And then a thing of terror happened. The only humans remaining in the room now were Norman Plumlee and Lydia. While Plumlee was busying himself with some end-of-day chores, Lydia picked me up from the surface of the squishy blue mat, where I had been idly spinning the colorful beads of the abacus, and carried me to another part of the room where, atop one of the long gray Formica tables, there stood: a cage. Yet another cage. Granted, this cage was much larger than the one in which I had been conveyed from the zoo to the laboratory, but it was a cage nonetheless. In it was a bowl filled with dry and unpalatable food pellets, and a voluminous bottle of water strapped to the bars on one side of the cage with a metal tube coming out of the bottom of it, from which I was expected to drink, like a fucking hamster. A fuzzy blanket and a squishy blue mat made of a material identical to the one on the floor covered the bottom of the cage. It was tall enough that I could easily stand up in it, and spacious enough that I could walk four or five paces from one end of it to another. I could see through all four sides of the cage, composed of thin steel bars. All told—yes, I had been in worse cages. But it was, goddammit, a cage.
Lydia placed me inside the cage and shut the door and locked it. My heart didn’t so much break as drop uncontrollably through a hollow shaft in my chest like an elevator with a snapped cable.
Dr. Plumlee joined her in looking in at me. Lydia made the same gesture of polite parting to me as the other humans had made to each other. Her wave was of the more feminine variety: with her fingers, not her hand.
“Good night, Bruno,” said Lydia, and she and the other turned to go.
They were leaving me. For emphasis, I repeat: they were leaving me.
Whether or not they were leaving me forever, I did not know. It was then that I began to realize I would never see my family again. I would never return to the zoo. Never again would I commune with other chimps, never again would I enjoy exercising my limbs on our jungle gym, never again would I have to endure my brother’s bullying or my father’s relentless emotional abuse, nor would I ever again sit in my mother’s lap, nor ever again play with Céleste.
I watched them leave together, Norman and Lydia: when they reached the door, Norm stretched out an arm and touched a row of things on the wall. I heard the noises clack clack clack, and each clack was followed by a section of the room going slowly, then quickly, dark. He clicked the last clack, eliminating the last source of buzzing fluorescent light. Lydia and Norm left the room, shutting the door behind them, ka-chunk. I heard the turning of a key in the lock. For a moment through the smoked-glass door I saw their silhouettes, their two blurry shadows facing one another, speaking. Then their voices vanished together, diminuendoing down the hallway into watery echoes punctuated by the contrapuntal rhythms of their four sneakers squeaking and scrunching on the floor, then an elevator door binging and bonging and scrolling open and then shut, and then silence—and then silence.
So there I was, Gwen—alone, in silence and in darkness and locked in a cage. That morning I had woken up, as usual, with my arms and legs intertangled with the warm arms and legs of my kindred, in the wet and rank interior of our habitat in the zoo, the only home I had ever known, and now night had fallen and I was locked inside a five-by-five-foot minimally furnished cold metal cage in a strange and sterile room, alone, in the dark. The only other time in my life up until this point when I had ever been left alone in a room was during that experiment with the peaches. But because I was not alone during that period of dramatic transition from zoo to not-zoo, I had not yet felt the rush of feelings that rushed into my head now. Among them: panic, terror, abandonment.
Why was I here? Why me? Had I been placed here in this cage to be slaughtered and subsequently devoured like my paternal grandparents were years ago, in darkest Africa? Perhaps, even worse, they were never coming back. I would be left to starve to death in here. All I knew was that I was confined in a space consisting of four walls and a ceiling and a floor, and I did not know why. These thoughts all came gushing into my undeveloped consciousness at once, and a demon of rage entered me.
I screamed. I wept and I screamed. I screamed and I wept. I rattled the bars of the cage. I upset my food bowl, scattering my dehydrated food pellets, sending them skittering in every direction. I threw myself around in the cage, hooting and howling and thrashing and wailing. I ripped up the squishy blue pad on the floor, and I ripped up the fuzzy blue blanket they had given me. With my fingers and toes and gnashing teeth I tore them utterly asunder, into scraps and tatters and fluff, and threw the scraps and tatters and fluff around the cage aimlessly. I yanked hard at the bars of the cage, tried to smash them with my feeble young chimp fists and feet, but the cold hard gleaming metal of the cage did not relent. I do not know for how long I raged. Hours, perhaps. But then—
The lights in the hallway outside the laboratory door came on, in the way fluorescent lights do, the full glow preceded by three false starts. The window in the door to the lab became a luminous panel of soft white light, and the numbers and letters on the door cast shadows of themselves in long ribbons of darkness across the room, over the long tables and the squishy blue mat where my toys lay. I heard a laborious plodding of footsteps in the hall. The volume of the footsteps gradually grew and the acoustic wavelengths of their echoes shortened until the footsteps stopped outside the lab door. An amorphous black shadow loomed outside the door. I heard heavy and irregular breathing. I heard a jingling of many keys, which went on for a long time before a key was selected and pushed into the lock in the handle of the door. The lock in the door turned and the bolt slid back and clicked and the door—noiselessly, except for the sound of the handle turning and the thin peeping of the hinges—opened. In the doorway’s white light stood a large being whose details remained obscured in shadow. The being’s hand groped the wall for the clacks and clicked one, clack, and one section of lights in the room came on, nzt-nzt-nzt-nzzzzzzzzzz, and illuminated the area above my toys, such that with two competing light sources, all objects in the room were given a pair of crisscrossing shadows.
This man—whose name I did not yet know was Haywood Finch—was medium in stature and roughly potato-shaped. He was not fat—girthy, yes, but more oddly shaped than fat; his figure was, like the potato, approximately ovular in contour, no matter whether viewed frontally, antipodally, or in profile, with a big chest that sloped gracefully outward and down into a sizeable belly. Big doughy arms sprouted lumpily from his shoulders, which blubbed and glooped and gurbled into a thick lumpy neck that gracefully became a roundish and very lumpy head, which looked as if it had been sculpted out of butter and then allowed to partially melt. His hair was buzzed down to a wiry black half-centimeter of stubble, and featured on its very apex its lumpiest and most prominent lump. He had little lumpy ears that stuck out of the sides of his head like they’d been glued on by a clumsy child, and his mouth hung forever slightly open. But by far his bizarrest physical features were his eyes. One of them behaved like an ordinary human eye, but the other behaved seemingly of its own accord, looking always in a different direction, always wandering errantly toward the upper-left corner of his head. These bidirectional eyes of his burned both with a warm sweetness—like the smell of sugar caramelizing—and with a twitchy and unhinged craziness. He had a uniform on: it looked much like the uniforms the brownshirts at the zoo wore, but his pressed and collared button-down short-sleeved shirt was a light blue one instead of brown; the blue shirt had a breast pocket on one side of the chest and on the other side a flashing brass rectangle fastened on with a pin, with a series of hieroglyphics graven upon it. The shirt was covered with big wet spots and was tucked into a pair of dirty blue jeans; a damp rag dangled from the back pocket of the jeans, and from one of the belt loops of the jeans dangled a thick metal chain, from which in turn dangled a hoop of keys—dozens, maybe more than a hundred keys, and these were fascinating objects to me—and the hoop of keys was fastened to his battered leather belt by a metal clip, such that the long metal
chain drooped down along one side of his thigh nearly to the knee and then sloped up again to the belt. The bottoms of his dirty jeans were tucked into heavy black grime-encrusted rubber boots.
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 barrragagaga!”
“Abbah abbah abb?”
“Barga barga oo-oo-oo-oo oooooook.”
“Eep-eep-eep eeyaugh eeyaugh.”
“Glrrrrrrrrrrrrrrargawargawarga!”
“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.”
“Yiikikikikikikikikiki 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.
VII
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.
I awoke the next morning to see three faces—those of Norman Plumlee, Prasad, and Lydia—scowling at me in disapproval. Well, the stoic faces of Plumlee and Prasad scowled in disapproval; they clearly did not li
ke what I had done in the night to my cage furnishings—that is, destroy and scatter them—but on Lydia’s face was not what I would call a scowl so much as a distressed frown of sympathy. This is why, Gwen—this is why all great primatologists are women. The male human mind is hateful, bellicose, possessive, punitive, and jealous, obsessed with cold notions of law and property and justice. The male mind thinks: how dare—how dare you destroy and scatter the property we so kindly lent you, you insolent creature! The male mind ponders such pertinent moral questions as whose stupid acorns are these if I go to the trouble of bending over and picking them up? But the female mind is quicker to empathy than indignation, and that is one reason why Jane Goodall and Dian Fossey and Sue Savage-Rumbaugh and Lydia Littlemore made such great pioneers in primatology.
Norman Plumlee opened my cage door and I clambered gladly out, but was immediately met with many stern reproaches, and a castigatory hand with the thumb and bottom three fingers curled around the palm and the wagging index finger aimed at me. The hand belonged to Norman Plumlee. Norman grabbed a handful of the fluff and torn bits of fabric that my mat and fuzzy blanket had become in the night, and held them to my face and made “shame on you” noises.
“It’s okay—it’s okay,” said Lydia. She put on her glasses and immediately took them off again, and with both hands tucked two wisps of hair behind the ridges of her ears. “He’s probably in shock, Norm. He’s never spent a night away from home before. He just got a little freaked out last night.”
The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore Page 6