It was like Zan and I had both started school on the same day.
PART TWO
I’m a slow learner.
Letters. Numbers. They’ve never come easily to me.
When I was nine, Mom and Dad had me tested. They wondered if maybe there was something wrong with my brain. A learning disability. A psychologist came to the house and asked me questions and looked at me and timed me and examined all my answers and wrote up a big report.
He didn’t find anything wrong with me.
I just wasn’t that smart, I guess.
Mom said it would all come in time: all the words and numbers would start to make sense, when I was ready. But I always got the feeling Dad thought I wasn’t trying hard enough.
He thought I had a bad attitude. He thought I was lazy. He got angry when my report cards came home.
I thought I was trying, but I just wasn’t very good at school. I wasn’t good at a lot of things, like controlling my temper. But I was good at loving Zan.
SEVEN
PROJECT ZAN
Drink, Zan said to me.
I shook my head and pointed at the food on his tray. Eat, I said.
We were talking with our hands.
Zan was in his high chair in the kitchen, and I sat in front of him, trying to feed him cereal with a spoon. He was over eight months old now, and could hold his own spoon and fork perfectly well, but he still liked throwing them more than putting food in his mouth.
Drink! Zan signed, jabbing his thumb urgently at his lips.
He wouldn’t get his drink until he’d eaten some food. Mom was very firm about that; she worried he’d fill up on milk and ruin his appetite.
Off to the side, the photographer was moving around, taking pictures. Time magazine was doing a feature story on Project Zan and they’d sent a reporter and photographer to spend the day with us. At first, Dad hadn’t been sure he wanted them to come. He didn’t think we were far enough along. He wanted to wait. But the university was keen, and I think they’d pressed Dad into it. It was an international magazine, and it would get the university a lot of attention.
And us too, Mom had said. She’d spent all of yesterday frantically cleaning the house and Zan’s suite, and worrying about what we’d all wear. She had me in cords and a vest, and had slicked my curly hair down with this cold, slimy stuff that was actually called Slik. I hated it, but I could tell everyone was stressed out about Time, so I just did what she wanted.
Today was like Zan’s first public performance, and we didn’t really know how he’d react to having strangers in the house, watching him all day. I kept thinking about that Bugs Bunny cartoon where the guy discovers this frog that can dance and sing. But whenever he tries to show other people, the frog just sits there stupidly and goes ribbit.
We all wanted Zan to be our dancing frog today and show everyone how smart he was. In the six months we’d been teaching him, he could already make eight signs, and understand dozens more.
I still had trouble believing it. A chimp learning human language? But every time he mastered a new sign it was like he was learning to name the world, bit by bit. No other chimp had ever done anything like this before. For the first time in human history we could talk, really talk, to another species. Sometimes it really did seem like something from a sci-fi movie.
Dad had carefully planned out the whole day so Zan would be doing things that would encourage him to sign. I’d been a little worried earlier, because when the reporter and photographer first arrived, Zan was pretty wild. He bounded around on all fours, he climbed furniture and bounced off walls. He was really interested in all of the photographer’s gear: the lighting stands and the shiny umbrella things and the camera itself. He wanted to shriek at everyone, and touch everything. Luckily Peter and I had managed to distract him with one of his dolls. After a few minutes, he seemed to lose interest in the strangers, and just wanted to get on with his regular Saturday.
Now, in his high chair, he signed drink to me once more, a little half-heartedly, and when I signed no he just stared at me reproachfully for a few seconds.
Out, he signed, gripping his long brown fingers in one hand, then pulling them free.
I couldn’t help smiling. If Zan liked his food, he’d stay and eat contentedly until it was gone. If he didn’t, he got restless within minutes. This particular cereal-and-vegetable blend wasn’t his favourite, but it was good for him, so we tried to get it down him.
Eat, I signed again.
Zan looked down at his food miserably, then back at me. Hug, he signed.
I laughed. He was hoping I’d take him out to hug him—another favourite ploy of his to end mealtime.
“Incredible,” I heard the reporter murmur behind me. He’d been watching the whole thing, taking notes. Dad and Peter had been quietly translating the ASL signs for him.
Hug, I signed to Zan, and leaned closer so I could put my hands around his little shoulders and touch my face to his. I felt his long skinny arms around my neck, but when I tried to pull back, they tightened.
“Zan,” I said aloud, “let go, please.”
He didn’t let go. I heard the soft hooting sounds he made when he thought something was funny. I tried to pull back but his grip was surprisingly strong and I couldn’t help giggling. And the more I giggled, the louder his pant-hoots became, until we were both laughing. I could smell his food in the bowl below me, and I had to admit, I wouldn’t have wanted it either.
I started tickling Zan. The tray was in the way, and I couldn’t get to his most ticklish spots under his ribs, so I went for the armpits. He shrieked with delight, and his arms flew free of my neck. I pulled away.
He frowned at me, curling his lips out in displeasure.
More, he signed.
More what? I signed.
Hug!
I looked back over my shoulder at the reporter and Dad and Mom, who were both beaming with pride. Really, it couldn’t be going any better. In the last five minutes, Zan had used four of his signs, and had formed them perfectly.
After lunch we all moved out into the backyard. It was early March, sunny and surprisingly warm. In Toronto we would’ve been staggering through grimy grey snow, but here we’d just cut the grass, and there were flowers in bloom and green things on the trees, and you were comfortable in a sweater. Zan wore shorts and a fleecy sweatshirt with the sleeves cut off so he could move his arms freely.
Zan loved the backyard, no matter what the weather was like. The first few times we’d taken him out, I was surprised he wasn’t more interested in the trees. He pretty much ignored them. A couple of months ago, I held him up to a low branch and tried to get him to grab hold. I assumed he’d just swing himself up and start sailing through the branches, like chimps in the wild. Zan held on to the branch for a second, but was trembling, and looked so frightened that I took him down right away. He clung to me for a long time. I guess it shouldn’t have surprised me, since he’d been born in a lab and raised in a house. Why would he know anything about trees?
His favourite place was the big sandbox. When he was younger he just wanted to dig his feet and hands into the sand, over and over. Then he tried eating it. He’d cram handfuls into his mouth and swill it and crunch it around and dribble it out. Then what he liked to do was watch me dig with the shovel. Before long he was grabbing it from me and digging on his own, hurling all the sand onto the lawn. We needed to buy a lot of extra sand. After a while he started filling the buckets and dumping them out. He could do this for a long time, really concentrating.
Lately what he most liked was to play hide-and-seek in the sand with his dolls. He’d hand them to me one at a time and want me to bury them, and then he’d dig around and find them all in about two seconds. Dad had decided that’s what we’d be doing today for the journalists, because we were trying to teach him the sign for hide.
He already knew how to sign baby. That’s what he called his dolls. Most of them were human babies, although he also had a litt
le chimp, a kitten, and a G.I. Joe action figure bulging with muscles and guns. I got him that one because I thought he needed some boy toys. He called that one baby too.
Peter and Dad got themselves settled in the sandbox with Zan’s dolls. Dad wanted to be in some of the pictures with Zan too, since the project was his. I just hoped it wouldn’t throw Zan, because I wasn’t sure Dad had ever played in the sandbox with him before. Dad let Peter do the signing.
Hide was a complicated one. It started out a bit like drink, which I thought was confusing. You had to put your right thumb to your lips and then move it down and hide it under your left hand. Zan was pretty good about putting his thumb to his lips, but not about the second part.
Zan handed Peter the doll and he held on to it, looking at him expectantly.
Impatiently, Zan made the baby sign.
Hide baby, Peter signed back to him.
Baby, Zan signed and made a little pant-hoot.
Hide baby, Peter signed.
Baby, Zan signed, very slowly and carefully, as if Peter wasn’t very bright and might not have understood him.
Peter signed just hide this time, and Zan hurriedly touched his thumb to his mouth—the first part of the sign.
“Good, Zan!” Dad said. “Very good.”
Zan’s eyes widened, not understanding what all the fuss was about.
“Now show him the rest, Peter,” Dad said quietly. The photographer clicked away from all angles.
Peter gently took Zan’s right hand and touched it to his mouth, then brought it down and covered it with his left hand. Most of the time Zan didn’t like his hands being held and would pull them away. Today, he put up with it long enough for Peter to guide him through the sign twice. Then Zan picked up the doll and shoved it at Peter in exasperation.
Peter and Dad then got on with the game, and hid all the dolls, signing hide as often as they could. Zan didn’t put the whole sign together, but it would come. He was fast, and getting faster, at learning.
After a good long session of hide-and-seek, Mom and Dad spent some more time playing with him, and showing him things around the yard, holding his hands and letting him swing between them. I remembered them doing that with me, but I didn’t think we had a picture of it. Who would’ve taken the picture? There was no Time photographer taking shots of me when I was little.
I watched them from across the yard, and for a moment it was like seeing some strange beautiful family that wasn’t mine. Mom was going down the slide with Zan between her legs, Dad waiting for them at the bottom. The photographer was loving it, and so was Zan. He didn’t usually get this much attention from so many people all at once. Dad hardly ever played with him. It was mostly me and Mom, or Peter and the other research assistants, in pairs.
“I hear you taught him his first sign,” said Norman Sayles, the reporter, walking over.
I nodded, feeling proud and kind of embarrassed. “Well, it was more like I was the first person he signed to.”
“Incredible. Hug, wasn’t it?”
“It was hug.”
“It must be quite something, having a baby chimp in the house,” said Mr. Sayles.
“Yeah, it’s great,” I said, my eyes wandering over to Mom and Dad, wondering if it was okay for me to be talking to the reporter. He didn’t have his notebook open or the tape recorder going, so I figured he was just making conversation while the photographer got his shots.
“Keeps your parents pretty busy, I bet,” he said.
“Well, we have a lot of help. There’re students from the university who come.”
“I bet he can be quite a handful sometimes, hey?”
I grinned. “He can be pretty messy.” I told him about how he got upstairs to my room once and trashed it.
He chuckled. “It’s remarkable watching you two together. The way you communicate so easily. Do you think of him as a pet or a little brother?”
My reply came instantly—and somewhat angrily. “A little brother. He’s way smarter than a pet. He’s like a real person. He’s one of the family.”
The reporter nodded and smiled.
“Can’t imagine life without him now, I bet,” he said.
“Nope.”
Dad was coming towards us now, and Mr. Sayles walked off to meet him.
At the end of the day, when the magazine people had left, Dad asked what Sayles had been asking me. I told him.
“There’ll be more reporters,” he said. “Best not to talk to them. They all want a story.”
“What do you mean?” I asked. I thought Zan was the story. What else did there need to be? We were teaching a chimpanzee how to talk!
“Oh, he was probably hoping you’d say something about how hard it was to raise a chimp, and how jealous you were, and how much strain it was putting on the family.”
“I didn’t say anything like that,” I said defensively.
“I know. That’s just the kind of thing they’ll be hoping for, though. Best to let Mom and me do the talking. The project doesn’t need any negative publicity.”
“How could there be?” I asked. What could be wrong with teaching language to an intelligent animal? We were making Zan’s life better, and maybe we could make the lives of all the chimps better. I said so to Mom.
“Not everyone will agree, Ben,” she said ruefully. “We’ve opened Pandora’s box. We’re going to get all kinds of publicity, and we won’t be able to control whether it’s good or bad. Get ready.”
EIGHT
PROJECT JENNIFER
We didn’t make the cover of Time, but we got six pages inside, with tons of photos of us playing and signing with Zan. We all looked incredibly happy. The headline was “The Real Doctor Doolittle?” and the story focused on how chimps were our closest relatives, and one day we might just be able to talk to them. I thought it was a pretty positive article, and was surprised Dad was annoyed by it.
Norman Sayles, the reporter, had also talked to some psychologists from other universities, some of whom didn’t say very nice things about Project Zan. One guy said we shouldn’t be wasting our time on chimps, when there were so many ways we could be helping humans have better lives.
I didn’t get any of that, and I really didn’t care much. What I cared about was how I looked in the pictures. People at school were going to see them. Jennifer was going to see them. There was one photo where I thought my smile looked goofy and my hair looked way too greasy (stupid Slik), but in the other two I looked pretty good—my hair had loosened up a bit. One of Mom’s friends had once told me I looked like the young actor Michael York, and he was famous and a sex symbol, so I was hoping maybe Jennifer would think so too.
It was a Tuesday when the magazine came out, and that night, as usual, I slogged through my homework. I needed Dad’s help with algebra—again. I guess he was generous to help me, but he always seemed impatient, like he couldn’t quite believe I was having trouble with such easy stuff.
There was a lot of work at Windermere and it was way harder than what I was used to. My first term I’d felt buried under homework. I’d made the cross-country team, and Dad wasn’t thrilled because he said I should be concentrating on my classes, but Mom stood up for me, and let me stay on the team. I even won third place at the regional finals. I liked running. I felt strong. I felt like I was in control.
I couldn’t say the same for French and math and grammar. I didn’t struggle as much as I used to with words and numbers, but it was still an effort. My Christmas marks had not been great. Dad had called them “sloppy.”
When I was finally done my homework that night, I found one of Mom’s blank logbooks, took it upstairs to my room, and closed the door. In neat scientific writing, on the cover I wrote:
Project Jennifer.
Since September I’d been trying to get to know her better. But it wasn’t easy. We were in only two classes together, our lockers weren’t close together, we ate at different tables at lunch time—and she was always, always, with her two best fri
ends. Shannon was the one with shoulder-length blonde hair, big blue eyes, a neat little nose, and a neat little mouth. She was definitely pretty, but not as pretty as Jennifer. Shannon was quiet. You didn’t hear a lot out of Shannon.
Jane was the loudmouth—and she terrified me. She had short brown hair, a long face, and she laughed a lot, but not in a nice way. Her smile sometimes looked more like a sneer. There was no way I could get near Jennifer when she was with Jane. I’d see Jane talking and looking around and laughing, and I was always worried she was talking about me. The few times I’d worked up the courage to pass by and say hi, I could hear Jane giggling right afterwards. Everything seemed to make her giggle and snort and sneer.
Jennifer hardly ever came over to talk to me. Once, she actually said goodbye to me at the end of the day, and I smiled all the way home on the bus, nearly missed my stop, and smiled all through doing my homework and eating dinner.
I guess I could’ve asked David about her, but it was risky. Ask too many questions about his sister and he’d be onto me. He probably already was. So I tried to be patient and listen, and observe her from afar.
With Project Zan, every researcher kept a logbook. What Zan ate, what he didn’t eat. What games he liked to play. What made him grumpy. What made him happy. What signs he used, how often, and how accurately. When he peed and when he pooed.
I figured I didn’t need to know quite so much about Jennifer, but I did need to get serious. I needed to get scientific. And a scientist needed data. The more findings I wrote down, the better luck I’d have getting to know her—and getting her to like me.
I opened the logbook to the first page and took a deep breath.
I had a lot to learn. Girls were very different from guys. They seemed to hug each other a lot and get all excited about seeing each other in the morning, or seeing a new scarf or a new bag or something. Sometimes there were big dramatic scenes and someone would be crying and someone else would be comforting her and giving dirty looks to someone else. They already knew the names they were going to give their kids, and how many they were going to have. It was pretty freaky.