Benjamin Hale: The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore

I suppose I shouldn’t say moronic, because that experiment was what marked me as different right from the beginning. Of course I had no idea what was going on at the time. I had not yet acquired language, so I couldn’t have articulated my thoughts. (That, by the way, is the ironic thing about acquiring language relatively late in life: words don’t exist to adequately describe what it’s like when that tempest of wordless thoughts whirling around in your head suddenly snaps to definition; that great hop from prelinguistic to linguistic is squarely in the realm of the ineffable.) As far as I knew, all that was going on was this: I was taken into a small, empty white room with a long rectangular reflective panel embedded in one wall. (I now realize this was a one-way mirror, behind which another scientist was probably watching me like a voyeur with an eye to a keyhole.) The scientist who had conducted me into the room was not the woman whom I would later come to know as Lydia (was that you watching from behind the mirror, Lydia?), but some droll old fat bearded sot who held no special interest for me. There was a transparent plastic box on the floor. The scientist produced from the pocket of his white coat — with the excessively theatrical flourish of an amateur magician — a peach.

A peach, Gwen — he was my serpent and I was his Eve. There we were, me in my prelapsarian nudity and he in his demonic white coat, tempting me with fruit coveted but prohibited. The only difference was environmental: we’d swapped sexy Edenic lushness for the sterile whitewashed walls of Science. Also, that particular fruit is semiotically associated with the female pudenda, isn’t it? Isn’t that why Cézanne painted them? — Still Life with Peaches ? — why, that’s just a quivering bowlful of vulvae sweating on the breakfast table, waiting for you to eat them up!

But the peach in question: so he takes, this scientist does, he takes a juicy piggish bite out of it and starts making yummy-yum-yum noises, mmmmmm , rubbing his belly, trying to goad my jealousy, you see. And as I recall, it worked. I was a simpler creature then. I remember wanting the peach at that moment more than anything. Hell, I would have sold my soul for a peach. (And in a way I did.) I remember hating, no, loathing that old smug fat imperious blob for the way he lorded the fruit over me so. So he took his bite, breaking the skin, releasing into the room the ambrosial aroma of that sticky wet fleshy treat, and then he, bastard, pushed me away when I reached for it. Then, turning to the box — transparent plastic box on the floor, remember? — he operated some sort of device which made the lid spring open, placed the peach inside and shut the lid. I was watching his actions with curiosity and a motley of deadly sins: greed, envy, gluttony, lust. Then, the demonstration: the box-opening mechanism consisted of a button and a lever; he pressed the button; then he rapped on the lid of the box three times with his knuckles, like this— knock, knock, knock ; then he flipped the lever and the lid of the box popped open. He reached in and — again, moving his arms in such a grossly histrionic manner it was as if he wanted the people in the nosebleed seats to see what he was doing and making a face like Look, Bruno, what do we have here? — extracted the peach.

Again I reached for it. Again he pushed me away. Then he put the peach back in the box, promptly left the room and pulled the door shut behind him. Bruno was alone.

Alone with the box, with the peach clearly visible but locked away inside, forbidden to Bruno. I looked at it a moment. I pressed the button, knocked thrice on the lid, flipped the lever, opened the box and removed the peach. Did I dare to eat a peach? Indeed I did.

In this way I fell from my state of innocence.

The door opened, I was escorted out and my brother, Cookie, in, where I understand the same procedure was repeated on him. A little while later all three of us — Cookie, Céleste, and I — had made it through the first round, and I was taken back into the room, until they decided enough time had elapsed to renew my appetite.

Only this time— this time, it was Lydia — gorgeous-smelling Lydia, my human peach — who attended me into the little room with the box. Just being alone in a room with that woman was enough. And now she removed a peach from the pocket of her white coat, she took a sopping wet bite out of it and took her sweet time chewing. Then she placed the peach inside the box, waited a moment, pressed the button, knocked her knuckles on the lid three times, click-click-click , flipped the lever that opened the box and retrieved the peach. After locking it up again she left the room, though I entreated her to stay. Alone, I again in turn pressed the button, tap-tap-tapped, flipped the lever and proceeded to feast: but this peach tasted so much richer than the first, as it was imbued with the magic of her touch — with her lips , no less — her tongue! — I had seen that woman put her mouth on this object! The vicarious contact made me insane with desire. I would have preferred her to chew the peach to a pulp and sensuously ooze it intermingled with her own fluids into my mouth. I ate every shred of the thing, every last ort and fiber and dribble of nectar and then sucked on the stone for an hour after and became enraged— enraged! — when the other scientists tried to take it from me: I kept it securely in my cheek and would under no circumstances relinquish it, until, yes, Lydia, Lydia herself coaxed me to surrender it by holding her hand to my mouth, and, finally, I willingly spat the stone, slick with my saliva, into the cup of her pretty hand.

Anyway, this bizarre and (to me at the time) unfathomable procedure was repeated again and again all day until it looked like we’d all had our fill of their fucking peaches.

Much later, Dr. Lydia Littlemore would explain to me why my performance on that day had marked me as extraordinary. In retrospect I understand now what I could only feel at the time. As I’ve said, I did not yet have language. This is not to say that I did not have a consciousness in those days, or that I did not have thoughts — I certainly did — but I had none of these traps in which to capture and keep them — words. Back then my thoughts could only trickle through my head in a liquid state; trying to think clearly was like trying to drink water out of cupped hands: most of it drips through your fingers before you’ve really had a chance to drink, and you remain thirsty still — thirsty, and ignorant. When my consciousness was solidified enough to understand, Lydia told me that I had participated in a psychological experiment they were running on two groups, human infants and preadolescent chimpanzees. The experiment goes like this. You have this transparent Plexiglas box with a door that can be opened by a mechanism requiring a two-step process to unlatch: press the button and flip the lever. You place inside the box something the infant or chimpanzee is supposed to want, in my case a peach — and this, in my opinion, is the most problematic aspect of the experiment. What complex being will always want a peach? Suppose I wasn’t hungry? Am I supposed to be a creature of such brainlessly insatiate appetite that given the opportunity I would cram every last peach on the planet into my ravenous maw? Later in my life, when I was sitting in on an introductory course in microeconomics at the University of Chicago, I realized that economists tend to think about their fellow sapiens sapiens in exactly these terms. Rational choice theory, so they call it: Homo economicus . Fools! The thing that defines us rational creatures, like you and me, Gwen, is precisely the fact that we’re not always rational.