Benjamin Hale - The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore

A bathroom adjoined her bedroom, where I looked at myself in a mirror for the first time that day, and inspected the cuts in my naked flesh. The girl — whose name, she told me, was Emily — came back with some clothes for me. But first she told me to take a shower, which I did. It both cleaned and warmed me. I was so dirty the runoff that dribbled down my legs and spiraled down the drain was black. When I had showered, little Emily swabbed my wounds with cotton balls that she dampened with stinging alcohol, and taped over them with dozens of Band-Aids. I lay supine on her bed as she treated my wounds. I tried to be modest before her, but in her no-nonsense office of nurse she swatted away my hands that held the stuffed zebra, and she did not remark upon my indecency. She gave me a pair of men’s underwear, socks, a pair of corduroy pants and a cable-knit sweater as green as a green apple. All of these things were too big for me; the pants I had to roll up at the ankles and scrunch in at the waist by means of a belt she also fetched for me, and the green sweater clung loosely to my form with flapping sleeves. She said these clothes belonged to her older brother, who was away at college and wouldn’t miss them. Later, she unearthed from a closet an old pair of her father’s shoes. They were black leather loafers, slightly worn and like everything else too big for me, but serviceable enough. Prompted then by my cries of thirst and my belly that snarled audibly with hunger, she even brought me food and drink. (Oh — where would I be but for the kindness of women?) She restored my strength with a tall glass of water and choice viands — a dish, a great dish of chocolate chip cookies! — which she procured from somewhere downstairs. She warmed to me a little, then a little more, and then we sat in her bedroom and talked for a long while of general things. She was in the ninth grade, she said, and a freshman student in high school. She spoke of her father and mother and her older brother in a tone of bilious vituperation, and I replied that I only wished I had a family like hers, and that she ought to count herself fortunate to be raised in a good home with a nice family, and she riposted by giving me the finger. Of course she inquired about my own unusual circumstances — i.e., how I came to be discovered hiding in her “Little Princess Playhouse,” trembling from cold and fear, with flesh badly lacerated, mud-spattered, and nude. I stalled and stammered and creatively perambulated the truth — which I admit was morally wrong in theory but right in practice, for although I puttered and obscured and flat-out lied to her about certain ticklish specifics — I think I may have told her that I was born with gruesome birth defects, and my impoverished parents had sold me at a young age into a life of indentured servitude with a traveling circus, from which I had just escaped (which was plausible enough) — if I slightly fudged my autobiographical facts it was only because I was afraid of how she might react if she knew the truth.

Little Emily did not guess that the being who kept her company in her bedroom that afternoon and night was actually a chimp — and not just any chimp! — but Bruno, the speaking chimp of Chicago, who had already attained a dubious and unwanted degree of celebrity, as much for his iniquities as for his accomplishments. News of my daring escape from the New York University’s nearby Laboratory for Experimental Medicine and Surgery in Primates (LEMSIP) in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York, appeared on the front page of the newspaper the following morning (tucked away in a quiet corner of the front page, but on the front page nonetheless). I don’t think little Emily suspected me then, though. I allowed her to continue in her belief that I was merely some sort of deformed midget. It’s a testament to her sterling character that she took me in, believing even this (which is unusual enough), and nursed my wounds, and gave me clothing, food, and shelter. After the initial shock of discovering me, she saw that I was articulate, and moreover that I was kind, and her first fear — that she would come to some harm at my hands — abated more with every passing minute we spent in conversation; but I suppose what put her at ease with me the most was a combination of the erudition I have by learning, and the charm I have by nature.

Little Emily and I had become so engrossed in our discourses that she forgot the time, and when she heard the sound of the front door of the house opening and shutting — faint as the sound was, her hyperattentive young ears immediately detected it — the color drained from her face, her eyes widened in fear, and she said: “Shit! My mom’s home.”

Downstairs, the dog went berserk with yapping; keys tinkled, shoes hit the floor. Then the voice of a woman calling: “Emily?”

“What should we do?” I said.

“You stay here,” she whispered. “I’ll deal with her. She knows she’s not allowed to come in. She respects my personal space.” (What therapeutic language!) “If anybody comes in they’ll knock first. So hide if you hear a knock.”

She rushed out of the room and shut the door.

“Hi, Mom,” I heard her sweetly sing out. I listened to her feet thumping fast down the stairs, taking them two at a time. Then I heard two female voices in conversation, but could not discern what they were saying. Little Emily was gone for a long time. I sat on her pink bed for a while, in my borrowed clothes. I got up and inspected the things in the room. It wasn’t a boring place to be left alone, crammed to the gills as it was with all manner of interesting diversions. I opened and shut every drawer in the bathroom, sniffed all her little perfumes and rolled out red nibs of lipstick, noted the pack of cigarettes stashed in the medicine cabinet, and noted the presence of tampons that indicated she had already begun to menstruate. I cannot resist the lure of the accoutrements of human femininity: I love women’s bathroom counters, stocked like alchemy labs with all those puffs and powders and potions and phials and bottles and canisters — the heady, intoxicating smells of all that stuff! Then I scanned the spines of the books in her bookshelf, looking for a text to pass the time with. There were lots of books that I guessed were things she had been assigned to read in school, simply written slender volumes deemed “literature” while still being accessible to youth— Of Mice and Men, Lord of the Flies —a lot of girls’ classics— Anne of Green Gables, Little House on the Prairie, Little Women —and then, interestingly, a lot of books that were juicy with sex — Anaïs Nin, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Justine, The Story of O . There were textbooks, picture books, poetry: Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, Sylvia Plath. The books were arranged in no immediately discernible order: not alphabetical, not chronological, not Dewey decimal. I had already read some of these titles, either curled up in an armchair in Mr. Lawrence’s library or sitting beneath a lamp at one of the long wooden tables in the reading room at the University of Chicago library. To pass the time I settled on a whimsical bit of frivolous juvenilia about a girl who for some reason is living in an attic with her family, in the pages of which I busied my eyes until little Emily’s return. Eventually she came back. She opened the door slightly, slipped inside, and clicked it shut behind her.

“You can stay here tonight,” she said in a voice two degrees north of a whisper. “But my mom and dad don’t know you’re here, so we have to be quiet. And you have to go in the morning. I have to eat dinner now. I’ll bring you some food later.”

Again she was gone, and again, maybe an hour or so later, she came back, this time with a plate of lukewarm food: chicken, carrots, peas, etc. “Here. I snuck this up for you.”