The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore by Benjamin Hale Page A

scratching markings into notebooks with pens or pencils. Lydia had her glasses on, and her hair was bound back in its academic ponytail. I sat on the desk and played with my toes. I looked out upon the faces of the students sitting silent and obedient at their desks. Fifty eyes trained on me as Lydia spoke. Many of these eyes were set in the heads of smooth-skinned young girls, some of whom had even removed their flip-flops, and were sitting with one foot playfully toeing the tripartite juncture of the plastic flip-flop strap and the other crossed beneath her in such a way as to show me the sole of her bare foot, with its callused heel stained yellow and green from the grass. Never before had I been in a room with so many grass-stained bare feet and skirts and breasts and so much soft sweaty flesh and long glossy hair in it. I could not concentrate at all on my work.
    When Lydia finished speaking, her students pushed their desks into the corners of the room to make a wide clearing for me. Lydia placed me in the center of the room. Then she picked up the cardboard box that I have erstwhile forgotten to mention and dumped its contents out before me. It was Norm’s box of curiosities: the stones, the washers, the pencils, the plastic flowers, and the stuffed animals.
    Lydia bade me to sort them. The task was embarrassingly simple. All I had to do was to recognize that a pencil—though it may differ in its specific physical details from all other pencils—is similar enough to other pencils, to a sort of Platonic ideal of “Pencil,” that it may reasonably be grouped with other pencils and not, say, witha stone. This concept—the generalized cataloging of the things of the world—underlies much language. I had sorted these objects thousands of times. Today, I held my feet in my hands in the center of the room and dumbly stared at them.
    I looked around me at all the young men and young women in the room. I looked especially at the young women. God, the smell of them. Their perfume, or whatever it was, their washed skin, their hair, the misty films of sweat in their armpits and knees and thighs, the smell of shampoos and conditioners, of soaps and freshly shaven legs—their grass-stained bare feet—their bright breasts heaving beneath their shirts…. Lydia flapped a treat before me. She sat down with me in the clearing with the pile of objects that lay unsorted at my feet—she spoke to me, cooing instructions. She organized the artifacts for me, then put them back in the box, shook it vigorously, and dumped them out again.
    I could not concentrate at all. The students laughed. What began as a few desultory twitters and snickers soon crested into a half-muffled wave of derisive cackling. Lydia spoke and spoke and spoke to me, entreating me to do
something
—sort the objects?—perform some of my signs?—show them what you can do!—the things I taught you!
    Of course I understood her words, I grasped the meanings of her signs—but the links between the signs and their meanings dissolved in the air before they reached me. I simply sat there in the center of the room, mutely, stupidly, intermittently picking up an item here and there—a pencil, a plastic flower, a stuffed animal—fingering it disinterestedly, and putting it down again: behaving, in other words, exactly like an ordinary chimpanzee, rather than the genius chimp they had apparently been expecting. Lydia flushed and grew frustrated with me—infuriated, even.
    Then: I smelled something. Something—specific, some smell that I had not previously noticed in the room. I detected somefaint but definitely present smell, a strange odor, oily and fleshy and sticky and briny and very, very human. I looked around the room, at all the bare legs, the flip-flops and the sticky thighs. There was a certain girl—oh, she was beautiful—this certain girl, so smooth, so soft, so bright—I could smell the films of sweat in the pits of her knees, between her toes, her