The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore - Benjamin Hale [90]
“Bruno!” Lydia snapped. “I’m not buying you another one.”
I don’t want another one, I communicated.
“Why in the world did you do that?”
I wanted to see what would happen if I let go, I communicated.
“That’s what happens. When you let go of your little human, he flies away.”
I need hardly bother to explicate the metaphorical implications of this moment.
We watched my balloon homunculus soar into the ether, shrinking from sight until he became an indistinguishable speck of pink against the blue of the sky. This was the ascent of man.
Where does it go? I asked.
“Africa,” said Lydia.
Africa, I wondered. My ancestral homeland. That’s where Zaire is, the birthplace of my biological father. I inwardly repeated the word to myself, codifying it to a mantra: Africa, Africa, Africa. The heart of darkness. The cradle of civilization. I understood it to be a violent place where one can never be safe. Where human beings eat chimps. The setting of my nightmares. Why did she say that so easily? So thoughtlessly? Africa.
On the way home, we stopped at a flower shop, where Lydia bought a bouquet of green roses.
When we arrived at home that evening, Lydia cooked one of my favorite foods: spaghetti. It’s such a cartoonish food. I loved to slurp up the long, slippery noodles. Damn it, I still do. Lydia opened a bottle of wine and poured herself a glass. I expressed a desire to imbibe as well, and she poured me a tiny amount—not in a wineglass, because she was afraid my maladroit hands would shatter such a delicate drinking vessel—but one of the nearly indestructible and spill-proof plastic sippy cups that were designated in our household specifically for my use.
Over dinner, our conversation was long and deep. She told me about her life. About her family, her upbringing in Arkansas, how she came here to Chicago to be educated, just like I was being educated. Talk gradually drifted to lighter topics. We joked. We laughed. She drank a few more glasses of wine, and became flushed and silly.
When our eyes met, I got a tingling feeling deep in my gut, a feeling like our two brains were directly connected by invisible electric wires running between the pupils of our eyes. And, with the dirty dishes still on the table, Lydia took my hand and guided me into our bedroom. She sat me on the bed, and we looked closely into one another’s eyes, shortening the lengths of the invisible electric wires connecting our brains. She brought her face to mine, and our lips met. Our mouths opened, and our tongues slithered together in salivary bliss. And we collapsed together back onto the bed, still unmade from that morning, and—but what else can I possibly say, without straying beyond the parameters of good taste? What words can graze the surface of such a subject, let alone explain it or express it? We made love. That night, Lydia and I truly, reciprocally, made love.
Actually, what I just described may be a lie, or a lie-like thing. Albeit a fiction, it is a useful fiction. We will use it for narrative purposes. The scene I just described—it happened—it happened many, many times—but I don’t think it happened like that, that first night, the night after I sort-of raped her. In truth the sexual relationship between me and Dr. Lydia Littlemore did not begin with a bang, but a whimper. There were many times we had to do it in the dark, very quietly, very slowly, before it was okay to bring it into the light.
Every word is a category, a tool of abstraction, a criminal approximation. Every word removes the thing it is supposed to represent from the real world. Thus, every word is a lie. And that is why it is so damnably difficult to speak about sex—or anything for that matter, but especially sex—in words. Just when you want most to speak the truth, the ineffable nature of your