The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore - Benjamin Hale [28]
“It’s okay—it’s okay,” said Lydia. She put on her glasses and immediately took them off again, and with both hands tucked two wisps of hair behind the ridges of her ears. “He’s probably in shock, Norm. He’s never spent a night away from home before. He just got a little freaked out last night.”
I was on the floor. I ran to Lydia and jerked on the leg of her pants and she picked me up and I hugged her and held on to her and planted my face against the soft flesh of her neck. I was forgiven.
I devoured some of the dehydrated food pellets that I had scattered the night before, not because they were at all palatable but because I had awoken with a belly roiling and snarling from hunger. I was permitted to play with my toys, but I did so only listlessly. The other humans arrived one by one with morning coffee steaming in their mugs. That day the experiments began in earnest. I remember how they presented me with flash cards with different symbols printed on them, and asked me, I think, to distinguish the cards from each other. I remember people making gestures at me, signs I was expected to attempt to emulate. I remember one particular experiment—all of these were repeated time after time and day after day, week upon week, I ought to remember them—in which I was shown an assortment of objects: stones, metal washers, pencils, plastic flowers, and small stuffed animals resembling pigs, chickens, rabbits, elephants, lizards, and the like (although they were not to scale—the elephant, for example, was the same size as the chicken). The human named Norm, the human who was clearly “in charge” here because all the other humans—even Lydia—seemed to defer authority to him, stored these artifacts in a big brown cardboard box that he removed from one of the cabinets under one of the long gray lab tables. He dumped the contents of the box onto the surface of the table and proceeded to sort them out for me, grouping the objects like with like: flowers with flowers, animals with animals, washers with washers, and stones with stones. Then, after sorting them, he would put all of the objects back in the box, shake it vigorously so as to randomly redistribute the contents and dump them back onto the table, then make a gesture indicating that I should sort them, like with like. If I sorted correctly, I was rewarded with a treat. If I sorted incorrectly, the treat was withheld.
I partook in these and other such experiments. They were fun, though sometimes I grew weary of them. Sometimes I was allowed to sit in the corner of the room on the squishy blue mat and manipulate my toys, and sometimes Lydia joined me. Oftentimes I crawled into her arms and looked into her bright brazen eyes and played with her bright blond hair. At lunchtime she put a collar on my neck and attached a leash (a degrading necessity in those early days), then picked me up and carried me through the building, down the stairs, and outside into the world, which was sunny but still soggy from yesterday’s rain. She brought her lunch with her in a brown paper bag. I was not particularly hungry because I had been plied with treats all morning for all the tasks I had correctly performed. She brought me to a courtyard behind the building that housed the Behavioral Biology Lab, a stretch of grass cut through with a brick path and surrounded by several buildings made of gray stone. There were many tall trees whose trunks were gray and knotted and gnarled like old men’s arms. Lydia sat down on a picnic bench and removed from the paper bag the following items: a turkey sandwich, diagonally bisected into two right triangles and wrapped in crinkly wax paper; a bottle of vitamin water; a green apple; and a “power” bar, which was a compact rectangular block of tightly compressed nutrients with raisins