Benjamin Hale: The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore

308: BEHAVIORAL BIOLOGY LABORATORY

I could see through the smoked-glass panel in the door, across which that number and those words were written in bold black capital block letters, that the lights were on. I could also see a shadow moving around in the room. I could see that there was something going on inside, that science was progressing in there. I took the door handle in my long purple hand, pushed it down, heard it click, found it open. I pulled the door open and stepped inside the room.

Dr. Norman Plumlee looked up from his work. He was alone in the lab. Norman Plumlee was alone, that is, except for the creature who lay restrained facedown to a bed by straps. The creature’s arms were strapped tightly to her sides. Her stumpy legs were spread-eagled and strapped down in place. A plump pink ball of flesh behind her advertised her fecundity. The fluorescent lights overhead flickered and buzzed.

The lab was somewhat altered — the squishy blue mat on which I used to play with my toys was gone. They had fancy new computers in the part of the lab where the humans worked. The thick glass enclosure that had originally been built for me was still there and showed signs of animal habitation: a tank full of drinking water, a pad and blankets for sleeping. The red plastic potty in which I had been trained to deposit my urine and feces so long ago was there again. The room smelled like the potty had recently been used, as well. The room smelled of animal: of urine, of shit, of sweat. I smelled the distinctively repulsive smell of the dehydrated food pellets that scientists always feed laboratory primates. There were orange peels strewn across the lab floor. The glass door that separated the human from the animal side of the lab was propped open. The creature was strapped to the gurneylike bed on wheels inside the glass-enclosed area. The creature who was strapped to the bed was Céleste. She had grown. (As had I, of course — both outwardly and inwardly.) There was little else behind her eyes than there had been when we were children. That is animal psychology: always the mind and soul of a child. Her gaze was syrupy with sleepiness.

Dr. Norman Plumlee, as I said, looked up from his work. There he stood, in room 308 of the Erman Biology Center at the University of Chicago, alone in the room except for Céleste, below the flickering and buzzing fluorescent lights of science. Dr. Norman Plumlee stood behind the animal, looking at the figure who had just entered the room in more confusion at first than alarm. Rage was driving the alcohol from my veins. I looked at the round black-and-white analog electric clock on the lab wall and took note of the time. It was ten after ten in the evening. From his presence in the lab — unattended, and at this time of the night — it could be deduced that perhaps Dr. Norman Plumlee was engaged in doing something he was not allowed to do. From the look on his face it would appear that I had caught Dr. Norman Plumlee doing something that he probably did not wish to be caught doing. From the look on his face I estimated that I had caught Dr. Norman Plumlee in the act of doing something that might even, were my discovery made public, jeopardize his career, or at least shame and embarrass him to where he might be hesitant to show his face on the street. Dr. Norman Plumlee was wearing turquoise-colored latex gloves and a white lab coat with the sleeves rolled up his thick and hairy forearms to his elbows. His beard had gone from salt-and-pepper utterly to salt, and his hairline had receded more. In his latex-gloved hands he held a thick clear plastic syringe. I guessed that this was an artificial inseminator. The business end of this instrument Dr. Norman Plumlee held inserted in Céleste’s squishy pink ape vulva. When I walked into the room, Dr. Norman Plumlee was in the very act of slowly depressing the button of the syringe with his thumb, pushing deep into her body whatever silvery viscous liquid was contained in the tube of the syringe. Then my eyes trickled away from them, and landed on top of one of the long gray formica lab tables, where I saw several publications of pornographic nature. I think one of them was a Hustler .

I grasped at once the nature of the experiment. I knew that it was human semen contained in that syringe, and that it was probably his own. This wasn’t science — this was rape.

Dr. Norman Plumlee did not say anything when he saw me. Nor did I. He fastidiously slid the clear plastic syringe out of Céleste, and the room was so noiseless that I could hear the faint slurp and sucking gasp of it leaving her sexual orifice even from as far away from them as I stood. He carefully set the syringe down with a click on a tray beside him. I flung my suitcase to the floor with a dull thud and a rattling of its contents. I removed my hat and threw it aside. I unbuttoned my coat, shrugged my way out of it, and folded it and threw it on top of the suitcase.

Dr. Norman Plumlee stepped toward me. I saw then in his face that he had finally recognized me.

“Bruno?” he said.

“I am Bruno Littlemore.” I spread the long purple fingers of my right hand and placed it on my chest.

“What happened to you?”

“I evolved.”

“I mean your face—”

“I evolved by surgery. Biology can only take you so far.”

He pushed his glasses up on his face with a fat finger. His shoulders were hunched up to his ears and his arms were hanging at his sides as stiffly as if his elbow joints had been glued in place. He took a few more steps in my direction.

“What are you doing to Céleste?” I said.

I could feel my body involuntarily reorganizing itself: shoulders rising, muscles condensing, twitching. Despite my evolution into a human being, I could not help displaying the outward physical signs of an animal on the verge of attack, and Dr. Plumlee recognized them.

“Bruno, Bruno,” he intoned, in an attempt at a soothing voice while moving his hands up and down in a let’s-just-calm-down-now gesture. “You’re not thinking of doing anything violent? That wouldn’t make sense.”

I saw him sidling toward a certain drawer in one of the cabinets under the lab tables.

“You created me,” I said. “And then you abandoned me. And now you’re going to do the same to Céleste.”

“We gave you a little help here, Bruno, and that is all. You created yourself.”

True as that was, I had no time to thank him for that apogee of compliments. I saw him make a swift jab for the handle of the drawer he was angling for. At that moment I realized that my days of smashing and biting were not behind me after all.

I shall not stoop to describe, Gwen, what it is like to kill a man in a fit of rage. To kill a man with one’s bare hands — not to mention feet, teeth, and a computer keyboard snatched blindly from one of the lab tables — all of which I employed to the task. For the sake of taste and decency I will not attempt to describe the feeling of causing a person’s life to flee from his body by means of brute force, nor will I discuss the feeling of watching the light being extinguished from his eyes, nor of watching his corpus go still and slack as his last breaths hiss from his lungs, as his blood goes flat in his veins and the electricity leaves his nerves. These are feelings that only murderers know, only monsters like me who have undergone this baptism of blood. I shall only remind you that an average healthy adult male chimp, such as I am now and was then, may be up to seven times stronger than a man, and that even the manhood into which I had come had not weakened the innate strength of these arms, nor had it managed to tamp out the potentiality for inner rage to become quickly sublimated into outer violence. Smashed fish tanks and whatever else aside, I had never fully made conscious use of this secret strength of mine, nor even fully realized it before. I shall only say that there wasn’t much that was recognizably human of Dr. Norman Plumlee left when I was through with him.