Free The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore by Benjamin Hale Page B

short life—big, bowlegged, walleyed, and twitchy, I sensed there was something deeply not right about the way he looked and walked and breathed and moved his body through space, as he now did, from the door to the lab right up to my cage in the corner of the room. As my eyes were still adjusting to the now partially lit laboratory, this man gradually and musically dragged his weight across the expanse of floor that separated us—
kLOMPa-whap-SHLINK kLOMPa-whap-SHLINK kLOMPa-whap-SHLINK
. He looked in at me through the bars of my cage, his breath whistling in through his nose and roaring out through his mouth like a pair of fireplace bellows and his bidirectional eyesbugging and blinking and goggling and boggling at me. And I looked at him through the bars of my cage. He didn’t say anything, but the demon of rage that had entered me was still in me, and so I was the first to speak.
    I said—or rather, I screamed:
    “Oo-oo-oo-oo ah-ah-ah heeaagh heeaagh
hyeeeaaaaaghhhh!
”
    And then—what did he do, this mysterious lumpy man who stood now just outside my cage looking in, this stranger of the crazy eyes and the musical walk? He screamed back at me. He replied in answer:
    “Oo-oo-oo-oo ah-ah-ah heeaagh heeaagh
hyeeeaaaaaghhhh!
”
    That shut me up.
    He mimicked the inarticulate chimp noise that I had just made. He copied it, beat for beat, tone for tone, note for note, and at the exact same pitch and volume. I was taken aback. He had mimicked my scream so perfectly that anyone secretly listening in would have assumed either that I had made the noise twice or else there was another chimp in the room. When I had somewhat collected my wits I said:
    “Uha huppa huh?”
    “Uha huppa huh,” he said, though without the rising inflection.
    “Eeegt eegt eegt,” I replied.
    “Eeegt eegt eegt.”
    “Oop oop oop
eeyaugh
.”
    “
Eeyaugh, eeyaugh
.”
    “Oooooooooo oo-oo-oo eeyaugh.”
    “Barga barga baraga barrra
gagaga
!”
    “Abbah abbah abb?”
    “Barga barga oo-oo-oo-oo oooooook.”
    “Eep-eep-eep
eeyaugh eeyaugh
.”
    “Glrrrrrrrrrrrrrr
argawargawarga
!”
    “Aat aat aat ananananananananaaaaaaaat!”
    “Birrrroing zuboing zuboing zuboing zuboy!”
    “Eeetoo eeteetoo amammmmmmnnnnn oot oot oot.”
    “Havar voo voy!”
    “Rannanakka rannakka
oit oit oit!
”
    “BrrrrrrrrrrrriiiiiiinnnGAAAHHH!”
    “Uffa uffa uffa
eeeeeeeeeeagghhht
.”
    “
Yiik
ikikikikikikikiki
eeeeeite eeeeeite!
”
    “Oo-
woo
oo-
woo
oooooo
reagh reagh
YEAAAAGGHHH!”
    Then suddenly we were talking all at once! I don’t recall how the rest of the conversation went. We made such joyous noise!
    This was perhaps the first completely reciprocal conversation I ever had with a human being. That first epic conversation with the great Haywood Finch, mildly retarded autistic night-shift janitor extraordinaire, was my truest introduction to human speech. We spoke in this manner for at least an hour, maybe more, before Haywood frantically glanced at his digital watch and realized that his routine had been upset and he must return immediately to work, and so after emptying all the garbage cans in the lab, off he loped, clomping and jangling away to mop the hallway floor.
    But that first conversation! What a joy it was to make noise purely for the sake of noisemaking. And yet out of all that playful babble, all that nonsense, patterns of language had begun to develop. That night, man aped ape. He copied my animal phonemes to a T and spat them back at me intermingled with playful additions and variations of his own, which I in turn attempted to imitate. We babbled wildly at each other, and what insane fun! We made music: somewhere, a strain of sense, a chorus, harmonies, melodies, rhythms, and motifs emerged out of our howling squall of gobbledygook. We added visual components—we made silly faces at each other, invented meaningless hand gestures. I slapped my chest and slapped my palms on the floor of my cage, and he unclipped the hoop of keys from