The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore - Benjamin Hale [21]
There were other humans in the room. They crowded around to have a look at me. Lydia introduced me to a man whom I recognized from the day of the peaches. She took my rubbery little hand and held it out to him for a mock handshake, and the man gently smothered it in the hot flesh of his own fat hand and smiled.
“Bruno,” said Lydia, “this is Norm. I believe you two have met each other before. Norm is the director of the Behavioral Biology Lab. Norm is a very smart man.”
“Hello, Bruno,” said Norm, as he relinquished my hand to me. “It’s an extraordinary pleasure to meet you. Do you remember me from our peaches experiment?”
I proffered him no reply.
“You showed us that day that you are a very interesting little guy, Bruno. You just might be a very important chimp.”
He smiled at Lydia and she smiled brightly back. I saw something in this exchange of faces between them that I did not like. Lydia took off her glasses and tucked a strand of hair behind her ear.
This man was Dr. Norman Plumlee. Remember that name. He was taller than Lydia but not by much, and I think he was in his late forties at the time. His face was porcine and buttery, the top of his head shiny and bald. Curly salt-and-pepper hair, more salt than pepper, wrapped around the back and sides of his head and curled over the ears into a kempt and understated beard that traced the edges of his jaw and encircled his mouth and looked like a crust of burnt toast. Unstylish glasses clamped the sides of his bulbous nose and unnaturally magnified his brown eyes, and when he raised his thick eyebrows he compressed the skin of his forehead into deep-creased strata, making his forehead look like a stack of flapjacks. His hands were thick and his fingers resembled sausages. He was overweight but not what I’d call fat. He spoke with a faint trace of an accent; I would later learn that there is a country called England, and that this man hailed from it. This meant that he incongruously added h’s to words that don’t have them and took h’s away from other words that do, many of his r’s became “ahs,” and when asking a question the pitch of his voice went up-up-UP-down? instead of up-up-UP?
There were several other humans present besides Lydia Littlemore and Norman Plumlee who were introduced to me in turn. Andrea was a young woman with a buoyant mop of flame-red hair, her nose the epicenter of an explosion of rusty freckles. Prasad was a small and middle-aged dark-skinned bald man with glasses. Jake was a lean and energetic young man with pallid skin and sandy hair. I was passed from one pair of arms to another, from one body to the next. All of them held me and played with me and spoke to me, but I was wiggly and impatient in the arms of anyone but Lydia.
People said things I failed to understand. Information was communicated—things were said that produced thoughtful expressions, things were said that produced ripples of laughter—but I didn’t get any of the jokes; it was all glossolalia to me. My understanding of language was so inchoate that the only words I managed to pick out of their fog of babble were my own name and Lydia’s. I don’t believe anyone began any serious attempts to instruct me on that first day in the lab. I wasn’t yet sure whether I would stay here or if I would be immediately returned to my family and the only home I had ever known in the Primate House of the Lincoln Park Zoo.
In any event my memory from this period is jumbled. I can’t recall what happened