The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore - Benjamin Hale [212]
“Curses! To hell with efficiency! To hell with convenience! To hell with communication! What kind of future are we making for ourselves, Bruno? What is this great supposed virtue we attach to these values—efficiency, convenience, communication? These are not human virtues—these are the debauched virtues of commerce! It’s a shopkeeper’s virtue! Listen, Bruno!” Leon gingerly brushed his long hair back with his fingertips and cupped a hand to his ear. “Listen,” he whispered.
“What?”
“Shh.” Leon’s voice sank to a stage whisper: “I hear something! I hear something occurring outside the sanctum of our little home.”
“I don’t hear anything.”
Leon raised his voice to full theatric boom: “Listen, Bruno, and despair, for what I hear is the flaccid language of business osmotically replacing every syllable of poetry still alive in the human heart!”
“Oh.”
“To hell with it all!” he thundered at the TV, waving his glass of wine in the air in front of him so histrionically that some of it slopped into the lap of his bathrobe. “Give me miscommunication! Give me confusion! Give me a world rife enough with errata to fuel the great tragedies of bygone eras! Where has the tragedy gone in our world? Tell me that! Everything is comedy! And you cannot truly appreciate comedy if you suck all the tragic out of life. Just look at this buffoon who lives in our TV. I mean our ‘president,’ Bruno. Look at him: he knows this is all mere comedy! Yes, he faces impeachment and so on, oh yes, you naughty boy, you’re really in trouble this time! But you can see that thin mask of concern on his face only scarcely conceals a smirk. A smirk! Inside, he’s thinking, ‘Tiddly-dee, this whole thing is actually funny.’ And, devil take him, he’s right! It is funny! ‘That’s right—acts of fellatio have been administered in this very office! Beneath this desk! What do you think of that, America? Aren’t you just a little jealous of your alpha male in chief? That’s right—suck it, America!’ We live in an age of comic unreality. Nothing’s real to us. It’s all jokes. I am sure—mark my word, Bruno—I’m sure some great tragedy is quietly brewing beneath it all. Go ahead and laugh, America, laugh your moronic heads off. But when tragedy befalls us—which it invariably must, for all our cellular telephones and World Wide Web sites have not jammed a very stick in the Rota Fortunae—when it happens, we will all be so sick and stupid from years of laughing that we won’t have a clue how to behave. Only then can true comedy begin again. We need tragedy to show us what’s really funny. Oh, God!” Leon turned his eyes to the ceiling in wistful abandon. “To live in an earlier world! I would put up with the horseshit! Really!”
After over a week my period of convalescence came to an end. After the first few days the swelling went down, my two black eyes healed, and a few days after that the pain had decreased from grating to almost bearable. A few days later I removed my bandages.
I waited until Leon was out of the house. I don’t remember where he was, maybe on a wine-and-donut run. I wanted to be alone with my nose. I climbed up on my little stepladder that led to the bathroom sink and stood before the mirror. The middle section of my face—just below my eyes, just above my mouth—was covered in bandages. I snipped at it with Leon’s plastic-handled children’s safety scissors, and gradually unpeeled the bandages from my face. Then I unraveled them in fistfuls. The bandages were sticky and wet on the inside and darkly mottled with dried blood. The bandages dropped to the bathroom floor, flap, flap, flap. The bandages smelled bad. The flesh of my face was wet and wrinkled from marinating in sweat under the bandages for a week.
There, in the middle of my chimp face, was a human nose.
My human nose so naturally melded to my face that it almost looked as if I was born with it, though when I first revealed it to myself the white scar that surrounds my nose was still very noticeable. Look at me.