Benjamin Hale - The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore

There were still other irritating matters to be dealt with. Little Emily’s mother, Mrs. Goyette, had come to the performance, and had felt particularly disappointed, possibly even betrayed. When the rest of the planned performances had to be abruptly canceled, she demanded her backing money back, threatened further legal action, and so on. Of course it would have been impossible to return any of her money, as we had spent it all, and then some. For a few days Leon and I hid out at home and spent a lot of time drunk. We played a lot of backgammon, too.

Leon even began to grow uncharacteristically concerned that the long and pestering arm of the law might soon want to reach its way into our lives as a result of all this silly folderol, and stick its meddling fingers into our various pies, and so he suggested it might be wise to leave the state of New York for a period of time. He put in a call to another one of his ex-wives — who lived in Los Angeles, a city Leon himself had lived in for a time, in another life — and in terms deft and delicate explained the gist of what she needed to know of the situation, and requested her temporary asylum, which she grumblingly but generously agreed to grant. It was time to leave.

I, for my part, decided it was time I returned to Chicago. I had to see Lydia. I was tired of living as a fugitive. I longed to see her, and to kiss her face and feel her skin against mine. I hoped that she was well. I had so many adventures to tell her!

So Leon and I agreed to travel west together. Among Leon’s Luddite tendencies was a tremendous fear and distrust of travel by airplane. He suggested that it might not be wise to go that way in any case, as it might present legal hassles if they identified us at the airport. So with the money from our ticket sales, we purchased boarding passes for an Amtrak train that would chug and roll all the way across America. We divided up the rest of the money, said good-bye (in our hearts, if not in person) to little Emily and her mother, and Leon’s daughter, Audrey, and her coworker, Sasha, and Mrs. and Dr. DaSilva, and everyone else who had entered my circle of civilization in New York. And so, we left.

It is a wonderful thing to travel by rail. Especially in the world as we have it now, when it seems such an anachronism. Traveling long distances by train is also an excellent way to meet people who, like Leon, are terrified of flying.

“I hope you never have to endure an airport or an airplane,” Leon told me, as we settled into our seats for the nineteen-hour trip from New York to Chicago. “It is a truly disgusting environment. All around you are nothing but the placidly content bourgeoisie, comfortable with their senses of entitlement and dispossessed of a single emotion worthy of feeling or a thought worthy of thinking. They are surface dwellers, both in soul and society. They wiggle into their seats subtly reeking of midprice perfumes and aftershaves, and usually proceed to look straight ahead of them without speaking a word to one another until the aircraft lands, or they open up their laptop computers to bury themselves in their work, or they open their artless books that are usually volumes advertised as being beneficial to their moral or psychological well-being, and if they chance to fall into conversation with their fellow passengers, they can only converse on harmless subjects such as golf or real estate. They are people who would rather pursue happiness than joy. That’s what I really detest about air travel. It’s not my fear of flying that prevents me from it; it’s my fear of the middle class. I can only tolerate the company of either the underclasses, or the aristocracy.”

Leon paused, held his breath and shifted his weight to ease the passage of a fart. He continued:

“So remember, Bruno: should you ever need to travel any great distance, you must always if possible take a train or a bus, any mode of transport but an airplane. That hideous invisible gas that permeates our civilization is at its thickest and most dangerous level of concentration inside the sealed cabin of a passenger airplane. But here? Look around! What do we see? We see all manner of people too low-class to fathom the idea of purchasing an airplane ticket. We see recent immigrants from distant impoverished lands, nattering amongst themselves in their exotic tongues, as well as a healthy sampling of drunks, perverts, rednecks, gangbangers, and drug addicts. We see people who are frighteningly thin as well as those who are frighteningly fat. We see people who belong to atavistically folksy religious sects that require them to dress for the early nineteenth century and speak in long-forgotten dialects. I prefer the company of these people, Bruno. In here, one can barely smell that poisonous gas — it is too well masked by the comingling odors of microwaved hot dogs, flatulence, and feet.”

The idea of flying (I have only been on an airplane once in my life, and under unpleasant circumstances that I have already related in this narrative) does not repulse me for safety reasons (which I would have to admit irrational), nor for Leon’s more subtle and difficult sociological reasons, and not only because there is nothing in my evolutionary pedigree (nor is there, for that matter, in yours) that could prepare me for the unnerving bodily discombobulation of the experience; rather, the idea of flying repulses me philosophically and psychogeographically. I have heard and I believe that a child in an airplane during takeoff may often be overheard to remark that the things he sees below through the window look like “toys.” That’s just it! Observing the earth from such a godlike perspective destroys an animal’s reverence for its geography. They’re not “toys,” kid. All that land you’re zipping over at forty thousand feet and five hundred miles per hour? Down there is a multitude of worlds that you will never know of. People may come to forget them, because they no longer care about them. So go ahead and let them die. Let the earth die, let all the animals die. You probably wouldn’t be interested in them anyway. All people care about is getting from one human environment to another as quickly as they can, wasting the minimum possible time in the places between the places. The human imagination yearns to connect point A to point B not with a line, but simply by folding space until the points touch — to entirely eliminate the space between them. This is why, in some science fiction films, people in the future may travel from place to place by teleportation. That is the ultimate realization of humanity’s quest to devise faster and more efficient ways of getting from one place to another: to simply eliminate the liminal spaces entirely. And then people will finally become what they have always sought to be: an animal who moves exclusively in environments of its own design, an animal that is all mind, an animal who has no use for its body, an animal who has no use for the earth.

But it was fun to ride the train! Beside us to our left the Hudson River rushed and sparkled against the Palisades as we shuffled and hooted away from New York City. We passed the train station of Hastings-on-Hudson, where I had once chosen to board the southbound train instead of the northbound train, and thus met Leon and had all the rest of that adventure. That was more than a year earlier. I liked the crisp dark blue suits that the ticket collectors wore, and I liked their shiny brass buttons and the flat plastic visors on their caps. Leon and I sat in a booth in the dining car, playing the games we had brought: chess (a game at which I am not skilled) and checkers (at which I am) and, as always, my most beloved game, the one that a certain bean-boiling one-legged bagpiper first taught me many years ago, backgammon. The train shuddered and hooted and rolled onward, and the chessmen, checkers, and dice clicked, clattered, and tumbled on the table between us. We talked to the people who came and went from the dining car; we watched the landscape slowly scrolling by, gradually changing from urban to rural and back to urban again. Everyone is so friendly on a train, so curious and talkative and eager to make friends with strangers. Perhaps this is because the people on a passenger train are acutely conscious of the anachronism of it, pushing the experience into the realm of novelty, of the fun and interesting and unusual, which prompts people to want to talk. Or perhaps this friendliness arises because those who choose to travel by train tend to be the people who, like Leon, long for an earlier world, a chaotic and inconvenient world where things took a lot of time and people enjoyed talking to each other. A world before the world became a world where every place looks the same and nowhere is home.