The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore (51 page)

Though I did not know it then, I was in the village of Hastings-on-Hudson, New York: a smallish town nestled on the side of a steep hill on the Hudson River, north of New York City. I walked a way through this upscale and quiet residential area until I came to a thicker and more heavily trafficked road, which I walked alongside, downhill, coming to a place where the buildings were closer together, where there were shops and restaurants flanking the streets and people moving here and there up and down the sidewalks. The people passing me on the street flicked their eyes down at me in mild surprise or curiosity as I waddled past them, and then politely, or disinterestedly, they looked away. I came to the top of a hill, which sloped steeply downward and ended in a wide river: across the river was a long wall of tall flat gray cliffs, and very far away but visible in the distance a massive blue bridge, built like a metal spiderweb, connected one bank of the wide black river to the next. I did not know it then, but the river was the Hudson, the cliffs across it were the Palisades, and the bridge in the distance was the George Washington. Seagulls reeled overhead. I saw railroad tracks running along the bank of the river. There was a train station where the town sloped downhill and came to an end at the water. I headed for the station.

I climbed the stairs to the station platform, my stubby legs by necessity taking each of the metal steps one at a time, and found myself standing on a long flat slab of concrete. It was a sheer accident that I decided that day to climb the stairs to the southbound train station platform, rather than the northbound platform on the other side of the tracks, which was accessible via a raised walkway. I hadn’t a clue as to what lay either to the north or the south of me. Who knows what my story would have become had I boarded a northbound train, which would have whisked me upstate, to
Albany or Buffalo, or even to the icy and moose-infested climes of Canada, or northeast to New Haven, or Providence, or Boston? I haven’t a clue what might have befallen me if I had chosen the northbound train, what I might have learned, who I might have become. All I know is that the fast-spinning wheels of the Fates had it otherwise, for when I saw the specks of headlights in the distance, and I heard the bellows of the whistle, two short and one long, and this enormous metal caterpillar came clattering to a stop, and the doors slid open, and I stepped onboard in my coat and low-pulled hat, expecting nothing more particular than to be taken someplace else, it so happened—it
just
so happened—that it was the southbound train I chose, and that, as the poet says, has made all the difference; for that rolling and bellowing metal caterpillar took me not to Albany, not to Canada, not to Connecticut or Boston, but to New York—to New York City, where I met a friend, and a little glory, and the beginning of my downfall.

I found an unoccupied booth upholstered with orange plastic pads, curled up against the wall beside the heating vents, and looked out the window west across the river at the granite cliffs. Thank God that money had been in the pocket of the coat I had liberated from the closet of little Emily’s parents’ house, or else I would have had nothing to buy my ticket with when the conductor clumped down the aisle between the seats. A voice came on a loudspeaker and chanted off a litany of destinations the train would reach:
Greystone, Glenwood, Yonkers, Ludlow, Riverdale, Spuyten Duyvil, Marble Hill, University Heights, Morris Heights, Harlem, Grand Central Station.
I handed a crinkled twenty-dollar bill to the conductor, and he handed me a ticket and change, perforated a paper card with a hole puncher and stuck it in a slot above my seat.

We rolled beneath the blue metal bridge I’d seen in the distance,
we bumped and shuddered past telephone poles and ragged brown brick buildings, until we were in a city, a huge and dense city of, I thought, potentially infinite complexity. The train filled up with more and more people after each stop, and with each stop the litany of destinations the voice on the loudspeaker chanted off shrank shorter by one place name. Three more passengers had to cram themselves in beside me in the orange booth. I kept my head down and pulled the brim of the hat lower, not wanting to expose my face to any undue scrutiny, but I felt their big bodies press warmly beside me. We were barreling headlong into New York City. After the penultimate stop—
Harlem, 125th Street
—we gathered speed, rolling high above the buildings and crowded streets alive with voices and honking cars, and soon after that we plunged into a profound and vacuous darkness, and in this darkness we remained until we slowly rolled to a stop—our final destination, apparently. The train’s electricity was cut, the long metal serpent sighed away to silence, and all the people crowded thickly around me—the train was crammed absolutely full by the time we descended into the darkness—erupted into sudden activity, everyone jostling each other, all knees and elbows, fists held to coughing mouths, rolled-up newspapers and magazines, coats buttoned, fat-stuffed luggage heaved from overhead racks, and they all lined up in the aisle to funnel out the doors. I joined the crush, and the flow of people pushed me through the door and onto another long concrete platform.

We were in a vast cavern, dimly lit by feebly buzzing lamps hanging high above us. In one direction the cavern stretched far away and out of sight into darkness, and in the other direction the concrete platform became a bright staircase. All the people who had just stepped off the train were swarming onto this staircase; I followed them. The weight and pressure of their stream of moving bodies pushed me along the platform, up the stairs, and into the light. At
the top of the stairs the crowd dispersed, each person going his or her own way to private destinations. I wandered around the floor like a chunk of flotsam on the surface of the sea, knowing neither where I was nor where I was going. I was in an underground network of ornately carven stone and golden-veined marble. Currents of human traffic rushed in many different directions, the waves of people meshing here and there into cross-streams, forming interference patterns of coming and going, some people bustling this way and others bustling that. They dragged suitcases on rollers behind them on the floor. They sat still or slumped over on benches. They sat at tables sipping coffee, reading magazines splayed flat before them. Shops, restaurants, cafés, bars, and news vendors operated out of nooks set in the walls. I found a set of wide marble stairs and climbed them. When I emerged at the top of these stairs, I was in a huge, glittering, beautiful room, what looked like the grand ballroom of a palace, where people wearing powdered wigs and whalebone corsets and masks ought to be waltzing to “
The Blue Danube
.” Instead, people in modern dress scrambled across the floor in frenetic hordes. In the center of the room a circular booth stood sentinel, glowing from within, with a huge round clock on top of it, like a temple to the concept of time, an altar to Chronos. Then I looked up: the huge, high, vaulted ceiling of this spectacular room was painted blue, and decorated with stars, the whole night sky spangling the robin-egg blue ceiling of the room, with golden outlines of animals drawn over the points of light, some of which were represented by real electric lights embedded like jewels in the ceiling! I must have stood there for half an hour at least, drop-jawed at the sight of this. It looked just like the planetarium that Lydia used to take me to so long ago, in Chicago. All those beautiful zoomorphs, the shaggy lion frozen by the suggestion of his stars in midpounce, the ethereal, sexy nymphs and goddesses and gods stretching their bows taut and aiming their arrows, creatures with wings and horns
and men whose torsos melted into the bodies of horses. I guessed that this huge and religious room was like a throbbing heart to this city, pulsing as it was with humanity, its valves taking people in through its arteries and pushing them out again through its veins, a big, bloody, pumping muscle of energy, of commute, of communication, of civilization, its ceiling painted with stars whose warm, audacious artifice dared to rival the more indifferent beauty of real nature. Indeed, I thought back on the sky at night over the Lawrences’ ranch in the wilderness of Colorado, with all its unfriendly and unhelpful and useless wonder, with its undercurrents of loneliness and fear, and wondered if this version wasn’t, in a way, an improvement.

I picked a direction and walked in it. I came to an escalator that lowered me into a chamber made of tile and concrete, which smelled of urine. At the bottom of the escalator turnstiles led into the catacomblike underground structure. I saw that it was an underground commuter train station, much like the stations they have in Chicago, except below the surface of the city. I squeezed myself beneath the turnstiles and waddled around in the big reeking concrete room awhile before descending some stairs, some more stairs, and hopping onboard the first train that whooshed, horn lowing and headlights glaring, into this dank and crowded oubliette of a train station, displacing the fetid air in the tunnel and blasting it in our faces like a hot wet wind. The train docked and hissed, the doors scrolled open, the boarding cluster of humanity stood aside to allow passage for the departing cluster of humanity, and I followed the people on.

Imagine: Here is Bruno. He is sitting on the subway. He is sitting on a seat on the train. Perhaps it is a southbound Lexington Avenue Local, which is grumbling like an enormous tapeworm through the intestines of the subway system. The train whimpers to a stop every once in a while and opens its valves to the inward
and outward effluvia of humanity, while Bruno, who regards them not, has been sitting patiently all day long inside this putrid contraption, half-twisted around and peering backward into the roaring blackness through the graffiti-engraved window. He has been sitting right where he is for hours, waiting for the train to take him someplace definitive, and growing increasingly apprehensive that he is not being taken anywhere. He is afraid that maybe the train is only traveling back and forth along a predestined route, and he is only seeing the same places over and over. In his mind, Bruno is busy pondering. What is he pondering? He is probably thinking thoughts deep and true and spiritual while he reflects on his unusual life. He is posing to himself questions like those that came to Gauguin when he saw all those well-upholstered Tahitian nymphs carrying woven baskets and in their uninhibited Asiatic innocence taking no notice of their freely bobbing breasts:
Who are we? Where did we come from? Where are we going?
And, like Tonto to the Lone Ranger, I answer:
What’s all this “we” stuff? I am Bruno, and I’m on my own journey. I am an animal with a human tongue, a human brain, and human desires, the most human among them to be more than what I am. And I have no idea where I’m going.

Then, while Bruno’s brain is submerged in these and other musings, the Beggar King enters. Who is the Beggar King? I will tell you. A man, who appears to be dressed as Henry VIII, has entered the train car from the far opposite end. There is a whoosh of rushing air as the door opens and thumps shut behind him, and this man announces his presence to everyone by throwing an arm in the air with a wild theatrical flourish, and he begins to shout: “To say that he is old, the more the pity, his white hairs do witness it—but that he is, saving your reverence, a whoremaster, that I utterly deny!”

Everyone on the train commences immediately to desperately ignore him, taking pains not to look him in the eye, as he could be dangerous. He is wearing a big floppy black hat like a sort of
formless tam-o’-shanter, pushed back on his head at what I can only accurately describe as a rakish angle, and the plume of a pheasant flutters from the side of it; he wears a glossy fur coat with colossal shoulder pads, a frilly white pirate shirt with droopy sleeves, an embroidered lace-up vest that I will be later informed is a “doublet,” a pair of poofy, diaperlike red silk pants, garters, tights, and buckled shoes. The most important thing to convey about this man is the sheer mass of him. To say that he is rotund would be to commit the sin of understatement. This man is a behemoth. He is a man of mythopoetic obesity. He is not only on the tall side—about six feet and an inch, I would estimate—but of such impressive diameter that he occupies about as much space as would three more modestly proportioned people lashed together in a bundle. The way he carries himself invites one to draw comparisons from among the lower orders: the walrus, the hippo, the manatee. The last of these is probably the most helpful for purposes of mental illustration because, due to the way his corpulent torso dwarfs his normal-size appendages, his arms do indeed appear to extrude helplessly out of his sides like a pair of ridiculous little flippers. And his legs? Any apprentice architect would be gravely lambasted by his superiors for designing a structure with such flimsy load-bearing mechanisms. The fact that those legs are apparently able to convey that body through space seems to defy the laws of physical nature, a defiance made tenfold impressive when you take into account the constant pitching and rolling of a subway car in motion. In one hand he carries a coffee can: a big tin cylinder that, according to the lettering on the side, used to contain the grinds of Maxwell House Colombian Roast. Hark!—he speaks.