The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore (64 page)

night—these clothes cling limply to their bodies, damp from the storm, already ripped and spattered with mud. Still, no one can find the people they had come in with. The people wander the beaches hand in hand with the perfect strangers that they had made love to in the bushes or under trees during the storm. Some of them are still curled up on cushions of matted grass, still naked and asleep. Some people walk along the perimeter of the island, carrying their shoes in their hands to feel the tide lap at their bare feet. People look into the sky, trying to determine a light source, trying to estimate by the position of the sun which directions are east, west, north, south—but failing, because the sun is too vaguely defined, the light too broadly diffuse across the red-green-gold sky to determine the directions of the compass. Some of the braver ones choose to explore the interior of the island: these ones almost immediately become hopelessly lost. These ones see—or they think that they see—the tip of a small mountain or hill in the distance, peeking above the treetops, and so they push through the jungle, shredding their clothes on thorny vines, smacking mosquitoes on their arms, trying to reach the higher ground, hoping to reach a point from which they can look out and see the full lay of the land. Those who decide to push their way inland into the forest will never reach the mountain, and those who decide to walk along the shoreline will never circumnavigate the island, will never connect their loop of footprints. This is because the geography of Prospero’s island expands with the consciousnesses of its explorers. The act of exploration itself causes the space to grow. The island is potentially infinite. For those who have chosen to stay behind, the play begins. Only it is so real that it hardly feels like a play. The people hover around Miranda and Prospero in the dark jungle. The light focuses on Miranda and Prospero, everyone else is standing in darkness. They have become invisible. They are only ears and eyes. They have no bodies; they take up no space. They are like mathematical
points, without volume, area, or any other dimensional analog. They are like spirits, observing invisibly. They have become what anthropologists only wish they could be. I am Caliban. When Prospero shouts—
What, ho! Slave! Caliban! Thou earth, thou! Speak!
—I come toward them, pushing past the people who are like elements of the forest to us actors, shoving them out of my way. The sticks and grasses snap beneath my plodding monster feet. I step into the light: hunched, grunting, limping under the weight of the bundle of sticks on my shoulders.
There’s wood enough within,
I growl.
Thou poisonous slave, got by the devil himself upon thy wicked dam, come forth!
When I step into the light, the people gasp. In horror? In disgust? Some of them look away. Others stare at me in perverse fixation.
As wicked dew as ever my mother brushed with raven’s feather from unwholesome fen drop on you both! A southwest blow on ye and blister you all over!
I am filth. I am a monster. I am a thing of darkness. I am naked except for a tattered loincloth clinging to my crotch. I am bent in half beneath my load of sticks. My flesh is covered with mud. I am half-human. Yet with soul enough to speak. I am a thing of lust and rage. I hate them. I hate Prospero. I hate them both. They have taken my birthright from me and put me to work.
This island’s mine by Sycorax my mother, which thou takest from me.
I hate all humanity. Nothing but fear and rage and hate comes out of my mouth when I speak, except for sometimes when I speak the most beautiful poetry in the play. I throw down the bundle of sticks.
When thou cam’st first, thou strok’st me and made much of me, wouldst give me water with berries in it, and teach me how to name the bigger light, and how the less, that burn by day and night…. You taught me language, and my profit on it is, I know how to curse.
And so it goes. Ariel flies above our heads, fades in and out of visibility. Ferdinand grunts under labor, Miranda loves him. Antonio plots, Gonzalo philosophizes, I get drunk with Trinculo and Stephano, I try to make them kill Prospero and steal his books.
Spirits flutter in and out of our heads and make us say things we do not want to say. The audience disappears into the play. It is not really a play. The play is not something the audience is watching so much as something they are experiencing. The play is not confined to a stage or even a linear series of scenes following scenes and acts following acts, but rather, everything happens all at once. We disobey all rules of time and space. Everyone leaves his or her body and becomes raw floating consciousness. The play exists all at one time in the same way a book exists all at once. The object and the narrative cannot be disentangled. The play existed in a collective space of thought and feeling and dream and the world became a fog of impressions that night, of timeless immediacy, of magic and sex and fear and laughter coming together into a many-headed dream, a many-minded dream, like a dream being dreamed by the Hydra, and we had all changed our minds and had the minds of animals.

P
rospero broke his staff and freed his magic. At first no one saw any distinct difference in their surroundings. But the magic was receding. It was bleeding away, like the blood from a cut throat. The people now looked around them and saw that the trees were made of plastic. The fronds of the palm trees were made of green construction paper cut into the shapes of leaves. The birds sitting in the branches? Fake parrots, clearly purchased from a novelty shop, intended as accessories to pirate costumes, with marble eyes and fabric feathers, wired to their perches in the fake trees by their thin plastic talons. The snakes and frogs on the ground? Limp rubber toys. The ground was not ground either; it was a hard flat floor with a little dirt and sand scattered on it. The starry firmament above was represented by several strings of Christmas lights tacked to the ceiling. The skies were colorful lights projected against the whitewashed brick walls of an abandoned subway station. It was a large room, but far from infinite. The stage scenery was no more impressive than backdrops for a grade school play. It was silly—hokey to the point of kitsch in its cheap fakeness.

The members of the audience glanced around themselves and at each other’s faces in mild embarrassment. They cleared their throats,
they shuffled their feet, they coughed and mumbled. When the play was over, the audience applauded politely, if too briefly, and then began to shuffle en masse toward the one point of egress, the elevator door. They did not even wait for all of the actors to finish bowing before they stopped clapping. They found the friends and loved ones in whose company they had come to the performance. The barefoot ones were the most embarrassed-looking; they irritably wiped the particles of sand clinging to their sticky feet and put on their socks and shoes. People shrugged themselves into their coats and jackets, casually noticing that their garments, being as they were drenched in the sea, held notwithstanding their freshness and glosses, seeming rather new-dyed than stained with saltwater. They checked their watches and snapped open their glowing cell phones (to check the time, not to make any calls, because we were too far underground to get any reception). They had been in this room for about three hours. All of them without exception needed to pee. We had no facilities available downstairs (though from the smell of things after the performance I suspect that didn’t stop some people); they crossed their legs and shook their feet in discomfort. The crowd bottlenecked at the elevator door. The elevator could only take people to the surface in groups of five or six at a time, so there was a long wait to get out. As there was no stage, there was no backstage, so Leon, Emily, and I and all the other actors had nothing to do but putz around awkwardly at the periphery of the crowd. We talked amongst ourselves, reassuring one another that the performance had essentially been a success. A theatre critic for the
New York Times
had been spotted in the audience. He was talking about the performance to someone standing next to him in the crowd waiting to leave. He was overheard to have grumbled the words “overblown” and “gimmicky.”

The magic was gone. The audience slowly filtered out of the room through the elevator.

There were supposed to have been five performances of
The Tempest
. However, apparently some “concerned” citizen who had attended the first night’s performance had alerted certain authorities, and before we could stage the second scheduled performance, while in rehearsal, we were paid a relatively brief and extremely unpleasant visit by two particularly vile men: a short old skinny one with a droopy mustache and glasses, and a big young one whose clean-shaven pink wad of a chinless head ballooned ridiculously from the confines of his shirt collar; the short old one wore a glossy zip-up jacket, a cap, and an official uniform of some sort, and the big young one wore a suit and a tie that had pictures of Looney Tunes characters on it. These two vile personages were, respectively, a public safety inspector and a fire code inspector—I misremember who was which. They did not even take more than fifteen minutes or so to tour the performance space before declaring that we would have to immediately and indefinitely cancel all future performances in this space, for, as they put it—as they had written in a judicious scribble upon some sheet of paperwork, and then tore from a clipboard a translucent yellow carbon-copied slip of whatever bureaucratic trash it was and handed it to us—“totally appalling”—I quote from memory—“totally appalling violations of fire code and building safety code.” These two were not done with us, though—they didn’t seem to be going away. These pathetic sots seemed to have more to say. They had things to say concerning law, and order, and money, and other cold things. They spoke of the elevator, I remember. Apparently the elevator had most recently been inspected in 1910, and the suit from the public safety department seemed shocked that it still worked. These two men kept trying to refer to the piece of paper they had given us, which Leon, dressed in his Prospero costume—his glittery blue lamé cape decorated with glued-on moons and stars of fuzzy white felt, and a matching pointy hat—was flapping in his fist like a battle flag as he railed at
them, shouting every curse that is vituperative under heaven until his face was as purple as a plum. In the end, somehow we succeeding in getting them to leave. But we knew we were finished. They were shutting us down.

There were all kinds of other pungent turds of officialese gobbledygook buried in that litter box of a document—fines for violations of this-and-that, ADA compliance violations, lack of elevator operation permit, blah, blah, etc. and etc.—not, in short, the sort of corrosively base considerations to which free-thinking dreamers and artists such as Leon or I were wont to intellectually stoop. If we had paid any attention to this scrap of yellow garbage, if we had deigned to take it the slightest bit seriously, then I’m sure we would have discovered the Shakespeare Underground to be hopelessly bankrupt, and we ourselves to be financially ruined in a deeper way than the most dismal destitution. However, we elected on the one hand to begrudgingly comply with their crushing request to cancel the four remaining scheduled performances of
The Tempest
, and on the other to rip that piece of yellow paper first into quadrants, then octants, and finally hexadectants, which were flung from Leon’s fist and fluttered like yellow snowflakes into a gutter as we exited the theatre that afternoon. As for the first decision, it was a practical one anyway, for it seemed that in parting those two men had even turned Leon’s own beloved great-uncle against us; as we were leaving Mr. Locksmith shook his thin old delicate fist, mentioning in a loud hoarse voice something about even further financial reparations, lawsuits, legal action, criminal charges he threatened to press, for apparently these two vile men had informed him that he too was in a state of dire liability for allowing us to use the illegal space that he happened to have access to, which should never, they said, have been done. And I’m afraid to report that our business relationship with Leon’s beloved great-uncle came to a disappointing close right then and there, with bad blood expressed on
the behalf of both parties, and Leon and I had to deem it wise to thenceforth avoid returning to those premises, which was, to say the least, inconvenient, as we still had quite a lot of stage equipment and whatnot in that room beneath his shop.

There were still other irritating matters to be dealt with. Little Emily’s mother, Mrs. Goyette, had come to the performance, and had felt particularly disappointed, possibly even betrayed. When the rest of the planned performances had to be abruptly canceled, she demanded her backing money back, threatened further legal action, and so on. Of course it would have been impossible to return any of her money, as we had spent it all, and then some. For a few days Leon and I hid out at home and spent a lot of time drunk. We played a lot of backgammon, too.