The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore - Benjamin Hale [16]
is another important memory of my mother, buried somewhere deep in the bedrock of my brain, which resurfaces sometimes in my dreams: an extremely vague memory of accompanying my mother to the laboratory. Look: the clouds of forgetfulness are pulling apart! What lies behind them? Shine forth, my memory, show us the truth. Was it the same laboratory where I would later be experimented on? No, it couldn’t be. It didn’t look the same. It was a different room. The lighting was different. I remember a strong yellow tint to the room. Was it the floor? The tiles must have been yellow. I was an infant; I was probably in a position to observe the floor more closely than other aspects of the room. How did I get there? How old am I? Look at me!—you could almost fit me in the palm of your hand, I must be only a month or two old. There are others there with us, humans, scientists—as always, scientists…. They’re not in the same room with us, though. They’re crowded together just outside a glass wall. We can see them, and we can hear them through holes in the glass. They’re speaking to my mother. She isn’t even curious about what they’re saying. But I am. I remember my urgent curiosity, I remember listening to the burbling waves of vocalization streaming from the mouths of the humans. Their faces are all indistinct in my memory. Mostly I’m looking at their legs. Their pants, the workaday shoes they wear to the lab, the flapping tails of their thin white coats. There is a strange sort of machine in the room—that I recall clearly. A computer—that’s what it must have been. There is a kind of platform with a padded surface in front of the computer, where my mother sits and attempts to manipulate the machine. There is a screen in it, and a long plastic tube coming out of the side of it that spits treats into a shallow plastic tray bolted to the bottom of the computer screen. To me it is a fascinating, alien curiosity, a thing of signs and wonders. Certain images appear and disappear on the screen, weird hieroglyphic emblems throbbing with artificial light. My mother clumsily touches the things that appear on the screen, and sometimes a computerized female voice utters some magic word in response, and then sometimes the symbols touched will disappear, and sometimes a peanut encased in a colorful shell of hard chocolate rolls happily through the narrow plastic tube in the side of the machine and lands click-rattle in the plastic tray, and my mother greedily snatches it from the tray and inserts the sweet little reward into her cheeks, and commences immediately to touch the screen again, hoping for another. She never gave me any of her food rewards. To my mother it must have simply been some glowing totemic god-in-a-box that chose to distribute peanut M&Ms at times according only to the dictate of its unknowable whimsy. My mother was a creature of such intellectual poverty, I’m sure she was doing little else besides randomly punching the screen and praying for her chocolate-covered peanuts. Meanwhile, when she wasn’t cradling me in her arms while touching the screen, I, Bruno, was permitted to bumble around on the floor of the lab, playing with various objects that the scientists had strewn around to distract my attention while they performed experiments on my mother. How many times did this scene occur? I haven’t a clue. I was so young, I barely remember. I cannot remember if what I just described is a unique memory of a particular event, or a patchwork of many different memories of many similar events that occurred over a prolonged period of time. In hindsight, it must be the latter. I remember the babble of the scientists all around me in the room. I remember a certain rubber ball that I played with while my mother was busy pathetically flunking test after test. The ball was blue, with a yellow stripe in the middle bisected in the exact center by a narrower red stripe. I remember the artificial and oddly intoxicating gluey rubbery smell of the ball. I remember enjoying these visits. I remember sitting in my mother’s warm soft lap as she punched