The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore - Benjamin Hale [20]
was only a temporary measure and I would soon be released. From my peripherally limited vantage inside the cage, I saw the world through a grid, changing from murky interior lighting to the comparatively blinding outdoors, although the weather was overcast. It was a warm wet summer day. Rain clouds loomed. The sky was a sheet of hammered iron, the sun a white blur. Lydia wedged my cage into the backseat of a car and closed the door. I saw the side of the back door of the car and a sliver of the window. I heard the sound of a car door opening, something going bing bing bing bing, the door slamming, keys entering the ignition. The radio came on and she turned down the dial until it was nearly silent. Keys turned, the engine went chuppitachuppita-FROOM!, a seat belt was buckled, the wheels loosened from a parked state into a state of motion. Then the perturbing sensation of movement, me sliding around inside the cage with the dips and turns in the road, the whoosh of other cars Dopplering past us. The clouds broke into rain, and the rain thrummed on the roof of the car in a pulsing tattoo, like loose-flung fistfuls of crackling pebbles. I listened to the steadily rhythmic rubber-on-glass squealing of the windshield wipers. After a while we came to our final stop, and I heard Lydia unbuckle her seat belt, withdraw the car keys, and open the door, then the spatter and crash of rain outside, the door slamming, and I saw the door in front of me open. I saw that the downgushing rain had already darkened the fabric of her shirt, glued it to her flesh. She had no umbrella. I could see her brassiere through her shirt. I saw the rain glaze her skin. I saw her arms reach out to remove the cage. She carried me through a parking lot. I pressed my face to the grate and clung to it with my fingers. I saw cars parked in obedient rows, rainwater steaming on the hot black asphalt. It wasn’t night, but the storm’s sudden darkening of the day had triggered the streetlights, whose orange glows were mirrored in the shimmering street. We ascended a series of steps, and Lydia set my cage down while she opened a heavy door and propped it by kicking a wooden wedge under it. The rain plitted through the spaces in the grate of my cage, and the fetid flap of carpet I was sitting on began to smell worse. I stuck my tongue out to catch the thin needles of rain. I became wet. A moment later I felt myself being hoisted up again and taken inside the building. The heavy door sighed shut behind us and the atmosphere immediately became clean and quiet and dry, though the halls were noisy with the echoes of pounding raindrops. Lydia carried me through a labyrinthine network of bright hallways. Her wet sneakers scrunch-scrunch-scrunched on the floors. She stopped before two metal doors in which I saw our fuzzy reflection, and it scrolled open onto a tiny metal room. We got in and she put me on the floor, pushed a button, and the doors closed. Then a bizarre swooping sensation in my interior organs. Bing, the doors opened, she lifted my cage again and took me down another passageway, scrunch-scrunch-scrunch, until we arrived at another door, with a series of symbols printed across a smoked-glass window, which I would much later learn spelled: 308 BEHAVIORAL BIOLOGY LABORATORY. In we went. Lydia knelt on the floor and unlatched my cage, and as the door opened I tumbled out. She picked me up. She smiled, she kissed my head. Lydia was drenched, trinkets of water dappling her face, her blond hair dark, sopping, and flaccid.
We were inside a clean, bright, spacious room, furnished with several islands of long rectangular tables, on which sat computers and other kinds of lab equipment. The room was made of four whitewashed walls, two of which featured whiteboards all scrawled over with shapes and symbols in red, green, and black marker, and two of which featured wide tall windows that could not be opened. The echoes of rain crackling and drumming on the roof warbled around in the big room, and waves of water chased each other down the sides of the windows, warping the