Half Brother (3 page)

“I think we should start using sign language with Zan now,” Dad said over breakfast one morning in mid-July.

I looked at him over my spoonful of cornflakes. “He’s only, like, three weeks old.”

“I think it’s a good idea,” said Mom. “Just so he gets used to seeing the signs.”

“We’ll have the whole team of research students by fall,” said Dad, “and that’s when we’ll start teaching him properly. But for now I’ve drawn up a short list of high-frequency words. These’ll be his first words, so if we can give him a head start, so much the better.” He nodded at the big kitchen bulletin board, where he’d tacked up a list.

Up. Drink. Give. More. Eat. You. Me.

“Hang on,” I said.
“I’m
supposed to learn sign language, too?”

“It’s pretty easy, Ben,” said Dad. “And it would really help Zan. And the project.”

I shrugged. “It’s not
my
project.” I shovelled more cornflakes into my mouth, staring down into my bowl. Mom and Dad didn’t say anything, but from the corner of my eye I saw them glance at each other, then back at me. Dad had his calm, psychologist expression on.

“I know all this change has been tough on you, Ben,” he said, “and it’s perfectly normal to feel jealous of—”

“I’m
not
jealous of Zan!” I said, looking at him, sucking happily on a bottle in Mom’s arms. Zan was fine: I didn’t feel much about him, one way or another. But I was sick to death of the
project.
I’d been hearing about it for months and months back in Toronto and, for the past two weeks, it was
pretty much all Mom and Dad talked about. They’d dragged me across the country for it, I had no friends—and now I was supposed to help them out?

“I don’t ask you guys to do my homework,” I muttered.

Mom laughed. “He’s got a point,” she said to Dad.

Dad nodded patiently. “It is an unusual project, Ben, I know. But Mom and I wouldn’t be doing this if we didn’t think it was going to be something truly remarkable. Think about it,” he said, and I couldn’t help looking up from my cereal to meet his gaze. “This isn’t a typical animal behaviour study. This is the first proper human attempt to talk, actually
talk,
with another species. Chimps are our closest relatives, and they’re extremely smart, but we’ve never had a conversation with them! If we can give them the tools of language, imagine what they might tell us, teach us! It’s incredible.”

Some of this I’d heard before, but it did sound exciting. It was like something from a sci-fi movie. One day people would read about it in
Popular Science,
and I could be a part of it. I caught myself nodding as Dad carried on, his eyes bright, his hands grasping at the air for emphasis.

“And that’s why the project’s whole design is so radical,” he said. “We’re trying to teach another species our language. Human language. So we need to raise Zan like a human baby, so he can learn language just like a human would. No cages. No labs. He’s one of us now. He has a crib and clothes and toys. And most important he has a family. He has a mother and a father—and a big brother too.”

“Ben,” Mom called up the stairs, later that morning. “There’s someone here for you.”

“Who?” I asked as I went down.

“I don’t know,” she whispered.

I reached the bottom of the stairs and looked out through the open front door. A kid about my age was riding around on his bike in the driveway.

I went to the door. “Hi,” I said.

“Hey. You just moved in, right?” the kid asked.

“Yeah, about a month ago.”

“I live up the road,” he said. “I’ve seen you cycle by.”

He coasted a bit closer to the door, keeping his bike balanced without putting down his feet. He was pretty good. He had shaggy blond hair and was fairly big without being huge. He smiled a lot.

“So, you coming out?” he asked.

“Yeah, sure, hang on.”

I went and told Mom I was going out. She seemed pleased.

“I’m Ben,” I said as I wheeled my bike out from the garage.

“Tim,” he said. “What grade are you in?”

“Going into eight. You?”

“Same. Are you going to Brentwood?”

“Yeah.” That was the local public school. “Is it pretty good?”

“Awful,” he said, grinning.

We charged around on our bikes. I let him lead the way, pumping hard to keep up. We went past where they were building the new subdivision, and Tim slowed down so we were alongside each other.

“It’s really cool in there,” he said. “We go there sometimes when they’re not working.”

I remembered the figures I’d seen once at dusk. Then Tim sped up again and took me down some roads I didn’t know, and we ended up at a little plaza where there was a bakery that had a big cooler with all different kinds of pop.

We sat outside on the edge of the sidewalk and drank from the sweaty bottles.

“You play soccer?” Tim asked.

“Not much.”

“Football?”

I shook my head.

“Any sports?”

“I run. Cross-country,” I said.

He grimaced, like that didn’t count.

“I do a lot of photography,” I said, feeling I needed to make myself look better. “I wouldn’t mind making movies one day maybe.”

“That’s cool,” he said. “Where you from?” “Toronto.”

“What’d you come here for?” “A stupid monkey,” I said. He laughed and sprayed out some pop.
“What?”
“Well, a chimp actually,” I said, and told him about the project.

“That’s crazy,” he said. “You like pinball?” “Yeah!”

“We’ve got a pinball machine in our rec room.” I looked at him in amazement. “Really?”

“Yeah. Dad got it used from one of his customers. It’s pretty good. You’ve got a second set of flippers up the ramp. C’mon.”

It turned out Tim lived just a couple of minutes up the road from us, in a small blue house. I’d passed it lots of times on my bike but never seen him. We went in the side door, straight down to the basement. The rec room had a low ceiling, and wood panelling. The carpet was dingy. There was a TV and a couple beat-up sofas and some coffee tables and a floor lamp. On the wall was a truck calendar. The whole room smelled like old shoes.

Blinking quietly in one corner was a
Planet of the Apes
pinball machine. On the back panel were pictures of angry-looking gorillas in helmets and armour and rifles, chasing humans in tattered rags. I’d seen the movie, and it was pretty exciting.

I’d never known anyone who had a pinball machine in their house. In Toronto there was an Italian coffee place near the school where we sometimes played at lunchtime, and it cost a quarter. Tim just pushed the red start button on the side, and the machine burbled to life, popping out the first ball. Tim was excellent, no surprise, since he had the thing in his house. He played the first ball for about ten minutes before losing it. Then it was my turn.

We talked a bit as we played. He loved soccer and was on a local rep team. His dad was a plumber. He had a brother two years older than him. His favourite subject at school was gym. He liked Charlton Heston movies. He liked Led Zeppelin and hated the Osmonds, especially Donny.

“Want to see something?” he asked after we’d been playing for about half an hour.

“Sure,” I said.

He took me through a doorway into the unfinished part of the basement. There were a couple of bashed-up deep freezes, only one of which was humming. Tim went to the quiet one and hefted up the lid. A musty smell of paper wafted out and I looked down at pile after pile of magazines with naked women on the covers. The sheer number of them, and all that skin, stunned me. The sudden heat in my cheeks travelled all the way down between my legs.

“Wow,” I said, swallowing and looking over at Tim. Even he looked kind of awestruck, gazing at them like the contents of a treasure chest.

“Yeah,” he said.

Overhead we heard his mother’s footsteps in the kitchen. “We’d better not look at them now,” he said, letting the lid drop.

Walking back to the rec room, I saw a wall rack with four rifles in it.

“Those are Dad’s,” he said. “He goes hunting. I’d let you hold one, but he keeps them locked up.”

I’d never held a gun, and wasn’t sure I wanted to. “That’s okay.”

“I’ve got a BB gun,” Tim told me, as though this would cheer me up. He grabbed a lightweight rifle tipped against the wall and held it up for me to see. “Model 105 Buck. Come on.”

In the backyard he set up some paper cups along the fence that bordered the fields and we took turns shooting at them. The ammunition was these tiny steel balls. To load,
you pumped a lever, then held the gun to your eye to aim through the crosshairs. Tim was a good shot. He could knock the paper cups off the fence almost every time. By the end, I’d gotten a couple. It was fun, actually.

Towards the end, I went to put the cups back on the fence and felt a sharp pain in the back of my jeans. It was like getting stung by a wasp.

I swore and gripped my bum and looked around. Tim was laughing. He was holding the gun.

“Geez,” I said. “That hurt!”

“Yeah, it does,” he said. “Sorry. Couldn’t resist.”

I looked at my hand to see if there was any blood, but there wasn’t. It hadn’t even torn my jeans. It just stung like heck. I was kind of angry with him, but he was smiling and laughing so good-naturedly it was hard to stay mad.

I figured I’d made a friend.

When I got back home, I walked into the living room and Mom was sitting in an armchair, holding Zan. Her blouse was unbuttoned and folded back on one side, and Zan was sucking at her breast. She and Zan both turned to look at me at the same time, Zan’s face brown against my mother’s pale skin. I instantly looked away, feeling like I’d done something wrong, like I’d seen something I was never meant to see.

“Sorry,” I said, and headed out of the room.

“Ben, wait,” I heard my mother say. “I’m sorry, I didn’t hear you come in.”

“It’s okay,” I said, stopping in the doorway, staring down at the carpet. From the corner of my eye I saw Mom put Zan down on her knee. He started whimpering and pawing her as she buttoned up her blouse.

“Even with the bottle, Zan still seems to want to nurse,” she said. “Your father thought it might be a good idea. To try and make sure he gets everything he’d get from his own mother.”

“Right,” I said, nodding. I didn’t want to think about it—not at all, really. “It’s sort of weird to see.”

“I know,” she said. “I have mixed feelings about it too. And it’s not like I have any milk to give him anyway.”

“You don’t?” I asked.

She smiled and gave a little laugh. “You need to have your own baby to produce milk.” “Oh,” I said, blushing. “Right.”

“Anyway, I can’t keep it up for too long; it’s getting painful.”

I nodded and made a
hmm
sound, like I was all calm and interested in what she was saying. Mom was always very big on everyone talking openly, and sharing everything, and not being embarrassed about our bodies especially. She said it was unhealthy to be embarrassed about the human body, and that it was beautiful and honest and natural.

But I’d had about as much nature and honesty as I could handle right now.

It was another week or so before I held Zan for the first time. I was sort of nervous. I sat down on the couch and Mom
put him in my arms. He was awake and he just settled against me, gazing up into my eyes and occasionally making a soft panting sound. It was a really intense look, like he expected something.

I remembered Mom saying that chimps spent a lot of time grooming one other. So I combed through Zan’s hair with my fingers, kind of patting him and stroking him, and he got very quiet and looked at me even more intently. Then I pretended to find something interesting in his hair, pick it out, and pop it into my mouth. I made a satisfied smacking sound. Zan looked very interested at that and hooted softly.

Without even realizing it, I was stroking him, and before long his eyes started to look sleepy, and he dozed off. Mom asked if I wanted to give him back, but I said it was okay, and stayed there like that for a little longer, Zan sleeping in my arms.

Mom took a picture of us with my camera.

It was hard to know what Zan thought of all the signs we made as we talked with him. But his eyes were alert and curious and he seemed to watch everything.

He always wanted to be held, so before I picked him up, I’d sign
up
—just pointing my index finger skyward—and then lift him. And he loved being hugged, so I thought it would be a good idea to teach him that sign as well. Before I gave him a hug, I’d do the ASL sign, which was simple, just crossing your arms across your chest, like you were giving yourself a hug.

The first time Dad saw me doing it he asked me to stop. “We need to start slowly with him,” he said. “We don’t want to confuse him.”

“I think Ben’s got the right idea, though,” Mom said. “Shouldn’t we be stressing the things that are most part of his life?”

“I suppose it’s fine for now,” said Dad. “But when we start teaching him properly, we’ll need to stick to the signs we choose. It’s got to be very methodical.”

In the first week of August, when Zan was about five weeks old, Dad decided it was time to introduce names. We picked the morning, so he was good and alert. It was Sunday. We all gathered around him in the living room and, for some reason, I thought of church. We never really went ourselves, but I’d been to a few baptisms.

In sign language, you get to invent your own name for yourself. A lot of the time it’s just the first letter of your name, signed somewhere on the upper part of your body, maybe the middle of your chest, or somewhere on your arm.

For Z you stuck out your index finger and traced a zigzag shape in the air.

Mom worried it might be a bit complicated for Zan, so I said maybe we could do it big across his entire chest, so the sign wasn’t too small and fiddly.

“Good idea,” said Mom.

Dad looked intently at Zan.
“You
—” he pointed at him. “
Zan.”

And he touched him with his index finger, slowly tracing
the Z across Zan’s chest. He did it several times, and then Mom and I did it as well, to reinforce it. “Zan,” I said. “You’re Zan.”