Benjamin Hale - The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore

When she wasn’t collapsed sideways across the bed or the couch, or slumped in a chair with an ice pack pressed to her temple in an attempt to chill the fire that raged in her brain and sometimes drove her to the point of vomiting, Lydia was often on the phone, conducting mysterious communiqués with unknown parties. Respectfully, I did not demand to know about them. I gave her privacy, space, and distance enough. I trusted her. I assumed she was conducting some sort of official business relating to my outburst at the art gallery, the particular implications of which I could not even begin to guess at. Our phone was in the kitchen. It was plastic and pale green, bolted to the wall at about (human) chest level, right beside the refrigerator, and the receiver was connected to the port by a long drooping plastic cord that coiled like a pig’s tail. When someone on the outside wanted to speak to Lydia, the phone would sound its alarm, which sounded like the gobbling of an electric turkey, and she would pad into the kitchen, her bare feet sticking to the floor, to pick up the receiver, and then would spend a long time — sometimes up to an hour or more — either speaking into it or listening to the inscrutably faint crunching noises that issued from it. I would watch her listening to or talking on the phone. We lived an almost entirely interior existence at this time — it was too cold to make going out any fun, and apparently there was nowhere we had to go, anyway — and Lydia, her poor brain dunked in headaches like a lobster in a boiling pot, would often go the whole day without changing out of the clothes she’d slept in, which often meant just a thin T-shirt and panties, and when she listened to the phone, sometimes she would unconsciously, very, very slowly, pace around in a small circle on the kitchen floor, and the long pale green plastic cord would wind itself around her body, around her pale bare legs — and then she would look down and realize what she had done, and reverse the direction of the small circles she was pacing, from counterclockwise to clockwise or vice versa, and the cord gradually unraveled around her, to hang loose and slack again between the phone port and her long, beautiful body.

Usually these conversations appeared benign enough, although she almost always hung the receiver in its peg in a more agitated state than she had picked it up in. Occasionally her voice would approach a pitch and tone that sounded angry, or outright hostile. I could gauge how pleasant the conversation had been based on the level of violence with which she slammed the receiver back in its cradle.

Other times she would say she had to go on an errand but that whatever she had to do was a complicated bit of business, for which she could not take me along. Such instances were irritating and unnerving, since for nearly a year I had barely been out of Lydia’s sight for more than an hour or two. And on these rare occasions she would suit up for the outside without me, then gather all her artifacts together — keys, briefcase, purse, sometimes a coffee cup — kiss me good-bye — once, chastely, on the forehead — nervous, preoccupied — wave, and exit through the front door. With my long purple fingers I inched the window curtains apart to watch Lydia enter her car, start the engine, check the rearview mirror and fasten her seat belt (always the cautious driver) as she edged out of her parking place and into the slush and sluggish traffic of the city streets. When Lydia left the house it hardly mattered where she was going — it mattered simply and only that she was gone. She had disappeared into another universe and would reappear in this one at another time. She was gone from my world, temporarily missing from my sphere of existence. When she was gone I would watch cartoons on TV, sometimes while furtively licking a battery, or I would paint in my studio, or else go upstairs to knock on Mr. Morgan’s door to see if he wanted to play backgammon, or let me listen to him practicing the bagpipes. After several weeks of this behavior — the phone calls, the mysterious errands — Lydia announced to me what were the apparent fruits of all her clandestine labors: we were moving.

Moving? I wondered. What did she mean, moving ? I spent most of the day moving in some way, didn’t I? Moving what? Moving how? Moving where ?

“We’re moving to Colorado,” said Lydia.

I did not even know what Colorado meant, what it was. Was it a place, or was it more like a state of mind or being? If it was a place, then was it also contained in Chicago? Was it in this… area ? This nation? This planet? What would we be doing there, exactly? And how, and more importantly, when would we be returning to Chicago?

“It’s hard for me to explain, Bruno,” she said to me one night as we were lying in bed, facing each other with our heads on the pillows. Outside, the snow lay so thick on the surfaces of the world that it cushioned the noises of the city, and the streets were eerily silent. Lydia ran her fingers through the fur on my head.

“We have to move,” she said. “It has to do with a lot of things, but mostly it has to do with money. Norm doesn’t want to keep doing the project because we’re out of money, and nobody wants to give us any more. People think that what we’re doing is stupid. They don’t understand it. They don’t think the science we’re doing is real science. They don’t think our results are real. That’s why they won’t give us any more money. Norm is stopping the project. He wants to do other things, he thinks we’ve gone as far as we can go with this project. And where does that leave you and me?” she asked herself rhetorically, sighing and rolling over in bed. “Out to dry.”

I nuzzled my face into her armpit.

“Norm wanted to give you back to the zoo.”

I looked up at her with a spike of panic.

“Don’t worry about that, Bruno. That’s not going to happen. I wouldn’t let that happen. They think I want to keep the project going. I mean, I do…” Her eyelids were trembling. Her voice grew soft. “But the main reason is because I love you. Bruno, I love you. I can’t let someone I love be put in a zoo.”

Then she turned over and she kissed me. Then we made love for the third or fourth time that day. Much later, when we lay panting and fatigued on the bed, our bodies twisted in the damp sheets, as if finally continuing her thoughts, she said:

“Norm isn’t going to be in charge of the project anymore. There is no project anymore, actually. Not formally. It’s not officially considered research anymore. That’s why we’re moving to Colorado. I couldn’t get any research grants. I didn’t even try, actually. The people who give out money for science would rather give money to Norm than me, and not even Norm can get any money right now. As soon as Norm found out that nobody was taking us seriously, he wanted to stop the project. Norm doesn’t want people to quit taking him seriously. Nobody ever took me seriously to begin with. Now they probably never will. So I have nothing to lose. Do you remember the man in the cowboy hat?”

Indeed I did.

“He said he’s going to give us money. He’s being very, very nice to us, and we should be very, very nice to him. He’s also going to give us a place to live. He owns a lot of land in Colorado. That’s where we’re moving. He said we can live on his ranch, and that we can stay there as long as we want and finish our project. For free. They have a big ranch, where they keep animals. Colorado is far away from here. There are lots of trees and mountains there.”

But logistics, woman, logistics! What about our apartment? What will become of that?

“I’m leasing the apartment,” she said. “Maybe we’ll come back here eventually. I don’t know. I don’t really know what’s going to happen.”