Benjamin Hale - The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore

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.”

The following day Leon and I donned the suits and ties that we wore when conducting serious business. Leon put his long hair in a ponytail and carried his officious-looking attaché case, and we took to the streets, visiting all the locksmith’s shops in the city one at a time, guided on our mission by the phone book pages.

The not-so-cleverly named establishment Mr. Locksmith was only the ninth place we visited. (Leon did have a general idea of where the shop was located.) Imagine the eight faces we saw before Leon’s long-lost uncle: all the arched eyebrows and questioning looks we received when a monstrously obese man and a deformed hairless dwarf, both in suits and ties and one of them carrying an officious-looking attaché case, entered their shops to inquire whether they had known Leon as a babe in arms. Most people told us to get lost and hurried us away. A few feared we might be engaged in something illegal or otherwise nefarious, and their hands drifted to their phones when we walked through their doors. Thank God we finally found the right place on only the ninth try, because by the late afternoon of our day of searching, my stubby little legs were so rubbery with exhaustion that I don’t think I would have been able to stand (literally) for another day of this heretofore fruitless quest. I did, however, enjoy exposing my nose to the fresh air and the adoration of the masses. We got a lot of interested stares, and not all of them were because of the freakish spectacle that we brought with us wherever we went; I’m sure that some of the women who passed us on the street looked twice at me not just because I was freakish, but because of my newly beautified face. We found Leon’s great-uncle’s shop off of Broome Street on the Lower East Side. The storefront was across the street from the courtyard of a decrepit tenement complex and in front of a pile of black fly-covered trash bags in a filthy and run-down-ish area. I’ve been told that during the years I have languished in captivity this area has undergone significant gentrification, but at the time the place still more or less looked authentically squalid.

There was a yellow neon light in the window, shaped like a key. Behind that, on a windowsill, a cat — a soft fat black cat with a white face, belly, and feet — lay beneath the neon key in a bed made of a rumpled towel, watching Leon and me from inside.

“This one is it,” said Leon to me. “I’m absolutely certain of it.”

“How do you know?”

Leon pointed at the cat. “The cat has seven toes on each paw. My grandmother had one just like it. That deformity has been passed down for generations of my family’s cats.”

I looked at the cat’s feet. He was right: the cat had enormous feet due to an excess of toes.

We went in. As we did the jingle-bells clinked on the door behind us and the cat mewled indifferently. It was a dark, cramped room with wood-paneled walls, full of all kinds of locks and keys — there were keys hanging on pegs in the brown breadboard walls. Everything inside was brass and brown, and had the metallic, oily smell of a machine shop. A man who looked to be about three hundred and six years old sat behind the counter on a stool, working on something at a high workbench. Bushy sprigs of white hair sprouted from his ears and nostrils, and he wore a green plastic visor. Behind the counter there was a small TV; the picture was jittery and the volume was low, and the man wasn’t watching it. The cat in the window was looking at me. I looked back at the cat. The twenty-eight-toed cat groaned and returned her attention to the sidewalk in front of the store.