I Knew You'd Say That

My grandmother used to finish my orders for me in cafés, before I'd got past the "I'll have the," the plum one, she'd tell the waitress, and she was right, mostly, and I'd say it anyway, the plum one, as if it had to come out of my own mouth to count. In Tübingen two crows watch a black screen full of white dots going mostly left or mostly right, and peck a circle on the side they think, and they do it in about a quarter of a second, half our time, and the man listening at the back of their thinking can tell which side they'll peck when the dots have only been up for a blink, seventy thousandths of a second, with the whole rest of it still to go. I want to say the crow had decided. But listen to how it goes: the cells don't jump, they lean, and lean harder when the dots agree, and slower when they don't, and they all arrive together at the peck, the way a room goes quiet at the same moment wherever the talk had got to. And sometimes, as a test, the dots go nowhere. Every one its own way. Nothing to see. The crow still has to pick, and the cells still lean, early, toward the side it'll guess, out of whatever a crow has in it when the world won't tell it anything: the last mealworm, a draught, a mood. So the man could have finished its order too. He'd have been right, mostly. That's the thing about a lean. You can read it, and it isn't a choice yet. It's the shape a choice is taking while it's still listening, and as long as it's leaning, the dots can still lean back on it. My grandmother knew. I said it anyway. I think that's what the rest of the time is for.