The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore - Benjamin Hale [37]
I wanted to speak for them, I honestly did. But with all those faces, those anticipant faces looking at me wondering and agog, I found that I simply could not perform. I tried. God knows I tried. I kept pointing at myself and trying to pronounce my name, but getting nothing out but pitiful burping and puttering noises. They must have been watching me try to say my name for an hour at least—but all for naught. Eventually they all peeled off and drifted away and went back to what they had each been doing before my utterance; I realize in retrospect this was probably a ruse—perhaps they thought my awareness of being observed was making me self-conscious and hampering my speech, that I would only have been able to speak when nobody expected me to. And perhaps they were right. But Lydia remained vigilant beside me for hours afterward, still coaxing me in a pleading whisper to speak.
I could not do it. I just could not speak for her, as badly as I wanted to. I was ashamed and embarrassed. I was experiencing the verbal equivalent of impotence. I don’t know why, but I could not speak.
But I do know that that evening, from my vantage point inside my cage I witnessed—but did not overhear in any detail—a very long and intense discussion, conducted on the part of both participants in the surreptitious sibilant hush of children talking in their beds after lights-out, between Dr. Lydia Littlemore and Dr. Norman Plumlee, who sat facing one another in the semidarkness of the lab after hours, hunched over one of the lab tables with elbows planted on the table. And I do know that I thought I could perceive a look of supplication on Lydia’s face, and an aspect of forbidding and reluctance on Norm’s. And I do know that Lydia said something that made Norm’s face smile, lighten, and soften. And I do know that shortly after this moment the conversation was considered finished, they had come to some sort of conclusion—most likely Norm had decided to acquiesce to a proposal of Lydia’s that he had initially regarded with dislike. And I know that Lydia and Norm then gathered up their things and stuffed them into satchels and struggled into their jackets and wound their scarves around their necks and did all the stuffing and zipping and buttoning prerequisite to venturing outside, because it had become quite cold by now, and I know they waved good-bye to me and switched off the fluorescent lights and let the door sigh shut and lock behind them. And I also know that the two of them had been talking together for so long after the end of the normal workday that they had overlapped with Haywood’s night shift, because he entered the room almost as soon as they had left it. This is why I also know that they surely must have passed him in the hallway on their way to the elevator, they with their coats and scarves on and fat satchels swinging in their hands and he pushing his cart with the bags and rags and mops and brooms, with his crazy bidirectional eyes and limping walk and face perturbed with tics and shudders and his black rubber boots and long keychain and hoop of many keys, walking kLOMPa-whap-SHLINK every step down the dark and echo-haunted hallway, and perhaps—this I do not know—perhaps they even exchanged a nod or a wave or a smile or a mumbled hello, though I suppose it is more likely that they ignored him completely. And I do know that the next day, at the close of the work day, I was not locked in my cage, because Lydia on that day would take me home to live with her. To live with her—in her home—with her. And I do know that I would never again sleep in conditions of enforced confinement. (Until, of course, now.) And I do know that scarcely had I finished listening to the binging and bonging of the elevator in the hall and the scrolling