Benjamin Hale - The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore

I was so jumpy, I wanted to jump on the bed. It was a very pliant and responsive bed, poor perhaps for sleeping but grade A for bouncing. The one Lydia and I had at home — yes, I still thought of it as “home”—was nowhere near so conducive to bouncing. Now there was one monkey, jumping on the bed. However, Dr. Lydia Littlemore (she had a Ph.D.) prescribed that there should be no monkeys jumping on the bed. So I stopped. Lydia sat on the edge of the bed, exhausted to the core of her being, squinting, and with her forefinger and thumb massaging the place where the bridge of her nose reached her brow. She complained of a headache. She picked up the phone and ordered food, which in due time was magically brought to us. We ate it on the bed and watched the TV. Lydia fell asleep in her clothes, on top of the quilt, with the TV still chattering and aglow. I turned it off and curled up beside her. The night came and went. I listened to trucks rumbling past us on the nearby highway all night.

In the morning we got back in the car and more or less repeated exactly what we had done the day before. Another long day of land scrolling past us. The character of the landscape changed and changed again. The temperature changed, the terrain changed, the quality and color of the light in the sky changed, the sun traveled across the sky as we traveled across the earth. We arrived at our destination after the sun had set. I had been asleep for the last few hours of the journey.

The jostling of Lydia’s car woke me. Until now the roads we’d driven on had been smooth and clean, but now we were rumbling over a tiny dirt road in the middle of nowhere. Lydia’s small car banged and shuddered down the road. Bits of dirt and gravel crunched and popped beneath our tires. We were moving slowly, crawling. I looked at Lydia. Her shoulders and face were scrunched up with concentration. She was having difficulty seeing what was in front of us, stretching her neck over the dashboard and squinting to discern a hint of the road in the dark. I looked out the window. I couldn’t see a thing. Only sheer absolute blackness. We may as well have been in outer space for all I could make out.

“We’re almost there,” Lydia half-sighed to me, as I sat up and smeared the drowse from my eyes. The car rattled and lurched up the steep unpaved mountain road in the dark. The headlights spat a cold white light on the dirt ahead of us, and behind us the brake lights of our car pulsed dim red light into the darkness. The car shuddered, the engine struggled. The headlights briefly illuminated a parabolic wooden sign, whose capital letters were rustically fashioned from sticks, which arched over the road from one roughly hewn upright log to another. We passed beneath the arch. Soon Lydia’s car came to rest beside a big metal gate in the middle of the road. She stopped the car but did not turn it off. She dug around in the glove compartment for something, found it — a little scrap of paper on which she’d written something — got out of the car and walked up to a little blinking box to one side of the gate. She did something to the box, and the gate moaned open before us. She got back into the car and continued to drive us up the thin dirt road. Eventually the car came to a stop in a wide flat area right in front of a massive and complicated house. We got out of the car with our suitcases. It was late. A few of the lights in the house were on, and there was a light on above the giant wooden doors in the front of the house. A row of lamps lined a long stone path that led from the place where we parked up to the doors of the house. Other than that, there were no other buildings, and no other lights around for miles. All around us were hills, dotted with patches of sparkling white snow that sloped upward and became dark mountains. Above us, the night sky swarmed with stars, so much of the universe’s twinkling smoke and dust — it was at once beautiful and terrifying. It looked just like the curvilinear ceiling of the planetarium in Chicago, except without the glowing outlines of all the beasts and gods and monsters that the constellations were supposed to represent drawn helpfully in the spaces between the stars.

The wheels under our suitcases grumbled along the stone path that led from the driveway to the giant double doors of the house. Lydia knocked on the doors. They winged open and we were met by a squat and sleepy-eyed older woman with curly brushed-iron hair who carried herself with gravity and austerity. She guided us upstairs to a guest bedroom with an adjoining bathroom. We were utterly exhausted, and we fell asleep at once, even in these unfamiliar environs, without any ceremony.

Lydia and I awoke the following morning, showered in the adjoining bathroom, dressed from our suitcases, and went out to explore the house. The house was vast, bright, and silent. Hand in hand, we wandered through the impeccably clean wood-floored and white-walled hallways. There was a lot of art on the walls. The excessive bigness, brightness, and cleanliness of the house made it a pleasant but strangely unhomelike place to be in. A giant upside-down cone of a chandelier hung from the high ceiling over the cavernous living room, which was made entirely out of real deer’s antlers linked together in a thorny spiraling tessellation. A wide staircase wrapped around half of the space and gracefully spilled into the room, moving us through the house less like wood than water. The staircase was like a wooden waterfall, a cascade of frozen visible music. The interior spaces of this house, in contrast to the rigid, boxy architecture I was used to — which always makes it seem like the architect’s top priority was to keep the lineaments between one room and another crystal clear — flowed in such a way that all the rooms melted smoothly together. At the bottom of the stairs, beneath the antler chandelier, a furry white rug lay on the wooden floor, and several white and brown couches and armchairs assembled around a low glass table beside a flagstone fireplace that contained a glass window, behind which the smooth flames of a gas fire burned in silence. Above the fireplace hung an oil painting of a group of cowboys riding muscular white horses across a snowy plain, with mountains in the background, and a storm threatening overhead in the top right corner. The walls to the left and right of the fireplace consisted of towering windows that filled the room with blinding bright light. Outside these windows, the earth all around the house crested into hundreds of cragged peaks, pink slabs of rock with clusters of pine trees between them, all powdered with bright snow. I had never seen mountains before. The light in the sharp blue sky was amazingly bright.

Dudley Lawrence sat in one of the white armchairs beside the glassed-in silent fire. He had not noticed us descending the stairs, noiselessly, in our socks. He was reading a newspaper and smiling to himself. His face looked like it smiled perpetually. He was barefoot in blue jeans and a blue denim shirt, from the open neck of which his white chest hair burst forth, and he wore reading glasses to see the paper. It was still quite early in the morning, but he looked as alert as if he had already been awake for hours. This man was a living illustration of wholesomeness, happiness, and vitality. Lydia and I were still damp-headed from the shower, and wearing clothes that were rumpled from being compressed two days in our suitcases.

Dudley Lawrence noticed us, looked up, snapped the newspaper in half backward and threw it on the side table next to the chair. Then he stood up, and I saw the giant decorative brass belt buckle that connected the lower half of him to the upper half. He radiated robustness and cheer. His white mustache lived inside of his smile like a snail lives in its shell. He opened his lean, strong, denim-clad arms to us.