—Yes.

He gestured to the page, speaking. She heard a few of his words: anecdote, can’t and data.

For most people, spoken language was such a powerful method of communication, an audio code that given enough time and skill and mutual trust, could briefly bridge the gap between two minds, allowing people something close to the same image or emotion or understanding. For her, speech worked in reverse. The more words used, the greater distance and confusion.

Her hair being wet most of the day here meant she couldn’t wear her hearing glasses. Constantly making guesses at what the others had said, she was feeling a little like she had as a child, isolated in a bubble.

He sucked on the Tums, moving it about. Of the men at the center, he was the hardest to lipread. He picked up a pen and started showing her the proper way to take notes.

At the top of the leftmost column on the page, he wrote ♂₁.

He said—Bernie.

At the head of the next column, he wrote ♂₂ and then looked at her with his eyebrows raised.

Junior—she said, supplying the name.

At the top of the next two columns, he wrote ♀₁ and then ♀₂.

Kat—she said—and Mother.

He made no comment on the names. He looked down and said a complicated sentence she couldn’t hear, the last word of which was communication.

Communication?—she asked.

—Yes.

She looked left and right, trying to imagine what the sentence might have been. When in doubt, she asked questions.—What kind?

She didn’t catch his words, but he wrote at the top of her notepad, Touch.

He watched the dolphins from his chair. Each time one of the dolphins touched another, he put a tick down on the notepad in that dolphin’s column. When Mother brushed her flipper against Kat’s as she swam by, he made a tick in Mother’s column. He did not note who it was that Mother touched or with what body part or whether it was a bite or caress. When Junior chased Mother, half riding on top of her for a full circuit of the lagoon so she could not surface to breath, Tibbet made just a simple tick in Junior’s column, no more information.

After a few minutes, he handed her notebook back to her, clearly expecting her to continue to keep tallying these touches. He tapped the cover of it with his fingers and said in a loud voice—Data.

So she tried out his method. In a way it was a relief to know what kind of notes she was supposed to take. For that whole day she counted touches between the dolphins. However, when she added the tallies up, she saw how much was missing. Yes, she now knew that Junior touched the others 10 percent more than the rest, but there was nothing in the numbers about how he touched others. It didn’t describe how he followed behind and to the side of Bernie like a fighter plane in formation, mimicking the bigger male’s movements and posture, turning when he turned, breathing when he breathed, so close that his beak sometimes touched Bernie’s flipper.