Benjamin Hale - The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore

I’m sure our readers know as well as you and I, that did not happen.

For a long and obnoxious time Lydia and I could not leave our apartment without having to push our way through a slobbering throng of journalists, gawkers, and protesters.

Ah, yes. The protesters. Shouting and chanting their idiocies outside of our apartment all day and all night. Praying for us, they said. Holding candles and singing hymns. Pumping picket signs in the air. Screaming their putrid throats bloody with their vile, hateful screeds. At least the journalists would only appear and disappear from the vicinity of the front door of our now-unhappy home at relatively sane times of day — they, after all, had their jobs, and presumably lives of their own to live — but the fervent religious zealots apparently did not, as they never, ever seemed to leave. Sometimes — in the beginning of the fallout — early in the morning, there would be hundreds of them standing in front of our building. They were a pestilence, an infestation. Sometimes we could call the police, who would come rolling leisurely down the street in their black-and-white cruisers, wheeling their way through the zoo, the human zoo into which these people had converted our quiet, tree-lined block of South Ellis Avenue. The cops would turn on the blue and red bar of light on top of their car and give them all a truncated whoop from the siren, and they would scatter in all directions, as cockroaches do when you flick the light on, only to congregate again mere minutes after the cops had left, huddling together all their bodies that housed all their pious Sunday-morning souls.

These people were led by a man whose name, as he told us through his megaphone, was “Reverend Jeb.” Reverend Jeb was not an “ordained” reverend of any church but his own. His full name was Milton Jebediah Hartley III. He was the proprietor of a nondenominational fundamentalist Christian church in Wichita, Kansas, who had driven himself and other protesters up to Chicago in a bus to camp out on our lawn and harass us. This Lydia and I surmised because we read the papers. He carried his body with the bloated parody of dignity that is common among “men of God,” and his typical uniform was a wool houndstooth suit worn with a blue bow tie and a blue-and-white-striped scarf that he would jauntily toss over his shoulder as he shouted his spittle-choked lunacies into the narrow end of his RadioShack megaphone. Reverend Jeb was a handsome older man, there’s no denying that. He had the leathery face and blocky features of an old-fashioned movie star, and a full head of brown hair shot through with gray, which he would swish back on his head with his fingers with the same theatricality as he would sling his blue-and-white-striped scarf over his shoulder. Nor is there any point in denying that Reverend Jeb was a man who — by dint of his style of dress and the booming braggadocio in his rich gravelly voice, carefully hedged into an accent that was part Southern preacher and part midcentury radio announcer — hearkened back with his every word and movement to a previous era — not necessarily a better one, mind you, but a previous one — when no man left his home without a hat on and not to be able to sing or tell a story right was seen as a sad, inhibiting trait.

Reverend Jeb was always there. Allow me to repeat for emphasis, lest that sentence look like a throwaway on the page: he was always there . Reverend Jeb was always, always, always there when we left our home — in which, during this brief, unhappy period of our lives, Lydia and I tended to barricade ourselves, unless some inescapable errand dragged us into the outside world. There he was, with his bow tie, his houndstooth suit, his blue-and-white-striped scarf and his RadioShack megaphone, timeless, undrainable of the venomous energy that surged in his jaws. Reverend Jeb apparently woke before us and went to sleep after us, if indeed he slept at all. His favorite words were (listed in, I believe, their approximate descending order of frequency in his speech; put these words in capital letters, Gwen, from the megaphone): “HELL,” “GOD,” “CHRIST,” “DAMNATION,” “EVIL,” “BEAST,” “MAN,” “WOMAN,” “SIN,” “SATAN,” “DEVIL,” “ABOMINATION,” “HEAVEN,” “WHORE,” “BABYLON,” “HARLOT,” “IMPURITY,” “UNCLEANLINESS,” “MONSTER.” Somewhere in my inner ear I can still hear the squawk and crunch of his RadioShack megaphone, and hear his vitriolic oratory thundering from our lawn in the morning, calling us sinners, calling Lydia the whore of Babylon, calling me an abomination before God and man, asserting that there lived in her belly the child of Satan.

“NEITHER SHALT THOU LIE WITH ANY BEAST TO DEFILE THYSELF THEREWITH!”—he screamed at us one morning, reading from a Bible held in the hand that did not hold the RadioShack megaphone—“NEITHER SHALL ANY WOMAN STAND BEFORE A BEAST TO LIE DOWN THERETO: IT IS CONFUSION! DEFILE NOT YE YOURSELVES IN ANY OF THESE THINGS! FOR IN ALL THESE THE NATIONS ARE DEFILED WHICH I CAST OUT BEFORE YOU! AND THE LAND IS DEFILED! THEREFORE I DO VISIT THE INIQUITY THEREOF UPON IT, AND THE LAND ITSELF VOMITETH OUT HER INHABITANTS!”

During downtimes there were just three or four others with him, bundled in their winter coats to make the important pilgrimage to our lawn to harass us, but at peak hours he was surrounded by hundreds of people. They chanted, they held lit candles in their hands and sang their stupid hymnals and liturgies and hosannas and “prayed” at us. Sometimes there were so many of them! Sometimes these glassy-eyed slack-faced adults brought along their adorable glassy-eyed and slack-faced children, who stood right beside their parents with little blond heads all abob with springy ringlets of flax-blond hair, picking their snot-drooling noses with grubby little fingers.

These people looked just like normal people. You would think they might bear some sort of clear distinguishing mark, maybe black spots upon their foreheads or something — but no — outwardly, there was nothing odd about them. If you passed any of these people on the street — out of their proper context — you would not have looked twice at them. But there was something, there was some gruesome contaminant in their brains that caused them to believe that the earth is six thousand years old, that cavemen rode dinosaurs to work, and that all the beauty of the natural world has been deliberately placed here by the devil like so many red herrings for scientists to find to test our faith in God. What in the world is wrong with a civilization in which we must take these people at all seriously? Why must we listen to their “opinions”? Why must we suffer them to jam their feet in the doors of our discourse? Why must we respectfully demur to their “faith”? Why allow their voices into our politics? Why must these intolerant people be tolerated? I refuse to tolerate them! I swear, Gwen, in my least “tolerant” moods I sometimes think that any truly just and wise society would regard religious faith not as some deep noble kind philosophical lofty spiritual bullshit, but merely as an official, DSM-certified mental illness ! Throw it right in there with schizophrenia! Why not?

Religion says this world is not good enough for us — that there is more, or that there should be. What is religion but the philosophical hatred of the world?

But why did these people hate us? Why were these people bivouacked on our lawn in order to harass us all day and all night? Because they, being good Christians, did not believe in evolution. They did not believe in evolution because the Judeo-Christian tradition is the ultimate anthropo-chauvinist doctrine, which asserts that man has dominion over the earth — that God has told him to be fruitful and multiply, to fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth — that he stands over and against nature, the chosen son of all creation, given by God his mind, his consciousness, all his human “dignity.” And they hated us because of this: because there, swimming in a pouch of fluid in Lydia’s lower abdomen, was living, unassailable proof of human evolution.