The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore - Benjamin Hale [243]
“Bruno?” he said.
“I am Bruno Littlemore.” I spread the long purple fingers of my right hand and placed it on my chest.
“What happened to you?”
“I evolved.”
“I mean your face—”
“I evolved by surgery. Biology can only take you so far.”
He pushed his glasses up on his face with a fat finger. His shoulders were hunched up to his ears and his arms were hanging at his sides as stiffly as if his elbow joints had been glued in place. He took a few more steps in my direction.
“What are you doing to Céleste?” I said.
I could feel my body involuntarily reorganizing itself: shoulders rising, muscles condensing, twitching. Despite my evolution into a human being, I could not help displaying the outward physical signs of an animal on the verge of attack, and Dr. Plumlee recognized them.
“Bruno, Bruno,” he intoned, in an attempt at a soothing voice while moving his hands up and down in a let’s-just-calm-down-now gesture. “You’re not thinking of doing anything violent? That wouldn’t make sense.”
I saw him sidling toward a certain drawer in one of the cabinets under the lab tables.
“You created me,” I said. “And then you abandoned me. And now you’re going to do the same to Céleste.”
“We gave you a little help here, Bruno, and that is all. You created yourself.”
True as that was, I had no time to thank him for that apogee of compliments. I saw him make a swift jab for the handle of the drawer he was angling for. At that moment I realized that my days of smashing and biting were not behind me after all.
I shall not stoop to describe, Gwen, what it is like to kill a man in a fit of rage. To kill a man with one’s bare hands—not to mention feet, teeth, and a computer keyboard snatched blindly from one of the lab tables—all of which I employed to the task. For the sake of taste and decency I will not attempt to describe the feeling of causing a person’s life to flee from his body by means of brute force, nor will I discuss the feeling of watching the light being extinguished from his eyes, nor of watching his corpus go still and slack as his last breaths hiss from his lungs, as his blood goes flat in his veins and the electricity leaves his nerves. These are feelings that only murderers know, only monsters like me who have undergone this baptism of blood. I shall only remind you that an average healthy adult male chimp, such as I am now and was then, may be up to seven times stronger than a man, and that even the manhood into which I had come had not weakened the innate strength of these arms, nor had it managed to tamp out the potentiality for inner rage to become quickly sublimated into outer violence. Smashed fish tanks and whatever else aside, I had never fully made conscious use of this secret strength of mine, nor even fully realized it before. I shall only say that there wasn’t much that was recognizably human of Dr. Norman Plumlee left when I was through with him.
So there I sat in room 308: BEHAVIORAL BIOLOGY LABORATORY, in that place that I had once known as a home and once again known as a workplace. The place that had helped my consciousness into existence. I had nothing left. Lydia was gone. Tal did not want me. Leon had gone to California. I could not have gone back to the zoo. I could not go back to science. I could not live in the world, either: I had just committed murder.
The lab was dirty with blood. The furniture was overturned, the glass cracked, the computers lay in ruins, broken scientific equipment and all kinds of machines were smashed and scattered across the floor, and the remains of a well-respected scientist lay slumped in a corner of the room in a puddle of blood that was quickly spreading across the floor. Who would have thought the old man had so much blood in him? The fluorescent lights above me flickered and buzzed.
I unstrapped Céleste from the bed to which she had been restrained in order to be raped by science. Her wrists and ankles were swollen and bruised from where she had been strapped down. How love must suffer in this stern world. I helped Céleste