• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 2260 0

wall. From time to time a train roared by above us. The tracks shook, the wheels of the train grinding against the tracks squealed and screamed, the whole place wobbled, thundered, and all the puppets dangling from the ceiling came alive and began to dance at the command of the train’s reverberations in the night. Their arms and legs and their grinning, grimacing heads jiggled and flailed, their wooden limbs clicked and clattered together as they danced. When I finally did fall asleep, my sleep was thrashing and fitful, and I dreamed of nothing but grinning little wooden men, dancing on the ceiling. That was a place where dream always teetered on the razor’s edge of nightmare. Lydia never took me back to that place again.

The finger-biting incident, though, happened one morning in the lab. For some reason I had slept poorly the night before, I don’t recall why. But in any event I was groggy and irritable, and not particularly looking forward to the day’s work ahead of me. We were doing some experiment; I think it had to do with more novel spoken instructions to manipulate various objects in various ways. Lydia was away, doing something else. I don’t know why, but she wasn’t in the room. Neither was Norm. I recall that it was just Tal and Prasad in the room with me. Tal was sitting with me on my squishy blue mat behind the glass wall that divided the domain of the human from the domain of the chimp. Prasad was on the other side of the glass, sitting at one of the lab tables, drinking a cup of tea and perusing some paperwork. Tal was holding a box of raisins.

Now, I liked raisins. But I did not love them. Tal was feeding me raisins, one for each successfully completed task. I guess this was before Norm orchestrated the complicated mock-capitalist system with the numbered chips. I must have misremembered when exactly that took place, Gwen, because I suppose otherwise Tal wouldn’t have been baiting me with direct food rewards. Or maybe she secretly harbored some personal moral or philosophical disgust with Norm’s value-chip system and so she just didn’t use it when Norm wasn’t around, which is also distinctly possible. Now that I think back on it, I remember that Tal had also chosen not to wear the frightening black metal welding mask that Norm insisted the experimenters wear when they asked me to perform their stupid tasks—so maybe that was indeed the case.

“Put some soap on the ball,” she would say, taking special care to emphasize the nouns and the preposition. Back in those days it was very important to use the right preposition with me. And I would pick up a bottle of liquid hand soap and obediently squirt a little of it on top of my inflatable yellow beach ball. This task completed, Tal handed me a squishy raisin from the box. A raisin. Must other creatures sing for their suppers so? I wasn’t even hungry. I took the raisin from her hand and set it down beside me for future consumption.

“You don’t want the raisin, Bruno?” she said.

I shook my head no. I did not, in fact, want the raisin at that moment. Tal continued with the experiment.

“Put the froggie in the refrigerator.”

(There was a small refrigerator in the lab; the froggie was a rubber frog that whimpered when squeezed.) Debased slave that I was, I put the froggie in the refrigerator. Tal dug her fingers into the depths of the raisin box and rummaged around in it for a raisin. It was the kind of raisin box that was red, with a picture of a beautiful girl with raven-black hair spilling from her bonnet, bearing in her arms a bountiful basket of grapes, her back to a blazing yellow sun rising behind her. I listened to the sound of her fingers rattling the raisins against the inner walls of the thin cardboard box. She finally successfully fished a raisin out of the raisin box, and held it out for me to take.

Now why, I ask, would I want another fucking raisin? I had just told her that I didn’t really even want the first one! She held out her hand, with the sad black gummy thing rolling around in the cup of her palm like a tiny turd. I did not want it. Not