The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore - Benjamin Hale [46]
The one small subversive thing I would do when she was out—when I sat there watching TV alone—was to crack open the TV’s remote control to get at its nine-volt battery, which I would gingerly touch to the surface of my tongue to feel a mild but thrilling little fuzzy electric shock. I also loved the coppery aftertaste. I would touch the battery to my tongue again and again.
My favorite program was Sesame Street, which was fine with Lydia because it was covertly educational. And indeed I learned many fundamentals from Sesame Street: how to count to ten, the colors of the alphabet, why not to eat cookies in bed. I particularly adored the segments dealing with Bert and Ernie. I was always rooting for Ernie, the freewheeling embodiment of the id, whom Bert, his stern superego, is forever trying to repress with his uptight inhibitions. Ernie, so naïve, squat, and orange; and Bert, with his yellow napiform head and scraggly black unibrow so quick to V in anger… But Bert is also wise in his own weltschmerzy way, and the two of them usually wind up learning something from each other. Every episode left Ernie a little less innocent and Bert a little more, making me wonder if someday their personalities might meet in the middle, when both achieve a self-actualized balance of wisdom and joy. Through Bert’s admonitions Ernie would come to understand something important, usually relating to his own hygiene or personal safety, and Ernie would sometimes broaden Bert’s mind a little with his energetic love of life, like in the episode in which they go fishing, and Ernie teaches Bert his shamanistic trick of invoking the fishes to simply leap out of the water and into their boat by vocal commands alone, by the awesome thaumaturgy of mere language.
I watched Sesame Street ritualistically every morning before Lydia took me to the lab. It began my day, providing a transition period from my dream state to my wakeful consciousness. If I got up before Lydia did I would report first to the television, to check in on the Muppet-populated universe of Sesame Street. In Sesame Street, as in much children’s entertainment, it is seen as perfectly natural that human beings should freely verbally communicate with nonhuman creatures.
Often, if I happened to rise early enough, I caught a show that preceded Sesame Street on weekdays, called Francis the Gnome. This was an animated series about a gnome named Francis who lived with his matronly gnome wife in a rustic home fashioned from the hollow of a tree in what appeared to be a temperate pine forest somewhere in North America. Francis wore a pointed green hat and a long white beard with a Tolstoyan fork. Francis served as doctor to the animals of the forest. He did good deeds for woodland animals in trouble: releasing them from hunters’ traps, nursing them back to health when they took sick. Francis was at home in nature. He too communed with the animals.
So I would watch cartoons on TV early in the morning before Lydia got up, licking a nine-volt battery over and over and over.
Lydia also provided me with lots of puffy colorful plastic cases containing videotapes of animated films for me to watch. I appreciated all the Disney films, like Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, Cinderella, The Sword in the Stone and Robin Hood—but obviously, as it touched on certain core thematic elements of my life, my favorite by far was Pinocchio. The literary characters with whom I most strongly identify are Caliban, Woyzeck, Milton’s Satan, and Pinocchio. Pinocchio is perhaps the most important of these. Even at the time I may have associated Lydia with the beautiful blue fairy who floats in through Geppetto’s window to bestow consciousness upon the puppet with a touch of her magic wand.
Before I get too far ahead of myself, I should tell you an anecdote that begins with strange screams that I heard in my dreams at night. I don’t remember how soon it was after I began living with Lydia that I started having these dreams. They usually happened right before I woke up in the morning. I would be lying