The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore (46 page)

My hair never grew back. What little I left of it soon also went away on its own. Since then, I have spent my life hairless. A cold, weak, naked creature of a day.

E
ventually the protesters went away. For the most part. Their protests in front of our house were no longer a daily occurrence, as they had been for months. A time finally came when we were left totally unharassed on most days. Although sometimes on weekends a few of them still showed up, the gathering of the faithful had whittled down to only a handful of indefatigable true believers—Revered Jeb, with his scarf and bow tie and brown houndstooth suit, RadioShack megaphone in hand, always reliably among them. But even Reverend Jeb was no longer an expected fixture in front of our door. Then finally a weekend came and went during which they did not show up at all, and we surmised they had forgotten or grown tired or bored with us, and we were finally free of them. Tal had fully moved in at this point. She had broken the lease of whatever Humboldt Park dump she had been inhabiting and relocated her whole gypsy bazaar of personal possessions, all her knickknacks and ornaments and gruesome lacquer-polished puppets into the cramped and uncarpeted bedroom that had once been Lydia’s stillborn son’s intended bedroom in days much different than these, and then, for a time, my bedroom, and then, for a time, my painting studio. Tal was crowded out of the room by her
things, as if the puppets wanted the living space, and they kicked her out so they could spread out their spindly wooden arms and legs, and she obeyed them, and did not sleep in that room.

At first she slept on the living room couch. But Tal spent only a night or two on the couch before Lydia, in what few words could still come to her, haltingly and stutteringly and pointingly and gesturingly invited her to sleep in “the big bed” with us. Lydia needed as much comfort, as much human warmth, as much skin next to hers as possible. Of course I would have preferred Tal to sleep alone. Before Tal came to stay with us, before the period during which every night all three of us were sealed in like a row of sardines in the bed, Lydia and I would make love in a sluggish, dreamy way—she, silent, pregnant, brainsick; both of us groggy and sweaty. Because of her sensitive belly it was only possible to conduct intercourse in a limited number of arrangements. That was one thing that was possible without words, one thing that was perhaps enhanced by wordlessness: the physical act of love. But Lydia seemed more and more often to not be in the mood for it, and there was no sex after Tal joined us in the bed. Lydia seemed to prefer that Tal be near to her, and so I, rather nobly I think, refrained from complaining of this sleeping arrangement.

It was a crowded bed all right, with me beside Lydia and Lydia beside Tal, or more often Lydia and Tal on the right and left sides of the bed and me monkey-in-the-middle between them, this to facilitate Lydia’s semisomnambulant night ramblings that came from spending the daylight hours drowned in sleep, so she could get out of bed without waking me or Tal. And who can say what she might have done during our slumber? Certainly not Lydia herself. More and more she found that she could not say anything. The disease in her brain lay heavy on her tongue, rendering it numb, slow, a useless slab of meat in her mouth. The bed wasn’t an uncomfortable place to sleep. I’m not a sleeper who craves contactless bodily
solitude. Especially with my then newly hairless body, I loved the way another’s flesh felt pressed against mine. If the two women ever caught me—perhaps from the thin slit of vision between almost-closed eyelids—surreptitiously, feverishly masturbating once I believed they were both asleep, they never said anything to me about it. When the necessary act was finished, I would quietly smear away the result on the hem of Lydia’s nightgown, roll over and submerge myself in dreams, falling asleep listening to the steady shallow rhythms of two human women breathing softly beside me.

Then in the morning murk of winter, Tal and I would rise together, prepare ourselves for the day and set out for the lab, leaving Lydia still asleep. Tal and I would make that walk of twenty or twenty-five minutes together from our home to the lab, our place of employment, side by side, buried in winter coats, our breath bouncing against our scarves back onto our faces for warmth. It wasn’t an unpleasant walk, anyway: a left turn on Fifty-second, a right on University, four blocks down, across the wide bustling expanse of Fifty-fifth just as the sun was breaking into full light over the road, past the white vastness of the snowed-over soccer field, block by block the university buildings looking more and more like medieval fortresses all buttressed, turreted and bulwarked, gargoyles squatting bat-winged and freakish at the corners of the sills with torrents of watery vomit hanging frozen from their open mouths, now a right on Fifty-seventh, and now we pass through the tabernacular gatehouse, jagged with dripping icicle teeth, then across the main quad, up the stairs, through the doors, down the hall, into the elevator, out of the elevator, down the hall, and through the frosted-glass door to the lab, room 308.

I do not know for how long we were being followed each morning before I noticed him. Tal and I had long since accustomed ourselves to slipping out the back way when we left the apartment in
the morning on our way to work, but with the protesters gone, we felt safe enough from their molestations to brave the world through our own front door—imagine!—as if we were not hunted criminals. On a certain morning as we were crossing Fifty-fifth Street, I happened to look behind us. I don’t know what prompted me to look back. Some little inchworm of paranoia inched into my mind and whispered to me that we were being watched. I turned around. I felt we were in the company of a third. When I counted, there was only she and I together, but when I looked behind us down the white road, I saw another. I did not know whether a man or a woman. When I looked harder, when my eyes narrowed to slits of concentrated vision, the person went away—like a mirage, like a Fata Morgana appearing steamy and silvery on the horizon to the eyes of a traveler hallucinatory with thirst, only to vanish upon closer inspection. We walked on. A block or two later down the road I turned around again. I saw someone walking down the street, in our direction, a block and a half north of us. Granted, there would have been nothing unusual at all—as this was Hyde Park, not Shackleton’s Antarctic—about a lone pedestrian who happened to be walking a block and a half in tandem with us, but the way this person was moving suggested some ulterior hostility. We walked on. I filched another backward glance down the street, and this time saw nothing. This afforded me no comfort. I said nothing about this to Tal, who was walking alongside me, heaving breath into her scarf in the cold with her eyes locked to the ground.

The next morning I saw him again. I was sure it was a man now. I saw him again, and again I looked a second time and he was gone. But I had noticed—or thought I had noticed, or convinced myself later that I had noticed—a brown suit, of what may or may not have been houndstooth, and a long blue-and-white-striped scarf.

I asked Tal then if she noticed someone walking behind us. She
said she didn’t see anyone, and shrugged it off. We went to the lab. I remember that day at work about as well as I remember my own birth. What I remember was what happened after.

When we left the lab that day, something in the world was wrong. The sun was waning weak and orange over the craggy parapets of the ivy-strangled gray stone buildings. It was early March. The snow on the ground had been painted over with rainwater, which had frozen to a candylike crunchy glaze of thin prismatic crystal on top of the old snow. Tal and I walked home together in near silence, listening to our breath and the footfalls of our booted feet busting through the carapace of ice on top of the snow. When we got home, Tal unlocked the front door and pushed it in. In the foyer we stamped the slush off our boot soles and hung our coats on pegs. The apartment was cold inside. It was nearly as cold inside as out. This was because someone had smashed in the glass in the back door. The remaining glass in the sliding door clung to the doorframe in jagged triangles. We walked into the silent living room in our snow boots. The blue-green glass was scattered like sugar, like sand, across the floor of our apartment. Shards of it kissed and crunched beneath our boots. Tal called Lydia’s name twice: the first time with the rising inflection of a question, and the second time loud, hard and flat. There was no answer.

Lydia was in the bedroom, right where we had left her that morning. We saw her lying in the bed. Tal saw her lying there, and immediately turned around and ran down the hallway to the phone. A moment later I heard her yelling and crying into the receiver of the phone in the kitchen. The room was dark, blinds shut. Lydia was in bed, in her nightgown—she effectively lived in that silken garment these days. The bed was soaked with her blood, soaked as damp as a sponge. I pressed my fingers into the mattress, and like a sponge its surface offered up blood as it squelched and sank under the slight pressure of my fingertips. Her legs were folded into her stomach
beneath the wet bedsheet. Her blond hair stuck out of her head in short spiky sprigs because her head had been shaved for her surgery several months before. Her eyes were closed. Her bloody bare feet stuck out from under the sheet. A lamp that had been on the bedside table lay overturned and broken on the floor. I went to the head of the bed and put my hands on her head. Her eyes vibrated a little under her eyelids. Her chest was drawing and exhaling air. Tal came back from the kitchen and flicked on the bedroom light, and we winced at the sudden brightness. Lydia groaned. Tal unpeeled the sheet, limp and heavy with wetness, from Lydia’s body. Her arms and legs were swollen and purple with bruises. The bottom of her nightgown had been yanked inside out and jerked up past her navel. Her bloody naked legs were curled into her belly. From between her legs a knotty cable of red flesh came out of her body, and this cable of flesh wound and wound out of her and connected to a little thing that lay there in the bloody sheets beside her on the bed. This thing was about as big as two fists held together. It looked like a rubber puppet. Its skin was red and blotched with purple. Its eyes were closed. It was curled into itself, with knees drawn up, and long rubbery arms tucked under the chin. It had a face, a twisted-up rubbery goblin face. Its round flaps for ears stuck straight out of the sides of its clumsy round rubber ball of a head. The membranous skin of the ears was so thin it was translucent—I could see the forking blue veins in them. It had a wide mouth, with a long space between the flat, upturned nose and the upper lip. The wispy black beginnings of eyebrows sprouted above its eyes. It had long gangly arms and stubby, foreshortened legs. But its fingers and toes—already with tiny fingernails and toenails on them—were so thin, and so delicate, so unmistakably human.

We could already hear the siren of the ambulance that Tal had just called screaming up our street outside when we looked up and saw writing on the wall. This was something we had failed to see
when Tal and I first walked into the room that afternoon. There was something scrawled on the wall of our bedroom. It was written above the headboard of the bed in black marker, in thick capital letters:

AND IF A WOMAN LIES WITH ANY ANIMAL, YOU SHALL KILL

BOTH THE WOMAN AND THE ANIMAL. THEY MUST BE PUT

TO DEATH. THEIR BLOOD SHALL BE UPON THEM.

LEVITICUS 20:16

T
hat night I was taken away. I was drugged, stripped naked, and locked in a cage. This cage was not dissimilar to the cage I had once been put into when Lydia conveyed me from my birth home in the Primate House of the Lincoln Park Zoo to the laboratory at the University of Chicago: it was a temporary cage, designed for carrying me against my will to a place where I had no wish to go. It was cramped, such that I could neither lie down at my full length nor stand up at my full height. It featured a grated metal door that hinged open when unlocked from the outside, through the squares of which I could only strain to see my surroundings. A repugnant odor filled this claustrophobic cube of space, smelling first of the unwelcoming plastic and chemical smell of its material, and later, once I had been forced by my confinement to piss and shit inside it, it smelled of my own bodily filth.

Why had I been put inside this cage that I describe? For three reasons: (one) I admit, for my own safety, as my life was believed to be in danger; (two) I suppose, for the safety of others, for I will own that on that evening I did do a good deal of weeping and gnashing of teeth, and of flailing, of spitting, of howling, of shrieking, of screaming, and I shall even humbly admit that my
behavior disquieted and disturbed the humans who were then in my presence—that I was showing myself, despite my articulation and erudition, to be unfit—at least temporarily—for the freedom of unrestricted social congress with and within human (and please, Gwen, make sure to seal this next word in a bitterly mocking envelope of quotation marks) “civilization”; and (three) for transport. For I was set to be forcibly relocated. Whither? Eastward. Why? For my imprisonment.