Benjamin Hale - The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore

Our footsteps echoed hugely throughout the room, multiplied several times over. Even the cat’s purring was amplified by the echo.

“Bruno,” Leon said. His voice was half-hushed in amazement. “This is perfect for the Shakespeare Underground! It’s even underground!”

He walked into the center of the room, winged out his arms, and spun around in the middle of the room like a giant child. He shouted out to hear his voice reverberate off the high moldy walls and vaulted ceilings, and the walls boomed so articulately with his many-times-multiplied voice that it sounded like four or five Leons were shouting in counterpoint: “FULL FATHOM FIVE THY FATHER LIES — OF HIS BONES ARE CORAL MADE. THOSE ARE PEARLS THAT WERE HIS EYES — NOTHING OF HIM THAT DOTH FADE — BUT DOTH SUFFER A SEA-CHANGE — INTO SOMETHING RICH AND STRANGE!”

There was long silence. Leon’s arms were still swung open wide, as if to embrace the universe. His great-uncle hacked nastily into a fist and ground his cigarette out on the floor.

The cat groaned and pawed my pants with its deformed feet.

Leon’s elderly great-uncle conceded to rent us the space at a relatively modest price that I will not divulge. He responded shruggingly and with considerable confusion to our whole idea and the nature of our inquiry. I do not think Mr. Locksmith ever fully understood what we were doing. It is possible that his faculties of reason were somewhat impaired by his Methuselan age, which, as I have said, I would have estimated at somewhere around nine hundred and seven. Mr. Locksmith was a workaday man, not an artist. In any event, it was with a servile, acquiescent, sagely demeanor and the patience of a Buddha that he put up with all our rehearsals, all the stage equipment that we rented and hauled down to his basement in pieces via the elevator in the back of his shop. He put up marvelously with all the actors who began to show up for rehearsals every day at his inconspicuous little locksmith’s shop, and what a rowdy lot we were!

Our production took shape over the coming months. A lot of things happened during this time in my life, Gwen. It would only require a hundred reams of paper and a thousand gallons of ink to do them proper justice, but because you and I and (I presume) our readers are only mortal, and unlike Mr. Locksmith presumably suffer from life spans with irritating promises of finitude, I will oblige us all to fast-forward through them, because I have almost come to the one time when I murdered a man in a fit of rage and therefore had to be placed in captivity, events which although they are philosophically insignificant I’m sure will tickle the puerile interest of the hoi polloi.

I had very little to do with the business end of the production: stage design, accounts, direction, casting, promotion, advertising, ticket sales, and so on. Come to think of it, did Leon, either? It turned out Leon was not an incompetent director. The Shakespeare Underground went aboveground at this point. We had a director, we had the principal actors, we had a budget, we had a performance space. By the time we had put all this together, our modest avant-garde theatre troupe did not look so pathetic. Leon, do not be surprised to learn, was not a pariah to everyone in the New York theatre world. He had been in it, and he was even well liked, in a personal sense, by many. Or enough, anyway. Phone calls were made, contacts were milked, people hired, money raised, things organized. Our production company entered such a stage of complexity that at some point I washed my hands of all this stuff. I won’t delve much into these pragmatic details here, as I have never had a head for them, nor do I find them terribly interesting to relate. I trusted it all to Leon, and simply trained the focus of my energies solely on my perfecting my performance as Caliban.

Little Emily’s mother pulled her out of a month or more of school so that she could attend our rehearsals. A car service would drop her off at our performance space in the morning, and pick her up in the evening. I would sit on the windowsill of the locksmith shop, sipping my morning cup of coffee and stroking the freakish-footed shop cat, and watch her expertly step out of the sleek black Lincoln town car in her buckled ballet flats, the parked car’s engine thrumming as the driver watched her until she was safely inside. During downtimes at rehearsals, when not sneaking cigarettes in the alley, she would dump out the backpack full of homework her teachers sent her home with, and on a board laid across a milk crate or some other ragtag desk she’d set up shop with pencils and calculators and whatever else, not letting her academic career slip for a second even though she was about to costar in what would be probably one of the most groundbreaking productions in the history of the theatrical arts.

Little Emily was a bag of contradictions, her mood as quick-shifting and unpredictable as mercury. Some days she would be all smiles for me, and other days I would say “Hello” to her and she would look away and say nothing in return, pointedly ignoring me — leaving me to wonder if I had said anything at all, or if I had only hallucinated my saying something to her, or perhaps even that I had only hallucinated my entire existence. Then the very next day — nothing that I am aware of having changed in the nature of our relations (I’m moving from the general to the particular here) — she took me fiercely by the hand and led me into a small, dark area of the performance space, between two long racks of costumes. They were long pink silk dresses with ruffled hems and poofy shoulders. What were they doing there? I don’t even recall their being used in the performance. The silk closed in around us, two whispering soft dark silk walls. My eyes dimmed. I could hear her breathing a foot or two away from me, and I could just barely discern the whites of her eyes, but otherwise, darkness.

“Hold out your hand,” she whispered, and I knew it was a command.

I did as she said. I opened my long purple hand and held it out palm side up. Then I heard a very faint squelching noise, and I felt a hot globule of runny, sticky fluid land bull’s-eye in the center of my palm.

“What in the world—?” I may have said, but she was gone, having already fled, stealthy as a jaguar, through the two rows of rustling silk dresses.

I was not revolted. When I had clawed my way out of the dark, I examined my hand, held it up to the light, watched the wetness glisten, watched the generous dollop of her spit break like an egg in a pan and slide easily down my wrist and forearm. Was this, I wondered, a gesture of affection?

During this time, a deep and brooding melancholy overtook me. What I felt like doing was taking long walks in very foggy weather while wearing an overcoat and an inwardly pained expression of perfect ennui, pausing occasionally to lean against a railing and gaze at a misty winter seaside, a picture of deep and brooding melancholy. I was alone, Gwen. I was a fugitive. I realized that I had to return to Chicago. I would try to push from my mind the fact that I was a coward for not trying to return to Chicago a long time ago. Truth be told, I was enjoying the adventure of my freedom in the world. I was deliberately not thinking about Chicago and Lydia. I knew I had to go back. I knew she might be dead. I was so afraid to think this that every time I felt the thought creeping into specific articulation in my mind, morphing from a vague dread to an actual full-on conscious thought rendered austere and finite with words, I would push it back, push it down, suppress it like an urge to vomit. I would briefly buckle over with pain, clutch my stomach, and let it pass, let it pass — then cautiously stand up, take a few steps, okay, better, better, all shall be well and all shall be well and all manner of things shall be well.