She would ask him to mimic.—Talk. Mary had a little lamb.

When she heard a response that sounded vaguely human (a groaning aaaah or rumbling eeerrrr), she would throw the ball for him. He was not a star pupil like Kat, and she graded accordingly.

—Good job, Junior. Yes! That was great.

She used the same high-pitched tone she’d use with a toddler. Rising and falling inflections, simple words, lots of excitement. Junior eyed her, his head cocked.

—You talked human, Junior. Talked human. Good job!

Blum insisted that along with mimicking language, she should also teach Junior the first few letters of the alphabet. The alphabet, he felt, was what a toddler should learn. His wife, he said, was always reciting it to the kids.

So when she got tired of asking for humanoid sounds, she’d say—Junior, let’s practice the alphabet. You want to? Let’s try. Talk. A, B, C, Dee.

He would click and she would not throw him the ball.

He would chatter his teeth at her in irritation and make the sound of a tea kettle whistling.

She would just repeat—Talk. A, B, C, Deeeeee.

Sometimes he got frustrated, wanting the ball and not understanding why she wouldn’t throw it. At these points, he’d bellow over her voice, interrupting. This was breaking the basic rules of conversation.

—QUIET, Junior. QUIET.

He roared and squealed.

—Junior, wait til I’ve finished. Quiet.

The men watched from the kitchen and the central living room. They could see and hear through the screen door and the big picture windows while they made food and ate, while they read and wrote and worked. It seemed at least one of them was always visible, watching her argue with a dolphin. She felt ridiculous, ineffective. Incapable.

—Talk. A, B . . . Junior, QUIET! Stop interrupting! STOP.

He quieted down gradually.

—Good. Now talk. A, B, C, Dee.

Microphones hung from the ceiling, every noise she and Junior made was recorded. A computer traced the audio on a roll of paper. Tibbet changed the rolls every two hours, labelling each with the date and time. How long she’d lived in the homearium was visible in the increasing pile of paper spools on the table in the men’s living room. Tibbet always seemed to be studying one of these spools, scribbling notations and frowning.

At least this reduced one of her worries: that Junior would start making human noises and she wouldn’t hear them. If that happened, Tibbet would notice and tell her.

* * *

She missed snorkeling in the water with all four dolphins. Swimming underwater with them, she could watch them play and fight, their grace and speed. She could hear their underwater sounds, that eerie range. The breadth and wildness of these noises had made her feel she’d been living her whole life inside an insulated glass box and someone had just cracked open the lid, letting in the world.

Here, however, she lived with just Junior, who was unable to dance and play with any real speed in the shallow water. Here, she was constrained to working above the water, without her hearing glasses, all sound muffled and far away. And she couldn’t let Junior make his natural sounds but had to restrict him to human ones. Both of them suffered with this narrow range of sound.