Benjamin Hale - The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore

I dreamt that I was making love with Lydia. We were in Chicago. It was years ago. We were in our bed in the apartment in Chicago. It was snowing outside. Her warm body, her skin next to mine. The bed became earth, and then I was crawling through damp, dark soil. Pebbles, roots, grubs. My hands reached the surface. I pulled apart the clods of dirt, and saw a faint spot of light above. I dragged myself above the surface and emerged in a forest. I was in the jungle. I was in a wet, dark, densely vegetated place, ancient and teeming with life, with steam, dirt, fire, blood, semen, water, disease, ghosts. Everything was alive, everything breathing and flowing and moving and writhing with animal spirits. I was surrounded by chimpanzees. Naked, hairy animals, unenlightened, ungifted with speech. Grunting, howling, farting, scratching themselves, eating bugs and worms, picking nits out of each other’s fur. Their rubbery masklike faces, dark glassy eyes. They looked at me, confused. I was not one of them. I looked up into the sky. I could see only patches of blue here and there; most of it was shrouded by branches. But in one of the places where I could see the sky unobstructed by the leafy umbrages of the giant jungle trees, I saw something: a tiny speck, something floating in the sky, way up high above the trees. It descended, getting bigger, clearer, until it floated down through the break in the trees to the forest floor: it was a pink balloon effigy of a human being. I reached out to touch it. It popped.

Someone was shining a flashlight in my eyes.

I blinked twice, and blinked again. My eyelids were weighty with drugged sleep.

“Hey buddy !” said the flashlight, in a nasally New York accent. “You gotta be kiddin me here!”

“What?… um… hello?” I mumbled, or something like it, into the light.

“C’mon, buddy, what’s a matter with you?”

The blinding light was yanked away from my eyes, and, squinting through burning tears of confusion, I saw the upside-down face of a police officer looking inquisitively into mine. I seemed to be lying beneath a blanket in the backseat of Leon’s ex-wife’s car. Leon himself was not present. I was so disoriented that I didn’t know at first if it was day or night. I felt the parked vehicle shudder as a monstrous truck whooshed past us on the road. My face hurt — like hell. My eyes were burning.

The police officer’s face and tone of voice were stern, but not malicious. He was middle-aged, clean-shaven, and white. He was also the unlucky possessor of one of those loose flaps of flesh that hang pendent from the throat and chin, which I only now remember is called a “wattle.”

“What time is it?” I said. “Where am I?”

“It’s three in the frickin’ morning, and you’re in a vehicle with an expired registration on the shoulder of the Hutch.”

“Well, that’s not where I went to sleep. I’m sure there’s some explanation, Officer.”

“What’s your name?”

“Bruno. My name is Bruno.”

“What’s a matter with your face?”

My hand leapt to my face, and the tips of my long purple fingers met some sort of hard, coarse, dry texture. There was something wrapped around my head just below my eyes. I realized it was a bandage — covering my nose.

“I’ve just undergone surgery, Officer,” I said. “I’m sorry, but I’ve been heavily sedated. I was under anesthesia.”

The police officer frowned at this information. However, because his head was upside down, his frown instead appeared to me as if a funny-looking sightless chin-creature was smiling at me.

He was standing on the roadside and leaning in through the open car window. He went away for a moment, to perambulate Leon’s ex-wife’s Wagoneer, briefly illuminating the trunk and front seats with his flashlight.

“Where — where is Leon?” I said, my mind still hazy.

“What?” said the police officer, returning to my side of the car.

Now I was aware of a second presence. There was a man in blue jeans and a black T-shirt following the policeman. This second man carried, mounted on his shoulder like some sort of weapon, a camera: a video camera. He pressed one of his eyes to the viewfinder, the other eye a squint. A red light on the machine blinked on and off, an evilly winking little red dot. Why do humans always feel this urge to document?

“Who is he ?”

“They’re filming this stuff for a TV show,’ ” said the cop.

“Yo,” said the cameraman.

“They’ll ask you to sign a waiver, unless you want ’em to blur your face on TV.”

“Probably won’t have to,” said the cameraman. “We only air the good shit. You know, where something actually happens.”

Is a dispassionate observer supposed to interlope the conversation like that?

“My, um, my friend — Leon,” I stuttered. The cop turned to me again. “He was supposed to drive me home after my surgery.”

“Some friend,” said the cop.

I was sitting up in the backseat now, clutching the blanket, wondering suddenly if it was all I had to cover my nakedness. I could tell by the dilation of the camera lens that the cameraman was zooming in on my face. Seedlings of panic begin to sprout beneath my skin. Was there a German shepherd present? Would they beseech him to rip the fragile flesh from my bones? I wondered if I would be on TV.

But hark! — there, in the distance, a lone figure is seen, approaching in the harsh orange lighting of the urban night. And he is a really big lone figure. He’s so girthy it looks as if he’s hiding a floppy sack of potatoes under his shirt, and he is huffing and wheezing with each toilsome step as he hoofs it along the shoulder of the Hutchinson River Parkway. His gigantic figure makes the man unmistakable, even to my bleary eyes.

“Leon!” I shouted from the back of the car, still wrapped in my blanket. As I opened my mouth wide to shout a sharp pain zinged all over my face, and I guessed I should refrain from straining my facial muscles until my nose had fully healed. An eighteen-wheeler, lit up like a circus, blasted past us in the night. The police officer responded to my shout by shining the flashlight in my eyes again. I winced. I pointed at Leon, loping and puffing up the shoulder of the road.

I said: “There! — him! — that’s my friend.”

Leon had clearly spotted the police officer, and in his steps there was now a marked hesitation, a heaviness, indicating a dread of entering this situation, mixed with his mind working wildly to come up with a way of evading it, which, as his steps drew closer, turned into a wild working of trying to think of what he was going to say.

“Hey buddy !” said the cop, redirecting the flashlight’s pale annulus at Leon. “Hey — you! This your car?”

Leon, approaching, waddled along the shoulder of the parkway as quickly as he could, looking exactly like a walrus attempting a lumbering and poorly planned escape from a zoo. In one hand, he carried a gas can. It was then I realized why the car was parked on the shoulder of the road. When Leon arrived, the police officer had to allow him some time to catch his breath.

“My — sincerest — ( gasp ) — apologies, Officer,” he said, pushing each word out of his mouth as if they were heavy objects he was heaving one at a time over a wall. “You see, gentlemen — I—my automobile — was — depleted of fuel — hence — it came to — an unfortunate halt — in this most inconvenient — location. However —” catching his breath and holding the gas can proudly aloft for all to see, including, presumably, the television audiences watching at home “—in response to the problem, I valiantly betook myself, an empty gasoline receptacle in hand, down the road to a local fueling station — a Mobil — whereat I procured this gasoline, which I have conveyed hither and with which I now plan to replenish the fuel tank of my automobile.”