Benjamin Hale - The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore

And then a thing of terror happened. The only humans remaining in the room now were Norman Plumlee and Lydia. While Plumlee was busying himself with some end-of-day chores, Lydia picked me up from the surface of the squishy blue mat, where I had been idly spinning the colorful beads of the abacus, and carried me to another part of the room where, atop one of the long gray Formica tables, there stood: a cage. Yet another cage. Granted, this cage was much larger than the one in which I had been conveyed from the zoo to the laboratory, but it was a cage nonetheless. In it was a bowl filled with dry and unpalatable food pellets, and a voluminous bottle of water strapped to the bars on one side of the cage with a metal tube coming out of the bottom of it, from which I was expected to drink, like a fucking hamster. A fuzzy blanket and a squishy blue mat made of a material identical to the one on the floor covered the bottom of the cage. It was tall enough that I could easily stand up in it, and spacious enough that I could walk four or five paces from one end of it to another. I could see through all four sides of the cage, composed of thin steel bars. All told — yes, I had been in worse cages. But it was, goddammit, a cage.

Lydia placed me inside the cage and shut the door and locked it. My heart didn’t so much break as drop uncontrollably through a hollow shaft in my chest like an elevator with a snapped cable.

Dr. Plumlee joined her in looking in at me. Lydia made the same gesture of polite parting to me as the other humans had made to each other. Her wave was of the more feminine variety: with her fingers, not her hand.

“Good night, Bruno,” said Lydia, and she and the other turned to go.

They were leaving me. For emphasis, I repeat: they were leaving me .

Whether or not they were leaving me forever, I did not know. It was then that I began to realize I would never see my family again. I would never return to the zoo. Never again would I commune with other chimps, never again would I enjoy exercising my limbs on our jungle gym, never again would I have to endure my brother’s bullying or my father’s relentless emotional abuse, nor would I ever again sit in my mother’s lap, nor ever again play with Céleste.

I watched them leave together, Norman and Lydia: when they reached the door, Norm stretched out an arm and touched a row of things on the wall. I heard the noises clack clack clack , and each clack was followed by a section of the room going slowly, then quickly, dark. He clicked the last clack, eliminating the last source of buzzing fluorescent light. Lydia and Norm left the room, shutting the door behind them, ka-chunk . I heard the turning of a key in the lock. For a moment through the smoked-glass door I saw their silhouettes, their two blurry shadows facing one another, speaking. Then their voices vanished together, diminuendoing down the hallway into watery echoes punctuated by the contrapuntal rhythms of their four sneakers squeaking and scrunching on the floor, then an elevator door bing ing and bong ing and scrolling open and then shut, and then silence — and then silence.

So there I was, Gwen — alone, in silence and in darkness and locked in a cage. That morning I had woken up, as usual, with my arms and legs intertangled with the warm arms and legs of my kindred, in the wet and rank interior of our habitat in the zoo, the only home I had ever known, and now night had fallen and I was locked inside a five-by-five-foot minimally furnished cold metal cage in a strange and sterile room, alone, in the dark. The only other time in my life up until this point when I had ever been left alone in a room was during that experiment with the peaches. But because I was not alone during that period of dramatic transition from zoo to not-zoo, I had not yet felt the rush of feelings that rushed into my head now. Among them: panic, terror, abandonment.

Why was I here? Why me? Had I been placed here in this cage to be slaughtered and subsequently devoured like my paternal grandparents were years ago, in darkest Africa? Perhaps, even worse, they were never coming back. I would be left to starve to death in here. All I knew was that I was confined in a space consisting of four walls and a ceiling and a floor, and I did not know why. These thoughts all came gushing into my undeveloped consciousness at once, and a demon of rage entered me.

I screamed. I wept and I screamed. I screamed and I wept. I rattled the bars of the cage. I upset my food bowl, scattering my dehydrated food pellets, sending them skittering in every direction. I threw myself around in the cage, hooting and howling and thrashing and wailing. I ripped up the squishy blue pad on the floor, and I ripped up the fuzzy blue blanket they had given me. With my fingers and toes and gnashing teeth I tore them utterly asunder, into scraps and tatters and fluff, and threw the scraps and tatters and fluff around the cage aimlessly. I yanked hard at the bars of the cage, tried to smash them with my feeble young chimp fists and feet, but the cold hard gleaming metal of the cage did not relent. I do not know for how long I raged. Hours, perhaps. But then—

The lights in the hallway outside the laboratory door came on, in the way fluorescent lights do, the full glow preceded by three false starts. The window in the door to the lab became a luminous panel of soft white light, and the numbers and letters on the door cast shadows of themselves in long ribbons of darkness across the room, over the long tables and the squishy blue mat where my toys lay. I heard a laborious plodding of footsteps in the hall. The volume of the footsteps gradually grew and the acoustic wavelengths of their echoes shortened until the footsteps stopped outside the lab door. An amorphous black shadow loomed outside the door. I heard heavy and irregular breathing. I heard a jingling of many keys, which went on for a long time before a key was selected and pushed into the lock in the handle of the door. The lock in the door turned and the bolt slid back and clicked and the door — noiselessly, except for the sound of the handle turning and the thin peeping of the hinges — opened. In the doorway’s white light stood a large being whose details remained obscured in shadow. The being’s hand groped the wall for the clacks and clicked one, clack , and one section of lights in the room came on, nzt-nzt-nzt-nzzzzzzzzzz , and illuminated the area above my toys, such that with two competing light sources, all objects in the room were given a pair of crisscrossing shadows.

This man — whose name I did not yet know was Haywood Finch — was medium in stature and roughly potato-shaped. He was not fat — girthy, yes, but more oddly shaped than fat; his figure was, like the potato, approximately ovular in contour, no matter whether viewed frontally, antipodally, or in profile, with a big chest that sloped gracefully outward and down into a sizeable belly. Big doughy arms sprouted lumpily from his shoulders, which blubbed and glooped and gurbled into a thick lumpy neck that gracefully became a roundish and very lumpy head, which looked as if it had been sculpted out of butter and then allowed to partially melt. His hair was buzzed down to a wiry black half-centimeter of stubble, and featured on its very apex its lumpiest and most prominent lump. He had little lumpy ears that stuck out of the sides of his head like they’d been glued on by a clumsy child, and his mouth hung forever slightly open. But by far his bizarrest physical features were his eyes. One of them behaved like an ordinary human eye, but the other behaved seemingly of its own accord, looking always in a different direction, always wandering errantly toward the upper-left corner of his head. These bidirectional eyes of his burned both with a warm sweetness — like the smell of sugar caramelizing — and with a twitchy and unhinged craziness. He had a uniform on: it looked much like the uniforms the brownshirts at the zoo wore, but his pressed and collared button-down short-sleeved shirt was a light blue one instead of brown; the blue shirt had a breast pocket on one side of the chest and on the other side a flashing brass rectangle fastened on with a pin, with a series of hieroglyphics graven upon it. The shirt was covered with big wet spots and was tucked into a pair of dirty blue jeans; a damp rag dangled from the back pocket of the jeans, and from one of the belt loops of the jeans dangled a thick metal chain, from which in turn dangled a hoop of keys — dozens, maybe more than a hundred keys, and these were fascinating objects to me — and the hoop of keys was fastened to his battered leather belt by a metal clip, such that the long metal chain drooped down along one side of his thigh nearly to the knee and then sloped up again to the belt. The bottoms of his dirty jeans were tucked into heavy black grime-encrusted rubber boots.