The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore (48 page)
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.
T
he 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.
