The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore - Benjamin Hale [132]
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