Benjamin Hale - The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore

The previous day (or whenever it was — my sense of time was garbled, the string of memories that led me here all tangled up in a knot) I had woken up in Chicago — and now here I sat, far away in an unknown place, in a tree, no less, like my fathers before me, and also like my fathers before me, naked. And I was bleeding profusely. I had cut myself badly on that fence. Cuts all over my legs, my chest, my arms. They were not rough cuts either — which are actually less painful — but thin, precise, deep slices. I was covered in blood. I was filthy. I was hungry, I was thirsty. I was lost. Oh — and, this being March, I think, while not abjectly freezing, it was very cold. And let’s not forget I was hairless, too, and to add insult to my compounded injuries, nude: therefore I was shivering. And I knew that they would be hunting after me. Thus was the state of my affairs: bleak. I sat there awhile, my arms hugging my legs for warmth, rocking back and forth, bleeding in a tree. I was an endangered animal.

By and by the bleeding stopped, but my skin was tingly, hypersensitive, swollen with pain for days afterward. I still have faint white scars. After escaping from the biomedical research lab, I crashed blindly through the woods in this place yet unnamed to me, until I came to a narrow paved road with a shallow ditch running beside it. I slogged through the ditch awhile, my naked feet stepping on rocks and twigs and squelching in the mud, diving for cover beneath muck and dead leaves and pine needles every time I heard a car coming. I lost myself in another thicket of these knotty, spindly brown trees, thrashed through the leaves and bushes until I came to a pond, which was frozen except for a hole in the center. At the pond’s edge I bashed the ice in until I uncovered liquid, and I drank from two cupped palms and rinsed my wounds with dripping handfuls of frigid water. My fingers went numb and turned blue. I cracked and rattled my way between trees and more trees and through crunching piles of leaves, sticks, slush, dirt, and hard old gray snow.

At first I thought I was deep in some unknown wilderness. It hit me like a gestalt shift — like the precise moment you realize the negative spaces surrounding that goblet make the silhouettes of two lovers poised to kiss — when I realized that I had not been in the wilderness, but actually in a wooded area of a big park or something, which sat along the peripheries of what looked like a quiet, leafy, upper-class suburb. I realized this only when I stumbled — ragged, muddy, blood-streaked, naked — out of the bushes and into someone’s backyard. Across the yard sat a palatial house, a big viny shingly stony half-timbered chunk of Tudor architecture painted white and brown, loaded with gables and turrets and windows with diamond-shaped panes set in diagonally crosshatching grids. A big brick veranda spilled from the back door of the house down in a series of wide shallow steps onto a long slope of lawn, which I’m sure shimmered like an emerald in the summer but at the time was brown and yellow with winter. There was a drained swimming pool near the house, with orange rust streaks drooling from the rivets in the blue-green marbled walls of white lime. At the bottom of the sloping lawn there was a children’s jungle gym: a ladder led to two parallel wooden beams connected by metal bars, while from one of these wooden beams two swing seats hung on slack chains — one of the chains was tangled such that one swing was twisted at an angle — and this was attached to a wooden platform, sheltered by a small roof and accessible by a ladder, and a bright red plastic slide slalomed to the earth from the deck of the platform. It reminded me of the furniture in the chimp habitat I shared with my original family in the zoo. The structure looked like it had fallen into habitual disuse, by the rust in its metal and the splitting in its wood. Beside it was a sandbox; several forgotten toys lay partially buried in the frost-hardened sand. Nearby all this stood a tiny pink house. I think one could safely call it a “cottage.” The little house, set away from the big: I was reminded of the little house/big house dynamic of the Lawrence Ranch. From inside the house (the big house) I heard the manic yapping of a small dog — yapping, most likely, at me. I approached the cottage.

This little cottage was about the size of a small garage. It was built to imitate a human dwelling, but all in miniature. The door, for instance, was not built to human scale — it was only slightly above half the height of a door in accordance with modern architectural standards. Two shuttered windows flanked a door placed dead in the center of one wall, with planter boxes full of dead flowers below each window. The door itself had an arched top, and was pink with a decorative white valentine heart in the middle. The heart was replicated in the pink trim above both the windows. When I came nearer I realized that the whole thing was made of plastic, designed to mimic the appearance of painted wood.

I tried the doorknob — which was also shaped like a heart — found it open, and went in. The door was so short that I, at my three feet ten, passed through it with only a few inches of space above my head. I shut the door behind me. It was cool inside, but warm enough. The tiny house was crowded with artifacts of an American childhood: toys and games and crayons and markers and stuffed animals. The interior walls were as pink as the gastrointestinal medicine that Lydia would sometimes urge me to swallow when I had a stomachache, and covered too with images of hearts and flowers, and also with smudgy fingerprints and the errant crayon and marker scribblings of children. A tiny tea set rested on a tiny tray on top of a lacy white tablecloth draped across a tiny tea table made of elaborately bent wire. Amid the plastic teacups, teakettle, and saucers, a plastic vase stood as centerpiece. From the lip of the table protruded the green plastic stems of fabric flowers. On the table, along with all this mock-Victorian crockery, were strewn several small rubber effigies of beautiful naked women, lankily proportioned and Nordic-featured, with heads of flowing bright blond hair; the women were disturbingly desexed, with smooth nippleless breasts and no discernible genitalia in their crotches, and one of them was, due perhaps to some horrific imaginary accident, missing an arm, for only a plastic peg the same color as her flesh protruded from the socket of her shoulder. Four small chairs that matched the wire table surrounded it, and the lumpy, lifeless forms of stuffed animals were pushed up on the seats of three of the chairs: a rabbit, a bear, and a duck (three animals that in the wild would obviously never sit down together in peaceful communion); the fourth chair was empty — reserved, perhaps, for Elijah. The corners of the room were obscured under mounds of other stuffed animals: a whole cuddly and disorderly menagerie of bears, birds, bunnies, horses, cows, pigs, camels, marsupials, waterfowl, ferrets, badgers, monkeys and — yes — apes. Among all these creatures, all these animals with their sweet dopey unblinking marbles for eyes, and cloth for skin, and cotton stuffing for bones and blood, I hid myself. I burrowed myself deep beneath them, and they enclosed around me, warmly enveloping my body — my cold, hurt, shivering, naked body — and, weak and battle-wracked in my aching bones, from fear and chase and cold and hunger and a thousand other stinging thistles of my fugitive deprivation, I made a soft nest of them, and my mind passed gently into the darkness of sleep, true sleep.

Later — I’ve no idea how much later exactly — my nostrils woke me. I smelled the very distinctive odor of cigarette smoke. The sense-memory had caused me, just before I woke, to dream of my father. For he, fat, mean, implacable Rotpeter, my biological father, was the one with whom I will always associate that odd rank musty smell, half-sweet and half-stink. I saw him squatting on a log in our chimp habitat in the Lincoln Park Zoo, smoking his chest weak and his teeth yellow and making our air stifling with his smoldering ill-gotten and clandestine-kept tobacco. I gently pushed aside the plush curtain of a stuffed pig that lay before my eyes, and peered: there was a girl — a pretty little girl — dressed in jeans and a sweater of azure silver-threaded cashmere. Her hair was brown as a nut and parted precisely straight down the center of her head and falling past her skinny shoulders on either side of her face, which was round as a full moon and nearly as radiant with the luster and smoothness of delicate youth. Her mouth and skin looked like they had been sprinkled with a film of gold dust, and her chipped fingernails were painted alternately red and green, Christmas-tree colors. She sat in the fourth chair, the previously unoccupied chair around the tea table, in the fluffy, motionless, and mute company of bear, bunny, and duck, smoking a cigarette. That’s what had woken me. She brought the white stick to her lips and shallowly inhaled, and as she did the thing deftly crackled and the end of it glowed orange for a moment, and she blew the smoke out from between her gold-dusted shiny lips, and with a poised index finger she tapped on it until a cake of ash crumbled off of it into the hollow of a teacup. The fragile beauty of the girl and the childlike innocence of her surroundings contrasted with jarring sharpness against the unwholesomeness of her activity.