Benjamin Hale - The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore

Tal held the raisin aloft, deftly pinched between her middle finger and thumb, and guided this raisin, this blackened, mummified corpse of a grape, toward my face, toward the direction of my shut mouth, then stopped a few inches from my lips and held it there. Slowly, slowly, she brought the raisin to my mouth, until the raisin itself touched my lips. I opened my mouth, and then I shut it. When I shut my mouth, both the raisin and the middle finger of Tal’s right hand were inside of it. For an instant, Tal’s finger was in between my top and bottom rows of teeth. And then it wasn’t.

I had never really done anything physically violent to a human in my life, and I never really would again, except for a few slipups, including the one murder I committed, which is what landed me in this place, but I will speak of that later.

Yes, there was screaming. Yes, there was blood. Yes, Tal looked down in horror at the stub where the ultimate and penultimate segments of her right middle finger used to be. Yes, she held her hand up to the light and looked at it with an expression that betrayed more amazement at first than physical pain, as if wondering where were the other two joints of her finger that only a moment before had been securely attached to the second knuckle? Yes, she held it that way, wide-eyed, aghast, against the cold flickering of the fluorescent lights that illumined the lab. And yes, just a brief moment, just a fraction of a second later, the blood began to burble up out of her finger, and a fraction of a second after that it began to spray from her hand, almost as if from the nozzle of a hose. Yes, the hot blood filling up my mouth tasted bitter, metallic. No, I did not swallow it.

There immediately followed a period of great tumult and confusion. To complement the craziness of the moment, the minute hand of the clock had just then managed to scale the left side of the clock face to surmount the top of the hour, which meant that all the classes in the building were being dismissed at about the same time, and now the hallways below us had suddenly come alive with murmuring and hundreds of shuffling shoes.

Prasad gave her a quick bandaging with the lab’s first-aid kit. There was a lot of yelling. Someone called an ambulance. For a short time there was some shouting about where the finger was.

“It’s still in his fucking mouth ,” Tal shrieked, cradling her hand to her chest, which was wrapped up in gauze and then again in her twisted and bloody T-shirt.

They tried to catch me, but I was too fast for them! I ran around the room like mad in the confusion, screaming, flailing, scrambling over the tables, upsetting the furniture, bouncing off the walls, causing a world-class ruckus. Shouting everywhere. Lydia — who at some point had rematerialized in the room — yelled at everyone: “ Leave! ” she commanded. “Everybody get out! I’ll handle this!”

“Are you sure?” someone said. “He’s dangerous—”

“Go. Go! Get out! I’ll take care of it.”

All the other scientists funneled out the door and into the hall, guiding Tal, who was now pale with blood loss and fright, still clutching her hand to her chest, out of the room. They left. The door shut behind them. I was cowering beneath one of the lab tables. The room was silent except for the sound of all the students jostling each other in the halls of the floors below us.

“Bruno,” Lydia called. “Bruno. Come here, please.”

I wouldn’t come out.

“Don’t worry. I won’t bite,” she said, keenly aware of the irony.

She found me huddled under a table. Lydia was on her hands and knees on the floor. She crawled toward me, and then sat down, cross-legged, and patted the floor in front of her. She had put on a sweet face, but I could tell in her eyes that she was furious with me.

“Come here,” she whispered. “Come to me.”

I scrambled out from under the shadow of the table and sat in her lap. She hugged me, and she kissed the top of my head and stroked my fur. I was shivering.

“Shhhh——,” she said. “Shhhh———.”

Gradually, my shivering stopped. She put a cupped hand below my mouth. (Recall, Gwen, the episode with the peach.)

“Please, Bruno,” she said. “Give it to me. Spit it out.”

I let the finger fall from my mouth. I pushed it out with my tongue, and the lifeless and slimy thing — and the raisin along with it — tumbled from my mouth and into the cradle of her palm, still attached to my lips by a sticky thread of drool.

“Thank you, Bruno,” she said, and closed her hand over it.

Then she picked me up and put me in the enclosure that was walled in by thick glass, and shut the door. I went willingly. I knew that I had done wrong. That I had sinned. She locked the door. I began to cry.

“You’ve been bad,” she said. “You’ve been very, very, very bad. I’ll deal with you later, Bruno. I have to go now.”

Lydia turned around and left, the finger held tightly in her hand. She hurried from the room, but remembered to flick off the lights as she left. No one came back to the lab for the rest of the day.

She needed the finger because she had vainly hoped that a doctor would be able to reattach it. Much later she would tell me that the doctors had in fact attempted to reattach the finger. She told me that although they had implemented all the sorceries of modern medicine available to them, they had ultimately failed to reattach it. In retrospect, I have come to wonder what effect the loss of the longest and middle digit on Tal Gozani’s dominant hand had on her career in puppetry.

Tal quit working at the lab after that, and she stopped visiting Lydia and me at our home. I believe the lab was legally in the clear, because they had a policy of requiring everyone who did research with potentially vicious animals like me — and are we not all “potentially vicious” animals, Gwen? — to sign some sort of waiver saying they wouldn’t sue if something like this were to happen. If she had been able to sue and had chosen to do so, then I’m sure it would have spelled certain doom for the project. Norm was already strapped enough for cash as it was. Maybe I would have been returned — God forbid — to the zoo. After this incident, everyone who worked in the lab behaved with a little more nervousness toward me, they deferred to me a little more respect — or caution, I couldn’t tell which, and ultimately it doesn’t much matter.

Everyone, that is, except for Lydia. She seemed to understand. To forgive me, even. It’s to be expected in this line of work. Chimps bite. Get out of the primatology business if you can’t take the primates, is what I say. I really don’t blame myself for it at all — I’m not that cruel.

As a result of this unfortunate incident, I once again had to sleep in that fucking laboratory for a time afterward. I do not know if this was intended as punishment, or what. I do not remember if it was days or weeks. It was mostly because, at least for a while, not even Lydia trusted me to behave properly in a domestic human environment.

The upshot of this temporary arrangement was that I got to see Haywood Finch again. I had not seen my friend in many months, and that first evening that I was back in the lab at night, I remember the sudden surge of joy I felt in my chest when I heard the familiar sound of his walk, stomping and jangling down the hallway, the kLOMPa-whap-SHLINK kLOMPa-whap-SHLINK of his boots, his chain, his hoop of many keys, when I saw his familiar blurry lumpy shadow looming in that familiar doorway, behind the panel of smoked glass in the door to room 308: BEHAVIORAL BIOLOGY LABORATORY. He opened the door, and snapped on the buzzing fluorescent lights, which slowly fluttered on, nzt-nzt-nzt-nzzzzzzzzzz.