Benjamin Hale - The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore

And now I arrive at my point: if ancient Athens were late-twentieth-century New York City, Diogenes the Cynic would be Leon Smoler. Leon the Cynic. Leon lived a perennially criminal existence, yet always managed to evade punishment without really trying. Leon cared so little for the laws of mankind that he saw our civilization as a sort of cosmic joke. His were never crimes of passion, or ignorance, or opportunism, or of any particularly malicious intent. There was certainly nothing at all political in his habitual criminality, either. He did not believe that the victims of his crimes in any way deserved them, and he did not imagine any sort of irreparably corrupt system that deserved to be gamed. Leon’s were crimes of cheerful and utter indifference. If Leon Smoler had not been blessed with an essentially peaceful demeanor (or not cursed with his unwieldy physique), he may in another life have been a dangerous man, for this indifference of his unquestionably bordered on the sociopathic. When he wanted something, he took it, and the way the world seemed incapable of meting out any consequences to him was nothing short of magic.

The mention of magic is apropos, for Leon was a magician as well, in a nonmetaphorical sense. When he wasn’t performing Shakespeare in the subway, he scraped together a supplementary income performing magic shows for children’s birthday parties, for office Christmas parties, etc. On such occasions, Leon dazzled his gaping, clapping, awestruck, ooh ing and aah ing audiences with his magic tricks, with his born performer’s showmanship, with his histrionic, always-in-motion and colossal body crammed (which seemed a magic trick in itself) into a plus-plus-size tuxedo — the decidedly old-fashioned kind, with the wing collar, black bow tie, vest, and cummerbund, the damp velvety burst of a red rose stuck in the buttonhole of his lapel, and a glittering blue lamé cape draped across his shoulders, decorated with moons and stars that Leon had industriously snipped with safety scissors out of white felt and glued on himself. I myself never learned the secrets of most of his better tricks, and thus they remained magic to me. He could do things with a deck of ordinary playing cards that bent the laws of physics. He could do things with a set of linking metal hoops that subverted the space-time continuum. He could do things with coins and wands and torches that defied gravity and electromagnetics. He could do things with silk scarves and hats and gloves and tea sets and tablecloths that momentarily unified the theory of relativity with quantum mechanics. He was also an accomplished juggler.

Later, I would submit myself to the role of assistant during Leon’s magic shows: I clad myself in a little red tuxedo and went hopping around in the audience, exaggerating for effect my already-unusual gait, with a hat in my hand turned upside down for tips at the end of the show, or holding or procuring things for Leon during the act, or seizing “volunteers” from the audience by the hand and dragging them onstage, or making weird and silly faces at the children, provoking sometimes laughter, sometimes tears. Leon furnished me with a kazoo of gleaming nickel, and taught me how to play it, and I practiced at it intensively, until I had essentially become a virtuoso at this surprisingly versatile and emotive instrument. After I had attained mastery over my kazoo, seldom did the instrument escape my lips during Leon’s magic shows. I was always zipping and blowing notes from it as I moved amid the audience, scurrying between bodies and legs, providing a running musical accompaniment to Leon Smoler’s magic tricks. I grew to love show business.

And we got by, Leon and I. I lived with him during the year I spent in New York, my year in show business. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

On the night I met him, the night I discovered him (and he discovered me) performing Shakespeare on the subway, enlightening the souls of the passengers, force-feeding poetry like castor oil down their throats to help alleviate their spiritual illness, and after he unmasked me for a monster in their midst, Leon took me to dinner. He took me aboveground, to the surface of the city. Together we ascended from the subway’s musty inferno onto the purgatory of the street. To celebrate our new alliance we dined under someone else’s reservation at the Four Seasons. Leon waited till the hostess’s attention was distracted, picked up the reservations log on the podium, read it, and replaced it before she looked up at us. Just like that.

“Mr. Burton Miller,” he announced.

“Party of two?”

“Indeed. I apologize for our earliness.”

“Your reservation is for seven,” she said, snatching a glance at her watch with a scowl of irritation. “Your table is ready anyway. Right this way.”

“Yes, yes,” said Leon, as she led us through the restaurant to a small table in a quiet corner of the room. No one dining in the restaurant could help but stare in our direction as we passed their tables: Leon was still wearing his Henry VIII costume, and I myself was a bit underdressed. “It’s far too early for any civilized dinner,” Leon whispered to me. “Of course our table is ready. We shall probably have approximately forty-five minutes before the real Millers show up.”

We ordered a very nice bottle of wine, which moistened the braised rabbit and sturgeon steaks we put in our bellies. Over dinner, in varying degrees of detail or abstraction, I told Leon my story from the beginning up until the moment I currently relate. By the time I was finished, we were sipping aperitifs and awaiting our dessert.

“Bruno,” said Leon, when I had come to my unhappy conclusion, “you have led a brief and troubled life, and you have probably noticed by now that ours is a civilization in a state of rapid and hideous decline.” Leon’s eyebrows, it is important to relate, were always twisted into some real or affected expression of righteous indignation. His eyes were always bugging with horror and irritation, and he had an effeminate tic of gingerly sweeping the long, stringy hair from his face with the tips of his fingers, which he was doing at this moment with one hand as he used the other to tilt a wineglass to his mouth. “Every worthwhile art in our world is a dying one,” he went on. “You have had the cruel misfortune to join humanity at a time when most people no longer care about the question of what it means to be human. Thus is the state of the world into which you were unwittingly led, and for this I sincerely apologize to you on behalf of the human race.”

I accepted his apology, which endeared me to him deeply.

“You shall become my student,” Leon announced. “I can think of no more perfect mentor than Leon Smoler to someone in your unlikely situation. I shall give you asylum in my home, and you in turn must enter a period of intensive training in the dramatic arts, for I see clearly that you are destined to become an actor. And of course you shall enjoy it. The theatre is the least degrading calling left in our ruined society, if not the most culturally relevant. But for now, I see that the time has come for us to flee this place.”

I looked behind us across the restaurant, and saw that some sort of squabble had erupted at the hostess’s podium, for the time was upon us (in fact it was more than a quarter past us, because they were late), and it seemed that the real Mr. Burton Miller, party of two, had arrived, and everyone involved was miffed to learn that two imposters had been dining in his name for the last hour. With ceremonial closure Leon yanked out the napkin tucked into the neck of his doublet for a bib, threw it in a contrivance of disgust across the table and rose to leave. The hostess was now clacking toward us at an angry clip, with a face betraying much vexation with us.