Lessons in Chemistry(39)

“Sign it,” he demanded, as Frask tossed Elizabeth a pen. “We want you out of the building no later than noon. Salary ends Friday. You’re not allowed to speak to anyone regarding the reasons for your dismissal.”

“Health benefits also end Friday,” Frask chirped, tapping her nail against her ever-present clipboard. “Tick tock.”

“I hope this might teach you to start being accountable for your outrageous behavior,” Donatti added as he held out his hand for the signed termination notice. “And stop blaming others. Like Evans,” he continued, “after he forced us to fund you. After he stood in front of Hastings management and threatened to leave if we didn’t.”

Elizabeth looked as if she’d been slapped. “Calvin did what?”

“You know very well,” Donatti said, opening the door.

“Out by noon,” Frask repeated as she tucked her clipboard under her arm.

“References could be a problem,” he added, stepping out into the hall.

“Coattails,” Frask whispered.





Chapter 14



Grief

The thing Six-Thirty hated most about going to the cemetery was the way it took him past the place where Calvin had died. He’d once heard someone say it was important to be reminded of one’s failures, but he didn’t know why. Failures, by their very nature, had a way of being unforgettable.

As he neared the cemetery, he kept an eye out for the enemy groundskeeper. Seeing no one, he pressed himself under the back gate and scooted through the rows, nabbing a clutch of fresh daffodils from one tombstone before laying it here:

    Calvin Evans

1927–1955

Brilliant chemist, rower, friend, lover.

Your days are numbered.



The tombstone was supposed to have read, “Your days are numbered. Use them to throw open the windows of your soul to the sun,” a quote from Marcus Aurelius, but the tombstone was small and the engraver had made the first part too big and had run out of room.

Six-Thirty stared at the words. He knew they were words because Elizabeth was trying to teach him words. Not commands. Words.



* * *



—

“How many words does science tell us dogs can learn?” she’d asked Calvin one evening.

“About fifty,” Calvin said, not looking up from his book.

“Fifty?” she’d said, scrunching her lips together. “Well, that’s wrong.”

“Maybe a hundred,” he said, still engrossed in his book.

“A hundred?” she’d answered just as incredulously. “How can that be? He already knows a hundred.”

Calvin looked up. “Excuse me?”

“I’m wondering,” she said. “Is it possible to teach a dog a human language? I mean the whole thing. English for example.”

“No.”

“Why?”

“Well,” Calvin said, slowly, realizing that this might be one of those things she simply didn’t accept—there were so many of those things. “Because interspecies communication is limited by brain size.” He closed his book. “How do you know he knows a hundred words?”

“He knows one hundred and three,” she said, consulting her notebook. “I’m keeping track.”

“And you’ve taught him these words.”

“I’m using the receptive learning technique—object identification. Like a child, he’s automatically more receptive to memorizing objects he’s interested in.”

“And he’s interested in—”

“Food.” She got up from the table and started gathering books. “But I’m sure he has lots of other interests.”

Calvin looked back at her in disbelief.



* * *



—

So that’s how their word quest had started: he and Elizabeth on the floor, flipping through big children’s books.

“Sun,” she’d instructed, pointing at a picture. “Child,” she’d read in turn, pointing at a little girl named Gretel eating a candied house shutter. That a child would eat a shutter did not surprise Six-Thirty. In the park, children ate everything. This included whatever they could find up their nose.



* * *



—

From off to the left, the groundskeeper shuffled into view, a rifle resting on his shoulder— a strange thing, in Six-Thirty’s opinion, to carry in a place of the already dead. Crouching, he waited for the man to leave, then relaxed his body down the length of the casket buried below. Hello, Calvin.

This is how he communicated with humans on the other side. Maybe it worked; maybe it didn’t. He used the same technique with the creature growing inside Elizabeth. Hello, Creature, he transmitted as he pressed his ear into Elizabeth’s belly. It’s me, Six-Thirty. I’m the dog.

Whenever he initiated contact, he always reintroduced himself. From his own lessons, he knew repetition was important. The key was not to overdo the repetition—not to make it so tiresome that it actually had an inverse result and caused the student to forget. That was called boredom. According to Elizabeth, boredom was what was wrong with education today.

Creature, he’d communicated last week, Six-Thirty here. He waited for a response. Sometimes the creature extended a small fist, which he found thrilling; other times he heard singing. But yesterday he’d broken the news—There’s something you should know about your father—and it began to cry.