The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore (61 page)

This also happened to be 1998, and when I wasn’t watching movies on it the TV had turned into little else but a window gazing onto the sordid vista of the president’s sexual liaisons, specifically his dalliances with a plump young thing who stood accused of repeatedly fellating our commander in chief and allowing him to insert a cigar into one or more of her orifices. There he was on television, rosy-faced, butt-nosed and silver-haired, sheepishly shrugging, denying all, as if he was not his nation’s leader but rather her philandering husband caught with the babysitter. Leon and I watched in
amusement as the news played and replayed footage of Bill Clinton assuring us that he did not have sexual relations with that woman. Leon had just returned from Artie’s, where he had picked up a double order of shrimp and a bottle of wine. The shrimp were nestled in a Styrofoam container in the lap of the terry-cloth bathrobe Leon usually wore while at leisure. Between cramming fistfuls of shrimp into his cheeks, Leon drank wine in gulps and shouted at the TV.

“Damn-blast it!” he roared. “Why does the Supreme Court get in such a tizzy when the president receives a blowjob? And why does he not simply say, ‘Leave me alone, get your own blowjobs!’? Really, Bruno. This whole business is so mind-bogglingly insipid. It’s nothing short of a sexual crucifixion. They may as well nail his penis to a cross. Think about JFK, for God’s sake. His sexual goings-on make Bill Clinton look like a fifties teenager groping in the back of a Plymouth convertible.”

I wasn’t entirely sure what the Supreme Court was.

“Gadzooks, Bruno, your education is riddled with holes!”

I didn’t deny it. It wasn’t my fault. As I’ve said, this is the curse of the autodidact.

“What’s the Supreme Court?” I demanded.

“I’m no civics teacher, but I shall do my best: the Supreme Court is a panel of political whores. You see, there are such things in our government as checks and balances. That’s why we have three branches of government: the executive, the legislative, and the judgmental. When I was a child, my teachers made it abundantly clear to me that this was why I was lucky to have been born in America. I supposed that British royals were as nasty as my grade school teachers, and so the Queen might see me walking to school one day and say, ‘I don’t like the looks of that boy. Cut his head off!’ Whereas here, even if both houses of Congress voted unanimously to have my head cut off, the Supreme Court could intervene. And that’s checks and balances.
Now
do you understand?”

A commercial came on. It was a commercial advertizing a certain brand of mobile telephones, which were at the time ascending to widespread popularity. The commercial opened with a shot of a theatre, an expectantly hushed audience sitting before a red velvet curtain. The curtains raised and parted, and what followed was a version of
Romeo and Juliet
abbreviated to thirty seconds because all the characters had cellular phones. The joke was that wireless communication technology speeds things up. Leon was appalled. He threw a shrimp at the TV, which briefly stuck to the screen before sliding off, leaving a wet mark.

“Of
course
these cellular telephones speed up communication! Why the blazes would you want to do
that
, you vicious bastards? The whole blasted plot of
Romeo and Juliet
—nay, of
all
great literature!—I daresay
hinges
on miscommunication. Flawed information, crossed signals, late and undelivered messages! What these infernal things are doing is paving over all the beautiful mountains and valleys of confusion in the landscape of human society! It’s disgusting! I’m sure that in a few years every idiot on the street will be puttering around like a somnambulist with one of these hideous devices nailed to his ear. And then we will at long last have entered the final phase of the decay of human civilization. Once everyone owns a cellular telephone, great literature will no longer be written, due to the end of miscommunication.”

“Perhaps,” I offered, “the advent of cell phones will not eliminate miscommunication, but simply speed it up. Much more efficient.”

“Curses! To hell with efficiency! To hell with convenience! To hell with communication! What kind of future are we making for ourselves, Bruno? What is this great supposed virtue we attach to these values—efficiency, convenience, communication? These are not human virtues—these are the debauched virtues of
commerce
! It’s a shopkeeper’s virtue! Listen, Bruno!” Leon gingerly brushed
his long hair back with his fingertips and cupped a hand to his ear. “Listen,” he whispered.

“What?”

“
Shh
.” Leon’s voice sank to a stage whisper: “I hear something! I hear something occurring outside the sanctum of our little home.”

“I don’t hear anything.”

Leon raised his voice to full theatric boom: “Listen, Bruno, and
despair
, for what I hear is the flaccid language of business osmotically replacing every syllable of poetry still alive in the human heart!”

“Oh.”

“To hell with it all!” he thundered at the TV, waving his glass of wine in the air in front of him so histrionically that some of it slopped into the lap of his bathrobe. “Give me miscommunication! Give me confusion! Give me a world rife enough with errata to fuel the great tragedies of bygone eras! Where has the tragedy gone in our world? Tell me that!
Everything
is comedy! And you cannot truly appreciate comedy if you suck all the tragic out of life. Just look at this buffoon who lives in our TV. I mean our ‘president,’ Bruno. Look at him: he knows this is all mere comedy! Yes, he faces impeachment and so on, oh yes, you naughty boy, you’re really in trouble this time! But you can see that thin mask of concern on his face only scarcely conceals a smirk. A
smirk
! Inside, he’s thinking, ‘Tiddly-dee, this whole thing is actually funny.’ And, devil take him, he’s
right
! It
is
funny! ‘That’s right—acts of fellatio have been administered in this very office! Beneath this desk! What do you think of that, America? Aren’t you just a little jealous of your alpha male in chief? That’s right—suck it, America!’ We live in an age of comic unreality. Nothing’s real to us. It’s all jokes. I am sure—mark my word, Bruno—I’m sure some great tragedy is quietly brewing beneath it all. Go ahead and laugh, America, laugh your moronic
heads off. But when tragedy befalls us—which it invariably must, for all our cellular telephones and World Wide Web sites have not jammed a very stick in the
Rota Fortunae
—when it happens, we will all be so sick and stupid from years of laughing that we won’t have a clue how to behave. Only then can true comedy begin again. We need tragedy to show us what’s
really
funny. Oh, God!” Leon turned his eyes to the ceiling in wistful abandon. “To live in an earlier world! I would put up with the horseshit! Really!”

After over a week my period of convalescence came to an end. After the first few days the swelling went down, my two black eyes healed, and a few days after that the pain had decreased from grating to almost bearable. A few days later I removed my bandages.

I waited until Leon was out of the house. I don’t remember where he was, maybe on a wine-and-donut run. I wanted to be alone with my nose. I climbed up on my little stepladder that led to the bathroom sink and stood before the mirror. The middle section of my face—just below my eyes, just above my mouth—was covered in bandages. I snipped at it with Leon’s plastic-handled children’s safety scissors, and gradually unpeeled the bandages from my face. Then I unraveled them in fistfuls. The bandages were sticky and wet on the inside and darkly mottled with dried blood. The bandages dropped to the bathroom floor,
flap, flap, flap
. The bandages smelled bad. The flesh of my face was wet and wrinkled from marinating in sweat under the bandages for a week.

There, in the middle of my chimp face, was a human nose.

My human nose so naturally melded to my face that it almost looked as if I was born with it, though when I first revealed it to myself the white scar that surrounds my nose was still very noticeable. Look at me. This monster had been made a man.

I stared at it. I stared from every possible angle, then derived new
angles of scrutiny out of a hand mirror held opposite the mirror on the wall. Mirror mirror on the wall, whose lovely nose is this?

I touched it. I lovingly stroked it with my long purple fingers. I looked so beautiful.

I began to cry. These were tears of joy. I felt the saltwater sliding in hot rivulets down the flanks of my beautiful new nose. This nose—as you can obviously see for yourself, Gwen—this nose was so artfully sculpted out of the flesh of my face… but it wasn’t just that. It was like the perfect nose had been found for me. The nose was totally in harmony with my face. I looked almost like I could pass for a natural-born human. I looked so good. My beautiful new face gave me a feeling of power. I wanted to parade my aesthetically improved face around town, introduce the world to the brand-new Bruno.

When I heard the front door open and close I burst from the bathroom to show Leon my new nose.

“Snakes alive!” Leon gasped. His eyes threatened to erupt from his eye sockets like corks from popguns. “Let me touch it!”

“Gently,” I warned. My nasal flesh was still very sensitive.

Leon placed a single shaky fat finger on the bridge of my nose.

“This is remarkable,” he whispered, “quite remarkable!”

Leon delicately caressed my nose with his finger. Then our eyes met in an uncomfortable way, and he quit touching my nose. We both looked away, and Leon pretended to cough.

“Come, Bruno, let us repair to Artie’s to celebrate your transformation. Audrey is tending the bar this evening.”

We went next door and ordered shrimp and wine, and I showed off my new face to Audrey and Sasha.

“Didn’t I tell you?” said Sasha. “He does good.”

“Wow! You almost look human, Bruno,” said Audrey.

“Thank you,” I said with a mild bow, taking the compliment with gentlemanly grace.

The girls all cooed and fawned over my face and patted me on
the head. I entertained many fantasies about all the thousands of women who would be powerless to resist the magnetic attractiveness of my face now that I had a human nose.

“I am afraid your honeymoon with your nose must be short, Bruno,” said Leon. “For tomorrow, we must begin in earnest to work on our play.”

I knew that was true. My convalescence had stalled the production for long enough. There was the ticklish and interesting question of finding an appropriate performance space. We were called the Shakespeare Underground because our performances were held underground both metaphorically and literally. Performing the whole play in the subway wouldn’t have been feasible. Leon had an idea that involved a long-lost uncle of his.

“I have a long-lost uncle,” he said, “who must be in his nineties by now. He has owned and operated a locksmith’s shop for many years. He inherited it from his father.”

“Is he your father’s brother?”

“No.” Leon dug his fingers through his beard in thought. “He is my mother’s father’s brother. I suppose that’s a great-uncle. In any event, I hope he’s still among the living. I haven’t seen him in the last thirty years or so. He ought to be, he’s a stalwart and salubrious fellow. We shall pay him a visit tomorrow.”

“Where?”

“An excellent question.” Leon turned to his daughter, who was busy at the other end of the bar, and called:
“Audrey!”
He clapped his hands twice and jabbed a finger in the air.

“What?”

“The phone book, my darling.”

Audrey rolled her eyes and plopped several huge phone directories on the bar counter, one for each borough. We flopped them open to the L sections and found the listings for locksmiths.

“I misremember precisely where my uncle’s shop is,” he said,
licking his thumb to page through the phone book. “I am reasonably certain it is located on the isle of Manhattoes, so we shall have to systematically visit every locksmith shop listed there until we find him.”

I agreed this was an excellent plan indeed. At Leon’s suggestion we ripped out the relevant pages from all the phone books.

“Jesus, Dad,” said Audrey. “Don’t vandalize the phone books.”

“Pish, my dearest. What conceivable need would anyone at this establishment ever have for a locksmith in this saloon? In any event, we shall return the missing pages when we are finished with them and you may tape them in again.”