Benjamin Hale - The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore

And we spoke and spoke and spoke. And through our gibberish I gradually developed my sense for the shapes of human words, I accustomed my mouth to the making of consonants and distinct vowel-sounds, of the plosives and the approximants and the labiodentals and the taps and flaps and fricatives, of the nasals and the glottals and the sibilants and the sonorants — I learned them all in nonsense form first. Through the ecstasy of nonsense I learned the musicality and the rhythm of human speech. Gradually my communication skills developed at night with Haywood Finch. After the first five or six months (the basic monotony of this period of my life provokes me to accelerate time here) I had not only learned to say “Haywood,” with the consonants basically distinct and correct, but also to properly articulate the first consonant-sound of my own name, Bruno. At first it came out as “boo-no,” but after obsessive independent practice I learned how to slip that ticklish r in between the b and the beginning of the first vowel, and in fact I found this combination of consonants so much fun to say that by endless repetition I quickly mastered the pronunciation of my name.

However, for many months, I never spoke my name to the researchers who populated the lab by day. My ever-expanding vocabulary of articulate noises and words — well, two words, “Haywood” and “Bruno”—were exclusively for use at night, during my sessions with Haywood. During the day, I was silent. And why was this?

First of all, it had simply never occurred to me to attempt to speak to the daytime humans. My self was divided. One self I used to interact with the humans of the day, and the other self I used purely for my sessions of joyous noisemaking with Haywood, the human who came to me in the night. I communicated in different ways with these two sets of humans; I was code-switching. The day humans were always constantly barraging me with tasks and games and experiments and a thousand other avenues of stimulus. They showed me films and mirrors and played me music and watched me while I manipulated my toys. They showed me pictograms and designs on paper and on little plastic tiles, they showed me stuffed animals and all kinds of items and articles and artifacts, and they spoke to me, and spoke and spoke and spoke to me. They made gestures and asked me to copy them, and when I did so accurately I was given treats. In this way I developed a substantial lexicon of specific signs, and other signs that we improvised as we went, usually strongly iconic or indexical in their visual processes. I was also, much more important, learning to comprehend an enormous amount of spoken English, but I had not yet tried to speak any of it. For the moment I was only listening.

But my yammering nocturnes with Haywood were accomplished in a spirit divorced entirely from that of the daytime laboratory. For one thing, my interactions with the humans of the day always lasted for a long time, and contained a psychological element of work . They, the scientists, were “at work”: when these people kissed someone good-bye and walked out of their homes in the morning, this laboratory was where they were going to. This is not to suggest that the scientists did not enjoy their jobs — for the most part, they clearly relished their work — but still, toward the end of the day, one could tell that their minds were beginning to wander homeward, their souls were leaving the lab and entering into a realm of imminent anticipations, into the afternoon commute, into after-work beers, into the expectant arms of spouses or beaux or inamoratas, into that sweet period of the day interstitially nestled between work and sleep, the precious mortar that glues together these two dull bricks that every day stack up and up and up to form the big flat wall of most of your life. This contagious feeling of being “at work” inevitably infected me as well. Even though I only spent the livelong day playing the silly games that they regarded as experiments, I still felt a sense of obligation in what I did. It was their job to play with me and feed me treats, and it was my job — and damned if I didn’t do my job dutifully and well — to play and eat treats.

Whereas my nightly nonversations with Haywood Finch were totally extracurricular, something we did expressly for the pure and happy hell of it, and this somehow made them so much more exciting than the official university-funded experiments that filled my daylight hours. Also, the duration of the time I got with Haywood each night was so much shorter — one hour — you could have almost set your watch to it. Haywood was no poor player who struts and frets his hour upon the stage — no, like any great performer, he always left me crying for more.

However, I think the most important reason why, in those early months, I made more linguistic progress with Haywood Finch than I did with the scientists has something to do with the fact that I had quickly become fairly certain that the daytime humans did not know about what was going on at night between me and Haywood. Perhaps they had never given a fleeting thought as to what the night-shift janitor might have been up to when the doors were locked and the lights out and everyone had gone home. This put a streak of the seditious in my furtive nightly sessions with Haywood. I had a secret. I had a secret that I was not telling the scientists, and this gave me a feeling of power. Not much power, true, but after having spent my entire life completely under the observation of and ignorant of the language of and therefore under the power of human beings, what a deliciously conspiratorial feeling it was to hold in my mind a little bit of information that they did not, and to share this information with only one other being. Haywood was my confidant — together, like two conspirators plotting a coup in some smoky back room, we exercised the dark subversive power of a secret language.

My love for Lydia widened and deepened even and ever more. In the months that followed my arrival at the University of Chicago’s Behavioral Biology Laboratory, the campus, which had been as deserted as a ghost town in the languid summer heat, one day abruptly exploded with bustling human activity. All summer long it had been silence, silence, then suddenly the hallways of my building were teeming during the day with energetic young humans. Their footsteps stampeded in the halls at regular intervals; their presence was a collective roar, their squeaking and scuffling shoes, their conversations, their laughter. Now whenever Lydia took me outside to roam the campus greenery and admire the foliage, the autumnally decadent weather was just beginning to singe the leaves with edges of yellow, and I saw these hale young humans everywhere: I saw them lolling in the grass, their shoes off with their socks wadded in the hollows of their shoes and the toes of their bare feet mingling with the blades of grass and their heels callused and stained yellow and green; I saw them lying on towels sunbathing; I saw their fingers noodling the strings of acoustic guitars; I saw them expertly throwing and catching bright discs — as well as balls of various sizes and colors — that glided gracefully through the air from one pair of hands to another; I saw them reading books, sipping beverages, smoking cigarettes; I saw some of them kissing or touching one another in amorous ways. So much life!

Some of them took great interest in me. When they saw Lydia and I strolling hand in hand across the campus, they would approach us and try to speak to me, and want to touch me. Sometimes Lydia let them, if I seemed receptive.

Lydia even took me to one of her classes. That fall Lydia was teaching a section of Introduction to Cognitive Psychology. One afternoon she put on my collar and clipped my leash to it and carried me across the main quad from the lab on the third floor of the Erman Biology Center to the classroom where she taught in Wieboldt Hall. Lydia Littlemore held a Ph.D. in cognitive psychology and a master’s in anthropology — she worked alongside the behavioral biologists while teaching as an assistant adjunct professor in the psychology department. She had only recently received her Ph.D., her curriculum vitae was still thin, and she was many years away from the hope of tenure. The soft scientists considered her to be harder than they, while the hard scientists considered her too soft. She was always struggling to convince the soft ones that she had a flexible heart and the hard ones that she possessed a mind of sufficiently implacable skepticism.