The Counterfeit Murder in the Museum of Man_ A Norman De Ratour Mystery - Alfred Alcorn [92]
I taught myself to read quite by happenstance. Like many of my brethren, I had taken part in the farce conducted by Damon Drex in which we picked at keyboards in an attempt to prove, for no good reason, that, with a finite number of monkeys (or at least of chimpanzees) and with a finite amount of time, you could produce one line of the literary canon and through that, by extrapolation, all of the world’s great literature.
But that was during a part of my life I call pre-procedure. Like the others I was chiefly interested in the M&M’s with which they rewarded us. More than the others, I think I had an inkling of what was going on. I had noticed people reading magazines and the prevalence of the little markings called letters on books, signs, and, of course, the computer screen.
Upon gaining sapience, I began to think of these little markings as a kind of code, though I had no word for it. And I might not have gotten very far if I hadn’t come across a child’s alphabet book that someone had left behind just outside my cage.
I pretended not to know what it was for. I treated it like a kind of security blanket and if any human was around, I would look at it upside down. Because if anyone had figured out what I was doing, they would apply for a grant, put me in a cage of my own, and bore me speechless with exercises designed to show results they could publish in a paper.
The alphabet book had large letters and simple words. It didn’t take me long to understand that G for GIRL could be combined with A for ANT, O for OSTRICH, and T for TREE to make the word GOAT. It took me a while to comprehend that the number of combinations was essentially endless.
I had difficulty grasping that words not only stood for things, but for actions, descriptions, and things other than things. There were simple sentences in another child’s book someone left behind and, after a while, I had learned them by heart. It took me some effort to understand the words a and the. They occurred so often, I thought they must be greatly important and that I was missing something essential.
But once I mastered the basic skill of reading, I tried to read everything I could get my hands on, which wasn’t much, but people do leave stuff around. Bus schedules. Pamphlets of various sorts. Even a pornographic magazine, which I took for one of those how-to manuals. I would pretend to look at the pictures in regular magazines, all the while trying to learn words from their context.
At the same time, I failed to link the complicated noises people make with their mouths to the words and sentences I was learning. Then, one day in the rec room Damon Drex had provided for his “writers,” I happened to be watching a television news program. One of my fellow chimps got hold of the remote and pressed the MUTE button. Words began to scroll beneath the person who had continued to talk, but soundlessly.
The significance struck me like a bad fall out of a tree: The words on paper, these combinations of letters, matched the vocalizations people were producing in their mouths. My own species communicate with sounds and gestures, of course, but nothing like this. I realized that people live in a sea of language, in a verbal medium that is the equivalent of air or water.
I was thrown again into one of those despairs provoked by an agitation of hope, expectation, and fear of failure. Because I knew I could never imitate the human range of sound with my own vocal equipment, I scarcely knew how to go about learning to understand what was being said.
And again, I had to proceed carefully lest some graduate student or postdoc hear what I was doing and start some infernal “research” project. I still had my alphabet book with its big letters and simple words. I decided to find someone I could trust to help me. Through bad luck, I chose Yvette, a sweet, smiling Haitian woman on the cleaning crew. She had always been kind to us and especially to