Chapter Sixteen
I couldn't wait for them all to leave me alone, and fortunately their human physical needs made this a reality sooner than I anticipated. They were going out for lunch. Marta made it clear that I was not to leave the garage under any circumstances, that if I heard any sounds I was to ignore them, and that they would return promptly within two hours so I needn't worry about that. As if I was worried about that! Two hours didn't seem like long enough for what I had in mind, but I would take it, seeing as it was all I was given.
It seems it was June Lee's birthday, seventh or eighth, I don't recall, and she was determined to celebrate with Marta at her favorite restaurant, and demanded Josef join them and her crew of other small children. Josef was not happy about it but a sharp glance from Marta was enough to make him go. His leash was even tighter than my own.
I wasted no time, but hurried over to the workbench where the computer was, and began searching for some mechanism that would turn it on. I assumed there would be some kind of bump or knob or perhaps a hand-held device which would do the trick, and it didn't take long to find the recessed soft pad behind the front panel which caused the machine to make its noises and come to light. This was my first experience with such a thing and I had no idea what would come next. Imagine how puzzled I was to see a solid blue screen with a small white rectangle, inside of which a little black bar went twinkling. I saw it as a door that you had to find your way through. What would let you in? Did you tap on it? Tried that. Didn't work. Did you blow on it? Not that. Did you press and hold on it? No again.
I stared at the white space for some time, inspecting it from every angle, and finally I thought to apply some of those mathematical transforms I had been seeing in the text books, not on the white space itself, but on the glass in front of it, and soon I began to see the residue of familiar markings, characters I recognized as alphabetical and corresponded to symbols on the long black tray that sat next to the machine. No wires connected the tray to the computer, but the association of the characters on the screen matching those on the tray made it certain in my mind that they were related.
I searched on the tray for the first of the characters, and tapped on it. Sure enough the same character appeared inside the white rectangle on the screen. These markings had been made over and over again to such an extent that their impressions bore into the back of the glass and echoed like a call in a canyon. There were some tricky ones, where you had to tap two places at once on the tray to form a variation of the character, but soon I had all nine in place. Nothing happened then. I was still missing some clue. Perhaps there was another special character, one that didn't make a mark but completed a sequence. I tried one or two with little arrows on them, but they only removed the last character or moved the twinkling black line to the beginning again. I had to remove all the characters and put them in again before I hit the right spot on the tray, the one with the longest arrow facing left.
Suddenly, the white space and the blue screen vanished, and in their place came a vivid scene of autumn trees and a beautiful lake in the sunshine. It was very pretty, but this was not what I was expecting. If I wanted to see a tree I could look outside a window, not that there were any of those in this garage. If there ever had been windows, they'd been replaced long since by the solid cinder blocks which lined the entire structure.
“What am I supposed to do now?” I cried out loud, and then to my great surprise, a voice came back to me from the machine.
“Would you like some assistance?” A soft female voice said to me.
“Yes,” I said, “I would very much like some assistance.”
I realized in that moment just how desperate I had been all along, the whole previous night and that day, how much I needed someone, anyone to hear me and to help me. I latched on to every one I saw, from Parsnip to Random to Miss Marta, even Josef and June Lee, only to be blocked and thwarted at every turn. There was no one to help me, no one to truly hear my pleas. I had never felt so alone, and now there was this voice coming out of nowhere. It was miraculous.
“What would you like to do?” the voice asked. I knew right away what my first task would be, the stepping stone that once acquired would free me from ever having to ask any other creature any questions at all.
“I would like to learn how to read,” I told the machine.
“Very well,” it promptly replied. “Would you like to learn to read English?”
“Yes,” I guessed, not quite certain what “she” was talking about.
“Okay,” she said, “Watch this now and you can learn.”
The next moment a movie started playing on the computer. In the movie a friendly older man very calmly walked me through the process of recognizing the black markings and how they represented sounds and how grouping them together formed words (as I suspected) and how to give it your 'best guess' to 'sound them out' for yourself. The movie included several tests where the machine prompted me to try to read out loud and judged me on how I did. I became so absorbed in the lesson that I almost did not hear the noises of Marta and Josef arriving home. Fortunately, Josef was in a terrible mood and was making a loud fuss.
“I hate little kids,” he was yelling, “They're noisy and dirty and smelly.”
“They are not smelly,” Marta calmly corrected him. “As for noisy, just listen to yourself.”
“And I hate June Lee,” Josef said. “I don't know why I had to go to her stupid birthday party anyway.”
“June Lee is very important,” Marta said as their voices drew closer to the garage door. I was panicking, trying to stop the movie but not finding the mechanism, until finally I remembered the soft pad at the back of the machine and guessed it might also turn the computer off as well as on. Luckily I was right, and I was able to rush back to my cot with moments to spare before the door swung open and Josef walked in, still complaining.
“I'm important too,” he whined,”even if I'm not June Lee.”
“You have one hour,” his mother informed him from behind the door. “Do something with it, will you?”
“I'm trying,” he said. “It's not easy making a stupid rabbit.”
“Maybe the ape can help,” her voice trailed off as the garage door closed.
“Fat chance,” Josef muttered as he glanced at me on his way back to the workbench. I was only calculating how long one hour would feel, and then wondering how long I would have after that. I was pretty sure I would have a good part of the night to myself locked in here, and then I could get back to the computer and learn more about reading. In the meantime, I thought I'd already learned quite a bit and was determined to take another look at some of the books on the shelf, and see what I could make out.