The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore - Benjamin Hale [36]
I looked at Lydia, and pointed at myself, and said to her: “Bruno.”
She answered me with this face: her eyes bugging, her nether lip hanging open and violently a-tremble.
This was hardly my water pump moment. I had been speaking my name to Haywood for months. It just happened to be the moment that I decided—partly out of my shame for having embarrassed and disappointed Lydia—to speak to her, to let her in on my secret world.
“Bruno—,” she said, craning her neck forward. She snatched off her glasses and let them dangle down on her chest. “What did you say?”
I looked at her blankly.
“Hey—” She stood up and shouted at the other scientists in the lab. “HEY!”
Like my moles ascending from the mole holes of my Whack-a-Mole system, all over the lab the heads of the other scientists popped up and turned toward Lydia.
“What?” they said all in unison. Lydia stood up.
“Bruno just—um. He just spoke. He said his name.”
Lydia’s eyes were enormous with shock and delight. She laughed: her body spontaneously convulsed with a breathy flutter of disbelieving laughter, and she put a hand to her mouth. She shook her head and blinked her eyes. With both hands she slid her hair behind her ears, then threw her hands in the air, slapped the tops of her thighs, and made a series of other gestures. Norm Plumlee made confused eyes at her and arched an incredulous eyebrow, and his forehead furrowed thickly.
“What?” he said. One could almost see a blizzard of question marks sprouting in the airspace above his head.
“Bruno just pointed at himself and said his name.”
The other scientists in the lab all stopped what they had been doing and immediately crowded around me on my squishy blue mat. Lydia knelt to the floor before me and looked deeply and passionately into my chimp eyes. She put on her glasses, then immediately snatched them off again, then tucked two stray strands of her hair behind her ears with both hands, then used these same hands to clap three times in rapid succession.
“Come on, Bruno. What did you say?”
I opened my mouth. But my lungs had been robbed of their oxygen. I don’t know what happened. I had just spoken—it was no accident, I knew that I had consciously and deliberately spoken my name to Lydia just a moment before. But I was speechless now. My diaphragm would not cooperate, it refused to provide the upward thrust of air in the throat necessary to bring a word into being. A demon of silence had entered me.
I looked from one face to the next, at the faces of all these scientists standing behind Lydia and looking down at me. Lydia quickly whipped her head around to cast a look behind her shoulder, and said: “Somebody get a tape recorder!”
Andrea scurried away in search of the tape recorder.
“Where is it?”
“I don’t know.”
“Come on, Bruno. Say that again. I’m Lydia. Who are you? What’s your name?”
“I can’t find it!”
“Do that again. Do that again. Please, do it for me. Say ‘Bruno.’ ”
“Do you want a treat?” said Norm, or something like it. “Say that again and you will have a treat.”
“Got it!”
Now the flame-haired Andrea knelt on her knees beside Lydia, aiming a small gray hissing box at me. Norm was standing behind them, flapping a treat in his fingers in an “I bet you want this, don’t you?” way. Prasad looked on with his arms skeptically crossed. All eyes were focused on me, all ears turned sharply in my direction.