The Dumb House

by John Burnside

  As a matter of conscience, however, I asked her what she wanted me to do. I told her to nod if she wanted me to take her to the hospital, and shake her head if she wanted to stay with me. I explained that, if she went to the hospital, I couldn’t stay with her anymore, but that someone else would look after her and the twins. She shook her head.

  For the next couple of days, I convinced myself that she could pull through. She was in terrible pain – that was obvious – but she seemed to have the will to fight. I had found some antibiotics amongst Mother’s medicines, and I administered these till they ran out. I don’t know how much good they did. After a while, she began to sink, and I realised she wasn’t going to make it. All that remained was to make her as comfortable as possible, and prepare her for what was to come.

  I have always admired the literature of the Tibetan Buddhists. They alone have understood the power of language in manipulating, not only this world, but the world beyond this, the world between one world and another, the bardo, the otherwise silent reaches of limbo. What could be more appropriate, I thought, than to use the Tibetan Book of the Dead to ease Lillian’s passing from this life to the next. It was, in a sense, the ultimate power of the word: the story was there to guide the soul through death, to sustain its awareness of itself, as it was dislodged from one state and hurled forward into another. So it was that, on the last night of her life, I sat down by Lillian’s bed and began to read. I had read her stories before; I had read her poems and fairy tales only recently, during her illness, but this was different. I began at the beginning and continued reading far into the night. When the pain was too great, I dabbed her face with a damp cloth and let her sip a little water, but I did not allow the course of the reading to be interrupted. I am certain that it helped her. I don’t know how much she understood, but there are different levels, different ways of understanding. Of course, she suffered a great deal: that was inevitable. When she died, just before dawn, she had lapsed into a semi-conscious state; by then, I think she was less aware of what was going on.

  It is a mistake to mourn the dead. I know that now. It makes no sense. We keep ourselves occupied, forgetting our own mortality, as if we possessed a unique form of presence, a unique reality, but what we also forget is the reality of the dead. It’s as if the living were more real for being present – yet there’s no logic in that position, it admits too much of transience. When Mother died, it didn’t make her any less real. On the contrary, it fixed her forever in a single moment, a perfect attitude. When Lillian died, she seemed as real to me as she had been, living. The words I was speaking brought her into focus during those last several hours: I think she knew what I was doing, even if she didn’t understand at an intellectual level, and I think she was glad. I know she smiled when I came to the part where the body of the departed becomes a rainbow, then finds itself in paradise, amongst the angels. I think she was ready to die, then. One part of her knew what was happening, and accepted its fate. For my part, I was able to let her go easily, without regret.

  What is the scientist? This is the most important question. I am not talking about the people who play at the edge of science, whose loyalties are to other powers, to home and family, to self, to business. They are the ones who talk about ethics, but they do not possess the true scientific ethic, which is total commitment. The scientist is the one for whom everything is a hypothesis, the one who is wholly dedicated to the experiment. There can be no exceptions. Although I can say, quite truthfully, that I had become fond of Lillian, although I missed her in the weeks after her death, I never once allowed myself to compromise the experiment for her sake. I could easily have taken her to a hospital and handed over the responsibility for her life to someone else. Instead, I did all I could to save her and, when that failed, I let her go. To have done otherwise would have meant betraying the experiment and, probably, betraying her. I do not believe, even now, that she would have wanted me to allow that to happen. The night after she died, I laid her out in one of the dresses I had bought her, on our first shopping trip. She looked utterly at peace. I carried her out to the grave I had prepared for her, in the new iris bed, and I laid her thin body in the cold earth. Before I covered her up, I kissed her, once, on the mouth. She had become a part of something larger than herself, larger than either of us, and I was sad, for a moment, that I had never been able to tell her that. It seemed a shame, that she would never know what part the twins might possibly play in the development of ideas. It seemed a shame, that she couldn’t have had one glimpse into the future, and become aware of the possibilities it presented.

  part three

  the twins

  I knew from the first that it was an error to think of the twins as my children, whatever the biological reality. It’s only a flaw in the language that confuses kinship with possession, and in this case the kinship was accidental. I had no real connection with these creatures who lay in the basement room, crying and fouling themselves, clinging to a life that I could easily have ended with a basin of water or a length of twine. For a few days after she died, Lillian was a palpable absence in the house, a stain that lingered over the makeshift cot before it faded away, almost imperceptibly. After that she was gone. It was simple, uncomplicated. Nevertheless, I was aware that the twins had been responsible, not only for her death, but also for the pain she had suffered, and for that reason alone, I was free of any instinctive sense of kinship, any desire to protect or nurture them that I might otherwise have possessed. I had read about such things – how, even in the most unexpected circumstances, a kind of paternal instinct would be aroused by the sight of one’s offspring, but from the start, the twins were, quite rightly, nothing more to me than laboratory animals. I had become fond of Lillian, in my way. I had enjoyed having her around the house; I had enjoyed waking in the dark and finding her thin body beside me, warm and lithe, like an animal, and in factual terms, they were her children. Nevertheless, I had no difficulty in proceeding with the experiment. The only difficulty was in keeping them alive and well for the first few weeks, so they might be of use later. I had to spend a fair amount of time and money fitting out the basement room as their permanent home and, at the same time, a suitable laboratory for my observations. To avoid the risk of discovery, I was obliged to do all the work myself. I built them a pen in the basement, so they could be contained easily later. I placed an observation grille in the door, I set up tape machines and video recorders in the room itself, so I could keep them under observation at all times. I knew I would have to ensure they were fed and cleaned, but otherwise I wanted to stay out of the basement as much as I could. It was an essential part of the experiment that they remain isolated. With the recording equipment, I could observe them without intruding into their awareness, just as wildlife photographers observe young chimpanzees at play. The essential point was to create a suitable environment, so they would be deprived of nothing essential to their development. I wanted them healthy, to ensure that my conclusions would not be clouded by any other factors. It was hardly surprising, for instance, that Genie had initially failed to develop intellectually, given the filth and squalor in which she lived. By contrast, the twins would have everything they needed. Everything except language. To avoid any residual possibility of attachment, or of accidentally speaking in their presence, I decided to give them labels rather than names: A for the male, and B for the female. That way, I would always be aware that they were, in essence, laboratory animals, not humans, and certainly not my children.

  The following months passed slowly. I recorded every observation, every sign of development, each gesture, each scream, in my log book. The twins passed quickly through all the stages of infancy that I had read about. In text book terms, they developed normally: eyes, teeth and, as far as I could tell, hearing. Soon they were able to move about on the floor, playing with their toys, displaying surprise and wonderment, fear and pleasure, a need for contact. They were obviously aware of one another from an early stage. They vocalised fre
ely, as babies do. At fixed times each day, I provided them with music – Mozart and Bach, but no vocal or choral works – in order to aid the development of their intelligence. For purely scientific reasons, the records I kept at this time are very detailed, but I wasn’t particularly interested in the early stages: I fed them, changed them, kept them clean and waited for that critical moment when, if they were going to speak, they would begin. I wore a surgical mask when I was obliged to handle them: first, to avoid passing on bacteria, and so infecting them with disease, which was a greater risk than it would have been otherwise, given their abnormal situation; second, to avoid their seeing me as anything other than a keeper. I didn’t want them to see me as a parent, or even as another of their kind. I had read books where all manner of creatures, ducks or geese, for example, would latch on to any available parent figure, even when that figure was of a different species. It was important that the twins did not see me in that light – and it appeared that the mask worked. Generally, while they were aware of me, they did not seem to regard my existence as anything more significant than the light in the room, or the music from the stereo system I had set up on high shelves on one wall of the basement. When I was forced to handle them – and I did so as infrequently as I could – they usually cried; most of the time, however, they were too wrapped up in one another to notice me. Their sense of attachment was extreme. Mistakenly, I believed that this was a good sign; perhaps I was thinking fondly of Poto and Cabenga. There had never been a control experiment in that case, after all. If the private language they had created was based on the snatches of German and English they had heard, that was only because they’d had such material to hand. What if there had been no such material? I wondered if I was about to find out.

  The singing began late one evening, just after feeding time, when I had dimmed the lights and left the room, so they could rest. At night I normally left the tape machine running, with one cassette in the deck, so I could monitor them until they fell asleep. Thus, if anything out of the ordinary happened, I would be aware of it, even when I was away from my listening post. Until that night, the tape had revealed nothing out of the ordinary: usually no more than a random cry, or a series of gurgles through the quiet hiss of the machine. Often there was nothing – no sound, no movement. As far as I could tell without a control, the twins were quiet for their age, though not abnormally so. They had vocalised in the usual way – or at least, in the way I would have expected. I had no reason to suspect they were holding anything back, and I had no cause for imagining they were deficient as subjects in any way. Yet until that night I felt there was something, if not wrong, then not quite right, something almost eerie about them, and I wondered what they were thinking and feeling, when they lay together, not yet asleep, but utterly silent, utterly motionless. It was absurd, of course, but from the start, I suspected them vaguely of a conspiracy of some kind.

  The events of that night changed everything. From my records, I see that they were exactly eleven months old at this time, which, in retrospect, seems extraordinary. I had expected language, if it happened at all, to come somewhat later; more slowly, in fact, than language development in a normal environment. Yet that night, and on the five or six nights following, they moved from almost total silence to a near-constant singing. It came out of nowhere, with no provocation, no stimulus, that I was aware of. One day they were mute infants, the next they had something extraordinary, which pleased and excited them from the very first.

  It must have begun quite soon after I left the room. For some minutes they were still then, slowly, almost tentatively at first, they began to vocalise in a different way, taking turns to utter phrases in a soft, haunting singsong that seemed, on a first hearing, a form of improvisation, an exchange on which they were working together, in a hesitant exploration of the possibilities of sound. To begin with it was experimental, almost quizzical, but after a frighteningly short time the singing grew louder and more confident. At the same time, it was more complex, with the twins joining together then moving apart in a kind of counterpoint till, by the time the tape ended, they were already on the way to developing an elaborate, seemingly conversational music. I have to admit that, the next morning, when I reviewed the tape, I found this music utterly beautiful and, from the first, I was certain that something was concealed in those sounds, some logic or pattern quite alien to the sense I knew. I was convinced there was a structure that I could find, in the usual way, by a slow and devoted analysis.

  Now, when I look back on those early days, I wonder where things began to go wrong. One mistake I made – and this surprises me, even now – was to assume, at the deepest level of my thinking, that the principal use of language was to convey information. At the surface, of course, I understood the social functions of speech. I knew that most discourse was pretty well meaningless when subject to analysis. Most people, for much of the time, use language as a crude tool: as a means of defence, or a medium of self-affirmation, or a social lubricant. A great deal of talk is aimless. There are times when people speak only to reassure themselves that they exist, or to validate the existence of others. Without language, they might lapse into an uneasy solipsism, unsure of the point at which one thing ended and another began; stripped of their boundaries, they would begin confusing themselves with the world around them. They feel they must speak, and it doesn’t matter very much what the speaking is about.

  Of course, there is something a little despicable about this need for small talk. Its ugliness is offensive: the nonsensical exchanges one hears in restaurants, or in theatre queues – they are all so unnecessary, so aesthetically redundant. I remember once, as a change from driving everywhere, I made a long train journey northwards. It was a clear, bright summer’s day: for part of the journey the railway line ran along a stretch of coastline, and I sat in my window seat, gazing out at dark rocks and a wide, empty expanse of shore, at thin veils of water spread over bright wet sand, where a mass of wading birds were hunting for sandworms, stepping out carefully over the glistening silt beds, as if they had just arrived, of a sudden, in a new world: a world that, for them, was mysterious and enchanted, a world that, all things considered, must seem to any thinking mind a logical impossibility. A crude evolutionist would say this world came into being by chance, by a series of random accidents, but even a moment’s thought will confirm that the statistical probabilities of each of these tiny accidents of weather and genetics happening, not only one at a time, but also as part of a complex and delicate whole, are extremely remote. The very existence of anything seemed to me, on that journey, a breathtaking and terrifying miracle – yet the other people on the train treated the whole magical event as something banal, ignoring the light, the sky, and the glittering water, hanging over their seats to chat to their companions, playing word games, droning on about nothing, repeating to strangers the same dull stories they had always repeated, to anyone who would listen, expressing their opinions, mumbling received ideas and half-truths to one another as if they were passing on items of arcane wisdom, or the cryptic messages of an oracle. As they hurtled on through this shimmering landscape, surrounded by wonder – a wonder, moreover, that they had no reason to believe would persist from one moment to the next – nobody looked at the world. Nobody saw it. At one point, a bird – a great tit, I think – flew up alongside the train, dipping and rising, flying along in perfect parallel for two or three hundred yards before turning and flicking away into the bright air. Nobody noticed. Instead, they talked: on and on, they talked about nothing, unravelling the world in their tedious, ugly converse.

  This is the nature of social existence. We talk in order to impose limits, to contain the world in a narrow frame. Yet every textbook on language proceeds upon an assumption of communication, concerning itself with structure and grammar, with meaningful exchange, with the possibility of analysis. There is almost no mention of this simple making of noise – even though that is the reason for most speech. People talk in order to make a noise,
and so be. Manners demand that they say something meaningful, at some level, but they might as well grunt, or howl.

  So, knowing this, why did I assume the twins were conversing? Why did I ever imagine their song was anything more than their way of being in the world, a simple extension of the cries and gurgles they had made as infants? Why did I never seriously suspect that singing was their way of telling themselves and one another that they existed, or even more likely, was the sole strategy they had open to them of casting a veil over all they saw and heard, over every feeling, every flicker and ripple of the world around them, every unexpected change in their own bodies and minds? Why did I imagine they had minds at all, in the real sense of the term. Birds sing. Foxes bark. Dolphins send variable and complex messages across miles of ocean. That doesn’t mean they can think. It was an error to assume that the singing of these children was any more valid than a cock’s crow at dawn, or a seagull’s mocking laugh.

  Nevertheless, it was an assumption I did make, for no good reason. I believed the twins were more than animals – more, I believed they were real in a way that the other people I encountered were not. For some reason, I believed they experienced their world with a sensitivity I could only imagine, and it troubled me. In the end, I recorded an open verdict on the twins. Nothing was proven one way or the other by the experiment I carried out. Yet in my heart I knew by the end that they were talking to one another about a world I could not see, or hear, or touch, and the language they were using was so perfect, so fully attuned to their being, that it was beyond any analysis that I might attempt.