Benjamin Hale - The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore

So then, a word on vanity, my vanity. Vanity: what sin is more uniquely human? This is why we are so impressed when an animal recognizes itself in a mirror. It’s vanity that makes us human. A bird or a fish will interpret its own horizontally backward image as a threat — not even realizing it is flat, not even remarking on the curiosity that this dangerous other moves only when the animal’s I moves. Hence the animal attacks the mirror. Hence the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in the glass. Hence the rage of Caliban not seeing his own face in the glass. Great apes, though, do see themselves in mirrors, as do dolphins and elephants. But let’s make a comparison to, say, tool use. The important thing is not so much the use of tools as the modification of tools. That is, we used to think that human beings were alone among the animal kingdom in their use of tools. Then somebody observed chimpanzees fishing for termites with twigs, and concluded that we must now unhook the velvet rope and allow chimps into the exclusive tool users club. Ah, but! — said the anthropo-chauvinists, we’re still the only species to modify tools, aren’t we, ha, ha! Then a woman — always a woman, a patient and compassionate woman — actually bothered to sit quietly and watch for long enough to figure out that we were in fact snapping live twigs off of trees and stripping the leaves before rooting around in the termite hole, because the termites stick better that way, for life clings to life. Since then, by the way, chimpanzees in “the wild” have also been observed smashing nuts open with rocks and hunting with makeshift spears. So check and mate then, we Pan troglodytes both use and modify, and the list of things that make human beings so fucking special continues to shrink.

But my point is, what goes for technology goes for vanity. To recognize oneself in a mirror is one thing, to modify oneself in a mirror is another. Body modification is more human than merely humanlike. I see human, I look in the mirror, I see ape. This was a great psychological vexation in my formative years. Monkey see, monkey want to be.

For what differentiates a human being from a chimpanzee? Merely in physical terms, I mean. If space aliens were to beam down to Earth tomorrow and look at all the creatures that slither, crawl, hop, run, prance, swim, waddle, and walk it, and initially have some trouble telling chimpanzees apart from humans, what subtle physiognomic distinctions would we tell them to take note of so they might better parse us out from one another? Notice the length of the legs and the forearms, we would tell them, the shape of the skull, the curvature of the spine, the distance between forefinger and thumb, that humans have two opposable thumbs and chimps have four. And chimps have thick hair all over their bodies. So there are two principal things hominid animals did when they branched off from our common ancestor: they gained language and lost their hair. In becoming human, I realized that I was faced with the daunting task of reenacting about five million years of parallel evolution, all by my little self. I had gained language, check, but now I began to want a physiognomy that was closer to human. It wasn’t just that altering my physical appearance made me more attractive — though it certainly did — but that I was disgusted with myself. Humans: I wanted to be one of them, and I simultaneously hated myself for this dirty disgusting perverted desire. I couldn’t go back to the zoo. I couldn’t go back to being a chimp, not after everything I had learned. I was between species. I still am. I don’t feel at home in either genus, Homo or Pan .

My body looked ugly, so goddamn ugly. I hated my face. I hated my nose. I hated my fingers. I hated my toes. I hated my long arms. I hated my stubby, ridiculous legs. I hated my grotesque feet. And now most of all I hated these sickly-looking, uneven patches in my once-thick coat of fur. I decided to simply get rid of it, to mow the field. To cover up my unsightly hair loss, one evening I shaved off all of my body hair. I was alone when I did it. I found a canister of shaving cream in the cabinet under the bathroom sink — the kind that squirts out a jet of green ooze that becomes thick foam when one agitates its molecules by rubbing it against the skin. I stood naked in the bathtub, sopping wet, and squirted this stuff into my remaining fur and lathered it in. Then I took the razor — all this equipment was Lydia’s — and, swishing it between strokes in the lukewarm bathwater I stood in, I scraped off all my hair, except for the few areas in which humans are hirsute: the top of the head, the underarms and the neat corona haloing the genitals. This was an adorable but futile gesture, for these four remaining patches of hair soon afterward also fell out. I had learned how to shave from watching Lydia shave her legs in the shower, a ritual I had observed hundreds of times. I wasn’t accustomed to using a razor. In the medicine cabinet I had found a package of plastic disposable razors, and I ruined every one of them during my full-body shave, nicking myself so frequently in the process that it seemed a gallon of my blood trickled out of me to swirl sickeningly red-brown in the water below. I had so much hair all over me that it took six or seven passes to get down to the skin. This is one instance in which having these long, flexible arms was a tremendous help, as I needed no assistance to reach my back. The shaving took an hour to complete. I depleted the entire can of shaving cream in the process. When I drained the water, the bathtub was coated an inch thick all around with a sodden carpet of soapy, bloody chimp hair. Imagine how it smelled. I scooped it up in sopping handfuls and dumped it all in the toilet, flushing repeatedly until it was gone, all gone, and then showered off all the residual hairs still clinging to my skin. When I was finished, I presented me to myself in the mirror. I scrambled onto the bathroom counter and clung to the rims of the sink by my opposable toes, to look at the full length of my naked and newly hairless body in the harshness of the four incandescent bulbs above the bathroom mirror. I stood inches away from the cool silver glass. I liked the way I looked. The novelty of this moment — the autoerotic thrill. In the next room I heard Lydia shift in bed and mumble something in her sleep. I caressed myself, sensuously smoothing my arms up and down my hairless torso. It wasn’t just the feeling — the newfound tingling hypersensitivity all over my body, the visible prickles of gooseflesh — it was also that I had never before looked so achingly human. I gazed into the mirror. What gazed back at me was no longer recognizably Bruno the chimp. In that reflection was undeniably a person, after a fashion. His legs had thickened out considerably with the years of exercise they’d been getting from all his bipedal walking. He stood on two feet, and rigidly upright — this creature no longer had a moronically bowed simian spine, but had begun to develop a slight S-curve in the small of his back above the tailbone, just like a man. He stood with his forehead out and chin aimed downward, instead of with his face jutting out like that of an ape, who enters a room jaw first. He stood with his arms at his sides. He was still dripping from the shower. Except for the patches in his crotch and armpits, his body was hairless: just one smooth long tract of peachy naked flesh. Flesh that needs to be clothed in the cold. Flesh that needs to be clothed for decency. Flesh that is unclothed only behind locked doors in the dark, in the most private of private moments, in the most private of private places. Flesh that is desirable, flesh that is shameful, flesh that is frail. Flesh that yearns for flesh. This animal in the mirror: it may have been that he stood a mere three feet ten, it may have been that his feet monkeyishly resembled his hands, with two extra thumbs sprouting grotesquely from his insteps, it may have been that his legs were stumpy and that his hands, when at rest, dangled down past his knees — but this animal carried himself like a man, god damn it, his eyes had a certain glint indicative of a brain pregnant with complex symbolic intelligence. Faculties of reason, faculties of vanity, faculties of pride. Thou hast made him little less than an angel. Here Bruno Narcissus received in his hand the dubious gift of an erection just from looking at himself, contemplating his own body, how humanlike it was becoming, how very human. He turned in circles in the mirror, admiring his freshly shaven skin, creaking his head over his shoulder trying to get a look at his backside. Bruno, the hero of our story, decided to masturbate onto the mirror. Or rather, it was decided for him. Who can say what real choice he had in the matter? That is a question for philosophers, not the humble autobiographer. All I know for sure is that Bruno stood before his magnificent image in the mirror and stared long and deep into his own eyes, and as he did messages bounced back and forth between his mind and his reflection, photons leapt and wiggled from his eyes to the mirror and back into his eyes, shot into those two globs of light-perceiving jelly in his head, tunneled through his optic nerves and buried themselves smack in the squishy electric meat of his brain, became data to be exploded and decoded by this beautiful organ of consciousness set snug in his skull, which soaks up the world’s information and reshapes itself in response, which reaches out and reshapes the world. Bruno stands, legs apart, proudly, aggressively, not unlike the men’s restroom pictogram he was once reminded of by a certain clown-made pink balloon, hips out, in love with himself, in love with his own body, stroking and yanking savagely on a penis that he has just lubricated with a generous dollop of spit, lips curling back to a snarl, gnawing on his tongue, thinking of nothing more erotic than simply being a member of the human race, of humanity! — and now his chest is suddenly burning with white heat and oo oo oo ah ah ah ah HYEEAAGHHHH, HYEEAAGHHHH! — ——he comes onto the mirror! — take that! — and that! — and the globules of milky syrupy goo go drooling triumphantly down the glass, as if the last remaining drops of his animal essence are contained in that splat of his jizzom, pure extract of primate, dripping away between me and my reflection.