The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore - Benjamin Hale [60]
On one of my better-behaved days—which, as my size, strength, intelligence, boredom, and general restlessness in the lab increased, became less and less frequent—one of Norm’s teaching assistants brought a class to the lab to visit, to watch me prove my competency at understanding spoken English. By this time they had removed the metal cage they had put me in during the early days of the project, and built a large enclosure in the room made of thick glass. The glass wall divided the room into two areas: one for me and the scientists, and the other for people who would visit, so that they could stand behind the glass and watch me work without fear of me ripping their faces off. The arrangement unpleasantly reminded me of the zoo, but I dealt with it. The students all crowded round outside the glass wall, their wet breaths blowing spots of fog on the surface of the glass. This particular experiment had been filmed many times. Nearly everything we did in the lab was now caught on video, by several cameras perched on tripods that had been erected at several points in the room to catch all the action. The Bruno Show was filmed every weekday, beginning in the morning when Lydia brought me to the lab and ending when she took me home. The scientists would later spend countless hours analyzing my behavior, watching my videos and carefully recording data.
I knew the drill. Lydia sat with me inside the glassed-in area of the lab. Norm was outside the wall with the students. Lydia was the one conducting the experiment because I responded to her vocal commands far more often than I did to Norm’s. My personal dislike of Norm rendered me less inclined to grant all his meaningless requests. But nowadays I almost always did them when Lydia asked, as a personal favor to her. Safely protected by the glass wall, Norm was showing me off, speaking about me to all his students, like a mountebank at a county fair, step right up, ladies and gentlemen, come marvel at the freak of nature we’ve grown in this very laboratory. Inside my play area were all kinds of objects: boxes, bags, stuffed animals, toys and such.
Lydia would say to me, “Bruno, please put the snake in the bag.”
And I would respond by picking up the slack green lifeless rubber snake and dropping it in the nearby brown paper grocery sack. Then she would say, speaking slowly, forcefully and articulately, “Put the soap on the doggie.”
I would pick up the bar of soap, walk over to the stuffed dog, and place it on its back.
“Good job, Bruno. Now put the elephant in the box.”
I picked up the stuffed elephant and dropped it in the cardboard box.
This is the way it usually went. However, Norm had recently added an extremely unsettling detail to this procedure. Lydia wore a flat black metal mask that completely obscured her face, with a rectangular window of opaque green glass for her eyes. I am told that this was a welding mask. She also wore a pair of oven mitts on her hands. Dressed in this insane costume—like a baker in Hell—she would ask me to perform the pointless tasks with the objects strewn about the floor of the playpen. I did not know what could be the reason for these new details that had been added to the ritual. Lydia looked slightly terrifying in this costume. Still, I knew it was her under there, and so I gamely complied with the requests coming from the tinny, echoey voice buried beneath the black metal mask.
And why, you may ask, why did Norm require Lydia to wear oven mitts and a welding mask during the experiment? This was to assure skeptics that I was receiving no visual cues from her face or hands, and had to rely on her spoken words alone for information. It was done to dissuade any potential accusation that I wasn’t comprehending spoken language so much as constructing a web of