Over the next few nights, in her boarding room in town, she read the book. She more than read it. She studied it, trying to understand Blum’s thinking and values, the ideas behind his research. In the center of the book were a few pages of photographs, Blum in surgical garb standing beside an operating table. On the table lay a gorilla, its body slack, its head shaved, metal instruments sticking out of its skull. The next photo showed the gorilla’s brain lying all by itself on a board. This animal had been taken apart to find out what had made it so miraculously capable when alive.

She considered every word in the book. Each time she came upon a term she did not know, she flipped to the glossary at the back. She wrote out the definitions by hand, kept the list taped to the wall by her bed so she could study them each night before she fell asleep. She learned words like axon and occipital. She learned terms like negative stimuli and avoidant behavior.

Some of the words were common ones she knew, but they seemed to mean something different in this book. She looked for them in the glossary but they were not there. Subject. Controls. Trials. The meaning of these common words must be taken for granted as concepts any reader should know.

The other thing not explained was the general attitude behind the actions in the book. She tried to deduce it from the context.

When she finished the book, she returned it and selected another one.

SIXTEEN

Decades later, Cora read a book about dolphins and sound. Their hearing range was ten times wider than a human’s, and they used sound in ways humans couldn’t.

The creaking noise they made was how they kept in communication with others. The sound cut through the water and could be heard miles away. No one knew how much information was coded into this creaking. It was hard to break the code when humans had difficulty underwater determining even which dolphin had spoken.

The crinkling (the voice Saran Wrap would have if it could speak) was how the dolphins touched things from a distance. This sound could be tightly focused, with or without power. With this crinkling, a mother could caress her baby from 50 feet away or shove a shark.

The final kind of sound, the clicking, was sonar, a form of vision. The clicking bounced off objects, the reflected information processed in the same part of the brain as sight. Potentially, the dolphin could see temperature, pressure and currents.

Since other animals were composed primarily of water, the clicking reflected off the densities of their internal organs in different ways. The sound and vision were combined in the dolphin’s brain to create a single three-dimensional image.

Despite understanding this concept intellectually, Cora had been unable to imagine how sound and vision could be combined, until the day she accompanied her daughter to a pregnancy check-up. The jelly was squirted on the belly and the wand pressed against the skin. Then the monitor suddenly displayed the curled creature inside sucking its tiny thumb.