Benjamin Hale - The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore

I gazed — feverish, sick — distantly I gazed up at the ceiling from where I lay crumpled and collapsed in the corner of the room. A moment before, it was as if those things they poked me with had instantaneously replaced every drop of blood in my veins with boiling water, and then instantly replaced it again with ice. I was shaking involuntarily. I had never felt so much pain. So much raw, hideous, physical pain — never. I heard people screaming. I heard them as if they were at the far end of a long tunnel. I heard a woman screaming. Lydia was screaming. Not so much in sorrow, but in anger.

Now my body lay rumpled, shaking, slack, in Lydia’s arms. I looked up at her face through the gauze curtain of my delirium and saw that her face was slick, bright with tears.

Norm, keeping his distance, stood a little ways off and to the side. He looked bashful. He looked afraid. He looked like he did not know what to do with his hands. Something passed over the features of his face that suggested he had just remembered something. Then he went out the door, probably to look for the Important Man. The Important Man had been among the first to flee.

Now everyone who had been in the gallery was gone, except for me, Lydia, and the two thugs who had shocked me into submission. No. There were two more people there. Dudley and Regina Lawrence stood still, side by side, in the middle of the room. They did not look like they had been frightened in the least by the regrettable events of the last minute and thirty seconds. They seemed to understand. They looked far more composed than Norm had been. They were keeping their distance not out of fear, but out of respect for me and Lydia. Even in my trembling stupor, even in my pain, even in my hate and misery — this endeared them to me.

As we were leaving, Dudley Lawrence cautiously approached us in the doorway. His hat was in his hands. With my mind in a very distant place but my body present, I watched him hand Lydia a card, and wink knowingly, and whisper something into her ear that I did not understand. His wife blew me a kiss. Lydia was now in possession of a small starchy paper rectangle that would soon dramatically alter my future. If I could have read the card that Lydia had just been given, I would have read:

Dudley Lawrence

Co-Founder

The Dudley and Regina Lawrence Foundation

for Animal Rights & Habitat Conservation

This was followed by an address and a phone number. But of course I could not read it yet.

Somewhere, somehow, Norm came back into the room, and there followed some terse, whispered, angry — very angry — dialogue between Norm and Lydia. Norm was enraged. Rage and bombast puffed him up like a zeppelin. Lydia was still crying, trying to blink back her unprofessional, unscientific tears. I hated Norm. Somehow we got away from him. We parted from Norm’s company and went home.

If you had been standing outside of the building, standing in the parking lot and looking at the side entrance of the University of Chicago Main Library, then you might have seen a beautiful and beautifully dressed young woman with short blond hair, in a black dress and high-heeled shoes, carrying in her arms a heavily subdued chimp, who wore the tattered remnants of a little gray suit and a lime-green tie.

Actually, Lydia must have been wearing a coat and a scarf on top of her dress, because it was so cold that night. It was the dead of winter. The first dustings of what would become a blizzard were fluttering down to us from above, in snowflakes so big and wet and fat you could actually hear the noises they made as they hit the ground.

Lydia and I exited the building into this skull-achingly cold night. The streetlights painted the dismal slab of urban sky above us with their sickly penumbras of orange light.

Lydia carried me. Her heels went scrap-clock, scrap-clock on the asphalt, our mutual shadow shifting under us as we passed beneath one streetlight to the next, toward her car at the back of the long and now-deserted parking lot of the library.

She stopped. Silence and the sounds of fat falling snowflakes replaced the rhythm of her footfalls. Languidly I looked around us. I did not understand what was wrong. Lydia’s tears had frozen to her face. Then I saw.

Lydia had realized she was walking on a thin and invisible film of black ice: flat, frictionless, as slick as oiled glass.

“Bruno,” she whispered. “Please hold on to me. Hold on tight.”

I clung to her neck. My arms were still weak.

Lydia kneeled to the ground. She placed her fingers on the pavement for support, and slowly slid her feet out of her shoes.

“Please hold these,” she said, and she put her shoes in the cradle of space created by my body and hers. I sucked in the humid lush smell of the insides of her shoes. I drank in the savory odor of the cushioning pads soaked in Lydia’s sweat. The insteps had a little blood in them, from two twin blisters that had burst at the backs of her heels. The air coming into my nose and mouth from the insides of her shoes was a small puff of warmth in the harrowing cold.

We had to walk another thirty feet or so to her car. Lydia sank all her gravity into one foot at a time, balancing me in her arms — walking so slowly, so carefully — not taking any risks. Heel-to-toe, heel-to-toe, each step flat on the freezing asphalt.

Lydia winced with each step. I’m sure the ice against the soles of her feet through the flimsy nylon pantyhose was so cold that it spun the wheel of pain around a full revolution, such that it did not freeze, but burned: a pain so sharp that it was more like fire than ice against the skin. I am sure the pain of the cold parking lot shot through her legs as if something were drilling holes in her bones and siphoning out the marrow through a straw.

That night, on our way home, Lydia made a stop somewhere and bought us a bottle of bourbon. That night, we took it home, and Lydia built a fire in the fireplace to warm her freezing feet by, and we got incredibly drunk together until we felt safe and warm and healthy and even sane. That night, Lydia and I made drunken love with the thrashing desperation of two people drowning, clinging to each other for help but in so doing only expediting their sinking, falling together under the surface of the sea.

Lydia and I did not return to the lab after that. Lydia was depressed. The stress, the disappointment, the nausea — whatever it was, it caused the headaches to come roaring into her skull every single night for weeks. Not only at night, but during the day, as well. I had never seen her so miserably incapacitated by her headaches. She did not even permit me to watch TV, because she said the device’s persistent high-pitched electronic whine — and the nattering of the things and people that appeared on the screen — aggravated her headaches. She lay diagonally across the bed all day, in her pajamas, with the blinds drawn, clutching her temples and moaning. She was therefore, during this period, no fun. So for entertainment I had to content myself with paging through my picture books, or else busying myself with my artistic pursuits. Outside our home the winter still ruled the sky and streets and air; we were in a particularly nasty cold snap; thus I was stuck inside. It was a time of silence and darkness in 5120 South Ellis Avenue, Apartment 1A.