Benjamin Hale - The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore

When my eyes opened I was in a cage. Four walls, a ceiling, a floor: no way out. Through the miserly square of vision given me of the world outside my cage, further cut by the crisscrossing metal bars into a grid of smaller squares, I saw a long metal floor, wavy with corrugations, and beyond that, a slightly curving metal wall. I heard a low droning rumble, a purring noise that gave this storage room or cargo hold — for that was what it appeared to be — an ear-swelling, stifling acoustic character. My head felt groggy, sick, hot, and blood-fat, as if my ears were plugged with wax. I rooted around with my fingers in the recesses of my giant round ears, and found nothing in them. I noticed that by yawning my mouth wide or by clicking my jaw this wax-stuffed ear feeling abated, albeit only slightly and temporarily. I also felt an unprecedented sensation in my guts, there was a woozy inconstancy to the quality of the gravity in this room. I concluded therefore that I was aboard a ship that was sailing on the sea. I had never been on a boat before of any sort, but I had heard and read accounts of the experience from various sources, and these remembered descriptions seemed to roughly align with what I was then experiencing: this nauseous pitching and rolling of the room, this dipping and weaving feeling, my body’s yearning for solid earth, for the reliability of gravity to keep my feet planted comfortably to ground. I made a noise, just to hear myself. I called out: “HELLO!” It was hard to hear with that softly vibrating rumble all over the room. No one answered. I was alone. Piled up in this room with me were all sorts of crates, boxes, bags, suitcases — suitcases? — why suitcases? Whatever journey we were on seemed to be a long one. It was chilly in the cargo hold of this vessel. My abductors had supplied me with a thin, ratty blanket — their one humane nod to considerations of my comfort — and in this flimsy scrap of cloth I wrapped myself tight against my shivering until the end of the journey, silently awaiting my fate. But this ship did not slowly push into port and maneuver itself at the dock to drop anchor, as I had expected, based on my chance readings on nautical matters, but rather, the sound of the vibrant rumbling purr that permeated the long dark metal room suddenly escalated in pitch and crescendoed in volume, and as it did I felt all my precious innards jump up into my throat with the sickening rollick of the craft. You see, Gwen, I was not in a ship sailing across the bubbling waves as I had thought, but rather flying through the sky, in an aircraft — and we were descending. The sound of the jet engines’ howl as we approached the surface of the earth was more terrifying than even thunder — for it was the work of man — and my heart nearly exploded in fear when I felt what I now believe was the jolting b-bump of our wheels making contact with the ground. This was followed by a period of comparative calm. I still sensed motion in my belly, but I guessed that our craft, grounded now, had slowed to a gentle creep, and the earth beneath us was perfectly flat. Then we stopped. I heard the hisses and sighs of depressurization. The reverberant purr of the whole moving building was abruptly cut, and silence swept into the auditory vacuum left in its wake. I heard noises above me, shifting, thumping, banging. Then a door opened. I heard a pressure lock released, the unratcheting of a hatch, something shrieking on metal hinges, and then the rich audioscape of the outside world. Two pairs of boots clanged arrhythmically on the corrugated metal floor. They were coming straight for me.

“There he is.”

“Poor guy.”

I decided to pretend to be asleep. I collapsed in affected slumber beneath my blanket. I heard the boots clang closer, and felt the presence of someone bending down to peer through the door of my cage. I dared not open my eyes.

“Smells like he pissed in his cage.”

“Where’s he going?”

“Westchester. NYU has a research lab up there.”

“The fuck’s wrong with his hair?”

“Dunno. They said it all just fell off.”

“Is he okay? He looks sick or something.”

“They knocked him on his ass with tranquilizers. They said he’d probably sleep straight through everything. This monkey’s out cold.”

“Look at the poor little guy, he’s all passed out and hairless and shit.”

“It’s a sad story. The lady he was with is terminally ill. She’s got brain cancer. Then she got attacked or something. Some religious nutcase tried to kill her. This all just happened yesterday. She’s in real bad shape. Then this guy just freaked his little ass out. For some fucking reason he was at the hospital with her in Chicago.”

“What? No.”

“Yeah. He starts tearing the place up, said he broke a fish tank or something. So they knock him out, good night. But then nobody knows what to do with him. They told me somebody puts in a call to somebody, yadda yadda yadda, the people at this NYU medical lab say they want him. They always need chimps. So they got him.”

“Is that the crazy lady in Chicago who was fucking her pet chimp?”

“Yeah, that’s the one. And this is the chimp.”

“I heard about that on the news. Shit was fucked up.”

“C’mon. You get that end.”

“We got directions?”

“I know the place. We take the Whitestone to the Hutch.”

I heard jostling and scooting, and then felt myself being hoisted up.

“He’s a heavy motherfucker.”

My cage wobbled and swayed as the possessors of these voices bore me away. I opened one of my eyes just a sliver. I saw the torso of one of the men, just outside the window of my cage. He was wearing a dark green uniform. He and the other man, who I could not see, carried me out of the cargo hold of the airplane and down a flight of stairs. It was daylight, cold and windy. I shivered under the thin blanket. They carried my cage across a wide flat expanse of gray concrete and set it down on the back of a motorized cart. The two men climbed into the front of the cart and we began to drive away. Through the small grated window and through a single eye that I would only half-open out of caution, I looked out across this expanse of gray concrete crisscrossed with long curving lines of yellow paint: I saw enormous machines resting on it; I saw people moving on it by foot and by vehicle; I saw an ice-blue sky looming cloudless overhead; and in the distance I saw many tall and glittering buildings. I saw a tangled lacework of gold, copper, silver, iron, steel — skyscrapers — the lattices of bridges, power lines, radio towers, smokestacks, and antennae. All this looked similar to what could be found in Chicago — similar in make and shape and character, and probably also similar in purpose — but I recognized none of it, which told me that I had been taken to another city, another seat of this civilization — one that was apparently even bigger than my beloved home city. What city on this earth, I wondered, could possibly have been built up wider and higher than Chicago? Was the world so insatiate? What conceivable need could there be for a city that was even greater yet, more sprawling, more complex, and more powerful than Chicago, my Chicago?

The two men transported me in the small vehicle across this ocean of concrete, parked the vehicle, hopped out. I closed my eyes again in my sleep of deceit. So in darkness I felt myself being picked up in my cage, carried across a breadth of space, and set down inside a warm, quiet enclosure. I heard car doors slamming shut, opening, slamming, locking with decisive clicks. I heard a radio flicker on with music. I allowed my eyes to open and perceived that I was in the storage area of a van. I could not see out of it. I guessed the last leg of my forced journey — that which was by road — to take about an hour’s duration. I could see nothing. The men conversed in the front seats, but for the throbbing engine of the van I could not hear them. We moved along quickly at times and crept slowly at others. The van eventually stopped, with a whine of brakes and the motor shuddering off. I shut my eyes. The doors opened and they picked me up and carried me, heaving and grunting. I opened my eye a cautious slit, enough to see that I was being carried into a building — a cool, large, clean, institutional building, a kind of place I was more familiar with than I would have liked to be. They carried me through the brightly lit hallways. I heard the two men’s boots scrunching on the hard shiny floors. Hallway, elevator, hallway, doors. They carried me down a long corridor and into a dim, cavernous room. The concrete floor sloped in the middle into a shallow valley with grimy iron drains in it, and the room smelled thick and perfect with the odors of animal excrement. But the sounds of the room: a cacophony of yelps, howls, hoots, screams, clicks, scrapes, scratches, chatters, rattles and bangs rose up like so much auditory vomit in the foul and filthy air from both sides of the room — we were descending, as if led by the hand of Virgil down the grotto steps into the Inferno, abandon all hope ye who enter here — these were the noises of the dungeon, like sounds suggested by a Hieronymus Bosch painting of unending pain, of suffering, of Hell. There were cages, and inside the cages twisted, screaming faces, the mocks and mows of apes with foreheads villainous low. On either side of the room stood three long rows of metal cages stacked one on top of the next, and each cage contained a chimp. This room was a prison, a torture garden, a madhouse for the dirty, for the crazed, for the rage-rankled and diseased creatures in it, locked up in four-by-four-foot cells forever till death deliver them from their pain, imprisoned and tortured for crimes unknown to them. Sick curiosity got the better of my caution, and out of horror I let both my eyes open. I saw them: I saw their rangy, sickness-ridden, parasite-bitten and malnourished arms and fingers dangling, weak, limp, pathetic, from between the bars of their cages, their eyes murky piss-yellow with jaundice, wracked with who knows what artificially injected illnesses — AIDS, hepatitis — their minds and bodies ravaged with hate and sadness and madness and fear. They shook, they shivered, they banged their fists against their heads and throttled the bars of their cages, they cried out in despair. This was the place where I had been brought. I shut my eyes.