The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore - Benjamin Hale [23]
The first to leave was the lean and energetic young man with sandy-colored hair who had been introduced to me as Jake. He signaled his parting by slinging a rucksack over one shoulder, hooking one thumb under the strap, and using his free hand to gesture: he held out the hand with an open palm and fingers widely spaced, jerked it once to one side and left the hand in this position until the other humans acknowledged it with similar gestures, though some of them would acknowledge it merely by making a certain facial expression that was sometimes—though not always—accompanied with a deft dipping-down-and-then-up of the head, which I later came to know as a “nod,” a common human signal that can mean either an affirmative answer to a binary question or a no-harm sign—its opposite being a side-to-side movement of the head, which is called a “shake.” Vertical—yes—nod; horizontal—no—shake: these were some of the earliest signs I learned. Even though each human made the sign in a different way it was always interpreted identically, which told me that this sign enjoyed a certain marginal plasticity of process that allowed for the insertion of the signer’s personal style. The flame-haired Andrea, for instance, made this sign in a manner that I later came to understand is considered more feminine: by bringing one hand close to her body, and, palm-out, thumb more or less stationary, flapping her four fingers up and down repeatedly while using her face to smile. Prasad, the dark-skinned and bespectacled man, made his egress while gesturing so subtly that his sign was nearly invisible, but his leaving was still perceived as benign. The form of these hand gestures appeared to be so wildly disparate dependent upon the gesturer that the only thing cluing me in to the fact that they essentially all had the same meaning was the fact that each provoked the same interpretation. This gesture was, of course, a “wave.” This too I learned quickly. It is really astonishing how far a communicative arsenal consisting only of a nod, a shake, and a wave can carry you; with these three signs you can say to anyone yes, no, harm, no harm, hello, and good-bye. Add to these the smile, the frown, and the finger point, and you’re practically already in basic-human-social-interaction business.
And then a thing of terror happened. The only humans remaining in the room now were Norman Plumlee and Lydia. While Plumlee was busying himself with some end-of-day chores, Lydia picked me up from the surface of the squishy blue mat, where I had been idly spinning the colorful beads of the abacus, and carried me to another part of the room where, atop one of the long gray Formica tables, there stood: a cage. Yet another cage. Granted, this cage was much larger than the one in which I had been conveyed from the zoo to the laboratory, but it was a cage nonetheless. In it was a bowl filled with dry and unpalatable food pellets, and a voluminous bottle of water strapped to the bars on one side of the cage with a metal tube coming out of the bottom of it, from which I was expected to drink, like a fucking hamster. A fuzzy blanket and a squishy blue mat made of a material identical to the one on the floor covered the bottom of the cage. It was tall enough that I could easily stand up in it, and spacious enough that I could walk four or five paces from one end of it to another. I could see through all four sides of the cage, composed of thin steel bars. All told—yes, I had been in worse cages. But it was, goddammit, a cage.
Lydia placed me inside the cage and shut the door and locked it. My heart didn’t so much break as drop uncontrollably through a hollow shaft in my chest like an elevator with a snapped cable.
Dr. Plumlee joined her in looking in at me. Lydia made the same gesture of polite parting to me as the other humans had made to each other. Her wave