The Study of Animal Languages: A Novel - Hardcover

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.

One
 

All my life I’ve been waiting,” says my father-in-law, through the stall door. We have stopped at a rest area along the in- terstate, halfway between our homes. I would meet him back in the car, if only he would stop waxing poetic.

“Frank?” I face the mirror, smoothing the hair over my thin- ning spot. “I’ll be—”

“First for school to end,” he interrupts. “Then for my twen- ties, then for success. Marriage, children, et cetera. For them to leave. For their children. Then the waiting became less conspic- uous. Waiting for the cry of boiled water. For the paper. For spring. It took a mighty long time to understand that what I’d been waiting for wasn’t each thing, actually, but the chance to wait for whatever came next.”

The toilet sounds, mercifully. It is not Frank’s, however, but the door of the adjoining stall that swings open. An elderly woman advances, angles toward the sink. She has been listening. She rinses her hands.

“Sorry,” I volunteer. “Men’s is out of order.”

Through the mirror she delivers a qualified smile, snaps her wrists over the drain, and departs. When I look up Frank is shuffling toward  me, coaxing the tongue of his belt into its loop. His shirt is too broad for his shoulders, and his face appears, as it usually does, to harbor some inconvenient hope.
He follows me back into  the food mart, where  I pay for a lukewarm coffee and  the  packaged  croissant he's selected. My watch reads half past five.

"Looks  about time for your meds," I say.
 
Grimacing, he turns away, pushing open the glass door. Out­ side a shy rain has started, colder than it looks.

"You know  what  it does to me,  right?"  he says, as we fold ourselves into the car.

"Come on. I promised your daughter." "Promised  her what?"

"That you'd be comfortable." I stab the ignition, but the car resists. "She wants you comfortable."

Prue hadn't wanted  him to come at all, in fact. He's unstable, she'd said again this morning, as I downloaded  an audiobook-a biography of Noam  Chomsky  I should have read long ago-for the drive up. This  was an exaggeration,  though  Frank  has been less predictable, lately, than  in the six years I have known  him, phoning Prue at odd hours to kvetch about the government, or to solicit her "scientific opinion"  on matters completely outside her purview. She had tried to convince him to cancel the trip, but he had insisted. She would be delivering the College's annual  public lecture in the Life Sciences tomorrow, and he was determined to attend.  With  Prue  scrambling to finish  her  tenure dossier, and with  Frank  lacking  both  a car and  the  money to rent one, the task of ferrying him from his studio in Chester, Vermont, to our home in Rhode Island had fallen to me.
The engine sputters  to life. I swing an arm  behind  his seat, glancing back to find  a Labrador  between our taillights, towing a woman  in heels. I slam the brakes. She flips me off and stag­ gers after the dog, tenting a newspaper over her hair.

"It evicts me," Frank  says, "from  my goddamn skin. Turns me into a sleeping and eating machine,  is what it does."

The  Clozaril, he means. Prescribed for schizophrenia and, in rare cases-among them, Frank's-bipolar disorder.

"Like there's a twelve-foot margin between me and the world, is what it's like," he adds. "Between me and my own head."

"You seem present enough  to me," I say. He has complained about  the side effects of Clozaril  before-the night sweats, the vertigo-but never this obliquely.

"Nothing like when  I'm off them,"  he says. "When I'm off them, I'm myself. Only trouble is the gaps."

We coast onto the highway. To our left a Christmas tree shudders by, lashed to a van.

"Gaps in normality, and whatnot." He pins the plastic sleeve of the croissant between his knees. "In my ability ... "

The sleeve pops open, releasing a stale, buttery odor. I breathe through  my mouth, feeling the swill of irritation  and fatigue he so often compels in me.

"My ability to summon the cast of mind required  to shop and chat and pay bills," he concludes.
 
You can flush the pills, as for as I'm concerned, I do not say. While  I haven't confessed as much to Prue,  I have always taken Frank's diagnosis with a grain  of salt. Part of my skepticism has to do with  that increasing  bloated leviathan,  the psychiatric in­ dustry, whose ever-expanding DSM has become so lengthy that most  people will qualify  for one disorder  or  another  over the course of a lifetime, making sanity  itself a form  of deviance. It doesn't help that Prue invokes it every time Frank  strikes a nerve, as though  his provocations were nothing but the illness, ventrilo­ quized. Not since her childhood, at least as far as I know, has he suffered   the  pivots  from  elation  to  despair  that  characterize manic depression. What she calls his "mania" strikes me more as a weakness for grandstanding.
"It's not that I see things  or anything, when the gaps set in," Frank  continues, through a mouthful of croissant. "And it's not depression. It's that everything ... how to put it ... signifies."

Feeling his eyes on me, I say, ''I'm not sure what you mean  by that, Frank."

"Have you ever been to Grand  Central Station?"
"Sure."

"When  you walk in, what do you hear?"

I blow out my cheeks, defeated-as usual-by his passionate sincerity. "I don't know ... footsteps?"
"Voices, kid." He throws  up his arms, showering  my lap with crumbs.  "Imagine  that  you could  comprehend-couldn't  help but comprehend-every conversation  taking  place in that  hall. That the voices untangled into words, hundreds  of words, each one significant."

"Fuck," I mutter, so distracted  I've missed our exit. Traffic  is mounting. The  detour will cost us half an hour, at least.

"... what it felt like," Frank  is saying now. "I could have been walking down any godforsaken street, sober as hell, and become suddenly aware of the wind, the vowel called 'wind,' aware of the trees and  their dances, and it's not that I could have named  the language they spoke, or report on it now, except to say that every­thing, everything, meant."


Through the mist a row of flashing  lights comes into view, indicating the source of the gridlock: a totaled van-half-scorched, despite the drizzle. Shallow flames lap at the engine.

"You look  tired,"  Frank   erupts,  clapping  my  shoulder  so firmly that I swerve. "What's  on your plate these days, kiddo?"

''I'm doing fine, Frank."
"Work?  Trouble in paradise?"
"Prue's fine. We're fine."

With a spurt of dread, I wonder  whether it sounds as though I am protesting too much. Things have been strained  between us lately-inevitably, I suppose,  given the  stress of her  upcoming tenure decision, though  that can't be all it is. We have never been this out of sync before. Last week, if only to set myself at ease, I bought  us discount tickets to the Gal:ipagos for the winter holi­day. She wrote her dissertation  on the mating rituals of the albatross, and has always dreamed  of seeing it in its natural  habitat.

To change  the subject I add, "She's very touched that  you're coming."

This  "touched"  is an  accusation,  neither  intended  nor  de­ served. Frank  has been present for most of Prue's triumphs and setbacks. Too present, at times.

"You'll enjoy yourself," I say gently. "There'll be a party  at our  place after the lecture. Did she tell you? You'll get to meet some of her colleagues, and  Walt's bringing May."

Walt is Prue's younger brother, refugee ofEnron's marketing team  and  a subsequent, financially ruinous divorce. We have seen more of him  and  his seven-year-old  daughter than usual since their  move to Central  Falls. Thanks to his ex-wife's addic­tion to painkillers, he has full custody.

Frank offers me the final claw of bread, which I refuse. He says, ''Assumed  I'd have to field some eggheads."

Over time, I have learned  to smile at his contempt  for aca­ demia.  Prue, who  shares some of his scorn for  the  chattering class, despite being one of us herself, shrugs  off most of his jabs. I read them as deflected  self-reproach, the chagrin of an intellec­ tual who never made much of his mind.

"Supper?" Frank gestures at a blue sign overhead.

"You  just ate," I say, although  I could  use a proper  coffee. We'll be home well after dinner  at this rate.

"Didn't  hit the spot," he says. He roots around  in his pocket, producing a washcloth  too late to catch his sneeze. As he mops his nose I merge into the exit lane, provoking  a blast from  the truck  behind  us.

Frank  scratches his head, his white hair so thick he has to dig to reach the scalp. He says, "You've read it, yes?"

Prue's  lecture,  he must  mean.  She  hasn't  shared  the  docu­ ment with me, and I hadn't considered asking her to. Public lec­ tures are a rote affair at the College, well advertised but sparsely attended. Since my first  appointment, I have delivered  two for the  Philosophy Department. Both attracted  a  modest  turnout, and  the second boosted my upcoming tenure case. If it goes over well, Prue's should do the same.

"Wouldn't  want to ruin the surprise,"  I say.

The  off-ramp  deposits us onto a lunar  stretch  of banks and car dealerships. The  diner, glowing on our left, looks festive by comparison. Across the road, a green air puppet throbs  in time with our turn signal.
"You're in for one," Frank  mutters. His voice is freighted with what he isn't saying: I love her more. He has probably read multi­ ple drafts  of the speech  by now. Despite everything,  my heart goes out to him. He has so little else to occupy his days that I can hardly reproach him for caring so fiercely.

"She mentioned she'd gloss the birdsong study," I say.

The  experiment,  which tested songbirds'  ability to discrimi­nate between melodies, was published over the summer  in Nature Communications, a distinguished  multidisciplinary journal.  It is Prue's first  contribution   to  the  study  of  animal   "languages," which, after languishing for thirty  years, has recently resurfaced as a branch of biolinguistics. Thankfully, her approach bears no likeness to the hijinks that  passed for research in the seventies- anthropomorphized chimps, sex with dolphins, and worse-but the phrase itself still doesn't strike her as the oxymoron it is. Most discouraging  about  the recent scholarship I have skimmed  is its interchangeable  use of the terms "communication" and "lan­ guage," a confusion  to which Prue succumbs  regularly. When  I press her, she usually concedes that  communication-the ex­ change  of information-is not  remotely synonymous  with  lan­ guage,  that  sine  qua  non  of thought:  a finite  set  of elements capable, like the Arabic numerals, of infinite variation.

We park  before the diner-all chrome  and scabbed leather. Though it is barely six, and a Thursday, the place is close to full.

"So," Frank  says, after we order. "Birdsong."

He straightens his knife. The  lines between  his sharp  gray eyes have deepened  since June, when I saw him  last. His brows, set high on his forehead, give him a look of permanent  surprise.

"You're the expert, I hear," I say.
 
According to Prue, Frank  had badgered his local library into subscribing to Nature Communications,and would have invited half the town of Chester to her speech, had she not talked him down.

"What  do you know?"  he says, tucking  his napkin  into his collar.

His belligerence usually amuses me, but now I feel a stab of indignation, blunted by weariness. Before meeting Frank, I had allowed myself to imagine  him as a surrogate parent, cosmic rec­ ompense  for  losing  my own.  No  such luck. Though we have made  our  peace with  one another  over the  years, each reunion reaffirms that Prue is all we share.

"Well,"  I concede, "Prue's team  began by recording a phrase of birdsong, and then ..."
 
The   waitress  descends  with  my  coffee  and  turkey  salad. Frank, a longtime vegetarian, has ordered lentil soup. As she sets his bowl before him  he catches her lightly on the wrist, pushing her bracelet aside to reveal a tattooed Arabic phrase.

"Urn ..." She retracts her arm, glancing at me.

"Sorry," Frank  says. "Couldn't see it."

"Please excuse him," I offer, mortified, but she is already hur­
rying off.

"Frank;" I lean forward. "That was-"

"The body as a page ..." He rolls his fist over one of his pack­aged saltines. "Never got one myself. Never saw the appeal."

Laughter  flares from  the  booth  behind  me, followed by in­ fant babble.

"I interrupted you," Frank  says.

Though he is thin, there is a softness about his jaw. His fore­ head glints. Sweating and weight gain are side effects of Clozaril. As he tears open the cellophane, crumbling his crackers into his soup, I can't help but marvel at the fact that not even an antipsy­ chotic can neutralize him.

"About  the  experiment."  He  glances  up at  me. "You were saying?"

"Right."  It all seems so ludicrous,  suddenly-the exchange with the waitress, his soliloquy in the women's restroom, Prue's birds and his obsession with them-that I laugh.

"What?" he says.

"Sorry." I recover. "Exhaustion."

"You're very kind  to drive me all this way."

It's nothing,  I almost say. Instead I take a bite of turkey.

"You haven't read the study," Frank says, addressing his soup.

"Of course I have," I lie. Prue had summarized it for...