The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore - Benjamin Hale [9]
That’s when the zoo authorities got wise to the fact that my father hadn’t quit smoking: because now, in addition to the usual lush aroma of fecal matter, the habitat reeked of cigarette smoke. They tore the place up looking for Rotpeter’s stash, but he’d hidden it so well they never found it. Whenever the brownshirts arrived on a raid my father cleverly—oh, so clever, Rotpeter—cleverly sat on top of the very rock covering the cache. They never found it. He ran out, though, not even halfway through the winter, and the cravings made him moody and irascible. The next summer, the zoo employees posted a conspicuous sign outside the ledge looking into our habitat that must have said something like PLEASE DO NOT GIVE THE CHIMPANZEES CIGARETTES, though we were on the other side of the sign and did not know exactly what it said and, as all of us were unlettered, would not have been able to decipher it anyway—making my father furious with confusion as to why his bum-a-smoke gesture, though still amusing, failed to make good as often as it had the previous year. This, by the way, was the summer I met Lydia, and it was the same summer as the Frog Incident.
The Frog Incident: at some point during the time between the experiment with the peaches and the time Lydia came to fetch me for acculturation, a frog—yes, a frog, you know, ribbit—had somehow made it into our habitat. Curious Rotpeter was intrigued and entertained by this hapless amphibian: he managed to catch it, and began to play with it, flopping it back and forth in his hands and laughing at it, letting the terrified creature struggle away and get a few hops out before he snatched it up again. It was a perfect blue-skied summer day on a weekend, so the zoogoers were out in droves, and a large group of humans huddled at the ledge, pointing at my father and laughing at him laughing at the frog. Then what did Rotpeter, my father, do? He proceeded to fuck it. Yes: he fucked the frog. He played with himself till hard, pried the frog’s mouth open, rammed his schlong down its throat and began to rape it. The frog kicked its legs in agony, and there was a gruesome squishy sucking wet slurpy pumping squelching noise like skwerploitch, skwerploitch, skwerploitch (don’t make that face, Gwen)—which I imagine was distinctly audible even up there on the other side of the Wall. Once or twice the frog succeeded in hobbling away a few inches in a feeble attempt at escape, and Rotpeter would grab it by the leg, drag it back, reinsert himself and continue to take his pleasure with it. This is more or less what I recall, or imagine I recall or may as well recall overhearing among the humans who stood at the ledge, looking on in horror, and—as the urge to document is weirdly intrinsic to your species—videotaping it:
“I’ll have to tell people about this,” says the woman with the video camera.
“Mommy?” says a little girl, “is the monkey raping the frog?”
“This is the monkey,” says the woman to her camera, “oh, wait, oh, see the frog, see the frog—”
“Just look at him goin’ at it!” says a man.
From somewhere up above us comes the laughter of a child, a bright pretty squeal of the stuff.
“Look at him enjoying this, this is so horrible!”
“Oh my God, it’s still alive,” someone says.
“Yeah, what’s crazy is the frog is still alive,” says the man, typically quick to interject the more emotionally