Becca Haber launched into a story that sounded like a million other stories. She had met her husband a couple of years earlier and had married him after knowing him only a few months. He was an artist. They’d had about half a year of glorious marriage, followed by a half year of hell, before they’d agreed to separate and see if things wouldn’t cool down.
He moved to Mexico City, where he had lived several years before. They sent each other E-mail messages every day; she flew down a couple of times for long weekends. Then, about four months ago, he’d stopped sending her E-mail. After a couple of weeks, she went down there. She found his house in perfect condition, but he was gone.
She stayed a few weeks, asking around about him, but his few friends said they hadn’t heard from him, either. The police couldn’t even stir up a modest curiosity about her panicked concern, implying these things happened all the time and that eventually he would come back when he got tired of the other woman.
Then one day when she answered the phone at his house, a man told her that her husband was dead and that he had proof, but she would have to pay for it. After a long negotiation, she found herself on a dark street somewhere in that vast city. A kid handed her a paper sack, and she handed him the money. She thought she was buying photographs of his bullet-riddled body. Instead, she was horrified to find the skull.
Becca Haber stopped here to gather her composure, but before Bern could speak, Alice, who had been squirming with increasing agitation, blurted, “Can you think of what if you should, Paul?” With an expression of disbelief, she asked, “Can you see through a flowing window on the outside of another thought that you believe?” She was incredulous. She turned her wide eyes on Becca. “I don’t think in a hundred wonders of it!”
Oh shit.
Alice scowled at Bern and screwed her mouth into a problematic pucker, as if she couldn’t believe what she was hearing.
“Jesus.” Becca was taken aback.
Bern was surprised by Alice’s reaction, too, but not for the same reasons as Becca Haber.
“Just a second,” he said to Becca, and he got up and went over to Alice and squatted down in front of her. Her sketch pad was in her lap, and she was still holding her pencil, though she had lost interest in the Kewpie dolls.
“Now listen, Alice,” he said softly, putting his hand on hers to get her attention. “It’s okay; it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter. Okay? It’s all right.”
“What doesn’t matter?” Becca Haber asked suspiciously.
“It doesn’t matter what I say to her,” Bern said, not turning away from Alice as he spoke to Becca. “She can’t understand me. I’ve got to make her understand the meaning of my words by the way I’m behaving, by my expressions.”
What he wanted Alice to understand was that what the woman was saying was okay with him. What Alice had to do was to control her agitation. She couldn’t disrupt the conversation.
It took some time. Alice kept wanting to look at Becca, moving her head from side to side to look around him as he tried to make eye contact with her to get her attention. It was as if Becca Haber had become the most outrageous thing Alice had ever seen.
He reassured her again, telling her that it was okay, that it didn’t matter.
Alice pulled her head back in dramatically mimed skepticism at his reassurances.
“You’re in ropes if that’s on this very side,” she said, flinging an incredulous look at Haber.
Bern took Alice’s oval face in his hands and gently guided her attention to the sketch pad in her lap. He began drawing a face, all the while telling her it didn’t matter, that it was all right.
Gradually, the face he was drawing took on an expression that was not immediately understandable, one of conflicting emotions, of mixed signals. As Alice noticed this and began to focus on the problem of figuring out this emotional puzzle, she began to calm down.
This went on for ten minutes or more, though it felt longer to Bern, who was acutely aware of Becca Haber’s close observation from behind. Finally after several jerky sighs, Alice became absorbed in trying to decipher the expression on the face that Bern had drawn.
After a few more minutes, he stood and returned to the coffee table.
“Look, I’m sorry,” he said, deliberately taking a different chair at the coffee table now. “I know it’s hard enough for you to talk about this without that kind of distraction. It must seem strange to you, I know. Sorry.”
“No, it’s okay,” Becca said, glancing warily at Alice. “Is she going to be all right? What was the matter?”
“Yeah, she’ll be fine. Who knows what the deal was,” he said.
Now Bern had a clear view of both Becca’s face and Alice’s. Becca took a moment to decide where to start over; then she leaned forward and put the skull on the table, facing Bern, and took the mandible off her knee and laid it beside the skull.
“You know, there’s probably a better way to do this,” Bern said. “If you need positive proof of identity, you’d be better off getting a DNA test.”
“Can’t,” she said, her hands now gripping the short lemon hem of her dress to keep it from working up.
“They can do it with bone now,” he said. “Mitochondrial DNA-”
“I’ve already been through all that,” she said. “He was an orphan. Abandoned. Parents unknown. Siblings, forget it. We don’t have any children. No medical records. No dental records.”
“He never went to the doctor or the dentist?”
“Not while I knew him.” She nodded at the skull. “There’s dental work there. Not much, just a little. But he never went to the dentist while I knew him.”
“What about before then?”
“I don’t know anything about him before then, except what I’ve already told you.”
Alice stifled a groan and rolled her eyes at Bern.
Chapter 5
The awkward little drama of Alice’s adolescent histrionics had the unintended effect of convincing Becca Haber that Alice really was beyond understanding what Becca was saying. But, in fact, that wasn’t precisely true.
The truth was more complex, as almost everything was when it came to dealing with Alice’s disability. The accident had deprived her of the ability to understand the meaning of words, either written or spoken. But even stranger than this was what Alice had gained as a result of her loss.
Human speech is automatically accompanied by an elaborate, and often unconscious, repertoire of facial expressions, voice inflections, tonal shifts, and gestures. These sometimes delicate and subtle expressions are called “feeling tone,” and they play a key role in our understanding of the meanings of spoken words because they give them an emotional context beyond the simple meaning of the words themselves. As we converse with others, we usually process these feeling tones unconsciously, hardly even aware of what we are doing.
People with brain injuries like Alice’s, however, being deprived of the ability to understand the literal meaning of words, compensate for this disadvantage by carefully observing the speaker’s feeling tone. They develop, to an uncanny degree, the ability to understand the intent of the spoken words without being able to understand the actual words themselves.
This complex sensitivity enters into an even stranger process when spoken words are used to disguise truth, to deliberately deceive. When people lie, they try to camouflage their deception by miming genuine feeling-tone characteristics.
However, not even the most accomplished liar can re-create genuine feeling tone. False feeling tone is always off-key. But most of us are distracted from noticing these off-key signs of lying because we are more intent on parsing the meaning of the words that the speaker is choosing.
People who suffer from receptive aphasia, like Alice, are almost supernaturally sensitive to the unconscious quiver of a facial muscle, to a strained nuance in a syllable, to a manipulated vocal modulation, or self-conscious intonation. They know intuitively that there is an emotional truth in feeling tone that transcends the speaker’s merely verbal expression, and they focus on the distortion of this truth as if it were a sour note in a solo.
