Benjamin Hale - The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore

“Bruno?” a voice called out to me, from some unknown height or depth.

I startled at the sound of my name. Somehow, all of those beautiful plastic girls, all those bright sexy fake-eyed lingerie-clad girls came tumbling and crashing down all around me like trunks of falling timber.

“Bruno!” Lydia shouted. She stomped toward me, burdened with big plastic sacks full of my new clothes swishing in her hands. I squatted on the display dais, cowering. My hands were cravenly slapped over my eyes, such that I resembled the first of the Three Wise Monkeys. The mannequins may still have been clattering and bouncing all around me.

“What are you doing?” Lydia hissed. Her head snapped up and looked around to see if anyone had noticed. Someone had. Lydia was so red I was afraid she would begin to bleed from her face in her shame of me. She grabbed my arm and savagely jerked me out of the jumble of felled mannequins, my fallen angels. She whipped my leash out of her purse, seized my collar, rotated it on my throat until the clip was in the front and attached the leash.

“What were you thinking?” she spat in my ear in a whisper. One of the salesgirls who worked in this area of the store was now clacking rapidly toward us. She was young and wearing an inch of makeup, with a name tag pinned to her shirt and high-heeled shoes of the same sort that my mannequin was wearing, exposing her tiny pretty feet and painted toenails. Those shoes, her feet — her toes, the gracile slope of her instep, her ankles — were mouthwatering to me.

The bags full of my new clothes lay beside us on the floor in a big puffy pile. Lydia was holding on to my leash with one hand while trying to reerect one of the mannequins. Her face was still enflamed with the hot blood of humiliation, and she was nervously, compulsively, tucking strands of hair behind the ridges of her ears.

“I’m so sorry,” Lydia said to the salesgirl.

“Don’t worry about it,” she said. “Please. We’ll take care of it.”

Lydia stopped trying to set the mannequin back up, but she hadn’t balanced it properly, and it immediately tipped over again, clattering and thudding back to the floor.

“I’m so sorry,” said Lydia. “I’m so embarrassed.”

“Please, we’ll take care of it.”

Then the salesgirl saw my face. She looked at my ape face under the hood of my floppy green sweatshirt. We locked eyes for a moment. She jumped back. We both shrieked. She began to back slowly away.

“Sorry,” said Lydia one last time, this time with a curt snort, and she snatched up the shopping bags in her fists and jerked on my leash. We fled. We left the store in a scramble of fear and desperation. We got caught in the revolving glass doors with the poofy plastic bags. Lydia jerked it loose and we tumbled through the glass merry-go-round and out onto the street. I clung to Lydia, my arms around her neck, my legs wrapped around her waist. She yanked the hood low over my head. She struggled under the combined burden of me and the plastic sacks full of my new clothes. She walked quickly down the sidewalk and around the corner, as if we were being pursued (we weren’t).

After we’d put a block or two behind us, she ducked into a doorway to escape the currents of pedestrian traffic on the sidewalk. She stopped, collected herself, and gave me a kiss of absolution for my recent sins on my forehead. I’d been in a state of shame at the embarrassment I had caused her, but that kiss instantly made me feel better. Such was the power of her forgiveness, her touch. We passed a flower shop, where there was a sidewalk display of pale green roses. Lydia bought a dozen of them, and the man behind the counter in the store wrapped them up for her in a cone of crinkling cellophane and another cone of paper. She asked him how he made the roses green. He told her he put dye in the soil.

I was allowed to hold them. I crushed the green flowers to my face and deeply sniffed them, and loved their gorgeous smell. Lydia hailed a taxi, which we rode back home. There, she cut the stems of the flowers and put them in an empty spaghetti sauce jar full of clear cool water from the tap and put them on the dining table for a centerpiece. I tried on all my new clothes, and Lydia one by one snipped off the tags for me with the same pair of scissors she had used to cut the stems of the green roses, and rooted through the folds of each article of clothing looking for pins and bits of plastic and stickers needing removal.

In the lab, everything was different. The lab was where Lydia and I went to work. At the lab we did what Norm wanted us to do. Norm was the boss of the lab, and, by extension, when I was in the lab, this meant he was my boss, too.

The difference between Lydia’s and Norm’s approaches to the project — the “project” that was my life — becomes evident in merely contrasting their personalities. For one thing, Norm was considerably older than Lydia, and when I met him he was already a scientist standing on a whole career’s worth of respect and distinction: tenured at his university, the value of his opinion secure in the scientific community. He sloughed his classes off on his teaching assistants, usually not even bothering to attend them. His science was rigorous, skeptical, fiercely adherent to responsible methodology. I’m not saying that Lydia’s methodology was sloppy by comparison — far from it. It’s only that Lydia was young, untested, untenured, scarcely published, only recently matriculated, and almost unknown in the world of science. She held a doctorate in cognitive psychology and a master’s in — not physical, but cultural — anthropology, whereas Norm was a behavioral biologist, through and through. Norm was a Skinnerian at heart, an operant conditioner, a pleasure-and-pain man, a pigeon-pecker. To Norm, if something couldn’t be meticulously and unambiguously measured and documented, then it could not be published in any way, ergo it did not “count.”

I sensed tension between them. Or thought I sensed it, or at least now I think I thought I sensed it, many years in retrospect. I sensed it in the way a child senses that his parents are fighting with each other, even if they conduct their arguments out of earshot. This philosophical gulf between them yawned ever wider over the duration of the project. Although I spent the vast majority of my time at home with Lydia, she would obligingly drive me to the lab nearly every day to do experiments with Norm.

During this time, Lydia was like a loving and permissive mother to me, and Norm was like a stern schoolmaster. I resented the way Lydia seemed to defer respect to Norm. From what source did Norm derive such respect? I knew nothing of — nor did I care anything for — anyone’s tenure or publishing history or the thickness of curricula vitae. (Now that I do know of these things, I care for them even less.) At home, with Lydia, Norm’s system of rewarding me for virtually everything — giving me a peanut, a piece of fruit or candy or whatever was on offer for every task I performed correctly — had been utterly abandoned, although this system was still pretty much in place at the lab, where the immediately gratifiable desires of my stomach apparently ruled, because they were all that could be methodologically counted on. If I did not always want a sticky delicious little piece of candy to put inside me, then Norm’s whole silly Skinnerian system of positive reinforcement for desired behavior would fall apart. Which it often did! The problem with Norm’s dogmatic insistence on his methodology of rewarding my behavior with food was that sometimes I didn’t really want the reward. I just wasn’t hungry. So, as a rigid behaviorist (I’m afraid nothing ever really changed his mind about that), what Norm realized he needed was some sort of objective currency, something that could be divided into small increments that would always be held to be valuable and desirable in and of themselves. Something I would always want. Essentially, what he needed to establish in my consciousness in order to keep up the simplistic yes/no/yes/no format of operant conditioning was a concept of abstract economics, some notion of, basically, money.