Benjamin Hale - The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore

You see (I said to Clever) it is natural that we should think language somehow created matter itself, since language creates thought in our minds, creates the very question itself. That the world was birthed on the tongue, in the mouth, in the lungs, in the blood, in the brain, in electricity, in light. That it was the word itself that formed the world. That we were birthed not by a great otherness who sculpted us from dust, packed the clay on our bones, and inflated our lungs with the kiss of life, nor even by an unaccountable explosion ringing out in an unimaginable void — but by our very capacity for conscious thought. A word begets time and consciousness, and consciousness begets the curiosity as to what begat time before we were conscious, and this begets the question: What happened in the beginning? But maybe a wiser question to ask is, What is beginning? If we had begun with that question, then maybe we wouldn’t get so twisted up in wondering what happened before the big bang, who uttered the cosmic word that brought us into existence, and what the turtle is standing on. Thus men forgot that all deities reside in the human breast.

At some point my monologue had become a dream, because I had fallen asleep in the field. Clever went back to the house to get Lydia. Clever took her by the hand and led her to the place in the field where I had fallen into drunken sleep beneath the stars. Lydia scooped me up in her arms and I half-consciously held on to her neck, which I kissed continually as she carried me to bed.

Last night I found something in my memory that may be of interest to our readers, Gwen. It is one last relevant bit of dangling narrative in need of narrating from my time at the ranch, and once I have narrated it, then we may spin those hands of that clock into that time-blur that I have promised.

I could not sleep last night. Sometimes I have these bouts of insomnia. Nothing terrible — nothing at all like what Lydia used to have — but every so often I spend a restless night in bed, I thrash around in my sheets, with my mind turning over and over like the engine of a car stuck in neutral gear. I still haven’t yet slept today, despite the fact that the unencumbered leisure of my daily schedule would not prevent me from filching a few hours’ worth of a nap.

So, as I lay in bed last night, flipping my pillow over again and again to cool my sleepless cheeks, watching the rectangle of moonlight on my bedroom floor slowly slant into a rhombus, for entertainment I began rummaging through the toy box of my brain to see if I could find any old half-forgotten memories to play with. And what I found buried toward the bottom, dusted off and examined with curiosity and a sudden gush of remembrance was this interesting hippocampal artifact. In my sleeplessness, I remembered an incident that happened at the ranch — I can’t exactly remember when it was, but I know that it was near the end of our stay there. I’m pretty sure that we left the ranch at the end of a summer, or the beginning of a fall. So, seeing as we arrived there in a winter, I guess we spent more than two years there, more like two and a half. Wait a moment, Gwen, the fog of my memory is lifting… lifting… I can almost see it… ah- ha! Yes, there it is. I see it clearly now. Just as I suspected: this happened on the Fourth of July. Independence Day. I also remember that it involved a hot tub.

There was a hot tub embedded in the wooden back deck of the big house. Wait, how could this have been in the summer? I remember very clearly the steam that was rising off the surface of the water. No, it was summer, because even midsummer nights can get quite cold at those altitudes — hence the steam. It was night. The color of the water — that I remember exactly: it was absolutely aquamarine, and glowing, as if it contained mysterious radioactive agents. Lydia is sitting in the hot tub. I am sitting in the hot tub. Mr. and Mrs. Lawrence are sitting in the hot tub. It is the Fourth of July.

That is a holiday I sometimes miss in my current confinement. I haven’t seen a Fourth of July since I’ve been sequestered here in the Institute. I am told — and I believe — that the first time Lydia took me to a Fourth of July fireworks celebration (in my mind the Fourth of July was a celebration that celebrated fireworks), I spoke of stars. This was in Chicago. I, Bruno, borne in her arms, was swaddled in the oversized green hooded sweatshirt that I would wear on our outings into human society. She took me to the fireworks celebration at Navy Pier on the Fourth of July. The sounds, the clicking and binging and whirring noises everywhere, the music threading through the atmosphere, the giant Ferris wheel: Navy Pier. When the music that accompanied the fireworks began to blare from the crackling loudspeakers and the fireworks began to shriek into the sky to detonate themselves above our heads, she said that I pointed up to the sizzling clouds of smoke and sparks, I pointed up at them with my long finger and distinctly said, in a voice slow and breathy with awe: “Stars!” Stars! Stars! STARS!

(It should be noted, however, that during the summers Chicago for some reason elects to discharge a battery of fireworks into the sky from Navy Pier every single Friday and Saturday night , and thus Chicago is a city spoiled rotten with fireworks, like a silly child who eats her favorite food every day until she loses the taste for it. So on the Fourth of July they compensate simply by shooting off lots and lots of fireworks! — which is admittedly an uncreative solution to the problem of pyrotechnic desensitization that arises from that city’s powerful thirst, her loving greed to smell the sulfur in her nose and to hear these ballistic hosannas and to see these wildflowers of energy blooming in the sky and reflected on the surface of her lake. I have said earlier that Chicago is curmudgeonly in the winters. Yes, but in the summers — perhaps, in fact, in order to amend for her frigid behavior most of the year — in the summers Chicago is no longer Chicago-that-somber-city, but instead is a wild rich child of a city, who demands to eat her cake and ice cream every single day — and the weakhearted people of the city give it to her, they give it all to her because they love her, they spoil her, just because, even if she doesn’t deserve it, they love to see the beautiful look on her face when she gets what she wants.)

Fourths of July were more subdued in Colorado, but no less beautiful. Many animals are terrified of fireworks, but I have never been one of them. Animals are afraid of fireworks because they do not understand them. To them, fireworks are an aberration — a frightening hole in the fabric of their accepted universe — whereas I, Bruno, share man’s love of fire. I too have plucked the red flower. I have joined the pyromantic primates. In my younger days, so long as Lydia was near, I never really feared a thing if I could see that she wasn’t afraid of it, and this included the potentially disturbing phenomenon of the inky firmament above us opening up with screaming bursts of colored fire. At the ranch, we had to sate ourselves with watching the Fourth of July fireworks display put on by the nearby sleepy mountain town of Montrose, Colorado, which was situated in the lap of a valley that we could see down into from the deck of the big house at the Lawrence Ranch, perched at the top of a long gradual slope of mountainside that spilled into the valley below. We sat on the deck at nightfall and watched from a great distance the fireworks that the people of Montrose shot into the summer air for themselves. From our high vantage point at the crest of the valley, watching the fireworks shoot up out of the town from miles away was like watching the destruction of a Sodom or Gomorrah in reverse, the fire and brimstone falling not from heaven to earth, but shooting up from the earth to make war against heaven. And we looked down into the valley, and lo, we did not turn to salt.