The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore - Benjamin Hale [207]
I dreamt that I was making love with Lydia. We were in Chicago. It was years ago. We were in our bed in the apartment in Chicago. It was snowing outside. Her warm body, her skin next to mine. The bed became earth, and then I was crawling through damp, dark soil. Pebbles, roots, grubs. My hands reached the surface. I pulled apart the clods of dirt, and saw a faint spot of light above. I dragged myself above the surface and emerged in a forest. I was in the jungle. I was in a wet, dark, densely vegetated place, ancient and teeming with life, with steam, dirt, fire, blood, semen, water, disease, ghosts. Everything was alive, everything breathing and flowing and moving and writhing with animal spirits. I was surrounded by chimpanzees. Naked, hairy animals, unenlightened, ungifted with speech. Grunting, howling, farting, scratching themselves, eating bugs and worms, picking nits out of each other’s fur. Their rubbery masklike faces, dark glassy eyes. They looked at me, confused. I was not one of them. I looked up into the sky. I could see only patches of blue here and there; most of it was shrouded by branches. But in one of the places where I could see the sky unobstructed by the leafy umbrages of the giant jungle trees, I saw something: a tiny speck, something floating in the sky, way up high above the trees. It descended, getting bigger, clearer, until it floated down through the break in the trees to the forest floor: it was a pink balloon effigy of a human being. I reached out to touch it. It popped.
XLI
Someone was shining a flashlight in my eyes.
I blinked twice, and blinked again. My eyelids were weighty with drugged sleep.
“Hey buddy!” said the flashlight, in a nasally New York accent. “You gotta be kiddin me here!”
“What?… um… hello?” I mumbled, or something like it, into the light.
“C’mon, buddy, what’s a matter with you?”
The blinding light was yanked away from my eyes, and, squinting through burning tears of confusion, I saw the upside-down face of a police officer looking inquisitively into mine. I seemed to be lying beneath a blanket in the backseat of Leon’s ex-wife’s car. Leon himself was not present. I was so disoriented that I didn’t know at first if it was day or night. I felt the parked vehicle shudder as a monstrous truck whooshed past us on the road. My face hurt—like hell. My eyes were burning.
The police officer’s face and tone of voice were stern, but not malicious. He was middle-aged, clean-shaven, and white. He was also the unlucky possessor of one of those loose flaps of flesh that hang pendent from the throat and chin, which I only now remember is called a “wattle.”
“What time is it?” I said. “Where am I?”
“It’s three in the frickin’ morning, and you’re in a vehicle with an expired registration on the shoulder of the Hutch.”
“Well, that’s not where I went to sleep. I’m sure there’s some explanation, Officer.”
“What’s your name?”
“Bruno. My name is Bruno.”
“What’s a matter with your face?”
My hand leapt to my face, and the tips of my long purple fingers met some sort of hard, coarse, dry texture. There was something wrapped around my head just below my eyes. I realized it was a bandage—covering my nose.
“I’ve just undergone surgery, Officer,” I said. “I’m sorry, but I’ve been heavily sedated. I was under anesthesia.”
The police officer frowned at this information. However, because his head was upside down, his frown instead appeared to me as if a funny-looking sightless chin-creature was smiling at me.
He was standing on the roadside and leaning in through the open car window. He went away for a moment, to perambulate Leon’s ex-wife’s Wagoneer,