I PHONED HARLOW AGAIN, and again got the machine. One more time I asked without pique, without drama, nothing but calm dignity as far as the eye could see, where Madame Defarge was. The monkey girl had made another unscheduled appearance, and it had landed her in jail again. When would she learn to behave with restraint and decorum?
It was still raining—large, icy pellets—and I had no bike, so I phoned The Graduate next, to see if a ventriloquist’s dummy of Madame Defarge had been left at the bar a couple of nights before. I don’t think the man who answered the phone understood the question. I don’t think he gave it the good old college try. It seemed I was going to have to go and look for myself, whatever the weather.
I spent the next two hours wandering about the town searching for various things I couldn’t find. I was soaking wet, cold to the bone, my eyes already starting to sting again because I’d stabbed new contact lenses into them. A living, breathing puddle of self-pity. Obviously, someone had taken Madame Defarge. I would never be able to afford the ransom. I would never get her back.
Davis was an infamous hotbed of bicycle theft. Bicycles were taken on a whim; people would steal one just to get to their next class. The police swept up the abandoned bikes and sold them at auction once a year, the money going to the local women’s shelter. I’d see my bike again, but I’d be outbid and I wouldn’t even get to complain, as it was all for such a good cause. Did I want women to have shelter or didn’t I? I loved that bike.
I faced the very real possibility that the sight of Officer Haddick chatting so familiarly with me might have spooked my brother. He must know I’d never deliberately turn him in. But how many times had Lowell said to me, “You just can’t keep your goddamn mouth shut”? When I was five, six, eight, ten, a hundred thousand times? I had learned to keep my mouth shut, but Lowell had never noticed.
I returned to my apartment, empty-handed, teary-eyed, and frozen through. “My feet will never be warm again,” I told Todd and Kimmy. “Toes will be lost.” They were sitting at the kitchen table, playing a vigorous sort of card game. Most of the cards were on the floor.
They paused long enough to click their tongues sympathetically and then moved on to their own complaints—an aggrieved list of everyone who’d come by while I was out.
First Ezra, on some lame excuse but clearly looking for Harlow. As a result, he’d seen the damaged smoke alarm. There’d been a lecture. Todd and I were putting not only our own lives at risk, but the lives of every single person in the building. And who was responsible for the safety of these people? On whom were they depending? Not me and Todd, that was for damned-sure certain. No, it was Ezra himself in whom they’d put their faith. Maybe we didn’t care if Ezra let them down, but it wasn’t going to happen. We could take that to the bank.
Next, some loser, some white-guy baka in a backward baseball cap, looking for Harlow, had given Todd this puppet-thing he’d said Harlow had asked him to return. “Ugly on a stick,” said Todd, presumably about the puppet. And, about Harlow, “Is this like her office now? Her business address?
“Because then Herself drops in. Goes and gets a beer without even asking, takes the puppet to your bedroom, and says to tell you it’s back in the suitcase as promised.”
“And ‘no harm done,’” said Kimmy. “‘As promised.’”
And then, another knock on the door! Skinny, bleached-blond, maybe thirty years old? Name of Travers. Looking for me, but since I wasn’t around, he and Harlow had gone off together. “Putty in her hands,” Todd said. “Poor sad sap.”
The fact that Harlow had hardly touched her purloined beer seemed to bother Todd more than anything else. She hadn’t even asked and now it just had to be poured down the sink as if it were a Bud Light or something instead of the last specialty wheat beer Todd had, a Hefeweizen, from the Sudwerk microbrewery. He wouldn’t finish it himself, because who knew where Harlow’s mouth had been? “It’s been Grand Central Station for kisama here all evening,” Todd said. He turned back to his card game, slamming the jack of clubs onto the table.
“You bastard,” said Kimmy either to Todd or to his ruthless jack, though I did, just for a minute, think she was talking to me.
Kimmy was one of those people I made uncomfortable for reasons they themselves couldn’t figure out. She never looked at my face, but maybe she was that way with everyone, maybe she’d been raised to think it was impolite. Todd said his grandmother, his mother’s mother, would never look someone in the eye or show someone her feet, although he also said she was the rudest person to clerks and waitresses that he’d ever met. “We’re in America,” she would remind him loudly if he seemed embarrassed. “Every customer is the king.”
Kimmy cleared her throat. “They said to tell you if you got back in the next hour, which you barely did, you should join them at the crepe place. They’re having dinner there.”
So I had only to walk out the door, make another trek downtown in the cold, hard rain, and there Lowell would be. I had a stirred-up feeling, a little excited, a little sick to my stomach, a sort of ipecac syrup of happiness. There Lowell would be.
With Harlow.
How could we talk about anything if Harlow was there?
But did I really want to talk about anything?
I felt all kinds of urgency. I also felt not quite ready. So I went to my bedroom, toweled my hair and changed into dry clothes, and then opened the powder-blue suitcase where Madame Defarge was sprawled over the folded clothes, ass up. I took her out. She smelled of cigarettes and had a damp spot on her dress. She’d obviously had a big night. Still, she was fine, hardly a hair out of place. She could go right back home whenever the airline picked her up, and no harm done, as promised.
Suddenly, weirdly, I felt a pang at the thought of losing her. Life is all arrivals and departures. “I hardly knew you,” I said. “And now you’re leaving me.” Her uncanny valley eyes stared up. She snapped her reptilian jaw. I made her wrap her arms around my neck as if she were also sorry. Her knitting needles poked my ear sharply until I shifted her. “Please don’t go,” she said. Or maybe I said that. It was definitely one of us.
• • •
THE FLIP SIDE to solipsism is called theory of mind. Theory of mind postulates that, even though these cannot be directly observed, we readily impute mental states to others (and also to ourselves, since the bedrock proposal is that we understand our own mental states well enough to generalize from them). And so we constantly infer someone else’s intentions, thoughts, knowledge, lack of knowledge, doubts, desires, beliefs, guesses, promises, preferences, purposes, and many, many more things in order to behave as social creatures in the world.
Children younger than four have trouble sequencing a jumbled set of images. They can describe any given picture, but they fail to see a character’s intentions or goals. This means they miss the very thing that links and orders the images. They miss the story.
Young children have the innate potential for a theory of mind, just the way Noam Chomsky says they do for language, but they haven’t developed it yet. Adults and older children sequence images easily into a coherent narrative. I myself took this test many times as a child and I never remember not being able to do it, though if Piaget says there was a time I couldn’t, then there was a time I couldn’t.
In 1978, when Fern was still safely tucked into our family, psychologists David Premack and Guy Woodruff published a paper titled “Does the Chimpanzee Have a Theory of Mind?” In it, they relied primarily on a series of experiments done with a fourteen-year-old chimp named Sarah, in order to see if she could infer human goals in observed situations. They concluded that, within limits, she could.
Subsequent research (that would be my father) raised doubts. Perhaps chimps were merely predicting behavior based on past experience rather than by imputing another’s desire and intention. Years of further experimentation have been mostly about improving the methodology for prying into the minds of chimps.
In 2008, Josep Call and Michael Tomasello took another look at a whole range of approaches to this question and the results. Their conclusion was the same as Premack and Woodruff’s thirty years before. Does the chimpanzee have a theory of mind? They answered with a definite yes. Chimps do see that mental states, such as purpose and knowledge, combine to produce deliberate action. They even understand deceit.
What chimps don’t seem capable of understanding is the state of false belief. They don’t have a theory of mind that accounts for actions driven by beliefs in conflict with reality.
And really, who lacking that will ever be able to navigate the human world?
• • •
AROUND THE AGE of six or seven, human children develop a theory of mind that encompasses embedded mental states. They’ve long ago mastered the basic first-order stuff—i.e., Mommy thinks I’ve gone to bed. Next they learn to handle (and exploit) an additional layer—Daddy doesn’t know that Mommy thinks I’ve gone to bed.
Adult social interactions call for a great deal of this awareness of embedded states. Most adults do this effortlessly and unconsciously. According to Premack and Woodruff, the typical human adult can work with four levels of embedded imputation—someone believes that someone else knows that someone else thinks that someone else feels unhappy—before becoming uncomfortable. Premack and Woodruff describe this four-level facility as “not impressive.” Gifted adults can go in as deep as seven layers, but that appears to be about the human limit.
• • •
HEADING INTO THE Crepe Bistro for dinner with Harlow and my brother was a challenging exercise in theory of mind. Had Lowell told Harlow how long it had been since he’d seen me? How excited was it okay for me to be? Although I trusted in Lowell’s discretion, I didn’t believe he had the same trust in mine. We both had secrets that the other might not know were secrets. So I had to figure out what Lowell had already told Harlow about our family, and he had to figure out what I’d already told her, and we both had to guess what the other didn’t want said, and all this had to be communicated quickly and in full view of Harlow, but without her knowing.
Test question: How many levels of imputation do you find in the following sentence? Rosemary is afraid that Lowell might not guess that Rosemary really doesn’t want him to tell Harlow about Fern because Rosemary believes once Harlow hears about Fern she’ll tell everyone else and then everyone else will see Rosemary as the monkey girl she really is.
And all I wanted was to be alone with my brother. I hoped Harlow had a sharp enough theory of mind to figure that out. If necessary, I planned to help her get there. I expected Lowell to help, too.