THIRTY-SIX
Homearium, Week 16

The next morning, it was obvious that Blum had told Tibbet and Eh. She could see this through the window. Each time she glanced over, at least one of them was staring at her. Their expressions distant and flat.

None of them stepped into the homearium to talk to her during the day.

* * *

That afternoon, she walked into the building to try to explain, to tell them the exact action that Junior had been doing on her knees, but they looked horrified. Every word she said made it worse.

* * *

The next day, Tibbet and two reporters were sitting inside the house. The reporters were from the Washington Post, and their visit had been scheduled for a week. They sat at the table smoking, examining the spectrograms and looking through the window at her in the tank. The reporters were taking careful notes about everything Tibbet said.

Tibbet’s stomach seemed more swollen now. He was in pain perhaps, maybe a bitter taste in his mouth. He was furious about everything here at the research center. He turned to her, his eyes cold, and then back at them, and she saw him say a short sentence.

The reporters’ heads rocked, as though something small had hit them in the forehead. Their eyes wide.

They looked from Tibbet to her and back. After a pause, they began asking questions.

Always in the past, when the reporters looked at her, their expressions had been a little confused, trying to understand who she was and how she got to do this work. That confusion was gone now.

They did not take any more notes.

Blum walked through the room a few minutes later. His eyes glassy, his hair long. The sunglasses. His shirt unbuttoned. The reporters considered him.

They left soon afterward.

Tibbet had almost certainly sworn them to secrecy. No faster way to spread the information.

* * *

Over the next week, the reporters who had appointments called and cancelled them, one after the other. The phone rang, clanging and metal, less and less often.

The few times now they got a call from a reporter, Blum would take the call himself. Through the window, Cora could see the joy and hunger in his stance, his voice booming out confident as he answered the questions. Within a minute, however, his face would grow troubled. He’d tap ash off his cigarette while he listened. He’d speak maybe once or twice more, speaking sharply now. Then, he would bark something into the phone and slam the receiver down.

It was possible these reporters were asking different questions. It was possible they came from different magazines.

* * *

In response, the men became almost pre-verbal. They barely spoke to each other, or to her. Blum would only talk to her to demand greater speed from Junior, this creature who pronounced words through his blowhole. Blum wanted clear pronunciation. He wanted sentences.

She pointed out Junior was learning faster than any human baby. After less than six months of exposure to language, he could speak thirty words. From Tibbet’s testing (Put ball on tail, Push raft), they knew he could comprehend at least 200.