Benjamin Hale - The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore

When did my love of Céleste become tainted with physical revulsion? I’d seen Céleste scrounge parasites out of her fur and eat them! Am I expected to be attracted to a girl of such grotesque manners? Hell, she eats my parasites! But wait! — I do that, too! They’re good! No! No! Go ahead and eat your own delicious goddamn parasites, Céleste, but Bruno’s moving up in the world! — even if it means leaving you — even if I do, in a very primitive and uncomplicated way, love you. Female chimps — when they’re in estrus their ugly plump vulvae inflate and swell out behind them, and they drag around these bloated pink balloons of flesh between their legs as they walk, their sphincters oftentimes plugged with repugnant globs of partially excreted shit. And those flat gray mealy breasts and protruding bellies and rangy hairy bodies and bald heads and scrunched-up noses? No, I’m sorry. It’s true, I am a deviant and depraved pervert: I have no desire to have sex with other chimps. But look— look! — look at all those human girls we see sashaying in all their anthropic glory past the Wall all day: all that long hair growing insanely out of the tops of their heads, those nearly hairless lower bodies propelled bipedally forward on those powerful, columnar legs, those massive round breasts so absurdly disproportionate to their bodies! So, as my father was loping around the habitat indiscriminately screwing any moist sluice he could find — my mother, my aunt, a frog for God’s sake — I had always been secretly pining for humans, longing to someday get to slither between the legs of those dazzling sapiens sapienettes I saw clip-clocking past me all day in those high-heeled shoes that make their calves taut and thrust their beautiful bulbous asses up, up, up in the air, just a little closer to God, like a streaming buffet of delicious desserts on display for Bruno behind impenetrably thick glass, to be admired but not to be touched.

Do I digress? Very well, then, I digress. I am large, I contain multitudes.

So there was Lydia, standing in the doorway of our habitat, bending to the ground and beckoning to me with her arms — so pink and smooth and fragrant — and into these arms I scrambled, and wrapped my hairy self around her neck, rested my head in the crook of her shoulder, and tossed a last parting glance upon my family as she took me away. And Lydia held my hand and guided me through the first chapters of Bruno’s bildungsroman, the journey into manhood my life has been ever since. I did not bid good-bye to my mother, I did not bid good-bye to my brother, I did not bid good-bye to my father, and I did not even bid good-bye to Céleste. Instead, I went with Lydia. I went with the human. I went with love, I went with lust, I went with language. I went with Lydia.

Hello, Gwen. This will probably be a brief session, I’m feeling moody and ill at ease today. We’ve only got twelve days to go before our performance of Woyzeck , and I fear my actors are still woefully unprepared. I was forced to make some criminally drastic cuts in the script owing to the fact that most of my actors cannot speak. Leon has volunteered to play the role of the Doctor whose psychological experiments drive the beleaguered Woyzeck deeper into madness, and I have convinced Sally — the assistant researcher who works part-time here at the research center on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays — to play Marie, the widow whom I, Woyzeck, murder in a fit of jealous rage at the climax of the play. The problem with Sally, though, is that although her verbal faculties are superb, her memory is not, and she’s prone to forget her lines, to say nothing of the fact that her acting is forced and wooden. Her delivery is off and her timing is bad even when she does remember her lines. All the other parts will have to be played by chimps, none of whom can speak a word of English, though a few of them can make a crude handful of ASL signs. Damn it, they’re impossible to work with. The researchers(-slash-wardens) who keep and study me patiently suffer the whims of my artistic genius, but all they really want me to do is help them teach language to the other chimps — a task I find fundamentally boring and depressing. Being a scientific anomaly is such a burden, Gwen, I can’t even begin to tell you. I’ve spent so much of my life in starkly decorated cool white rooms from which escape is impossible. Why are laboratories always so uncomfortable? Always the same sepulchral décor, the same blue-green glass and concrete floors and whitewashed walls, the same ever-present ambient murmur of computers and fluorescent lights and air-conditioning. So of course I appreciate that they have allowed me to more or less furnish my own modest chambers according to my own taste. This couch we’re sitting on is my own. That is my coffee table, those are my books, and that’s my painting on the wall there.

When Leon was here yesterday he tried to smuggle in a bottle of Scotch for me. He was found out, the bottle was confiscated, and now poor Leon is severely on the outs with the management — which is infuriating, ludicrous. Is this a primatology research center that I’m in, or rehab? Sometimes I can’t tell. I detest being treated like a prisoner. There are times, Gwen, when I’m on one of my Thoreauvian walks in the woods — never unsupervised, even if the scientist charged as my chaperone respectfully gives me my distance — there are times when I’m walking in these woods, when I come to the very perimeter of the premises, where there is a twenty-foot-high chain-link fence forebodingly topped with a coil of concertina wire. The chain links of the fence mesh with the branches of the pine trees just beyond them to create dazzling moiré effects in certain light — at sundown, for instance. And sometimes I peer past the fence, through the many diamonds of negative space between the metal links, at the small patch of world that lies beyond it: beyond the fence are trees both coniferous and deciduous, bushes, ferns, and even a few palm trees to serve as taunting evidence of my proximity to the ocean, which is a sight I hold to be beautiful and darkly mysterious. Farther yet, beyond all this vegetation, clearly visible through the leaves and the branches, is a narrow paved road. A road, Gwen. Flat gray asphalt cut down the center by a dashed yellow line into two lanes, coming and going, vein and artery. Beside the road, negative parabolas of wire droop from one wooden cross to the next. Sometimes there are blackbirds sitting on the long bights of wire. I’m going to confess something to you, Gwen, and you must never repeat it to anyone, lest I lose even more of my circumscribed freedom. Sometimes I wonder how quickly I might be able to scramble up that chain-link fence before I’m found out. I wonder how badly I might injure myself on that coil of concertina wire on my way over the top of the fence. I wonder at what vertical point on the other side of the fence it would be safe to let go and brace myself for the fall. I wonder where that road leads to, in either direction. I wonder if I would be able to hitch a ride with a passing motorist. I wonder all of these things, Gwen, when I see the birds and the road and the blue expanse of sky above it, and then I see a twenty-foot-high fence separating me from all of that, and I yearn to rejoin that foul and miserable and dark and disgusting world that hurt me so badly — all in spite of the fact that I have everything I could ever need right in here. There is my confession, Gwen. It is a sin not of deed, nor even word, but of thought, of the mind, of the heart, of delectatio morosa , of restlessness, of ingratitude, of hatefulness, of yearning for what I have not got, of desire.