Benjamin Hale - The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore

Then things really start happening. Every neuron receptor in my brain is firing at once, I’m swept up in a flood, I’m flying, I’m floating, I’m dying, and now the flesh beneath me is roiling like an earthquake and something just, just happens —a feeling of such intense experience that the world goes white, I’m hysterical, I’m blind!

And there we lay, Bruno and Lydia, gasping, quiescent, silent, and I’m still sandwiched between Lydia’s sweaty flesh and the fabric of her nightgown. My face burrowed between her breasts, my bliss and her arms wrapped around me, and I fall asleep this way, still inside of her.

Lydia woke up the following morning with a chimp in her nightgown.

I was unprepared for her initial reaction. I awoke to the sight of her face, peering down at mine through the neck of her nightgown. Morning had come, leisurely and bright, the sun having burned away the clouds: birds eep-eep-eep ing outside the window and sunlight suffusing the membranous fabric of my silk tent, making it warm and reddish. Blinking away my sleep, I looked up at her and smiled, blissfully, I think, and she answered my smile with an aghast look that completely perplexed me, before I was violently removed from my tent — yanked and kicked and jerked and pulled out. This was the only time I can remember Lydia ever being physically forceful with me in any way. When she had disentangled me from her nightgown, she, without offering a word, jumped out of bed — I was still in a daze — ran into the bathroom, slammed the door shut, and locked it.

She remained in there for hours. I bashed my fists against the door and alternated between doleful screams and pitiful whimpers, crying and raging — in apology, in lamentation — inarticulately pleading with her to reemerge from the bathroom. I wailed until my vocal cords were worn threadbare from all my wailing. She would not come out. She would not respond. I heard running water. I heard the toilet flush a few times. Eventually I heard the familiar whisk of the showerhead. Curls of steam escaped from the crack under the door.

I worried. I was still essentially dependent on Lydia for basic survival — that is, I needed her to make food for me. I grew hungry. Still, she remained locked up and incommunicado in the bathroom.

I was starting to feel light-headed from hunger, I had to eat something. I could reach the cereal boxes in the pantry, but I could not reach the milk in the refrigerator, nor could I reach the cutlery and crockery above the kitchen counter, so I was forced to dump a pile of Cheerios on the dining room table and dejectedly munch my dry, brittle rings of oats without the help of any moistening agent other than my own spit. Christ, Gwen, that’s the way I took my meals when I was living in the fucking zoo! I was so presumptuous! See how quickly I recidivate to my barbarian habits without Lydia?

That was the longest morning of my life. I had — I had lost my virginity the night before, hadn’t I? The earth had moved! Her Bruno was a man, now! I suppose I had expected there to be some new sense of special communion between us. Instead she locked herself in the bathroom and refused to come out. What in the world had I done?

I turned on the TV and tried to watch Sesame Street , but it was useless, I couldn’t keep my mind on it. Not with Lydia so apparently upset, and not with me not knowing why. Bert and Ernie were no solace to me now.

Then I got an idea. I was just full of good ideas, wasn’t I? I would write her a letter: a love letter. That would surely entice her to come out from her self-imposed sentence of solitary confinement. So Cyrano de Bruno took up one of his Magic Markers — the red one, the color of fire, blood, passion — and, upon removing a starchy sheet of white paper from my sketchpad that lay on the floor of the studio that Lydia had built for me, and fastidiously peeling off the perforated edge to remove the unsightly serrated strip where I’d torn it from the rings, squatted down right there on the floor of my studio and composed a letter: a love letter. There were, of course, no actual words discernible in it, as I was still illiterate. To the untrained eye it probably would have looked like just a lot of frenzied scribbling. But my intentions were absolutely clear, I think. The spirit of the gesture — if not the letter — was perfectly legible. Contained in this arduous, ardorous scramble of red lines — thick, meaningful, still heady-smelling and damp from the juicy marker tip — was the lucid and simple and absolutely earnest message: I love you.

And then I slipped it, my love letter, this leaf of paper bearing my message of explosive passion, under the crack of the bathroom door. I waited.

When Lydia came out, I wondered at first if she was the same person who had gone in. Could it be that she had been somehow replaced by another woman of very similar stature and carriage, transformed maybe by the mirror — my original Lydia remaining encapsulated in the glass, and the glass Lydia in turn made flesh? Is that possible? I guess that morning she’d spent locked up with herself, she’d spent in reflecting on her life, reflecting on her memories, reflecting on her reflection, until the reflection had bounced back and forth between her eyes and the eyes of the woman in the mirror so many times that it was impossible to tell which was real and which was reflection. When she came out, Lydia was of course clad in exactly the same apparel in which she had gone in — her nightgown — but — she had — she had cut her hair! She’d cut off her hair with the medicine-cabinet scissors! It took me aback. She had hacked off all her long bright beautiful blond hair, cut it down to a spiky boyish mange that was barely longer than the fur on my own ape head.

I probably would have immediately disintegrated into an apoplexy of hot streaming tears of utter confusion if it were not for the composed aspect of grace and authority that she radiated. I was the weak one here, the broken one, the supplicant, the child, the animal — she the mother, the woman, the human being. Was I forgiven? Forgiven for what ? What had I done? Why had she made me feel as if I needed to be forgiven for something? Was it — was it about last night?

She picked me up and held me. I snuggled my fleecy face against her cheek. I combed my long purple fingers through her close-cropped hair. In so many gestures and protean wordlings, I asked her where her hair could have possibly gone. (I couldn’t really speak articulately at this time, Gwen. Only Lydia could understand my primitive speech.) We sat on the bed. It was unmade still, the sheets all twisted into a messy wad half spilling off the edge of the mattress.

“I cut it, Bruno. I flushed it down the toilet.”

I asked her why.

“I was having a hard time looking at myself in the mirror.”

I did not understand. Why would it be hard to look at oneself in a mirror?

“I’ve thought things through, Bruno. I’m feeling better now. I guess I cut off my hair because suddenly I wanted to look different. Sometimes that helps someone feel different. Do you like it?”

I wasn’t sure.

“I know you love me, Bruno. Your picture was very sweet.”

I thanked her.

“I love you too, Bruno. But — what you did last night — you’re not supposed to do that unless someone is awake . Do you understand?”

I wasn’t sure.

“Bruno, you can’t do that unless you have the permission of the person you’re doing it with. Do you understand that?”

I shrugged uneasily.

“And if the person you’re doing it with is asleep, then you can’t possibly know if you have their permission. Okay?”

I said nothing.

“So that means you can’t do that with someone who is asleep.”