The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore (23 page)

I had never really done anything physically violent to a human in my life, and I never really would again, except for a few slipups, including the one murder I committed, which is what landed me in this place, but I will speak of that later.

Yes, there was screaming. Yes, there was blood. Yes, Tal looked down in horror at the stub where the ultimate and penultimate segments of her right middle finger used to be. Yes, she held her hand up to the light and looked at it with an expression that betrayed more amazement at first than physical pain, as if wondering where were the other two joints of her finger that only a moment before had been securely attached to the second knuckle? Yes, she held it that way, wide-eyed, aghast, against the cold flickering of the fluorescent lights that illumined the lab. And yes, just a brief moment, just a fraction of a second later, the blood began to burble up out of her finger, and a fraction of a second after that it began to spray from her hand, almost as if from the nozzle of a hose. Yes, the hot blood filling up my mouth tasted bitter, metallic. No, I did not swallow it.

There immediately followed a period of great tumult and confusion. To complement the craziness of the moment, the minute hand of the clock had just then managed to scale the left side of the clock face to surmount the top of the hour, which meant that all the classes in the building were being dismissed at about the same time, and now the hallways below us had suddenly come alive with murmuring and hundreds of shuffling shoes.

Prasad gave her a quick bandaging with the lab’s first-aid kit. There was a lot of yelling. Someone called an ambulance. For a short time there was some shouting about where the finger was.

“It’s still in his fucking
mouth
,” Tal shrieked, cradling her hand
to her chest, which was wrapped up in gauze and then again in her twisted and bloody T-shirt.

They tried to catch me, but I was too fast for them! I ran around the room like mad in the confusion, screaming, flailing, scrambling over the tables, upsetting the furniture, bouncing off the walls, causing a world-class ruckus. Shouting everywhere. Lydia—who at some point had rematerialized in the room—yelled at everyone: “
Leave!
” she commanded. “Everybody get out! I’ll handle this!”

“Are you sure?” someone said. “He’s dangerous—”

“Go.
Go!
Get out! I’ll take care of it.”

All the other scientists funneled out the door and into the hall, guiding Tal, who was now pale with blood loss and fright, still clutching her hand to her chest, out of the room. They left. The door shut behind them. I was cowering beneath one of the lab tables. The room was silent except for the sound of all the students jostling each other in the halls of the floors below us.

“Bruno,” Lydia called. “Bruno. Come here, please.”

I wouldn’t come out.

“Don’t worry. I won’t bite,” she said, keenly aware of the irony.

She found me huddled under a table. Lydia was on her hands and knees on the floor. She crawled toward me, and then sat down, cross-legged, and patted the floor in front of her. She had put on a sweet face, but I could tell in her eyes that she was furious with me.

“Come here,” she whispered. “Come to me.”

I scrambled out from under the shadow of the table and sat in her lap. She hugged me, and she kissed the top of my head and stroked my fur. I was shivering.

“Shhhh———,” she said. “Shhhh—————.”

Gradually, my shivering stopped. She put a cupped hand below my mouth. (Recall, Gwen, the episode with the peach.)

“Please, Bruno,” she said. “Give it to me. Spit it out.”

I let the finger fall from my mouth. I pushed it out with my
tongue, and the lifeless and slimy thing—and the raisin along with it—tumbled from my mouth and into the cradle of her palm, still attached to my lips by a sticky thread of drool.

“Thank you, Bruno,” she said, and closed her hand over it.

Then she picked me up and put me in the enclosure that was walled in by thick glass, and shut the door. I went willingly. I knew that I had done wrong. That I had sinned. She locked the door. I began to cry.

“You’ve been bad,” she said. “You’ve been very, very,
very
bad. I’ll deal with you later, Bruno. I have to go now.”

Lydia turned around and left, the finger held tightly in her hand. She hurried from the room, but remembered to flick off the lights as she left. No one came back to the lab for the rest of the day.

She needed the finger because she had vainly hoped that a doctor would be able to reattach it. Much later she would tell me that the doctors had in fact attempted to reattach the finger. She told me that although they had implemented all the sorceries of modern medicine available to them, they had ultimately failed to reattach it. In retrospect, I have come to wonder what effect the loss of the longest and middle digit on Tal Gozani’s dominant hand had on her career in puppetry.

Tal quit working at the lab after that, and she stopped visiting Lydia and me at our home. I believe the lab was legally in the clear, because they had a policy of requiring everyone who did research with potentially vicious animals like me—and are we not all “potentially vicious” animals, Gwen?—to sign some sort of waiver saying they wouldn’t sue if something like this were to happen. If she had been able to sue and had chosen to do so, then I’m sure it would have spelled certain doom for the project. Norm was already strapped enough for cash as it was. Maybe I would have been returned—God forbid—to the zoo. After this incident, everyone who worked in the lab behaved with a little more nervousness
toward me, they deferred to me a little more respect—or caution, I couldn’t tell which, and ultimately it doesn’t much matter.

Everyone, that is, except for Lydia. She seemed to understand. To forgive me, even. It’s to be expected in this line of work. Chimps bite. Get out of the primatology business if you can’t take the primates, is what I say. I really don’t blame myself for it at all—I’m not that cruel.

As a result of this unfortunate incident, I once again had to sleep in that fucking laboratory for a time afterward. I do not know if this was intended as punishment, or what. I do not remember if it was days or weeks. It was mostly because, at least for a while, not even Lydia trusted me to behave properly in a domestic human environment.

The upshot of this temporary arrangement was that I got to see Haywood Finch again. I had not seen my friend in many months, and that first evening that I was back in the lab at night, I remember the sudden surge of joy I felt in my chest when I heard the familiar sound of his walk, stomping and jangling down the hallway, the
kLOMPa-whap-SHLINK kLOMPa-whap-SHLINK
of his boots, his chain, his hoop of many keys, when I saw his familiar blurry lumpy shadow looming in that familiar doorway, behind the panel of smoked glass in the door to room
308: BEHAVIORAL BIOLOGY LABORATORY
. He opened the door, and snapped on the buzzing fluorescent lights, which slowly fluttered on,
nzt-nzt-nzt-nzzzzzzzzzz.

“
Haywood!
” I shrieked.

“
Bruno!
” he screamed.

That night, even Haywood forgot his routine. He was so glad to see me again. That night, we sat up in the laboratory, separated by a wall of glass, and howled gibberish at each other almost until the beginning of dawn.

I have never, by the way, eaten a raisin since. Raisins make me want to vomit. I hate raisins.

I
shall never forget the day that Lydia, on one of our outings, took me to the Museum of the Art Institute of Chicago. On that day, all the dormant potential for sweetness and light buried deep in some volcanic cranny of Bruno’s soul erupted forth to the surface, igniting fires, fires!

This day is important, Gwen, because I became an artist on that day. It had been a few months since the biting incident. It was summer again. It’s a snarling irony that there was actually a bit of a row that took place on the museum steps that morning between Lydia and a rent-a-cop, some dough-faced lout in a cryptofascist uniform with shiny buttons all over it claiming to be a museum employee, concerning the question of whether or not a chimpanzee should be admitted entrance into this temple of Eleusinian Mysteries—an art museum. Bigotry! Just when I thought Lydia and this Gestaposeur might actually come to blows, some higher-up from the museum’s bureaucracy intercepted the argument as third-party arbiter, and it was finally determined that my admittance was permissible depending on the caveats that I was to be at all times: (one) secured on my leash, and (two) either holding Lydia’s hand or being physically carried by her, which was fine with me because there was no
other place in the world I’d rather have been than dangling from the neck of my Lydia.

The first paintings to really excite me were the many female nudes: reclining, standing, bathing, sleeping, descending staircases, splishing about in streams or wringing riverwater from their hair, standing on clams, brandishing swords and scales in allegorical triptychs while their diaphanous garments teasingly slip from their shoulders, unabashedly loafing around in various states of undress in the Turkish seraglios of tittery European imagination, and that beautiful Manet of the pouty strumpet lounging on a pile of silk pillows with a hand planted on her crotch and her shoes on…. Clearly the Great Master(bator)s of the History of Art were just as irresistibly fascinated by the very subject that did then and continues to fascinate Bruno: the disrobed human female. I couldn’t contain myself!—I wanted to fuck them all! I wanted to fuck Manet’s Olympia and Botticelli’s Venus, I wanted to fuck Mary Magdalene in her grotto and that double amputee Venus de Milo who’s got nothing now to prevent that sheet from falling, I wanted to fuck all the bare-breasted goddesses in the allegorical triptychs, too, I wanted to fuck Justice and fuck Peace and fuck Fidelity, I was even waiting at the bottom of the stairs for the nude to finish descending, where I would unlock her with the key of my desire from Duchamp’s prismatic prison! After advancing first through the classical stuff and then through the tantalizing objects of Italian Mannerist lust, then eighteenth-century French Romanticism—robes, togas, tunics, and bedsheets unfurling left and right to expose rolling pink swaths of luminous human flesh you could almost smell and taste in the paint—we came to the Impressionists: the two I liked the best were certainly Van Gogh and Gauguin.

Gauguin, because all those sweet plump honey-complected Polynesian tarts re-ignited my libido after I’d had to suffer through
a bunch of brain-numbingly insipid pictures of flowers and vegetables and dead fish and other such crap.

But Van Gogh! Van Gogh, because he’s a genius. Van Gogh was the first painter I admired for purely platonic reasons. My God, the landscapes of Van Gogh! You know all those pastoral pictures of the wind shushing through cypress trees on grassy hillsides somewhere in the south of France?
What
pastoral? Those are the
least
pastoral pastoral paintings you’ll ever see. Everything in the landscape is chattering and rattling and hissing and screaming! Those paintings aren’t pastoral!—they’re full of weeping and gnashing of teeth.

Then we came to the Moderns, which I also liked, but in a different way. I took a crash course in the history of Western art that day, and so twentieth-century sallies into the realm of the wildly abstract shocked me on the same day I was also shocked by the concept, the very concept of representing three-dimensional form on canvas at all. I saw Picassos, Matisses, Mondrian’s colorful boxes, Jackson Pollock’s haphazard psychoscapes, Rothko’s subtly defined rectangles of color. Yes, yes, said Bruno to his soul. This is it. This stuff is the best of the best of being human.

We lingered in the museum until it closed—so unwilling was I to leave the place. When we came home that day, I was able to communicate to Lydia, in a struggling handful of gestures and rudimentary utterances, that I had found my calling: I wanted to paint.

“Do you want to draw pictures like the ones we saw today at the museum?” said Lydia.

Yes, I affirmed, nodding. Yes, yes, yes.

The very next day Lydia—this inexhaustible fount of human benevolence—went to the store and bought me a large pad of sketch paper and some art supplies: crayons, pencils, watercolors, a box of Magic Markers.

Crayons have never done it for me. I realize that the image of a crayon by itself practically stands as a synecdoche of childhood, but in practical usage I found them sorely wanting. I detested the way the tips would become blunted almost immediately. I did not like the rough quality of the lines they made on the paper, I did not like the feeling or the texture, and I hated when their waxy tips bore down into the paper wrapping—the sound of the paper crayon wrapper scraping against the paper I was drawing on never failed to solicit a cringe and a shiver from me. No!—to hell with crayons!
I
was a marker man.

Magic Marker was my first medium, Gwen, and I still think it’s a wonderful one. There’s the exhilarating smell when you uncap a marker, the juicy wet nib, the feeling of the thing bleeding ink onto the page for you, so smooth, so vibrant: the change one enacts upon a blank sheet of paper is so material, so pleasingly concrete and direct. Here’s a naked field of virginal white—now uncap a marker of your favorite color, drag it across the page and—
shooop!
—now there’s a violent streak of color in it, the immediately visible effect of your own physical agency, ha, ha,
ha!