Benjamin Hale - The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore

So there I sat in room 308: BEHAVIORAL BIOLOGY LABORATORY, in that place that I had once known as a home and once again known as a workplace. The place that had helped my consciousness into existence. I had nothing left. Lydia was gone. Tal did not want me. Leon had gone to California. I could not have gone back to the zoo. I could not go back to science. I could not live in the world, either: I had just committed murder.

The lab was dirty with blood. The furniture was overturned, the glass cracked, the computers lay in ruins, broken scientific equipment and all kinds of machines were smashed and scattered across the floor, and the remains of a well-respected scientist lay slumped in a corner of the room in a puddle of blood that was quickly spreading across the floor. Who would have thought the old man had so much blood in him? The fluorescent lights above me flickered and buzzed.

I unstrapped Céleste from the bed to which she had been restrained in order to be raped by science. Her wrists and ankles were swollen and bruised from where she had been strapped down. How love must suffer in this stern world. I helped Céleste climb down from the sacrificial bed. She had obviously been drugged. She could not walk or crawl on her own. Her knees caved beneath her. Her movements were sluggish. Her eyes were heavy-lidded, feverish, and glassy.

There was a sink in the lab, where I washed the blood from my hands as best I could. I put on my hat and coat. I unsnapped the locks of my suitcase and took out some clothes, and dressed Céleste in them. She was a little smaller than me, the clothes were baggy on her. I gave her some pants, and dressed her in the same droopy-sleeved green hooded sweatshirt that I used to wear when I was very young, in which Lydia used to dress me when we went out in public, to hide me, to avoid suspicion. I shut the suitcase and picked it up. We were almost out the door when another thought came to me, and, following the thought, I went back to the body of the dead scientist, and searched through his pockets until I found his wallet. My shoes stepped in the blood. I slipped the wallet into the pocket of my coat. Then together Céleste and I struggled through the door that led into and out of 308: BEHAVIORAL BIOLOGY LABORATORY and into the hallway, which had gone dark again, and which our presence lit up again. We walked — she leaning on me, and me doing most of the walking — down the hall, and we rode the elevator to the first floor, and I guided her out and down another hallway toward the door.

Behind us, far down the hallway and out of sight, as we were nearing the door, I heard the peep and squeal of the wheels of a cart — and, very slowly, I heard a softly muted form of a familiar series of sounds: first the quarter-beat of the heel of a boot making contact with the floor, followed immediately by the clomp of the rest of the foot coming down, and then the deft squeak of the toe launching the foot on its journey toward the next step, then a loop of chain whapping against a denim-clad thigh, and the tinkling of a hoop of many keys: kLOMPa-whap-SHLINK — kLOMPa-whap-SHLINK — kLOMPa-whap-SHLINK…

I saw that I had left a trail of footprints in blood behind me in the hallway.

I grabbed the handle of the door that led out and pushed on it, and we left. The door whispered shut, clunked, and locked behind us. I wiped the bottoms of my shoes off in the grass.

How love must suffer in this stern world. How love must suffer.

With most of the money I had left from New York I paid for another taxi to take us northward out of Hyde Park. I told the driver to let us out when we were passing between the stony feet of the skyscrapers of the Loop, and I asked for a room at the Palmer House Hilton on Monroe and State. We had ducked inside the hotel almost at random. It was raining again, and deep night. I was still woozy-brained with drink, and Céleste was drugged and stumbling. Two small figures, their clothes soaked flat to their suspiciously proportioned little bodies, waddled past a doorman in a cap and gloves and a brilliant bottle-green coat with shiny gold buttons, pushed through the hotel’s revolving glass doors, wandered through the elegant underbelly below the hotel’s main lobby, found an escalator, and rode it up a floor to a high-ceilinged and spacious and crapulously decorated lobby, all gilded neoclassical ornaments and Corinthian columns and so forth, glass and brass, golden-veined expanses of marble, painted plaster and potted ferns. I yanked the hood of my floppy green sweatshirt low over Céleste’s face, to hide her apeness. At the golden-veined marble slab of the hotel’s front desk I booked a nonsmoking room with one king-size bed on the nineteenth floor. I put it on Dr. Norman Plumlee’s credit card. I kept my hat tipped low over my features. The mirror-paneled elevator whooshed us up to the nineteenth floor in seconds — so fast it was slightly nauseating — and we scurried down the hallway and found the door to our room. I slid the keycard inside, watched a light flash green, and pushed the door open. I flicked on a light, took the sign reading DO NOT DISTURB from the other side of the door and affixed it onto the outer door handle, then shut the door, locked it, and clapped the hasp of the door guard over its brass knob.

We drew the curtains over the window and did not leave the room for three days. We hung our damp clothes from the shower curtain rod in the bathroom, and went naked for the rest of the time. The room immediately took on the smell of damp fur, and the smell got mustier and more mildewy over the course of the next three days. We ordered up food for ourselves from room service, always instructing the staff to leave the trays of food outside the door. We dined on steak. We dined on lobster. We ordered up bottles of wine. We dined on prosciutto and melons, chilled oysters, oxtail, salmon, duck, soft-boiled quail’s eggs and venison sausage, and ordered crème brûlée and chocolate mousse cake and sweet port wine for dessert. All of it went on Norm’s MasterCard. We let the dirty dishes stack up on the floors. We held on to one another for long hours. I gave Céleste whiskey and wine. I told her stories about my long adventure in human civilization, and she blinked dumbly at me, pursed her lips, and scratched her hairy protuberant belly. I tried to show her how to use the toilet, but she did not comprehend me. When she shat on the floor I dutifully picked it up in a wad of toilet paper and disposed of it. I read to her from the Bible we found in the drawer of the dresser: for idle entertainment I read her Genesis and Job and the Song of Solomon — and Céleste blinked dumbly at me, pursed her lips, and scratched her belly. On the first night we stripped the quilt and the tightly tucked crisp white sheets from the mattress and tore them into fine shreds, and we ripped open the plush pillows piled at the headboard, and we scattered all the tatters and soft feathery fluff around on the bed and wadded it into a warm fluffy nest on top of the mattress, in which we would lie together all day and all night, in our nest, in a lazy-limbed embrace, napping. Soon, having no clear use for them otherwise, we also shredded the various literatures provided in the room — the Bible, the phone book, and a copy of Be My Guest , the autobiography of Conrad Hilton (the room service menu we spared) — and we scattered the shredded pages all over the carpeted floor of the room. Sometimes, for recreation, we would jump up and down on the bed until we collapsed from exhaustion and mirth. At these times I could never help but to sing aloud: two little monkeys, jumping on the bed… and as I sang this song, this children’s song, Céleste would howl and pant-hoot and shriek along to the tune in very approximate accompaniment — no doubt causing much wonder as to the nature of our racket in the adjacent rooms. Other times, we would sit up on the bed in our fluffy nest and watch TV. We watched TV while Céleste sat behind me and went through the motions of grooming me, even though I had no fur, and then we would switch places, and I picked and combed my fingers through the fur on her back, just as we had done when we were children. So we sat on the bed and took turns grooming one another, with plates of gourmet food sitting before us in the nest of tatters and fluff on top of the mattress, and I cut her steaks into bite-size pieces for her, and she would daintily pinch up the little bits of meat in her long purple fingers and insert them between her wide pink lips and chew them, and we sipped our wine, and we watched TV. We watched soap operas. We watched sitcoms. We watched daytime talk shows. We watched late-night talk shows. We watched music videos. We watched old movies — the movies I used to watch with Leon: with Greta Garbo, the Marx Brothers, Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn, Jimmy Stewart, Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, Errol Flynn, Laurence Olivier, and Orson Welles. We also watched Sesame Street , so that Céleste too could know the joys of Bert and Ernie. We watched interesting pornographic films that we ordered to the room on Norm’s credit card. And — perhaps most important — we watched cartoons! We watched Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck! Goofy and Donald Duck! We watched the cartoons that take eternal pursuit as their theme: both the amorous pursuit of lover and beloved — such as Pepé Le Pew, that French skunk undaunted in his unrequited and mistaken love for a black cat whose back has been accidentally painted with a white stripe — as well as the violent pursuit of predator and prey: Coyote and Road Runner, Sylvester and Tweety, Tom and Jerry… all that mythic pursuit! — the endless flux of the chase, the magnetic push-and-pull of aggression and defense, of repulsion and desire!.. perhaps the true spirit of myth — of Echo and Narcissus, of Achilles and Hector — survives for us, in its pure form, only in cartoons.