Benjamin Hale - The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore

Now we should return to my biography. I suppose at the time I did not realize I was bidding forever good-bye to my biological family. All I knew at this moment was that the only thing I ever really wanted was finally happening.

I held on to Lydia. My arms were wrapped around her neck and my face was planted against the warm sticky skin of the area of her body where her neck sloped into her shoulder, she with one arm supporting my hindquarters and one hand rubbing the fur on the top of my head as she carried me. Dr. Lydia Littlemore was wearing a short-sleeved, red-checked gingham shirt tucked into her jeans, and her blond hair was in a ponytail. I hooked the opposable toe of my right foot in the breast pocket of her shirt. The zookeeper followed us with a set of keys as Lydia carried me through the dank pissy hallways of the managerial part of the Lincoln Park Zoo Primate House, brought me to a small holding and storage room, and locked me in a little cage with a handle on it for transport. This cage was an unpleasant thing, made of hard gray plastic outfitted with a metal grate for a door and a flap of sodden carpeting on the floor. Lydia wriggled her fingers through the squares of the grate, and smiled broadly and brightly at me with her face just a few inches past the door and her eyes meeting mine, in order to reassure me, I think, that I was not in trouble and not in danger, that this was only a temporary measure and I would soon be released. From my peripherally limited vantage inside the cage, I saw the world through a grid, changing from murky interior lighting to the comparatively blinding outdoors, although the weather was overcast. It was a warm wet summer day. Rain clouds loomed. The sky was a sheet of hammered iron, the sun a white blur. Lydia wedged my cage into the backseat of a car and closed the door. I saw the side of the back door of the car and a sliver of the window. I heard the sound of a car door opening, something going bing bing bing bing , the door slamming, keys entering the ignition. The radio came on and she turned down the dial until it was nearly silent. Keys turned, the engine went chuppitachuppita-FROOM! , a seat belt was buckled, the wheels loosened from a parked state into a state of motion. Then the perturbing sensation of movement, me sliding around inside the cage with the dips and turns in the road, the whoosh of other cars Dopplering past us. The clouds broke into rain, and the rain thrummed on the roof of the car in a pulsing tattoo, like loose-flung fistfuls of crackling pebbles. I listened to the steadily rhythmic rubber-on-glass squealing of the windshield wipers. After a while we came to our final stop, and I heard Lydia unbuckle her seat belt, withdraw the car keys, and open the door, then the spatter and crash of rain outside, the door slamming, and I saw the door in front of me open. I saw that the downgushing rain had already darkened the fabric of her shirt, glued it to her flesh. She had no umbrella. I could see her brassiere through her shirt. I saw the rain glaze her skin. I saw her arms reach out to remove the cage. She carried me through a parking lot. I pressed my face to the grate and clung to it with my fingers. I saw cars parked in obedient rows, rainwater steaming on the hot black asphalt. It wasn’t night, but the storm’s sudden darkening of the day had triggered the streetlights, whose orange glows were mirrored in the shimmering street. We ascended a series of steps, and Lydia set my cage down while she opened a heavy door and propped it by kicking a wooden wedge under it. The rain plitted through the spaces in the grate of my cage, and the fetid flap of carpet I was sitting on began to smell worse. I stuck my tongue out to catch the thin needles of rain. I became wet. A moment later I felt myself being hoisted up again and taken inside the building. The heavy door sighed shut behind us and the atmosphere immediately became clean and quiet and dry, though the halls were noisy with the echoes of pounding raindrops. Lydia carried me through a labyrinthine network of bright hallways. Her wet sneakers scrunch-scrunch-scrunched on the floors. She stopped before two metal doors in which I saw our fuzzy reflection, and it scrolled open onto a tiny metal room. We got in and she put me on the floor, pushed a button, and the doors closed. Then a bizarre swooping sensation in my interior organs. Bing , the doors opened, she lifted my cage again and took me down another passageway, scrunch-scrunch-scrunch, until we arrived at another door, with a series of symbols printed across a smoked-glass window, which I would much later learn spelled: 308 BEHAVIORAL BIOLOGY LABORATORY. In we went. Lydia knelt on the floor and unlatched my cage, and as the door opened I tumbled out. She picked me up. She smiled, she kissed my head. Lydia was drenched, trinkets of water dappling her face, her blond hair dark, sopping, and flaccid.

We were inside a clean, bright, spacious room, furnished with several islands of long rectangular tables, on which sat computers and other kinds of lab equipment. The room was made of four whitewashed walls, two of which featured whiteboards all scrawled over with shapes and symbols in red, green, and black marker, and two of which featured wide tall windows that could not be opened. The echoes of rain crackling and drumming on the roof warbled around in the big room, and waves of water chased each other down the sides of the windows, warping the view of what lay outside the building, which involved an expanse of green grass and several trees. One of the long tables was pushed against a wall, and on it sat a large cage fashioned from thin metal bars. The floor was of shiny salmon-pink vinyl tile. A big blue squishy mat lay in one corner of the room, on which was scattered a collection of brightly colored toys. Voices conversed; wet sneakers scrunched and squeaked; white fluorescent lights buzzed overhead and cast rectangular reflections on the shiny floor; human bodies moved around in the space. I realized that I had been in this room before.

There were other humans in the room. They crowded around to have a look at me. Lydia introduced me to a man whom I recognized from the day of the peaches. She took my rubbery little hand and held it out to him for a mock handshake, and the man gently smothered it in the hot flesh of his own fat hand and smiled.

“Bruno,” said Lydia, “this is Norm. I believe you two have met each other before. Norm is the director of the Behavioral Biology Lab. Norm is a very smart man.”

“Hello, Bruno,” said Norm, as he relinquished my hand to me. “It’s an extraordinary pleasure to meet you. Do you remember me from our peaches experiment?”

I proffered him no reply.

“You showed us that day that you are a very interesting little guy, Bruno. You just might be a very important chimp.”

He smiled at Lydia and she smiled brightly back. I saw something in this exchange of faces between them that I did not like. Lydia took off her glasses and tucked a strand of hair behind her ear.

This man was Dr. Norman Plumlee. Remember that name. He was taller than Lydia but not by much, and I think he was in his late forties at the time. His face was porcine and buttery, the top of his head shiny and bald. Curly salt-and-pepper hair, more salt than pepper, wrapped around the back and sides of his head and curled over the ears into a kempt and understated beard that traced the edges of his jaw and encircled his mouth and looked like a crust of burnt toast. Unstylish glasses clamped the sides of his bulbous nose and unnaturally magnified his brown eyes, and when he raised his thick eyebrows he compressed the skin of his forehead into deep-creased strata, making his forehead look like a stack of flapjacks. His hands were thick and his fingers resembled sausages. He was overweight but not what I’d call fat. He spoke with a faint trace of an accent; I would later learn that there is a country called England, and that this man hailed from it. This meant that he incongruously added h ’s to words that don’t have them and took h ’s away from other words that do, many of his r ’s became “ahs,” and when asking a question the pitch of his voice went up-up-UP-down? instead of up-up-UP?