The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore - Benjamin Hale [204]
“I know how that feels!”
“Precisely! You are in a unique position, Bruno, because you have seen this cage from both within and without. And just as you have liberated yourself from the confines of this cage, we must liberate narrative art from its cage. We must return the theatre back to the wild, where it is free, if it so chooses, to rip its spectators to bloody shreds!”
“The theatre of wild animals!”
“Bruno!”—Leon grasped me by the arm, grasped it as forcefully as if he had just suffered a heart attack—“What a brilliant phrase! The theatre of wild animals!”
We toasted to this coinage, violently knocking our martinis together in celebration. An idea had just been born. The theatre of wild animals: we fell in love with the idea at once. In the meantime, I was able to convince Leon to begrudgingly permit me to borrow—he considered it a loan, a term I hoped he would forget about—seven hundred dollars from our company cash box to pay for my nose.
XL
My nose. Exactly as I once did, Gwen, upon the lid of a now-quasimythical Plexiglas box on the floor of a small white room in the Behavioral Biology Laboratory of the University of Chicago—the box that led me into civilization—years later, with the same ape knuckles I knocked three times: knock, knock, knock. Only this time it was not a transparent plastic box containing a peach that I knocked three times upon, but rather a door—a door I had seen once before—in back of an inconspicuous Brazilian beauty salon. Beside me stood my magnitudinous friend, Leon Smoler, who, finally bending to my desire to have a new nose, had driven me in his ex-wife’s Wagoneer from the apartment we shared on City Island to this place, and would drive me home following my operation. On the drive to Queens we noticed that Leon’s ex-wife’s car was running low on gas. This problem would have been easy enough to ameliorate, but Leon, acting in rational economic self-interest by seeking to minimize production expenses, wanted to milk every last possible mile out of the current contents of the fuel tank, and he planned to make the eighth of a tank that was already at our disposal when we picked it up from Leon’s ex-wife’s house in Yonkers last all the way from City Island to Queens, then back to City Island, to our apartment behind Artie’s Shrimp Shanty, where he would tenderly outstretch me supine on my bed to convalesce, then back to Yonkers to return the car. I expected to be anesthetized and in no shape to see myself home after the surgery. So long as I got my nose—and I am infinitely grateful to Leon for this favor—I chose not to advise him as to the wisdom or folly of his plan, nor to the ethical questions it raised.
The car was parked outside on the street in front of the Impanema Beauty Salon. Beside Leon stood Cecília, Dr. DaSilva’s wife and the owner of the legitimate end of the business that this establishment conducted. (But what business is legitimate, really? The entire system of economic exchange has always smacked of unnaturalness to me, of absolute spiritual illegitimacy.) In the inner pocket of my jacket was an envelope, containing nine one-hundred-dollar bills, two of them borrowed from Audrey and the other seven borrowed from the production budget of The Tempest. The door opened. There stood Dr. DaSilva, looking even more like a man in a silent movie than he had before: that slicked-back pewtery fish-skin hair, the ends of his elegant little mustaches pointing down and away from his nasal septum like two arrows, the supreme gentility of his manners, and the gentleness of his demeanor.
I distinctly imagined that I heard the trilling of a toy piano providing musical accompaniment, and after he extended his delicate hand to me and I shook it in greeting, a black title card appeared onscreen, with the words printed on it and framed in an ornate border: Hello, Mr. Littlemore! Perhaps there were other words exchanged between us, but they are cleverly implied by our facial expressions and gestures. The doctor asked who this Gargantua was who loomed so tall and wide beside me, and