The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore (68 page)

Yes, I admit that I am not as altruistic as Superman. That is why Superman is Superman and Bruno is Bruno. I am not a hero. I am
a cowardly pernicious sniveling selfish wretch, who would destroy the world for his own happiness. But does that make me a villain?

I stood before the outer door to the apartment building, glancing up to notice the honking flocks of blackbirds that burst and fluttered from tree to tree in the blue and orange gloaming of that March day. I steeled myself, and sank a long purple finger into the buzzer. I hopped up and down on the toes of my shoes in anticipation. I crushed the green roses to my nose and drank them in. I took in a deep breath and let it slowly out. I cleared my throat. I wondered if she wasn’t at home. I pressed the buzzer again. A moment later, a crunching of static and a voice—a woman’s voice, but not Lydia’s—electronically croaked through the speaker.

“Hello?” said the crunchy voice in a confused but polite tone. “Who is it?”

“Lydia?” I said. My voice squeaked. I cleared my throat again. “Is Lydia Littlemore at home?”

“Who is this?” demanded the voice, less polite now.

“A friend,” said I. (I wanted to surprise her.)

The speaker buzzed, and I pulled on the door, went into the hallway and let it thump shut behind me.

I stood in the hallway. The door to the apartment I had shared with Lydia opened up about a quarter of its width—apartment 1A, the only door on this floor—and a figure stood in it, holding the edge of the door, peering past it into the hall.

“Hello?” said the figure, in the same voice as I had heard, but without the staticky distortion of the buzzer. “Can I help you?”

I waddled closer to the door, flowers and suitcase in my respective hands, hat on my head.

As I came closer I saw that the figure who stood in the doorway was Tal. She looked much the same as before, except that she was not clothed in the flowery gypsy garb she was wont to wear when I had known her best. Instead she wore more drably conservative
garments: sweater, jeans, socks. Her thick wavy black hair was bound back in a ponytail reminiscent of the way Lydia used to wear her hair. Standing before her in the hallway, I transferred the bouquet of green roses from my right hand to the crook of my right arm, carefully, so as not to damage them, the paper and cellophane crinkling in my hand during this delicate operation. With my right hand thus freed, I moved it to the top of my head, pinched the shallow depressions in the crown of my natty black hat and slowly, gentlemanly, removed it. And there I stood in the dimly lit hallway of the apartment building in which I used to live in bliss with Lydia, my first and only true love. In the same building in which Griph Morgan, with his bagpipes and his parrots, used to live upstairs. In one of the only places on earth so formative upon my memory and consciousness. There I stood, in my coat and scarf, with a bouquet of green roses for Lydia tucked beneath my arm, carrying my hat and suitcase, my three feet and ten inches of stature heightened slightly by my shoes.

I looked up at Tal: I smiled at her and said hello. I admit that my gaze sank momentarily to the missing segments of the middle finger of her right hand, before I remembered myself and redirected it back to her face.

I did not know what I expected to happen then on her face, but the look of absolute horror that subsequently appeared on it as soon as she finally recognized me was not exactly what I had been angling for.

“Oh my God,” Tal half-whispered, slowly backing away from me. She edged herself away from the doorway, narrowed the openness of the door, and stood inside the apartment with one hand on the doorknob, ready to slam it shut if necessary.

She said: “
Bruno?
”

I said: “My name is Bruno Littlemore. Bruno I was given, Littlemore I later gave myself. I have come for Lydia.”

“What in the
world
”—she hissed, her expressions roving elastically from fear to confusion to disgust—“happened to your
face
?”

“Ah, this?” I said, tapping the side of my proud human nose with a long purple finger. “This is my nose. Do you like it?”

I smiled in the friendliest way I could.

Then Tal did, in fact, slam the door in my face. She locked it and slid the deadbolt.

I felt the blast of wind the door displaced in my face. If I had been any closer, the flat hard door would have certainly squashed my beautiful nose against my face, immediately undoing the careful work of my surgeon.

As I wailed and hammered on the door with my fists, pleading with her to let me in, I felt an unpleasant wave of déjà vu. A wave of déjà vu as visceral and stomach-clutching as a wave of nausea. I felt at that moment that I had spent a great portion of my brief and unhappy life engaged in the labor of screaming and pounding in desperation on doors that were closed to me—crying, begging, shouting—sometimes in rage and sometimes in despair, to be let in. Or out. Begging either to be let out or let in. I have always stood on some threshold. They have never let me in… or out.

After seeming hours of my loud and pitiful bellowing—after angry neighbors upstairs opened up their doors and shouted down at me, demanding first to know what the trouble was and then simply for quiet for God’s sake—Tal finally opened the door a squeak. She kept the security chain hooked.

“Tal!” I screamed into the crack of light. “Please let me in! I won’t hurt you! I won’t hurt anyone! I just want to see Lydia!”

“Why?” she snapped. “Are you going to smash anything or bite anything?”

“No! I’m a new man! I promise! I’ve changed! My days of smashing and biting are behind me!
Please
—,” I whispered, “please trust me.”

Tal slammed the door again, unhooked the chain and slowly opened it. I slipped inside, suitcase banging against the doorjamb, roses crinkling to my chest. I stepped into the foyer and shut the door behind me. Tal was wearing boots, now, and she was holding a big kitchen knife.

“That’s not necessary,” I said. “I won’t hurt anyone.”

Tal spat out a reverse-gasp of sardonic laughter. “You’re too late for that,” she said.

I let my head dip down in shame at this comment.

“Where the hell have you
been
?” she said. “What do you
want
? I can’t believe you came back here. How did you even get back to Chicago?”

“In time,” I said (sagely, I hoped), “all shall be explained. But, Tal, please…” I knew my voice had a tearful tremor in it, now.

I was still standing in the dark and muddy foyer of that apartment I knew better than almost any set of rooms in the world, feeling less even like a guest than an intruder, wondering if I should take off my shoes or presume enough even to unbutton my coat, still awkwardly juggling in my arms flowers, hat and suitcase as I said: “Where is Lydia? Please… I want to see Lydia.” I felt tears surging up beneath my cheeks, threatening to cloud my vision.

“Are those for Lydia?” said Tal, pointing at the bouquet of green roses in my hand with her knife.

I held the flowers out a little from my chest. For a moment the crinkling of the cellophane and paper they were wrapped in was the loudest sound in the room. I couldn’t answer her because I was afraid that I would cry if I tried to speak. I only nodded yes.

Tal sighed through her nose as she looked down at me, holding the green roses. She backed into the apartment and set down the kitchen knife she had wielded at me on the dining table with a click of metal on wood and beckoned to me to enter the apartment.

Everything inside the apartment had changed. All the furniture
was different except for the dining table. There were new pictures on the walls. The living room wall had been painted over with sunflower yellow paint. Some of Tal’s disgusting lacquer-faced wooden puppets were sitting in a row like spectators on the fireplace mantel.

Tal stood with her back leaning against the edge of the dining table as I came inside, not taking off my shoes or my coat. I walked into the middle of the room. She crossed and uncrossed her arms, then braced her palms against the edge of the table behind her. She crossed her arms again, uncrossed them again, and then took a few steps toward me. She bent down to me until her face was level with mine. She was also close to tears.

“Bruno—,” she began. I already knew by then what she had to say to me. By the time she began to say it—by the time the information had actually begun to exit her lips—I had already endured the four or five longest and worst seconds of my life. I knew already what she had to say, and I did not want to hear her say it, and yet I knew that it had to be said. By the time she was actually saying it, I could not even see her face because my eyes were so blinded by tears of rage, nor could I hear or understand a word she said, because my ears were so deafened by the volume of my emotion, it was as if they had been plugged with wax.

L
ydia had died six months before I arrived in Chicago. Somehow this had never even occurred to me—in my conscious mind—as a possibility, even though I guess I did know she had been deathly ill when I was taken from her. It never occurred to me that someone I had loved as much as I loved her—and there has only ever been one such person in all my life—could die, or that I would not be present for it. Lydia’s attackers were still on the loose, and always will be. Lydia’s tongue had gone numb, limp, and languageless from the poison in her brain, and so she could not name them, or even describe them. When she died she was as silent as any animal. After they had untimely ripped my child from her womb, and after I had been deported by Animal Control and taken to the LEMSIP biomedical research laboratory in New York (from which, as we know, I escaped), Lydia lost the will to live. The tumor that had been scraped partially and unsuccessfully from her brain could not be killed off with radiation therapy, though her doctors had tried. For the final months of her life, she was utterly speechless. Her hair had fallen out, she grew thin and frail, her sweet fragile skin nearly transparent over her sweet organs and sweet bones. In her final days she was delicate, naked, and silent. Tal nursed her,
and loved her, and took care of her, and I hope her presence eased Lydia’s passage to the other side.

And then she died. It was torture for me even to see the inside of that apartment. Before she died, but after she knew that she almost certainly would die, Lydia sold the apartment to Tal for the symbolic price of one dollar. Tal had moved in completely, and after Lydia died she cleared the space of most of its old things. Most of the old furniture was gone. Tal had sold it and bought new furniture, furniture not miasmal with Lydia’s memory. She painted the walls yellow and warmed the place up with all her rustic bohemian artifacts. The dining table and chairs she kept, but little else remained. These rooms that I knew so well that even now I sometimes move through them in my dreams had been stripped and dressed in new clothing.

I left our—Tal’s now—apartment. I left in rage. All this hell in my brain, in my stomach and my chest—why did I have to hide it from the world?

Tal did not ask me if I needed a place to stay, and I did not bother to hint that I did. I could not have slept in that place, anyway. She told me that she had to go, and she did not specify why or where or with whom. I left that place.

The light had failed all around me, and now it was night.

I still had my suitcase in my hand and my hat on my head. The bouquet of green roses I left in the apartment. On the dining table. I hope she forgot to put them in water. I hope they died.

My cheeks were enflamed with crying. My chest was hot with sadness and anger, hatred of the self, and hatred of the world. I stumbled through the streets as if drunk. I was slightly drunk, actually, from the whiskey I’d had earlier. I decided at once to become drunker. I entered an establishment for just such a purpose on Fifty-third Street. It was a restaurant with a bar in the back of it, like Artie’s Shrimp Shanty, where Leon and I had passed many a joyous night beneath that giant rubber shark.

“Table for one?” came a terrifying voice emerging from some unknown height or depth. I looked, and saw that the voicer of these words was a young hostess whose presence I had overlooked in my state of frailty.

“No, thank you,” I said. “I have come for liquids, not solids, therefore I’ll sit at the bar,” which I promptly did, climbing onto a stool at the otherwise deserted bar counter.

The bartender slapped a cardboard coaster before me on the counter.

“Get you anything?” said he.

“A quadruple Scotch on the rocks, please,” said I.

Looking askance at me, the bartender prepared the beverage, and I drank it. Then I ordered another.

I had three of these and entered dreamtime.

I vaguely recall that the bartender engaged me in some sort of dialogue, and I also vaguely recall that at some point he advised me to drink more slowly, then advised me to stop drinking, then
told
me to stop drinking, then
advised
me to leave the establishment, then
told
me to leave, and then, finally, on account of no one’s advice, behest, or agency but my own, I left. I also vaguely recalled the blare and glare of the streets outside, and that when I was in that dark building it had rained heavily and then abated to a persistent drizzle, and that all the red and green and yellow traffic lights and the streetlights and the neon signs in the storefronts and the headlights of passing cars were all mirrored brightly and shakily in the wet black asphalt. I walked the streets, my suitcase thudding behind me, with no idea as to what time it might be or where I was going.
I am a monster,
I thought.
I am filth. I am a thing of darkness.