Benjamin Hale - The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore

It must have been a few weeks later when I bit Tal’s finger off. Though to be perfectly fair to me, she had been doing something I found irritating. Also it was essentially unintentional. I had only meant to give her finger a punitive little nibble, I certainly didn’t mean to bite the whole thing off .

We had been seeing a lot of Tal lately. She and Lydia had been having their little sleepovers with increasing frequency in recent weeks. Lydia had even taken me to Tal’s apartment, where I once spent a terrifying night sleeping on the foldout couch in her living room. Tal Gozani’s apartment was the opposite of Lydia’s. Whereas Lydia’s apartment was a clean and psychologically comforting space, Tal’s living quarters were like some cluttered gypsy bazaar, where one half-expected to hear the whine of a snake charmer’s flute weaving through the air amid all that chaotic gimcrackery of bottles, cups, candles, baubles, trinkets, gewgaws, and musical instruments (a French horn, a banjo, a guitar). The apartment was small, just three little rooms: a bedroom, a grimy nook of a bathroom, and a sitting room/dining room/kitchen that Tal also used as a puppet-making workshop. A massive rough wooden worktable was pushed against one wall, dwarfing the rest of the furniture in the room. The surface of the table was where she made all her silly disgusting horrific puppets, and it was cluttered with all kinds of tools and materials — pliers, wires, paints, brushes, glue, wood, putty, clay, fabric, scissors, knives, hammers, awls, hooks, clasps, rubber bands, string, buttons, ribbons, needles, thread — a whole arsenal of implements that were apparently necessary to the business of puppet production and which made the room look like a place where industrious elves make toys. In this room it was impossible to determine where the precise boundaries of the space were because it was so cluttered with needless bric-a-brac. And puppets. The room was: filled — with — puppets . There was that Mr. Punch puppet that had horrified me so, and his wife, Judy, hanging on the pegs of a hat tree. Tal made both hand puppets and marionettes. There was a jester, a skeleton, a chef, an alien, a witch, a sailor, a cowboy, an Arabian belly dancer, a robot, a pirate, a Cossack, a rabbi, a genie, a knight, a king, a queen, a princess, a matador, a three-piece mariachi band. There were monkeys, bats, turtles, horses, cows, pigs, rabbits. Tal suspended her puppets from hooks screwed into the ceiling and walls, such that all her eerie wooden homunculi dangled on their strings like hangmen all over the room, with their hideous expressions, their gawky shiny lacquered faces leering pruriently down at me everywhere I went.

And those are just the visuals of the place. As for the audibles, the olfactibles and the tactiles? Tal had these thin brown sticks that she would light on fire with a match, which slowly smoldered away into thin snakes of ash in their shallow brass trays, and as they burned they gave off musky odors that intermingled with the distinctive smell of the fat white cigarettes she sometimes smoked. She lived in an old wooden building, as creaky and leaky as a ship in a storm, situated in some far-flung area of the city that I don’t believe I’ve been to since. The final unsettling touch to this environment was that she lived directly below the tracks of the L. If you looked out her kitchen window you would see the sooty iron latticework that supported the elevated tracks, and periodically the whole apartment was set to shuddering and rumbling as the train blasted over us in the night.

I remember that evening vaguely. Usually Tal would visit us in our far more pleasant environs, and during these visits Lydia would insert an animated film for me— Cinderella, Pinocchio , etc. — into our television, which happily distracted my attention while the two of them sat on the couch, cuddling and cooing and sometimes smoking one of Tal’s lumpy white cigarettes. But for some reason, tonight we were visiting Tal’s place. And Tal — being no great lover of the candy frivolities of contemporary Western civilization — did not own a TV. Being in that place was like being in a store that sells expensive and fragile things. I was afraid to touch anything for fear that I would be castigated if something broke. So for entertainment I had to content myself with wandering her tiny apartment and visually inspecting the outlandish objects therein. I remember sitting with Lydia and Tal on her cramped, mildewy, musty-smelling couch and watching Tal page through a scrapbook of photographs, pointing at each one and explaining it to Lydia. There were lots of pictures of Tal standing around in some dusty brown godforsaken moonscape of a place that for some reason she kept insisting is real, even though Lydia did not appear to doubt the photographic evidence of its existence. She said she had been working on a caboose.

Lydia’s and Tal’s shared mood became sillier and sillier as the evening wore on. Tal’s company had an interesting effect on Lydia. Tal certainly lightened her spirits, that I will admit. When the two of them were together they even began to take on one another’s speech patterns and gestural mannerisms. When they would talk together they would almost mirror each other. Lydia began gesticulating when she talked in the same ways that Tal did, and vice versa. Lydia would absorb Tal’s habit of pulling her bare feet up beneath her and sitting cross-legged on a couch with her hands in front of her, grabbing her ankles through the triangle of space in her lap. They sat across from each other on the couch like this, and when Lydia’s hand fluttered to her face to tuck an errant strand of thin blond hair behind the ridge of her ear, Tal’s hand would unconsciously mirror the movement in sympathy, even though her own unruly cords of hair were too thick to stay in place. In this way, they talked and laughed and touched each other’s hands and drank wine and smoked the lumpy white cigarettes all night, their mood becoming ever sillier.

Eventually they became so disastrously silly that in the course of the evening, after food, after wine, as Lydia and Tal were passing one of their lumpy white cigarettes back and forth between them on the couch, they offered it to me. Perhaps I had reached for it in curiosity, and they interpreted this as a request. I accepted it: I took the smoldering thing between my little rubbery fingers as I had seen them do, I put it between my lips as I had seen them do, and I breathed it in as I had seen them do, bringing the hot pungent-smelling smoke deep inside my body. I exhaled, and then coughed — I coughed and wheezed and sputtered, choking on the smoke. My eyes watered and my throat constricted. I recovered soon after and felt better. And then I began to feel a feeling that was totally unprecedented by any of my previous experience with the world. It was like I had swallowed a jellyfish egg, and now it was growing inside my stomach, the amorphous gelatinous creature pulsing and throbbing deep within me. I felt exhausted and yet hyperalert at the same time. My head was floating like a balloon several feet above my body. Lydia held me, I curled up in her arms, and she stroked my fur with her hands and kissed the top of my head.

And then they started playing with the puppets. They took them down from their hooks in the walls and ceilings. Tal’s fingers crossed over and under the wooden X that controlled the limbs and head of one of the marionettes — it was the skeleton puppet — and the limp dead thing turned alive — dangling from her hand it was suddenly kissed with the breath of life. It even had a distinct personality. The bones came alive and danced, like the vision of Ezekiel. This time, I was cognizant enough that the puppet was not a real creature that I was content to observe it without feeling too much wild trepidation in my heart. One of the musical instruments Tal had in her apartment was a guitar. I do not remember how the guitar got to be in Lydia’s hands, but suddenly, it was there. There were many things I did not know about Lydia, things I had never wondered about because they were so beyond my conceptions of what was even possible. One of these things I had never known before was that Lydia knew how to play the guitar. She laughed a nervous little laugh when the thing was first in her arms, apologizing, excuse-making for her playing before she’d even begun to play, saying how she was years out of practice and so on. Tal said, don’t be modest, I don’t care, let’s hear you play it. I can’t play it, she said. Lydia strummed it once, and frowned at how out of tune it was. She twanged a string, with her head bent low over the golden body of hollow wood, her hair hanging down over the hole in the middle of it. She listened, her eyes closed in concentration, and with her left hand screwed and unscrewed the keys on the long end of the instrument while checking and balancing the looseness or tightness of the strings by softly hitting them with the knuckle of her thumb. Tal waited for her to tune the guitar with the skeleton marionette crumpled at her feet in a pile of painted wooden bones, and I watched. When she thought she had it tuned Lydia strummed it again, and the warm full note whanged out loudly and faded away, and with it the skeleton rose up from the floor. Lydia began to play a song on the guitar. I was amazed at the way her lithe strong slender fingers squeezed notes from that delicate machine of wood and wire. It was a joyful song, it was joyful noise. On the floor, the skeleton decided to dance to the music. Something about the combination of music and puppetry and the effects of the lumpy white cigarette did not frighten but rather transfixed me. The laughter of the two women, the clicking limbs of the wooden skeleton dancing like a dervish to the guitar from which Lydia’s hands coaxed a series of sublime noises: it was hypnotism. Soon there were two wooden Xs in Tal’s competent hands, and now there were two creatures dancing on the floor of her apartment to the music of the guitar: the Arabian belly dancer — blush-cheeked, diaphanous-veiled, and glitter-skinned — was now dancing with the skeleton, representing Eros and Thanatos respectively, sex dancing with death. Now a dance demon entered me. Now I, Bruno, was dancing with the puppets: a tangle of thin hairy limbs I was, jumping and swerving in — if not time, then an approximation of it — along with the puppets, as if they were my fellow living creatures: for at that moment, as brainless and artificial and as wooden-bodied as I knew them to be (the only brains they had they had by proxy from their mover and creator), for a long moment, the music and their movement made me fully accept them as conscious beings. Faster and faster we danced, the puppets clicking and rattling around me, the guitar ringing out, the trains rumbling past the window in the dark, the two women’s voices in constant laughter, and me with my body and mind in a waking fever dream, a trance.