Benjamin Hale - The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore

An important thing to convey about Haywood Finch is the tremendous amount of noise he made as he walked. For not only did he breathe in a strange way — a lot of irregular wheezing and huffing and snorting — but every step taken in those heavy rubber boots had a thunderous volume and authority to it: first the quarter-beat of the heel of the boot making contact with the floor, followed immediately by the clomp of the rest of his foot coming down, and then the deft squeak of the toe launching the foot on its journey into the next step. This combined with the jangling of the keys and the loop of chain whapping against his thigh to create a percussive racket that was jarringly discordant yet eerily hypnotic, like Balinese Gamelan music. The sound of his footsteps consisted of: one, the clomping boots; two, the whapping chain; and three, the tintinnabulation of the keys. The rhythm of his walk was further eccentricized by a severe limp, due to one of his legs being shorter than the other. So the rhythm of his footsteps sounded like this: kLOMPa-whap-SHLINK kLOMPa-whap-SHLINK kLOMPa-whap-SHLINK…. Haywood Finch — whose name I did not yet know — was employed by the University of Chicago as a janitor, hence this outrageous and musical costume he wore. It was his duty to sweep the floors, mop the floors, wipe the windows, scrub the toilets, scour the sinks, sanitize the urinals, remove the trash, and to perform any other undesirable chore one could think of. I was also later informed that Haywood Finch was considered “slow”—he suffered from a degree of mental retardation coupled with autism, and these and other yet stranger neurological ailments prevented him from excelling in the social world of daytime employment, although he performed his duties as a night-shift janitor at the Erman Biology Center at the University of Chicago with unfailing rigor and aptitude, in solitude, and in the middle of the night. He liked the solitude, he liked the dark, he was comforted by the endless repetition of his work. But I did not know any of this yet. At the time I knew only this: on the one hand, I was no longer alone in the room, but on the other hand, I was no longer alone in the room.

I did know that this was the most frightening human being I had ever seen in my short life — big, bowlegged, walleyed, and twitchy, I sensed there was something deeply not right about the way he looked and walked and breathed and moved his body through space, as he now did, from the door to the lab right up to my cage in the corner of the room. As my eyes were still adjusting to the now partially lit laboratory, this man gradually and musically dragged his weight across the expanse of floor that separated us— kLOMPa-whap-SHLINK kLOMPa-whap-SHLINK kLOMPa-whap-SHLINK . He looked in at me through the bars of my cage, his breath whistling in through his nose and roaring out through his mouth like a pair of fireplace bellows and his bidirectional eyes bugging and blinking and goggling and boggling at me. And I looked at him through the bars of my cage. He didn’t say anything, but the demon of rage that had entered me was still in me, and so I was the first to speak.

I said — or rather, I screamed:

“Oo-oo-oo-oo ah-ah-ah heeaagh heeaagh hyeeeaaaaaghhhh! ”

And then — what did he do, this mysterious lumpy man who stood now just outside my cage looking in, this stranger of the crazy eyes and the musical walk? He screamed back at me. He replied in answer:

“Oo-oo-oo-oo ah-ah-ah heeaagh heeaagh hyeeeaaaaaghhhh! ”

That shut me up.

He mimicked the inarticulate chimp noise that I had just made. He copied it, beat for beat, tone for tone, note for note, and at the exact same pitch and volume. I was taken aback. He had mimicked my scream so perfectly that anyone secretly listening in would have assumed either that I had made the noise twice or else there was another chimp in the room. When I had somewhat collected my wits I said:

“Uha huppa huh?”

“Uha huppa huh,” he said, though without the rising inflection.

“Eeegt eegt eegt,” I replied.

“Eeegt eegt eegt.”

“Oop oop oop eeyaugh .”

“ Eeyaugh, eeyaugh .”

“Oooooooooo oo-oo-oo eeyaugh.”

“Barga barga baraga barrra gagaga !”

“Abbah abbah abb?”

“Barga barga oo-oo-oo-oo oooooook.”

“Eep-eep-eep eeyaugh eeyaugh .”

“Glrrrrrrrrrrrrrr argawargawarga !”

“Aat aat aat ananananananananaaaaaaaat!”

“Birrrroing zuboing zuboing zuboing zuboy!”

“Eeetoo eeteetoo amammmmmmnnnnn oot oot oot.”

“Havar voo voy!”

“Rannanakka rannakka oit oit oit! ”

“BrrrrrrrrrrrriiiiiiinnnGAAAHHH!”

“Uffa uffa uffa eeeeeeeeeeagghhht .”

“ Yiik ikikikikikikikiki eeeeeite eeeeeite! ”

“Oo- woo oo- woo oooooo reagh reagh YEAAAAGGHHH!”

Then suddenly we were talking all at once! I don’t recall how the rest of the conversation went. We made such joyous noise!

This was perhaps the first completely reciprocal conversation I ever had with a human being. That first epic conversation with the great Haywood Finch, mildly retarded autistic night-shift janitor extraordinaire, was my truest introduction to human speech. We spoke in this manner for at least an hour, maybe more, before Haywood frantically glanced at his digital watch and realized that his routine had been upset and he must return immediately to work, and so after emptying all the garbage cans in the lab, off he loped, clomping and jangling away to mop the hallway floor.

But that first conversation! What a joy it was to make noise purely for the sake of noisemaking. And yet out of all that playful babble, all that nonsense, patterns of language had begun to develop. That night, man aped ape. He copied my animal phonemes to a T and spat them back at me intermingled with playful additions and variations of his own, which I in turn attempted to imitate. We babbled wildly at each other, and what insane fun! We made music: somewhere, a strain of sense, a chorus, harmonies, melodies, rhythms, and motifs emerged out of our howling squall of gobbledygook. We added visual components — we made silly faces at each other, invented meaningless hand gestures. I slapped my chest and slapped my palms on the floor of my cage, and he unclipped the hoop of keys from his belt and rattled it around in front of his face. Our signs and noises and gestures were not discrete or digital but strictly analog, fluid and organic, uncompartmentalized, improvisational, cooperative at times and at times mock-combative. From a raw clay of nonsense we were every moment molding signifiers that had no signifieds, empty signs, decorative and happily meaningless words. Did we communicate anything? No. But language for the sake of communication follows language that is noise for the sake of fun — that is, music —and — this I truly believe — all truly beautiful language is for the sake of both: communication and music.

And when this man — the strangest man I had ever known — when this man clomped and jangled away and clacked out the light and left the room, he did not behave in the way the other humans had behaved upon leaving. He did not politely wave or say good-bye; he simply and unceremoniously switched off the light and pulled the door shut without looking back. I was not exactly hurt by this curt and neglectful leavetaking of his. I had already gathered that this man did not think or operate in the same way as most other humans, and I sensed no malignancy in his departure. After he left I felt much better. Our nonsense conversation — or nonversation , if you will — had cured me of the rage demon that had previously entered me. Thus exorcized by our babbleoneous merrymaking, I gathered up the scraps and tatters and bits of fluff that I had in my panic made of my cage furnishings, and fell asleep, my heavy-lidded slumber comporting me away inside myself to other worlds, my simple brain steeped in a warm bath of primitive dreams.