The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore - Benjamin Hale [224]
to a child, everything is alive. The people forget the bedraggled figures who struggled half-drowned onto the beach the night before. Some people simply choose to wander around the island as curiously and aimlessly as if they themselves have just been shipwrecked. Their clothes—the nice coats and dresses and shirts and ties and scarves that they had worn to the performance, to the theatre, only last 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