The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore by Benjamin Hale Read Free Book Online Page A

distribute peanut M&Ms at times according only to the dictate of its unknowable whimsy. My mother was a creature of such intellectual poverty, I’m sure she was doing little else besides randomly punching the screen and praying for her chocolate-covered peanuts. Meanwhile, when she wasn’t cradling me in her arms while touching the screen, I, Bruno, was permitted to bumble around on the floor of the lab, playing with various objects that the scientists had strewn around to distract my attention while they performed experiments on my mother. How many times did this scene occur? I haven’t a clue. I was so young, I barely remember. I cannot remember if what I just described is a unique memory of a particular event, or a patchwork of many different memories of many similar events that occurredover a prolonged period of time. In hindsight, it must be the latter. I remember the babble of the scientists all around me in the room. I remember a certain rubber ball that I played with while my mother was busy pathetically flunking test after test. The ball was blue, with a yellow stripe in the middle bisected in the exact center by a narrower red stripe. I remember the artificial and oddly intoxicating gluey rubbery smell of the ball. I remember enjoying these visits. I remember sitting in my mother’s warm soft lap as she punched the colorful glowing screen over and over, trying to coax peanut M&Ms from the frivolous demon in the wall. I remember listening to the people talking, trying to discern the mechanics of this weird world to which I was a newcomer, a foreigner, a stranger. I remember feeling myself being wrapped in the soft blanket of their babble. I remember—very, very vaguely—I remember even beginning to feel at home with the sinuous ribbonlike rhythms of human conversation fluttering in and out of my ears, trickling like cool water over the smooth stone of my brain, carving designs into my infantile and infinitely malleable consciousness.
    My soul then was a thing of darkness, naked and devoid of form.
    I remember this so vaguely that I’m not even sure whether I’m remembering it or making it up. But there it is, Gwen, you may have it.
    But as for the earliest warning signs of my sexual perversion? Let’s talk about love. I felt love for my mother. I felt love for Céleste. But was there anything at all erotic in these loves? Did I feel anything remotely Oedipal in my biological mother’s warm, soft, stupid lap? Was there even the slightest tingle of preadolescent sexuality in my close bond with Céleste? No. No, no,
no
, absolutely not. Now, I do not assert this because I’m an anti-Freudian; I only assert this because my childhood was not innocent of sexual longings. In fact, I was obsessed with the sexual side of things, the coital, the carnal,the warm creamy slippery fucking fuckal. From an abnormally, maybe even unhealthfully precocious age I was inwardly consumed with a fierce, insane, insatiable lust that was always rushing and crackling its way through my soul like a match held to a pile of dry straw.
    I never felt—even very early on—I never felt like I quite belonged to the same species as my mother or Céleste. I loved Céleste, but I did not lust after her. I did not lust after her because she was a chimp. My erotic desires lay elsewhere, yes, even then. For years in the course of my early development I kept my burgeoning desires secret. Or at least I thought I did. In retrospect, surely my mother knew. She could see something in the way I watched the human women just beyond the glass wall or above the ledge of the greater wall—
the
Wall—some bright animus thrashing like an electric snake in the pits of my eyes that was more than just the chaste fascination of the amateur anthropologist. For fascinated indeed was I by their forms—but it was a fascination mingled in with the surging juices of young lust. And why
should
I have been, why should I ever have been sexually attracted to other