The Study of Animal Languages

by Lindsay Stern

  I gird myself. Behind me, the baby shrieks.

  Before he can speak again our waitress reappears, smiling nervously. As she leans down to clear Frank’s bowl her scent—floral, with an undertow of musk—wafts toward me.

  “We’ll take the check, thanks,” I say, feeling, in spite of everything, a pang of desire.

  “No, Prue didn’t say that,” Frank says, too loudly. “I read it in the goddamn New York Times.”

  One pill by dinnertime, Prue had said. Promise me you’ll watch him take it.

  “That guy”—he points at a heavy man in the corner, sitting alone—“and those guys”—a couple—“and them”—a family—“they’ve all heard the news, probably. So have laypeople all over the States.” Suddenly plaintive, he adds: “It’s a breakthrough, and nobody—”

  “Are your meds on you?” I interrupt.

  “Nobody saw it coming.”

  “Are they in the car?”

  “The implications . . . ”

  “Go get them.” I toss the keys across the table, desperate for solitude.

  He stares at me. Only when I pull out my phone does he obey, trudging down the aisle of booths and through the door.

  The Times? He must have been hallucinating. I wake the phone, Googling Prue’s name and a few relevant keywords. But there it is, seven entries down: an article titled “Mind or Birdbrain?” published last month. Numbly, I click the link, only to find Prue’s study buried in a middle paragraph. The citation is respectful, but decidedly tangential, and the article is online only.

  I face the window, my reflection yielding to a view of the parking lot and the streaking lights beyond. It has gotten darker. By the diner’s neon glare the strip mall looks even more desolate than it did when we arrived. No sign of Frank, from here, nor of our Subaru. As a hatchback reverses out of its spot, one taillight blown, I feel my stomach plunge. Lunacy, to trust him with the keys. Snatching my phone, I bolt for the door, nearly colliding with our waitress, who is shouldering a tray of ice cream sundaes. She gasps, catching one of the teetering glasses, but another tips forward, sloughing off its whipped cream and pitching its cherry onto a nearby table.

  “Sorry,” I call out, registering the sudden hush. When I turn back Frank is standing in the threshold.

  “Where’s the fire?” he says. As the door eases closed behind him, his bib flutters.

  “Christ.” I stumble over myself. “I thought you’d taken . . . ”

  “It’s a nice car, but not that nice.”

  He pats my shoulder and then bends—wincing—to help the waitress clean the mess. By the time I fetch some extra napkins from the bar they are finished, and the voices around us have risen again.

  “Your pill?” I venture, when we sit back down.

  “Finis.” He slides the keys across the table.

  The tightness in his voice suggests otherwise. Bunching up his napkin he adds, as though sensing my misgivings, “Entitled to some privacy, aren’t I?”

  Our waitress returns with the check. As I fumble for my card, Frank hands her a twenty-dollar bill.

  We are quiet for most of the next hour. Frank leans his head against the window, his breath smoking up the glass. When he starts to snore, I turn the audiobook on low, relaxing into the author’s account of Chomsky’s teenage years.

  “God’s dead,” Frank mumbles.

  My phone trills. I pull it out to find an unfamiliar number—a telemarketer, probably—and switch it on silent.

  “Cognitive science is way beyond universal grammar,” he adds, over the narrator.

  He casts me the steely look that still has the power to unnerve me, to remind me of what he does all day in his attic apartment, crowded with secondhand books. For all his dogmatizing, the man is formidably well read.

  “I thought you were sleeping,” I say.

  We have reached South Kingston, and are weaving now through the warren of roads flanking the campus. Music thuds from a ramshackle house, and then recedes. In a moment there is only fog again, everything black but the shining road and the tall silence of the pines.

  “You’re pissed,” Frank says.

  “I’m just tired.”

  “If it’s about before, don’t bother.” He claps me on the knee. “It is what it is. You are who you are. I’m her dad. I’ll always think she could have done better.”

  “Jesus, Frank,” I say, mortified to feel myself blushing again.

  He laughs. “I’m just playing with you, kid.”

  Instead of replying I jab the volume button, and the car goes mute.

  He glances at me, then says gruffly: “You know I’m here for you, if you ever need me.”

  We pull into our driveway, pebbles crunching under the wheels. The living room light is on, and I wonder as I turn off the gas whether I have imagined the dash of motion by the outdoor stairs, receding now behind the elm. Our upstairs neighbor, the pianist, it must be. Out for a smoke.

  Frank squeezes my wrist. “I’m serious.”

  “You’re the one I’ll turn to,” I say with irony, though it comes out as fatigue.

  The back door opens and Prue steps out, her face awash in the headlights. Her eyes are smiling, but her breath is clouding my view of the rest of her face.

  “I’ve been calling,” she says, coming around to my side of the car. “What happened to you guys?”

  “Sorry.” I check my phone to find I’ve missed her twice. “It was getting late, so we stopped for a bite.”

  She folds her arms, shivering. Her hair is wet, her cheeks raw from the shower. Ducking her head, she waves at Frank, but he is clambering out of his seat.

  To me she murmurs, “He took it?”

  “Of course.” I kiss her forehead. “Now get inside before you freeze.”

  “Pumpkin!” Frank crows, approaching us.

  Prue steps away from me, organizing her face into the look of bright repose she wears for her immediate family. Frank reaches for her, dropping his duffel bag on the gravel.

  “Hey, Dad,” she says.

  He traps her in a hug so tight she rolls her eyes.

  “Calm down, Frank.” I hoist his bag onto my shoulder, squinting against the cold. “She’s not going anywhere.”

  Two

  I should begin at the beginning. Who I am, and so forth. How I met Prue. What I’ve published, and where. How I landed in philosophy. Facts, in short, that moor the present to the past. Together, they counteract the sense—more noxious by the year—that my progress since my college days has been a long digression. You found a vocation; you found love, they remind me. Your best work is still ahead of you.

  My name is Ivan Link. I was born in 1964 on the outskirts of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, which makes me forty-seven years old, come January. My mother, an army nurse and bibliophile of Latvian descent, married my father shortly after the Korean War. They had me late, and cared for me in a remote, deliberate way, admitting into our home none of the emotional bombast—the tantrums, the tides of indignation and remorse—that seemed to govern the households of my schoolmates. Until she died eleven years ago, of complications following a stroke, my mother and I were kind to each other. Had we met as adults, I think we would have gotten on fairly well, which is more than can be said of most mothers and sons. The same, I suspect, would have been true with my father. He was a decorated corporal, and my hero, though I inherited none of his savoir faire. A wire blown loose in an electrical storm killed him in 1976, three days after I turned twelve. What I remember most, besides the emptiness, is the slurred ink on the memorial posters tacked to the telephone pole where he died. No one removed the posters, even after heavy rains, so eventually I took them down myself. I learned later that my mother had been five weeks pregnant at the time of his death. She miscarried, and I remained an only child.

  Mathematics came easily to me,
and by the end of my senior year, my success in the quantitative subjects had earned me a partial scholarship to Boston University. I lived in a stuffy rented room off campus, and paid the rest of my way cleaning beakers in a lab at MIT. I read Carl Sagan. I took up chess. I was lonely, and told myself that I was free. The pleasures of collegiate life—sloth, sex, debauchery—held little purchase on me, but my indifference to them, coupled with my apparent looks, seemed to intrigue rather than annoy my peers. I even attracted a few women.

  One of them, an ambidextrous Swede named Madeleine, inadvertently handed me my occupation. It was October of 1984. We were juniors, but she was older, having taken time off to build houses in Guam. I was still majoring in math, and had a vague idea of a future in some area of finance, even as a part of me recoiled at the thought. I would have made a tepid analyst. It was the theoretical dimension of math, rather than its applications, that galvanized me. Partly out of genuine interest, and partly to impress Madeleine, I had applied to study combinatorics the following year at the inaugural Budapest Semesters in Mathematics, a competitive program whose leaflet, which I had encountered in the Math Department’s lounge, promised glamour and subsidized rent.

  The Friday after I applied, I noticed Madeleine’s day planner on my couch. She had left for class only moments before, so I heaved up the window to call after her. The wind was blowing east, raveling her thin blond hair and pitching her name back into my mouth. Rather than call out to her again I set my elbows on the sill, watching her retreating shoulders melt into the throng of scarves and coats approaching Knyvet Square. She had an appointment later that afternoon, she had said, that would preclude our habitual Friday evening date, though I had forgotten what it was. Planner in my possession, I decided to check.

  Whatever I found was so innocuous it left me embarrassed. I tossed the planner back onto the sofa, inadvertently freeing a document wedged inside the cover flap. Like most of Madeleine’s papers, this one was minted with coffee rings. “Two Models of Scientific Explanation,” read the title, followed by a name I recognized: Carl Hempel. In the upper left corner was a handwritten note about a midterm essay, due the day before to her philosophy professor. I had offered to proofread it, I remembered suddenly, but in the end I hadn’t found the time. “It had to do with this Hempel character, she’d said.” Out of sheepishness, coupled with the faintly erotic wish to take into my mind what had passed through hers, I began to read his paper.

  I had always considered philosophy a romantic discipline. To my mind, it stood for everything wrong with the humanities: imprecision, grandiloquence, large nouns, and contempt for the verifiable. A sampling of Nietzsche in a freshman seminar, coupled with Kierkegaard’s frightful Either/Or, had only confirmed that impression. Thanks to souring conditions in Eastern Europe, the liberal flirtation with communism had begun to fade by the time I entered college, and with the exception of an antiapartheid rally I attended in May I had managed to resist the quixotic spirit that newfound freedom—stoked by LSD—seemed to elicit in many of my classmates. I had satisfied my humanities requirement the previous spring with a course on Shakespeare. The professor, a respected formalist, indulged none of the postmodernist fervor—intellectual pornography, in her eyes—that was sweeping English departments at the time. I enjoyed the course. In the plays themselves I found no casuistry, no cant; only eloquent, imperfect human beings.

  Hempel’s paper therefore took me by surprise. To begin with, it contained no jargon. It was written in clear, vernacular English, in prose as elegant as a geometric proof.

  It argued that scientific explanations are deductive in character. They conform, Hempel showed, to the cardinal rule of logic known as modus ponens: If A, then B; A; therefore, B. Suppose, for example, you set out to explain why it happens to be snowing. You would begin by citing a law of nature—all water freezes below 0° C—and go on to note that the air temperature has dropped below that—to −2°, say. Given those conditions, the rain must have frozen. Therefore, by modus ponens, snow.

  The paper was outmoded by then, though I could not have known it. If I had, it wouldn’t have mattered. I was transfixed by its suggestion that the laws that govern thinking also govern the material world—from the shadow on the moon to the shifting tides to the neuron that orchestrates a thought. Even miracles, in light of Hempel’s argument, were not impossible. They were simply counterexamples, exceptions to natural law. After the law had been revised, the circumstance—once anomalous—would seem predictable. Nothing confounds, in retrospect.

  I had located a pen and was jotting down some less intelligible, more adolescent version of this riff on the back of the essay. Madeleine would discover it later, I knew and didn’t care. Here was a style of thought that promised to hold chaos at bay—that exposed, in the lunacy and violence of the natural world, the grace of a syllogism.

  I stood up. Across the road a sparrow lifted off a tree—a maple, I guessed, its leaves flaring crimson and gold against the blue. Even the thrum of traffic seemed clarified, renewed. I reread my notes, feeling exalted. They were muddled, to put it lightly, and lacking in the cool decisiveness that Hempel had achieved. Nonetheless, I can’t help but think of them with some nostalgia. They represented my first groping efforts as an analytic philosopher.

  My rejection letter from the Budapest program arrived six weeks later. By then I had coasted through most of the books on Madeleine’s course syllabus. She was intrigued, if somewhat unsettled, by my newfound enthusiasm. My former ennui had bothered her, I sensed, yet it had also given her cause to counteract it. She had played the vital one—the raconteur, the fox—a role in our dynamic she was not eager to give up. She turned quizzical around me, and then withdrawn. The rejection letter, which should have come as a relief, as it meant we wouldn’t be spending the following fall semester apart, only made things worse. In the days after it arrived we were awkward with one another, like friends reunited too soon after a theatrical goodbye. So elaborate were our plans to keep our relationship afloat between continents—transatlantic letters, New Year’s Eve in Rome—that their collapse unmoored us. By January, we were finished.

  The Challenger exploded. Reagan bartered with Iran. I took whatever jobs I could, drafting my graduate applications at night, and—on my third attempt—landed a spot in a philosophy PhD program in Albuquerque. My dissertation, on the origins of the correspondence theory of truth, was so haughty and derivative I can hardly bear to think about it, though it capped my pedigree in epistemology, the study of knowledge. When it was finished, I moved back east to accept a string of lectureships—one in the Ivy League—none of which morphed into a bona fide position. It wasn’t until my midthirties, when I was proofreading for extra cash, that I revisited Hempel. In one single, caffeinated evening, I wrote a paper that analogized a weakness in his model of scientific explanation to the “Gettier problem,” a paradox that illuminates the role of luck in forming justified, true beliefs.

  I’m gobsmacked, wrote my doctoral advisor, when I emailed her the draft. She forwarded it to the editor of Sum, an important journal, where it was published the following year. I was elated, but wary. I had long burned off the hubris of my graduate years, and my piddling adjunct salary had laid waste to my ego. Nonetheless, on the strength of that publication I heaved myself back into the job market and was rewarded with a handful of interviews for assistant professorships in the Midwest and Northeast corridor. At a faculty reception following one such interview—for a position in Chicago that, incidentally, I did not receive—I met Prue.

  * * *

  —

  WE WOULD STILL be strangers, had I not mistaken her for someone else. She relishes that detail. I would just as soon forget it; that we owe our marriage to my error does not strike me as especially funny. If anything, it unnerves me in its tacit reminder of how easily we might have ended up without each other.

  “Wouldn’t touch that, if I were you,” I began.

&nbs
p; She was leaning over a tray of smoked salmon, her figure drowned in a purple anorak. I was feeling brittle, after my interview, but had finally worked up the courage to approach her. An administrator had pointed her out as visiting lecturer Nicola Dunn, a philosopher of music known for her arid sense of humor. We had corresponded years ago about a paper of hers, though I doubted she remembered me.

  As she turned, however, I saw that the administrator had been wrong. The woman before me was too young to be Nicola—late twenties, I guessed (she was thirty-one, in fact)—with eyes that lit up her face.

  “Sorry?” she said. She was gripping the tongs. In her other—left, ringless—hand, she held an empty plate.

  “It’s fake.” I felt myself redden. “Usually is. You can tell by the color.”

  She followed my gaze to the salmon, shadowed by its flounce of lettuce. The food was a favorite of mine, but a 60 Minutes segment on its production had put me off the affordable brands.

  “See how pale it is?” I sipped my vodka tonic. “They inject it with brine to keep it heavy, then spray it with liquid smoke.”

  She frowned. I blushed harder, suddenly aware of how preposterous I must seem, besieging her with trivia.

  “Not that you wanted to know that.” I stepped back. “Just forget I said anything.”

  But her face relaxed. She said, “I’ve been living a lie.”

  Her voice was cool, contralto. Freckles dusted her nose.

  To my confusion, she peeled back a sleeve of salmon and draped it across her plate. Then, still smiling, she helped herself to three sodden capers.

  “Liquid smoke,” she added, turning back to me. “Now that’s technology.”

  She took a bite. I said, to say something, “What brings you here?”—horrible—“Are you an applicant?”

  “I’m on the faculty.” She shielded her mouth, still chewing. “But I think I may jump ship.”