The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore

by Benjamin Hale

  I was on the floor. I ran to Lydia and jerked on the leg of her pants and she picked me up and I hugged her and held on to her and planted my face against the soft flesh of her neck. I was forgiven.

  I devoured some of the dehydrated food pellets that I had scattered the night before, not because they were at all palatable but because I had awoken with a belly roiling and snarling from hunger. I was permitted to play with my toys, but I did so only listlessly. The other humans arrived one by one with morning coffee steaming in their mugs. That day the experiments began in earnest. I remember how they presented me with flash cards with different symbols printed on them, and asked me, I think, to distinguish the cards from each other. I remember people making gestures at me, signs I was expected to attempt to emulate. I remember one particular experiment—all of these were repeated time after time and day after day, week upon week, I ought to remember them—in which I was shown an assortment of objects: stones, metal washers, pencils, plastic flowers, and small stuffed animals resembling pigs, chickens, rabbits, elephants, lizards, and the like (although they were not to scale—the elephant, for example, was the same size as the chicken). The human named Norm, the human who was clearly “in charge” here because all the other humans—even Lydia—seemed to defer authority to him, stored these artifacts in a big brown cardboard box that he removed from one of the cabinets under one of the long gray lab tables. He dumped the contents of the box onto the surface of the table and proceeded to sort them out for me, grouping the objects like with like: flowers with flowers, animals with animals, washers with washers, and stones with stones. Then, after sorting them, he would put all of the objects back in the box, shake it vigorously so as to randomly redistribute the contents and dump them back onto the table, then make a gesture indicating that I should sort them, like with like. If I sorted correctly, I was rewarded with a treat. If I sorted incorrectly, the treat was withheld.

  I partook in these and other such experiments. They were fun, though sometimes I grew weary of them. Sometimes I was allowed to sit in the corner of the room on the squishy blue mat and manipulate my toys, and sometimes Lydia joined me. Oftentimes I crawled into her arms and looked into her bright brazen eyes and played with her bright blond hair. At lunchtime she put a collar on my neck and attached a leash (a degrading necessity in those early days), then picked me up and carried me through the building, down the stairs, and outside into the world, which was sunny but still soggy from yesterday’s rain. She brought her lunch with her in a brown paper bag. I was not particularly hungry because I had been plied with treats all morning for all the tasks I had correctly performed. She brought me to a courtyard behind the building that housed the Behavioral Biology Lab, a stretch of grass cut through with a brick path and surrounded by several buildings made of gray stone. There were many tall trees whose trunks were gray and knotted and gnarled like old men’s arms. Lydia sat down on a picnic bench and removed from the paper bag the following items: a turkey sandwich, diagonally bisected into two right triangles and wrapped in crinkly wax paper; a bottle of vitamin water; a green apple; and a “power” bar, which was a compact rectangular block of tightly compressed nutrients with raisins and chocolate chips embedded in it. She offered me a bite from each of these items, bites that I took more out of curiosity than hunger.

  Since there was no one else around, Lydia unhooked my leash and allowed me to climb the trees, which I did, happily, in the sunlight, brachiating madly in their rustling canopies. Such an outrageous thrill it was to climb those giant trees, knowing that for the first time in my life there were no fences or walls or bars or windows to keep me inside. I could have easily run away if I’d wanted to, but of course I did not want to, not with Lydia beaming sweetly up at me from the picnic bench below, chewing on a wad of turkey sandwich held in her cheek. This being a university campus and this being the summer, there was very little foot traffic in the courtyard. The sun was bright and hot. I observed the midflight lovemaking of a pair of iridescent dragonflies.

  Up and up and up I climbed into the canopy of the tallest and oldest and most magisterial tree in the courtyard. I scrambled into the highest branches that were still thick enough to support my weight. I emerged from the flapping green leaves to find myself standing higher than the highest of the buildings surrounding the grassy courtyard.

  In every direction I saw a vast and strange and infinitely complex world previously unknown to me. I looked to the west, and saw the rooftops of buildings stretching endlessly into the distance, and far away a train shuffling along the elevated tracks and a highway with trucks lumbering along it and down the serpentine filigrees of overlapping exit ramps. I looked to the south, and saw the great vertical pipes of a hundred organs of industry unfurling satin scarves of black smoke into the air. I looked to the east, and saw a lapping and foaming body of blue-green water, speckled with sailboats and reaching out to the horizon where it became a thin band of silvery blue. And then I looked to the north.

  I saw the stone titans of the downtown Loop looming high over Chicago. I did not yet know that each of these monsters had a name—the Tribune Tower, the John Hancock Center, the Sears Tower—but I knew that they shot into the sky so high that tracing their heights made me queasy and light-headed. I knew that they were designed with bizarre and terrifying features jagging and cragging out of them, juts and abutments and spikes and spurs and needles and bars and crowns and prongs and horns and forks and knives, a tangled skein of twisted metal appendages reaching up out of the earth like the fingers of enormous demons clawing their way out of hell to assault the heavens.

  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.

  VIII

  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. Th
ey 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:nυ / )—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.

  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 imp
ortant, 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.