The Study of Animal Languages

by Lindsay Stern

He has tipped his head back against the cushion, his eyes closed. Realizing he has fallen asleep, I wonder whether I should wake him up before I leave. As I start to ease off the futon, however, he opens one eye. “Serious?”

  “I have the tickets,” I say. “For two weeks, starting January third. One of them was for Prue, but . . .”

  He reaches out and squeezes my shoulder. She has told him everything.

  “I’d love to.” He strokes Cordelia’s head. “But what would this one do while I’m gone?”

  “True.”

  There is a rush of wind outside, and the room fills with light. Something small and hard hiccups down the roof.

  “This is all you,” Frank says. “Take yourself on an adventure. Who knows, you could be the next Darwin.”

  Voices filter from the stairwell, sprinkled with laughter. Frank’s neighbors, probably, coming in from the cold.

  “It’s funny,” I say. “I’ve been alive for almost half a century, and I don’t know the first thing about anything.”

  “Amen.” Frank slaps his knee, rousing Cordelia.

  “I used to think . . . ,” I trail off. “I used to think life would go like this: You get bashed around a bit, fuck up, lose people, and in the process figure out what really matters. But now . . .”

  He sips from my water glass.

  “It’s more like figuring out that your life was never even about you, to begin with. You’re not the hero. You’re just someone in the cast.”

  “I’ll be damned,” Frank says. “You’re starting to sound like a philosopher.”

  Before I leave he insists on arming me with snacks for the road. I accept them, and then pet Cordelia goodbye.

  “Will I see you again?” I say, straightening up.

  He stares at me, surprised, and then claps me on the back.

  “What kind of bullcrap is that? I’ll be knocking at your door before you know it, kid. You’ll be sick of me.”

  I let him hug me, and then put on my coat. He walks me back downstairs.

  It is close to evening, but the light is stronger now than it has been all day. As I make my way to the car Frank falls back, waving. His shadow stretches all the way down the block.

  “Don’t be a stranger,” he shouts.

  I raise my hand.

  He is still standing there when I reach the car. As I open the door his reflection swims across the glass: backlit, blazing, like some Icarus. Though I do not turn around, I can feel him watching me as I climb into the driver’s seat, wake the engine, and begin.

  Author’s Note

  Ivan’s solution to the Gettier problem was inspired by Ernest Sosa’s work on the subject. The abstract of the paper Ivan peer reviews was adapted from Özlem Beyarslan and Ehud Hrushovski’s paper, “On Algebraic Closure in Pseudofinite Fields,” published in 2012 in the Journal of Symbolic Logic. Prue’s study on birdsong was inspired by Kentaro Abe and Dai Watanabe’s paper, “Songbirds Possess the Spontaneous Ability to Discriminate Syntactic Rules,” published in 2011 in Nature Neuroscience.

  Acknowledgments

  Whoever said a happy childhood was the worst gift to give a writer never met my family. For their love and enthusiastic support, I would like to thank my parents, Glynnis O’Connor and Douglas Stern, who read every single draft of this novel. My beloved sister, Hana, sustained me with her humor and bullshit allergy, and by putting up with the sound of my typing in the early mornings.

  For enabling me to throw myself full-time into the initial drafting of this book, I would like to thank the Thomas J. Watson Foundation, especially Chris Kasabach and Sneha Subramanian, and Denise Gagnon and Suzanne Spencer at the Amherst College Fellowships Office. For the time and space to destroy and rebuild it, I am indebted to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. I would like to thank msy teachers, Lan Samantha Chang, Paul Harding, Benjamin Hale, Charlie D’Ambrosio, Kevin Brockmeier, Ayana Mathis, and Alan Gurganus for their wise and meticulous reading; the Susan Taylor-Chehak family and the Maytag Corporation Fellowship Fund for their support; Deb West, Jan Zenisek, and Connie Brothers for their generosity of spirit; and my peers, Sorrel Westbrook, Shaun Hamill, Mgbechi Erondu, Erin Kelleher, Jason Hinojosa, Joseph Cassara, Monica West, Kris Bartkus, Nyuol Tong, Melody Murray, Iracema Drew, Amanda Kallis, Maya Hlavacek, Keenan Walsh, Sasha Khmelnik, Ryan Tucker, Patricia Helena Nash, Liam O’Brien, Regina Porter, Okwiri Oduor, and, especially, Maria Kuznetsova for their encouragement and solidarity.

  The Writers’ Workshop is also where I met my inimitable agent, Henry Dunow, who saw this novel through multiple transformations. Without his editorial eye, insightfulness, and moxie, it would not exist in its current form.

  For their feedback on early drafts, I am tremendously grateful to Roger Creel, Carolyn Ruvkun, Brian O’Connor, Nica Siegel, Andrew Zolot, Kate Johnson, Gerry Howard, Jareb Gleckel, and Eskor David Johnson. Thanks also to my teachers at the Brearley School, Amherst College, and Yale University; to Shakespeare and Company bookstore for its hospitality; to the Franke family; and to Yale’s Comparative Literature Department for its ongoing belief.

  To everyone at Viking who put this book into the world: my gratitude knows no bounds. On the production end, I would especially like to thank Gretchen Schmid, Allie Merola, Elizabeth Yaffe, Gretchen Achilles, Eric Wechter, and Trent Duffy for his exquisitely thorough copyediting. On the publishing side, I am enormously grateful to Andrea Schulz, Kate Stark, Lindsay Prevette, Chris Smith, and Brian Tart. Most of all, I am indebted to the wonderful Lindsey Schwoeri for her patience, incisive questions, and dazzling editorial powers.

  J.M. Coetzee’s novel Elizabeth Costello inspired some of this book’s subject matter. For the conversations that also fed it, or for advice at a key juncture, I would like to thank Shruthi Badri, Chelli Riddiough, Viveca Morris, Taylor Grant-Knight, Sofia McDonald, Maru Pabón, Rick Stern, Lisa Djonovick, Joanne Gillis-Donovan, Pedro Reyes, Danielle Amodeo, Terry Cullen, Asja Begovic, Henrik Onarheim, Jennifer Acker, Patricia Morrisroe, Lee Stern, Sarah Aubrey, Solyda Say, Allegra di Bonaventura, Ayesha Ramachandran, Moira Fradinger, Marta Figlerowicz, Martin Häglund, Phyllis Granoff, Alexander George, and John Durham Peters. Special thanks to my dear friend and sparring partner Deidre Nelms, whose enthusiasm for this project never flagged despite the many drafts I foisted on her; to Lenka Peterson and the late Ruby Stern; to the O’Connor and Stern clans; to the Barsh-Garbasz and Silver-Greenberg families; and to my Brearly Squad, the antitheses of fair-weather friends.

  While they did not have a direct hand in this novel, Daniel Hall and Adam Sitze supplied the wisdom and mentorship that informed its growth. I am deeply grateful to both of them. I would also like to thank Susan Sagor for her early confidence and outstanding intellectual example, and for introducing me to the semicolon.

  About the Author

  Lindsay Stern is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and the recipient of a Watson Fellowship and an Amy Award from Poets & Writers magazine. She is currently pursuing a PhD in comparative literature at Yale University. The Study of Animal Languages is her first novel.

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