Benjamin Hale - The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore

I would not stay in this place. No. I refused. My pride would not let me. Pride? Or was it my vanity? Fine, then: call it my vanity. To say nothing of my fear. I do not care what you call my motive for escape, but I had to escape. I would not live in there, I would not die in there. I thought: you fuckers cannot keep me here. I will find a way out — I will claw and chew and fight my way out if I have to, and I do not care in the least who I hurt in the process. You do not own me. I will not give my life to science. I will not give my life to human medicine. If my body could provide the data that cure every disease in the world, I still would not let you touch it. No, Man, you shall not have dominion over me .

The two men who had brought me here stopped and lowered my cage onto the piss-stained cement floor.

“Careful when we transfer him. We don’t want him waking up and giving us any trouble.” I felt the gaze of the man looking at me through the bars of the cage. “Aw,” he said. “This little baldheaded guy’s sleeping like a baby.”

“Good.”

I felt and heard the cage door being unlocked. It squeaked open. The man prodded my falsely sleeping flank with an experimental finger.

“He’s out cold.”

“So c’mon then. Let’s do this.”

Two big hot human hands entered my cage and took hold of my arms. Though my heart hammered at my ribs and my stomach trembled, I did all I could to keep feigning sleep. I tried to relax completely, to let slack every muscle in me, to be limp, as floppy and boneless as a stuffed toy, as a puppet. The hands dragged me out of the cage. I slid out onto the cold floor. He picked me up by the shoulders. I let my legs dangle like rags.

“Okay, now get the cage open.”

I opened my eyes and bit down as hard as I could on the forearm of the man who held me. I let my teeth sink deep into his skin. I felt my teeth pressing through cloth and skin and muscle and clamping down on bone, and I ripped my mouth away with my jaws locked.

“FUCK!” the fellow asseverated. He dropped me.

Blood was running rapidly out of the shirt cuff of his green uniform. I tasted that hot coppery taste in my mouth. The chimps imprisoned all around me in three rows stretching down the length of each long wall — they shrieked, they barked, they crashed around in their cages, a pandemonium of noises both animalistic and metallic. The other man stood by in dumb shock beside the open door to the empty cage where they were supposed to put me, sitting flush between the walls of two other cages, each containing a single miserable and sickly chimp. I stood naked before them on the concrete floor. Blood poured from the arm of the man I had bitten. The two looked at me for a moment, too agog with surprise to do anything for a very brief moment. In this moment I held up my right hand with my index, ring and pinky finger curled into my palm, but with the second digit from my thumb stretched straight upward for their viewing. And lest our readers mistake the general for the particular, let me clarify: that goes out to all humanity.

“HA!” I informed them. And so saying, I turned, pivoting sharply on my heels to rotate my body away from them such that I faced the other direction, looking down the corridor of cages toward the door at the end of it, while conversely showing them my hairless backside and naked little ass — and I ran.

Oh boy, did I run.

I had no time to gather my bearings. My adrenaline-flooded nerves shimmered with panic. Here, Gwen, is where I heave a sigh of mild remorse that the narrative I tell must now dip its fingers ever so slightly into the cartoonish, the grotesque, even. So be it. Tell it I must, for it is true.

Fumbling, four-limbed and pell-mell, my body an exploding ball of fear-driven energy, I ran down the corridor between the two walls of cages full of chimps — chimps like me, but like me only by genetic accident of birth — all of them screeching, teeth-gnashing, cage-shaking, wailing in their pitiful metal boxes. Broken, doomed. I wish I could have unlatched their cages, set them free. They shouted at me as I ran, perhaps half in envy or admiration of my mad dash for escape, and half in pleading for their own freedom — but I had no time to play their liberator — I had to liberate myself! — and so I ran. I raced headlong between them toward the door. The other man, the one I had left physically unpunished, now began to chase after me, having recovered from the initial surprise I gave him, while the man I had bitten staggered, grumbling hoarsely in pain, clutching his bleeding arm, in the other direction, to the opposite end of the room where there was another door — to trigger an alarm of some sort? I crashed through the heavy double swinging doors at the end of the corridor and into a hallway, shooting wild looks around me for something in arm’s reach to bar the doors with, and, finding nothing, I chose a direction and kept running. Then a blaring electric roar sounded all over the building — it was an alarm! — and I saw a retina-piercing white light flickering from a red machine at the corner of a wall. The noise was so bone-grindingly loud. Doors all down the hallway whacked open and confused-looking men and women in white coats stumbled out of them, blinked, looked around, and shrieked when they saw me as I scrambled past them, bouncing off the walls, swinging from the pipes in the ceiling, rushing between their legs, knocking them to the floor. I heard the clamor of pursuing feet in the hall behind me. I picked a door at random and pushed through it, finding an emergency stairwell on the other side. I started down the rectangular spiral of whitewashed metal stairs. The building roared and flashed everywhere with the alarm. I hadn’t descended two flights before my pursuers came through the door after me. They were men in shiny blue jumpsuits — they had walkie-talkies clipped to their belts and vests, beeping, crunching and squawking with static, and they carried electric prods. I jumped off the railing down the shaft, bouncing from one flight down to the next, in my animal agility gripping, swinging, releasing, swooping myself down the stair shaft by my long arms and four hands. The sickening spiral of stairs above me shrank rectangle by rectangle to the ceiling. The staircase wobbled and clanged with shoes, and the tall blank room resonated up and down with the echoes of shouting human voices. I jumped onto the next landing and saw a door with a narrow window in it, and I saw that the window was bright with the natural light of sun and sky. The green light of an institutional EXIT sign glowed above the door. I slammed myself into the bar of the door, it fell open for me, and I was out. I was in an alley behind the building. I looked to the right: a long flat brick wall, beyond which I could see what looked like a parking lot. I looked to the left: more wall, several dumpsters, more parking lot. I looked straight ahead: a chain-link fence with a pigtail coil of razor wire strung along the top of it. Beyond the fence: a forest of thin brown dead trees — and the possibility of escape. Now I was climbing the fence, which wobbled with my weight against its poles, metal chiming against metal, and I heard the handle of the door jitter open behind me. I did not look back. I scrambled over the top of the fence and dragged my naked body through the coil of razor wire. I felt the blades lacerate my flesh in a dozen places as I scrambled panic-blind and unthinking through it. I heard gunshots, actual gunshots behind me, but the bullets missed me. I was already swinging by my long arms, crashing through the dry branches of the trees, brachiating from canopy to canopy, before I even felt the pain, or saw the freely flowing gush of my own bright blood leaving my body.