The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore

by Benjamin Hale

  I dreamt that I was making love with Lydia. We were in Chicago. It was years ago. We were in our bed in the apartment in Chicago. It was snowing outside. Her warm body, her skin next to mine. The bed became earth, and then I was crawling through damp, dark soil. Pebbles, roots, grubs. My hands reached the surface. I pulled apart the clods of dirt, and saw a faint spot of light above. I dragged myself above the surface and emerged in a forest. I was in the jungle. I was in a wet, dark, densely vegetated place, ancient and teeming with life, with steam, dirt, fire, blood, semen, water, disease, ghosts. Everything was alive, everything breathing and flowing and moving and writhing with animal spirits. I was surrounded by chimpanzees. Naked, hairy animals, unenlightened, ungifted with speech. Grunting, howling, farting, scratching themselves, eating bugs and worms, picking nits out of each other’s fur. Their rubbery masklike faces, dark glassy eyes. They looked at me, confused. I was not one of them. I looked up into the sky. I could see only patches of blue here and there; most of it was shrouded by branches. But in one of the places where I could see the sky unobstructed by the leafy umbrages of the giant jungle trees, I saw something: a tiny speck, something floating in the sky, way up high above the trees. It descended, getting bigger, clearer, until it floated down through the break in the trees to the forest floor: it was a pink balloon effigy of a human being. I reached out to touch it. It popped.

  XLI

  Someone was shining a flashlight in my eyes.

  I blinked twice, and blinked again. My eyelids were weighty with drugged sleep.

  “Hey buddy!” said the flashlight, in a nasally New York accent. “You gotta be kiddin me here!”

  “What?… um… hello?” I mumbled, or something like it, into the light.

  “C’mon, buddy, what’s a matter with you?”

  The blinding light was yanked away from my eyes, and, squinting through burning tears of confusion, I saw the upside-down face of a police officer looking inquisitively into mine. I seemed to be lying beneath a blanket in the backseat of Leon’s ex-wife’s car. Leon himself was not present. I was so disoriented that I didn’t know at first if it was day or night. I felt the parked vehicle shudder as a monstrous truck whooshed past us on the road. My face hurt—like hell. My eyes were burning.

  The police officer’s face and tone of voice were stern, but not malicious. He was middle-aged, clean-shaven, and white. He was also the unlucky possessor of one of those loose flaps of flesh that hang pendent from the throat and chin, which I only now remember is called a “wattle.”

  “What time is it?” I said. “Where am I?”

  “It’s three in the frickin’ morning, and you’re in a vehicle with an expired registration on the shoulder of the Hutch.”

  “Well, that’s not where I went to sleep. I’m sure there’s some explanation, Officer.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Bruno. My name is Bruno.”

  “What’s a matter with your face?”

  My hand leapt to my face, and the tips of my long purple fingers met some sort of hard, coarse, dry texture. There was something wrapped around my head just below my eyes. I realized it was a bandage—covering my nose.

  “I’ve just undergone surgery, Officer,” I said. “I’m sorry, but I’ve been heavily sedated. I was under anesthesia.”

  The police officer frowned at this information. However, because his head was upside down, his frown instead appeared to me as if a funny-looking sightless chin-creature was smiling at me.

  He was standing on the roadside and leaning in through the open car window. He went away for a moment, to perambulate Leon’s ex-wife’s Wagoneer, briefly illuminating the trunk and front seats with his flashlight.

  “Where—where is Leon?” I said, my mind still hazy.

  “What?” said the police officer, returning to my side of the car.

  Now I was aware of a second presence. There was a man in blue jeans and a black T-shirt following the policeman. This second man carried, mounted on his shoulder like some sort of weapon, a camera: a video camera. He pressed one of his eyes to the viewfinder, the other eye a squint. A red light on the machine blinked on and off, an evilly winking little red dot. Why do humans always feel this urge to document?

  “Who is he?”

  “They’re filming this stuff for a TV show,’ ” said the cop.

  “Yo,” said the cameraman.

  “They’ll ask you to sign a waiver, unless you want ’em to blur your face on TV.”

  “Probably won’t have to,” said the cameraman. “We only air the good shit. You know, where something actually happens.”

  Is a dispassionate observer supposed to interlope the conversation like that?

  “My, um, my friend—Leon,” I stuttered. The cop turned to me again. “He was supposed to drive me home after my surgery.”

  “Some friend,” said the cop.

  I was sitting up in the backseat now, clutching the blanket, wondering suddenly if it was all I had to cover my nakedness. I could tell by the dilation of the camera lens that the cameraman was zooming in on my face. Seedlings of panic begin to sprout beneath my skin. Was there a German shepherd present? Would they beseech him to rip the fragile flesh from my bones? I wondered if I would be on TV.

  But hark!—there, in the distance, a lone figure is seen, approaching in the harsh orange lighting of the urban night. And he is a really big lone figure. He’s so girthy it looks as if he’s hiding a floppy sack of potatoes under his shirt, and he is huffing and wheezing with each toilsome step as he hoofs it along the shoulder of the Hutchinson River Parkway. His gigantic figure makes the man unmistakable, even to my bleary eyes.

  “Leon!” I shouted from the back of the car, still wrapped in my blanket. As I opened my mouth wide to shout a sharp pain zinged all over my face, and I guessed I should refrain from straining my facial muscles until my nose had fully healed. An eighteen-wheeler, lit up like a circus, blasted past us in the night. The police officer responded to my shout by shining the flashlight in my eyes again. I winced. I pointed at Leon, loping and puffing up the shoulder of the road.

  I said: “There!—him!—that’s my friend.”

  Leon had clearly spotted the police officer, and in his steps there was now a marked hesitation, a heaviness, indicating a dread of entering this situation, mixed with his mind working wildly to come up with a way of evading it, which, as his steps drew closer, turned into a wild working of trying to think of what he was going to say.

  “Hey buddy!” said the cop, redirecting the flashlight’s pale annulus at Leon. “Hey—you! This your car?”

  Leon, approaching, waddled along the shoulder of the parkway as quickly as he could, looking exactly like a walrus attempting a lumbering and poorly planned escape from a zoo. In one hand, he carried a gas can. It was then I realized why the car was parked on the shoulder of the road. When Leon arrived, the police officer had to allow him some time to catch his breath.

  “My—sincerest—(gasp)—apologies, Officer,” he said, pushing each word out of his mouth as if they were heavy objects he was heaving one at a time over a wall. “You see, gentlemen—I—my automobile—was—depleted of fuel—hence—it came to—an unfortunate halt—in this most inconvenient—location. However—” catching his breath and holding the gas can proudly aloft for all to see, including, presumably, the television audiences watching at home “—in response to the problem, I valiantly betook myself, an empty gasoline receptacle in hand, down the road to a local fueling station—a Mobil—whereat I procured this gasoline, which I have conveyed hither and with which I now plan to replenish the fuel tank of my automobile.”

  “Where’d you learn to talk, jackass?”

  Leon arched his eyebrows and lifted his chin, striking an aspect of great dignity. “The theatre.”

  “Lemme see your license and registration.”

  “Certainly, Officer.” Leon rifled through his pockets for a wallet. As he did, the police officer trained a suspicious eye on
me.

  “You know the registration on your plates is out of date.”

  “That is because this automobile does not, in fact, belong to me. If it did, I would have surely exercised enough forethought to remember to reregister it at the proper time. As it is, this car belongs to my former wife, and I am sure you are all-too-well familiar with a certain negligence in such practical matters that is characteristic of the fair sex.”

  “What, like letting your damn car run outta gas on the Hutch?”

  “Pish, Officer. I am only human.”

  “Hey, we might run this shit after all,” mused the cameraman.

  Leon handed him his driver’s license. The policeman read it under his flashlight. He looked up.

  “You been drinking at all?”

  “Nay, sir, not a drop.”

  This could not have possibly been one hundred percent true, I thought. I wanted to say, “Why, thy lips are scarce wiped since thou drank’st last,” but I checked my tongue, considering the circumstances.

  I saw the moon, tinted orange, rising above the trees like an orb of burning blood suspended on a wire before the velvety curtain of night.

  “I think your buddy back there’s a little sick,” said the officer. The cameraman audibly suppressed a guffaw. “You oughta take care of him.”

  “He’s recently had an operation. I was transporting him safely home, whereupon the car became suddenly and completely unexpectedly depleted of fuel.”

  “Tell your ex-wife to reregister her car. It’s a month past expiration. We stopped to take a look ’cause it looked like a suspicious vehicle.”

  The police officer gave Leon his driver’s license back, and the two men got back in their car and drove away. My brain was still sodden with anesthesia. I did not fall back asleep, but mumbled and gurgled to myself in the backseat, watching the shadow play created by the car passing under the streetlights lining the parkway, and listening to the traffic in the other lane whooshing past us. I felt simultaneously chilled and relaxed. I imagined I was in a spaceship, blasting away from the earth and into the cold black vacuum of space at a velocity close to the speed of light, so that time dilates and millions of years go by, and one day I crash-land on an alien planet populated by a hostile race of talking hairless upright apes, only to discover to my horror that this is really earth. I felt a great surge of affection for Leon, in spite of his appalling incompetence. He had let his ex-wife’s Wagoneer run out of gas on the parkway, then left me asleep and drugged in back of his car in the middle of the night as he hobbled down the shoulder in search of a gas station. Yet I felt no anger, no resentment, toward him. He was my friend. I felt my organs sloshing around inside my little body with every turn, every slight shift of centripetal force. Leon had the radio on, very softly, so as not to disturb me, and I think he had it tuned to an “oldies” station, which was playing a Roy Orbison song: only the lonely… know the way I… feel tonight… And I listened to Roy Orbison’s angelic falsetto mournfully cooing that bittersweet threnody to his loneliness into the rush and howl of a cold dark night on the Hutchinson River Parkway.

  Soon Leon was easing the car off the highway and onto the small winding roads that led us through Pelham Bay Park, across the mint-green bridge and back to City Island. I looked out the window as we were shuddering across the bridge that took us home, and I saw the giant neon-red lobster, doomed—doomed like someone in Greek mythology is doomed in Hades to endlessly repeat some futile task—to forever repeatedly open and close his claw. His red light was reflected in the black and wobbling waters beneath him. Leon parked the car and helped me out. I tried to walk, but I could not. The earth kept pitching and shifting under my feet; it was like trying to walk on the bottom of the ocean. Leon held my hand to support me, but it was obvious to both of us after a few of my unsteady steps that autonomous locomotion was still impossible for me, and the only way I would make it back to the apartment unaided would have been to crawl there. So Leon scooped the still-delirious me up in his big squishy arms and hoisted me up, and I clambered onto his shoulders and sat on them, just as we would do while performing Shakespeare in the subway stations. And I held on as tightly as I could. And I clung to him, riding on Leon’s shoulders, my face swaddled in surgical gauze, as he inched his mass fastidiously down the sidewalk, walking under the lurid orange lights, under an urban night sky, orange and starless.

  We passed Artie’s Shrimp Shanty, long since closed up and dark by now, around the corner, past the dumpsters by the kitchen door, and opened the door to our apartment, and Leon carried me inside, reminding me to duck beneath the doorway. He took me into the apartment without snapping on any lights that would have disturbed my retinas with their unwanted brightness, guiding himself only by his intimate knowledge of the space. He laid me supine on my bed, the futon in the living room. It wasn’t made. Leon tucked me in. I clutched the blankets and fell asleep almost immediately: my eyes shut, and I returned to oblivion like a weary traveler finally returning home, mumbling Lydia’s name until it dissolved into nonsense syllables and disappeared into silence.

  XLII

  When I woke up the next day it was the afternoon and my head felt hot and my skull was throbbing fuzzily with a headache. I looked at myself in the bathroom mirror, at my gauze-wrapped head, felt my face flaming with postoperative pain, and felt with my hand the new protrusion in the middle of my face where my nose was, hidden underneath the bandages.

  “The doctor informed me you’re not to remove the bandages for six days,” said Leon over breakfast, rattling the pages of the New York Times he had purchased that morning when he had left the apartment to buy donuts. He had purchased two dozen donuts at a Dunkin’ Donuts three blocks away, and had even abstained from eating two of them, which were for me. One of them was a plain cake donut, which I found at least marginally palatable, but the other was coated in chocolate frosting, in which was embedded an overabundance of those unsettlingly plasticlike sticks of color called “sprinkles,” which I find to favor the eye over the tongue, so Leon obliged to eat that one as well.

  “And he apologized,” continued Leon, the chocolate-and-sprinkle-coated donut making spongy squelching noises in his mouth as he chewed it, “for the sad fact that he had no painkillers to spare and for obvious reasons was not able to write you a prescription. But he said you should be taking them for the next few days or else you will probably have to endure excruciating pain.”

  The pain I was in was dull and horrible, but not yet excruciating. I consumed my donut, taking tiny rabbitlike bites because I couldn’t open my mouth very wide without experiencing a burst of flames in my facial nerves, in the place where I now understood my new nose to be.

  I didn’t leave the house for a week. I drank a lot of wine. From beneath some pile of rubble in the apartment Leon managed to unearth a brown plastic prescription jar of Percocet pills with a long-expired label that he said was from a past knee surgery. They did the trick. I took the Percocets and washed them down with wine, and spent much of the next few days lying with my head propped up on a mountain of pillows watching TV while floating about three feet above my body. I completely exhausted Leon’s video collection. I watched 2001: A Space Odyssey, Last Tango in Paris, Annie Hall, Satyricon, and I blew through an entire boxed set of Ingmar Bergman videos that Leon had, titled Let’s Talk About Death. Leon even rented Pinocchio for me, which I watched several times in rapid succession, and it brought me joy. Leon kept me company while I convalesced, and occasionally went out to rent videos for me and to buy more donuts and wine.

  This also happened to be 1998, and when I wasn’t watching movies on it the TV had turned into little else but a window gazing onto the sordid vista of the president’s sexual liaisons, specifically his dalliances with a plump young thing who stood accused of repeatedly fellating our commander in chief and allowing him to insert a cigar into one or more of her orifices. There he was on television, rosy-faced, butt-nosed and silver-haired, sheepishly shrugging, denying al
l, as if he was not his nation’s leader but rather her philandering husband caught with the babysitter. Leon and I watched in amusement as the news played and replayed footage of Bill Clinton assuring us that he did not have sexual relations with that woman. Leon had just returned from Artie’s, where he had picked up a double order of shrimp and a bottle of wine. The shrimp were nestled in a Styrofoam container in the lap of the terry-cloth bathrobe Leon usually wore while at leisure. Between cramming fistfuls of shrimp into his cheeks, Leon drank wine in gulps and shouted at the TV.