The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore

by Benjamin Hale

  “Damn-blast it!” he roared. “Why does the Supreme Court get in such a tizzy when the president receives a blowjob? And why does he not simply say, ‘Leave me alone, get your own blowjobs!’? Really, Bruno. This whole business is so mind-bogglingly insipid. It’s nothing short of a sexual crucifixion. They may as well nail his penis to a cross. Think about JFK, for God’s sake. His sexual goings-on make Bill Clinton look like a fifties teenager groping in the back of a Plymouth convertible.”

  I wasn’t entirely sure what the Supreme Court was.

  “Gadzooks, Bruno, your education is riddled with holes!”

  I didn’t deny it. It wasn’t my fault. As I’ve said, this is the curse of the autodidact.

  “What’s the Supreme Court?” I demanded.

  “I’m no civics teacher, but I shall do my best: the Supreme Court is a panel of political whores. You see, there are such things in our government as checks and balances. That’s why we have three branches of government: the executive, the legislative, and the judgmental. When I was a child, my teachers made it abundantly clear to me that this was why I was lucky to have been born in America. I supposed that British royals were as nasty as my grade school teachers, and so the Queen might see me walking to school one day and say, ‘I don’t like the looks of that boy. Cut his head off!’ Whereas here, even if both houses of Congress voted unanimously to have my head cut off, the Supreme Court could intervene. And that’s checks and balances. Now do you understand?”

  A commercial came on. It was a commercial advertizing a certain brand of mobile telephones, which were at the time ascending to widespread popularity. The commercial opened with a shot of a theatre, an expectantly hushed audience sitting before a red velvet curtain. The curtains raised and parted, and what followed was a version of Romeo and Juliet abbreviated to thirty seconds because all the characters had cellular phones. The joke was that wireless communication technology speeds things up. Leon was appalled. He threw a shrimp at the TV, which briefly stuck to the screen before sliding off, leaving a wet mark.

  “Of course these cellular telephones speed up communication! Why the blazes would you want to do that, you vicious bastards? The whole blasted plot of Romeo and Juliet—nay, of all great literature!—I daresay hinges on miscommunication. Flawed information, crossed signals, late and undelivered messages! What these infernal things are doing is paving over all the beautiful mountains and valleys of confusion in the landscape of human society! It’s disgusting! I’m sure that in a few years every idiot on the street will be puttering around like a somnambulist with one of these hideous devices nailed to his ear. And then we will at long last have entered the final phase of the decay of human civilization. Once everyone owns a cellular telephone, great literature will no longer be written, due to the end of miscommunication.”

  “Perhaps,” I offered, “the advent of cell phones will not eliminate miscommunication, but simply speed it up. Much more efficient.”

  “Curses! To hell with efficiency! To hell with convenience! To hell with communication! What kind of future are we making for ourselves, Bruno? What is this great supposed virtue we attach to these values—efficiency, convenience, communication? These are not human virtues—these are the debauched virtues of commerce! It’s a shopkeeper’s virtue! Listen, Bruno!” Leon gingerly brushed his long hair back with his fingertips and cupped a hand to his ear. “Listen,” he whispered.

  “What?”

  “Shh.” Leon’s voice sank to a stage whisper: “I hear something! I hear something occurring outside the sanctum of our little home.”

  “I don’t hear anything.”

  Leon raised his voice to full theatric boom: “Listen, Bruno, and despair, for what I hear is the flaccid language of business osmotically replacing every syllable of poetry still alive in the human heart!”

  “Oh.”

  “To hell with it all!” he thundered at the TV, waving his glass of wine in the air in front of him so histrionically that some of it slopped into the lap of his bathrobe. “Give me miscommunication! Give me confusion! Give me a world rife enough with errata to fuel the great tragedies of bygone eras! Where has the tragedy gone in our world? Tell me that! Everything is comedy! And you cannot truly appreciate comedy if you suck all the tragic out of life. Just look at this buffoon who lives in our TV. I mean our ‘president,’ Bruno. Look at him: he knows this is all mere comedy! Yes, he faces impeachment and so on, oh yes, you naughty boy, you’re really in trouble this time! But you can see that thin mask of concern on his face only scarcely conceals a smirk. A smirk! Inside, he’s thinking, ‘Tiddly-dee, this whole thing is actually funny.’ And, devil take him, he’s right! It is funny! ‘That’s right—acts of fellatio have been administered in this very office! Beneath this desk! What do you think of that, America? Aren’t you just a little jealous of your alpha male in chief? That’s right—suck it, America!’ We live in an age of comic unreality. Nothing’s real to us. It’s all jokes. I am sure—mark my word, Bruno—I’m sure some great tragedy is quietly brewing beneath it all. Go ahead and laugh, America, laugh your moronic heads off. But when tragedy befalls us—which it invariably must, for all our cellular telephones and World Wide Web sites have not jammed a very stick in the Rota Fortunae—when it happens, we will all be so sick and stupid from years of laughing that we won’t have a clue how to behave. Only then can true comedy begin again. We need tragedy to show us what’s really funny. Oh, God!” Leon turned his eyes to the ceiling in wistful abandon. “To live in an earlier world! I would put up with the horseshit! Really!”

  After over a week my period of convalescence came to an end. After the first few days the swelling went down, my two black eyes healed, and a few days after that the pain had decreased from grating to almost bearable. A few days later I removed my bandages.

  I waited until Leon was out of the house. I don’t remember where he was, maybe on a wine-and-donut run. I wanted to be alone with my nose. I climbed up on my little stepladder that led to the bathroom sink and stood before the mirror. The middle section of my face—just below my eyes, just above my mouth—was covered in bandages. I snipped at it with Leon’s plastic-handled children’s safety scissors, and gradually unpeeled the bandages from my face. Then I unraveled them in fistfuls. The bandages were sticky and wet on the inside and darkly mottled with dried blood. The bandages dropped to the bathroom floor, flap, flap, flap. The bandages smelled bad. The flesh of my face was wet and wrinkled from marinating in sweat under the bandages for a week.

  There, in the middle of my chimp face, was a human nose.

  My human nose so naturally melded to my face that it almost looked as if I was born with it, though when I first revealed it to myself the white scar that surrounds my nose was still very noticeable. Look at me. This monster had been made a man.

  I stared at it. I stared from every possible angle, then derived new angles of scrutiny out of a hand mirror held opposite the mirror on the wall. Mirror mirror on the wall, whose lovely nose is this?

  I touched it. I lovingly stroked it with my long purple fingers. I looked so beautiful.

  I began to cry. These were tears of joy. I felt the saltwater sliding in hot rivulets down the flanks of my beautiful new nose. This nose—as you can obviously see for yourself, Gwen—this nose was so artfully sculpted out of the flesh of my face… but it wasn’t just that. It was like the perfect nose had been found for me. The nose was totally in harmony with my face. I looked almost like I could pass for a natural-born human. I looked so good. My beautiful new face gave me a feeling of power. I wanted to parade my aesthetically improved face around town, introduce the world to the brand-new Bruno.

  When I heard the front door open and close I burst from the bathroom to show Leon my new nose.

  “Snakes alive!” Leon gasped. His eyes threatened to erupt from his eye sockets like corks from popguns. “Let me touch it!”

  “Gently,” I warned. My nasal flesh was still very sensitive.

  Leon pla
ced a single shaky fat finger on the bridge of my nose.

  “This is remarkable,” he whispered, “quite remarkable!”

  Leon delicately caressed my nose with his finger. Then our eyes met in an uncomfortable way, and he quit touching my nose. We both looked away, and Leon pretended to cough.

  “Come, Bruno, let us repair to Artie’s to celebrate your transformation. Audrey is tending the bar this evening.”

  We went next door and ordered shrimp and wine, and I showed off my new face to Audrey and Sasha.

  “Didn’t I tell you?” said Sasha. “He does good.”

  “Wow! You almost look human, Bruno,” said Audrey.

  “Thank you,” I said with a mild bow, taking the compliment with gentlemanly grace.

  The girls all cooed and fawned over my face and patted me on the head. I entertained many fantasies about all the thousands of women who would be powerless to resist the magnetic attractiveness of my face now that I had a human nose.

  “I am afraid your honeymoon with your nose must be short, Bruno,” said Leon. “For tomorrow, we must begin in earnest to work on our play.”

  I knew that was true. My convalescence had stalled the production for long enough. There was the ticklish and interesting question of finding an appropriate performance space. We were called the Shakespeare Underground because our performances were held underground both metaphorically and literally. Performing the whole play in the subway wouldn’t have been feasible. Leon had an idea that involved a long-lost uncle of his.

  “I have a long-lost uncle,” he said, “who must be in his nineties by now. He has owned and operated a locksmith’s shop for many years. He inherited it from his father.”

  “Is he your father’s brother?”

  “No.” Leon dug his fingers through his beard in thought. “He is my mother’s father’s brother. I suppose that’s a great-uncle. In any event, I hope he’s still among the living. I haven’t seen him in the last thirty years or so. He ought to be, he’s a stalwart and salubrious fellow. We shall pay him a visit tomorrow.”

  “Where?”

  “An excellent question.” Leon turned to his daughter, who was busy at the other end of the bar, and called: “Audrey!” He clapped his hands twice and jabbed a finger in the air.

  “What?”

  “The phone book, my darling.”

  Audrey rolled her eyes and plopped several huge phone directories on the bar counter, one for each borough. We flopped them open to the L sections and found the listings for locksmiths.

  “I misremember precisely where my uncle’s shop is,” he said, licking his thumb to page through the phone book. “I am reasonably certain it is located on the isle of Manhattoes, so we shall have to systematically visit every locksmith shop listed there until we find him.”

  I agreed this was an excellent plan indeed. At Leon’s suggestion we ripped out the relevant pages from all the phone books.

  “Jesus, Dad,” said Audrey. “Don’t vandalize the phone books.”

  “Pish, my dearest. What conceivable need would anyone at this establishment ever have for a locksmith in this saloon? In any event, we shall return the missing pages when we are finished with them and you may tape them in again.”

  The following day Leon and I donned the suits and ties that we wore when conducting serious business. Leon put his long hair in a ponytail and carried his officious-looking attaché case, and we took to the streets, visiting all the locksmith’s shops in the city one at a time, guided on our mission by the phone book pages.

  The not-so-cleverly named establishment Mr. Locksmith was only the ninth place we visited. (Leon did have a general idea of where the shop was located.) Imagine the eight faces we saw before Leon’s long-lost uncle: all the arched eyebrows and questioning looks we received when a monstrously obese man and a deformed hairless dwarf, both in suits and ties and one of them carrying an officious-looking attaché case, entered their shops to inquire whether they had known Leon as a babe in arms. Most people told us to get lost and hurried us away. A few feared we might be engaged in something illegal or otherwise nefarious, and their hands drifted to their phones when we walked through their doors. Thank God we finally found the right place on only the ninth try, because by the late afternoon of our day of searching, my stubby little legs were so rubbery with exhaustion that I don’t think I would have been able to stand (literally) for another day of this heretofore fruitless quest. I did, however, enjoy exposing my nose to the fresh air and the adoration of the masses. We got a lot of interested stares, and not all of them were because of the freakish spectacle that we brought with us wherever we went; I’m sure that some of the women who passed us on the street looked twice at me not just because I was freakish, but because of my newly beautified face. We found Leon’s great-uncle’s shop off of Broome Street on the Lower East Side. The storefront was across the street from the courtyard of a decrepit tenement complex and in front of a pile of black fly-covered trash bags in a filthy and run-down-ish area. I’ve been told that during the years I have languished in captivity this area has undergone significant gentrification, but at the time the place still more or less looked authentically squalid.

  There was a yellow neon light in the window, shaped like a key. Behind that, on a windowsill, a cat—a soft fat black cat with a white face, belly, and feet—lay beneath the neon key in a bed made of a rumpled towel, watching Leon and me from inside.

  “This one is it,” said Leon to me. “I’m absolutely certain of it.”

  “How do you know?”

  Leon pointed at the cat. “The cat has seven toes on each paw. My grandmother had one just like it. That deformity has been passed down for generations of my family’s cats.”

  I looked at the cat’s feet. He was right: the cat had enormous feet due to an excess of toes.

  We went in. As we did the jingle-bells clinked on the door behind us and the cat mewled indifferently. It was a dark, cramped room with wood-paneled walls, full of all kinds of locks and keys—there were keys hanging on pegs in the brown breadboard walls. Everything inside was brass and brown, and had the metallic, oily smell of a machine shop. A man who looked to be about three hundred and six years old sat behind the counter on a stool, working on something at a high workbench. Bushy sprigs of white hair sprouted from his ears and nostrils, and he wore a green plastic visor. Behind the counter there was a small TV; the picture was jittery and the volume was low, and the man wasn’t watching it. The cat in the window was looking at me. I looked back at the cat. The twenty-eight-toed cat groaned and returned her attention to the sidewalk in front of the store.

  “I’m almost closed,” said the man, glancing disinterestedly at us and then at his watch. “Fifteen minutes.”

  “No matter,” said Leon. “We are not here for keys.”

  “Then what do you want?”

  The man had a bald, liver-spotted head and wraparound glasses that looked about two inches thick.

  There was a basketball game on the TV. Staticky reception made it appear to be snowing on the court. I noticed a cord running from the bottom of the neon tube twisted into the likeness of a key and down to an electrical outlet above the floor molding.

  Leon threw out his arms in an invitation to embrace, and roared: “My dearest uncle!”

  “Hm?” said the old man behind the counter.

  “It’s me, your grand-nephew! It’s Leon!”

  “Eh?”

  “Leon Smoler!”

  The man looked blankly at him from beneath his visor. His skin was translucent and he looked like he weighed little more than a child. The man rose from his stool and walked up to the counter so slowly it was as if the air were made of glue. He was humpbacked with age and not much taller than me.

  “I’m Yvonne’s son,” Leon helped him.

  “Ah,” said the man. The gears were turning in his head as quickly as the hour hand of a clock—but they were turning.

  “Ah!” he finally said. His mouth had thre
e teeth in it and his tongue was as black and dry as an old boot. “Leon!”

  The old man opened the trapdoor of the counter and baby-stepped out to be hugged by Leon, who had a difficult job of hugging him with sufficient heartiness without crushing him like a baby bird in a fist.

  “How’s your mother, kiddo?”

  “Safely interred, thank you. She hasn’t budged in fourteen years.”

  “Atta girl. It’s been too long, Leonard! You oughtta visit more often.”

  After several agonizingly long moments of preliminary introductions, catching up, and other such social niceties, Leon revealed the ulterior motive for our call. The old man—whose name, despite it being the name of his business, was not “Mr. Locksmith,” but was actually Samuel B. Siegel—was the owner and had been the sole operator of this locksmith’s shop for more than forty years after inheriting it from his father (Leon’s great-grandfather). He was surprised that Leon knew about the vast space below his shop, which was accessible only by an elevator in the back of the store. I was also surprised. Mr. Locksmith—as he shall here on out be called, because I prefer the moniker to his real name—looked at his watch, then locked the storefront, unplugged the neon key in the window and took us into the back room in shaky, puttering steps. He made a series of smooching noises, and the fat soft black-and-white cat stretched herself, got up from her bed beneath the neon key, and followed us.

  To the right of the work area and counter there was a short narrow hallway lit by a single bare low-wattage lightbulb in the middle of the ceiling. A door on the right opened into a small bathroom that doubled as a storage place for cleaning supplies. There was a shallow porcelain dish on the floor with a mop in it and a yellow plastic sign, folded up against the wall, saying, CAUTION, WET FLOOR, and below that, CUIDADO, PISO MOJADO: between the languages, a man was falling. The back rooms smelled like oil, smoke, and cleaning fluids. Then the hallway bent left, a bend sinister, and we bent sinister with it. A calendar was tacked to a corkboard on the wall, the bottom half a grid of dates with notes scrawled in the squares, the top half featuring a photograph of a sand-speckled naked woman lying on a tropical beach in mildly pornographic repose. The hallway ended in an old-fashioned elevator, the kind with a grate of brass latticework that accordions open and shut. Everything in it, the panel with the buttons, the walls, the ceiling, was fancy, decorated with loops and filigrees of bent metal and carved wood, because it was built in a time when elevators were still special, when there was still enough amazement in them for people to want to ornament them—only this one was old and in a state of creaky disrepair, covered in stains and rust and dust, the brass discolored and the wood chipped and scratched and worn down. Mr. Locksmith was using it as a storage closet. He rolled back the brass accordion grating of the elevator door with a clatter and shriek of old and poorly lubricated metal parts grinding together, and started removing buckets and brooms with shuddering, sapling-thin arms. Leon inspected his cuticles and sighed in irritation as his great-uncle fastidiously removed the things in the elevator.