Half Brother (24 page)

Mom and Dad fought that night.

They woke me up. My digital clock said it was past one in the morning. They were still in the living room, so I quietly made my way to the top of the stairs.

“… can’t just make a unilateral decision like that,” Mom was saying. “It affects me too.”

“You’ll have had almost two full years with him,” Dad replied calmly. “That’ll give you ample data for your thesis, no problem.”

“Zan was more than a
thesis,
Richard. He was supposed to be a lifetime project for both of us.”

“It was a glorious idea, but it’s not working, and there’s nothing I can do about that.”

“There is. You’re too impatient. You’re not giving it enough time. Get rid of Jaworski and bring in someone else.”

“Greg was the perfect fit—you know that.”

“He has a very, very rigid view of language. He doesn’t even have his own children.”

“So what?”

“So he has no first-hand knowledge of how children learn language.”

“He’s done study after study—” “Yeah,
studies.”

“Which is exactly what
we
do, Sarah. Jaworski is respected.”
“You’re
respected.”

I heard Dad sigh, almost sadly. “Not like him.”

Mom said, “We moved our family across the country for this project, Richard. You left a good job at a good university. We left our friends behind in Ontario. We left our
families.”

“No great loss there.”

“Not for you, maybe. Unlike you, I actually love my family.”

“They drive you crazy, Sarah. You’re well clear of them.”

“Yes, the fewer people in your life, the better. People are so
inconvenient
to you.”

“What is it you want to
say,
Sarah?”

“You’re shutting down Project Zan because it’s more work than you imagined. Admit it. And I’m not talking about intellectual or even physical work.
Emotional
work. Zan wants relationships with us. He wants parents. He wants love. So what do you do? You walk away. If something’s not the way you want, you just
walk away.”

“This is absurd,” Dad said. “You’re talking about Zan like he’s a human.”

“I’m also talking about your own son.”

There was an awful silence. Then Dad said, “How many times do we have to have this discussion?”

“Richard, you didn’t even want your own
child,”
Mom said.

I was taking these tiny, silent sips of air, and felt suddenly light-headed.

“I didn’t want a child right
then,”
said Dad. “We were in the busiest stages of our educations. A lot of men would’ve walked away. I stuck it out.”

“Stuck it out,”
said Mom. “That’s really heroic. I was the one who put my career on hold so you could finish your PhD. You’ve had it your way always, Richard. You wanted this project, and now you’re killing it. Don’t you care how Ben feels about this?”

“Ben’s upset, but this is not just about a boy and a pet. It’s about my career. I started with nothing,” he said fiercely. “Everything I got, I worked like hell for: the best marks, the scholarships. Jobs. And I am not going to let this experiment wreck my reputation. Ben’ll get over it.”

“Maybe. But will he forgive you?” Mom said.

After that, their voices got too quiet for me to hear.

Even if Dad couldn’t answer Mom’s question, I had a feeling I could.

Through January and February I put Zan to bed myself whenever Mom and Dad let me. The students had no problem
leaving a bit early. I liked giving Zan his bath and putting him into his pyjamas and grooming him while he drank his bottle. Sometimes we looked at his favourite books, and sometimes I told him the story of his day. He’d groom me back, parting my hair, gently touching and removing bits of dried skin. He was always very calm, and loved having his hair combed as he lay across my lap.

He still wouldn’t go to sleep on his own, though. He’d arrange his blankets and his toys the way he wanted, but he needed you to lie down right beside him. Sometimes he’d leave an arm across your chest.

I didn’t mind. That was how they slept in the wild, in their tree nests, snuggled against their mothers.

As I lay there, I thought of ways to save the project, ways to convince Dad to keep it going. Peter and I were making a big list of ideas. Officially, Project Zan was still going ahead. None of the other students had been told it was ending. Dad said he’d do that later in the spring. I had a couple of months to change his mind.

It didn’t take Zan long to fall asleep, but it was a trick to get away without waking him. Before, I used to get impatient, first lifting his limp arm clear, then shifting my body away inch by inch, getting one leg down on the floor, then another, sliding my torso clear. Sometimes he’d wake up with a shriek and I’d have to start all over again.

But these nights, I stayed with him until I was sure he was deep asleep. I liked the heat of his body. I liked the faster beat of his heart against my own. A couple of times I even fell asleep myself and Mom had to come and wake me.

Once she let me sleep the whole night through with him. When I woke up, Zan was already awake and gently grooming the back of my head. He didn’t seem surprised to see me in his bed, but he was certainly happy, and as I’d opened the curtains and let the sunlight in, I felt good about myself.

I felt like I’d kept him safe.

I
n early March, Mr. Stotsky gave us a creative writing assignment. We’d been reading a collection of short stories that used all sorts of different descriptive techniques, and now we were supposed to write a piece about some part of our daily lives.

I started writing about a typical Sunday morning with Zan. It was fun; there was so much to describe and explain, but three paragraphs into it I started thinking about all the words I was using, and how easy that made it.

I had so many.

Zan had only sixty-six. I knew each of them by heart. At my desk I wrote them down on a fresh piece of paper. It didn’t seem like much to work with.

I started my piece again. I decided I would only use Zan’s words. I would try to tell the story of his morning in the only way he could tell it.

It took me quite a long time.

Up! Up now. Come give hug. Hug. Tickle! More tickle. Drink! Sweet drink. Now! No clean. No clean! Hug! Hug!

Gimme drink. More. Eat, drink. Good. Me eat. Hurry! Me eat. Banana! Apple. Gimme sweet. Hurry you. Milk good.

Where baby? My baby! Mine! More hide. More hide baby! Where baby? There baby! Baby drink. Eat baby eat! Baby! Mine!

Look book. Dog. Brush. Ball. Red ball. My book. Mine.

Out! Hurry! You me out! Now! Out!

Shoe on. Hurry shoe. Ball. Me ball.

Play sand. Bucket mine bucket. Hurry! Give shovel. Hide. Hide toy. Where toy? Me look. Me look. Where toy? There toy! More hide toy.

Listen. Listen bird. Bird eat. Listen. Me drink. Gimme sweet drink.

Come tickle. Kiss. Tickle hug. More. Up hug!

I called the piece “Sunday Morning.”

A week later, when we got our assignments back, my teacher put it face down on my desk. When I turned it over, I saw that he’d written
Stop messing about
and given me a C-.

That night I took it home and asked Mom and Dad to read it.

“It’s Zan’s vocabulary,” said Mom.

“I understand that,” Dad said impatiently, draining his whisky. “But you’re not a chimp, Ben. This is gibberish. What’re you trying to prove?”

He was right—I
was
trying to prove something. Something that might help change his mind.

“You’re saying he’s learning
words
but not
language,”
I said. “So maybe the problem is the words we’re teaching him. He does pretty well with them, but how much can you say with sixty-six words? You said it yourself.
Gibberish.”

“The amazing thing,” said Mom, looking at it again, “is how expressive it is.”

“Maybe with more words,” I said, “and
better
words, I mean, more verbs and stuff, his sentences would—”

“Ben, if you look at the raw data—and Greg and I have, over and over—you’ll see that mostly Zan uses the
same
very few words, and he uses them over and over again, for emphasis, for demands. There’s very little variation. He’ll just never have the grammar or sophistication to do anything more than this. I’m sorry, Ben, but that’s the truth.”

A few weeks later, Peter and I did an evening shift together. Zan was getting impatient for his dinner, bouncing around his suite. He ran right up to the small, locked refrigerator, thumped on it, and then signed:

Open food box.

Peter and I looked at each other, and I said, “Did you see that?”

It wasn’t just that he’d used a three-word phrase—a complete sentence too! It was that he’d never been taught the word for refrigerator. So he’d just gone and made one up on his own!

“It makes total sense.
Food box,”
said Peter.

“He’s never done anything like that before,” I said. “It’s a creative use of language!”

I felt this swelling of happiness and hope inside me. Maybe
this
was the kind of thing that would save Project Zan. A breakthrough! Could this change everything?

We told Dad right away, and he seemed interested.

“Zan did it three times?” he asked.

“Three times he called it a food box,” Peter said.

Dad pursed his lips and nodded thoughtfully. “Does it constitute an abstract use of language, though? He saw the fridge, which to him is just a box.”

“We’ve never called it that,” I pointed out.

“But he’s familiar with all sorts of other boxes,” Dad said. “Like the fun box.”

“But that’s an important distinction too,” said Peter. “Knowing that there can be many different
kinds
of boxes.”

“I’ll note it down and give Greg a call,” Dad said. “Get his take on it.”

“He just needs more words, Dad,” I said, “more time, then he’ll be able to put them together better!”

Zan had made up his own word—this was more than just memorizing or mimicking. If that wasn’t language, what was?

But I got the sense it didn’t matter to Dad. It was like he’d already decided the project was a failure, and nothing would change his mind.

Early in April, I told Mom and Dad all my ideas about how we could keep Zan, assuming the project was really going to be cancelled.

They both listened without saying anything, which freaked me out a bit, because I was so used to Mom, and especially Dad, interrupting me.

“I want to show you something,” Dad told me.

He got his attaché case from the hall and pulled out a newspaper clipping. It was a story about some woman in the U.S. who had a twelve-year-old pet chimp. The chimp had been in commercials for soft drinks and fast-food chains. He’d even been on a TV show as a wacky sidekick for a pizza delivery guy.

According to the news story, a repairman came over to fix the dishwasher, and the chimp decided he didn’t like the repairman. He attacked him. He mauled the guy’s face, crushed his hands and might have killed him if the chimp’s owner hadn’t started stabbing her own pet with a steak knife. Then the cops came and shot the chimp dead.

“They’re not pets, Ben,” said Mom gently.

I shook my head. “Zan would never do anything like that.”

“Look what he did to Ryan,” Dad pointed out. “That was with baby teeth.”

“I bet this other chimp wasn’t raised like Zan,” I said. “Maybe he wasn’t treated well. Peter said they beat show biz chimps if they don’t behave. Anyway, when Zan bit Ryan, it was because of that stupid chair of yours. Ryan deserved it.”

“How about Joyce Lenardon?” Dad said.

That took the wind out of my sails. Joyce hadn’t done a thing to provoke Zan into biting her. That’s what had made it scary; it seemed really sudden and unpredictable.

“The fact is,” said Mom, “we can’t keep a chimp in our house.”

I looked at her. “But I thought you … you loved him.” Mom just smiled at me, sadly and kindly. “I’m a scientist too, Ben.”

“It’s better for everyone,” Dad said. “Not me,” I said. “And not Zan.”

Dad made the official announcement at the next Sunday meeting. I was allowed to attend.

He told everyone Project Zan was being shut down. There were lots of questions. There was confusion. There were some tears.

Dad sat placidly in his armchair. “Despite all that he’s learned, despite his proficiency and the occasional flare for creativity, Greg Jaworski and I are not convinced he’s learning human language—or ever will. But he’s taught
us
a great deal, and for that we’re very grateful to him.”

“What will happen to him?” asked one of the students.

“Well, technically Zan is the property of the university, and they, like me, understand that Zan belongs to science.”

The phrase made me feel sick to my stomach. Zan didn’t
belong
to science. He belonged to his real mother, but we’d stolen him and raised him to think he belonged to us.

“That means,” said Dad, “that we were eager to find a good home for him elsewhere. Not a zoo. Not the entertainment industry. But a proper research institution.”

“Not a biomedical lab,” Peter said.

Dad looked at Peter in surprise. “I would never transfer Zan to a biomedical lab.”

“So no invasive procedures?” Peter asked.

Invasive,
I knew, meant getting stuck with needles, or cut open.

Dad shook his head. “Siegal University in northern Nevada has a primate institute that is very well regarded. I’ve been talking to them about Zan and they’re willing to take him on.” He paused and looked around the table. “And they do not conduct any kind of biomedical experiments. Zan’s new home will be a very, very good one.”

“So the university’s sold Zan?” I said.

Dad looked over at me. “Yes. It’s a standard transaction with animal test subjects.”