Tal lay on her side, with her hands folded under the pillow and her legs partially curled in. Lydia lay beside her, with her knees curled into the hollows of Tal’s knees, and her cheek resting on the skin of her shoulder. Lydia’s arm was wrapped around Tal’s body, with her right hand cupped over Tal’s left breast. Lydia was faintly, sweetly, laughing in her sleep.

I
t must have been a few weeks later when I bit Tal’s finger off. Though to be perfectly fair to me, she had been doing something I found irritating. Also it was essentially unintentional. I had only meant to give her finger a punitive little nibble, I certainly didn’t mean to bite the whole thing
off
.

We had been seeing a lot of Tal lately. She and Lydia had been having their little sleepovers with increasing frequency in recent weeks. Lydia had even taken me to Tal’s apartment, where I once spent a terrifying night sleeping on the foldout couch in her living room. Tal Gozani’s apartment was the opposite of Lydia’s. Whereas Lydia’s apartment was a clean and psychologically comforting space, Tal’s living quarters were like some cluttered gypsy bazaar, where one half-expected to hear the whine of a snake charmer’s flute weaving through the air amid all that chaotic gimcrackery of bottles, cups, candles, baubles, trinkets, gewgaws, and musical instruments (a French horn, a banjo, a guitar). The apartment was small, just three little rooms: a bedroom, a grimy nook of a bathroom, and a sitting room/dining room/kitchen that Tal also used as a puppet-making workshop. A massive rough wooden worktable was pushed against one wall, dwarfing the rest of the furniture in
the room. The surface of the table was where she made all her silly disgusting horrific puppets, and it was cluttered with all kinds of tools and materials—pliers, wires, paints, brushes, glue, wood, putty, clay, fabric, scissors, knives, hammers, awls, hooks, clasps, rubber bands, string, buttons, ribbons, needles, thread—a whole arsenal of implements that were apparently necessary to the business of puppet production and which made the room look like a place where industrious elves make toys. In this room it was impossible to determine where the precise boundaries of the space were because it was so cluttered with needless bric-a-brac. And puppets. The room was:
filled
—
with
—
puppets
. There was that Mr. Punch puppet that had horrified me so, and his wife, Judy, hanging on the pegs of a hat tree. Tal made both hand puppets and marionettes. There was a jester, a skeleton, a chef, an alien, a witch, a sailor, a cowboy, an Arabian belly dancer, a robot, a pirate, a Cossack, a rabbi, a genie, a knight, a king, a queen, a princess, a matador, a three-piece mariachi band. There were monkeys, bats, turtles, horses, cows, pigs, rabbits. Tal suspended her puppets from hooks screwed into the ceiling and walls, such that all her eerie wooden homunculi dangled on their strings like hangmen all over the room, with their hideous expressions, their gawky shiny lacquered faces leering pruriently down at me everywhere I went.

And those are just the visuals of the place. As for the audibles, the olfactibles and the tactiles? Tal had these thin brown sticks that she would light on fire with a match, which slowly smoldered away into thin snakes of ash in their shallow brass trays, and as they burned they gave off musky odors that intermingled with the distinctive smell of the fat white cigarettes she sometimes smoked. She lived in an old wooden building, as creaky and leaky as a ship in a storm, situated in some far-flung area of the city that I don’t believe I’ve been to since. The final unsettling touch to this environment was that she lived directly below the tracks of the L. If
you looked out her kitchen window you would see the sooty iron latticework that supported the elevated tracks, and periodically the whole apartment was set to shuddering and rumbling as the train blasted over us in the night.

I remember that evening vaguely. Usually Tal would visit us in our far more pleasant environs, and during these visits Lydia would insert an animated film for me—
Cinderella, Pinocchio
, etc.—into our television, which happily distracted my attention while the two of them sat on the couch, cuddling and cooing and sometimes smoking one of Tal’s lumpy white cigarettes. But for some reason, tonight we were visiting Tal’s place. And Tal—being no great lover of the candy frivolities of contemporary Western civilization—did not own a TV. Being in that place was like being in a store that sells expensive and fragile things. I was afraid to touch anything for fear that I would be castigated if something broke. So for entertainment I had to content myself with wandering her tiny apartment and visually inspecting the outlandish objects therein. I remember sitting with Lydia and Tal on her cramped, mildewy, musty-smelling couch and watching Tal page through a scrapbook of photographs, pointing at each one and explaining it to Lydia. There were lots of pictures of Tal standing around in some dusty brown godforsaken moonscape of a place that for some reason she kept insisting is real, even though Lydia did not appear to doubt the photographic evidence of its existence. She said she had been working on a caboose.

Lydia’s and Tal’s shared mood became sillier and sillier as the evening wore on. Tal’s company had an interesting effect on Lydia. Tal certainly lightened her spirits, that I will admit. When the two of them were together they even began to take on one another’s speech patterns and gestural mannerisms. When they would talk together they would almost mirror each other. Lydia began gesticulating when she talked in the same ways that Tal did, and vice versa. Lydia would absorb Tal’s habit of pulling her bare feet up
beneath her and sitting cross-legged on a couch with her hands in front of her, grabbing her ankles through the triangle of space in her lap. They sat across from each other on the couch like this, and when Lydia’s hand fluttered to her face to tuck an errant strand of thin blond hair behind the ridge of her ear, Tal’s hand would unconsciously mirror the movement in sympathy, even though her own unruly cords of hair were too thick to stay in place. In this way, they talked and laughed and touched each other’s hands and drank wine and smoked the lumpy white cigarettes all night, their mood becoming ever sillier.