The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore - Benjamin Hale [77]
There immediately followed a period of great tumult and confusion. To complement the craziness of the moment, the minute hand of the clock had just then managed to scale the left side of the clock face to surmount the top of the hour, which meant that all the classes in the building were being dismissed at about the same time, and now the hallways below us had suddenly come alive with murmuring and hundreds of shuffling shoes.
Prasad gave her a quick bandaging with the lab’s first-aid kit. There was a lot of yelling. Someone called an ambulance. For a short time there was some shouting about where the finger was.
“It’s still in his fucking mouth,” Tal shrieked, cradling her hand to her chest, which was wrapped up in gauze and then again in her twisted and bloody T-shirt.
They tried to catch me, but I was too fast for them! I ran around the room like mad in the confusion, screaming, flailing, scrambling over the tables, upsetting the furniture, bouncing off the walls, causing a world-class ruckus. Shouting everywhere. Lydia—who at some point had rematerialized in the room—yelled at everyone: “Leave!” she commanded. “Everybody get out! I’ll handle this!”
“Are you sure?” someone said. “He’s dangerous—”
“Go. Go! Get out! I’ll take care of it.”
All the other scientists funneled out the door and into the hall, guiding Tal, who was now pale with blood loss and fright, still clutching her hand to her chest, out of the room. They left. The door shut behind them. I was cowering beneath one of the lab tables. The room was silent except for the sound of all the students jostling each other in the halls of the floors below us.
“Bruno,” Lydia called. “Bruno. Come here, please.”
I wouldn’t come out.
“Don’t worry. I won’t bite,” she said, keenly aware of the irony.
She found me huddled under a table. Lydia was on her hands and knees on the floor. She crawled toward me, and then sat down, cross-legged, and patted the floor in front of her. She had put on a sweet face, but I could tell in her eyes that she was furious with me.
“Come here,” she whispered. “Come to me.”
I scrambled out from under the shadow of the table and sat in her lap. She hugged me, and she kissed the top of my head and stroked my fur. I was shivering.
“Shhhh———,” she said. “Shhhh—————.”
Gradually, my shivering stopped. She put a cupped hand below my mouth. (Recall, Gwen, the episode with the peach.)
“Please, Bruno,” she said. “Give it to me. Spit it out.”
I let the finger fall from my mouth. I pushed it out with my tongue, and the lifeless and slimy thing—and the raisin along with it—tumbled from my mouth and into the cradle of her palm, still attached to my lips by a sticky thread of drool.
“Thank you, Bruno,” she said, and closed her hand over it.
Then she picked me up and put me in the enclosure that was walled in by thick glass, and shut the door. I went willingly. I knew that I had done wrong. That I had sinned. She locked the door. I began to cry.
“You’ve been bad,” she said. “You’ve been very, very, very bad. I’ll deal with you later, Bruno. I have to go now.”
Lydia turned around and left, the finger held tightly in her hand. She hurried from the room, but remembered to flick off the lights as she left. No one came back to the lab for the rest of the day.
She needed the finger because she had vainly hoped that a doctor would be able to reattach it. Much later she would tell me that the doctors had in fact attempted to reattach the finger. She told me that although they had implemented all the sorceries of modern medicine available to them, they had ultimately failed to reattach it. In retrospect, I have come to wonder what effect the loss of the longest and middle digit on Tal Gozani’s dominant hand had on her career in puppetry.
Tal quit working at the lab after that, and she stopped visiting Lydia and me at our home. I believe the lab was legally in the clear, because they had a policy