Whatever. He rises from his carrel and wanders to the proper spot in the library shelves. Hours of work leave him cross-eyed. In the low library light, the books look like town houses for pipe-cleaner people.
One spine jumps out at him. Its electric lime letters scream out against a black field: The Ape Inside Us, by Rubin M. Rabinowski. Adam pulls down the hefty volume and plops into a nearby armchair. The book falls open to an image of four cards:
Beneath, a caption reads:
Each of these cards has a letter on one side and a number on the other. Suppose someone tells you that if a card has a vowel on one side, then it has an even number on the other. Which card or cards would you need to turn over to see if the person is right?
He perks up. Things with clean, concise, right answers are antidotes to human existence. He solves the puzzle fast, with total confidence. But when he checks his solution, it’s wrong. At first he thinks the printed answer is in error. Then he sees what should have been obvious. He tells himself he’s just wiped out from hours of working on other kids’ assignments. He wasn’t focusing. He would have gotten it, if he’d been paying attention.
He reads on. The book claims that only four percent of typical adults get the problem right.
What’s more, almost three quarters of people who miss the problem, when shown the simple answer, make excuses about why they failed.
He sits in the armchair, explaining to himself why he has just done what almost every other human being also does. Below the first row of cards, there’s another:
Now the caption says:
Each one of these cards stands for a person in a bar. One side shows their age and the other shows their drink. If the legal drinking age is 21, which card or cards do you need to turn over to see if everyone is legal?
The answer is so obvious Adam doesn’t even need to find it. He gets it right this time, along with three-quarters of typical adults. Then he reads the punch line. The two problems are the same. He laughs out loud, drawing looks from the gray-haired, late-night public library crowd. People are an idiot. There’s a big old OUT OF ORDER sign hanging from his species’ pride-and-joy organ.
Adam can’t stop reading. Again and again, the book shows how so-called Homo sapiens fail at even the simplest logic problems. But they’re fast and fantastic at figuring out who’s in and who’s out, who’s up and who’s down, who should be heaped with praise and who must be punished without mercy. Ability to execute simple acts of reason? Feeble. Skill at herding each other? Utterly, endlessly brilliant. Whole new rooms open up in Adam’s brain, ready to be furnished. He looks up from the book to see a library closing down and throwing him out.
At home, he reads on into the night. He picks up again, through breakfast the next morning. He almost misses the bus. He fails to deliver the day’s homework to his clients. It’s the first blow to his good name since he set up the cheating business. He holds The Ape Inside Us under his desk during the first three periods, educating himself on the sly. He finishes before lunch, then starts it all over again.
The book is so elegant that Adam kicks himself for not having seen the truth long before. Humans carry around legacy behaviors and biases, jerry-rigged holdovers from earlier stages of evolution that follow their own obsolete rules. What seem like erratic, irrational choices are, in fact, strategies created long ago for solving other kinds of problems. We’re all trapped in the bodies of sly, social-climbing opportunists shaped to survive the savanna by policing each other.
For days, the book carries him along in a happy stupor. Armed with the patterns the book reveals, he imagines himself running experiments on every girl in school, a dollop of nail polish on their shoe-heels to keep track of their comings and goings. The best part is Chapter 12, “Influence.” Had he read it as a freshman, he’d be school president-for-life. The mere idea that human behavior—his lifelong nemesis—possesses hidden but knowable patterns as beautiful as anything he once witnessed in insects makes his insides sing. He feels lighter and righter than he has since his sister disappeared.
. . .
WHEN THE TIME COMES to take the college entrance exams, he nails them. His