The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore - Benjamin Hale [76]
“Bruno,” she said. “Come on. Please take the raisin.”
I shook my head no.
“Okay, Bruno,” she said, improvising, and ate the raisin herself. Was she trying to make me envious? Was she trying to make me covet my neighbor’s raisin? Did she want me to think, You villainous slut! How dare you eat my raisin? If that was what she was after, it wasn’t happening. I didn’t care. I already had a raisin of my own.
“Bruno,” she said. “Please give your flower some water.”
Now, what made all these tasks so maddening was their sheer needlessness. By “my flower” she was indicating a yellow flower made of thin synthetic fabric placed atop a green plastic stalk that sprouted from a plastic flowerpot full of rubber dirt. This was a miserable object. What demonic impulse so inspires humankind to manufacture sad rubber imitations of the simplest articles of natural beauty? The dirt in the flowerpot was disgustingly unrealistic, but the flower itself could almost fool you—until of course you touched its petals, and your fingers were rudely shocked by the brittle texture of the synthetic when you were expecting the plump wet kiss of honest life. What she wanted me to do was to take a watering can that had a little water in it, and dribble the water from its porous neck into the rubber dirt; a tragic mimicry of what would have been a bestowal of nourishment upon a living thing—if only the thing were real.
Sluggish-limbed and bored, begrudging her at every step, I hoisted myself up, went over to where the watering can was, dragged it one-handed across the floor behind me, clanging and banging as it went, water sloshing around inside it and splashing out in puddles here and there, and I tipped its beak into the plastic pot, submissively suffering to “water” the fake dirt.
“Good job, Bruno!” Tal clapped her hands twice in approval. “Very good!”
Then she rooted around in the raisin box and offered me another raisin.
I shook my head no.
“You don’t want a raisin?” she said, thrusting the raisin at me. “Raisins are good. They’re good for you.”
(Ah-ha! I get it now, Tal. You were feeding me the raisins because you were concerned for my health. Because you were concerned that I was always using the wages I earned in the lab to buy nothing but junk food, the M&Ms and the marshmallows and the candy bars that Norm had on offer, all the gooey wonderful sweet stuff that I happened to like, while ignoring utterly the nuts and the vegetables and your “nature’s candy,” the raisin!)
Tal held the raisin aloft, deftly pinched between her middle finger and thumb, and guided this raisin, this blackened, mummified corpse of a grape, toward my face, toward the direction of my shut mouth, then stopped a few inches from my lips and held it there. Slowly, slowly, she brought the raisin to my mouth, until the raisin itself touched my lips. I opened my mouth, and then I shut it. When I shut my mouth, both the raisin and the middle finger of Tal’s right hand were inside of it. For an instant, Tal’s finger was in between my top and bottom rows of teeth. And then it wasn’t.
I had never really done anything physically violent to a human in my life, and I never really would again, except for a few slipups, including the one murder I committed, which is what landed me in this place, but I will speak of that later.
Yes, there was screaming. Yes, there was blood. Yes, Tal looked down in horror at the stub where the ultimate and penultimate segments of her right middle finger used to be. Yes, she held her hand up to the light and looked at it with an expression that betrayed more amazement at first than physical pain, as if wondering where were the other two joints of her finger that only a moment before had been securely attached to the second knuckle? Yes, she held it that way, wide-eyed, aghast, against the cold flickering of the fluorescent lights that illumined the lab. And yes, just a brief moment, just a fraction of a second later, the blood began to burble up out of her finger, and a fraction of a second after that it began