The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore - Benjamin Hale [164]
“There he is.”
“Poor guy.”
I decided to pretend to be asleep. I collapsed in affected slumber beneath my blanket. I heard the boots clang closer, and felt the presence of someone bending down to peer through the door of my cage. I dared not open my eyes.
“Smells like he pissed in his cage.”
“Where’s he going?”
“Westchester. NYU has a research lab up there.”
“The fuck’s wrong with his hair?”
“Dunno. They said it all just fell off.”
“Is he okay? He looks sick or something.”
“They knocked him on his ass with tranquilizers. They said he’d probably sleep straight through everything. This monkey’s out cold.”
“Look at the poor little guy, he’s all passed out and hairless and shit.”
“It’s a sad story. The lady he was with is terminally ill. She’s got brain cancer. Then she got attacked or something. Some religious nutcase tried to kill her. This all just happened yesterday. She’s in real bad shape. Then this guy just freaked his little ass out. For some fucking reason he was at the hospital with her in Chicago.”
“What? No.”
“Yeah. He starts tearing the place up, said he broke a fish tank or something. So they knock him out, good night. But then nobody knows what to do with him. They told me somebody puts in a call to somebody, yadda yadda yadda, the people at this NYU medical lab say they want him. They always need chimps. So they got him.”
“Is that the crazy lady in Chicago who was fucking her pet chimp?”
“Yeah, that’s the one. And this is the chimp.”
“I heard about that on the news. Shit was fucked up.”
“C’mon. You get that end.”
“We got directions?”
“I know the place. We take the Whitestone to the Hutch.”
I heard jostling and scooting, and then felt myself being hoisted up.
“He’s a heavy motherfucker.”
My cage wobbled and swayed as the possessors of these voices bore me away. I opened one of my eyes just a sliver. I saw the torso of one of the men, just outside the window of my cage. He was wearing a dark green uniform. He and the other man, who I could not see, carried me out of the cargo hold of the airplane and down a flight of stairs. It was daylight, cold and windy. I shivered under the thin blanket. They carried my cage across a wide flat expanse of gray concrete and set it down on the back of a motorized cart. The two men climbed into the front of the cart and we began to drive away. Through the small grated window and through a single eye that I would only half-open out of caution, I looked out across this expanse of gray concrete crisscrossed with long curving lines of yellow paint: I saw enormous machines resting on it; I saw people moving on it by foot and by vehicle; I saw an ice-blue sky looming cloudless overhead; and in the distance I saw many tall and glittering buildings. I saw a tangled lacework of gold, copper, silver, iron, steel—skyscrapers—the lattices of bridges, power lines, radio towers, smokestacks, and antennae. All this looked similar to what could be found in Chicago—similar in make and shape and character, and probably also similar in purpose—but I recognized none of it, which told me that I had been taken to another city, another seat of this civilization—one that was apparently even bigger than my beloved home city. What city on this earth, I wondered, could possibly have been built up wider and higher than Chicago? Was the world so insatiate? What conceivable need could there be for a city that was even greater yet, more sprawling, more complex, and more powerful than Chicago, my Chicago?
The two men transported me in the small vehicle across this ocean of concrete, parked the vehicle, hopped out. I closed my eyes again in my sleep of deceit. So in darkness I felt myself being picked up in my cage, carried across a breadth of space, and set down inside a warm, quiet enclosure. I heard car doors slamming shut, opening, slamming, locking with decisive clicks. I heard a radio flicker on with music. I allowed my eyes to open and perceived that I was in the storage area