Benjamin Hale - The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore

Lydia wrapped me in a blanket for my journey across campus, and cradled me in her arms, my legs curled around her sides with my toes hooked together and my arms around her neck. The clusters of students standing around conversing looked up and smiled and gawked at me. The weather was still warm but getting chillier. Fat gray pigeons hopped stupidly among the yellow leaves that now littered the ground, and in the trees periodic bursts of throaty awaw ing came from beaks of dirty black crows. We entered a building much older than the one I was ordinarily kept in. The wind we made in the hallways rustled leaflets and fliers and posters tacked to corkboards or taped to the walls. We entered a small classroom through a heavy brown door that whispered and clunked shut behind us. The students were sitting in their seats, talking. Conversation subsided as Lydia walked to the front of the room and set me down on the surface of the desk. Let’s say there were twenty-five students in the room. Lydia began to speak. Some of the students began scratching markings into notebooks with pens or pencils. Lydia had her glasses on, and her hair was bound back in its academic ponytail. I sat on the desk and played with my toes. I looked out upon the faces of the students sitting silent and obedient at their desks. Fifty eyes trained on me as Lydia spoke. Many of these eyes were set in the heads of smooth-skinned young girls, some of whom had even removed their flip-flops, and were sitting with one foot playfully toeing the tripartite juncture of the plastic flip-flop strap and the other crossed beneath her in such a way as to show me the sole of her bare foot, with its callused heel stained yellow and green from the grass. Never before had I been in a room with so many grass-stained bare feet and skirts and breasts and so much soft sweaty flesh and long glossy hair in it. I could not concentrate at all on my work.

When Lydia finished speaking, her students pushed their desks into the corners of the room to make a wide clearing for me. Lydia placed me in the center of the room. Then she picked up the cardboard box that I have erstwhile forgotten to mention and dumped its contents out before me. It was Norm’s box of curiosities: the stones, the washers, the pencils, the plastic flowers, and the stuffed animals.

Lydia bade me to sort them. The task was embarrassingly simple. All I had to do was to recognize that a pencil — though it may differ in its specific physical details from all other pencils — is similar enough to other pencils, to a sort of Platonic ideal of “Pencil,” that it may reasonably be grouped with other pencils and not, say, with a stone. This concept — the generalized cataloging of the things of the world — underlies much language. I had sorted these objects thousands of times. Today, I held my feet in my hands in the center of the room and dumbly stared at them.

I looked around me at all the young men and young women in the room. I looked especially at the young women. God, the smell of them. Their perfume, or whatever it was, their washed skin, their hair, the misty films of sweat in their armpits and knees and thighs, the smell of shampoos and conditioners, of soaps and freshly shaven legs — their grass-stained bare feet — their bright breasts heaving beneath their shirts…. Lydia flapped a treat before me. She sat down with me in the clearing with the pile of objects that lay unsorted at my feet — she spoke to me, cooing instructions. She organized the artifacts for me, then put them back in the box, shook it vigorously, and dumped them out again.

I could not concentrate at all. The students laughed. What began as a few desultory twitters and snickers soon crested into a half-muffled wave of derisive cackling. Lydia spoke and spoke and spoke to me, entreating me to do something —sort the objects? — perform some of my signs? — show them what you can do! — the things I taught you!

Of course I understood her words, I grasped the meanings of her signs — but the links between the signs and their meanings dissolved in the air before they reached me. I simply sat there in the center of the room, mutely, stupidly, intermittently picking up an item here and there — a pencil, a plastic flower, a stuffed animal — fingering it disinterestedly, and putting it down again: behaving, in other words, exactly like an ordinary chimpanzee, rather than the genius chimp they had apparently been expecting. Lydia flushed and grew frustrated with me — infuriated, even.

Then: I smelled something. Something — specific, some smell that I had not previously noticed in the room. I detected some faint but definitely present smell, a strange odor, oily and fleshy and sticky and briny and very, very human. I looked around the room, at all the bare legs, the flip-flops and the sticky thighs. There was a certain girl — oh, she was beautiful — this certain girl, so smooth, so soft, so bright — I could smell the films of sweat in the pits of her knees, between her toes, her thighs — she had an outrageous mane of thick black hair, a pair of mountainous breasts, seismically rising and falling under her clothes, filling me with violent desire. Her legs were effeminately crossed beneath a knee-length orange skirt made of a thin stretchy material, and one of her flip-flops — she was wearing orange flip-flops that matched the skirt — one of her sweaty squishy flip-flops dangled from the big toe of her bare foot, which she held partially aloft, bobbing the flip-flop, slapping it softly against her heel by pushing on the front of it with her toe. Her toenails were painted red. This faint smell, this weird oily briny coppery smell — this smell, I believed, originated from her .

I put down the stick or stone or stuffed animal or whatever it was that Lydia had just thrust into my hands and begged me to categorize, and I approached this woman, those legs, those yellow-and-green-stained feet, those blood-red toenails, those sweaty squishy orange flip-flops — that smell — and I crawled across the room to her. My limp leash dragged tinkling on the floor behind me. This girl was gnawing on the end of her pen and slapping her flip-flop against her heel. She realized that I was coming for her. She put down her pen, allowed the leg in question to descend and crossed it with the other, and as she did, that curious odor sharply, briefly spiked in pungency, and I had absolutely no doubt now that it was she whom I sought. I was getting curiouser and curiouser. I came closer, and at first the girl reached out to me with her pretty slender hands — the nail of each of her fingers was likewise painted red to match her toes — and I sniffed at her fingers, and determined that they were not what I was after. My head dove down to her legs. I sniffed her grass-stained feet, her sweaty squishy orange flip-flops… getting closer, closer…

The girl emitted an involuntary squeak of shock. She recoiled from me in terror. She shoved her hands deep between her legs and bunched up the material of the orange skirt. I was trying to burrow my head beneath her skirt.

This is what I was doing when Lydia, in a fury, snatched at my leash and jerked me back, choking me. She tore me away from her.

I noticed then that all the other students were laughing. Roaring, thunderous with gleeful derisive laughter. All except for the girl herself — my wild-maned red-toed sweaty sticky squishy smelly girl — no, she was not laughing. She was burning. Her face was stained such a brutal shade of crimson that it looked like she was tied to the stake and burning, burning to death for passively committed blasphemies of medieval imagination, burning in order to be purified of some supernatural miasma cleansable only by passionate licks of fire, burning for witchcraft, burning, perhaps, for the visitation of an incubus…