Benjamin Hale - The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore

When Lydia could play the guitar no longer, when Tal’s fingers and arms were exhausted from dancing the puppets, and when my own arms and legs were numb with fatigue, we all fell down together. Lydia and Tal collapsed on the couch. I collapsed on the floor. The puppets also collapsed on the floor. For a time (who knows how long? — Chronos had been murdered for one night), we all lay there, listening to the occasional roar of the train outside the kitchen window, Lydia and Tal hot-faced and gasping from too much laughter, Bruno panting on the floor, the guitar sleeping silently in Lydia’s lap, and the puppets lying danceless beside me with their strings limp around their crumpled bodies.

When it was time for bed, Tal pushed on the back of the couch, which turned into a flat, uncomfortable bed. A blanket and a pillow were procured for me, in order to mimic homier sleeping conditions. Lydia kissed me and tucked me into this makeshift bed. The world was like a big warm pot of stew that I had dunked my head in. Then Lydia joined Tal in the bedroom. In the dark, the muddy ugly orange light from the streetlights outside crept into the room, casting the shadows of the puppets against the opposite wall. From time to time a train roared by above us. The tracks shook, the wheels of the train grinding against the tracks squealed and screamed, the whole place wobbled, thundered, and all the puppets dangling from the ceiling came alive and began to dance at the command of the train’s reverberations in the night. Their arms and legs and their grinning, grimacing heads jiggled and flailed, their wooden limbs clicked and clattered together as they danced. When I finally did fall asleep, my sleep was thrashing and fitful, and I dreamed of nothing but grinning little wooden men, dancing on the ceiling. That was a place where dream always teetered on the razor’s edge of nightmare. Lydia never took me back to that place again.

The finger-biting incident, though, happened one morning in the lab. For some reason I had slept poorly the night before, I don’t recall why. But in any event I was groggy and irritable, and not particularly looking forward to the day’s work ahead of me. We were doing some experiment; I think it had to do with more novel spoken instructions to manipulate various objects in various ways. Lydia was away, doing something else. I don’t know why, but she wasn’t in the room. Neither was Norm. I recall that it was just Tal and Prasad in the room with me. Tal was sitting with me on my squishy blue mat behind the glass wall that divided the domain of the human from the domain of the chimp. Prasad was on the other side of the glass, sitting at one of the lab tables, drinking a cup of tea and perusing some paperwork. Tal was holding a box of raisins.

Now, I liked raisins. But I did not love them. Tal was feeding me raisins, one for each successfully completed task. I guess this was before Norm orchestrated the complicated mock-capitalist system with the numbered chips. I must have misremembered when exactly that took place, Gwen, because I suppose otherwise Tal wouldn’t have been baiting me with direct food rewards. Or maybe she secretly harbored some personal moral or philosophical disgust with Norm’s value-chip system and so she just didn’t use it when Norm wasn’t around, which is also distinctly possible. Now that I think back on it, I remember that Tal had also chosen not to wear the frightening black metal welding mask that Norm insisted the experimenters wear when they asked me to perform their stupid tasks — so maybe that was indeed the case.

“Put some soap on the ball ,” she would say, taking special care to emphasize the nouns and the preposition. Back in those days it was very important to use the right preposition with me. And I would pick up a bottle of liquid hand soap and obediently squirt a little of it on top of my inflatable yellow beach ball. This task completed, Tal handed me a squishy raisin from the box. A raisin. Must other creatures sing for their suppers so? I wasn’t even hungry. I took the raisin from her hand and set it down beside me for future consumption.

“You don’t want the raisin, Bruno?” she said.

I shook my head no. I did not, in fact, want the raisin at that moment. Tal continued with the experiment.

“Put the froggie in the refrigerator .”

(There was a small refrigerator in the lab; the froggie was a rubber frog that whimpered when squeezed.) Debased slave that I was, I put the froggie in the refrigerator. Tal dug her fingers into the depths of the raisin box and rummaged around in it for a raisin. It was the kind of raisin box that was red, with a picture of a beautiful girl with raven-black hair spilling from her bonnet, bearing in her arms a bountiful basket of grapes, her back to a blazing yellow sun rising behind her. I listened to the sound of her fingers rattling the raisins against the inner walls of the thin cardboard box. She finally successfully fished a raisin out of the raisin box, and held it out for me to take.

Now why, I ask, would I want another fucking raisin? I had just told her that I didn’t really even want the first one! She held out her hand, with the sad black gummy thing rolling around in the cup of her palm like a tiny turd. I did not want it. Not even for later. I pushed her hand away.

“Bruno,” she said. “Come on. Please take the raisin.”

I shook my head no.

“Okay, Bruno,” she said, improvising, and ate the raisin herself. Was she trying to make me envious? Was she trying to make me covet my neighbor’s raisin? Did she want me to think, You villainous slut! How dare you eat my raisin ? If that was what she was after, it wasn’t happening. I didn’t care. I already had a raisin of my own.

“Bruno,” she said. “Please give your flower some water .”

Now, what made all these tasks so maddening was their sheer needlessness. By “my flower” she was indicating a yellow flower made of thin synthetic fabric placed atop a green plastic stalk that sprouted from a plastic flowerpot full of rubber dirt. This was a miserable object. What demonic impulse so inspires humankind to manufacture sad rubber imitations of the simplest articles of natural beauty? The dirt in the flowerpot was disgustingly unrealistic, but the flower itself could almost fool you — until of course you touched its petals, and your fingers were rudely shocked by the brittle texture of the synthetic when you were expecting the plump wet kiss of honest life. What she wanted me to do was to take a watering can that had a little water in it, and dribble the water from its porous neck into the rubber dirt; a tragic mimicry of what would have been a bestowal of nourishment upon a living thing — if only the thing were real.

Sluggish-limbed and bored, begrudging her at every step, I hoisted myself up, went over to where the watering can was, dragged it one-handed across the floor behind me, clanging and banging as it went, water sloshing around inside it and splashing out in puddles here and there, and I tipped its beak into the plastic pot, submissively suffering to “water” the fake dirt.

“Good job , Bruno!” Tal clapped her hands twice in approval. “Very good!”

Then she rooted around in the raisin box and offered me another raisin.

I shook my head no.

“You don’t want a raisin?” she said, thrusting the raisin at me. “Raisins are good. They’re good for you.”

(Ah- ha! I get it now, Tal. You were feeding me the raisins because you were concerned for my health . Because you were concerned that I was always using the wages I earned in the lab to buy nothing but junk food, the M&Ms and the marshmallows and the candy bars that Norm had on offer, all the gooey wonderful sweet stuff that I happened to like , while ignoring utterly the nuts and the vegetables and your “nature’s candy,” the raisin! )