Benjamin Hale - The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore

And I knew — by intuition — I knew that these dark demon-fingered giants were the products of men: the human race had designed and built these cryptic structures for purposes I could not yet fathom. And I thought about the life I had previously led as an ape. I reflected upon the crude little nests of sticks and leaves that we built for ourselves, and I reflected upon our petty conflicts and our wordless loves and our miserable lives of debasement and perpetual captivity which we in our poverty of mind and poverty of spirit could think of no way of remedying or escaping. And then I trained my gaze upon these great stone monsters in the distance. And I fell in love.

I forsook my animalhood right then and there at the top of that tree, because of this crazy, disastrous love I was in with humanity. Of course I was in love for all the vainest and greediest reasons. And it was this vanity and greed and lust that drove me to — following your example some several million years too late — come down out of the tree. I climbed down from that tree to spend the rest of my life running from the yawning darkness of animal terror toward the light of fire stolen from the gods, and like you, I remain in a state of constant pursuit, never quite escaping the darkness, nor ever reaching the light.

So I climbed down from the tree. Lydia was sitting below me at the picnic table. She had finished her lunch, and while watching me brachiate had economically and ecologically folded, double- and triple-folded her brown paper lunch sack into a thick square for future reuse. I grabbed on to her and she took me back inside to the lab. The experiments continued. Then the day was done. I was given a new fuzzy blanket and more dehydrated food pellets and carrots and a new squishy blue mat to pad the floor of my cage, although this one was sternly superglued to the floor in order to make it more difficult to destroy and scatter if another rage demon should enter me, which it did not. I still disliked being made to sleep in the cage after the scientists had gone home, but at least now I was reassured of a routine — that come morning, I knew the humans would return to fill my day with fun. Night fell again, and again the strange man returned to carry on a nonsense conversation with me for approximately one hour. I fell asleep, I twitched and dreamed and woke with the rising sun, the scientists returned with steaming cups of coffee, and the experiments resumed.

This pattern, needless to relate in exquisite detail, continued for many days and nights. The scientists were pleased with me. They said I was making rapid progress. And every night the lumpy man in the blue uniform would arrive and speak with me for one hour. The language between us was beginning to almost mean something. For instance, we had learned one another’s names, and we had developed an idiosyncratic system of signs and words for greeting and leavetaking. We were beginning to create a little pidgin dialect, a trade language, a lingua franca just for the two of us.

Haywood would point at himself and say, “ Ae , ou!” (phonetically: / ’eI:υ /). This part of my journey is difficult to relate in print because we are constrained somewhat by the tonal inelasticity of text — but essentially Haywood was intoning the two syllables of his first name, minus the consonants.

Then he pointed at me.

I mimicked his gesture, pointing at myself and saying “ Aeee … ooooough.”

Haywood made me understand that this was incorrect by scowling and whipping his head from side to side and making an ugly, guttural noise in the back of his throat, like this: “BEEEEEEEEEEEAAAANT!”

Again Haywood pointed at himself and said, “ Ae , ou!”

Then he pointed at me.

I pointed at myself and said: “Aeee — ooou.”

“BEEEEEEEEEEEAAAANT!” said Haywood, grimacing and lashing his head from side to side.

Then, pointing at himself: “ Ae , ou.”

Pointing at me now.

“Ae… ou?”

“BEEEEEEEEEEEAAAANT!”

This went on many, many times before I finally, perhaps even by accident, pointed at him and said, “ Ae , ou.”

He responded by grinning, nodding his head up and down while shrilly ululating—“ Lalalalalalalalalalalalalala! ”—and he accompanied his song of general positivity by picking up his hoop of many keys and shaking it for me, and the dancing keys jangled and jingled like so many pretty chimes. I clapped, I pant-hooted, I cheered in delight, because I loved the shimmering music they made.

This is something, by the way, that the scientists who worked in the laboratory never once thought of doing: to reward my progress not with tidbits of food, but with beautiful noise. For sometimes I simply was not hungry — so at these times the reward of a treat meant nothing to me outside of the psychological reward of their approval — but my appetite for beautiful noises was always insatiable.

We repeated this many times until I was able to understand that “ Ae , ou” was not something that one said when pointing at oneself, but something that one said when pointing at this man in particular. I also came to understand that when Haywood pointed at me, he was asking me to make the sound that meant me: my name. Of course I knew my name, in the sense that I knew to come (or choose not to come) when a human shouted at me, “Bruno!” But I had never dreamed of actually attempting to articulate these two syllables with the glottal machinery of my own chimp mouth, an instrument that had previously been good for little but the ingestion of my food and drink, the inhalation and exhalation of my breath, and the making of all my aimless screeching, growling, howling, panting, and hooting noises.

I pointed at myself and made my first attempt at conscious spoken language:

“Ooh, no.”

I almost slapped my hands over my mouth — maybe I even did slap my hands over my mouth in astonishment at the dangerous magical noise that had just come out of it! It was a word ! It was — it was my own name !

Of course my clumsy infant tongue could not curl itself around the complexity of the initial consonant sound of my name — the labial plosive B tumbling immediately into an R , demanding of the tongue a tricky little maneuver of mid-mouth acrobatics — but the two distinct vowel-tones of my name — a narrow-mouthed oooh followed by a wide-mouthed (n) ohhh (/ ’u: n υ /) — these I nailed on the first try, and even managed to partition them with a quick trip of the tongue to the top of the mouth to make a feeble and breathy but definitely distinctly audible N .

In response Haywood screamed in glee and shook his keys so obstreperously I feared they might explode.

For the rest of that evening we simply took turns pointing at each other and intoning each other’s names. There was no way that Haywood could have known that my actual name was “Bruno.” I’m sure he assumed that my name was “Uno,” which indeed is plausible enough nomenclature for a chimp. I’m not even sure Haywood gave much thought to such issues as the plausibilities of chimp nomenclature.

The next night, when Haywood returned, we began our nonversation with our game of pointing first to ourselves and then each to the other, and stating in turn our own name-sounds and then the name-sound of the other. What followed after was a typical session of ecstatic gibberish, but when the hour had passed and it was time for Haywood to go, we signed off in this way as well. This exchange of pointing and stating of name-sounds became the traditional way of beginning and ending our nonversations — which I had come to crave and rely upon like therapy sessions. I so enjoyed my nightly nonversations with Haywood that I no longer even bothered to display any sign of protest or dislike when the end of the work day came and it was time to sequester me again in my cage, because I knew this meant my session with Haywood was soon forthcoming. Once Haywood even pressed his hoop of many keys against the bars of my cage, and allowed me to play with them. This was an important moment, Gwen. Perhaps I imagined, or even believed, somewhere in my soul or burgeoning mind, that the seat of Haywood’s animal charisma lay in that hoop of many keys: it was his juju, his phylactery, these keys were like rosary beads, they somehow protected him from evil, or made him great, made him powerful, gave him the ability to speak with animals. I shook them and jingled them, and admired their shimmering music.