The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore

by Benjamin Hale

  But why, I ask—why, Dr. Norman Plumlee, did you decide that external bodily elements of communication do not count as part of language? Is language not comprised of an entire flexible interface of both spoken and visual interaction? No human mother speaks to her infant only while wearing oven mitts and a welding mask! Spoken language is but a single component of communication. We speak as much with our hands and eyes and faces as we do with our lungs and throats and tongues—namely, principally, with our brains. Analog gestural communication isn’t “cheating.” Removing words from the interface of the body only removes them from their natural environment, like putting an animal in a cage.

  Yet Norm doggedly continued to insist upon the necessity of the mask and mittens, so the fact that I understood what Lydia was saying might be taken more seriously by potential skeptics. Taken seriously by whom? By whom, Norm? Whence this desperate, this pitiful fear of not being taken seriously? This fear permeates everything, everything humans do! This terrible fear of not being taken seriously haunts the heart of every scientist!

  What is science? Must science necessarily be enslaved to rigid methodology?—to the quantifiable?—to the repeatable?—to the measurable?—to the (dare I suggest it) publishable? If you’re studying the inanimate world, sure… the unconscious world, the world of quarks and quasars, of waves and particles, of the chemical and mechanical movements of the universe’s material… I have no beef with the scientific method as it is applied to, say, physics. But when you are studying another sentient being, a fellow conscious organism? Of course, of course the good scientist must follow proper methodology, collect data accurately and draw conclusions carefully and responsibly if he is to publish, and the good scientist must of course publish if he is going to apply for grants to fund further research and maintain his post at his institution, if he is to secure tenure, in order to keep making money, in order to eat! And in order to do all this, he must publish, publish, publish—or not get any money—and by extension, perish! I sometimes wonder if the demands of capitalism enfeeble certain fields of science. Because that was why Norm was in such a rush to test, to record, to document, to prove, to publish—to be taken seriously. He wanted this to be hard science. He did not understand how soft it is—soft and vulnerable, like flesh itself. Like life. Like me. My brain, the seat of my soul, is as mysterious and plastic and irrational a thing as yours, Norm, or any man’s for that matter. It bucked against your numbers! In your frenzy to publish, in your desperation to be taken seriously, you tried to cram “soft” science into the same box as the hard stuff—and in the process you ignored all the evidence that was right in front of your face! You lost it! Lost! Much is lost, and much is never found that might be if scientists would only allow themselves to look in the right places. The very hardness of hard science sometimes renders it too impoverished to study a subject so protean and spontaneous as language. Lydia came to understand this, and Norm did not, and that, I believe, was at the heart of their falling-out. That and, obviously, me.

  Lydia had an almost quixotic faith that she would be able to teach an ape to fully understand and to perhaps even verbally communicate in English, if only she were able to find the right pupil—someone special, some exceptionally brilliant Nietzschean überchimp such as (ahem) myself. And don’t try to feed me any of the usual nonsense about undescended larynxes and so on, about the vocal tracts of apes being anatomically unequipped for articulate speech. Put that aside, and simply listen to the sound of my voice. The mere physical equipment of vocal communication constitutes a thin layer of moss coating the rock of the issue, and that rock is the brain, the mind. My brain, my mind.

  Lydia Littlemore was a pioneer of the furthermost untrammeled frontiers of science, of linguistics, of primatology, of cognitive psychology, and, indeed, of philosophy. But so, for that matter, is every mother whose child learns to speak. For she did nothing for me that a human mother would not do for her human child: she loved me. And I loved her. That was my only motivation. That was the only reward, the only conditioning I needed.

  One could argue that love has no place in science. Those who make such arguments may as well argue that love has no place in human civilization, or in life.

  XIV

  At some point I realized there was a new woman working in the lab: Tal. I would not learn her last name—Gozani—until much later. Tal was taller than Lydia. Tal was tall for a woman. At first I think I had a little difficulty connecting the word to the person, because her name happened to be an exact homonym for an adjective describing what she was: tall. I already knew the word tall, though I don’t know if the scientists at the lab knew I knew it. As I have said, before I began to talk much I already comprehended far more spoken English than anyone imagined I did. Maybe I would have been less confused if Tal was short, or if she remained tall but was named “Short.” Anyway—she entered my life the way most people did in those days: one day, she was there. This woman I’d never seen before began to appear in the lab every day and began interacting with me, and there you have it.

  In addition to being tall, I think Tal was very young when she first came to the lab. Younger than Lydia, anyway. She was (as I know in retrospect) a graduate student at the University of Chicago. I would guess Tal was in her early twenties when she started working at the lab—which would make her seven or eight years younger than Lydia when all this happened. At first I liked her well enough. I have always tended, and especially in those days, to get along with women better than I do with men, so I was glad to have another feminine presence in the lab. But there were some extraordinarily unusual aspects to Tal.

  In addition to being tall, she had smooth, olive-colored, almost yellowish skin that offset her crisp gray-green eyes. She had thick, strong legs. She dressed in strange clothes. She would wear a thin sheet of bright stretchy decorative fabric wrapped around her legs for a skirt. She was constantly clicking and rattling all over with bits of rustic jewelry made of wood and rope and silver. She wore big clunky boots if the weather turned bad, and if it turned good she wore ropey brown woven sandals that crisscrossed up her calves. Often, though, she would go barefoot. She would take off her sweaty brown sandals and leave them by the door to the lab, then spend the day thumping around the floor in her bare feet. Sometimes I would inspect her sweaty brown sandals, lined up by the lab door. I would curiously lick the salt-ringed depressions that her toes had carved into their surfaces. This going barefoot was something I had never seen a human do before, at least not in a professional setting. Lydia was usually barefoot or in socks in the home, but outside her home, she always wore shoes all day. I wondered why ordinary norms of decorum were relaxed for Tal. All the other scientists’ feet were imprisoned within their shoes, generally workaday white sneakers, but Tal was allowed to romp the lab in dirty naked feet as comfortably as if this room were her own home.

  She let me play with them, I remember—her bare feet. I had just met her for the first time a few days before. We sat together on my squishy blue mat, behind the glass wall that divided the lab into the human side and the chimp side, my playpen. We were sitting together, manipulating my toys. Tal sat cross-legged at first, then leaned back and stretched her legs out flat on the mat, and her bare feet emerged from beneath the stretchy red fabric of her skirt. I was transfixed by her feet. They were so ungodly dirty. They were so callused and rough. Her toenails were chipped and short, her toes armored with thick hard yellowish skin, the soles of her feet nearly black with filth. I remember thinking that they looked less like the feet of a woman than the feet of an animal, like me. I reached out with my long rubbery fingers and inquisitively tickled her toes, but I believe her feet were so accustomed to the unshod life that they had lost that especially sensitive vulnerability of the flesh that is prerequisite to effective foot-tickling. My tickling of her feet evoked from her lips a smile, yes, but no laughter. Her one nod to podiatric vanity was a thick blunt ring of tarnished silver hugging the thinnest segment of the second toe on her left
foot. I touched the ring with my finger. “It never comes off,” she said. I noticed also that, unlike the smooth, glabrous legs of most of the human women I had seen, this one’s legs were coated with fine wispy fur. A thin silver chain dangled from her neck. She let me touch that, too. It had a sleek, scaly texture; it slid and slithered over my fingers like something alive, like a slender worm of light. And at the end of this chain was a piece of jewelry, an emblem of some sort. The emblem was composed of two interlocking equilateral triangles, one upside down and the other right-side up, such that the two linking triangles form a hexagon in the center, with six smaller equilateral triangles directly abutting each side of the hexagon and pointing outward from the center to form a radially symmetrical six-pointed star. For a moment I was hypnotized by the way its elements connected, how the eye could assemble, dissect and reassemble the image, the kaleidoscopic matrix of its harmonious geometry. I put it in my mouth. “Don’t put that in your mouth,” she said, and took it out. She wiped my spit off of it on her scarf and tucked it back under her shirt, where it slid down her chest and disappeared in the sloping gully of flesh between her breasts. My gaze then ascended to the very pinnacle of her, past her throat, her chin, her lips, her nose, past the conjoined twins of her furry black eyebrows that met in a delta of fuzz above the bridge of her nose and above her wide forehead, to find the most outrageous aspect of her physiognomy: her hair. It was black as India ink, and arranged not in lots of very thin threads like that of most humans, but was all clumped and scrunched up into an array of thick, muscular ropes. I touched them. I laughed at their surprising texture. They didn’t feel like anything that really ought to be sprouting out of the top of anyone’s head. They felt almost like plant life. I stroked these long knotty cables of hair, and I grabbed one of them—the girth of it fit just inside my fist—and I squeezed it, and in my hand it felt just like the vines of ivy that crawl all over the sides of the magisterial stone buildings on the campus. That’s all I had to compare it with in my then-very-small grab bag of a posteriori experience. I squeezed her hair-ropes. I loved playing with women’s hair. I still do. But this was—this was something else entirely. She laughed. Her laugh was a gleeful flutter abruptly truncated by a silly little snort.

  “These are dreadlocks,” she said. Dread and lock being two of the unfriendliest words in the English language, I wondered why on earth anyone would choose to affectionately apply them to a style of hair.

  Oh, and the way she walked in those dirty bare feet of hers. That was impressive. Tal didn’t walk like an ordinary human. For a long time I had associated human walking with the persistent rhythmic squeaking and squawking of sneakers on the hard tile floor of the lab. (Except for Haywood, the garrulous musicality of whose walk we have previously discussed.) And then there were the students at the university, with whom I honestly had only limited contact during my time at the lab—a great diversity of footwear abounded on the bottoms of their legs. I came to love the sound, for instance, of high-heeled shoes. They make that scrap-clock, scrap-clock noise to which my mind to this very day immediately attaches erotic associations. Flip-flops also make interesting sounds, that repeated squishing and slapping they make against the heel, and sometimes a little bubble of air gets trapped between the bottom of the foot and the moist surface of the flip-flop, which when pushed out from beneath the flat of the foot by the pressure of gravity may result in a very rare, and very faint—but always uproariously funny—fart noise. Tal, though, generally eschewed shoes of any sort, preferring always to go barefoot, but rather than eliminating any sound that might emanate from her feet, her walk in fact seemed even louder than a normally shod person’s. She walked always with directness and even a sense of aggression, planting one foot directly in front of the other, describing perfectly straight lines wherever she went. Her long, thick, and frighteningly strong legs connected with surfaces beneath her body in loud, meaty stomps. When she walked across a room I could feel the vibrations she made, with each new step for a brief moment her body became rooted to the earth as solidly as a tree. This only happened when she was barefoot, though; it wasn’t quite the same effect when she had her sandals on. Tal was as comfortable as any human I’ve met with her own bipedal existence. Most humans are still a little awkward on two legs, despite years of evolution. Indeed, upright walking may have been useful for traversing the plains of prehistoric Africa, but ultimately, considering how people of a certain age are wont to gripe and caterwaul about their legs and feet and hips and knees and backs giving out on them, I wonder if it wouldn’t be a bad idea to go back to all fours.

  It was difficult to gauge the nature of Tal’s relationship with the rest of the scientists at the lab. I don’t think they quite knew what to make of her. It’s possible that they found her presence as weird and unruly as I did. Whenever she said anything, the other scientists seemed to trust her words a little less, as if they needed additional rechecking and verification. They were all a little colder with her than they were with each other. I am always keenly conscious of the dynamics of social dominance hierarchies. In the primal society of the lab, Norm was the alpha male. Prasad was the beta male. The other men were graduate students, and they ranked below Lydia, who was the highest-ranking female. The female graduate students ranked below the male graduate students, and Tal was definitely the omega of the omegas—and everyone in the lab treated her accordingly. Even the other low-ranking females would put her in her place with very subtle dominance displays. Except for Lydia. Lydia took a shine to her, and this was what socially protected Tal from the rest of the group. The approval of the lab’s highest-ranking female was enough to keep Tal on board, but not enough to raise her status above omega.

  At some point during the first few weeks I started seeing Tal in the lab, Lydia began to speak of her surprisingly often. As soon as it was time to go home, all thoughts having anything to do with the lab—including the lab personnel—were banished at once from my mind, and I directed my attentions toward what the remaining part of the day had in store for me: what foods I would eat, what cartoons I would watch. But now with increasingly frequency Lydia would talk about Tal on the drive home, or over dinner. I was frankly a little put off by how many times Lydia would mention her in conversation. See, in addition to all her aforementioned weirdnesses, Tal was apparently a woman of very particular and passionate hobbies. She was a dancer, and a maker of puppets. I really had no idea yet what “dancing” and “puppets” were. Come to think of it, I now think that it must have been Tal’s training in modern dance that gave her that aggressive, stomping barefooted gait. But as for the puppets…

  I remember when Tal—at, I suppose, Lydia’s behest—brought one of her puppets to the lab. It was probably the most terrifying and hideous thing I had ever seen. I was fascinated by human beings’ representations of themselves—like the mannequins in the department store. But this thing was the human form not abstracted (like the mannequins) but deliberately exaggerated, tortured and perverted, its every aspect and feature twisted into the grotesque. Violent spots of red enflamed its long, beaky nose and its lacquered wooden dimples that were pushed outward by a leerily grinning crescent mouth, and it had huge blue marble eyes with inwardly bent brows. The overall expression implied the face of someone about to do something meaningless and cruel. He wore a pointy red hat and a little gold-trimmed red suit. The point of the hat drooped over his head such that his profile had three ugly hooks protruding from it: the hat and his nose pointing sharply down and his chin pointing sharply up. Tiny pink-painted stationary wooden hands poked out of the empty cloth bags of his sleeves. On the bottoms of his floppy cloth legs he wore pointy green shoes with jingle-bells sewn onto the tops of them. The creature looked like some sort of demonic elf. He was horrifying—and I hadn’t even seen him in motion yet.

  “Bruno,” said Tal. “Meet Mr. Punch.”

  Tal slipped her arm into the vacant bag of the creature’s body, and suddenly it (one) was fucking alive, and (two) h
ad attached itself to her arm.

  Without my noticing, Tal had also somehow turned her voice into a distorted, barely articulate, high-pitched, metallic quacking noise. And yet, because my attention was diverted to the monstrosity on the end of her right arm, even though I perfectly well knew it was she who was speaking, the voice seemed to emanate from the head of the puppet—as if this tiny monster made of wood and fabric and marbles had been given not only an independent agency and autonomous locomotion, but a consciousness, a voice!

  “That’s the way to do it!” declared the disgusting creature, and followed it with a mischievous cackle. “That’s the way to do it! Ah-hahaha-ha!”

  Why in the world was this being done to me? The other scientists crowded around us in skeptical distrust of this whole exercise. Lydia sat cross-legged on the squishy blue mat on the lab floor, and Tal sat crosslegged directly facing her. I sat in Lydia’s lap. As soon as the puppet began to move its horrible head and speak with its horrible quacking voice, I turned my head away from it, burrowing my face into Lydia’s body, where it was fragrant and safe and warm and I could be near her nourishment-symbolizing breasts. In retrospect, the puppet probably did not wave its arms or clap its hands or nod its head or speak in its quacking voice more than a total of ten or fifteen seconds before Lydia called a halt to the experiment. Lydia signaled Tal to stop what she was doing. She could see at once that whatever effect they had been hoping for with this experiment (amusement?) was not happening, but rather I was afraid. Tal reached into her mouth and removed some sort of spit-slimy piece of metal. Then she removed her arm from the body of the puppet, disemboweling him, rendering him a slack dead bag of fabric with hands and a head.