Benjamin Hale: The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore

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.

Lydia 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.

My course of direction somehow took shape: at first subconsciously, and then consciously.

I walked down Fifty-third until I turned south on University, then walked another three blocks, across the wide bustling expanse of Fifty-fifth, past the soccer field, block by block, the university buildings looking more and more like medieval fortresses, all buttressed and turreted and bulwarked and with gargoyles squatting bat-winged and freakish at the corners of the sills, vomiting rainwater from their open mouths, now a right on Fifty-seventh, now passing through the tabernacular gatehouse, then across the main quad to the Erman Biology Center at the University of Chicago.

The door was locked. I stood on tiptoes to look through the narrow window in the door. I rattled the door handle. I punched the door and hurt my hand. I stood there in front of the door for an hour. Eventually, a young man — what looked like a student, working late at a lab — walked out the door. My coat soaked through, rainwater dribbling from the brim of my hat, I pushed past him when he opened the door. He held it open for me as he was going out. Then I watched a spasm of doubt play across his features: his unthinking politeness at holding the door open for me was interrupted by caution. He realized that I might not be allowed into the building. I shoved my way past him. My hat passed just beneath his arm as I angrily banged my suitcase through the narrow passageway. Once inside the hall I turned back and saw his face in the window, giving me a quizzical and offended look through the narrow window in the door as it was sighing shut and the lock clunking. Then he rolled his eyes and went away. I ignored him. I waddled down the hallway. My wet shoes squawked and crunched on the salmon-pink vinyl floor. I passed under fluorescent lights that reflected white rectangles on the floor. I pressed the arrow-shaped Up button beside the elevator. The elevator happened to be resting on the ground floor, and so the doors rolled immediately open for me. I stepped inside, and with a long purple finger depressed the button labeled 3. The elevator bore me whooshing upward two floors, stopped, and opened, and I stepped out. The hallway was in darkness, but when I stepped out of the elevator my presence triggered the energy-saving fluorescent lights, which began to buzz and flicker on above me as my shoes squawked and crunched on the floor. The lights roused on one by one in my wake, illuminating the white walls and pink floors with the cold fluorescent glow of science. The flickering lights illuminated the doors to rooms 302, 304, and 306, and at the next door, I stopped: