The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore - Benjamin Hale [222]
orchestra is nowhere and everywhere at once. Unseen cellos murmur like a swarm of bees; the violins shiver against the thrumbling tattoo of the timpanis. The music is dark and quiet at first, halfway between audible sound and pure naked feeling. Some of the people feel strangely warmed by the music and others feel chilled. The music does not emanate from any discernible source or direction. It is everywhere, it permeates the jungle and the ocean and the stars and the darknesses between them. The music somehow comes from inside the leaves of the trees, from inside the snakes and frogs that slither and hop at the people’s feet, and from inside the blood moving inside their own brains. The isle is full of noises, sounds, and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not. A thousand twangling instruments hum about their ears. A soft crack-and-rumble of thunder in the distance. Now fast-moving black clouds smother over the stars, and the sky turns black. The people stand on the beach by the sea, or further inland, on the grass that is a green as deep as an emerald and feels fat with water under their bare feet, and they look up, and they watch the sky. Those stars and that moon, which only moments before they were amazed to see, are now obscured by thunderclouds speeding across the sky. The clouds are like paint poured into water. The clouds move fast but at the moment the wind is calm down here on the ground. The silence and stillness below the scope of heaven seems to portend some coming meteorological violence. The temperature drops. People hug their jackets to their bodies and brace themselves for the storm. The frayed leaves of the creaking palm trees are hardly moving at all. The palm fronds click together with an only barely kinetic languid floating in the tropical air. The snotgreen sea slops and laps as if it is asleep and its body is moving only in response to dreams. But up above, the silent sky is a snake pit, writhing with black and green muscles of vapor that coil around one another, strangle one another. The clouds look as though they are made of solid matter, not gas. The clouds race in over our heads. Their bellies sag with water. A flash of lightning asks a question of the clouds, three heartbeats of silence follow, and the thunder answers. What does the thunder say? Another blast of lightning spreads out its veins and disappears, quickly trailed by its dawdling wake of thunder. The moon lights up the clouds from above and behind them, making them glow palely in the spot where the moon is. Sometimes the clouds tear apart for long enough to show a flash of the moon’s whiteness. Now the sea beyond the beach begins to churn. The people standing on the beach look out across the water. They watch the water slap and splash with greater and greater violence. Rain whips down on us from the sky. It’s just a needly spray at first. The air is mist. Raindrops patter on leaves. The people are getting wet. Some of them take cover under the fronds of palm trees. Some of them hitch their jackets up over their heads. Some of them simply let themselves get wet. Women smear away running makeup with their fingers and push soaked hair back from their faces. The rain is warm. It’s a monsoon rain. The rain builds in intensity until there is a lull in its flow that everyone can feel, a quieting of its noise and a tangible drop in barometric pressure, the unmistakable moment right before drizzle becomes deluge, and it does, and now the rain comes thudding down on our heads hard and fast, pelting the beach’s sand with fat crater-leaving splats of water, weighing down flowers and the leaves of the trees, bending branches, drenching everyone to the skin. The people begin to peel off their wet clothes. An erotic charge in the air joins the electric. The people leave their clothes slopped in wet piles on the sand. The people shiver and shake, and lie down naked in the sand. Now the wind blows the rain sideways and pushes the limber-trunked palm trees flat against the earth. People cling to trees, to rocks, to each other. Who knows what sacred