The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore Read Online Free PDF Page A

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 detached factual analysis on an atrocity.
    “Oh, and it’s still alive!” says the woman. “Oh, you poor thing—run away, little froggie, run away!”
    Of course the frog didn’t make it. After my father shot his wad down the frog’s throat, he peeled it off and tossed it over his shoulder like a slob does a dirty sock, and slumped himself down for a postcoital nap on the spot.
    The frog wasn’t dead, just maimed, violated, wounded beyond the help of modern medicine. I so vividly remember seeing that poor stupid animal staggering around, reeling, the victim of a brutal sexual assault, dragging its belly through the dirt on its weak legs, near death, pale sticky underbelly heaving in, out, sputtering, my father’s jizzom dribbling from its mouth. And I was overcome with sympathy for this creature. I am no savage, Gwen. My own heart bleeds when I see pain in another. The only humane thing left to do for this frog was to put it out of its misery: and so I scooped up the ravished frog and, swinging it by the legs, mercifully bashed out what little brains it had in its frog head by whacking it against a nearby log. This coup de grâce was uncharitably misinterpreted by the humans as a mere continuation and the natural culmination of the sickening orgy of sadoerotic torture that the
Pan troglodytes
were for whatever reason enacting upon this defenseless frog. At this point I think a woman at the ledge shielded her young daughter’s eyes with a hand of parental censorship.
    My father, needless to say, with his cigarette-smoking andfrog-raping antics, was a local favorite among the primates at the Lincoln Park Zoo. His ill-gotten celebrity at the zoo outshone all the other residents of the Primate House, and oh God did he bask in that iniquitous limelight, the stupid narcissistic thug. They loved him at the zoo. Adored him. As I mentioned earlier, there were a few lowland gorillas living in the habitat across the hall from us, including a magisterial old silverback male whom I don’t believe I ever saw engaged in any activity other than dejectedly draping his massiveness over the structures in his habitat in various attitudes of languor so bored, so hopeless that they could have only arisen from a feeling of humiliation so complete as to reduce his life of confinement and public display to a flat stretch of days full of nothing but a dull yen for the only remaining passage of escape still availed him in the bittersweet promise of death. The miracle of my fate is that I was offered my release from just such a miserable life by the salvation of language. Quite literally, I talked my way out. But you could see, you could just
see
that fat old silverback’s regal eyes glistening with hatred for my father, hatred for all of Rotpeter’s zany performances, all his crowd-pleasing, repulsive clowning around, the way that self-debasing popinjay would prance up and down along the length of the chimp habitat right in front of the glass, banging on the window, hooting, clapping, stomping, clacking his teeth, making silly faces, doing the hear-no-see-no-speak-no-evil routine, peeling back his wet pink pinguid pithecine lips from his gums to reveal two rows of slimy yellow teeth, and slapping his palms on his chest and generally behaving for all the world like some sort of caricature of a chimpanzee, a loathsome self-parody, thus prompting the humans to point and giggle and ooglie-mooglie at him like the slavering idiot clods they were and
oh
, did they love him, the humans, how they would point at him behaving like a moron and then remark among themselves how
human
, how eerily