Becoming Human by Gene Brewer

Author:Gene Brewer [Brewer, Gene]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781479781546
Publisher: Xlibris US
Published: 2013-01-31T00:00:00+00:00

24

Much to my surprise, David and Robyn came in after they had gone to dinner. Not for sex, though. Perhaps they, or at least David, still felt guilty. In any case, he brought over a stepstool and began fiddling with my eyes. This made me a bit nervous. “What are you doing, David?”

He cleared his throat of genuine phlegm, explaining that he was coming down with a cold. “I’m going to try to fix one of your eyes so you can wink.”

“Not both of them?”

“If you wink both of them, it’s not a wink. It’s a blink.”

It only took an hour or so. With the help of a shutter powered by a couple of tiny motors, he was able to shut my left eye for a fraction of a second and open it again. When he was finished tinkering with the device, he asked me whether I had seen TV ads for a light that turns on with a clap.

I told him I hadn’t.

“Can you make a clap?” No problem. When I did so my left eye winked. Then he fixed it so that I could do it with a little snort, rather than a clap. “Too percussive,” he explained. As soon as I had mastered the snort they were gone again, presumably for sex, despite David’s cold.

“Thank you! Thank you!” I called out after them. But I still didn’t trust them.

While I was practicing my winking, and despite the presence of the security camera in the corner, Ed came by that night to check on me. Taking care not to shine his flashlight into my eyes, he asked me, “How are you feeling, Oscar? You okay?”

Nobody had ever asked me how I felt about anything. “A little down, I guess.”

“Really? Anything I can do?”

“Yes, there is. I’d like to surprise the crew with a memoir of my experiences being born and growing up in the lab. Do you think you could find me a recording device of some kind so I could do that?”

“No problem. There are voice-activated recorders that ought to do the trick for you.”

“That would be great! Please sit down if you have a minute.”

“Nah, sorry, I can’t stay. You’d be surprised how many rooms there are to cover in this building. That’s why I usually just took a look through the little window in your door to check out the lab.”

He sprayed his light around the packed desks and benches, the equipment lining the walls. “How do you guys get anything done with all this stuff in here?”

“We manage.”

“It’s almost as bad as Security. There’s hardly any room to move around in.”

“Then we have something in common, don’t we?”

“Yes, I suppose we do. Unless you like jazz.”

I didn’t want to offend Ed, or anyone else, but I found jazz to be too haphazard, unregulated. It has been said that it’s like playing tennis without a net. I told him I didn’t get to hear much jazz.

“You should listen to some of it. It grows on you.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.