Now, I liked raisins. But I did not love them. Tal was feeding me raisins, one for each successfully completed task. I guess this was before Norm orchestrated the complicated mock-capitalist system with the numbered chips. I must have misremembered when exactly that took place, Gwen, because I suppose otherwise Tal wouldn’t have been baiting me with direct food rewards. Or maybe she secretly harbored some personal moral or philosophical disgust with Norm’s value-chip system and so she just didn’t use it when Norm wasn’t around, which is also distinctly possible. Now that I think back on it, I remember that Tal had also chosen not to wear the frightening black metal welding mask that Norm insisted the experimenters wear when they asked me to perform their stupid tasks—so maybe that was indeed the case.
“Put some soap on the ball,” she would say, taking special care to emphasize the nouns and the preposition. Back in those days it was very important to use the right preposition with me. And I would pick up a bottle of liquid hand soap and obediently squirt a little of it on top of my inflatable yellow beach ball. This task completed, Tal handed me a squishy raisin from the box. A raisin. Must other creatures sing for their suppers so? I wasn’t even hungry. I took the raisin from her hand and set it down beside me for future consumption.
“You don’t want the raisin, Bruno?” she said.
I shook my head no. I did not, in fact, want the raisin at that moment. Tal continued with the experiment.
“Put the froggie in the refrigerator.”
(There was a small refrigerator in the lab; the froggie was a rubber frog that whimpered when squeezed.) Debased slave that I was, I put the froggie in the refrigerator. Tal dug her fingers into the depths of the raisin box and rummaged around in it for a raisin. It was the kind of raisin box that was red, with a picture of a beautiful girl with raven-black hair spilling from her bonnet, bearing in her arms a bountiful basket of grapes, her back to a blazing yellow sun rising behind her. I listened to the sound of her fingers rattling the raisins against the inner walls of the thin cardboard box. She finally successfully fished a raisin out of the raisin box, and held it out for me to take.
Now why, I ask, would I want another fucking raisin? I had just told her that I didn’t really even want the first one! She held out her hand, with the sad black gummy thing rolling around in the cup of her palm like a tiny turd. I did not want it. Not even for later. I pushed her hand away.
“Bruno,” she said. “Come on. Please take the raisin.”
I shook my head no.
“Okay, Bruno,” she said, improvising, and ate the raisin herself. Was she trying to make me envious? Was she trying to make me covet my neighbor’s raisin? Did she want me to think, You villainous slut! How dare you eat my raisin? If that was what she was after, it wasn’t happening. I didn’t care. I already had a raisin of my own.
“Bruno,” she said. “Please give your flower some water.”
Now, what made all these tasks so maddening was their sheer needlessness. By “my flower” she was indicating a yellow flower made of thin synthetic fabric placed atop a green plastic stalk that sprouted from a plastic flowerpot full of rubber dirt. This was a miserable object. What demonic impulse so inspires humankind to manufacture sad rubber imitations of the simplest articles of natural beauty? The dirt in the flowerpot was disgustingly unrealistic, but the flower itself could almost fool you—until of course you touched its petals, and your fingers were rudely shocked by the brittle texture of the synthetic when you were expecting the plump wet kiss of honest life. What she wanted me to do was to take a watering can that had a little water in it, and dribble the water from its porous neck into the rubber dirt; a tragic mimicry of what would have been a bestowal of nourishment upon a living thing—if only the thing were real.
Sluggish-limbed and bored, begrudging her at every step, I hoisted myself up, went over to where the watering can was, dragged it one-handed across the floor behind me, clanging and banging as it went, water sloshing around inside it and splashing out in puddles here and there, and I tipped its beak into the plastic pot, submissively suffering to “water” the fake dirt.
“Good job, Bruno!” Tal clapped her hands twice in approval. “Very good!”
Then she rooted around in the raisin box and offered me another raisin.
I shook my head no.
“You don’t want a raisin?” she said, thrusting the raisin at me. “Raisins are good. They’re good for you.”
(Ah-ha! I get it now, Tal. You were feeding me the raisins because you were concerned for my health. Because you were concerned that I was always using the wages I earned in the lab to buy nothing but junk food, the M&Ms and the marshmallows and the candy bars that Norm had on offer, all the gooey wonderful sweet stuff that I happened to like, while ignoring utterly the nuts and the vegetables and your “nature’s candy,” the raisin!)
Tal held the raisin aloft, deftly pinched between her middle finger and thumb, and guided this raisin, this blackened, mummified corpse of a grape, toward my face, toward the direction of my shut mouth, then stopped a few inches from my lips and held it there. Slowly, slowly, she brought the raisin to my mouth, until the raisin itself touched my lips. I opened my mouth, and then I shut it. When I shut my mouth, both the raisin and the middle finger of Tal’s right hand were inside of it. For an instant, Tal’s finger was in between my top and bottom rows of teeth. And then it wasn’t.
I had never really done anything physically violent to a human in my life, and I never really would again, except for a few slipups, including the one murder I committed, which is what landed me in this place, but I will speak of that later.
Yes, there was screaming. Yes, there was blood. Yes, Tal looked down in horror at the stub where the ultimate and penultimate segments of her right middle finger used to be. Yes, she held her hand up to the light and looked at it with an expression that betrayed more amazement at first than physical pain, as if wondering where were the other two joints of her finger that only a moment before had been securely attached to the second knuckle? Yes, she held it that way, wide-eyed, aghast, against the cold flickering of the fluorescent lights that illumined the lab. And yes, just a brief moment, just a fraction of a second later, the blood began to burble up out of her finger, and a fraction of a second after that it began to spray from her hand, almost as if from the nozzle of a hose. Yes, the hot blood filling up my mouth tasted bitter, metallic. No, I did not swallow it.
There immediately followed a period of great tumult and confusion. To complement the craziness of the moment, the minute hand of the clock had just then managed to scale the left side of the clock face to surmount the top of the hour, which meant that all the classes in the building were being dismissed at about the same time, and now the hallways below us had suddenly come alive with murmuring and hundreds of shuffling shoes.
Prasad gave her a quick bandaging with the lab’s first-aid kit. There was a lot of yelling. Someone called an ambulance. For a short time there was some shouting about where the finger was.
“It’s still in his fucking mouth,” Tal shrieked, cradling her hand to her chest, which was wrapped up in gauze and then again in her twisted and bloody T-shirt.
They tried to catch me, but I was too fast for them! I ran around the room like mad in the confusion, screaming, flailing, scrambling over the tables, upsetting the furniture, bouncing off the walls, causing a world-class ruckus. Shouting everywhere. Lydia—who at some point had rematerialized in the room—yelled at everyone: “Leave!” she commanded. “Everybody get out! I’ll handle this!”
“Are you sure?” someone said. “He’s dangerous—”
“Go. Go! Get out! I’ll take care of it.”
All the other scientists funneled out the door and into the hall, guiding Tal, who was now pale with blood loss and fright, still clutching her hand to her chest, out of the room. They left. The door shut behind them. I was cowering beneath one of the lab tables. The room was silent except for the sound of all the students jost
ling each other in the halls of the floors below us.
“Bruno,” Lydia called. “Bruno. Come here, please.”
I wouldn’t come out.
“Don’t worry. I won’t bite,” she said, keenly aware of the irony.
She found me huddled under a table. Lydia was on her hands and knees on the floor. She crawled toward me, and then sat down, cross-legged, and patted the floor in front of her. She had put on a sweet face, but I could tell in her eyes that she was furious with me.
“Come here,” she whispered. “Come to me.”
I scrambled out from under the shadow of the table and sat in her lap. She hugged me, and she kissed the top of my head and stroked my fur. I was shivering.
“Shhhh———,” she said. “Shhhh—————.”
Gradually, my shivering stopped. She put a cupped hand below my mouth. (Recall, Gwen, the episode with the peach.)
“Please, Bruno,” she said. “Give it to me. Spit it out.”
I let the finger fall from my mouth. I pushed it out with my tongue, and the lifeless and slimy thing—and the raisin along with it—tumbled from my mouth and into the cradle of her palm, still attached to my lips by a sticky thread of drool.
“Thank you, Bruno,” she said, and closed her hand over it.
Then she picked me up and put me in the enclosure that was walled in by thick glass, and shut the door. I went willingly. I knew that I had done wrong. That I had sinned. She locked the door. I began to cry.
“You’ve been bad,” she said. “You’ve been very, very, very bad. I’ll deal with you later, Bruno. I have to go now.”
Lydia turned around and left, the finger held tightly in her hand. She hurried from the room, but remembered to flick off the lights as she left. No one came back to the lab for the rest of the day.
She needed the finger because she had vainly hoped that a doctor would be able to reattach it. Much later she would tell me that the doctors had in fact attempted to reattach the finger. She told me that although they had implemented all the sorceries of modern medicine available to them, they had ultimately failed to reattach it. In retrospect, I have come to wonder what effect the loss of the longest and middle digit on Tal Gozani’s dominant hand had on her career in puppetry.
Tal quit working at the lab after that, and she stopped visiting Lydia and me at our home. I believe the lab was legally in the clear, because they had a policy of requiring everyone who did research with potentially vicious animals like me—and are we not all “potentially vicious” animals, Gwen?—to sign some sort of waiver saying they wouldn’t sue if something like this were to happen. If she had been able to sue and had chosen to do so, then I’m sure it would have spelled certain doom for the project. Norm was already strapped enough for cash as it was. Maybe I would have been returned—God forbid—to the zoo. After this incident, everyone who worked in the lab behaved with a little more nervousness toward me, they deferred to me a little more respect—or caution, I couldn’t tell which, and ultimately it doesn’t much matter.
Everyone, that is, except for Lydia. She seemed to understand. To forgive me, even. It’s to be expected in this line of work. Chimps bite. Get out of the primatology business if you can’t take the primates, is what I say. I really don’t blame myself for it at all—I’m not that cruel.
As a result of this unfortunate incident, I once again had to sleep in that fucking laboratory for a time afterward. I do not know if this was intended as punishment, or what. I do not remember if it was days or weeks. It was mostly because, at least for a while, not even Lydia trusted me to behave properly in a domestic human environment.
The upshot of this temporary arrangement was that I got to see Haywood Finch again. I had not seen my friend in many months, and that first evening that I was back in the lab at night, I remember the sudden surge of joy I felt in my chest when I heard the familiar sound of his walk, stomping and jangling down the hallway, the kLOMPa-whap-SHLINK kLOMPa-whap-SHLINK of his boots, his chain, his hoop of many keys, when I saw his familiar blurry lumpy shadow looming in that familiar doorway, behind the panel of smoked glass in the door to room 308: BEHAVIORAL BIOLOGY LABORATORY. He opened the door, and snapped on the buzzing fluorescent lights, which slowly fluttered on, nzt-nzt-nzt-nzzzzzzzzzz.
“Haywood!” I shrieked.
“Bruno!” he screamed.
That night, even Haywood forgot his routine. He was so glad to see me again. That night, we sat up in the laboratory, separated by a wall of glass, and howled gibberish at each other almost until the beginning of dawn.
I have never, by the way, eaten a raisin since. Raisins make me want to vomit. I hate raisins.
XVII
I shall never forget the day that Lydia, on one of our outings, took me to the Museum of the Art Institute of Chicago. On that day, all the dormant potential for sweetness and light buried deep in some volcanic cranny of Bruno’s soul erupted forth to the surface, igniting fires, fires!
This day is important, Gwen, because I became an artist on that day. It had been a few months since the biting incident. It was summer again. It’s a snarling irony that there was actually a bit of a row that took place on the museum steps that morning between Lydia and a rent-a-cop, some dough-faced lout in a cryptofascist uniform with shiny buttons all over it claiming to be a museum employee, concerning the question of whether or not a chimpanzee should be admitted entrance into this temple of Eleusinian Mysteries—an art museum. Bigotry! Just when I thought Lydia and this Gestaposeur might actually come to blows, some higher-up from the museum’s bureaucracy intercepted the argument as third-party arbiter, and it was finally determined that my admittance was permissible depending on the caveats that I was to be at all times: (one) secured on my leash, and (two) either holding Lydia’s hand or being physically carried by her, which was fine with me because there was no other place in the world I’d rather have been than dangling from the neck of my Lydia.
The first paintings to really excite me were the many female nudes: reclining, standing, bathing, sleeping, descending staircases, splishing about in streams or wringing riverwater from their hair, standing on clams, brandishing swords and scales in allegorical triptychs while their diaphanous garments teasingly slip from their shoulders, unabashedly loafing around in various states of undress in the Turkish seraglios of tittery European imagination, and that beautiful Manet of the pouty strumpet lounging on a pile of silk pillows with a hand planted on her crotch and her shoes on…. Clearly the Great Master(bator)s of the History of Art were just as irresistibly fascinated by the very subject that did then and continues to fascinate Bruno: the disrobed human female. I couldn’t contain myself!—I wanted to fuck them all! I wanted to fuck Manet’s Olympia and Botticelli’s Venus, I wanted to fuck Mary Magdalene in her grotto and that double amputee Venus de Milo who’s got nothing now to prevent that sheet from falling, I wanted to fuck all the bare-breasted goddesses in the allegorical triptychs, too, I wanted to fuck Justice and fuck Peace and fuck Fidelity, I was even waiting at the bottom of the stairs for the nude to finish descending, where I would unlock her with the key of my desire from Duchamp’s prismatic prison! After advancing first through the classical stuff and then through the tantalizing objects of Italian Mannerist lust, then eighteenth-century French Romanticism—robes, togas, tunics, and bedsheets unfurling left and right to expose rolling pink swaths of luminous human flesh you could almost smell and taste in the paint—we came to the Impressionists: the two I liked the best were certainly Van Gogh and Gauguin.
Gauguin, because all those sweet plump honey-complected Polynesian tarts re-ignited my libido after I’d had to suffer through a bunch of brain-numbingly insipid pictures of flowers and vegetables and dead fish and other such crap.
But Van Gogh! Van Gogh, because he’s a genius. Van Gogh was the first painter I admired for purely platonic reasons. My God, the landscapes of Van Gogh! You know all those pastoral pictures of the wind shushing through cypress trees on grassy hillsides som
ewhere in the south of France? What pastoral? Those are the least pastoral pastoral paintings you’ll ever see. Everything in the landscape is chattering and rattling and hissing and screaming! Those paintings aren’t pastoral!—they’re full of weeping and gnashing of teeth.
Then we came to the Moderns, which I also liked, but in a different way. I took a crash course in the history of Western art that day, and so twentieth-century sallies into the realm of the wildly abstract shocked me on the same day I was also shocked by the concept, the very concept of representing three-dimensional form on canvas at all. I saw Picassos, Matisses, Mondrian’s colorful boxes, Jackson Pollock’s haphazard psychoscapes, Rothko’s subtly defined rectangles of color. Yes, yes, said Bruno to his soul. This is it. This stuff is the best of the best of being human.
We lingered in the museum until it closed—so unwilling was I to leave the place. When we came home that day, I was able to communicate to Lydia, in a struggling handful of gestures and rudimentary utterances, that I had found my calling: I wanted to paint.
“Do you want to draw pictures like the ones we saw today at the museum?” said Lydia.
Yes, I affirmed, nodding. Yes, yes, yes.
The very next day Lydia—this inexhaustible fount of human benevolence—went to the store and bought me a large pad of sketch paper and some art supplies: crayons, pencils, watercolors, a box of Magic Markers.
Crayons have never done it for me. I realize that the image of a crayon by itself practically stands as a synecdoche of childhood, but in practical usage I found them sorely wanting. I detested the way the tips would become blunted almost immediately. I did not like the rough quality of the lines they made on the paper, I did not like the feeling or the texture, and I hated when their waxy tips bore down into the paper wrapping—the sound of the paper crayon wrapper scraping against the paper I was drawing on never failed to solicit a cringe and a shiver from me. No!—to hell with crayons! I was a marker man.
The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore Page 17
