The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore

by Benjamin Hale

  XXVII

  Last night I found something in my memory that may be of interest to our readers, Gwen. It is one last relevant bit of dangling narrative in need of narrating from my time at the ranch, and once I have narrated it, then we may spin those hands of that clock into that time-blur that I have promised.

  I could not sleep last night. Sometimes I have these bouts of insomnia. Nothing terrible—nothing at all like what Lydia used to have—but every so often I spend a restless night in bed, I thrash around in my sheets, with my mind turning over and over like the engine of a car stuck in neutral gear. I still haven’t yet slept today, despite the fact that the unencumbered leisure of my daily schedule would not prevent me from filching a few hours’ worth of a nap.

  So, as I lay in bed last night, flipping my pillow over again and again to cool my sleepless cheeks, watching the rectangle of moonlight on my bedroom floor slowly slant into a rhombus, for entertainment I began rummaging through the toy box of my brain to see if I could find any old half-forgotten memories to play with. And what I found buried toward the bottom, dusted off and examined with curiosity and a sudden gush of remembrance was this interesting hippocampal artifact. In my sleeplessness, I remembered an incident that happened at the ranch—I can’t exactly remember when it was, but I know that it was near the end of our stay there. I’m pretty sure that we left the ranch at the end of a summer, or the beginning of a fall. So, seeing as we arrived there in a winter, I guess we spent more than two years there, more like two and a half. Wait a moment, Gwen, the fog of my memory is lifting… lifting… I can almost see it… ah-ha! Yes, there it is. I see it clearly now. Just as I suspected: this happened on the Fourth of July. Independence Day. I also remember that it involved a hot tub.

  There was a hot tub embedded in the wooden back deck of the big house. Wait, how could this have been in the summer? I remember very clearly the steam that was rising off the surface of the water. No, it was summer, because even midsummer nights can get quite cold at those altitudes—hence the steam. It was night. The color of the water—that I remember exactly: it was absolutely aquamarine, and glowing, as if it contained mysterious radioactive agents. Lydia is sitting in the hot tub. I am sitting in the hot tub. Mr. and Mrs. Lawrence are sitting in the hot tub. It is the Fourth of July.

  That is a holiday I sometimes miss in my current confinement. I haven’t seen a Fourth of July since I’ve been sequestered here in the Institute. I am told—and I believe—that the first time Lydia took me to a Fourth of July fireworks celebration (in my mind the Fourth of July was a celebration that celebrated fireworks), I spoke of stars. This was in Chicago. I, Bruno, borne in her arms, was swaddled in the oversized green hooded sweatshirt that I would wear on our outings into human society. She took me to the fireworks celebration at Navy Pier on the Fourth of July. The sounds, the clicking and binging and whirring noises everywhere, the music threading through the atmosphere, the giant Ferris wheel: Navy Pier. When the music that accompanied the fireworks began to blare from the crackling loudspeakers and the fireworks began to shriek into the sky to detonate themselves above our heads, she said that I pointed up to the sizzling clouds of smoke and sparks, I pointed up at them with my long finger and distinctly said, in a voice slow and breathy with awe: “Stars!” Stars! Stars! STARS!

  (It should be noted, however, that during the summers Chicago for some reason elects to discharge a battery of fireworks into the sky from Navy Pier every single Friday and Saturday night, and thus Chicago is a city spoiled rotten with fireworks, like a silly child who eats her favorite food every day until she loses the taste for it. So on the Fourth of July they compensate simply by shooting off lots and lots of fireworks!—which is admittedly an uncreative solution to the problem of pyrotechnic desensitization that arises from that city’s powerful thirst, her loving greed to smell the sulfur in her nose and to hear these ballistic hosannas and to see these wildflowers of energy blooming in the sky and reflected on the surface of her lake. I have said earlier that Chicago is curmudgeonly in the winters. Yes, but in the summers—perhaps, in fact, in order to amend for her frigid behavior most of the year—in the summers Chicago is no longer Chicago-that-somber-city, but instead is a wild rich child of a city, who demands to eat her cake and ice cream every single day—and the weakhearted people of the city give it to her, they give it all to her because they love her, they spoil her, just because, even if she doesn’t deserve it, they love to see the beautiful look on her face when she gets what she wants.)

  Fourths of July were more subdued in Colorado, but no less beautiful. Many animals are terrified of fireworks, but I have never been one of them. Animals are afraid of fireworks because they do not understand them. To them, fireworks are an aberration—a frightening hole in the fabric of their accepted universe—whereas I, Bruno, share man’s love of fire. I too have plucked the red flower. I have joined the pyromantic primates. In my younger days, so long as Lydia was near, I never really feared a thing if I could see that she wasn’t afraid of it, and this included the potentially disturbing phenomenon of the inky firmament above us opening up with screaming bursts of colored fire. At the ranch, we had to sate ourselves with watching the Fourth of July fireworks display put on by the nearby sleepy mountain town of Montrose, Colorado, which was situated in the lap of a valley that we could see down into from the deck of the big house at the Lawrence Ranch, perched at the top of a long gradual slope of mountainside that spilled into the valley below. We sat on the deck at nightfall and watched from a great distance the fireworks that the people of Montrose shot into the summer air for themselves. From our high vantage point at the crest of the valley, watching the fireworks shoot up out of the town from miles away was like watching the destruction of a Sodom or Gomorrah in reverse, the fire and brimstone falling not from heaven to earth, but shooting up from the earth to make war against heaven. And we looked down into the valley, and lo, we did not turn to salt.

  We could barely even hear the fireworks. The bullets sang up from the town’s cluster of lights, rising to their designated heights and no higher, where they exploded into shimmering umbrellas of sparks and made noises that arrived late to our ears, noises that after running up our slope of the valley had been reduced to little pops no more impressive than the sounds of string-tethered corks pneumatically thrust from the muzzles of popguns. Pop!… pop-pop!… pop! And, like a giant clumsy child with a brimming bucketful of light, the fireworks carelessly splashed their waves of artificial color—red, yellow, blue, green—all over the faces of the mountains on either side of the wide dark valley.

  Obviously all the animals on the ranch were terrified of the spectacle, but there was little that could be done to comfort them. They heard the shrieks and bangs distinctly from far away; the elephants felt the vibrations of them in their big flat feet, all the ungulates huddled together for protection; the birds hid their heads beneath their wings and the burrowing animals burrowed deeper into the earth. In their benighted animal minds, stars were not supposed to swing so low. The night was supposed to be silent and dark. These things could be the portents of disaster, the end of the world or the beginning of a new one.

  We were sitting on the deck drinking white wine, wine from Mr. Lawrence’s own vineyard. The other chimps had gone to bed. Or, I recall that Larry and Lily had gone to bed—was this before the death of Hilarious Larry?—it couldn’t have been—so it was just Lily who had gone inside to retire for the night. Where was Clever? Clever had curled up and fallen asleep in a deck chair. Lydia is sitting in the hot tub. I am sitting in the hot tub. Mr. and Mrs. Lawrence are sitting in the hot tub. It is the Fourth of July. Is Lydia wearing her canary yellow bathing suit? Yes, let’s say she is. So much of her smooth beautiful skin on display for eyes that are not entirely mine. I do not particularly like water—I mean, I drink it, yes, but I don’t like my body being in water—few chimps do. We cannot swim because our bodies are too dense. I just dabble my toes a few millimeters deep into the swimming
pool, feel the bone-chilling shock of it, and jerk them back, thereafter flatly refusing to submerge my body any further in the vile stuff. But I don’t mind the feeling of being in a hot tub. The Lawrences’ hot tub was embedded in their deck and shaped roughly like a kidney, a kidney full of warm aquamarine water, caused to glow from within by underwater lights, and steaming and bubbling like a witch’s brew. A hot tub is different from a swimming pool. Lowering oneself into a hot tub is like lowering oneself into a tank full of amniotic fluid, like slipping back into the womb. And the Lawrences’ hot tub featured a certain switch that when switched incited torrents of bubbles to shoot into the water from a series of holes in the tub’s smoothly curving inner walls. I would press the switch again and again, and position myself right in front of one of these holes to let my body be massaged by the pressure of the jet thunderously farting out a hot stream of bubbles. We were all sitting in this hot tub. There were no more fireworks. The fireworks had come and gone away.

  Are the humans drunk? I don’t know. Probably. They never permit me to drink very much. Each of us is sipping a glass of white wine. No, I am not. I have already had my allotted fill tonight, but the three humans are still drinking wine. They are holding and drinking from glasses full of wine while actually sitting in the tub at the same time, occasionally setting the glasses on the surface of the deck. Everyone has his or her arms stretched over the lip of the tub in poses of relaxation. They are talking. Mrs. Lawrence and Lydia are enjoying some sort of conversation, while Mr. Lawrence contentedly looks on. I am enjoying the sensation of the bubbles massaging my back. I don’t remember what is said here, but I think Regina Lawrence is the one who just said it, and I remember that whatever it is that has just been said has caused Lydia to blush. I can almost feel the temperature of the already-warm water rise a degree or two from the sudden heating of Lydia’s blood.

  “No, no,” Lydia denies, speaking to Mrs. Lawrence as I glance over at her. Lydia is shaking her head vigorously back and forth, and her hair—which at this point has grown long again—is wet, and slaps her face as she shakes her head. But Lydia is not seriously upset: she is smiling, smiling a smile that threatens to erupt into a laugh, despite the fact that she is vehemently denying whatever Mrs. Lawrence has just accused her of. Her almost-laughter is half-gleeful and half-nervous. Is she drunk? My God, yes: she’s drunk.

  “Don’t think we’re stupid,” says Mrs. Lawrence, smiling also, to soften the aggressiveness of the comment. Regina Lawrence’s titanic breasts are pushed together by the top of her crimson bathing suit. She is leaning into the area of her husband’s body where his lean arm meets his chest, which is wet and furry with curly white hair. “I can tell when a woman’s in love.”

  Lydia says nothing. The gods of Smile and Frown war for dominance over Lydia’s expression. After a long struggle, Smile emerges victorious. Then she laughs, but covers her mouth as if her laughter were a cough or a hiccup.

  “Don’t worry, darling,” says Regina Lawrence. “We’re no puritans ourselves.”

  I look again at Lydia, whose smile and laughter have gone from her mouth, and whose eyes are now staring down into the aquamarine depths of the warm, steaming water. I look into the water, too, trying to see what she might be looking at. Then I look up at the stars. Stars! Stars! Then my gaze settles halfway between the water and the stars, and I look at Mr. and Mrs. Lawrence, sitting directly across from us in the hot tub. I notice that a cloud of tension, without my realizing exactly when, has recently entered the airspace between us. I look over at Clever Hands, my mute companion, who is fast asleep in the canvas seat of a lounge chair on the deck, about fifteen feet away from us. Clever lies in the chair, slack-limbed and snoring. Sukie, the dog, is curled up asleep on the deck directly beneath Clever’s chair. I look back at Mr. Lawrence, and see what may or may not be a wild look of sex in his eyes behind the foggy shields of his glasses.

  Then I see something floating on the surface of the water. The bubbles rising from the bright depths of the tub bat the thing around on the steaming surface of the water. It looks like a lily pad, or a dark red flower, some sort of floating vegetable matter for a frog in a swamp to sit upon. It floats around aimlessly in the water between us, in the middle of the tub. I stare at it, transfixed. I realize that it is the bottom portion of Regina Lawrence’s swimsuit.

  In the vast darkness beyond the deck, the night is ferocious with the rhythmic chirping of crickets. There must be a cricket hiding under every leaf out there. The din they make deafens one, their incessant krreepa, krreepa, krreepa. Very far away, a band of coyotes cackle in the mountains. For a moment, nobody moves.

  Seeming eons and probable moments later, more articles bubble up to join the limp red rag of material floating on the surface of the smoking blue-green water. Regina Lawrence sets her wineglass on the surface of the deck, settles into the water till it comes up to her chin, then resurfaces, and as she does, the upper portion of her swimsuit now also floats to the top of the water. The voluminous cups of her swimsuit top drift around in the glowing water like the bulbous red eyes of a sea monster whose body lurks just below the surface. Now Mr. Lawrence gradually worries his Speedo down his legs, and that too rises up to the surface from below the gurgling water. I look blankly across the water at them, across these three pieces of fabric floating in the tub like dishrags, and at Mr. and Mrs. Lawrence, whose blurry and pale bodies are now completely naked beneath the bubbles and the steam that wafts up into the atmosphere from the pale blue-green water. Mrs. Lawrence’s breasts bob on the surface of the water for all the world like the bodies of two plucked geese. And her nipples. I must draw special attention to her nipples. What nipples! I’ve never seen such nipples. Lydia—Lydia has these tiny pink buttons for nipples, like the sweet little eyes of a white rabbit—but these?—these nipples are like big fat mushy cookies! I cannot help but stare! I flick a sidelong glance at Lydia. What in the world is she doing? Her breathing is heavy and irregular. Her breathing is heavy and irregular, coming into her in gulps of breath and going out of her in staggered shivers. I recognize that look on her face: the inner corners of the eyebrows tending upward, the eyelids half-closed over eyes that are not seeing, an expression of pleasure so intense it is almost an expression of pain. I recognize that look on her face and I recognize that cadence in her breathing. This is what she looks like, this is how she breathes when we are in the preliminary stages of making love. I look down: down into the glowing blue water. It’s hard to see in the steaming, wobbling water, but my eyes are able to ascertain the following information: (one) Regina Lawrence has at some point in the recent past diagonally extended one of her trunk-like naked legs across the middle of the tub; (two) she has placed her bare foot in the crux of Lydia’s groin; (three) the big toe of this foot has managed to maneuver itself beneath the fabric of Lydia’s canary yellow swimsuit; (four) this toe is currently employed in the business of sensuously rubbing the flesh of what may or may not be Lydia’s clitoris. The naked Lawrences begin to scoot toward her, with clear prurient intent. At this point Lydia inadvertently drops the glass of wine that she has been holding in her hand this whole time, but about which she has recently forgotten. It happens like this: deeply distracted, her fingers involuntarily loosen their grip on the thing, which plops into the aquamarine water; the wine in it spills into the water; for a brief moment the wineglass floats on the surface like a boat before the bowl of the glass fills up and the vessel capsizes, goes under, and plummets, surprisingly quickly, straight down into the tub, where it gets caught in one of the thundering streams of bubbles issuing from the holes in the sides of the tub, which shoots it through the water and smashes it against the other side of the tub. The glass shatters, noiselessly.

  “Fuck!” said Lydia, as we abandon the present tense. She slapped a hand to her mouth. “Oh, no—oh—I’m sorry, I’m so sorry—”

  Her face was red, her eyes flickered with blinks. She sucked in a giant swallow of air and straightened herself. She
straightened herself like you straighten a bent wire.

  “Nobody step in it!” said Mr. Lawrence, always trying to be helpful.

  “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” Lydia kept saying. Her muscles and nerves had been infused with an inexplicable sense of frenzy. “Let’s get out, Bruno. I think it’s time for bed.”

  When she said this everyone clambered out of the tub as if a poisonous snake had just been dropped into the water. Lydia extended a hand to me to help me out. I shivered violently. I despised the cold shock of the air on my wet body. The water flattened my fur heavy against my skin. Mr. and Mrs. Lawrence’s pink and dripping naked bodies fished around in the bubbling water for their sopping garments. Mr. Lawrence was covered with wiry white hair. Mrs. Lawrence was plump and jiggly. Her wet gelatinous breasts slapped around like fish. Mr. Lawrence’s semierect penis was crimson—bright crimson!—before he hurriedly stuffed it back into the genital pouch of his Speedo swimsuit. Lydia vigorously rubbed me down with her towel until all my fluffy fur crackled with static electricity, and then she vigorously rubbed herself half-dry with it before she began, in frantic whips and jerks, to put her clothes back on over her canary yellow swimsuit. Mr. Lawrence busied himself with the job of draining the hot tub—to safely get at the broken glass, I suppose. Regina Lawrence, her sleek body reminding one of a porpoise, approached Lydia.

  “I’m sorry, darling, I—”

  “No, no,” said Lydia, quickly. “Please, don’t be sorry. It’s fine. Everything’s fine.”

  “I hope you’re not upset. Dudley and I thought maybe you would be open to—”