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“So p-presumably”—I thought about it for a moment—“the captain has to give away most of the gold in bribes.”
“Well, you’d think.” He was grinning again. It should have been maddening. “But actually he can keep ninety-eight coins.”
“But how?”
“It’s, uh, quite boring really. You have to reason backwards, starting with the possibility that all the pirates have been killed except D and E.”
I closed my eyes and worked it through. If only two pirates were left alive, then Pirate D would get to keep all the money. Which meant that if three pirates were left alive, then C would be able to bribe E, as E would stand to gain nothing if there were only two pirates. And so on, all the way up the chain to the captain.
I opened my eyes again, pathetically pleased with myself, wanting to lay my reasoning at his feet with a flourish. But plosives were lined up ahead of me like landmines. I was already strugglingwithpirate.Bribewould surely be unconquerable. I’d sink into my speaking as if it were quicksand, and he’d have to rescue me. And I’d inevitably resent him for it.
“He gives a coin to P-Pirate C and E and keeps the rest.” I didn’t feel proud anymore. Just small and hindered. “But nobody would actually think it through like that.”
His laugh climbed into the sky like smoke, fading too quickly. “Maybe I should have said five accountants.”
Oh, what was I doing? Keeping this kind stranger standing in the rain. He was probably wet and cold and tired, and later he would tell this story to a friend or a lover. I imagined his big hands cradling a cup of tea—he’d like it hot and strong and sweet—and he wouldn’t be mocking exactly, only gently bewildered:I wanted to get home, he’d be saying,but this daft bloke kept me talking about game theory of all things. Then he’d shake his head.I suppose he was lonely or something.
“I d-don’t really see how this is any less abstract.” I hated how I sounded right then: prissy and cold. “It doesn’t actually illuminate anything about the way people really think or make decisions.”
“That wasn’t the best example,” he admitted sheepishly. And I hated even more that I had made him feel that way. “But you can use it as a sort of toolkit for understanding some stuff about the way the world works. Stuff that would probably drive me spare if I couldn’t say,Ah, that’s what’s going on there.”
I told myself that we were simply caught on the awkward edge of politeness—that uncertain moment between the suspension of the usual rules of interaction and their resumption. But insteadof something helpfully noncommittal that would set him free to go away and forget about me, I heard myself ask, “What s-sort of…um, s-stu-stu-uff?”
Even thoughstuffis pretty much my public enemy number one. A sibilant, fricative nightmare, with thatuh-uh-uhin the middle to pratfall over.
His smile shone at me through the gloom, bright as a crescent moon. “The worst and stupidest stuff. The petty things, you know, like why there’s never any spoons in the office kitchen. It used to really bug me that I was the sort of person to get wound up over something like that.”22
“Well, it’s very annoying.” Particularly becauseIwas always so careful to return my teaspoons after use.
“It is,” he agreed, and I felt so absurdly touched to be sharing a small irritation with somebody who seemed less like a stranger with every word he uttered. “But it’s worth thinking aboutwhyit happens.”
“Because people s-suck?”
He shook his head in mock chagrin. “How did somebody so pretty get so cynical? It doesn’t really have anything to do with people sucking. Taking one spoon doesn’t hurt anyone, unless everybody does it. The problem is everybodydoesdo it.”23
I was interested, charmed, but I was also having trouble focusing on what he was actually saying.
Instead, I was thinking,Pretty?
Etymologically complex, that one. Roots in Old Norwegian, Low German, Middle Dutch, Mercian, so many varieties of pronunciation, of meaning.
When I did my MA in London, I’d been allowed to see the original manuscript of the York Mystery Plays in the British Library.24
Medium: ink on vellum.
I have never forgotten that bold script, defying time with its aggressive downstrokes, its occasionally sensuous curves. I’d wanted to touch it, run my fingers over the shape of the words, the way one learns the sweep of a lover’s spine. The way I had once read Marius. I remembered now, with peculiar vividness, the lines, “he schall, and he haue liff / Proue till a praty swayne.” So dashing, the swish of thes, the loop of they, the unflinching certainty of letters.
And, oh heavens, suddenly all I could imagine was a different body beneath my hands. Long flanks and freckles and…spoons. We were talking about spoons.
“Surely,” I said, “it doesn’t matter whether it’s malicious if you s-still can’t find s-something to stir your drink.”
“Maybe not. But rather than getting all pissy about it, I just think to myself: Right… Well… It’s just understanding people and groups and incentives. The tragedy of the commons again.”
I stared at him. This man who would make a rational choice not to be annoyed with his colleagues, where I would simply marinate in bitter quiet and sip my inadequately brewed tea. “B-but if the outcome is always no teaspoons, isn’t this a rather d-depressing portrait of humanity?”25
“Well, that’s where it interests me most because”—he dusted sand from his gloves, and the particles danced golden in the rain like dust motes—“it doesn’t just show you the problem, it shows you the solution.”
“Get more spoons?”
