Benjamin Hale - The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore

Tal took me with her to the lab the next day. Oh! — 308 Erman Biology Center! Norm was there, fat and irritating and beard-tugging as ever, right where we last left him, though his salt-and-pepper beard now had considerably more salt in it. The gray Formica tables, the salmon-colored vinyl floors, the thick glass enclosure, the faintly flickering and buzzing fluorescent lights — this place brought a tide of sense-memories back to me, and I almost drowned in it. I had gotten much bigger since I was here last — at three feet and ten inches and a stalwart one hundred and thirty pounds I was essentially full grown now — and so I was shocked by how small the things in the room appeared when contrasted with the images of them I had in my memory. Prasad and Andrea (and Tal, of course) were still working at the lab, but those were the only people from the old days whom I recognized, as the rest were grad students who had moved on and been replaced with new grad students. There were a lot of new faces. Norm received me back to the lab with a tone of welcome that only thinly masked his chilly resentment. He was obligatorily impressed with my language faculties, but at the same time I could see him seething beneath his beard with childish jealousy over the fact that my linguistic mind had truly come to blossom not under his guidance but under Lydia’s, and that he probably full well knew that in the process of my education he had been more of a hindrance than a help.

Since I bear no official documentation, I have never been able to legally work in this country or any other. Rather than pay me under the table per se, Norm decided to evade this ticklish legal problem by including my wages in Tal’s paychecks, effectively, for the books, making up the difference of my earnings by giving her a raise. And from Tal’s paychecks they went straight into paying off Lydia’s mounting medical bills. So I felt like an indentured servant during this time, as I never saw the actual cash proceeds of my labor.

So it was back to the grindstone of science with me. Every day a long nauseating wave of déjà vu. To the usual old tests they added a battery of new ones. I remember word-association games, Rorschach inkblot tests — all the classic psychoanalytic tactics. I also remember EEG tests, which for some reason I had to undergo once or twice a week. They would paste a nest of electrodes to my head and tell me to lie down in a bed and be absolutely still. Don’t move a muscle, they said. Even in this I found a way to rebel. I remember looking over at the needle scratching out a line on a scroll of graph paper that rolled on and on like the cylinder of a player piano, which was supposed to indicate the levels of my brain activity. I was told to lie still as a stone so that they could observe the spikes and dips that happened as a result of my mysterious inner processes while my body lay quiescent, instead of the less interesting spikes that happened due to muscle movements. For instance, if I lifted my right index finger, a spike would suddenly shoot up in the line the needle was etching out on the scroll of graph paper. But the scientists would notice if I disobediently dared to lift my fingers to gum up their data, and would castigate me accordingly when they caught me doing it. However, I realized — as I lay there motionless in bed, my brain feeding the machine, feeding science through the feeding tubes that were all the wires pasted to my head, looking askance at the scroll of paper and watching the skittish electric march of my brain activity documented in graphite by a jittery needle — I realized I could make the graph spike by silently, invisibly, clenching and loosening my jaw. The scientists never noticed. Ha, ha, ha! I would watch my brain graph and playfully experiment with making electroencephalographic artworks: the scroll of graph paper was my canvas, my jaw my brush, my own brain activity my paint. I repeatedly clenched and unclenched my jaw to make interesting patterns, slowly or rapidly increasing or decreasing the pressure between my closed teeth to make dramatic hills and mountains or sloping valleys or plateaus in my graph, or at a steady rhythm to make visual music, or letting a long undramatic line of relatively low activity go by before a sudden ecstatic orgy of jaw clenching — always invariably causing the scientists to knit their brows and stroke their chins as they fondled the long sheet of thin waxy paper, tracing with pointed fingers the unexplainable oddities and anomalies in the graph, wondering among themselves what in my brain could have possibly provoked these strange and beautiful markings.

I should also not forget to mention that it was around this time that began my great depilation. I have theorized that my initial hair loss was due to the tremendous stress in my life at the time. Universal alopecia — for that is the deceptively poetic-sounding name of the condition I contracted — sometimes occurs when an animal is in a severe state of emotional turmoil, which indeed I was at this time. Through all this bad luck and trouble, I lost all my dear sweet hair. Lydia being pregnant and in pain and losing her mind, me having gone to work, Tal having moved in with us, a crowd of crazed imbeciles constantly encamped outside our home for the express purpose of harassing us — how had my life descended so suddenly into such hell? Whatever the cause, my hair has never grown back since. This is when I became my smooth, pink, hairless self, which you see now before you.

I first noticed it one morning in the shower. I climbed, sticky from my slumber, out of the bed and into the shower, leaving Lydia asleep, preparing for my day of work at the lab. I had to rise so early to go to work, and early rising has always been hateful to my constitution. I am not a “morning person.” This being winter, the calendar’s dark vale of late sunrises and early sunsets, Tal and I had to get up while the windows were still painted black with night. In the shower I felt the hot hissing needles of water all over my body, and I yawningly scrubbed, shampooed, and rinsed myself as usual, but — not as usual — when I twisted off the water, I looked down at my toes and noticed that an inordinately thick deposit of my hair had collected at the drain, severely slowing the spiraling flow of the soap-marbled water. Disgusted, I scooped the stuff up in my hand, plopped it in the toilet, and flushed. I checked myself for any perceptible thinness in the hair all over my body, but could find nothing distinct. This event repeated itself in every detail on the morning of the following day, and the morning after that, and so on. I was losing more and more hair. In a week or two the clumps of hair glued to the drain after my shower were practically fistfuls. Soon it began to simply come out in my hands. No pulling or yanking was necessary to loose the stuff from my body — for I am no trichotillomaniac — it simply left me on its own accord. I would be sitting in the lab, working diligently away on some particularly difficult problem, while absentmindedly running my fingers through the fur on top of my head, and — what’s this? — look! — in my hand there’s a tangled skein of my hair, so much of it that it looks like I deliberately grabbed a bunch of it in my fist and uprooted it by force. Then one day, after my morning shower, I climbed up onto the sink to get a good look at myself full-on in the mirror. What I saw made me howl out in fear. Tal heard me scream — Lydia just turned over in bed and grunted listlessly in her brain-sick sleep — and came bursting through the bathroom door, which I had left unlocked, fearing no intrusion. I was naked before her eyes, but my panic robbed me of my modesty.

“I’m losing my hair!” I shouted. She could see that it was true. Great empty swaths of my flesh lay raw and exposed in rangy mottles all over my body where my fur had thinned to nothing. I was hideous. I looked sickly. Tal touched my fur. My wet hairs just slid off of me and stuck to her fingers. I was so embarrassed about my condition, that day I wore a long-sleeved shirt and a stocking cap to work, which I kept on all day long, refusing to unlid myself. (Thank God I did not have to submit myself to an EEG test that day.) It did occur to me that I might be losing my hair because I was becoming human. I was becoming one of you, the naked apes, the apes of vanity.