Half Brother

by Kenneth Oppel

  “Or renting him out for commercials.”

  Peter blew out a big breath. “Well, that’s a whole other can of worms. I mean, we put him in show biz and we’re making him sing for his supper all over again.”

  I remembered how Dad had turned down a couple of offers to use Zan in TV commercials. They’d wanted to put him in overalls and muddy boots and get him to walk around the kitchen and make a mess, and then show how you could clean up, even after all that, if you just used their amazing new kind of soap.

  Even though the money was tempting, Dad had thought it would interfere with the experiment and the family stuff, and it would look like we were profiting from Zan instead of studying him. But that was all over now.

  “I don’t like it either,” I said. “But it’s better than him getting sent away, isn’t it? You don’t think Dad would send him to a lab, do you?”

  Peter looked out the windows for a few seconds. “I don’t think so.”

  “You won’t tell anyone else about this yet, right?” I said.

  He shook his head. “I think a few people are picking up rumours. That robot, Ryan Cross, he seems to have some idea what’s going on.”

  I said, “I just don’t want everyone quitting on Zan right now. Dad says we’ve got enough money until the spring.”

  Peter nodded. “Bottom line, Ben—even if your dad had money, he doesn’t want Zan around. He’ll see it as … an embarrassment, you know. The experiment he lost control of. The one that got away. Come on, throw your bike in my trunk and I’ll drive you home. Your parents are going to be worried about you.”

  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.

  EIGHTEEN

  THE LAST SIGN

  In 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.”

  With every mention of Zan’s new home, I felt like the walls of my chest were collapsing until no air was reaching me. Some of the students were looking at me, so I stared at the carpet.

  “What kind of facility is it?” Peter asked.

  “Well, I can tell
you, the chimps have twenty-five acres of land and more facilities and professional support staff than we had here. Zan would also have company. They’ve got some adolescents as well as some adults. And the director, Jack Helson, is very knowledgeable. Zan will be in good hands.”

  No one said anything.

  “Now, I just want to assure you all,” Dad said, “that none of this has anything to do with your performance on the project. Project Zan was not a failure, ladies and gentlemen. This is science. A pursuit of the truth. It’s not wish fulfillment. It’s not fantasy. It told us the truth and we have to accept that. Now, as it happens, I have a relatively new experiment underway, and it’s likely to get a great deal larger very soon. I’d be happy to welcome any of you as research assistants, if you’re interested.”

  “The rats,” said Peter.

  “Correct,” Dad said. “It promises to be a very fruitful project.”

  It was Monday, mid-April, beautiful outside, but everything was colourless to me. In two weeks, Zan would be going to his new home. I didn’t care about school. Sometimes I didn’t even bother handing in my homework. I became a clock watcher. I didn’t talk to anyone. Jennifer started looking like someone I’d known a long time ago. A few times David tried to talk to me, but it made me embarrassed, like he just pitied me. I didn’t talk in class. I stayed out of people’s way.

  When I got home from school, Peter was outside with Zan. When he saw me through the sliding glass he waved me out.

  “What’s up?” I said.

  He smiled. “I’m going with him.”

  It was like the blue in the sky, the green in the trees, had suddenly come back a bit. “You mean to Nevada?”

  He nodded. “I told your dad I wanted to keep working with Zan, and I applied to grad school at Siegal. Your dad wrote a letter of recommendation for me. And he helped me put together a proposal for working with Zan, to see if he’d teach the other young chimps to sign. I guess Jack Helson has all sorts of projects going on down there and he seemed to think this would fit in with some of them.”

  “Dad helped you?” I said.

  “A lot.”

  I didn’t want to like Dad right now, but I couldn’t deny he’d done a nice thing, a good thing. Zan wouldn’t be alone. He’d have his favourite friend with him. It wouldn’t be me, but it would be the next best thing.