The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore - Benjamin Hale [217]
He walked into the center of the room, winged out his arms, and spun around in the middle of the room like a giant child. He shouted out to hear his voice reverberate off the high moldy walls and vaulted ceilings, and the walls boomed so articulately with his many-times-multiplied voice that it sounded like four or five Leons were shouting in counterpoint: “FULL FATHOM FIVE THY FATHER LIES—OF HIS BONES ARE CORAL MADE. THOSE ARE PEARLS THAT WERE HIS EYES—NOTHING OF HIM THAT DOTH FADE—BUT DOTH SUFFER A SEA-CHANGE—INTO SOMETHING RICH AND STRANGE!”
There was long silence. Leon’s arms were still swung open wide, as if to embrace the universe. His great-uncle hacked nastily into a fist and ground his cigarette out on the floor.
The cat groaned and pawed my pants with its deformed feet.
XLIII
Leon’s elderly great-uncle conceded to rent us the space at a relatively modest price that I will not divulge. He responded shruggingly and with considerable confusion to our whole idea and the nature of our inquiry. I do not think Mr. Locksmith ever fully understood what we were doing. It is possible that his faculties of reason were somewhat impaired by his Methuselan age, which, as I have said, I would have estimated at somewhere around nine hundred and seven. Mr. Locksmith was a workaday man, not an artist. In any event, it was with a servile, acquiescent, sagely demeanor and the patience of a Buddha that he put up with all our rehearsals, all the stage equipment that we rented and hauled down to his basement in pieces via the elevator in the back of his shop. He put up marvelously with all the actors who began to show up for rehearsals every day at his inconspicuous little locksmith’s shop, and what a rowdy lot we were!
Our production took shape over the coming months. A lot of things happened during this time in my life, Gwen. It would only require a hundred reams of paper and a thousand gallons of ink to do them proper justice, but because you and I and (I presume) our readers are only mortal, and unlike Mr. Locksmith presumably suffer from life spans with irritating promises of finitude, I will oblige us all to fast-forward through them, because I have almost come to the one time when I murdered a man in a fit of rage and therefore had to be placed in captivity, events which although they are philosophically insignificant I’m sure will tickle the puerile interest of the hoi polloi.
I had very little to do with the business end of the production: stage design, accounts, direction, casting, promotion, advertising, ticket sales, and so on. Come to think of it, did Leon, either? It turned out Leon was not an incompetent director. The Shakespeare Underground went aboveground at this point. We had a director, we had the principal actors, we had a budget, we had a performance space. By the time we had put all this together, our modest avant-garde theatre troupe did not look so pathetic. Leon, do not be surprised to learn, was not a pariah to everyone in the New York theatre world. He had been in it, and he was even well liked, in a personal sense, by many. Or enough, anyway. Phone calls were made, contacts were milked, people hired, money raised, things organized. Our production company entered such a stage of complexity that at some point I washed my hands of all this stuff. I won’t delve much into these pragmatic details here, as I have never had a head for them, nor do I find them terribly interesting to relate. I trusted it all to Leon, and simply trained the focus of my energies solely on my perfecting my performance as Caliban.
Little Emily’s mother pulled her out of a month or more of school so that she could attend our rehearsals. A car service would drop her off at our performance space in the morning, and pick her up in the evening. I would sit on the windowsill of the locksmith shop, sipping my morning cup of coffee and stroking the freakish-footed shop cat, and watch her expertly step out of the sleek black Lincoln town car in her buckled ballet flats, the