“Please, we’ll take care of it.”
Then the salesgirl saw my face. She looked at my ape face under the hood of my floppy green sweatshirt. We locked eyes for a moment. She jumped back. We both shrieked. She began to back slowly away.
“Sorry,” said Lydia one last time, this time with a curt snort, and she snatched up the shopping bags in her fists and jerked on my leash. We fled. We left the store in a scramble of fear and desperation. We got caught in the revolving glass doors with the poofy plastic bags. Lydia jerked it loose and we tumbled through the glass merry-go-round and out onto the street. I clung to Lydia, my arms around her neck, my legs wrapped around her waist. She yanked the hood low over my head. She struggled under the combined burden of me and the plastic sacks full of my new clothes. She walked quickly down the sidewalk and around the corner, as if we were being pursued (we weren’t).
After we’d put a block or two behind us, she ducked into a doorway to escape the currents of pedestrian traffic on the sidewalk. She stopped, collected herself, and gave me a kiss of absolution for my recent sins on my forehead. I’d been in a state of shame at the embarrassment I had caused her, but that kiss instantly made me feel better. Such was the power of her forgiveness, her touch. We passed a flower shop, where there was a sidewalk display of pale green roses. Lydia bought a dozen of them, and the man behind the counter in the store wrapped them up for her in a cone of crinkling cellophane and another cone of paper. She asked him how he made the roses green. He told her he put dye in the soil.
I was allowed to hold them. I crushed the green flowers to my face and deeply sniffed them, and loved their gorgeous smell. Lydia hailed a taxi, which we rode back home. There, she cut the stems of the flowers and put them in an empty spaghetti sauce jar full of clear cool water from the tap and put them on the dining table for a centerpiece. I tried on all my new clothes, and Lydia one by one snipped off the tags for me with the same pair of scissors she had used to cut the stems of the green roses, and rooted through the folds of each article of clothing looking for pins and bits of plastic and stickers needing removal.
XIII
In the lab, everything was different. The lab was where Lydia and I went to work. At the lab we did what Norm wanted us to do. Norm was the boss of the lab, and, by extension, when I was in the lab, this meant he was my boss, too.
The difference between Lydia’s and Norm’s approaches to the project—the “project” that was my life—becomes evident in merely contrasting their personalities. For one thing, Norm was considerably older than Lydia, and when I met him he was already a scientist standing on a whole career’s worth of respect and distinction: tenured at his university, the value of his opinion secure in the scientific community. He sloughed his classes off on his teaching assistants, usually not even bothering to attend them. His science was rigorous, skeptical, fiercely adherent to responsible methodology. I’m not saying that Lydia’s methodology was sloppy by comparison—far from it. It’s only that Lydia was young, untested, untenured, scarcely published, only recently matriculated, and almost unknown in the world of science. She held a doctorate in cognitive psychology and a master’s in—not physical, but cultural—anthropology, whereas Norm was a behavioral biologist, through and through. Norm was a Skinnerian at heart, an operant conditioner, a pleasure-and-pain man, a pigeon-pecker. To Norm, if something couldn’t be meticulously and unambiguously measured and documented, then it could not be published in any way, ergo it did not “count.”
I sensed tension between them. Or thought I sensed it, or at least now I think I thought I sensed it, many years in retrospect. I sensed it in the way a child senses that his parents are fighting with each other, even if they conduct their arguments out of earshot. This philosophical gulf between them yawned ever wider over the duration of the project. Although I spent the vast majority of my time at home with Lydia, she would obligingly drive me to the lab nearly every day to do experiments with Norm.
During this time, Lydia was like a loving and permissive mother to me, and Norm was like a stern schoolmaster. I resented the way Lydia seemed to defer respect to Norm. From what source did Norm derive such respect? I knew nothing of—nor did I care anything for—anyone’s tenure or publishing history or the thickness of curricula vitae. (Now that I do know of these things, I care for them even less.) At home, with Lydia, Norm’s system of rewarding me for virtually everything—giving me a peanut, a piece of fruit or candy or whatever was on offer for every task I performed correctly—had been utterly abandoned, although this system was still pretty much in place at the lab, where the immediately gratifiable desires of my stomach apparently ruled, because they were all that could be methodologically counted on. If I did not always want a sticky delicious little piece of candy to put inside me, then Norm’s whole silly Skinnerian system of positive reinforcement for desired behavior would fall apart. Which it often did! The problem with Norm’s dogmatic insistence on his methodology of rewarding my behavior with food was that sometimes I didn’t really want the reward. I just wasn’t hungry. So, as a rigid behaviorist (I’m afraid nothing ever really changed his mind about that), what Norm realized he needed was some sort of objective currency, something that could be divided into small increments that would always be held to be valuable and desirable in and of themselves. Something I would always want. Essentially, what he needed to establish in my consciousness in order to keep up the simplistic yes/no/yes/no format of operant conditioning was a concept of abstract economics, some notion of, basically, money.
Norm set up a sort of “company store” in the lab, where I could “buy” my treats. So instead of being given treats directly for the tasks I correctly performed, everything I ate (in the lab—of course I ate for free at home) had to be purchased, by me. With what, you ask? Norm minted special play money for use in the closed economy of the lab. He cut thin chips out of wooden dowels of varying diameters and stamped them with numbers indicating their value. The smallest chip was printed with the Arabic numeral 1, the next smallest with a 5, then a 10, then a 25, and the biggest and thickest wooden chip was stamped 100. Clever, no? Pennies, nickels, dimes, quarters, and dollars. They were different colors, too, painted with thick bright monochromatic coats of paint. I seem to recall the pennies were red, the nickels blue, the dimes green, the quarters silver, and the dollars gold. The valuations of the different chips took me several weeks of instruction to fully grasp. When Norm was reasonably sure I understood the chips’ value relationships, my rewards in the lab were no longer doled out in the form of raw goods, but in liquid holdings, with these idiotic colorful chips that I could later use to purchase food items from the company store, when I wanted to eat something. After that, whenever I performed a task correctly—sorting the items correctly, responding correctly to spoken commands to manipulate the objects, correctly playing a computer game designed to teach me symbolic logic—I was rewarded with one of these chips. For simple tasks they usually gave me a penny, and for more complex ones they might give me a nickel or a dime. Then I could cash up by turning in lower denominations for the higher ones. I remember the gestalt moment when I grasped that just one of the quarters was equal in value to twenty-five of the pennies—even though it didn’t look that way, because there were obviously a lot more of them. Now that’s symbolic logic. They also furnished me with a personal “bank” to keep my earnings in, which was a cardboard shoebox with a slot cut in the lid for me to deposit my wages.
The second part of this system was the company store. The company store was made out of one of the lab tables pushed close to a wall to serve as a counter, behind which the food items were stored in cabinets and a little refrigerator, both locked, and a locking metal cashbox. I was not allowed behind the “counter.” Norm printed up big wobbly sheets of laminated paper with pictures of all the items that could be purchased at the store, with their prices printed above the pictures. A “menu.” When I wanted to buy something, I walked up to the counter with my “money,” po
inted at the picture of what I wanted from the “menu,” paid up, and then they gave me my food. I even clearly recall (or may as well) the prices:
1 raisin 1¢
1 grape 1¢
1 regular M&M 1¢
1 peanut 1¢
1 almond 1¢
1 cashew 1¢
1 small handful of peas 1¢
1 small handful of blueberries 1¢
1 small handful of raspberries 1¢
1 peanut M&M 3¢
1 Milk Dud 3¢
1 cube of caramel 3¢
1 strawberry 3¢
1 plum 5¢
1 apricot 5¢
1 carrot 5¢
1 Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup 5¢
1 bite-size candy bar (Snickers, Milky Way, etc.) 5¢
1 peach 10¢
1 apple 10¢
1 orange 10¢
1 pear 10¢
1 marshmallow 10¢
1 hard-boiled egg 25¢
1 banana 25¢
1 full-size candy bar (Snickers, Milky Way, etc.) 25¢
1 cup of yogurt 50¢
1 hot dog 50¢
1 Popsicle 50¢
1 Fudgsicle 50¢
1 meatball 50¢
1 mango 50¢
1 cupcake 50¢
I suppose Norm’s introduction of a capitalist system to the small society of the lab had its desired effect on me. It took me very little time to build a psychological association of the monetary chips with a sense of inherent goodness—to see them as precious, even. I became miserly. I deliberately ate less so that I could save more chips. I came to desire the chips more than I had ever desired the little bits of food that were to be consumed immediately—because the more chips I had, the more potential goods I knew I had the purchasing power to acquire. I did always reliably want their filthy little monies. I horded them in my shoebox. I loved to dump it out and look at them, admiring my wealth, then close the lid of my bank and pick up each chip and put them back in the box, dropping them through the deposit slot one by one.
Nor did it take long for the scientists to begin using the chips as bribes. If they wanted me to participate in a certain experiment, if they wanted me to come to a certain area for some reason, if they wanted me to quit throwing a fit, to quit flailing or biting or screaming and shut up and behave for once—every time I was being unruly or obstinate, they would offer me one of the chips. They’d usually start the bidding with a 5¢ chip, and if it didn’t work—if I couldn’t be bought that cheaply—they would increase the denomination of their offer. In such instances I usually wouldn’t settle for less than a shiny silver 25¢ chip. Some of the lab workers began to grumble that the introduction of this system had been a terrible idea, that it had the unintended effect of perversely rewarding negative behavior. Then I suppose Norm would remind them that the little wooden chips were actually effectively worthless, so they might as well use them as bribes, or put them toward whatever end necessary. (Here I would like to remind Norm that the very same could be said for human money.) Paying me off was simply the easiest way to calm me down when I was upset. So naturally I began to deliberately throw fits in order to incite their bribery. I suppose they spoiled me.
Thus the experiments continued, month after month and season after season, teaching me the mores of human society while simultaneously twisting up and corrupting my soul. Was my corruption merely a by-product of my enculturation?—or was it in fact an essential part of the process?
While this economic system eliminated the ticklish problem of the food-rewards’ value fluctuating with the state of my appetite, it failed to fix the bigger problem. It alleviated the symptom but did not cure the disease. This disease of Norm’s was a fundamental failure of understanding. It was his unshakable faith in the usefulness of behavioristic training. Yes, I realize that behaviorism works perfectly well for training pigeons in boxes to peck at discs. But I am not a pigeon. Language is not a disc in a box. The idea that one can teach language to a rational creature by using essentially Skinnerian methodology is patently absurd. That would be like giving food to a baby only if he says a word correctly, and punitively starving him if he babbles incoherently. Try that at home. I doubt it will make your baby learn to talk any more efficiently. Second languages we may learn through deliberate instruction—badly. Nobody ever really learns anything they do not want to learn. We learn our first language through immersion, through our fascination, through love. Mere vocabulary is not language, Norm. Syntax is not language. Grammar is not language. To define these things as necessary properties of capital-L Language (whatever that is) is like defining eating exclusively as eating at a table with a fork and a knife—that’s not a holistic definition of eating; that’s just good manners.
But when an infant gazes into his mother’s eyes and speaks a first word—even if he has no clue what it “means”—that is language. The child’s first word is not a symbol. It is not a representation, it is not a sign impregnated with abstract meaning, it is not a signifier and not a semiote. It is not a thin coating of signification painted over the surface of an a priori extant concept, suddenly revealing its definition like the act of throwing a sheet over something invisible. It is not a representation. Before a word becomes any of these things, it is simply an act. It is not a naming of the world, but rather the world’s creation.
Norm’s insistence on deliberate instruction, all his treat dangling and clever byways of circumventing the deeply problematic and frankly inhuman aspects of behaviorism, this cynical system of trapping a creature between pleasure and pain, of bribing and withholding—all this points to his original sin of misunderstanding. His misunderstanding was to underestimate language’s connections to love, to beauty, to pure awe of the universe. A being does not acquire language because scientists give it treats if it learns words. A being acquires language because it is curious, because it yearns to participate in the perpetual reincarnation of the world. It is not just a trick of agreement. It is not a process of painting symbols over the faces of the raw materials of the cosmos. A being acquires language to carve out its own consciousness, its own active and reactive existence. A being screams because it is in pain, and it acquires language to communicate.
On one of my better-behaved days—which, as my size, strength, intelligence, boredom, and general restlessness in the lab increased, became less and less frequent—one of Norm’s teaching assistants brought a class to the lab to visit, to watch me prove my competency at understanding spoken English. By this time they had removed the metal cage they had put me in during the early days of the project, and built a large enclosure in the room made of thick glass. The glass wall divided the room into two areas: one for me and the scientists, and the other for people who would visit, so that they could stand behind the glass and watch me work without fear of me ripping their faces off. The arrangement unpleasantly reminded me of the zoo, but I dealt with it. The students all crowded round outside the glass wall, their wet breaths blowing spots of fog on the surface of the glass. This particular experiment had been filmed many times. Nearly everything we did in the lab was now caught on video, by several cameras perched on tripods that had been erected at several points in the room to catch all the action. The Bruno Show was filmed every weekday, beginning in the morning when Lydia brought me to the lab and ending when she took me home. The scientists would later spend countless hours analyzing my behavior, watching my videos and carefully recording data.
I knew the drill. Lydia sat with me inside the glassed-in area of the lab. Norm was outside the wall with the students. Lydia was the one conducting the experiment because I responded to her vocal commands far more often than I did to Norm’s. My personal dislike of Norm rendered me less inclined to grant all his meaningless requests. But nowadays I almost always did them when Lydia asked, as a personal favor to her. Safely protected by the glass wall, Norm was showing me off, speaking about me to all his students, like a mountebank at a county fair, step right up, ladies and gentlem
en, come marvel at the freak of nature we’ve grown in this very laboratory. Inside my play area were all kinds of objects: boxes, bags, stuffed animals, toys and such.
Lydia would say to me, “Bruno, please put the snake in the bag.”
And I would respond by picking up the slack green lifeless rubber snake and dropping it in the nearby brown paper grocery sack. Then she would say, speaking slowly, forcefully and articulately, “Put the soap on the doggie.”
I would pick up the bar of soap, walk over to the stuffed dog, and place it on its back.
“Good job, Bruno. Now put the elephant in the box.”
I picked up the stuffed elephant and dropped it in the cardboard box.
This is the way it usually went. However, Norm had recently added an extremely unsettling detail to this procedure. Lydia wore a flat black metal mask that completely obscured her face, with a rectangular window of opaque green glass for her eyes. I am told that this was a welding mask. She also wore a pair of oven mitts on her hands. Dressed in this insane costume—like a baker in Hell—she would ask me to perform the pointless tasks with the objects strewn about the floor of the playpen. I did not know what could be the reason for these new details that had been added to the ritual. Lydia looked slightly terrifying in this costume. Still, I knew it was her under there, and so I gamely complied with the requests coming from the tinny, echoey voice buried beneath the black metal mask.
And why, you may ask, why did Norm require Lydia to wear oven mitts and a welding mask during the experiment? This was to assure skeptics that I was receiving no visual cues from her face or hands, and had to rely on her spoken words alone for information. It was done to dissuade any potential accusation that I wasn’t comprehending spoken language so much as constructing a web of understanding out of external information inadvertently provided by her body—facial tics, gaze-following, the tensing or relaxing of her muscles, accidental gesticulations: the sort of things a seasoned gambler calls a “tell.”
The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore Page 13