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By Root 2370 0

said she could get me a job working at the lab. Now that I had learned language, apparently I was even more valuable to science, and Norm wanted me back. They were willing, she said, to pay for my services, since this time around I was considered conscious enough to provide consent, and therefore would no longer be treated like a slave. I had freed myself from the animal slavery of my silent mind, only to be offered my previous job at pittance wages. I would be able to help pay for things around the house. The way Tal put it, there seemed to be no option. Bruno was all grown up now, and tight circumstances demanded it was time for him to go to work. I, Bruno, nobly, albeit begrudgingly, decided to accept her offer—or command, or whatever it was. I had to go back to the lab. I would do it, but only for Lydia. Simply put, we needed money, and I, like any whore, had nothing to sell but myself. So I sold myself back to science, and back to the lab I went.

Tal took me with her to the lab the next day. Oh!—308 Erman Biology Center! Norm was there, fat and irritating and beard-tugging as ever, right where we last left him, though his salt-and-pepper beard now had considerably more salt in it. The gray Formica tables, the salmon-colored vinyl floors, the thick glass enclosure, the faintly flickering and buzzing fluorescent lights—this place brought a tide of sense-memories back to me, and I almost drowned in it. I had gotten much bigger since I was here last—at three feet and ten inches and a stalwart one hundred and thirty pounds I was essentially full grown now—and so I was shocked by how small the things in the room appeared when contrasted with the images of them I had in my memory. Prasad and Andrea (and Tal, of course) were still working at the lab, but those were the only people from the old days whom I recognized, as the rest were grad students who had moved on and been replaced with new grad students. There were a lot of new faces. Norm received me back to the lab with a tone of welcome that only thinly masked his chilly resentment. He was obligatorily impressed with my language faculties, but at the same time I could see him seething beneath his beard with childish jealousy over the fact that my linguistic mind had truly come to blossom not under his guidance but under Lydia’s, and that he probably full well knew that in the process of my education he had been more of a hindrance than a help.

Since I bear no official documentation, I have never been able to legally work in this country or any other. Rather than pay me under the table per se, Norm decided to evade this ticklish legal problem by including my wages in Tal’s paychecks, effectively, for the books, making up the difference of my earnings by giving her a raise. And from Tal’s paychecks they went straight into paying off Lydia’s mounting medical bills. So I felt like an indentured servant during this time, as I never saw the actual cash proceeds of my labor.

So it was back to the grindstone of science with me. Every day a long nauseating wave of déjà vu. To the usual old tests they added a battery of new ones. I remember word-association games, Rorschach inkblot tests—all the classic psychoanalytic tactics. I also remember EEG tests, which for some reason I had to undergo once or twice a week. They would paste a nest of electrodes to my head and tell me to lie down in a bed and be absolutely still. Don’t move a muscle, they said. Even in this I found a way to rebel. I remember looking over at the needle scratching out a line on a scroll of graph paper that rolled on and on like the cylinder of a player piano, which was supposed to indicate the levels of my brain activity. I was told to lie still as a stone so that they could observe the spikes and dips that happened as a result of my mysterious inner processes while my body lay quiescent, instead of the less interesting spikes that happened due to muscle movements. For instance, if I lifted my right index finger, a spike would suddenly shoot up in the line the needle was etching out on the scroll of graph paper.